“Soren, you do need the path. It won’t give you your eye back. It won’t give us anything it tells us.”

“Why should I trust you?” he said in the same half-coherent tone. “Friends with traitors, I’m worthless, get rid of me, but instead, you rub it in, oh look at this new friend I found,” he growled, “as if you forgot what he’s done.”

Okay, that was it. No more being nice. For Soren to be dealing with emotional issues due to his lack of an eye, that was one thing. For him to be blaming me in any way for Lydian being here, to claim that I’d forgotten what he had done to my body, that was something else entirely.

I grabbed him by the arm, and with sharp reflexes, he threw my grip off and pushed me onto the icy floor. The horror in his eye returned from the dullness as I fell and hit the ice with a hard crack, and the little spiderweb lines of already-broken ice cracked quicker and louder. Before he even had a chance to lunge for me, I fell into a cold so intense that my limbs were like twigs about to snap. Colder than even the river we had to cross to get into Niflheim, cold enough that my blood froze in my body with so much pain that I screamed out, cold water forced into my lungs as I screamed again and tried to take in a breath of air. Cold so bad that unconsciousness, death even, would be a better replacement from what I was feeling right now.

No sounds came beneath the surface, and I opened my eyes, still barely able to move through the cold. I stared in shock and began to sink, then something gentle embraced my waist. A woman, smiling? No, not a woman—or well, not a human woman. Her scaly fingers stroked my cheeks as she slipped around me, her grasp ever changing so I couldn’t move. Her touches were kind and tender, like tending to a new baby.

She made an echoing sound across the ocean and more and more of her kind, the margygur, came. So much like the tales of the sirens and mermaids who came up from the coasts told, but also so much different; the human eye couldn’t appreciate their beauty, the human skin couldn’t completely process their touch, and I could barely process it now as they swam and spoke around me.

I struggled to get out of her grasp before I was crowded by them, but I couldn’t break free. She had me where she wanted and finally released my wrist from her clawed grip. Little beads of blood floated away in the water.