The Ever After

by Amanda Hocking

  “I’m sure he and you have a lot to talk about,” I said.

  “We do,” he agreed. “I’m looking forward to talking with him more tomorrow.”

  Hanna was going to help Jem and Johan do a video chat tomorrow while I did the aural healing with Tove and Sunniva. Johan was going to make sure his wife was home, so Jem could finally meet her.

  Jem and I hung out in the room for a bit longer, talking about the strange twists our lives had taken, and then we went down to grab something to eat at a café around the corner. After that, we parted ways. I checked in with both Dagny and Pan, and everything sounded like it was fine back in Merellä.

  That left me free to spend the evening fretting and pacing. When I finally felt tired enough for bed, I ended up tossing and turning for a long time, but finally I fell asleep.

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

  Not the prison cell, but the corridor outside it. Narrow and dark, although the stones seemed more rust colored than I remembered. Or maybe it was because all the lamps were lit.

  The hallway ended in an almost blindingly bright light, and as I walked into the atrium, lifting my arms to shield my eyes, I realized something.

  “I’ve been here before,” I said softly, and lowered my arms. I squinted up the tall silo of a room. A staircase wound around the walls, and the roof was all glass, letting in so much sunlight. “I’ve done this before.”

  “All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again, binrassi,” a woman said in a sultry baritone, and I looked over to see her standing on the steps.

  Her wide eyes were dark, like her long hair floating ethereally around her. She wore a gossamer gown, adorned with goldenrod and poppy red flowers, and a shawl of soft bird feathers. She was lovely and luminous, but her expression was grim.

  “But this time, you’re the one that must stop it,” she said in her deep, seductive voice. “You must hurry.” She raced up the stairs, her long train billowing out behind her.

  “Wait!” I shouted after her, but she never slowed. “Where are you going?”

  She was nearly at the top of the stairs, so I ran as fast as I could. When I got to the landing at the top, the only way out was a set of large doors, and I hurried through, but there was no sign of her.

  Outside, the air felt warm and crisp, and the beautiful mountainside city around me was eerily silent. Carts were left unattended in the dirt roads, and front doors left open on empty houses.

  The air turned cold and dark clouds rolled in, and I knew that a dense fog would follow behind it.

  “What am I to do?” I shouted into the still air. “You told me to stop it, but how do I do it? What am I even stopping?”

  “You’re stopping the end of everything you know,” she said, and I whirled around to see her standing there as the fog thickened around her.

  “How do I stop it?” I asked, and as the harsh air burned my throat, I realized it was smoke, not fog.

  She came closer to me, and sadly she said, “You will give your heart and your blood. That is the only way you will kill the wyrm.”

  “What?” I asked incredulously, and the ground shook beneath my bare feet. “How could I possibly do all that?”

  “When the time comes, follow the lone white elk.” She was nearly shouting to be heard over the rumbling. Stone buildings crumbled all around us, but she didn’t move, so neither did I.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When the time comes, follow the lone white elk. If you don’t, the whole world will burn,” she warned me, and suddenly, everything erupted in screams.

  The city that had a moment ago been devoid of life was abruptly filled with running, terrified men, women, and children. Some were bloodied, some singed, all of them screaming and shouting in a language I couldn’t understand.

  My lungs and throat burned and flashes of green lit up the smoke. The woman in her gossamer gown was gone, and I was dodging strangers and collapsing buildings. I ran around a burning barn, narrowly avoiding a panicked crowd rushing toward me.

  I heard a guttural growl, and the last thing I saw was a burst of green before an inferno engulfed me.

  47

  A Journey Back

  Tove and his husband, Bain, lived in a surprisingly luxe townhouse at the peak of the bluffs. It was the end unit in a row of six, and they had panoramic views of the vibrant green forest and deep blue Mississippi River cutting sharply through the land.

  Honestly, their house looked like something out of one of those home-decorating shows I sometimes watched with Hanna, Mia, and Finn. Soft gray walls like downy clouds, white marble tiles around the fireplace, wood floors so dark they were nearly black, and elegant crystal light fixtures. There were also a few chic rustic pieces, like a silver moose head made of mercury glass mounted on the wall and a chunky knit mohair blanket on the back of the sofa.

  When I got there, Bain answered the door and showed me to the sitting room, where Sunniva was already waiting. A cup of tea—mint flavored based on the scent—was in her hands, both carefully cupping the mug so her rings clinked against the ceramic.

  “Tove, your guest is here!” Bain shouted up the stairs. He smiled nervously at me. “He’ll be down in a minute.”

  Though he’d been the Chancellor for years, Bain lacked a politician’s knack for hiding his true feelings. Part of that was his boyish face and his wide blue eyes. His features were otherwise very Trylle, but his light eye color meant he had Skojare in him too.

  Tove jogged down the stairs a moment later, his hair still damp from the shower. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I finished filling the bath in the guest room with cold water.” He glanced at me, his mossy green eyes landing on me for a split second. “Just in case.”

  “That really doesn’t sound safe,” Bain said, his voice tight with worry.

  “We’ve got this,” Sunniva told him, and set her cup on the mirrored coffee table. “I’ve been training.” Long, thick lashes framed her earnest brown eyes, and her dark hair hung in a thick Dutch braid.

  “Didn’t you have a book club you wanted to get to today, hon?” Tove asked Bain.

  “I did.” Bain took a deep breath. “Be safe.” He looked to me. “All of you.” He kissed Tove, then gave me and Sunniva a polite goodbye before departing out the front door.

  After he’d gone, I told Sunniva and Tove about the hyperrealistic dream that ended in me burning in green flames.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Sunniva asked flatly, while Tove went into the kitchen to get a wet washrag and an ice pack.

  “I’m not normally the type to tell everyone about my dreams,” I said. “But this seemed so real. Like it was really happening. Or the memory of something that did really happen.” I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of the way my flesh burned and smoke filled my lungs. The scent of ashes and smoke still clung to the inside of my nostrils.

  Sunniva shrugged. “Maybe it did happen, but it didn’t happen to you. You didn’t die in a fire.”

  “Not yet,” I muttered.

  “I’ll be keeping tabs on your body temp,” Tove said as he returned. “I won’t let things get out of control.”

  “Let’s do this,” Sunniva said, and pointed to the furniture. “Move this out of the way.”

  I stepped toward the couch, preparing to lift it, but with a wave of Tove’s hand, the couch slid back to the stairs, the coffee table toward the fireplace, and the chairs went back toward the dining room. He tossed a throw pillow down in the middle of the wool floor rug, and I lay down on my back.

  As he positioned the ice pack under the back of my neck and laid the washcloth across my forehead, I looked past him and asked Sunniva, “If it was a memory, can you recover it?”

  “I can recover the memory of a dream.” She got a stepladder from the closet under the stairs and set it up at my feet. “But you already seem to remember it pretty well, so it doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited time.
Your body can’t handle doing this for too long.”

  “You’re right.” I sighed. “Could it have been a lysa?”

  “I have no idea. Lysas have nothing to do with aural healing.” She was on the top step of the stepladder and she pushed up the sleeves of her green blouse. “Now, are you ready?”

  “Yeah, of course.” I closed my eyes and lay still.

  “I need you to try to remember what you want me to recover,” she commanded.

  Since she’d asked me this last time, I had come prepared and already decided on the moment I most wanted to remember. The memory that surfaced when Elof took me to the Ögonen neighborhood to see their secret sorgblomma garden, but pain stopped me from being able to see it all the way through.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and lay perfectly still—

  —and I was back in Lemak the häxdoktor’s office. The bed with restraints was behind me, and I sat shackle-free at an old wooden desk. My wrists still bore the red, blistered reminders that my freedom was only temporary.

  It was only me and Lemak. And all of his dying flowers. Glass beakers lined the apothecary table with wilting yellow sorgblomma littering dry petals everywhere.

  “These are what he wants you to work on today,” Lemak said, handing me a narrow tube of paper.

  Slowly I unrolled it, and I saw the jagged Tryllic lettering.

  Tryllic was a runic bastardization of Russian Cyrillic with a Finnish influence. The Trylle had invented it centuries ago, after the Vittra intercepted royal correspondence and laid siege on the kingdom. Because of that, the Trylle wanted to create a language that the other tribes wouldn’t be able to decipher, and so they kept the Rosetta stone secret for many, many years.

  Now it’s a nearly forgotten language, with hardly any Trylle even bothering to learn it. Finn knew it, and he wanted me to study it because he thought it was important to remember our heritage and that it might be useful, the same reasons he had me learn Norse and Swedish. I had hated learning it at the time, but now it was literally saving my life.

  I still wasn’t fluent in it, not by a long shot, and I hadn’t read any Tryllic in quite a while. Lemak and Indu had gathered me various old documents to do comparisons and help decipher it.

  The main scroll that I had spent the most time on—days? Weeks? How long had we been there? I could feel memories overlaying it, a dozen different days at that desk, my wrists healing only to be bloodied and raw again, the flowers crumbling in their beakers replaced by fresh ones that wilted again—was called “A Recipe for the Journey Back.”

  In my attempts to finish the recipe, I made a few “unrelated” translations, or at least, that’s what Lemak would say each day I didn’t solve the puzzle they’d been working on for years. Lemak would lean over me, his long bony fingers on my shoulder, his breath reeking of fermented elk meat with his words in my ear: “You’re wasting time, and we’re losing patience. You need to stick to what truly matters.”

  I had futilely tried to explain to him that I didn’t know if a passage or word was relevant until I translated it, and the archaic wording made it very hard to decipher without some time and effort. But he wouldn’t listen, so I merely said, “I’m doing my best.”

  Then I’d uncovered the passage that made Lemak lose it—he struck me across the face, twice, and when I crouched down on the floor, trying to hide from more blows, he began hitting me over the head repeatedly with an old book. Dazed and in pain, I tried to fight back, but he hit me with a PSG before I had the chance.

  That had been my punishment for translating about the formation of Áibmoráigi:

  “Frey took the kingdom and was called the King by the Swedes, and they paid taxes to him. He built a great temple in Áibmoráigi. Then began the Älvolk domains, which have been ever since.”

  Another passage that earned me a beating on a different day: “The sky last will turn green on the most violent night, but good morning brings light to us all.”

  The room was heating up, and I felt like I was slowly roasting in an oven, but I kept my head down and did my best work. I didn’t know what Lemak would do to me—or Pan, Dagny, and Elof—if I didn’t. So even when the flowers began to crumble right before my eyes, and the sweat dripping off my brow smeared the scrolls, I kept working without complaint.

  Until finally—as the days rushed together, all the hours mashed into a matter of moments—I had completed the recipe for a disturbing blood pudding:

  1 drinking horn of álfar blood

  1 mug of spring lamb stock

  3 whole goose eggs

  corn cockle seed flour

  lard of hvalnum melted over an open fire

  mashed cloudberries

  sorgblomma, stem and liquid, mashed into a paste

  dried mugwort, powdered in a mortar

  Induian pear, minced

  albino elk heart, minced

  Stir it all together, cook in a full-sized cauldron until firm.

  “Why is the recipe so special?” I asked as Lemak read it over.

  “It’s not what the recipe is,” he said. “It’s about what can be done once it’s consumed.”

  He was so delighted, his thin lips pulled back to reveal his yellowed teeth in a sickly smile, and when I asked if I could translate the bit that was scribbled at the bottom, he grunted, “You can waste your time if that’s what you choose,” without backhanding me.

  Still, I wasn’t sure how long his mood would last, since some of those ingredients sounded hard to come by. The hvalnum may even be an extinct water mammal, though it sounded like it could be a harbor porpoise. They’d been taking my blood, but I wasn’t álfar. At least not completely. At the thought of someone cooking my blood and eating it, my stomach rolled, and I coughed to suppress my urge to vomit.

  As I hurried to translate the scribblings, the heat in the room continued to rise. Over the course of a few days, actually. Lemak ordered me to continue translating it now, after Indu demanded more information about the ingredients. But it had been several days, and they had never been patient.

  The stone walls were sweating, and the paper kept rolling and warping from the rising temperature.

  “Can you turn down the heat?” I asked, nearly gasping from the suffocating warmth.

  “It’s fine down here,” Lemak snapped, and then he was reading over my shoulder. “Finish your work.”

  But the truth was that I thought I already had. The words at the bottom simply said, “Frey’s father has closed the bridge for the ekkálfar, and to cross it is to undo his words, and his word is bond.”

  The water in the beakers began to boil, and the stone tiles scorched the bottom of my feet. I lifted them up, resting my heels on the edge of the chair to keep the skin from melting off.

  “I can’t stay here anymore,” I said, practically shouting.

  Lemak looked at me, and from his mouth, I heard Tove’s voice: “We’re getting you out of there now.”

  Wind rushed through the room and the walls began to shake. The papers on the desk burst into flames, and I screamed.

  “Ulla, I need you to open your eyes,” Sunniva said, and her voice shook the entire room.

  48

  Annul

  My hair was still wet from the ice bath, but I changed out of my clothes as soon as I got back to the hotel. Jem and Sumi were already there, him sitting in the rocking chair in the corner, Sumi pacing in front of the lacy curtains, but we were waiting for Finn. I wanted to talk this all over with him almost more than anybody.

  He’d know what to do.

  At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

  He arrived a moment later, pounding on the hotel room door, and when Sumi answered it, he rushed in and over to me.

  “Are you all right? You sounded so panicked on the phone.” Finn sat down on the bed beside me, and his dark eyes were frantic with worry.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” Then I shook my head and corrected myself. “Mostly fine. Pretty much.”

  “Yo
u sure?” He put the back of his hand against my forehead, checking my temperature, and he frowned. “You’re still very warm.”

  I leaned away from him and his overbearing parental mode. “It takes time to cool down completely, but I’m getting there.”

  He let his hand fall. “What did you remember?”

  “I know what the Älvolk are doing and what they want,” I said. “They’re making some kind of mystical blood pudding with rare, disturbing ingredients.”

  I’d written them down in a notebook, and I held it out to him, but Sumi snatched it before anybody else had a chance to, and she quickly read through it.

  “They think if they consume it, they’ll be able to cross the bridge and enter Alfheim,” I explained.

  “Why’d you write this on here?” Sumi tapped the bottom of the page where I’d jotted down Frey’s father has closed the bridge for the ekkálfar, and to cross it is to undo his words, and his word is bond.

  “That was the last thing I remember translating,” I said.

  “Oh, sweet sister Hel,” she said under her breath. “They mean to cross the bridge and enter Alfheim. They want to undo the word of Frey’s father, annulling the enchantment that kept the entrance to Alfheim closed. But if they do what Frey said was impossible by crossing it, then the bridge would be open to everyone.” She looked to Jem with wide eyes. “On both sides.”

  Jem cursed and rubbed his chin. “They’re not prepared here. They’ll be slaughtered.”

  “I had a dream. Or maybe a lysa. Or a vision,” I said. “I don’t know. But I think it was about the fall of Áibmoráigi. There was a woman, and she told me that I needed to prevent it again.”

  “How?” Sumi asked.

  “When the time is right, I need to follow the lone white elk,” I said uncertainly.

  Finn scoffed. “That sounds like a stress dream.”

  “No, Finn, it wasn’t,” I insisted. “I’ve been seeing an albino elk, and now I’m told I’ve got to stop something terrible from happening. So what do I do?”