“You would give up any hope of a relationship with him, Charlee,” Ylva added.
The words were hard to form. “I know,” she whispered.
“Oh, Charlee. I thought you loved him,” Ylva said softly.
“He won’t…he can’t be with me. Not properly. But I love this world, Ylva. I love this part of him, too much to give it up altogether. If I can’t be with him, properly with him, then I think I can be happy living in his world. I know I will be happier than if I have to give up both him and the Kine.”
Ylva studied her for a long moment. “Charlee, you know about me. You know why I am no longer part of the Kine. That is an option for any of the Kine. It is a difficult choice, but even Asher could—”
Charlee shook her head. “No.”
“Then you’ve thought about it,” Ylva said.
“Of course I have! But I won’t ask that of him. I won’t let him do it. This is the only way, Ylva.”
“If you were to ask him, I believe Asher would consider it. For you, he would give it all up.”
“No.”
“But—”
“No, Ylva. Your husband never knew what you were and you thought that was doing him a kindness, but if he had known, I think he would have fought to make you stay with the Kine. If he loved you, he would have insisted you stay.”
Ylva blinked. “It was my decision,” she said, her voice thick.
“To die for him?” Charlee asked, as gently as she could.
Ylva quickly wiped at her eyes. “I have never regretted my decision. Not even now.”
“Then let me give you the human perspective. Your husband’s perspective, if he had known. I will not ask Asher to give up the work and the life that defines him, that makes him who he is. I love that part of him, just as much as I love his quick temper and his dry sense of humor and his suits and Torger and his apartment in Soho, all the things he does as a human. If he left the Kine, he would become someone different. He would grow to hate the half-life left to him, and he would grow to hate me for bringing him to such an end. I won’t do it.”
“You don’t know that,” Ylva replied. “Asher is a strong man. If he left, it would be because he wanted to. He would make the decision and live with it.”
“But he wouldn’t live forever.” Charlee shook her head. “I’ve thought about nothing else for three days. This is the only way.”
* * * * *
Unnur looked down at the three cards she had drawn. It was supposed to have been a three-card weather spread. But from the way the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, making her shudder, she knew the cards were talking to her directly.
It had been months since they had spoken. Her dreams had become the medium for instruction, and in truth, the success of her business and the never-ending flow of customers and orders via the Internet, and all the endless details of keeping her flourishing business flowing meant that she hadn’t dealt a spread for herself in a very long time.
She had employed her first assistant nearly two years ago, and when business pushed beyond her assistant’s abilities, Unnur had finally hired a store manager to take over some of the more complex ordering and administrative tasks.
Unnur’s private reading sessions for some of the most influential businessmen in the southern states had boomed. She began to fly from state to state, city to city, to consult with leaders and entrepreneurs, to read for them and discuss their concerns.
It was all as her dreams had predicted.
She had come back to Lakeland to check in on the store and see that Bridget was managing well enough without her and to take a small vacation—one day of working in the store and sleeping in her own bed. It was the best sort of relaxation she could think of.
And so she had laid out the weather spread, as it was late summer and stiflingly hot outside. It was good thunderstorm weather, which always made her nervous.
Unnur looked down at the three cards, her heart thudding erratically. “Oh dear,” she murmured and let her fingertip slide along the side of the Queen of Wands. She sat on the left, but the King was not next to her. For the first time ever, he was separated. He sat on the right and he was reversed. Impulsive, ruthless. Demanding.
“What happened?” Unnur cried.
For sitting between them, keeping them apart, was The Lovers…also upside down.
* * * * *
Asher stepped back from the open door in confusion, for Eira stood in his apartment doorway, wrapped in a fur-lined shawl and wearing heavy sunglasses. “Regin,” he said formally, bowing his head. “This is…unexpected.”
“I’m here as a friend, Asher. Please let me in.”
He stood aside and she strode into the room, looking around. “Very comfortable,” she remarked and took off the sunglasses. “Do you have anything to drink?”
Asher shut the door. “There’s some Johnny Walker from the last time Roar visited.” Eira didn’t like wine or light mead or any of the drinks she called frou-frou fripperies. She took her alcohol neat and harsh.
He pulled the bottle out of the cupboard on the front of the kitchen island and searched for clean glasses and put them next to the bottle.
Eira had shrugged off the shawl. She wore, as always when in civilian clothing, boots with heels, pants that clung to her powerful thighs, and a silk shirt in a color that flattered her dark brown eyes and dark hair. There was a pendant visible between the open fronts of the shirt and as she moved, Asher saw that it was a black iron triquetra. Humans thought it was a Celtic symbol, but Odin had claimed it as his long before the Celts existed.
“Let me,” Eira said, picking up the bottle before he could.
Asher demurred. As the Valkyrie in the room, it was her choice to serve the drinks if she wanted to. As his Regin and his guest, she would have been perfectly correct to let him pour the drinks. But she was not here as Regin. That worried him, but he let none of it show.
“You are well, Eira?” he asked, keeping to the pleasantries.
“Well enough, thank you. Oslo is very pleasant in summer.”
“But you still wear furs despite the pleasantness.” He grinned. “And you wonder why Roar chose New York.”
“The opera house, I believe, had something to do with it.”
“That wasn’t built when we first arrived.”
“Then I was misinformed.” She picked up a glass and held it out to him. “Einherjar,” she murmured formally.
“My thanks.” He took it and waited for her to pick up her own. That was one human custom he had been happy to adopt. It had always felt rude to him to guzzle his drink while a woman stood by watching empty-handed.
Drunks love company. He could hear Roar’s voice dryly countering his reasoning.
They drank the stiff shots she had poured and Asher winced. No, he was never going to love whiskey.
Eira picked up the bottle again and poured until Asher’s glass was nearly half full. Four or five shots, at least. Then she pushed the glass toward him.
“Why are you here?” Asher asked. The formalities were done with.
Eira put the bottle down and her gaze caught his. “You’ll hear about this in the halls soon enough, but I thought I would tell you directly. I recruited a new Amica today. One that has no family connection to the Amica or any history with us.”
“Why are you—” telling me this, he began to say, but the truth was obvious.
“Red hair, an intriguing scar on her cheek, and a direct way of dealing with the world,” Eira said. “She will be popular among the ranks.”
Horror spread cold fingers through him. “No, no, no, no. You can’t. Eira, take it back. Tell her you changed your mind. Refuse her a place.”
“Ylva and Charlee both spoke very eloquently in petition to have me take her on.” Eira picked up the glass and put it in his hand, curling his lifeless fingers around it. “The matter is done, Asher.” More gently she added; “Drink.”
He couldn’t move. The agony was too great. It
had claimed his nerves and his thoughts. “I did this,” he whispered.
Eira picked up the bottle. “You did nothing that you did not promise the Council, years ago. Did you think I had forgotten, Asher?”
No, but he had. That stupid promise. It had got him out of a tight corner at the time, but he had forgotten as usual that time would catch up with him. Time always did. Eventually.
Eira played with the corner of the label, picking at it. “Now that I’ve met Charlee, I think I know now why you were so complacent about having her join the Amica. You thought her scar would be a drawback, that it would make her less attractive to the others.”
He couldn’t speak. Could barely unlock his chest enough to draw breath. He put the glass down as he curled over, hunching forward, trying to relieve the pain.
That’s all I can give you. He had been so adamant. So inflexible. He had driven her to this.
“I don’t believe her scarring will be any sort of deterrent at all,” Eira said. “There is a life to the woman, a brightness that will have them flutter around her like moths at the flame.”
Asher gasped, gripping the edge of the counter for balance, as his mind filled with images. Charlee at a feast, the men pawing her as she served their mead. Worse, some faceless, nameless Einherjar trapping her in a dark corner of a hall and forcing himself on her.
“There must be some way to reverse this,” he pleaded, his voice strained.
Eira gave him a pity-filled smile. “Drink, Asher,” she urged.
He picked up the glass again and drank deeply.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
As the power of the solstice came to a peak, Sindri opened himself up, drawing it to him and channelling it to the crucible, which almost glowed with the energy pulsing in it. He had grown so practiced at these collections and so efficient, that he often thought he could detect a non-animate shock emanating from the power itself, as it was ripped away from the path it would naturally take, along ley lines and through to the core of the earth and was instead funnelled into the crucible.
The crucible itself had grown heavier with every collection. From the weight and power fields that pulsed around it, Sindri knew that the time was very near. His work was almost done. And then…and then he would be able to prove to her that he was worthy.
He gasped aloud his hope and joy as the last of the power rushed through him, and lowered his arms, panting. He looked around. There was child standing in among the vines, watching him with big eyes. Here in the depths of the Amazonian jungles, Sindri had not expected to be disturbed, but humans were persistent creatures, thriving in the most inhospitable corners of the world. They were like the cockroaches Sindri had grown to abhor.
He lifted his hand, fingers spread toward the child and muttered a word.
The child turned and sprinted back into the jungle, leaping over trunks and stones and other obstacles like a fleeing deer. It would not remember Sindri, and he was content.
He touched the crucible. This had been a great collection. Here on the equator, a solstice was neither summer nor winter. It just was. The slackening of the Coriolis forces here enhanced the power of the alignment, focusing it. The crucible was warm and almost comforting, except for the power fields still strumming around it. Reluctantly, he removed it and laid it carefully in its carrying case and closed the case.
Soon, he promised himself and her, even though she was thousands of miles away and couldn’t hear him. But soon, she would. Soon, she would listen to every word he spoke.
Soon.
* * * * *
Eira walked through from the private section of the bedroom into the public area, and Charlee watched the sway of her hems critically.
“What do you think?” Eira asked.
“I think you would rather be wearing your trousers and your sword strapped to your side.”
Eira smiled. “Or the latest Prada pantsuit. Or a tunic and mantle, which are the only civilized thing to wear to a feast. But they do insist on tradition, and so…” She spread the skirts of the apron dress, her fingers spreading across the fabric. “It’s so soft,” she murmured. “You’ve outdone yourself once more, Charlee.”
“Thank you.”
Eira studied her. “Are you nervous?”
“Is there a reason I should be?”
Eira smiled knowingly. “Your first full feast, with every hall in attendance.”
Charlee laughed. “Nervous about that? No. But I’m still very grateful you chose me to attend you. Everyone assures me the sight of the halls in full assembly is breathtaking. This will be my first chance to see it for myself.”
“It’s not every single Herleifr,” Eira said, as she turned away. “I don’t think the entire Second Hall could hold all of us at once. But every hall will have two representatives there, and that is still nearly two thousand people.” She picked up earrings and held them up.
“Not the green ones,” Charlee told her. “The red ones there.”
“Thank you.” Eira looked at her in the mirror. “Asher will be there.”
“He might be,” Charlee agreed, squashing the flutter of her heart.
“He will be. I checked. His attendance is confirmed.”
The flutter increased. Charlee shrugged as casually as she could. “In a hall with over two thousand people, the chances that I’ll run into him are remote.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Eira asked.
“It’s been over four years.”
“A long time.”
“Not to the Kine,” Charlee said. “He’s probably still angry.” She had run into Asher in the round hall, five weeks after she had been taken on as the newest Amica recruit, and she hadn’t been ready for it. She doubted she would have ever been braced for that meeting.
It had only taken days for Charlee to know her decision to stay among the Kine was the right one. Life among the Kine was a richly filled smorgasbord of cultures and people, all of them known to each other, all of them distant or close friends. Life was utterly different inside the halls, where they could drop their human roles and truly be themselves.
Eira had undertaken to train Charlee herself, and so Charlee had taken her first walk through the portals, from New York to Oslo, accompanied by an Einherjar from the Second Hall. He had explained the portals to her as his gaze flickered over her, but English was not a strong language for him, and Charlee was left to figure out most of it for herself.
“They’re controlled worm holes?” she asked finally, when he brought her to stand in front of them. There were two portals, one on either side of the broad flight of steps that led down to the front door of the New York hall. Charlee would have liked to have stopped to look around the hall itself, but the Einherjar had seemed hurried.
“No. Not wormholes.” He shook his head, frowning, as he sought for the right word. “Magic.” He lifted his finger and thumb, held closely together. “Un poco.”
Just a little.
“Little magic?” Charlee queried.
“All the magic that is left, except—” and he patted his sword hilt. His sword was fully extended, but she assumed that it would disappear just like Asher’s did. The portals, then, and the swords was all the magic the Kine had left, if she followed him properly. That meant that at one time, there had been more. Where had it all gone?
The Einherjar held out his hand to her. “Must, to go through. Or you,” and he hit his chest with the flat of his hand.
“I can’t go through unless you’re touching me?”
He beamed and nodded and held out his hand again. She took it and he stepped through the curtain of grey mist, pulling her after him. She stepped through nervously, and felt a slight tug, then his hand pulled her forward. She took another step and emerged into huge room, blinking.
Her first incoherent thought was my jeans were so the wrong thing to wear! For everywhere she looked, there were men and women in formal human clothing, long robes, even a full kilt. There were light summer linens
, heavy winter outerwear, boots, sandals, and shoes of all types. Weaving among them were more men dressed similarly to the Einherjar who was escorting her. Swords, leather breastplates, and more leather armor covering their arms. Thick leather bands around their wrists. There was an astonishing array of weapons worn: knives thrust through belts, axes, and the big swords hanging at their hips. Charlee was looking at her first Einherjar in the closest thing to a uniform they had: battle gear.
There were a number of women wearing what Charlee recognized as apron dresses. She had made more than a few of them herself while apprenticing with Anja. The pattern was a simple one made of triangles and squares, using up every inch of a length of cloth. But there were endless variations on what one could do with the garment once it was cut. Embroidery, overskirts, under-dresses, looped up hems, lacings, jewelry, smocking...the design and construction could run from work wear to high formal gowns. The ones she was seeing here in this cavernous great hall were more workmanlike.
Amica, she guessed.
The Einherjar tugged her hand again, drawing her across the hall. It rose for endless feet up to a rounded roof. Pillars circled the hall ten feet inside its walls, holding up the roof. At the domed roofline, windows punched through the stone walls. Light spilled down from them onto the marble floor, leaving pools of bright sunlight that everyone walked through.
On opposite sides of the rounded room were more of the portals. Perhaps ten on each side. This, then, was a cross-road to other halls.
Charlee didn’t know it then, but she would get to know the central hall very well. It was more than just a cross-road for the portals. Most of the major public rooms and galleries that gave access to them fed off the rotunda, including the great hall itself, the Second Hall. Tryvannshøyden, which everyone called the Second Hall, was the seat of power among the Kine.
Eira was their Regin, first among all Valkyrie, and leader of armies. The last had startled Charlee until she had seen Eira actually using a sword. Then she had no doubt that the stories she had already heard about Eira’s human life as a sword-for-hire were not exaggerated.
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 41
