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.”
“Land creatures,” said the mermaid dismissively. She kept swimming, tail flicking through the water.
Cassie tried to watch the mermaid, but the mermaid swam in a blur now, still circling her. “They’re almost sea mammals,” Cassie said. It was a controversial theory, but her father had done a paper on it. Maybe the caretaker of the sea would like the theory. “Blubber. Water-resistant fur. Streamlined ears. Webbing between their toes. They’re evolving into the sea.” Please, let her believe!
The mermaid laughed, and the bubbles spun in waves. “I am helping you,” she said. “You have not drowned.”
The mermaid swam even faster. Cassie felt dizzy. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the vertigo stayed. She opened her eyes. “But I need to find Bear!” she shouted. Bubbles cycloned faster and faster. She was surrounded, as if in a net. Cassie swam at the bubbles. She was thrown back into the center. She could not see through the bubbles. “Wait!” The mermaid blurred into silver and green.
The cyclone lengthened. Cassie saw it stretch like a Slinky through the sea. “Hush, child,” Sedna said. “Trust the munaqsri. We want what is best for our world, as all creatures do.”
“Not the trolls,” Cassie called through the bubbles. “The trolls don’t want ‘what’s best.’ They want the polar bears extinct!”
“No one knows what the trolls want,” the mermaid said. “You must go to Father Forest. He knows best how to help you.”
“Who is he?” she asked eagerly. “How do I find him?”
The cyclone collapsed around her. Bubbles hit Cassie’s skin. She kicked, yelling, and the bubbles squeezed. Cassie flew. Like paint squirting from a tube, she shot down the cyclone through the water. The roar of the water drowned her screaming as she sped through a tunnel of bubbles. Just when she thought the ride would never end, she felt the sea undulate beneath her and the cyclone of bubbles thrust her into the air. She broke out of the water. Sun hit her eyes. “Whoa!” she yelled as she rushed to meet the shore.
CHAPTER 21
Latitude 68° 32’ 12” N
Longitude 89° 49’ 33” W
Altitude 2 ft.
Cassie skidded on her tailbone. “Ow, ow!” Shielding her face, she slammed into a dune of snow. For an instant, she lay there, limbs tangled. She was alive. She had dived into the Arctic Ocean and lived.
Closing her eyes, Cassie inhaled. The air tasted wonderful, like salt and sun and earth. Opening her eyes, she turned her head. Her pack lay beside her. The nylon had ripped in three spots, and the frame had warped into an S, but it was dry and whole.
Gingerly, she untangled herself and tested her joints—no broken bones. Just a lot of bruises. She pushed herself up to sitting and looked around. Glacier-scoured rocks stretched for miles, patches of snow alternating with windswept expanses. She was on the tundra.
A brown blur scooted over her mukluks. She jerked her feet under her.
“I am here,” a voice said.
“Where? Who said that?” she asked. She looked around at the rocks, the waves, the sky.
The brown blur shot past her, darting from rock to rock. Suddenly, it stopped, and she saw a roly-poly brown rodent, like a furry toy football perched on a rock—a lemming. Cassie grinned. Sedna had said she’d help. Cassie just hadn’t expected that help to take the shape of a magical rodent. She pictured herself telling Bear about this. He was going to laugh for days.
“Come on,” the lemming said. “Pick me up. We must be off. I have responsibilities to tend to, you know.”
With the lemming cradled in her hands, Cassie sped across the tundra at munaqsri speed. The world sped by like a film on fast-forward. She saw clips and heard snippets of the landscape as it changed around her. Geese flew overhead, and unseen birds called across the grasses. In hollows, purple saxifrages and arctic white heather flourished. Poppies bloomed in snow patches. She was heading south (quickly), and summer was heading north.