“If we have to tell her we know about the serpent,” I said, “I think we should tell her what I told Dione, how I have to be the one—”
“No. We aren’t lying to the queen. If she realises, we’re done. We have to tell the truth.”
“Wecan’ttell the truth about the serpent—”
A shadow passed beneath us. We stopped moving at once, holding our breaths. I watched Lysi for a reaction. She stared through the ice, brow furrowed.
After a moment, she said, “Whales.”
I relaxed, but Lysi stayed tense. I wondered if she was worried the whales would mistake us for seals.
We waited until their shadows disappeared before continuing on.
Lysi was right that lying to Dione did not work in our favour, and lying to the Atlantic Queen would be risky. The best bargaining power we had was knowledge of how to control the deadliest weapon in the world—but spreading that information around was also dangerous if it ended up in the wrong hands.
“There has to be another way to go about this,” I said.
“Mee, the potential to control the serpent is the only thing that will get the queen’s attention. Why else would she get involved in a war that’s not her own?”
“But it is her war!”
“Not yet. Adaro might be preparing to strike, but he hasn’t. We’re asking Medusa to initiate the war between Atlantic and Pacific by striking first. That’s a big decision, and it had better come with a high return.”
“If she’s the queen everyone says she is, she’ll want to stop the war regardless.”
Lysi wilted. “I guess.”
“Besides,” I said, “if we tell her the truth, she’ll take what we say and go after the serpent.”
“We can make sure we get to the serpent first.”
“And what if she kills us to ensure that doesn’t happen?”
Lysi hesitated for a fraction of a second. “She won’t. Besides, even if she does end up with the serpent, I’m sure we’ll be a lot better off—”
“No. We’re not taking it out of his hands only to put it into someone else’s. We need to finish this.”
Lysi gave a deep sigh, her breath clouding in the air.
We continued in silence for a long while.
When a grey mass rose in the distance, I nodded towards it. “Land?”
“Diomede Islands. We’re going between them where the ice is thickest.”
I tried to mentally locate myself on a map. I’d taught myself geography from one of Tanuu’s high school textbooks. I remembered reading that these two islands marked the border between Russia and Alaska, and the International Date Line put one island nearly a full day ahead of the other—but I couldn’t remember anything useful, like what kind of population these islands had.
The ice thickened enough that ridges rose where the breaking floes pushed against each other. Icicles formed in Lysi’s hair. My braids solidified down my back. Thankfully, while I recognised the cold, it wasn’t uncomfortable in my new body. The goose bumps prickling up my arms seemed purely aesthetic—something I pointed out to Lysi, and which she didn’t find as exciting as I did.
We kept going, and going, and going. It seemed as though the Diomedes would never get here. I fell into a trance, eyes on the ice, one hand in front of the other. The friction against my tail stung like sandpaper. Every time I turned my head, my icicle-braids pressed heavily against my shoulders.
So when we emerged onto to a flat plain, I was startled to find we’d made it to the islands. We moved between them—Big Diomede on our left, Little Diomede on our right. We would definitely be over top of the army now, if we hadn’t passed it already.
The wind blew hard. With the pure white landscape, hollowness in my ears, and numbness beneath my skin and scales, I felt an odd sensory deprivation. I vaguely wondered why I hadn’t turned into a mermaid-shaped ice sculpture.
The ice continued to thicken until even the slow rise and fall of waves was subdued. The thickest ice was closer to Little Diomede, so we stuck to that side of the pass.
Abruptly, Lysi stopped.
