Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun (17 page)

The mermen were swimming right past us. I held my breath and prayed they wouldn’t see us.

“I know,” the other one replied. Neither of them looked our way. “We need to find more crystals. One was never going to be enough for him.”

“It would help if we knew where the first one had come from,” the first merman said, and I didn’t hear any more of their conversation, as they’d gone out of earshot.

I let out a heavy breath. Clearly too heavy, as one of them turned around.

“What was that?” he said. “Is someone there?”

“Look! A couple of mermaids in the shadows!” the other one said.

“What do we do?” Shona hissed.

“Swim!”

We flicked our tails as hard as we could, propelling ourselves along the channel, past fish with bright-blue bodies and startled looks on their faces and away from the scary-looking mermen.

“Hey! Come back!” the mermen yelled. It took them about half a minute to catch up to us. One of them grabbed the end of my tail.

“Who are you?” he demanded. I struggled to get away from him, but he was too strong.

The other one had a hold of Shona. “How did you get here?”

“Let us go!” Shona squealed.

“Let’s take them to the boss,” one of the mermen said.

“Are you sure?” the other one replied. “There’s not a lot he can do while he’s frozen.”

“He’s not frozen. He can move his mouth, his fingertips, and the tip of his tail; most importantly, he can speak. That’s all he needs to do. We follow the great Njord’s orders, not our own.”

“What’s a ‘great Njord’?” I asked before I could stop myself. Maybe it was similar to a fjord. It
sounded
similar enough.

“Who, not what!” the merman still gripping my tail with his hands snapped.

“OK,
who
’s a Njord, then?”

“Our leader.”

The merman who had Shona nudged his head in the direction we’d been heading. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. They’ll find out soon enough.”

Then he leaned down and grabbed a long strand of seaweed. Pulling it up and biting into it with his teeth, he quickly wrapped it a couple of times around the end of Shona’s tail. He passed it back to the other merman, who did the same to mine.

“Just in case you had other plans,” he said, showing half a mouthful of yellow teeth as he laughed in my face. His breath nearly made me faint. It smelled like a bin full of dead fish that had been left to rot for a year.

The mermen swam along the tunnel, pulling us behind them. “Not a bad catch for the first day back in business,” one of them said.

“Instant promotion, I’m thinking,” the other one replied.

Shona and I wriggled and writhed and grimaced as we half swam and half got dragged to the area in the middle of the mountain. I tried not to think too hard about what was waiting for us, and what this Njord guy was going to do with us once we got there.

“Bring them closer. Let me see their faces!”

The guards had brought us to the exact place we needed to be, to the exact person we had wanted to find: Neptune’s brother! I didn’t know whether to be terrified or relieved. Although, I have to say that after being dragged along and tied up with seaweed, to face an almost identical replica of Neptune — only mostly made out of ice and looking down at me with loathing and disgust on his face — I was tending toward the “terrified” option.

The water ended in front of Njord, so we couldn’t swim right up to him. The mermen pulled us as close as we could get.

Before any of them could say anything, I decided to take the initiative. After all, we had come here to help Njord. As soon as he heard that, he was bound to let us go.

I was about to speak. I looked at his face — the only part of him that seemed capable of movement. As I did, it broke into what I guessed was probably supposed to be a smile. If you try to imagine a shark as it spots fresh prey and opens its mouth ready to swallow it whole, you’d be halfway to imagining what his smile looked like.

“I am glad you decided to join us,” Njord said as I stared. His voice felt like a snake, slithering around the caves.

“I . . . I . . .” I tried to tell him why we were there, but couldn’t find my voice. Instead, I reached a hand into my pocket to show him the crystals.

“Silence!” Njord bellowed. For the first time, I seriously began to doubt our plan. Could this really be Neptune’s beloved brother? Could Neptune really want us to free him? It didn’t seem possible.

The guard roughly grabbed my arm. “Quiet, you,” he growled, in case I hadn’t understood what “silence” meant. I gripped the crystals even tighter inside my pocket.

Njord stared at me. “I saw what happened,” he said. “And I saw that it was an accident. I might have been ice, but my eyes were open. Inside, I was alive. I saw what you had, but it wasn’t enough. Yes, it freed my head enough that I can now speak. It freed my fingertips enough that I can now grasp. It freed the tip of my tail enough that I can now flick it with rage and cause a storm.”

Of course! If this was Neptune’s twin brother, he probably had the same powers. It was
his
anger that had caused all the freak storms at sea!

“But clearly I need more than one crystal to free me completely,” Njord said, his voice a whisper, so quiet and so sharp and so cold it felt like a thin blade slicing through me. “And I believe you have more.”

Njord continued to stare at me. My fingertips were warm against the crystals in my pocket, but they didn’t seem to want to let go of them. What should I do? I decided the truth was the only strategy that would protect us. After all, we had originally come here to do the very thing he was now asking of us. If only I could get rid of the feeling in my gut screaming at me not to do it.

I spoke quickly. “We know that someone did this to you,” I said. “We know who you are. I mean, we think we kind of know your . . . brother?”

Njord raised an eyebrow. “Continue,” he said.

“Neptune can’t remember what happened,” I went on quickly. “He knows something bad happened to you, and he knows that whoever did it took his memory away. We’ve come to help you. We want to reunite you with your brother.”

The caves fell silent. Not the tiniest sound. Njord’s eyes bored into me. Behind me, Shona and the guards waited for a response. It felt as though the moment itself had frozen.

And then, suddenly, everything changed.

Njord smiled broadly. “The child has come to help us!” he announced. “To reunite me with my beloved brother!” Njord laughed a raw, rasping laugh.

He shifted his eyes to look at one of the guards. Njord’s neck was still frozen, so he couldn’t actually move his head. “Release them both!” he ordered. “We are all friends!”

The two mermen instantly untied us, bowing low as they backed away again.

Njord smiled at me. “I’m sorry about that,” he said sweetly. “I’m sure you can understand we have to take precautions until we know if our visitors are friends or foes.”

I rubbed my tail where it had been tied. “It’s OK,” I said. He had a point. And he
was
Neptune’s twin brother, after all. Neptune had never been known for his great social skills. I mean, look how he’d brought Aaron and me to see him at the start of the mission — blindfolded and bundled into fishing nets!

“So, you were saying,” Njord said, his voice oozing friendliness and warmth, “about wanting to help.”

“We want to bring you and Neptune back together,” I said. “It’s what we were sent here to do.”

“How wonderful,” Njord replied, smiling broadly.

I edged closer to him, wondering exactly what I was supposed to do. Did I have to drop a crystal on him, or what? I still had the crystals in my hand, still had my hand in my pocket. I wanted to open my fingers — I really did — but something was stopping me. Fear? Doubt?

Whatever it was, Njord could obviously see it, too, as he kept talking in a soothing, cajoling voice. “I will be so happy to see my dear brother,” he said. “So happy to make friends again after such a silly squabble.”

“Squabble?” I asked.

“Oh, we were always at it. It was nothing unusual. A petty disagreement. A bit of silly nonsense that went too far”— Njord looked down at himself —“and ended up with this.”

“Your disagreement ended up with you being frozen? But how?”

“Oh, you know what brothers are like when they fight. And when the brothers in question have as much magic and power at their disposal as the likes of us, it can be a bit dramatic when things get out of hand.”

“I understand,” I said, trying to sound as if it were exactly the kind of thing I came across every day: arguing with someone and accidentally finding one of you had been turned to ice. Again, the doubt gripped me. I turned to Shona. She seemed to shake her head. Did she feel the same way as I did?

I closed my fingers more tightly around the crystals. Shona swam to my side. “Something isn’t right,” she whispered, echoing my feelings perfectly.

“I agree,” I whispered back. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Me neither.”

I gathered all the courage I had and turned to Njord. “I think you’re lying,” I said, imagining myself being carried away by those guards and fed to the shark with the spear.

“We thought someone horrible had done this to you,” Shona said. “We thought someone turned you to ice and then took Neptune’s memory away so he couldn’t help you.”

“And your point?” Njord replied.

“Our point,” I said, “is that we don’t understand why Neptune would be so desperate to free you again if
he
was the one who turned you to ice in the first place! He told us something awful had happened, and we assumed he meant something awful had happened to
you.
”

“But if Neptune himself did it,” Shona continued, “how can we be sure he really wants you to be unfrozen?”

“We just can’t take that risk,” I told him.

Njord frowned. “My dear brother has clearly come to regret his actions,” he said.

“Hmm,” I murmured.

“Look, it was a silly brother’s prank that got out of hand — no harm done. Now, let’s just get on with unfreezing the rest of me and we can all have a lovely reunion.” A tight edge had crept into Njord’s voice.

I looked at Shona. “I’m not convinced,” I said.

She shook her head. “Nor am I.”

Njord fixed his steely eyes on me. “There is nothing not to be convinced about,” he hissed. “Now, give me the crystals!”

I flicked my tail and tightened my grip on the crystals.

Njord sucked on his teeth. “Neptune wronged me,” he hissed. “I had something he wanted, and he wasn’t happy, all right? And, yes,
he
did this to me. He did it out of
greed,
the only thing that truly motivates him!”

I turned to Shona. “To be fair, that does sound quite typical of Neptune.”

Njord’s face was red, his cheek pulsing as he spoke through gritted teeth. “He probably remembers how he wronged me and wants to make amends. And he probably sent you because he knows you can undo the damage.”

Shona and I looked at each other. “I don’t know what to do,” I whispered.

Njord’s fingertips were reaching out to me, edging between the crushed, frozen ice. They were like tendrils of seaweed, stretching and swaying on the tide. “Please,” he begged. “Help me. Help my brother. Bring us back together.” A tear edged out of his eye and trickled a wet track down his face.

Maybe he
was
telling the truth. I pushed one of the crystals deeper into my pocket — just in case — and slowly brought the other one out of my pocket. The second I did, Njord’s face changed.

“Seize her!” he bellowed.

The guard was by my side in moments. Before I even knew what was happening, he had grabbed my arm and snatched the crystal from my hand.

“Take them away!” Njord ordered. His eyes had narrowed to black slits, his forehead creased like corrugated iron. The other guard grabbed Shona. He quickly tied the seaweed around her waist. A minute later, we were prisoners again.

The guard who had stolen the crystal turned to Njord. “Now what, my lord?”

“Now, release me from my prison!” Njord bellowed. “Give me the crystal!”

The guard swam toward Njord and placed the crystal into Njord’s outstretched hand. Njord closed his fingers around it. He shut his eyes. “At last, I will be free,” he said. “My turn to reign is nearly here.”

“The girls, my lord,” said the guard who held Shona. “What do you want us to do with them?”

Njord didn’t even open his eyes. Smiling to himself, he said, “Take them to the dungeons. Lock them away while I decide what is to be done with them — and with my traitorous eel of a brother.”

The guards turned and swam off, dragging us along the winding tunnels and down to a dark, cold cave in the deep belly of the mountain.