Glittering Shadows

by Jaclyn Dolamore

  “Details, details. The river unites Irminau and Urobrun in spirit if not in borders.” He took his feet off the table and spread his hands across the map depicting the two countries. “And you must know that we were one country, two hundred years ago.” He pointed at the northern region of Irminau. “The river Urobrun originates from the mountains here and flows through the great forest of Irminau.” He traced the line of the river through Irminau, the larger of the two countries. Urobrun was like a small triangle snipped off the tip of Irminau, but it had much of the fertile land and access to the sea. “Magic flows from the forest to the river, spreading to the people who live near it, losing potency as it goes until finally it reaches the sea.”

  “I’ve seen stories about magic coming from the forest, but does it really?” Freddy asked.

  “The stories are true.” Sebastian pointed at Freddy with a pencil. “Magic comes from the great tree called Yggdrasil.” He flourished the pencil along with the name. “Every year the Norns would bring water from the river Urobrun to water the roots of Yggdrasil, and in return, magic would flow out of the tree and to the people.”

  Yggdrasil. That name stirred the ghost of a memory within her.

  Home, whispered a voice inside her. Nan remembered the wind whispering through the dense green leaves, felt the rough texture of the bark beneath her fingers. Then she shook her head, trying to dispel the thought. She was a city girl who had never even seen a forest. A tree? Her home definitely wasn’t a tree.

  “Do you remember it at all?” Sebastian asked.

  “No,” she lied.

  “That may be because of the tragedy. Someone killed you and your other sister, in your previous lives.”

  Every word he spoke stirred fresh images. Two women: one dark-haired and serious, the other just a young girl. My sisters. It didn’t seem possible that she could have family, stretching across more than one life, when she had grown up feeling so alone.

  “Ingrid was the only Norn left to protect Yggdrasil,” Sebastian continued. “One night the tree was felled by men from Urobrun. They even dug up the roots. This pivotal moment helped lead to the war. Ingrid worried the destruction of the tree would disrupt your memories.”

  “So the Urobrunians destroyed the tree…in order to destroy magic?” Nan asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “But it obviously didn’t work,” Freddy said. “Magic isn’t gone.”

  “Ingrid planted a new tree from seeds she had saved. But it hasn’t been the same since. Children are rarely born with magic now.” He looked at Nan again. “The main revolutionary force in the city wanted to free the workers and overthrow the Chancellor in favor of a fair and open government. But we—the Hands of the White Tree—look past that. The people of Urobrun can say they don’t need magic and call the people of Irminau backward rustics—but this country will always be a part of Irminau, with Yggdrasil at its heart.”

  “You want unification?” Freddy asked.

  “It only makes sense. Each country has different resources. And each is messed up in a different way.”

  “So what about the Norns?” Nan asked. “How do we fit in?”

  “You should all hear the music of fate—the wyrdsong.”

  “The sounds I hear at night,” Nan said softly, amazed at just how much he knew, that he could put a name to the song in her dreams.

  “So you do still retain that connection,” he said. “Ingrid will be glad to hear it. The wyrdsong guides you. It’ll help you know how fate is meant to go.”

  “I sensed that,” Nan said. “I tried to use it on Rory Valkenrath, when I was trying to convince him that he needed to release the dead. I thought somehow that if he heard it, he would understand. And I think it was working, until Arabella shot him.”

  How strange it was to hear she had such responsibility, and Sebastian was so much more forthcoming than Arabella.

  “So…you’re the leader of all this?” Freddy asked. “You still haven’t explained how that happened.”

  “My father oversaw a small duchy in Irminau,” said Sebastian with a shrug. “So I’m fairly well-versed in everything from military operations to taxes.”

  “How many men do you have?” Nan asked. “What’s the plan?”

  “About five hundred, all told,” Sebastian said. “This is the central base. We occupy two other buildings as well—Bauer Hall and Reuenthal House.”

  “It’ll take more than five hundred men to unify Urobrun and Irminau,” Freddy said.

  Sebastian looked unfazed, leaning back in his chair. “Yes, the UWP is much larger than us, for now.”

  “The UWP?” Freddy asked.

  “The United Workers Party,” Nan said. “The Valkenraths didn’t let you read the paper, then?”

  “Afraid not.” Freddy crossed his arms.

  “The UWP are the dominant revolutionary group in the city,” Sebastian said. “We’ll support them to keep the city from falling to Irminau.” He pushed back his sleeve to check a wristwatch. “I’d rather not allow King Otto and his magic users to gain a foothold here.”

  A young man walked halfway down the stairs and peered in. “Sir, Karetzky is here with a report.”

  “Ah, a messenger.” Sebastian lifted a hand. “I’ll be there soon. Tell him to wait in my office.” He turned back to Nan. “Make yourselves at home. There’s a spread of food upstairs, if you’re hungry.”

  She could barely recall the last time she’d eaten. Food seemed an alien concept.

  “What about Thea?” Freddy asked. “How long does healing take?”

  “You’ll be the first to know when Ingrid is done,” Sebastian said. “But don’t worry. She’s a miracle worker with wounds.”

  Thea tried to scream. Her brain and voice fought to connect, and a hoarse sound tore from her throat. Ingrid’s eyes met hers.

  Her eyes were a clear gray that bored into Thea’s soul. Trust. She kept singing, her voice more beautiful than any song of earth. The sound seemed to match Thea’s thoughts—shape her thoughts, even. Pain fell away.

  She had seen her father die with the sunrise. She had held his hand and watched him go. She had seen a man rotting in the depths of the underground, workers shot on the street, her mother left alone with sorrow written on her face. So many terrible things she wanted to wipe from her mind, so many burdens she wondered how she could bear. Ingrid’s song, Ingrid’s eyes…they offered release.

  Forget these pains. Don’t think. Let the world’s song beat with your own heart, and nothing you have seen on earth will matter.

  All the dark memories that pulsed in Thea’s heart grew buoyant. If she just opened her hand, they would fly free, and she would be free of them.

  Father—Mother—

  Her jaw trembled with uncertainty. The motion of the saw reverberated up her arm as her bone split clean in two. The split was like the calm after the storm—the grinding gone silent, her arm set free of ugly memories. Ingrid’s hand gripped her arm just above her wrist, and Thea felt her blood held back by Ingrid’s will. Then the wound began to seal, skin climbing over blood and bone. Everything she saw and felt seemed far away, like reading a horror novel on a sunny day. It wasn’t real.

  Her injured hand had dropped onto the cloths. It was just a dead thing now, like her father’s body with his soul gone out of it.

  Scream. Scream! Please, scream! Stop her!

  Ingrid seemed to notice her distress, and smiled at Thea, the sun streaming through the windows catching her fair hair so she looked radiant as a painted angel. And then she held up a new hand, a splendid wooden hand with neatly articulated little fingers. Designs were burned into the wood, curls and patterns, the kind of dreamy images that might float in one’s head just before falling asleep at night. Ingrid was like a nightmare—

  A dream come to life, Thea thought, with her strange melody and her wise eyes.

  Ingrid held the wooden hand to the stump where her old hand had been, and Thea could feel that this was not just any
wood. It was alive. As soon as it touched her, it began to put out roots that crawled through her skin, tickling beneath, wending their way inside of her. Filling her with everything she had lost.

  All the pain was gone now.

  Ingrid let the last note die softly. Then she cocked her head again. “Does your hand feel better?”

  “Yes.” Another answer teased at her mind. But why? Of course she felt better.

  Now when she looked at her left hand, she didn’t see the wood, but the perfect match to her right. The pale hue of her palms, the thin lines webbing across, the pinker shade of her fingertips, the veins running beneath—it was all there. And the wooden hand moved exactly as she wished it to, even though it only had the ghost of sensation. No one would know it was wood, except Thea.

  “Even you will forget,” Ingrid said, seeming to read her mind.

  Yes, I will forget, she thought. It’s better than new.

  “This wood is from my tree,” Ingrid said.

  “Your tree?”

  “My Yggdrasil.” Ingrid looked slowly at the ceiling, like she was following the line of branches above her head instead of a hairline crack in the plaster. “The sacred tree of Irminau. It’s the most beautiful place, Thea. I wish we could go there now, so you could feel its magic running all through you. You would feel such serenity. But now you have a little piece of it. Do you feel it?”

  A vision flashed over Thea’s head: the bright spring green of a tree’s branches filling the room, blocking the ceiling from view entirely. It brought her back to childhood, to summers in the forests outside the city visiting Uncle Peter or her mother’s dear friend Antje. But this was the tree of all trees. A tree so strong and magnificent that she almost thought she heard the rustle of its leaves across the miles. “I do.”

  Ingrid’s eyes dropped back down to meet Thea’s, and the vision broke. “But you mustn’t tell anyone. There isn’t enough magic to go around.”

  “Like Freddy’s magic.” Thea understood. “We can’t tell anyone, because he can’t bring back every person that dies. And you can’t give everyone a piece of Yggdrasil.”

  “Yes. You understand.” Ingrid wiped away the blood smeared on Thea’s arm. “I’m glad you came. There are never many girls around here, and I’ve missed my sisters. I hope you’ll help me protect my tree.”

  “Of course I will,” Thea said, eager to have purpose. She was no longer just a sixteen-year-old girl who had left school and become a waitress, a girl who had fallen in with Freddy by accident and could not match his power.

  Ingrid had trusted her with something great.

  Sebastian showed Freddy and Nan to a dining room. Sigi was already there, eating a sandwich piled high. The remnants of lunch were spread across one end of the grand table: breads, cold cuts and boiled sausages, cheeses, sliced potatoes, pickles, butter, horseradish, and mustard. Only a lifetime of manners kept Freddy from grabbing food by the fistful. Thanks to his constant use of magic, he was always hungry, and last night he had worked some of the strongest magic of his life on an empty stomach.

  “I hope the conversation went well,” Sigi said.

  “It was…interesting,” Nan said, making a slight face.

  Freddy quickly assembled a sandwich and folded it into a napkin. “I’m going to find Thea. I can’t imagine healing takes longer than this.”

  “Good idea,” Nan said.

  Freddy nosed around downstairs as much as he could without seeming overly suspicious, but only found common rooms—dining room, music room, a ballroom that was quite creepy in its empty expanse, a front parlor and a back parlor, and a few miscellaneous rooms of chairs and paintings. The house overlooked a vegetable garden out back, and even now in November, a gardener was out picking lettuce. Magic, Freddy thought, wondering how many other sorcerers worked for Sebastian.

  He headed for the stairs and almost collided with Will on the second-floor landing.

  “Oh—hey,” Will said. “I was just going to ask you—we have a few nice empty bedrooms. Want to come see which you’d like?”

  Freddy frowned. Had Will been ordered to keep him from the third floor? The question was casual enough, but it seemed like Will had just been standing there—and choosing a bedroom sounded uncomfortably permanent. “I want to check on Thea first. It’s been a while.”

  “Ingrid will let you know as soon as she’s ready, I’m sure. I don’t want to disturb her. But Thea is in the best of hands, I can tell you that. Ingrid’s so gentle.”

  Soft footsteps were padding down the stairs. “How sweet to say. All in a day’s work.” A slight blond girl appeared in view. Her eyes fixed on Freddy. She reached out to touch his silver hair before she was all the way downstairs. When he flinched back, she laughed gently. “No need to be shy. I’ve just never seen the like on someone so young!”

  “Are you Ingrid? I need to see Thea.” He knew he sounded rudely blunt, but he didn’t care.

  “And she would like to see you,” Ingrid said.

  “How is she?”

  “Wonderful.” She waved for Freddy to follow her up.

  Thea was in bed sitting back on a pile of fluffy pillows, but her eyes lit when she saw Freddy. Her left hand looked good as new. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “A little drugged, but…good.” She smiled up at him. “Don’t worry. You look so concerned. Sit down.”

  Freddy pulled over the wooden chair, picking up a bottle of medicine on the nightstand. It looked similar to the stuff the maid gave him when he had a headache, but he had never seen Thea look dreamy. The room smelled very clean. “What happened?” he asked. “What did she do?”

  She waved her fingers. “She fixed it, obviously. What about you, did you learn anything? Did you meet Sebastian?”

  “Yes. He had a lot to say about Nan and the Norns. Ingrid is one, too.”

  “She told me about the tree.”

  “Yggdrasil?”

  “I could almost see it, the way she spoke. To think we never even knew it existed! It must be the most beautiful place.”

  “Thea, can you tell me more about the healing? Did she give you anything else to take besides this medicine?”

  “Her magic takes the pain away. It made me dream.” Her expression shifted to something haunted, and then she reached for his hand. “I need a dream. It was nice to forget everything for a minute.”

  “I know.” He gripped her hand back. Her fingers felt solid and warm. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “Freddy…”

  “Yes?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. I felt like there was something I needed to tell you, but I can’t even think of it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Must’ve been a dream I had after I passed out.”

  This feeling of wrongness had been creeping into Freddy’s mind from the moment Max shot Thea. Could he have done it deliberately to provide a reason for Ingrid to be alone with Thea? If they knew so much about Freddy already, they might also suspect he had feelings for her. That he trusted her. That he’d lost everything from his own bedroom to his cat to all the people he’d known, and she was his only anchor.

  And also, his weakness.

  Who was Nan Davies?

  According to Sebastian’s story, nobody. Her name and face were just a mask to put on for this life. She was supposed to help the Hands of the White Tree protect Yggdrasil. She must never again dream of owning her own shop or go out at night to the Telephone Club to work with Thea and joke with customers.

  She would never again be an ordinary girl.

  “So what did Sebastian say?” Sigi asked. “Does it match what my mother told you?”

  “He knows a lot more than Arabella did. There are three Norns, and one of them is here. He said I’m supposed to…” She hesitated.

  “What?”

  “It sounds stupid when I say it aloud. Actually, it sounds stupid even if I don’t say it aloud.”

  “I’m sure it’s not stupid,”
Sigi said, leaning on the table.

  “I’m supposed to bring water to a sacred tree in the north called Yggdrasil.”

  “That’s all? But why?”

  “So the water can carry magic throughout the land to the people. It preserves balance. I told you it sounded stupid.”

  “It sounds mystical. Where is this tree?”

  “In Irminau. But—the tree was actually destroyed right before I was born.”

  “So then there’s nothing to do?” Sigi poured a cup of tea from the pot on the table, although it had obviously gone cold.

  “I don’t know. He says Ingrid planted a new tree. She’s another of the Norns. He called her ‘my sister.’ I suppose I should talk with her.”

  “Nan.” Sigi tilted her head to one side. “Whenever you talk about this stuff, you know, you seem different…unhappy. Like you’re being shipped off to boarding school.”

  “Maybe I just need to understand it better.” She chewed her thumbnail a moment, remembering how her boss used to harass her about that habit. “I’ve always sensed I was different from other people. If it’s my fate, how can I fight that?”

  Sigi was quiet. She sipped her tea and made a face.

  “You don’t believe in fate, do you?” Nan asked.

  Sigi shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right that you have no choice about your own life. I mean, how do we know Sebastian and Ingrid are right?”

  “I’ve tried to have a normal life,” Nan said. “I had a normal job, and I planned to be a dressmaker. I would still love to have that life, but it never works. I can’t shake that feeling, telling me I have some larger purpose to fulfill.”

  “But it seems like that feeling goes against your own heart. How could it be right?” Sigi stared into the teacup, now half-empty. “I guess it’s easy for me to say.”

  “No—you’re right,” Nan said. “That’s my problem. Everything Sebastian told me feels right and wrong at once. I have to find out more, even if it means…losing a part of myself. The Nan part.”

  She hoped Sigi understood that she would have given anything to have a normal life, to see colors and go to dances and yearn to be touched and kissed.