“My husband is,” she said. “He’s the polar bear munaqsri.”
Rising higher in the water, as massive as a monster from a myth, the bowhead drummed, “He may be, but you are not. You have no ties to us.”
The ice rocked as if in an earthquake. Spray and wind hit her face. She spread her legs to keep her balance and held the shoulder straps of her backpack. He didn’t care if he drowned her, she realized. Looking up at the leviathan, she said, “I’m tied to him. We made vows.”
“We are all bound by our promises,” he intoned.
Cassie pushed her hair out of her eyes and squinted up at the bowhead. He eclipsed the sun. “Please. You have to help me reach the troll castle.”
“Nothing living ever goes there,” the bowhead said.
“Then take me across the ocean,” she pleaded. “Just to the shore. I’ll find the way myself from there. But please, help me off the ice!”
“I do not help humans.”
“The bears will die if I don’t save their munaqsri,” Cassie said. She couldn’t fail. Her beloved bears would vanish from the face of the earth. “Help me for their sake.”
The bowhead drifted against the crumbling ice. Cassie flailed as the ice rocked. “The bears are not my concern,” he said.
He had to care about something! She cast around for another idea, and she hit on inspiration. “I’m carrying the Bear’s child,” she said. “One of you. A future munaqsri.”
The bowhead sprayed water from his spout. Screaming, Cassie threw her gloved hands over her head and ducked as it rained ice-cold seawater. “You risk a munaqsri,” the bowhead boomed. “It cannot be allowed.”
Beside her, the arctic fox hissed and growled. “You hold a species’ future inside you, and you undertake this quest? You seek death.”
Oh, no, she’d made it worse. “But I have to save—”
“I cannot allow you to endanger a future munaqsri,” the bowhead said.
“Nor I!” Fluffy said.
“You must stay on the ice where you belong.” With that pronouncement, the bowhead submerged. A vast wave of water surged in his wake.
Cassie scrambled away from the wave. “I’ll die if I stay!” She would die, the bears would die, the foxes would die. Bear would be trapped in the place that had made Gail scream.
“The bears will care for you until the child is born,” Fluffy said. “And when he is grown, the bears will have their new king. My foxes shall live, and all will be as it should.”
She shook her head. Her throat felt choked. She had to make him help her. She couldn’t lose her one chance at Bear. “Bowhead!” she shouted at the waves. Could he still hear her? Please, let him hear her. The glittering black waves still churned in his wake. Cassie called to the deep, “You want your precious child to live? Then keep its mother alive!”
She ran and dove into the Arctic Ocean.
CHAPTER 20
Latitude 84° 10’ 46” N
Longitude 74° 22’ 53” W
Altitude -32 ft.
Cold seared her skin. Knives sliced her bones. She kicked the water. Thirty feet down, she shed her pack. It sank. I’m not dying, she thought. This isn’t the end. She saw the surface: golden green. Clawing the water, she swam toward it.
She could not feel her hands. She had no arms. No legs.
Numb, she burned. Her lungs screamed.
Golden green turned black.
Fifteen minutes. Death water.
It hurt to die.
And then it didn’t hurt. Cassie was cocooned in currents. She swept through silver fish and translucent jellies. Cod eddied around her body, and comb jellies grazed her with their rain-bow cilia. Light—green—hung in the water like dust in air.
She looked down at a garden of brilliant orange starfish and golden sea anemones. Was this heaven? Small lobsters crawled over rocks. Crabs with spider legs scrambled over mud to hide in soft strands of algae. She looked upward. Belugas undulated through the green light. The water filled with the sounds of their chirps and whistles. She watched them swim, singing, overhead. No one’s heaven had lobsters and off-pitch belugas. It would even be odd for a hell. She smiled and tasted salt. She was underwater. Alive.
But how? She’d hoped the bowhead munaqsri would save her, but she didn’t see him. He would have to be touching her to save her. Oddly, no one was touching her. So who was keeping her alive? And warm? And not in pain? “Hello? Anyone?” Her words burbled in the water.
The tide carried her through strands of algae. Soft ribbons of green brushed against her. The algae coated the loose ice overhead and the floor below so that they looked like an overgrown lawn. Cassie eyed the dustlike krill. “Hello? Do any of you talk?”
No shrimp answered. At least she wouldn’t have to hold a conversation with something almost microscopic. She nearly laughed at the image, but then the sea darkened. Cassie looked up; the bowhead blocked the sun. He looked as if he could swallow her entire universe. Cassie shrank from the living eclipse, acutely aware how much she didn’t belong here. She was alive only by someone else’s decision. What if whoever it was changed its mind? The bowhead passed over her, and in his wake, sunlight flooded the water. She didn’t want to be down here a second longer. She swam toward the sun.
Current slammed against her, sending her tumbling sideways. Her hood fell back and her hair swirled. She tried again, aiming diagonally upward.
Fish swarmed her. Cod, their silver bodies streaking in the slanted light, surrounded her. She could not move her arms without slapping them. The fish butted their heads against her, pushing her down and then propelling her through the water. She flailed like a windmill, and the fish scattered.
As the water cleared, she saw a shape—it was coral, a city of coral, rising out of the muddy sea floor. Teeming with fish, the city was an organic Manhattan. In its own way, it was as grand as Bear’s castle.
She heard a laugh. Cassie spun in the water. “Who’s there?” she called. Really, it could be anything from the pink crustaceans to the comb jellies.
It was a mermaid.
Perched on a salt-encrusted rock, the mermaid had codlike scales on her tail that spread into silvery skin at her navel. Her human skin rippled in soft wrinkles, like a bloated drowned body. She laughed in streams of air bubbles.
Without thinking, Cassie said, “You’re mythical.”
The mermaid’s laugh grew wilder and harsher. It sounded like waves breaking.
Cod nibbled at the mermaid’s hair. Made of kelp, her hair drifted around her face like Medusa’s snakes. Cassie noticed the mermaid had no fingers, and a memory tugged at her, one of the local stories. This was the creature who had spawned the Sedna stories, the Inuit sea woman whose father had chopped off her fingers. “You’re Sedna,” Cassie said. Months ago, Bear had mentioned Sedna as the overseer of the Arctic Ocean.
With a flick of her fin, the mermaid rocketed toward Cassie. Instinctively, Cassie shielded her face, but the mermaid veered around her and circled her in a jet stream of bubbles. “I have heard of you as well,” Sedna said. “You are the girl who was forced to marry the polar bear to save your mother from the trolls.”
“No one forced me,” Cassie said. “I chose to save her.” And now she was choosing to save him, whether he loved her or not. “I need to reach the castle that’s east of the sun and west of the moon. Will you help me?”
“The bowhead says that you have a future munaqsri inside you,” the mermaid said. She swam faster. Bubbles cycloned around Cassie.
Cassie pressed her hands to her curved stomach. It was only a fetus right now. “It’s not even born yet, and it might not want to be a munaqsri. But Bear’s alive now. Please, help me. If not for me, then for the polar bears.”