Thief Eyes
Page 4
“Bullshit.” Ari threw his menu down. He looked furious. “You use magic as an excuse for everything. Tell Haley what really happened.” He glanced at Dad, then back to his mom. “Tell her the real reason neither of you followed Amanda when she ran.”
I looked at Katrin. “Wait—you were there?”
“That’s enough, Ari,” Dad said.
“It is not enough!” Ari said. “I cannot believe you did not tell her.”
“Tell me what?” The stomach-clenching, I-don’t-want-to-know feeling returned, stronger than yesterday.
Katrin said something to Ari in Icelandic. It sounded like a warning.
Ari answered her in English. “Yes, well, if you and Gabe had kept your hands off of each other, maybe Amanda would not have run.”
“What?”
Dad let out a breath and sank down into his seat. Katrin said something sharp in Icelandic and pointed to the door.
Ari answered her in Icelandic this time, his scorn clear enough. “I am sorry, Haley,” he said to me in English. “But it is not sorcery I am sorry for.” He grabbed his leather jacket and notebook and stalked out.
I looked from Katrin to Dad. My chest felt tight. “Is it—” The words stuck in my throat. “Did you—”
Dad shut his eyes. He looked utterly, completely lost.
The room felt too hot, too close. I didn’t care how lost Dad felt, not if he—but he couldn’t have—he wouldn’t have. I stood, grabbing my own jacket and backpack as I did.
“Haley,” Katrin said. “Until the coin is returned, you remain in danger. Hallgerd’s spell could consume you yet.”
“You—” I couldn’t get enough air. I couldn’t stand to even look at her. Had she and Dad really—I whirled away and bolted down the hall, pulling on my jacket as I did.
“Haley!” Katrin shouted, right across the restaurant. “You must never run from magic!”
I burst out the door and across the hotel parking lot. Sun shone off the asphalt as I ran, pack bumping against my shoulders. Katrin ran after me, Dad close behind. I didn’t slow down. If I ran, I didn’t have to think—about Mom, about magic, about Dad and Katrin. My sneakers crunched as I turned onto a gray gravel path. The gravel gave way to dirt, and gray geese flew up from the river to my right. Ahead of me I saw the blocky walls of the rift valley outlined against a bright blue sky. Dad and Katrin both shouted after me, but they were too slow. Their voices quickly faded.
Gulls flew in circles high above. The path sloped uphill, through green grasses. I’m running now, Dad. Are you happy? Anger made my eyes sting. The coin flared hot in my pocket, though I’d left it on the table.
“Haley!” a woman’s voice called, somewhere inside me. Had that voice cast a spell that consumed my mother, like Katrin had said, or had Mom really just run away because she knew that Katrin and Dad—
I ran faster, breathing hard, up some stairs and past the tourists at the Law Rock. By the drowning pool, Ari was scowling into the water. Anger pulled me past him, up the trail and toward the waterfall. I heard more words in my head, but they weren’t in English, and I couldn’t understand them. The pulling grew stronger. My anger burned hotter.
Fear trickled down my spine. I tried to stop running; my feet didn’t listen. A pair of small birds flew out of my path. I heard the rush of the waterfall, but I couldn’t slow down.
“Haley! I’m angry at them too, yeah?” Ari sounded very far away. He panted, as if he was running after me.
I reached the rocks and felt the cold spray of the waterfall. The pulling urged me around behind the stones, toward a dark cave within them. A raven cried out. Hot wind began to blow, and the scent of sulfur tinged the air.
The fear grew like fire beneath my skin. The cave mouth drew closer. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t even turn around. I grabbed on to the stones. I couldn’t turn back, so instead I tried climbing upward—anything to avoid going around the rocks and into that dark cave. The pulling fought me, but not as hard. I kept climbing, my sweaty hands sliding against the stone.
The voice inside me began yelling. My headache flared sharper. Down below, Ari called after me. I couldn’t hear his words above the water. I could only keep climbing the slick rocks. Water soaked through my jeans and jacket, but I wasn’t cold—I was stiflingly hot.
The world spun and went dark. I smelled smoke and the sour stench of old meat. I blinked my eyes open and found myself crouched in a dim cave. Long hair fell around me like a veil. I squeezed my eyes shut. The girl climbing the rocks seemed a distant vision. The ground trembled beneath me, a low murmur that began to build.
I didn’t dare open my eyes. I knew when I did the vision would be gone, and I would be the long-haired woman in the cave.
Hot wind stroked my cheek. I jerked away from that burning touch. As I did, my sweaty fingers lost their grip on the stones, and I returned to my own body with a jolt. I was falling, falling—I reached for the rocks and missed. I screamed, even as fog filled the air. A hand grabbed at my pack and fell away. Cold wind whistled past my ears; wings beat the air. I braced for the pain that would take all other thoughts away.
I slammed into the rocks below, and the world went black.
Chapter 4
I dreamed of a tower of gray blocks, stacked beside a rushing waterfall. Too high—a child’s arm reached out and knocked the wobbling tower down.
I dreamed of a bow strung with fire. An arrow was loosed from the bow, and it caught fire as it flew, tracing a burning arc through the air. Where the arrow landed, I knew the world would burn, down to its very roots. I would burn, too, down to my very soul—but I didn’t fear fire.
I dreamed of a gray-eyed girl who solemnly held out her fist to the man who knelt before her. “Promise me, Father. Promise I will determine my fate.” She opened her hand. A ring lay there, woven of her own silken hair.
The man chucked her under the chin. “I’d promise anything for my beautiful girl,” he said. The child beamed up at him, but even in my dream I knew the man was lying. All fathers lied, one way or another.
The dream faded, leaving me alone in the dark. I tried to open my eyes. My lids were too heavy. Something had happened—there’d been wind, water, falling. There’d been pain, too, or would be once—
“You need not remember.” The words held the rhythm of wingbeats, steady and lulling. I’d never heard that voice before. “You need only sleep.”
I slept.
When I woke, I could open my eyes, but the darkness remained as thick as before. The air was cold and damp. Hard stone lay beneath my back. I tried to sit up.
Pain arced through my spine. It burned through my arms and legs and skull, my every shattered bone. I bit my lip to keep from screaming, remembering dimly that I must never cry out, however terrible my dreams. A gasp escaped my lips as I fell back to the stone.
“Not a good idea,” said a squeaky voice. “You need rest. You need healing. You need time.” I heard claws tapping stone. Something—the air around me?—lifted my head. Someone pressed a cup to my lips.
Warm, sweet liquid filled my mouth. I swallowed, and even that small movement hurt. Sweetness flowed down my throat, into my spine, along my arms and legs and skull, down to the smallest bones of my fingers and toes.
“Who are you?” My voice sounded strange and thick.
I heard a bark—or maybe a laugh. “Only a scrap of lingering lore some choose to remember. Nothing you need worry about.”
I thought about sitting up again, but moving had hurt the last time I’d tried it. I struggled to remember what had happened, but thinking took too much work. I slept once more.
In my sleep, I heard voices.
A woman’s voice: “Haley! Where are you, Haley? The fire I called burns on—in my hair, in my thoughts, in the coin you yet hold. You took that coin of your own will. Do you refuse the bargain that goes with it? For three days I have returned to this cave, hidden from my father’s view, to seek you out. Are you a coward after all?”
I tried to recall why I wanted a way out, but I saw only burning things: a bow, an arrow, a woman’s hair, cracks within the earth.
A squeaky voice: “Here. Drink this.” Sweetness filled me again.
A voice that held the beating of wings: “You need not remember. You need only sleep.”
* * *
When I woke again, the pain was gone. I sat up slowly, afraid, but nothing hurt. I began trembling, with shock or relief or maybe both. The air was still dark. I couldn’t see my own fingers, held up in front of my face. Just then, that didn’t matter. “I’m all right,” I whispered, and the trembling eased.
Small feet clicked against the stone and stopped beside me. I felt a cup pressed to my lips. The liquid within smelled sweet and alcoholic. I pushed it away.
“It would be better if you drank.” The squeaky voice again. I reached out and felt soft fur. So soft—more like a plush toy than anything real.
“I’m not thirsty.” Whatever was in the cup would make me sleep, and I didn’t want to sleep anymore. I heard movement in the dark as the furred creature left my side. Something scraped the floor.
I felt around me. I was sitting on a hard low platform, like a stone bed. The air smelled heavy with water. I swung my feet over the edge—still no pain. “Is there light?” I asked my—captor? Rescuer? Had I needed rescuing?
“I will get light.” Claws tapped rock, leaving me alone.
I squinted into the dark, but my eyes didn’t adjust. I knew I’d been able to see before—where? I couldn’t remember. My thoughts felt fuzzy and strange. I stood—the floor was stone, too—and walked forward, stretching my arms out in front of me. After a few steps I came to a rough stone wall.
My shoes squeaked as I returned to the platform. I’d been running. I remembered that much. I’d been running, and someone had been calling my name.
Haley—somehow, I pulled that name from the back of my mind. It was like pulling something out of thick, sucking mud. My name was Haley. I held on to the thought, afraid that if I let go, I would lose it.
I sank to my knees, fighting nausea. I was in more trouble than I could imagine if I had to work to remember my own name.
I rubbed my arms. They were covered in nylon—jacket sleeves. My long hair was loose, and it fell into my face. Think, Haley. Where did I live? I couldn’t remember. Family? Nothing, just sludgy darkness where my memories should have been. My teeth chattered. It was cold in this stone room.
Yellow light flared at the edges of my sight. Too bright—I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. More light bloomed in front of me, behind me, as if by magic. The light cast faint shadows.
I blinked and stood. I was in a small stone room, maybe ten feet across, wearing jeans and a blue hooded jacket. The light came from small bowls of oil with burning wicks in them, set in shoulder-high niches in the walls. Smoke drifted from the bowls, carrying an oily animal scent. Aside from the bed and the lamps, the room was almost empty, with just an ivory-colored drinking horn filled with amber liquid, set in a wooden stand beside the bed, and some shelves and ledges in the walls, which disappeared into the darkness above me. To my left, a broad doorway led out into a dark tunnel.
A small white fox padded out of the tunnel and crossed the room to sit at my feet. An arctic fox with small ears and a long fluffy tail—not a red fox or a fennec fox or any of the other species names that tumbled into my awareness. Why could I remember twelve kinds of foxes when I couldn’t remember my family or home?
“Light,” the fox said.
Never mind what species he was—I sank abruptly down on the stone bed. “You can talk.” None of those dozen species could talk.
“So can you.” The fox scratched behind his ear with one paw. I couldn’t help it—I reached out to pet him. The fox leaned into my hand. His woolly fur really was that soft.
Was I someone who liked animals? I stared into the darkness above. My name was Haley. What else? Mother and father? Sisters or brothers? My thoughts slid away when I tried to focus them, as if they, too, were beyond the light. I clenched my other hand into a fist, released it when my nails—sharp nails—dug into my palms. “Ouch!” I jammed both hands into my pockets.
My fingers brushed soft cloth in one pocket, warm metal in the other. A memory of gray eyes and hot wind shook loose from the dark, and another of losing my grip and falling—
I jerked my trembling hands out of my pockets. Maybe there was a reason I’d forgotten. I stared down at my palms. They were crossed with faint half-moon scars.
In the distance, I heard wings beat the air. A huge black raven flew out of the tunnel and into the room, wings outstretched. A half dozen small black-capped birds—arctic terns—followed in its wake.
I scrambled to my feet. The raven swooped up onto one of the ledges, perched there, and looked down at me through bright black eyes. Dizziness washed over me. Somehow I knew those eyes remembered all I’d forgotten. The smaller birds arrayed themselves on lower shelves while the fox tapped my ankle once—a friendly gesture—then curled up on the floor, wrapping his bushy tail around his paws.
The raven flapped its wings—slowly, rhythmically—and somehow those wingbeats shaped themselves into words. “So. You have chosen to wake.” He flexed his black claws. His glossy wings shone in the lamplight.
“Who are you?” Speaking—thinking—took too much work while staring into those eyes. I looked down. My sneakers were gray with gravelly dust. “Why did you bring me here? What do you want?”
The raven’s wings kept beating the air. I swayed in time to that beat. “I saved your life.”
Even without looking at the bird, speaking took effort. “Why did my life need saving?”
“It didn’t,” the raven said matter-of-factly. “But the other one, by whose spell you were caught—the fire she called on could tear the land asunder, should it be set free. Perhaps your dying while bound to her magic would not be enough to release that fire. Perhaps it would. I prefer not to take chances. The other one was young when she cast her spell. She thought it a game, a matter of her own human life, yet the earth still trembles with the memory of how she called upon the realm of fire.”
I had no idea what the raven was talking about, and my murky memories yielded nothing. “What other one?”
“I’ll not name her, lest I give her more power—for though she died a thousand years before you were born, time is a fragile human thing and can be altered to bring the land’s ending. All things must end, as my master foretold long ago. Even so I would hold off their end awhile longer. I would remember for a small time more.”
“Wait, you’re saying the world could end if I die?” Yeah right, the earth really does revolve around me. I laughed uneasily. I didn’t need my memories to know how unlikely that was.
The raven didn’t laugh. He just kept flapping his wings. A chill breeze blew through the room. “This island, certainly, which is all of the world I can see. You are not as strongly tied to the spell as the other one. You have only touched the fire—you have not offered gifts to the giants who wield it, and they have not left their power burning within you in turn. If they had, you would be as far beyond my reach as the other one. As it is, the danger is smaller, but still real. Just ask the first victim of the spell.”
“What first victim?” My throat caught on the words. There was pain in that question’s answer, pain sharp as shattered bone.
“Ah.” The raven’s wingbeats slowed to a whisper. “Even were I willing to return that memory to you, you would not want it.”
Yet now that I knew the memory—the pain—was there, I couldn’t help searching my thoughts for it, like digging at an old scab.
The memory remained out of reach. I looked up again. It was easier now than before. I focused on the glossy wings and avoided the bright eyes. �
��Who are you?” My words echoed in the stone chamber.
“I have many names. Most of them humans have forgotten. Muninn is one a few yet remember. Memory is another. Not human memory—human memories are short. That is no matter. All any mortal beings once knew, I remember for them. Once I held those memories for my master, but he walks less and less often in this world. Yet though the old gods retreat to their own places, Memory remains in this land to the end of days.”
I kept scratching at that scab. Pain shot behind my eyes, but I didn’t cry out. I remembered how I’d woken, swallowing screams. Apparently I was someone who could handle pain. “I can hold my own memories,” I said.
Muninn threw back his head and krawked—it sounded like a warning. “Your memories were small enough payment for the life I saved. What gift can you offer me to have them back again?”
I barely knew my name. What could I possibly have to give? Why should it take a gift just to get my own memories back? “You had no right to take them.”
“Nor did I have any right to save your life. Yet save it I did, and that life is the one thing I’ll not take back again.” Muninn ducked his head and began grooming his sleek feathers.
The fox opened his tiny brown eyes. “It is easier to forget.” The small terns bobbed their heads in agreement.
I shoved my hands into my pockets and felt warm metal once more. I pulled out a small silver coin, engraved with circles and lines. I heard—or maybe remembered—a woman’s voice calling my name.
Muninn’s head jerked up. His wings moved. “What is that? I remember that.”
I held the coin out. “Would you like it?”
The raven blinked, his eyes flashing gray. “Now that is an interesting offer. Destroying the coin might make the earth safe from the spell—or it could release the spell’s power into the world. Best, perhaps, if I simply keep watch over it to prevent you from drawing on its power.”