“You exaggerate,” Charlee told him. “Pierre in Asher’s restaurant is a brilliant chef. You must have eaten at the Ash Tree more recently than months ago.”
Roar raised his brow and his lips thinned.
Charlee stared at him. “You’ve never been?” she breathed.
“I never got an invitation,” he said shortly.
Charlee rolled her eyes. “Siblings!” she sighed. “My big brother would say something almost exactly the same, I’m sure. Asher would be so pleased if you stopped by, because it would look like you came without need of an invitation, like you wanted to be there.”
Roar rubbed an invisible spot off the edge of his plate with his big thumb. “You could be right,” he said.
Charlee laughed. “You’ve both lived for centuries and you’re still behaving like school kids.” She climbed off her stool and cleared the counter of the plates and cups.
“Do you see your big brother often?” he asked.
“Whenever he is in town. Eira doesn’t mind me taking a few hours off and crossing over, although I usually get hustled straight out of your hall and out to the street before I can look around properly.” She smiled. “Tonight—today, I mean—is the first really good look I’ve got.”
“I’d be happy to give you the nickel tour before you go back.”
“Thank you. I would love to see more. Your hall seems to be much different from Tryvannshøyden.”
“They deliberately cultivate grandeur, in Oslo, to remind everyone that is the seat of power for the Kine. We prefer things to feel homier here.”
“So this hall is more like it used to be?”
“With a few modern conveniences, like running water.” He grinned. “Homelike is good. Too much like home would be a real pain in the rear, especially for the Amica who serve here. I’ve noticed that a woman’s work is the last to receive updating and efficiencies. Men prefer to improve their own lives and work first.”
“Perhaps because men understand their own work better than a woman’s work, especially women in the past.”
“I don’t think it’s just the past,” Roar returned. “Modern women are expected to do it all, maintain a home and work full time to cover family expenses, yet the burden of child-rearing, household maintenance, cooking, cleaning, even running the kids to soccer practice, that is still often the woman’s sole responsibility.” He smiled again. “Eira says that women’s fight for equality was the worst idea in history. They voted themselves right into overload. They were better off in many ways when the roles of men and women were divided and respected.”
“And do you agree with Eira?” Charlee asked.
“Sometimes, yes, I do. But there are a lot of freedoms for women that came with the right to vote and social acceptance of the idea of equality that I don’t think women should be in a hurry to give back. Traveling alone. Living alone, if you choose to. Entry into any career you want, if you want it badly enough.”
“I guess I didn’t want a career badly enough.”
“You don’t consider the Amica a career, then? Most Amica do. They fight as hard to be accepted into the Amica as any woman has fought to win a corner office for herself in the corporate world.”
Charlee shook her head. “I see the Amica as a lifestyle choice.”
“Then you did see it as a choice?”
Charlee hesitated. “I saw it as a choice between becoming part of the Kine world, which I had caught just the smallest glimpse of from the corner of my eye, or fighting for that corner office, which seemed quite meaningless in comparison.”
“You didn’t want to stretch your mind, Charlee? Find out where it could take you? There’s a whole world of science out there, and the horizon on what they’re discovering is broadening every day.”
“The Kine keep my mind more than stretched, thank you,” Charlee replied truthfully. “It may not be science, but I’ve learned that Kine politics is just as complex and challenging.”
Roar laughed. “Then the human world’s loss is our gain.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Darwin switched on the lights, and banks of neon flickered into life, making Charlee jump. “Should you do that?” she asked. “The light will be seen through the window.”
“It’s not like we broke in here,” Darwin pointed out. “You heard my conversation with Frankie. The guards know we’re here.”
“They let us in because you won the last poker night,” Charlee pointed out. “It’s three in the morning. I just thought that someone might take exception to anyone roaming the library at this time of night.” She looked around the big basement room. “What is this place?”
“Archives,” Darwin said flatly. He moved between four big empty counters over to the bookshelves and cupboards against the walls. As he passed the last counter, he leaned down and plucked surgical gloves from a box on the shelf beneath and began to work his hands into them. “Did you notice the hiss the door made when we stepped in here?”
“Humidity control?” Charlee asked. Her skin had tightened as they stepped in, indicating it was dryer than outside.
“And positive air pressure. Just a bit. Encourages dust to stay on that side of the door.” He opened the glass front of one of the cupboards. “This isn’t the true archival vault. It’s just a working room. The stuff in here is valuable, but not so valuable that no one can touch it. It’s where all the professors come to do their research. I keep telling them they should charge by the hour. They’d make a fortune.” He reached into the cupboard and picked up a book that looked ancient to Charlee. It was about eight inches thick, and the covers were stiff and dark with age. The edges of the pages were very yellow.
“Spread that cloth there across the counter for me,” Darwin told her, pointing with one gloved finger, the others curled around the edges of the book.
Charlee found the cloth, which felt like a soft sort of plastic to her, and unfolded it and laid it on the counter.
Darwin put the book down on the plastic. “This is a fifteenth-century English copy of the eighth-century original. As the original was written in Old English, a more or less modern English translation would be a lot closer to the correct meaning than, say, translating from a Greek or German one.”
“There’s Greek and German versions of this, too?” Charlee asked, studying the cover, which Darwin hadn’t opened yet. There was nothing on the cover. It was a blank leather slate, scored with scratches and stains.
“If there is, no one knows about it. This is the only copy in existence. The original Old English version has never surfaced.” He touched the cover reverently.
Charlee didn’t attempt to do the same. She wasn’t wearing gloves and Darwin had not indicated that she could. The gentle and careful way he was handling the book told her that he would be just a little bit freaked by a non-professional trying to turn the pages. So she leaned close and watched carefully.
“Remember that Nine Worlds prophecy you told me about?” Darwin asked.
“You found it?” she breathed, stunned.
“Think so, yeah.” He still hadn’t opened the book. “Researchers figured this book was a joke. The English equivalent of Nostradamus spouting his nonsense that someone faithfully wrote down.”
“It’s a book of predictions?”
“Not like Nostradamus. He restrained himself and just dealt with human affairs. That’s why this book was dismissed as nonsense from an academic point of view. There’s talk of giants and dwarves, light elves, dark elves…sound familiar?”
Charlee nodded.
Finally, Darwin opened the book. “Then I found this.” He carefully turned the pages, which were full of dark, Gothic-styled copperplate writing, and the occasional diagram drawn in spidery lines. Charlee pulled back as a sour, overripe stench washed over her. It made Darwin chuckle. “And now you can guess where this was found.”
She wrinkled her nose and leaned back over the page he had opened it to and tried to read the first line. The lines were in
dented and more or less centered, like a poem would be in a modern text. She frowned as the stylistic text made her work to understand the words.
“There’s p’s everywhere,” she complained. “What is this, Anglo-Saxon?”
“Middle English,” Darwin replied. “It’s close enough to modern English that if you stare at it long enough, it comes together. And the p’s aren’t p’s. They’re thorns. You pronounce them the same way you would the t and h in ‘the’.”
Charlee rolled her eyes and looked at the text again. “U’s are V’s, too,” she murmured as the first word shifted into something she recognized. “That’s ‘overthrow’.”
“Very good,” Darwin murmured. “Go on.” He pulled a pad of paper and pen from under the counter. “Read it out.”
Very slowly, Charlee read out the words. “Overthrow the saintful king and merciful queen, the raven king shell—”
“Shall,” Darwin corrected, writing quickly.
“To bring within the king of king with the marked blowan.” She raised her brow at him. “Blowan?”
“Blossom. Bloom.”
Charlee turned back to the page and tackled the last line of the prophecy. “To face the...the wrath of the worlds.”
Darwin turned the pad around to face her and tapped it. His writing was neat and small.
Overthrow the saintful king and merciful queen
The raven king shall
To bring within the king of kings with the marked blossom
To face the wrath of the worlds.
Charlee stepped back and straightened up from her lean over the book. “That’s the Nine Worlds Prophecy?” she asked. “It just says ‘worlds’. There’s nothing about nine of them.”
“Don’t forget that this is a translation of a much older book that would have been written in Anglo-Saxon. Translation can be a bitch, when you’re working five hundred years in the future. All the contemporary culture of the original book is long gone.”
“You mean the translator was guessing?”
Darwin grinned. “In a way. Academics do the same sort of guessing now. They choose the best translation given everything they know about life and literature at the time the text they’re translating was written. But sometimes even dating older texts is a guess, too.” He tapped the page gently. “Notice anything else about it?”
“It’s really bad poetry.”
He rolled his eyes. Then he moved around the counter, back to the glassed-in shelves. Underneath the glass fronts were open shelves where more modern books sat. He picked one up and brought it back to the counter. It had a reddish-brown, scratched and stained cover, and the spine, which was a good three inches thick, had raised channels across it, every inch or so.
Darwin didn’t put the book on the plastic. “This was published in the late seventeenth century,” he said. “No one knows who wrote it. The title page is missing, and they sometimes forgot to include headers and footers back then.”
Charlee moved around the counter to look at the pages as Darwin rifled through it. He was handling the book with much less care, and she could see that the pages were printed, not hand-written. He flipped back and forth, zeroing in on the page he wanted. She could see many stanzas on the pages. “What is this?”
“Someone went to the trouble of collecting prophecies and writing them down. He’s got Nostradamus, Coinneach Odhar, Mother Shipton, even Virabrahmendra, from India, so the guy did his homework. Not too shabby for the eighteenth century, which is probably why someone thought it was worth setting out the type to print the book in the first place, even though the content would have been considered anti-Christian for then and there. That’s where I found this.”
He spun the book to face Charlee and pressed his finger against the open page.
Topple the saintly king and merciful queen,
The raven king shall.
To usher in the king of kings with the branded bloom,
To face the wrath of the worlds.
The Nine World Prophecy—auth. Unknown
Charlee pulled the pad over and compared them. “They’re the same, more or less.” She straightened up again. “But what does it mean?”
“That’s the problem with old prophecies,” Darwin said. “They usually don’t make much sense until they come true. Then, hindsight lets you figure it out.” He tapped the page again. “Norse mythology describes nine worlds. So this prophecy deals with some sort of conflict involving all nine worlds. But you say Ragnarok has already happened, back in pre-history, so is this a second Armageddon?” He shrugged.
“A saintly king,” Charlee murmured. “There was a Saint Stephen.”
“You’re thinking of Stefan?” Darwin grinned. “From what you’ve told me, Eira is the last woman I’d call merciful. Marc Antony in a dress, is more her style.”
“So long as the dress is a Donna Karan original, yes.” Charlee sighed. “And they don’t call them a king or queen, either.”
“But the symbolism fits,” Darwin replied. “The original text, remember, was probably Old English. The dude who translated it in the sixteenth century probably used king and queen because those were the names for the leaders of his time. It would make sense to people reading his book, back then.”
“So we should substitute ‘President’, then?” She looked at the first line. “The raven President will kill the President and the First Lady.”
Darwin looked at her. “Even less poetry-like, ain’t it?
Charlee moved over to the original medieval text. “It’s not poetry, but when you say it like that, it stops being cute.”
“I don’t think it was ever meant to be cute, Charlee. This is talking about the equivalent of all-out war. Every world, every creature in those worlds, all coming together to heap their anger on us.”
Charlee looked at his thoughtful face as he stared down at the modern translation. “But it could happen somewhere far in the future,” she said. “The Kine are immortal. It could be talking about something in the thirtieth century. They’ll still be here then.”
Darwin closed the book in front of him, and it shut with a heavy thumping sound. “Let’s hope so. We know the Kine are real, that magic is real, that Valhalla was real. The Vanir, who gave them all the prophecies in the first place, I guess they’re real, too. One of their prophecies made it into human records, at least, and you said that Stefan and Eira speak of the Vanir prophecies like they speak about the portals and their swords vanishing at will, and like I talk about making hot chocolate. It’s a normal, accepted concept, like gravity or evolution.”
“There’s plenty of people that dispute evolution,” Charlee pointed out.
“And there’re probably plenty of Kine that think the prophecies are just cute stories from their past, too,” Darwin replied. “My analogy still stands.” He was still frowning, shifting uneasily.
“What’s bugging you?” Charlee asked softly.
“Ah, it’s probably nothing.” He gathered up the medieval text and put it back into the glass cupboard.
“Tell me anyway,” Charlee said.
Darwin sighed and pulled off his gloves. “I’ve been circling around this since I found the prophecy a few weeks ago. You said the Kine have been deliberately keeping to themselves since they got here, centuries ago. It’s their laws.”
“Laun,” Charlee said in agreement. “Which I’m absolutely breaking every time I talk to you.”
“And I understand the privileged position that puts me in,” he returned. “If Anna-Maria were still alive, I wouldn’t have breathed a word of this to her. Knowing puts one in an awkward position.”
“It puts you in danger,” Charlee said flatly.
“Yeah, that, too. But the older I get, the less I care.” He shrugged again. “Here’s the thing. The Kine have been behaving themselves, playing nicely with humans, being human, ever since they got here. Asher might disagree—”
“He does.”
“—But I think it’s one of their smarter
moves, staying hidden. So, look at Norse mythology, what we know of it. The Einherjar and Valkyrie are real. Magic is real. The gods were real, but no one knows where they are, and we should probably all be grateful they’re not around anymore, because I can’t see them being content to stay in hiding century after century, while this One True God gets all the kudos and worship.”
“Aren’t you Catholic?” Charlee asked, trying to hide her smile.
“I grow less Catholic with every passing day,” Darwin said flatly. “These portals you described, Charlee. I think they’re part of Yggdrasil.”
Charlee had been doing her own reading. “The one tree that connects the worlds?” she asked now, remembering the name.
“Symbolism, remember?” Darwin asked. “The tree connects the worlds, yes. What if these portals are the tree? They’re connecting everything.”
Charlee frowned. “But they only connect places on Earth. Hall to hall, to hall.”
“So, they’re the roots, which are buried in the earth. If they are, and if the tree really is a metaphor—”
“Then where do the branches go?” Charlee breathed, finishing his thought. She held out her hand. “Bridges,” she said. “There was a bridge or something.”
“Bivrost,” Darwin supplied. “It was the bridge from Asgard to the other worlds, or just to Midgard, depending on who’s talking about it.”
“Portals—roots—running across the world itself, and bridges—the branches—connecting the world to all the other worlds. The tree really is the center of the universe, isn’t it?”
Darwin nodded. “And we should cry with relief that the bridges aren’t open anymore. If all the concepts from the mythology are true and so far, the more you learn about the Kine, the more we’re seeing that the concepts were right, well, the...things...on those other eight worlds....” He picked up the book with the modern translation in it and held it up. “Prophecies—real prophecies –they have a way of coming true. This is one prophecy I’d rather not live to see.”
* * * * *
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 45
