Like a Freeze

by Olivette Devaux

  Ash kind of hoped the officer wouldn’t have heard that, but he had, and narrowed his eyes in a way that was both familiar and alarming.

  He clasped Ash’s arm.

  They felt each other.

  The policeman had a power signature, element unknown. He let go as though he’d touched a hot stove. “Okay, you guys. Okay. Are you stabilizing him? Doing... you know?”

  “Yeah. What’s your name?”

  “Sergeant Sorensen. And yours?”

  “Cooper Anneveinen.”

  “Any relation to Owen Anneveinen?”

  “He’s my uncle,” Cooper said quietly, trying to maintain his focus.

  “Yeah. We’re probably distant cousins. I’ll need you to put the sword away as soon as the cavalry arrives. I’ll go check on the kid in the car.”

  Ash didn’t know how did sergeant Sorensen know the life sign within the cab belonged to a kid, but he soon heard a soothing, manly voice counteract the high-pitched fear of a boy who wasn’t quite an adolescent.

  The resonance of that voice, deep and rumbling, propagated like a drum beat, soothing and hypnotic. Tribal, almost – although that was unlikely with a name like that. Sentences of reassurance flowed into a chant, and the chant soothed Ash as much as the crash victim in the car.

  By the time the small intersection flooded with EMTs and the flashing lights of a fire truck and an ambulance, Cooper’s sword was securely sheathed away.

  Sergeant Sorensen got out of the cab and met the EMTs and a pair of troopers who arrived at the scene. After a brief conversation, he stooped by the blood where the injured man used to be. He dipped his finger in his blood, and strode toward Cooper and Ash.

  The temperature must’ve dropped a good twenty degrees since the EMTs took over, because Cooper’s teeth were chattering and Ash, who normally didn’t mind cold at all, moved as though through molasses.

  The trooper left a bloody swipe across Cooper’s forehead. “A message for your Elders.” Then he did the same to Ash. “We are in your debt, and you are a welcome visitor on our lands.” He gave them a grim smile. “He’ll probably pull through. That sword – if you don’t mind, I’d like to see it when we meet at the New Year.”

  Cooper drew himself up to full height and met Sorensen’s gaze. “What’s your first name?” he asked.

  “Feather. Joseph Feather Sorensen at your service.”

  “I’ll see you there, Feather. About the sword – we’re still working it out. It’s complicated.”

  “You need me to drive you? You have some real clothes with you?”

  “Y...y...yeah,” Ash chattered. “But I’m okay.” He swayed slightly, catching his balance as though he had just over-extended on a sword cut. “It’s just energy drain.”

  “Get in the back,” Sorensen ordered. “You can’t drive safely in this state.”

  Obediently, Ash crawled into the only free back seat, and wedged himself into the surrounding camping equipment hard enough to buckle his seat belt. Sorensen slid behind the wheel, next to Cooper. “One of my troopers will follow me in my car. This way, at least I get to visit the camp early.”

  “Thanks,” Cooper said as he put the sword away. He had questions to ask, many questions, but Feather Sorensen hummed a tune that matched the hum of the wheels against the frozen road just so.

  He knew he was being sung to sleep. He just knew it.

  “Relax,” Feather whispered from the front. “Trust me. Uncle Owen’s my teacher, too. You need the rest more than you realize.” He hummed some more.

  The car, the road, the accident – it all dissolved into a warm cocoon of soothing darkness.

  ASH SLIPPED INTO sleep despite his best effort to resist Feather Sorensen’s hypnotic hum. His last thought revolved around trying to analyze that particular talent, and whether it was anything like Mark’s control of sound waves.

  A whoosh of cold air woke him up, that and the sound of car doors opening and closing, and of excited chatter that drifted on the fresh air as though from miles away.

  He tried to wake up, but his eyes wouldn’t open.

  “What did you do to him?” Cooper ask accusingly.

  “He resisted,” a man said. That man again, the state trooper who had declared them unfit to drive. The one with his own power signature and his own history of tutelage at Uncle Owen’s knee. “Sorry,” he added. “I didn’t mean to put him under this deep.”

  Ash felt warm fingers touch his forehead as though someone tried to wipe off his sweat – and he could move again, albeit slowly.

  He didn’t think he could speak, not in a way that would do his intelligence credit, so he just pressed his lips together and unbuckled his seatbelt. Slowly, carefully, he hauled himself out of the car.

  “And here is our other hero!” Uncle Owen closed the distance between them and pulled him into a warm embrace. “You need some reishi, I imagine. Although I hear Feather got a bit heavy-handed with you.” His crow’s feet crinkled in a smile. “Don’t worry, there’ll be no lasting damage. I second his opinion that rest was best. How’re you feeling now?”

  “Hi,” Ash croaked. “Okay, I guess.” A patent lie, of course. He could feel the headache threaten from behind his eyes. “Although I’m glad it’s night and there’s no sun.”

  “Hm.” Uncle Owen gave him a long look. “We have a gher set up for you. You’re sharing with two cousins of Cooper’s, so don’t expect too much privacy.” He gave an apologetic grin. “Next year we’ll make sure you’re properly outfitted. But come now, your cots are waiting!”

  Ash followed Uncle Owen and Cooper through the campground, where a large fire circle was surrounded by round tents made of canvas. “You use yurts?” he asked.

  “One of these round tents is properly called a gher,” Feather said next to him. “A village of them is a yurt, but in American English, ‘yurt’ is an easier word, so I guess it stuck.” He grinned. “And yes, they’re practical. They have more room than a teepee, and you can still make a nice fire in the middle.” He switched his grip on something, and Ash realized Feather was carrying the huge bedroll he and Cooper had packed just two days ago.

  “I can take that,” Ash said.

  “I’m sure you can, once you’re properly awake,” Feather retorted, although Ash detected a guilty note in his voice.

  “You did your best,” Ash said. “Thank you. I’m sure I’d be a wreck with a migraine, had you not put me to sleep.” He was going to ask how did Feather do that, except Feather cut in.

  “Or a wreck on the road. You’re one of the most pig-headed people I’ve ever met.”

  A thin chuckle from Cooper would have, under ordinary circumstances, made his eyes roll. Ash didn’t bother mounting a defense this time. His energy went into putting one foot in front of another, crunching along a well-trodden path in the snow along a row of oil-burning tikki torches.

  Within minutes, he was dosed up with the bitterly vile reishi mushroom tincture, tucked inside his sleeping bag, and drifting off to sleep. This time, he didn’t even need Feather to persuade him.

  CHAPTER 4

  JARED

  Ancient oak planks, stained with oil and age, dug into Jared’s face the way they had done after he had first arrived to this world inside the old katana. He knew he had not just dematerialized, though. Lying still, he tried to remember what happened.

  Was it just a dream? Old Woman wasn’t sitting by him anymore, and when he turned, there were no traces of her calligraphy on the low table.

  She was gone.

  Strange, and alarming – because he had never been alone in here before.

  He stumbled to his feet, yawned, and tiptoed inside the house. A vague plan of pulling his futon out of the hidden wall storage crossed his mind.

  He sprawled across the tatami mats instead, and closed his eyes.

  Just for a few minutes.

  ASH AND COOPER

  Cooper’s bladder woke him up, which was moderately okay, because the canvas of the gher�
�s roof was already lit with splotches of sun and shadow. He slept past daybreak, then.

  Slowly and silently, so’s not to wake up his tent-mates, Cooper stretched to his full length on his cot and wiggled his fingers and toes. The air within the canvas and wood structure was cool, but not freezing. A metal bowl brazier, like the one used for backyard campfires, sat in the center of the circular gher. Lifted off the floor by a rack of carefully stacked wood that seemed too long for burning in the bowl, it was cleverly insulated from the snow that formed the floor.

  His eyebrows shot up as he realized that he had, automatically, reached to the earth to ground and center, but the earth wasn’t where he had expected it to be. Three feet of packed snow separated Cooper from his native element. And that was a good thing, because digging a hole that deep would have been troublesome, and the ground was frozen so hard, the snow ended up insulating them from its dangerous bite.

  As Cooper stirred on his cot and unzipped his sleeping bag, he noted that his camping bed was soft enough, but not an ordinary mattress. A rope bed, maybe? But no, that would’ve creaked.

  He tried to sit up, and failed, getting lost in the bed’s softness.

  With an exasperated grunt, Cooper rolled off the bed and onto a floor covered with an ancient carpet like he’d have expected in some grandmother’s house, topped with a generous sprinkling of furs.

  The floor was no colder than the air, and its softness easily broke his fall. Curious now, Cooper dug under the sheepskins and bear skins. How was this done?

  A ten-inch layer of straw on top of snow, he found, gave them protection both from any wetness and cold. Since the cool air was trapped by the old rug that had seen better days, Cooper quickly rearranged the floor covers the way he had found them, and rose. Was the bed made of straw, too?

  He dug under the blankets, discovered a bizarre secret, and decided more revelations will have to wait until Ash was awake as well. The other two cots were empty, with bedrolls tidily spread out.

  He had to stoop a bit on his way to the hanging canvas door flap and unfasten its toggles and thongs. Once he laced on his boots, he opened the door just enough to squeeze out, careful of not letting the heat out. He knew the morning air outside would be colder.

  The chill breeze off the lake ripped off his sleepiness along with any excess body heat. “Damn!” he yelped, then shut his mouth.

  “What’s the matter, Cooper? You grew up in these parts. Have you grown soft down south?”

  Cooper turned toward the unmistakable sound of his father’s voice. Nikko Anneveinen lounged in a seat carved into snow, but padded with blankets and furs. He was wearing snow pants with a bib over a turtleneck and a thick knit sweater, and his gloved hands cradled a cup of something hot and steaming.”

  “Hi, dad!” Cooper walked over to give him a proper hug. “Where are the bathrooms? And is that coffee?” He drew the frigid air, happy to find a confirmation of his hopes. Yes, there was coffee here somewhere.

  “Come, I’ll show you.” His dad finished his cup, set it on his seat, and looked him up and down. “Good work last night, by the way. You did us proud, saving that man.”

  Cooper shuffled his boots on the packed snow, uncertain how to respond to praise after all those years of having been isolated. “So Dad,” he said instead, “just three more days to the New Year’s Celebration, right? You know neither Cooper nor I have ever taken part. Maybe you could give us some kind of a briefing.”

  Nikko shot him a hurt look. “We came down for the Summer Solstice. That was pretty close, although... hmm. There are some family members you haven’t seen in years. The Nightwind part of the family is here from Canada, have been camping here for the last week or so. Your uncle Gregory wants to see that blade of yours. Everyone’s been talking about it!”

  They walked out of the encampment as they talked, passing the last tent and following a meandering trail marked by oil lanterns that hung off the tall pine trees. The packed snow, worn down by both traffic and by design, still creaked under the soles of their boots. Cooper shivered, glad that the trees sheltered them from the wind off the lake.

  “We don’t use the tikki torches under the trees, obviously. Here, where the light is unsupervised, we use safety lanterns so people can find the jacks after dark. Don’t stray off the path. The snow is deep. You could fall in and not get out.”

  “I know, Dad.” Cooper well remembered the treacherous powder that sometimes formed funnel-shaped caves around trees. Getting out of those unassisted was no small task. In the famous Colorado powder, skiers and hunters died that way every year. The Minnesota snow was wetter and denser most of the time, but not always. Paying attention to their wild and rustic environment was a key survival skill.

  “I know you know. Give Ash a proper introduction to all the hazards, will you?”

  The canvas structure of the outhouse loomed ahead of them. The green tarp had a flap opening at each rectangular end.

  They slipped in.

  The outhouse boasted a lumber shell (“Because some people refused to freeze their asses in the wind,” according to his dad,) and a sturdy wooden structure equipped with six wooden toilet seats and lids.

  They did their duty.

  As Cooper reached with is earth sense, he came to realize that someone had dug a trench in the snow that reached into the frozen ground. He frowned, wondering whether the snow walls would collapse.

  “How is this reinforced, Dad?”

  With a satisfied grin, Nikko spent their walk back explaining the engineering behind the composting toilets and how they could’ve used his expertise this time around, both as an architect and as an earth elementalist. “I just wish we had a Fire Man with enough control to melt the snow accurately and warm the earth for digging,” he said as they neared his gher. “It would’ve made the backhoe’s job a lot easier.”

  ASH HAD A dream where he walked through a field of red poppies with an old woman. She was tall and lanky, with short-cropped gray hair and wearing a long, flowing kimono. They were on their way to tea, and she was scolding him for some horrid, yet inevitable, thing he had done in the past.

  He had apologized, again and again, with all the eloquence he could muster.

  “So your name is Ash Ravenna. Interesting. I knew a Ravenna back during the Great War,” she said, and the wan smile Ash saw flicker across her face told him that she and his namesake had had a secret of sorts. A pleasant secret. He wondered whether he was related to this man. He wondered whether his potential ancestor and the old woman had been lovers. “How did you meet him?” he asked.

  “I was a nurse in a hospital, and he was a patient,” she said with that faraway look that people had when they remembered things from very long time ago.

  “I’m sorry,” Ash said, assuming the worst.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said with a chuckle. “He didn’t die. He pulled through and returned to his wife in Ottawa.”

  Ottawa. So she was Canadian. “May I ask you your name?” Ash said, keeping his voice soft like the lapping of gentle waves. He’d wear her down to an answer, but he’d be careful not to push. Dreams fled if he let the water flow too hard.

  “It has been quite a while since anyone had asked me,” she said. “They all call me the Old Woman now, but I’ve had a number of names. What was it, now? Minnie. No, not Minnie – Millie. Maybe it had been Emilia. Or Amelia? I think it had been Amelia. That, and yes! Ameru.” She turned to him with a smile that her gray-green eyes with mischief. He noticed an old scar on her freckled, leathery cheek. “You may call me Ameru-san, child. But I wanted to ask you about that young man of yours.”

  “His name’s Cooper,” Ash helpfully supplied.

  “Ash!” He heard his name, but the the woman – Ameru – was no longer by his side.

  “Ash, babe,” Cooper said in a bright, bemused voice that was of the here and now. “Wake up, Ash!”

  “But Ameru,” Ash said, but suddenly his words felt thick in his mouth and the red
poppies were replaced by the red highlights in the curls of Cooper’s copper-tone hair.

  “Wake up, you sleepyhead, it’s almost noon.

  “Is it?” Ash blinked hard, then looked around, taking in his environment for the first time. “Where are we? You said snow camping, but this is unexpectedly nice.”

  “It is, and I can’t wait to show you all the neat things they have built. It’s all natural, the wood gets reused every year. They keep a storage trailer hidden in the woods so it’s easier to set everything up.” Cooper folded his arms on the edge of Ash’s cot, and settled his chin on it. It gave him the appearance of a satisfied cat. “You missed breakfast, and so did I, but there is coffee. And lunch is being served, so if you want to take a snow bath to freshen up, you better do it fast.”

  Ash perked up. “Coffee sounds great.” He shooed Cooper off to get some space, and clambered out of his bed. “What’s this made of? It’s comfortable, but only when you’re laying down.”

  “I know,” Cooper said with a nod. “The frame is made of tree branches, lashed together with wet raw hide and set to dry. It’s much tighter than rope. It’s like a loosely built box. And the inside is all boughs of evergreens. The sharp stick side goes down, and the fluffy needles are pointed up. Like a nail bed, but a lot softer.”

  Ash frowned. “So how many trees did they take down so we can sleep well? How many people are there?”

  Cooper pulled him into a hug. “No trees died. The winter storms off Lake Superior create enough damage, there’s always a wind-break with a few trees down. The boughs get used for bedding, the trunks get cut up come Spring and dried for next year’s firewood. Or for structural wood, if the tree is just right.”

  “You asked,” Ash said with wonder in his voice.

  “Of course I asked,” Cooper chided. “With a camp of fifty to a hundred people, you have to worry about sustainability. Especially when the whole horde shows up several times a year!”