It’d worked. Bodi had gone right back to sleeping like a rock through the whole night. Bastet had told Kanmi that she didn’t think it was entirely appropriate to give their son something that looked like a weapon, and Kanmi had told her, “It’s a security object. Everyone needs something to believe in. At his age, it’s easier to believe in something tangible that gives him control of his life, at least a little bit. And it’s working, isn’t it?”
She hadn’t had much to say in response, besides a comment that it was a weapon and that this could lead him to whacking other little children with it, in emulation of what he saw on the gladiatorial fights on the far-viewer. Kanmi’s response had been to enroll both of his sons in an after-school gladiatorial training program intended for children. Discipline, self-control, self-defense, and respect for others. He thought they could use those qualities.
Here and now, the boys were wide-eyed at meeting their father’s co-workers again. Bodi clearly idolized Trennus. “You wrestle with the monsters, right?”
Trennus laughed. “Only when I have to.”
“Can I learn how?”
“Maybe. But if you’ve any amount of your father’s talents, you might be a very good sorcerer someday, instead.”
“At the rate things are going, he’ll be a magus,” Kanmi grumbled. “And then the world will end.”
The seat beside Trennus was conspicuously empty. Kanmi cleared his throat and gestured at it. “So, have you been stood up?”
“No, I just have been waiting for the right moment to introduce her. I didn’t expect so many people that she doesn’t know well here tonight.”
Kanmi frowned. “You’re starting to sound like Caetia’s sister. That made no sense at all. We’ve never met the mystery woman.”
This was attracting Adam and Sigrun’s attention at the head of the table. Trennus sighed, and stood. “I’ll go get her.”
“This should be good,” Kanmi said with a grin, as he helped Himi cut up his food beside him. “Hey, ben Maor, you think we should lay money on Matrugena here coming back in with an invisible woman? Or going outside and coming back in, claiming that she’s left for the airport?”
Adam’s lips twitched. “I think she exists, whoever she is. I’m just wondering if she’s another summoner, or something.”
___________________
Trennus heard the words behind him, shook his head, and stepped out into the main room, Lassair still balanced on his shoulder. He needed to find someplace where no one was going to see her shift her form. Are you sure, flame-heart? he asked her, silently. I can put up with the teasing until there are fewer strangers around.
It’s a little frightening, showing them my face, when they’ve gotten used to the other forms, Lassair admitted. But if I wait till tomorrow, it will just be harder, won’t it?
Probably, dear one. Trennus found the lavatory area, and gestured to the doors. There you go. No. That’s the men’s room. The other one . . . there you go. Try not to frighten anyone.
I know how to do this, Trennus. Lassair’s tone was mildly agitated. Not at his light words, he knew, but because of the overall situation.
Trennus waited. No screaming, no sounds of dropped items. This was good. After a moment or two, Lassair opened the door and slipped back out again. Entirely too much water in there, she told him as he offered her his arm, and she slipped her hand through to rest on his inner elbow.
“You look beautiful,” he told her, sincerely. She did, too. There was almost no way in which she could really tone down what she was, though he’d definitely noticed that she often played with her proportions. Some days, she was slender and athletic, and some days, voluptuous, depending on her mood. At the moment, she was somewhere in between, and her red eyes still held that spark of blue-violet light at their centers, and her hair was a dark garnet . . . with the inevitable phoenix feather tangled in with it. The dress she’d created for herself had a Gothic-style brocade bodice and a rich velvet skirt that entirely matched her hair, and she’d managed to tamp down the light that tended to radiate from her skin. You’ve been practicing.
I’m so very nervous, I don’t think I could glow if I tried.
Trennus watched any number of heads turn as they walked back across the lobby. Careful. Don’t scorch the floor.
I’m trying not to. I really am.
I know. And I know you’re scared. But it’s all right. They know you already. You’ve healed Kanmi. You’ve healed Sigrun. The Morrigan knows, you’ve helped Adam out a few times, too. Trennus opened the door, and ushered her into the private dining room.
He watched a dozen or so heads lift along the table. Mouths opened, and absolute silence fell. After a moment, Kanmi cleared his throat, and looked down at his two young sons. “Bodi? Himi? Put your fingers in your ears.”
“But why, Daddy?”
“Fingers. Ears. Now.”
Both of the boys, their dark eyes wide, did precisely that. Kanmi looked up at Trennus, and said, in a tone of utter and amused resignation, “You son of a bitch. You’ve been holding out on all of us.” He tugged at his sons’ hands. “You can listen now.” Kanmi looked back at Trennus again. “And to think I thought she was imaginary.”
Adam was a little wild-eyed, but Sigrun, Tren noticed, looked surprised, but not overly so. In fact, the valkyrie stood and walked over to offer a wrist-clasp to Lassair . . . who reached out and hugged her, instead. Is there any reason why we should stand on formality, sister?
“Ah . . . I cannot think of any,” Sigrun admitted, and looked up from Lassair to Trennus, an expression of worry in those clear gray eyes. Easy enough to read, after spending so much time together. “You’re quite certain about this?” Sigrun asked, in Gallic, in the informal mode used between friends. “There are those who would say that you have cut yourself off from humanity enough, with your studies.”
I can still understand you, Stormborn.
“Yes, I am aware of that, but this conversation need not to be for every ear at the table.”
Trennus reached down and gave Sigrun a hug, himself. She was a very dear friend, and he loved her, in a way. “Quite certain. And since Lassair is interested in every aspect of being human, I think she might actually engage me more with humanity than otherwise.” Trennus gave Sigrun a rueful smile. “She informs me that she wants to go watch a circle dance.”
No. I have watched them before, from the heart of a fire. I wish to participate. Be a celebrant. Lassair paused. Will you permit me to celebrate your union with Steelsoul tomorrow, Stormborn?
“Of course. I cannot imagine not having you there . . . in some form or another. Though if you’re there, I think that your other spirit should be, too. She’s part of the team, after all.” Sigrun smiled at that, an expression that was like the sun coming up. “Adam?”
Adam finally stood and came over. Took Lassair’s hand in his own, and looked down at the fingers. “I’ve been wondering why you constantly smell like wood smoke of late,” he admitted to Trennus, quietly. “I thought perhaps you had a terribly blocked-up chimney. One overgrown with roses.”
“No, but the balcony of my apartment has managed to attract every flowering vine you can imagine. There’s morning glory and honeysuckle trailing over the whole thing. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the damned things did get into the chimney at some point. I can’t explain it, and L . . . Asha here,” Trennus smiled, and avoided her name at the last moment, “says they’re too pretty to pull away.”
They are. They’re green and they live and they’re beautiful.
“Who am I to disagree?” Trennus smiled, held the chair for Lassair to be seated.
___________________
The next morning, Caesarius 32, 1956, the entire wedding party and all the guests arrived at the Odinhall. The first unpleasant surprise had actually come at some time after midnight local time, when Sigrun’s parents’ flight had gotten in from Cimbri. Adam and Sigrun had been just finishing their late dinner with their guests in the restaurant and ha
d entered the lobby of the hotel to go upstairs just as Ivarr and Medea had arrived. Sigrun’s jaw had dropped open slightly as the bellhop had had to assist with the revolving metal and glass door at the front, and a Hellene-looking woman with brown, curling hair and green eyes had emerged . . . pushing a wheelchair weighted down by a tall Cimbric man in his late sixties. His hair had surely once been flaxen, but was pure white now, and braided back from a long, rectangular face. The man also had a massive cast wrapped around his right leg, from the hip to the knee, and a grim expression lightened only slightly when he spotted Sigrun.
“Fæder!” Sigrun had exclaimed, immediately, and raced forward to drop to her knees beside the chair. It was the first time Adam had ever seen hints in her as to what she might have been like as a child as she caught at Ivarr’s arm and rattled at him in Cimbric for a moment, gesturing towards his injured leg.
She even went so far as to reach out a hand, the runes on her skin starting to glow, but her father caught her hand, and told her, firmly, “No.”
“But I can heal you—”
“No.” The spate of Cimbric that had followed was too swift for Adam to follow the twists and turns of the language. It wasn’t as harsh-sounding as his native Hebrew, but it was damnably twisty in places, with consonants he was more accustomed to out of Hellene. Th, for example, which could be pronounced two different ways, apparently, and could be written with two completely different symbols.
After a moment, Adam approached and put a hand on Sigrun’s shoulder. “I only caught some of that,” he murmured, in Latin. “Your father won’t let you heal him?”
“The wound isn’t fresh,” Ivarr said, in perfectly good Latin, offering his hand to Adam for a wrist-clasp. “Sigrun couldn’t heal it even if I permitted her to try. I took a bad step on the stairs last week.” A flash of grim humor. “Ten minutes after hanging up the telephone with Sophia, and her telling me to watch where I placed my feet, else I’d find myself someplace low looking somewhere high. They had to operate and put metal in my hip and thighbone. It will heal.”
A flare of temper in Sigrun’s eyes, and a twitch at the corner of her lips. Adam knew the signs, but to any outsider, her face would have been blank. Ivarr patted her elbow, lightly. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to give you away tomorrow, Sigrun. But I’ll be there to watch.” Ivarr lifted his head and gave his wife a look.
“We need to get checked in. It was a very long flight, and your father is tired. Travelling so far with such an injury, less than a week after surgery to repair his femur and hip? Has taken much out of him.” Medea’s words were precise, and clearly delineated exactly how much trouble it had been to make their way here for this occasion. It was all in the tone, somehow. “Let us pass, and he can speak with you again tomorrow, once he’s had some rest.”
Adam felt every muscle in Sigrun’s body tense. “Of course,” Sigrun replied, looking at her father, reserve entering her face and voice now. “I regret having kept you. You are, of course, tired.” She bowed her head slightly, and moved away from the wheelchair. “If I had known of your injury, I would have told you to stay in Cimbri and rest.”
A flash of pain in Ivarr’s face, as he half-turned in the chair to look at his daughter, but his wife had already begun pushing him towards the check-in desk. Adam slid his hand to the small of Sigrun’s back as she turned away. “He didn’t mean to dismiss you. And your step-mother is concerned for his health.”
“I am aware of both of those things,” Sigrun replied. The pure formality of her language spoke volumes to Adam, as did the tautness in the muscles under his fingertips. She was angry, but pulling it inwards, as she almost always did. “It does not matter. We should retire, ourselves.”
In their room upstairs, he watched her pace back and forth for a while, before offering, quietly, “We can get someone else to give you away, if he can’t stand up. Livorus, maybe?”
“Yes. That would be more than acceptable.” Sigrun finally sat beside him on the couch and let him rub at her neck a bit. “Medea is Medea. Nothing will ever change her. She did not like me as a child, and she resented being forced to care for me. My father is my father. Proud of me, but stubborn. And then there’s Sophia.” She bit off each word as she spoke. “Why did it not occur to her to say, plainly, ‘do not go back downstairs tonight, Father.’”
Adam wanted to say because then it’s not fun for her, but that wasn’t entirely fair. Sophia was mad. And her madness wasn’t malicious. It just was. “Because if she actually said anything that anyone understood, then the future wouldn’t happen the way she sees it, and she’d have to admit that the future can be changed, and she can’t let anything threaten her reality,” he offered, at last, and Sigrun gave him a single, horrified glance for the insight. “Come here, neshama,” he told her, gently. “We’ll fix it all in the morning. Come to bed.”
The next morning, Adam had to assure his parents and sisters several times that they were allowed to be on the floor that they were now entering. Sigrun, before turning them over to their bear-warrior escorts outside the elevator, turned and looked around at the various people assembled. “This area of the building will . . . be different,” she warned. “Different for each of you. Adam, Trennus, and Kanmi have all been here before. But each person sees it with their own eyes, as I understand it.”
Kanmi raised a finger. “I remember it looking a lot bigger on the inside than the outside of the building would permit. I’d love to know why.”
Sigrun looked off into space for a moment. “I will certainly use the wrong words. I have to translate this from my native tongue into Latin, and the concepts are not congenial to either language.” She paused. “When I asked him once, Tyr answered, thus: This entire room is a construct, taking a piece of the extradimensional aentropic space that exists in three dimensions as humans understand them, with a few others humans are not aware of, but lacks the defining dimension of time. This is colloquially known as the Veil. The room creates a . . . translation matrix . . . which permits direct physical interface between the four-dimensional space known as the mortal realm, and the . . . transdimensional space that is the realm of the gods.” Sigrun paused. “I have only the faintest of glimmerings as to what any of that actually means.”
Trennus and Kanmi had both snapped upright, however. They looked at each other in excitement, and started firing questions at Sigrun, who raised her hands, and replied, “No, I know no more, and like enough should not have said so much. But Tyr teaches that if someone is wise enough to ask a question, then perhaps they are ready for an answer.” She shrugged and looked around. “I will come up by a different elevator and get changed upstairs.” She smiled at Adam. “You have what you’re wearing?” As always, the formality of her speech softened for him.
He hefted his bag and smiled at her. My mother is about to have a stroke. “Yes. And Trennus has the ring. At least, he had better.”
“Then I’ll let you go.” Sigrun leaned up and kissed him, and waved as they all got onto the elevator for the final ascent.
The first thing that Adam heard, as the doors opened again, was a gasp from Himi and Bodi. “It’s the Elysian Fields!” Himi said in a tone of awe, and Adam wondered what the child saw.
Just as last time, Adam at first saw blackness, and then he looked out into the heart of space and time. He saw stars in every color, shining cold and steady in the far distance. The haze of nebular gases. The swirl of distant galaxies. Then the distance in the perspective began to decrease, and he saw . . . planets. Moons. Ones familiar from his many books on the subject, but different. Huge. Vast. And still, beyond them, the swirl of billions of stars that made up the single galaxy in which they made their home. As Saturn’s bulk moved off to his left, Adam could only think, We are so small. We are so very small, not even grains of sand in all this vastness. But somehow . . . we still matter. He had to blink away tears of awe, and looked over to see blank terror in his mother’s face. “It’s all right,” Adam told both his par
ents, and put an arm around his mother’s shoulders. “I hesitate to ask what you see . . . .”
“Light,” Maor said, his voice oddly gentle. “Light, everywhere.”
“If I walk out there . . . I’ll fall,” Abigayil said, her voice trembling.
“Mother, what are you talking about?” Rivkah said, in a tone of awe. “It’s Eden. Or as close as I’ll ever see. It’s the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen. Flowers and fruit and fountains.”
“It’s not a garden, silly. It’s the ocean,” Chani said, dreamily. “A cliff looking down on the beach, and nothing but blue waves for miles in every direction.”
Adam worked on getting the rest of the guests to step out of the elevator. Ehecatl was doing the same, coaxing his wife and children along. Most of them seemed to see something along similar lines, though no two were precisely the same. But all perceived aching wonder and limitless beauty. Lassair shook her head when Adam asked what she saw. You would not understand, Steelsoul. The Veil has no time. No duration, really, not as you experience it. We are not beings of the same dimensionality as humans and all that is in your world. But this is also not the Veil that I know. This is . . . ordered. Constructed. I see . . . lines, contracting down to points. Vortexes. Bricks and blocks and rules to help humans understand this place. She sounded uneasy, as well.
Sophia, helping to push Ivarr’s chair, stopped and stared, her face suddenly strangely at peace. Her father reached up and touched her hand where it rested on the back of the chair. “What do you see, daughter?”
Sophia smiled. “Nothing, Father. I see nothing, and it is everything I ever wanted it to be.”
Livorus studied the area, a faintly contemplative look on his face. “I don’t suppose,” he asked Adam, “that they would allow me to linger and read any of the books?” The Roman sighed. “Or drink any of the wine, either. All imaginary, I fear.”
Adam glanced back at Kanmi and Trennus. “Do I even want to know?”
“I see black again,” Kanmi asserted. “White lines through it, like chalk on a board, except when I look at the lines, they’re made of numbers. Energy in patterns, and described. It really is a construct . . . .” he looked around, “and they’re numbers I could sit here and stare at for hours. They’re beautiful. And I’m not sure I could ever understand them.” He gave Adam a faint shrug. “Everyone sees their own version of nirvana, eh? I see the perfection of reason and the underlying mathematics of the universe. My sons see what they’ve been told they’ll see.” Just for an instant, Kanmi looked sad. “I actually hope it’s not an illusion. I rather like mine.”
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 82
