“What does that mean?”
“Where does the strength for my magic come from? I can’t give and give, I must also take.” Ingrid drew back, like she was suddenly uncomfortable with how much she had said, but she still held Thea’s hand. “Thea, do you know what I did to you?”
Thea flexed the fingers of her left hand. The movement was perfect. “You healed my hand.”
“More than that.”
“You…” The memory was like sliding her hand into ice. “You cut off my hand.”
“Good,” Ingrid said. “You have to be able to accept, first, the difficult choices I made for Yggdrasil. If you had not given a piece of yourself to Yggdrasil, you would not be able to have its power. Give and take, you see.”
Shouldn’t a sacrifice like this be chosen, not forced?
Thea kept her thoughts quiet. She didn’t want Ingrid to withdraw her gifts. And maybe in the haze of her pain, she had chosen this. “I understand.”
“I will teach you the first spell. It will help keep you safe if anything happens. Close your eyes and imagine Yggdrasil.”
Thea summoned to mind an image of Yggdrasil’s thick trunk, the branches that spread toward the golden light of the sun. She felt its warmth as clearly as if she stood beneath it, on a perfect June day, with the air lazy and fragrant.
“Think of the piece of Yggdrasil that is a part of you, and imagine it spreading through you until you become joined with the tree itself. You are no longer soft flesh and bright blood that can easily spill: You are as strong as the trunk of a tree that has stood for longer than any human memory.”
Thea remembered now when Ingrid had given her the wooden hand, how she had felt as if tiny roots were threading up her arm. She twitched, briefly alarmed by the memory, and opened her eyes. The sight of Ingrid calmed her again. Ingrid’s eyes were closed, her chest slowly rising and falling with deep breaths.
Thea surrendered to the feeling of something greater than her urge to protect her own body. “I feel it,” she whispered.
“The more you give yourself to Yggdrasil, the stronger you will become.”
“I want to be strong.” Thea’s heart was beating faster. If she could get closer to Yggdrasil, feel its magic, then she wouldn’t need anyone.
“I don’t get to teach magic to other girls,” Ingrid said. “It reminds me of when I was with Verthandi and Urd.”
“Your sisters?”
“Yes. Nan is Verthandi.”
“It fits, somehow,” Thea said. “Does she always look like Nan?”
“Her appearance changes, as mine does. And yet I think she always does look like Nan. Strong.” Ingrid smiled. “That was good, for your first attempt. You should try to connect with Yggdrasil every day, and if anything bad happens, tap into that connection. The strength of the tree will be inside you, and if you’ve succeeded, bullets will glance off you and blows will lose their power.”
“I’ll be protected from pain,” Thea said softly, seeing the leaves of Yggdrasil grow even brighter in her mind.
“Remember to keep it a secret. I wish I could give it to everyone, but I can’t.”
“Of course,” Thea said. “I would never tell a soul.”
Two guards trailed Freddy, staying back just enough that he couldn’t forget their presence. Not many people were out to begin with. Behind the gates of fancy homes in the neighborhood, children cried and dogs barked. The park was abandoned.
On Kesslerstrasse, the shops were open again. The butcher had empty windows and a line out his door. Women exited, clutching small paper-wrapped parcels as if they were gold. Stores selling everything from shoes to musical instruments had their window displays stocked. The clothing store had an elaborate display of painted mannequins wearing ladies’ fall day dresses in dark red and green with pleated knee-length skirts. However, no one opened the doors, no one lingered at the windows. The most popular spot in the row seemed to be the barber, where a crowd of men spilled into the street, talking, gesturing, smoking. “What a bunch of lies!” one man kept shouting.
The clock shop was where Freddy was most tempted to linger. He couldn’t remember his early years spent at home, but the sound of multiple ticking clocks must have been constant background noise. It could have been the sound of all his life. He had tried to cling to his past. With books instead of his father’s guidance, he taught himself to repair broken clocks. Gerik brought them to him, indulging the hobby.
Now these clocks, ticking out of reach behind a shop window’s glass, felt symbolic of the future. He wouldn’t be fixing clocks anymore. When he was the Chancellor’s prisoner, he needed to dream of that other life. Now, he had to think of making his own decisions about his power.
It was a short walk to Republic Square, and he couldn’t avoid it forever, though he couldn’t separate it from the image of a burning pyre of workers’ bodies.
Of course, all that was over. The square, which was ordinarily a popular place for picnics, was blocked off to pedestrians, with a few armored military vehicles parked around. The protestors had been cleared out, although their detritus remained: Bits of trash, handkerchiefs, papers, and photos littered the park. A flock of geese drifted around the fountain.
But in front of the statue The Maiden of the People, a tall stone figure bearing a sword and the flag of the Republic of Urobrun, was a circle of burned grass as wide as a small house. The Maiden’s expression looked more aggrieved than noble. And just across the street, the Chancellery loomed.
Doubt crept up on Freddy. The Chancellery was familiar, yes, and he missed familiarity. He had forgotten how formidable the building was: The government might be modern, but no one had felt the need to replace the Imperial architecture of one hundred years ago, white columns soaring toward statues of soldiers on horseback and angels blowing trumpets. Only the bright flags of the Republic, hung in pairs on the front of every government building, stated that the Empire was dead.
He walked up the wide, empty stairs, approaching the guards. They stared at him from afar, their weapons in easy reach. His existence was known to so few, he didn’t expect to be recognized.
He held up his hands. “I’m Frederick Linden,” he said. “You’ve been looking for me.”
The moment he said his name, they started moving toward him. One of them grabbed his arms, yanking them behind his back.
“Hey!” Freddy said. “Ease off. I came of my own will.”
More guards had already crawled out of nowhere. They jostled him inside without saying a word to him, and he wondered if maybe he was wrong—maybe they meant to hurt him after all. Perhaps they considered his crime to be so grave that they would execute him.
They dragged him into a small room, locking him inside. The only comfort was that the room was nicely furnished with the red upholstered chairs ubiquitous in government buildings. If they meant to kill him, surely he would be thrown straight into a dank cell? Or was this wishful thinking? Suddenly he found the hundred bad things Sebastian had mentioned were all in his mind at once.
The door opened, and Marlis entered with the Chancellor’s adviser, Diedrich Volland, and two guards. Freddy recognized these particular guards—they had been among the ones to stand outside the door when he revived people.
He felt limp with relief, even though it wasn’t warranted.
“It is you,” Marlis said. She seemed so much her normal self that it made her radio broadcast seem like a bad dream. “Where have you been, Freddy?”
“Laying low. I didn’t know who might be looking for me. I’m glad to have made it here safely.” He wanted her to feel they were on the same side, at least for now.
“I’m glad to see you as well. I’m sorry for locking you up in here. We’re trying to minimize the number of people who know your role, so the guards were told you were a suspected rebel leader and not to ask you any questions until we arrived. We are in dire need of your services.”
“In what way?”
“Come with me.”
/> The inside of the Chancellery was as quiet as the outside. The place felt like a giant funeral parlor, with the few men they passed wearing black and speaking only in soft voices.
“We have a lead on your parents, Freddy,” Marlis said, as they walked into the courtyard to meet their car. “I hope you can help me, and I will be happy to help you in return.”
“What do you want from me?”
“My father,” she said, her tone growing heavier. The driver opened the door for them, and Marlis climbed in first. Volland was last, keeping Freddy between them.
“I want to see my parents delivered to safety first,” Freddy said.
“I’m not asking you to bring back thousands of people. Just one.” She sat stiffly. She didn’t wear her grief—that wasn’t her way. He knew how much her father had meant to her.
“It’s wrong,” he said. “When I was kidnapped by Arabella von Kaspar, I—”
She interrupted him. “As if she was trustworthy! Of course she would say it was wrong!”
“Listen to me!” he said. “I found out that magic has a balance, and if it’s disrupted, there are consequences, and there are even guardians—” He stopped. He knew she wouldn’t believe him about the Norns. She had always seemed to lack any imagination, and even he had found the story hard to swallow at first, so she would surely scoff.
“Guardians?” she pressed. “You don’t mean Norns?” She said “Norns” like the word was a snake she held by the tail.
“You know about it?” Freddy asked.
“A little. What do you know?”
Freddy was careful with the truth, trying not to implicate the people he’d left behind. “The morning before the dead escaped the underground, the Valkenraths asked me to revive a girl I had already revived before. She had been shot and died a second time. Normally, this wouldn’t be possible because the revived can’t die from a mere gunshot wound. The girl told me she was a Norn.”
“What is it that the Norns supposedly do?” Volland asked.
“They have powers that allow them to intervene when humans abuse magic,” Freddy said.
“What kind of powers?” Marlis asked.
“I don’t know,” Freddy said.
“Do we have anyone we can spare to check the archives for more information?” Marlis asked Volland.
“I can manage without Brewer,” Volland said.
“Then get him right on it.”
It only took a few minutes to reach the Chancellor’s home, where Marlis promptly got out and crossed her arms impatiently. She had always acted as if she expected to rule in her father’s stead, and now it seemed like she thought the day had already come. Volland even seemed to be taking orders from her.
Marlis led the way. She was wearing a plain gray silk dress he had seen her wear many times before. Two guards brought up the rear, with Freddy in the middle. Volland had parted from them along the way, probably to give the order to Brewer, who Freddy thought might be Volland’s secretary.
The Chancellor was lying in state on his bed. Freddy had never seen the Chancellor’s private chambers. He felt like an intruder, seeing a painting of his late wife gazing upon him from the wall, a pile of newspapers on the nightstand, the slippers on the ornate rug. In Freddy’s mind, the Chancellor was always standing, speaking forcefully, with every situation under control. Now he looked pale and small beneath the heavy canopy, eyes closed, hands folded.
“How are you keeping him preserved?”
“Bathed in serum. It has a few uses, rather like baking soda.” Freddy could see the silent temper in Marlis’s face now. Even as a child, she had grown cold and fierce rather than crying when she was upset. She bit her thin lips, and gently smoothed her father’s brow, creased so he looked harried even in death.
“Revive him now, and I will assure your parents’ safety,” she said.
“I want to see them first.”
“I’m afraid it can’t work that way,” she said.
“You need my magic.”
“I do, but do I need your cooperation? You take pleasure in using your magic, I know.”
This was the test. He knew her weaknesses, but she knew his, too. She was poised yet tense, an animal waiting to strike.
“Marlis, we shouldn’t act as enemies,” he said. “Don’t you realize how precarious all of this is?” He spread his hands to indicate the wider world.
“Of course. I’m sure I know much more than you do.” He saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes. “Please, just bring him back and do not let him go until I say so.” She turned to the wall abruptly, smoothing her hands over her face and hair, and then adjusting her glasses.
He stepped closer to the Chancellor’s body, feeling the familiar itch of magic in his fingers. He knew now that he couldn’t allow people to live, and when he let her father go, she could harm his parents anyway. His only chance to gain the upper hand was to show Marlis he meant business.
“I can’t agree to the terms,” he said. “I can’t let him live.”
She looked at the guards. “Tie him.”
Freddy had seen the guards quickly subdue the people he revived when they were occasionally panicked and violent. Now he received the same rough treatment as one guard grabbed him and the other pulled up a heavy wooden chair. They didn’t care if they bruised his arms or scraped his skin as they held him down with iron arms and bound his legs to the chair.
“Marlis!” He twisted his head to look back at her. The chair faced the Chancellor. “Is this really how you want it to go?”
She wasn’t watching the guards, and stood by the window, clutching the curtain in one hand. Sunlight turned loose strands of her dark hair to red-gold.
The guards yanked his hands forward and reached for the Chancellor’s hands. The dead man’s cold hands were pressed into Freddy’s and tied there, forcing his magic to flow. It had always flowed with a touch, and now he had to choke it back with everything in his power.
That meant touching death, touching the clammy, soft hands of the man who, along with Gerik and Uncle, had forced him into a childhood of imprisonment. His throat was tight and painful. Holding back magic felt oddly like choking back tears. Now the guards were roping his chest to the back of the chair, and then his elbows to the arms. He couldn’t even speak. It took everything in him not to revive the Chancellor.
“Leave him,” Marlis said, and he heard her walk from the room quickly. She was ashamed she’d done this to him. He heard it in her voice and her step.
He was faced with the ghastly sight of the Chancellor, now with his arms extended toward the chair like Freddy was a macabre puppeteer. Every instinct inside of Freddy screamed to bring life back to these cold hands and that slack face.
He tilted his neck back to look at the ceiling. The urge was dampened, ever so slightly, if he didn’t look at the man. He was breathing fast, wiggling his feet against his bonds, restless to work, and he still felt the Chancellor’s slack skin forced against his fingers.
I will bring you back, he thought. I’ll let you say good-bye to your daughter. But not yet. Just—not—yet.
His hands were growing warmer, and his face, too, as if he were running for his life. The magic seemed like it would boil inside him if it wasn’t used. He had never resisted like this before. The Valkenraths brought him the dead and praised him when his work was done. Arabella said he had become addicted to the feeling, that he wouldn’t feel this way if the Valkenraths hadn’t pushed him into it.
He shut his eyes, battling silently. A wave of cold nausea passed over him, even as his hands and face were sweating. The tingling feeling that always came with magic danced up his arms and down his spine and then behind his eyes.
His eyes opened again. The ceiling was plain white plaster but he saw stars and flashes. He kept staring until they faded and his heart slowed its beat to an everyday rhythm.
It was a silent fight, leaving him spent and relieved. The magic seemed subdued. He could still feel it at the ready
, though he had control.
No clock was in view, and time seemed to crawl. He sat exhausted, trying not to think about the unpleasant position he was in. He heard footsteps creaking outside the door occasionally, but no one entered. How long could Marlis stand to wait?
Marlis couldn’t stop pacing Papa’s office, couldn’t stop the tears from running down her face, couldn’t stop the sick feeling twisting inside her. A part of her wanted to confide in Freddy, but she didn’t know where he’d been or what he’d heard. Papa first. Freddy later.
She was only vaguely aware of Volland in the background, speaking to someone at the door, then doing something at her father’s desk.
“Marlis,” he said.
“Yes?” She stopped pacing.
“It’s going to be all right.”
Gentle words made it worse. “It’s not,” she snapped. “I don’t need to be patted on the head.”
Even though her ire didn’t rattle him, something had, she realized. She could see it in his eyes. “Brewer found a report on…Well, a little before you were born, our intelligence in Irminau captured and killed a young woman with persuasive powers who spoke of ‘rustic myths like the Norns and the sacred tree.’”
“They killed her?”
“According to the report, she was too dangerous to keep alive because of her ability to enchant.”
Volland still hadn’t said anything direct about Papa’s dying words. She drew a quick breath. “Did you know I was adopted, Volland? Did you know any of it?”
“No. I’ve only worked for your father for eight years. No one spoke of it. I’d imagine very few people know; he wouldn’t want that known.”
Wilhelmina knew, Marlis thought, remembering the talk of the tree at lunch, and the odd way Wilhelmina had looked at her when she asked about it.
Glittering Shadows Page 12
