I thanked him, then opened the door and stepped into the color explosion that was the Mästare’s chambers. Everything about her space was bold, bright, and stylishly decadent. Walls of rich crimson with curtains of indigo, rugs of gold and teal.
Amalie was sitting on her velvet sofa, drinking tea that perfumed the air with the scent of blackberries. But she wasn’t alone.
A man stood at the window, staring out at the city. His back was to me, and the way his hands were clasped behind him only accentuated his broad shoulders. He was tall, over six feet, and his head was shaved smooth.
“Ulla, how nice to see you!” Amalie said cheerfully, like we were old friends instead of barely acquaintances.
She was a tiny woman, practically drowning in her rich violet robe, and her silvering dark hair was cropped into a pixie cut. With all her heavy copper jewelry and ruby rhinestones, she looked like she was more accessory than woman.
“Mästare.” I started to bow then managed to stop myself before going fully into it, but my cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and I avoided eye contact with her.
The man turned around and immediately flashed a toothy grin. The crinkles around his dark eyes suggested age and wisdom, but the rest of his face was rather statuesque and eerily smooth. He seemed to be somewhere between twenty years old and eternal.
“Hello, Ulla, I’m Ragnall Jerrick, the Korva of the Mimirin.” He stepped forward—lunged almost, with a single long stride—and he extended his meaty hand toward me.
“Hello, it’s, um, nice to meet you,” I stammered and managed a nervous smile.
Korva was the top position in the Mimirin, maybe even in the entire city. It was sort of an amalgam of a dean, CEO, and mayor. Someone had once told me about the internal speculation about who really held the power—the Korva, the Information Styrelse, or the Mästares.
Regardless, Ragnall Jerrick was a powerful figure, and he looked it. His suit was an impeccably tailored long black satin with fitted tunic lined with a Saxon knot trim, and like the Mästare, he had a preference for rings.
“Shall we sit?” He gestured to the sitting area.
“Tea?” Amalie asked, and she began pouring a cup before I could respond.
I sat down, carefully smoothing my skirt.
“You look nervous,” Amalie commented, then held the cup toward me. “Here, have some tea.”
I took it from her, letting it warm my hands.
“I hope you don’t mind that the Korva is joining us,” she said.
“No, not at all.” I smiled thinly.
“I don’t usually intrude on matters like this, but Amalie mentioned your situation, and it sounded so interesting, I had to know more.” He leaned back, crossing one leg over the other. “I’m always curious about the visitors to our shining city on the sea.”
“You’re curious about what I know?” I asked, surprised. “I don’t really know much. That’s why I’m here.”
“Ragnall was speaking more about your friendship with the unwell girl Eliana,” Amalie clarified. “We do have records of Jem-Kruk, but we are limited on what we can tell you.”
“Records?” I asked. “What do you mean? Criminal records?”
“No, nothing like that.” Amalie laughed and waved her hand. “Jem-Kruk is listed as a visiting docent, and he’s staying at the staff housing in exchange for his input on projects in history and anthropology.”
“You know him? You know where he’s from?” I asked.
The Mästare looked subtly to Ragnall, then she replied carefully, “The information we have about his village is that it is a very isolated, relatively primitive community in the Arctic.”
“So what he said is true,” I said, more to myself than to them.
“We don’t know what he’s told you, obviously, and we are able to confirm very little of what he says,” Ragnall elaborated cautiously.
I sipped my tea, buying myself time as I processed what they’d told me.
“You know where Eliana is from,” I realized in dismay. “And you knew about her unusual blood?”
“We didn’t realize she was connected with Jem-Kruk, not while she was here.” Amalie looked to Ragnall again, and he nodded in response. “We have not performed any … biological examinations on any of the members of Jem-Kruk’s community, not before Eliana, so we had nothing to compare her samples to.”
“I can understand that…” I trailed off, and I willed myself to meet Amalie’s intense, bright gaze. “When you were here with Eliana, why didn’t you tell me you knew someone like her?”
“Because I didn’t know that I had,” she replied. “I hadn’t spent much time with her, and she remembered so little about herself it was impossible to know who she really was.”
“Knowing what you know now, who do you think Eliana really is?” I asked her directly.
She hesitated—her eyes flitting once more over to Ragnall, who kept his face locked in a gleaming toothpaste-ad smile.
“I suspect that she is an álfar,” Amalie answered finally.
“How come I don’t know more about the álfar?” I asked. “I hear about the five tribes all the time. Why don’t we talk about them the same way?”
“That’s a great question,” Ragnall agreed jovially.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“The álfar didn’t make contact with any of the tribes until around the beginning of the 1900s,” Amalie explained. “And in the early years, they were very, very private, even more than they are now.”
“Over the years, everyone here at the Mimirin has worked hard to keep communication open between us,” Ragnall said. “It has been a long, arduous journey at times, but we have made real progress in getting to know such a reclusive tribe.”
Then, as I looked at them—Ragnall with his painfully wide, salesman smile, and Amalie with her more restrained, timid smile, though their eyes shared an eager intensity—it finally dawned on me what was going on here.
“You still didn’t know much about them,” I said and leaned back in my chair. “You didn’t invite me here to tell me about the álfar—you were hoping I could tell you about them.”
Amalie pursed her lips, but she didn’t disagree. “They are secretive, but you seem to have earned their trust.”
I laughed despite myself. “I wouldn’t say Eliana and Jem have been forthcoming with me.”
“You have to understand our situation.” Amalie had been holding her cup of tea and saucer, but she leaned forward to set them back on the tray. “We have been trying for so long to unite the tribes, to work together so we can truly understand our shared histories and our place in the world.
“You could be an ambassador for us, helping to strengthen a friendship we’ve been trying to build for decades,” she said emphatically.
“Not a real ambassador, of course,” Ragnall added quickly. “Not a staffed position, but more of a symbolic role, helping all of trollkind.”
“Leading an expedition for our heritage,” Amalie added.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Nothing that you’re not already doing,” Amalie said. “Just talk to Jem, be friendly, get to know him. Later, we’ll get together, the way we are now, and we’ll have a chat about things. We may have a few questions, but nothing invasive, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, because what choice did I have? Amalie and Ragnall literally had the power to kick me out of Merellä, maybe even the entire kingdom, if they wanted to. And so they called me an ambassador, when what they really meant was spy.
30
Biology
“So, they gave you his address and sent you on your way?” Dagny asked, but I couldn’t tell if her incredulity was directed at me or at the Mästare and the Korva.
“Basically.” I leaned against the lab countertops beside her, idly toying with the folded note written on the Mästare’s letterhead.
As soon as I left Amalie’s chambers and the bizarrely intense meeting, I headed str
aight to the labs. Elof was finishing up a class, but as soon as it ended, I slid in the past the departing students.
Dagny cleaned up lab equipment in the sink, while Elof sat at his desk, dealing with his lesson planner. Since it was only the two of them, I felt comfortable telling them both all about the Mästare and the Korva’s strange proposal.
“Right before I left, Amalie told me that Calder wasn’t expecting me back until after lunch, and then she gave me his address,” I said and held up the paper.
“Jem-Kruk’s address?” She took the paper from me without asking and hurriedly read it. “This is in the staff housing at the Mimirin. He lives here?”
“Is he my neighbor?” Elof got up from his desk and came over to us.
“Are you going to go see him?” Dagny asked, and she held the note out so that Elof could read it.
He scoffed. “That’s one floor above me. He’s practically been on top of me.” Then he looked up at me. “How long has he been here? Why haven’t I heard about this?”
“I don’t think he’s been here that much,” I said. “A couple weeks near the beginning of June, and then he came back recently, according to Amalie. She also said he’s been keeping a low profile.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” Elof said, but he still sounded slightly offended about being kept out of the loop.
“Did you know about the álfar?” I asked.
“Not especially. They treat their biology like trade secrets, so they don’t like talking to me.”
“When I was growing up, there were all these stacks of old National Geographic magazines around the house,” I said.
Mr. Tulin would’ve been a hoarder if his wife had let him, but magazines were something he refused to give up. It was mostly the ones with the best pictures—art, architecture, science, and nature. They were tucked away in nooks, stacked on end tables, left sitting in boxes under the window until they were sun-faded and warped.
“There was this one issue that had a big feature on ‘lost tribes’ and ‘uncontacted peoples,’” I remembered. “All over the world, there are these little pockets of humans totally detached from the greater civilization. Some of the tribes have essentially never had contact outside of their villages, so they’re even more cut off than we are.
“In Iskyla, that seemed impossible to imagine, so I was obsessed with these stories,” I went on. “There are literally hundreds of these small communities. Tiny, intense clusters with specific traditions, beliefs, and languages.
“Much of their way of life seemed unusual or primitive, or at least very different than what I’d grown up around,” I said. “And the more I think about the álfar, the more I notice the similarities to these lost tribes. Eliana was very odd, but she spoke our language, understood how to use electricity, and got along fine around the city, relatively speaking. Like she’d spent time with a lost world and in our human world.”
I looked over to see Elof eyeing me up with an arched eyebrow. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to launch into a monologue. I was just thinking aloud.”
“All right, fine, I cave,” Elof announced abruptly. “I’ll tell you what I know.”
Both Dagny and I looked at him, and she asked, “What are you talking about?”
“Dagny, I thought you knew me well enough by now.” He tsked at her but he was smiling. “There’s a super-secret hidden tribe of magical beings that defy cultural and biological norms, and you think I didn’t immediately want to know everything about them?”
She smiled. “How silly of me.”
“What do you know?” I walked over to his desk.
“Not much more than you, unfortunately,” he admitted wearily. “I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting your new álfar friends—other than Eliana—but I did meet a young man who claimed to be from Adlrivellir, and the Styrelse believed him.
“The main thing that got me really curious was his perfect English,” Elof explained. “Trolls have adopted English as their primary language for centuries, but before that it was mostly old Norse and Germanic. Even now, many communities speak and incorporate the ancestral Scandinavian mixed with nearby human languages, like Inuit, French, Spanish, and German.
“It turns out that the álfar speak five languages.” He held up his hand to demonstrate. “Two that we—both trolls and humans—have no record of at all; an old variation of Norse; English; and a psychic one that we apparently can’t handle.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest, honestly. He became deliberately obtuse every time I pressed him on it. But no matter, because this particular story is about how come their English became so similar to ours.”
“How did that come to be?” Dagny asked.
“When they met us, initially they were very excited,” Elof explained. “This was a thousand years ago, and while the troll kingdom always lagged a bit behind humans, the álfar were trapped way back in the Dark Ages.”
“I always thought our delays in technology and industry had to do with our reliance on our abilities,” Dagny said. “Humans had to create advancements for themselves. Necessity is the mother of invention.”
“Funny you should mention that, because that seems to track for the álfar as well,” Elof said. “They have been reliant on their abilities, and it seems to be with good reason, though I have yet to see the full display of their particular talents.
“Regardless, the álfar were originally excited to join our worlds, or at least that’s what was written in the scant records of the time,” Elof said. “There were a few things—a couple letters, some drawings, a limerick—that establish that the trolls and álfar were mutually happy about the union, if slightly but justifiably trepidatious.
“And things fell apart very quickly,” he went on. “The álfar living in the troll kingdom were almost entirely wiped out by the Grændöden.”
“The Green Death?” I translated. “Didn’t that wipe out a lot of trolls too?”
“It did, but that was hundreds of years later, in the thirteenth century,” Elof clarified. “Are you familiar with it?”
“Some,” I admitted. I’d heard of it because it had decimated the troll populations in Scandinavia, so there were hardly any of our kind still living in our homeland.
“Candida viridi,” Elof said. “It’s a fungal infection that gets in the blood, causes candidiasis, and after a few painful days, their skin gets a greenish hue, and they pass away. We eventually figured out how to handle it, but the first time we encountered it, when we were breaking bread with the álfar, it was a massacre. There are few accounts from that time, but the first recorded mention of the Grændöden describes leaving man, woman, and child dead in their beds.”
I snapped my fingers. “That’s what happens with a lot of these lost tribes! They’re not used to our germs or our environment, so they don’t have the basic immunities that we take for granted.”
“Not even we have an immunity for that, but it appears to have hit them worse,” he said grimly. “Nearly going extinct had a sobering effect on the álfar, and they retreated into themselves. But they have never given up hope that we will reunite someday, or at least that’s the conclusion Mästare Amalie has drawn, since they continue to speak our language.”
“You disagree with that?” I asked.
Elof gave a disingenuous shrug. “Perhaps. It’s possible. Maybe even likely.”
“But?” I pressed.
He leaned forward and tented his fingers together. “When the álfar first met the trolls, they weren’t just exploring their neighborhood. One of the reasons the disease was so devastating to the álfar was because there were so many of them living around Áibmoráigi.” He paused, as if letting it sink in. “They were making an exodus.”
“From what?” Dagny asked.
“I have no idea.” He shook his head. “Maybe they were running from something or searching for something that they didn’t have at home, like food or water.�
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“But after the Grændöden, they went back to where they came from, and they haven’t really come back since,” I said. “That means they must have made peace with whatever they were running from or found a new source of food or whatever.”
“The Grændöden was near-certain death,” Elof reasoned. “Whatever they went back to only needed to be a little bit better than that.”
31
Visiting
The door to the apartment groaned open after my agonizingly long wait in the hall, and when Jem-Kruk saw me standing there, he grinned slowly.
“You found me,” he said simply.
“I can’t really take credit for it. The Mästare gave me your address.”
He stepped back and opened the door wider. “Come on in.”
“I’m Dagny Kasten.” She’d been standing beside me, and she introduced herself with a brusque handshake.
It had been her idea to come here, saying that was what the elders wanted—“Or why else would Mästare have given you his address?” she had reasoned insistently. “We might as well get it all done.” Naturally, she was concerned about my safety (and her curiosity had no bearing, obviously), so she had to come with me.
At first glance, the suite looked better than Calder Nogrenn’s apartment on a lower floor in the staff housing, even though it had the exact same tight two-room floor plan. But as we went inside, I realized it had just been styled significantly better. The dark kitchen cabinets had been painted bright white, and the mushy-green-pea walls were a contemporary fog-gray.
The dusty clutter of Calder’s place was entirely absent. Sleek seating, a stack of books, and several potted plants were the only furnishings.
While Dagny and Jem continued their cautiously polite introductions, I noticed the one thing that was definitely better here than Calder’s place—the view. Beside the sofa was a large picture window with sheer curtains. I pushed them aside and peered out at the bustling citadel, and at the ocean beyond the walls.
“They tell me this is the best view in the staff housing.” His voice was behind me, and when I glanced back, he was closer than I thought, with his dark eyes on me. My skin flushed, and I looked back out the window.
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