The Ever After

by Amanda Hocking

  In the background, I heard a loud clatter, and Elof calling Dagny’s name.

  “I have to go help Elof with something,” she said. “I’ll talk to you soon, though, Ulla. Stay safe.”

  “You too,” I told her, and ended the call.

  Then I lay back on the air mattress, and I stared up at the fluffy white clouds on the pale blue ceiling of the twins’ room, and I tried to figure out what I was going to do from here.

  7

  Binrassi

  Niko had been the first one to sneak into the room, but I was ready for a reprieve from my growing anxiety. Everything felt so up in the air, and I was so untethered.

  Not to mention the near boundless hospitality that Finn and his family had shown me. But I couldn’t possibly expect that to last forever. They had six children and Finn’s mother to worry about, plus Finn’s high-stress job as the minister of defense of the entire Trylle kingdom.

  I allowed myself a few more minutes alone with Niko, reading him a passage from Sunny Plants for Funny Kids. It didn’t say much of interest. With petals of gold and nectar of red, this big flower smells of the dead. When I finished, I put it back on the shelf and scooped Niko up in my arms before heading downstairs.

  I found Mia and Hanna in the kitchen, trying to make sweet-and-sour red cabbage with mushroom and quinoa sausage for supper with the twins crawling around. I managed to entertain the littler kids, keeping them out from underfoot while Mia sautéed and boiled in pots and pans at the stove, and while Hanna cut and prepped nearby and made quite the sous chef to her mother.

  Hanna used the time to ask me a thousand questions, but she grew increasingly disappointed with my constant refrain of “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember.”

  “How long are you going to be here?” Hanna asked finally.

  “Um, I’m not sure.” I sat cross-legged on the floor, with Lissa on my lap, leaning forward and using her pudgy hands to help her sister stack perilous towers of plastic cups.

  Mia was sautéing the mushrooms with her back to me, and she looked over her shoulder at me. “You know you can stay here as long as you want.”

  “I could kick Emma out, and you could stay in my room,” Hanna offered.

  “Hanna, no,” Mia admonished her before Hanna got too carried away with fantasies of evicting her little sister. “Finn and I were talking, and we could empty out all the things we put in your room after you moved out. We hadn’t meant to turn it into storage like that, but my summer cleaning got away from me.”

  “No, I don’t want you guys going to any trouble. I’ll be fine on the air mattress until I can figure out what I’m going to do next.”

  “Well, there’s no rush. You’ve been through a lot, and you need time to sort things out. We all understand, and we just want you to be okay.”

  “Thanks, that—” I was going to finish with means a lot to me, but at that exact moment, Luna decided to clock Niko in the head as hard as she could.

  He immediately screamed, so Lissa started to cry, and within seconds, all the kids were having a meltdown. Hanna finished cooking while Mia and I dealt with consoling everyone else.

  They calmed down in time for supper, but then everyone was talking, and the conversation never went back to me or my future plans. Which was fine by me, because I didn’t want to talk about it anyway.

  The great thing about having ten of us in the house—five of them under the age of eight—was there was always so much commotion going on, and it was easy to get lost in it if you wanted to.

  Despite my lengthy midday nap, I was exhausted by bedtime. Unfortunately, the twins weren’t nearly as ready for sleep as I was at nine-thirty P.M. After three rounds of their favorite lullaby, Luna finally went down, but Lissa was still fussing.

  I’d tried everything I could think of, so I took Lissa from her crib, and I held her in my arms. I can’t say for certain that it worked for her, but within minutes, I was out.

  And the next time I opened my eyes, I was in the dungeon again.

  Not the prison cell, but the corridor outside of it. It looked the same as it had last time. Narrow and dark, although the stones seemed more rust colored. Or maybe it was just because it was brighter. All the lamps were lit, with one on either side every few feet.

  The hallway ended in an almost blindingly bright light, and I shielded my face with my arm as I walked into the atrium. It was a tall silo of a room, with a stone staircase that wound up to the glass roof letting all the sunlight pour in.

  A woman was standing on the stairs, a few steps up from the bottom, and she smiled serenely. Her long dark hair floated ethereally around her, and her pale gown adorned with flowers of goldenrod and poppy red seemed to be one with her luminous bronze skin.

  “You need to hurry,” she said in a voice that was deeper than I would’ve thought. It was throaty and almost seductive.

  “Why?” I asked as I walked toward her, and she started running up the stairs, so her floral train billowed out behind her.

  “Hrudda, binrassi.” Her sultry baritone was urgent but her lyrical drawl made it sound almost playful.

  She ran faster, and I didn’t want to lose her when she went through the doors at the top of the stairs, so I chased after her.

  I followed her outside, where the air felt crisp but strangely warm. I found myself in a beautiful city built into the side of the mountain. Tall stone buildings straight out of the fairy-tale picture books I read to the children, with vine-covered turrets. Around me were houses, a stable, a garden with wilted flowers.

  Despite all the buildings, all the carts unattended in the dirt roads, all these signs of life, even a fire crackling in a pit, I didn’t see a single living thing. The eerie stillness was broken when the wind picked up, bringing with it a rustling and a rattling of metal, like broken bells.

  I spun around slowly, but I couldn’t see the woman I’d been following. Dark clouds were rolling in, blocking out the sun. A dense fog was sweeping over the town.

  The harsh air burned my throat, making me cough, and I realized it wasn’t fog but smoke.

  I couldn’t see through it, but I heard the rumble of stones collapsing into each other. The ground was shaking, and I started running, as if I could outrun the smoke and stone avalanche.

  “Help!” I shouted. “Help me!”

  “Hurry, hurry, binrassi,” she said, her voice booming through me even though I couldn’t see her.

  I tried to run faster, but I tripped on the unstable ground. There was a flash of bright green, cutting through the billowing smoke. And then the building behind me began to collapse, and I had no time to react as the heavy stones tumbled down on me.

  I opened my eyes, gasping for air as I stared up at the clouds painted on the ceiling. Lissa babbled softly beside me, quiet toddler ramblings of comfort.

  “Thanks, Lissa,” I said, but my voice was hoarse, and my throat still burned the way it had in the dream.

  I put Lissa back in the crib, and then I went down the hall to get a drink of water and clear my head of the intense, vivid nightmare.

  8

  Familiarity

  Hanna had been on the phone with her grandfather, Johan, while Mia and I set up Hanna’s laptop in a quiet corner of the house. After quite a bit of back and forth, Hanna thought she’d finally gotten Johan to understand how to video chat.

  The three of us sat on the couch, with Hanna’s laptop across from us, propped up on some wooden blocks on top of the coffee table. The laptop screen was black, except for the lime green phone icon in the center, and the only sound was the electronic da-da-da of the ringing.

  “He hasn’t answered yet,” I said.

  “I told him to answer when it rings,” Hanna said wearily.

  “Maybe you should call him on the phone,” Mia suggested.

  “No, Mom, he’s got it. Give him a minute.”

  Finally, the ringing stopped, and an old man squinted at the screen through his small oval spectacles that sat on
the end of his nose. The salt-and-pepper hair on his head was slightly darker and thinner than his bushy beard.

  “Oh, hello,” he said. “I can see you all. Can you see me?”

  “Yes, we can.” Mia smiled. “It’s nice to see you again, Johan.”

  “Hi, Grandpa,” Hanna said with a lackluster wave.

  His smile deepened. “It’s so nice to be able to see your face when we talk.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy video chatting,” Mia said.

  “Yes, it seems like a wonderful invention,” he agreed. “Now, I don’t think I quite understand what you were asking about earlier. Something about a book?”

  “I had some questions about the book you wrote,” I said. “The one you showed me when I tried to drop Hanna off back in June, about Jem-Kruk.”

  “Why?” he asked in surprise. “You can ask me anything you want, of course, but I can’t imagine that old fairy stories are of that much interest to you.”

  “But is that all they are?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Johan asked.

  “Is any of it true?” I asked.

  He laughed, a warm chuckle, and readjusted his glasses. “No. They’re only stories.”

  “Were you inspired by anything from your life?” Mia tried.

  “Well, I’m sure I was, the way I imagine most authors are,” he said. “But I feel like you’re trying to find out about something in particular. Perhaps it’d be easier if you just asked straight out.”

  “She met Jem-Kruk,” Hanna blurted out.

  He shook his head. “What?”

  “I met someone named Jem-Kruk,” I clarified. “And he seemed to match the description in your books.”

  “It’s an unusual name, to be sure,” Johan said. “But I taught at a tracker school, and I had students named Iago, Artemis, and Dartha. Naming a child after a character from a children’s book is a fairly common occurrence.”

  “But there was other stuff,” Hanna persisted. “My friend Eliana came from a land of three suns and pink skies.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about a place like that,” he said. “Truth be told, I don’t even really remember writing the book. My wife and I were little more than newlyweds still, and Nikolas was only a baby. I was having my go at tracking, so I’d be gone for long stretches of time. The stories were something I wrote to ease my boredom and to feel close to my family.

  “But I was miserable, and sleep-deprived for most of it,” Johan went on. “I know I wrote the book, but I have no recollection of it.”

  Hanna frowned and her brow pinched up, and she’d gotten that look, like she was about to start arguing. Mia leaned in and put a hand on her daughter’s back, curbing Hanna before she got going.

  “Nikolas always spoke fondly of his childhood,” Mia said. “I don’t think he was ever aware of any hardships in the family.”

  “I’ve always thought it’s such a blessing that children never know everything about their parents,” he said, but he sounded morose.

  “As I’ve been talking about these things with Hanna, I realized that I know very little of your life before Nikolas was born,” Mia said.

  “I grew up in a small village, and I doubt that it was that much different than yours.” Johan leaned back in his chair slightly. “I am happy to talk to you about Nikolas or your lives or yes, the fantasy world I told my son as a bedtime story thirty years ago. But I am rather perplexed about your interest in this.”

  “It’s sort of hard to explain, but I’ve been trying to find my parents,” I began uncertainly. “And somehow, the paths keep leading back to this book. My mother’s name is Senka, and she’s from another kingdom, called Alfheim.”

  “Alfheim?” His bushy eyebrows raised high. “No, that’s not a troll myth. That’s the humans and their Norse myths.”

  “They’ve based other stories on us too,” Hanna interjected. “Grandma Annali always says that even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

  Johan chuckled, but it wasn’t as warm as it had been before. Even his smile changed, his lips pressed together in a thin line nearly hidden by his beard. “She sounds like a smart woman.”

  “So you don’t know anything more about Jem-Kruk or Senka than what’s in your book?” I asked, giving it one last attempt.

  “No, I’m saying that I don’t even know that much,” he corrected me. “All of that was made up, and I don’t even remember making it up anymore.”

  “If you don’t want to talk about the book, Johan, that’s fine, and completely understandable,” Mia said. “But we’d still like to talk to you about your life and about your childhood and Nikolas’s.”

  He was silent for a moment, staring off at some spot beyond the computer. Behind him, I could see the rows of books filling the curved shelves that surrounded him in his towering study. He was sitting in the room where I’d chatted with him at the beginning of the summer. It had smelled of earthy sandalwood, and we’d sat near the fireplace, him sipping wine while telling me how the tales of Jem-Kruk were his favorites.

  And now he didn’t seem to want to talk about it at all. Maybe he was put off by the intrusion, or maybe he was hurt that Hanna’s interest wasn’t more motivated by love. Or maybe it was something else entirely, but I didn’t know what was going on.

  Finally, he asked, “Is that true, Hanna?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m ready to know about Nikolas.”

  “Well, I’ll have plenty to tell you, but I’d like some time to collect my thoughts before we get into that,” he said. “Maybe we can set up another one of these video chats later on with Grandma Sarina? I know she has a lot she wants to talk to you about.”

  Hanna smiled. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  “Sarina did have a … friend named Senka,” Johan said. “Years ago, and I don’t really remember her anymore, but I can talk to her. It’s likely not the same Senka you’re looking for, but Sarina will most likely be happy to speak with you.”

  “Yeah, that would be really great,” I said.

  He smiled in a way that didn’t quite reach his eyes and said, “I’m always happy to help.”

  9

  Plans

  The conversation veered after that, with both Mia and Johan getting teary-eyed, and I felt like I was encroaching on a private moment. I excused myself, and they talked for a while longer, just long enough for me to make a pot of tea on the stove.

  Mia tried to apologize about the conversation not being more fruitful for me, but I told her that she’d already been more helpful than she needed to be. The call seemed to have left her sad and tired, so I offered to make lunch for the kids while she lay down.

  She took me up on it, and soon I was boiling carrots I’d plucked fresh from the family garden. And as I stood over the stove, it occurred to me how seamlessly I slid back into the life I had before.

  When Finn and Mia took me in five and a half years ago, I’d known that I couldn’t stay here forever. I’m nineteen years old. I have to make my way in the world eventually.

  The problem was that the options in the Trylle kingdom—or any of the kingdoms—were so limited. I’d been homeschooled since I got to Förening. (Finn had initially hired a private tutor to catch me up because my Iskyla education had been severely lacking.) But I had still made a few friends around my age, and I saw the choices they made with the hands they’d been dealt.

  Sybilla Janssen and Alva Lund had become trackers, the same as their older siblings and parents had before them. But those jobs were drying up, both because the royal families weren’t having children at the rates they once were and because the Queen was trying to stop the reliance on the changelings. Fewer changelings meant fewer trackers.

  There were still plenty of spots open on the Queen’s guard, which served as the military and the police. My friend Isak Vinstock had joined, hoping to get on the detective track, but the competition was so steep, he’d been languishing in Oslinna for years, working on the recovery, rebu
ilding homes and facilities.

  Isak wasn’t the only one who went to Oslinna either. I knew of several other kids who had gone there for the construction work.

  But most of the trolls I’d been friends with stuck around Förening, with many still living with their parents. A few were going to Förening Tertiary Educational Center, getting education degrees to work in the grade school, and another was apprenticing at his mother’s organic specialty bakery.

  And there were the others that got married right out of high school and were already starting families. Even in 2019, it wasn’t uncommon for Trylle to marry young, sometimes even as young as sixteen or seventeen. Non-royalty were faring better with fertility, but Finn and Mia’s well-populated home was an outlier these days.

  That basically covered all the options for someone like me in Förening—soldier, teacher, baker, wife. There was nothing wrong with any of them, of course, and they were all fine pursuits in their own right. But I wasn’t sure that any of them were what I wanted to do. I mean, marriage someday, ideally, but I wanted to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life first.

  My reason for going to the Mimirin institution was that I had hoped to find out where I came from. If I knew where I came from, I’d know where to go, right? Besides, I had to put all of Finn’s linguistic lessons to good use.

  But the more I learned, the more questions I had, and the more uncertain I felt about myself, my future, and my place in the world. And I had the big black hole of the Lost Month hanging over me.

  The kids were fussing for lunch, and I didn’t have time to worry about all the existential questions weighing on me when preparing food for the family.

  It worked so well, I spent the afternoon busying myself with the kids—feeding them, cleaning up after them, entertaining them. They made it a lot easier to ignore the dread at the pit of my stomach.

  Eventually, I ended up outside in the warm sun. Behind the house was a small barn and a decent-sized pasture—an angled grassy clearing, surrounded by a stone wall to prevent errant children or animals from tumbling off the sheer bluff face at the edge of the artificially leveled field.