“Ghosts so kind, ghosts so dear, speak to us and we will hear. Ghosts, we call you, now appear!”
Tatiana had kept the spell really basic, just in case, and had written it, as Donata had requested, to ensure that they were only calling on the spirits they wanted to see, and hopefully giving them the power to communicate, which they’d lacked during any interactions with the Ulfhednar. Because Donata had a natural gift for speaking to the dead, she thought she would probably be able to hear them anyway—she’d heard Freddy’s brother, after all, although her screwed-up powers made it difficult. But if this spell worked as she hoped it would, then Magnus should be able to hear the ghost as well.
If it worked.
She said the spell loudly and with focus, and then they waited. It didn’t take long.
A figure slowly appeared before them, first indistinct and then becoming clearer, as if it was tuning in on the call of the magic. A tall blond man with short-cropped hair and faded blue eyes, he was a little too rugged to be handsome, but she suspected that in life he had had a certain rough charm. His face bore an expression of mixed joy and confusion when he caught sight of Magnus.
Magnus’s own face mirrored that of the spirit, but sadness darkened his bright blue eyes. “Calder,” he said. “My old friend.” He put out a hand and then dropped it to his side, gazing helplessly at Donata, clearly out of his depth.
“Hello, Calder,” Donata said, taking a step closer to the dreamcatcher and the figure beside it. When the ghost tried to move away, it became clear that the spell had worked. A hint of panic joined the confusion.
“It’s okay,” Donata said in a soothing tone. In her experience, ghosts tended to be somewhat childlike in their reactions, and she tried to talk to them as clearly and simply as she could. “It won’t hurt you. The magic is just there to help you stay here until we’re done talking. I’m a friend of Magnus’s, and we need to ask you some questions. Is that okay?”
Calder nodded his head slowly, his attention mostly still on Magnus.
“Why aren’t you in Valhalla, where you belong?” Magnus asked, his tone strained. He’d probably rather be fighting a herd of wild boars than doing this.
“I wish I was,” Calder said. Donata breathed a sigh of relief and glanced at Magnus to see if he’d heard.
“You were in Valhalla, my brother, weren’t you?”
A smile lit up his friend’s face and made him almost handsome. “Oh, yes. It was just as wonderful as they had always promised us. All my friends and family who had gone before were there, and we spent the days drinking and feasting and playing games. There was no more pain, and I never grew tired. The sun always shone.” His expression darkened. “But then something happened, and I was pulled away.”
“Pulled away by whom?” Donata asked. “Do you know?”
He nodded unhappily, tiny wisps of ectoplasm floating off into the air around him. “It was a priestess of the goddess Idunn. She said it was the goddess’s command that I had to leave Valhalla and go home, and if I did, I would be reborn and be a youth again, free to live my life all over. I didn’t want to go—once you are in Valhalla, existence on this plane doesn’t seem so appealing—but I found I couldn’t resist her pull. She must have had the goddess’s blessing, to have been so strong.”
Huh. Somehow Donata wasn’t so sure.
“Why appear only to Magnus?” she asked. “Why not your family or your other friends?”
“I don’t know,” Calder said. “It was as though I was directed to him. But I was only able to come through to him once, and then he couldn’t seem to hear me.” Agitation made his outline waver. “He got hurt because of me.”
“It’s okay,” Magnus said. “I’m fine. It was just a surprise, that’s all.”
“Did you know that others had been brought back as well?” Donata asked.
“I thought I saw a few of my friends from Gimle who had been with me in Valhalla,” he said. “But I could never get close to them to be sure.”
“Hmm.” It was about time to wrap this up. Both Calder and Magnus were getting more miserable by the minute. And really, she only had two more questions to ask.
“This priestess,” she said. “Could you tell what clan she was from?”
Calder wrinkled his forehead, as if remembering something. “Yes, I could. I recall thinking it was odd that a priestess from the badger clan would be contacting me, and not one from our own Bear clan.”
Next to her, Magnus stiffened, and she held out an unobtrusive hand to keep him from saying anything.
“Did you see anyone else with this woman? Was she alone, or was there someone with her?”
Calder scratched his head, not realizing his fingers weren’t quite touching his skull. “Now that you ask, I think there was a figure standing behind her, in the shadows where I could barely make out anything but a glow in the shape of a person.”
“A glow,” Donata repeated, a trifle grimly. Damn it. She’d known there had been someone else’s magic mixed up in this somewhere. “Thank you, Calder. You have been really helpful. Can you do one more thing for us?”
“I’ll try,” he said. “Will it help me get back to Valhalla? I don’t belong here anymore.” He gave a sad look in Magnus’s direction. “Although it has been good to see you again, old friend.”
Magnus nodded, trying to smile. “You too, Calder.”
Donata gestured at the dreamcatcher. “Can you put your hands on that, and call all the others? The ones who should be there and not here?” She turned to Magnus to explain. “My great-aunt designed this so it would only call one ghost initially to make it easier to communicate. But Calder should be able to call in all the others.” She turned back to Calder. “Go on, see if you can do it.”
The ghost reached out his hands, which seemed to become more solid as they entered the slight glow of the dreamcatcher. Slowly, one by one, all the other spirits appeared, standing in a circle around the dangling feathers and ribbons. Magnus spoke each of their names under his breath as they solidified enough to be recognized, and nodded his head at Donata when they were all present.
She pulled a small pair of silver scissors out of her pocket. “Rest well, play well, and be at peace,” she said, and then she cut the webbing that ran in crisscrossed lines through the middle of the dreamcatcher. Like popping bubbles, each of the ghosts vanished instantly.
Magnus made an involuntary move forward, as if to stop them.
“Where did they go?” he asked plaintively.
“Back to Valhalla, where they belong,” Donata said. “Hopefully this time for good.”
Magnus’s hands curled into fists at his sides. “Damned straight. Come on, ’Nata. I think it is time we go have a talk with the Lawspeaker and the rest of the elders. They need to know about what we learned. And man, are they going to be pissed.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
The day after she and Magnus talked to the elders, Donata went home. Magnus drove her back on the Sunday a week and a half after Thanksgiving, six weeks after she’d arrived. So much had happened, it felt more like a year.
Their drive back was mostly silent. Occasionally they’d chat about something inconsequential, but for the most part they were each lost in their own thoughts, neither willing to broach the subject of an uncertain future.
She’d already promised to come back for his induction ceremony at the winter solstice, so they knew they’d see each other at least one more time. Beyond that, nothing had been discussed or decided on. Donata just knew it was time to go home. As much as she loved Magnus, she didn’t belong in his world. She suspected he no longer belonged in hers.
She didn’t know whether to be grateful or bereft when the seemingly endless trip was over.
He stayed the night and they made love one last time, and in the morning he was gone. Life went on. If it was a little bit emptier than before,
well, she had plenty of things to fill it.
Explaining her pregnancy to Ricky was surprisingly easy (he took it well, all things considered, and immediately started planning how to fit all the necessary baby things into the relatively small apartment). Explaining it to her best friend, Doc Havens, was a little bit more challenging, although Doc was as supportive as usual (as long as it didn’t mean she’d have to babysit). Donata’s family, on the other hand, proved more difficult, although eventually her parents seemed to come around to the idea of having an unexpected grandchild, and her sisters to becoming aunts. Thankfully, there was no stigma attached to unwed motherhood in the Witch world, although Donata had to persuade her mother that she didn’t need a professional nanny, an entire nursery’s worth of top-of-the-line baby furniture, and a proper Witch husband. Not necessarily in that order.
On Tuesday she went back to work, resigning herself to the dubious joy of digging through the teetering mountains of cold cases for the next month and a half. Life went back to normal, more or less, other than the fact that she missed Magnus most minutes of most days, a lot more than she’d expected to.
She’d think she saw him walking down the street, and would open her mouth to call his name before she realized it was just some other tall man with broad shoulders and long blond hair. At night, her dreams were filled with images of the two of them together, and some mornings she woke to find tears on her lashes, and the sheets twisted around her like a straitjacket.
It was hell, but she was going to have to get used to it. He’d worked like a demon to get his place with his people back after so many years cut off from the clan ties that were everything to an Ulfhednar. She wasn’t going to ask him to give it all up again simply because she missed falling asleep next to his large, warm body and talking over their problems together and making love. That would be too selfish, even under the circumstances.
Donata considered—briefly—giving up her life in the city and going back to Gimle. But the thought of abandoning everything she’d worked so hard for, not just for herself but for the Witch-cops who would follow in her footsteps, was just untenable. A year ago, she might have done it. She’d been burned-out by talking to the dead and discouraged from being stuck in the basement at the precinct and ignored by all the Human cops who were uncomfortable with the strange and somewhat unsavory job she did. But everything had changed when she’d gotten involved with the Pentacle Pentimento, and these days she actually loved her job and felt as though she was serving an important purpose.
Not to mention that now that she was pregnant, she wanted to be near her family, despite the challenges in their relationships. Unfortunately, she would never really feel at home in a tiny rural town in Maine, no matter how much she liked the people.
The day before the winter solstice, she drove a rental car back to Gimle, retracing the trip she’d first made almost two months before. She missed Magnus’s amusing stories on the way, and the journey seemed twice as long. But it was worth it when she pulled up in front of the compound and Astrid opened the front door, a huge smile on her wide face and a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies in one hand.
She hugged Donata with the arm not holding the plate. “How was the drive, dear? You should have let Magnus come and get you. He would have been perfectly happy to, you know.”
Donata grabbed a cookie and stuffed it into her mouth. Her sweet tooth had been working overtime lately, for which she blamed the baby and not the sadness that dogged her like a perpetual low-grade fever.
“These are great,” she said, coming into the front hall. “And I told him it didn’t make any sense. He would have had to make an extra trip to get me, then an extra trip to bring me home.”
Astrid sighed. “Oh. I thought perhaps you’d be staying. You would be welcome, you know. Both you and your baby. Even if it turned out not to be Magnus’s. We Ulfhednar love children.”
Donata grinned. “I know. I had a hell of a time convincing the annoying man from the Alliance Council that in all my time here, I’d never seen any evidence of an Ulfhednar couple having more than the two offspring they were allowed by the rules of the Compact.”
“And did you, dear? Convince him, I mean?”
Enar and Erik came screeching into the hallway, moving at top speed as usual. “Donata!” Enar yelled. “We made you something. Wait until you see.” Erik grinned from ear to ear, gave her a hug, and they both raced off again.
Donata laughed at their retreating backs. “Suspicion isn’t evidence, Astrid. I was honestly able to tell Clayton Moore on my honor as a Witch I’d never seen anything to prove his theory, and he had to take my word for it. Hopefully the Alliance will give all the Ulfhednar some space for a while.” She hung her coat up on a hook that was made out of an impressive set of antlers, and helped herself to another cookie. “Any idea what they made me?”
Astrid beamed proudly. “They’ve been working with Halvor in the woodshop since you left. They created a lovely cradle, carved with suns, moons, and, of course, the occasional bear. I hope you like it.”
Donata hoped she wouldn’t burst into tears when she saw it. Those boys. “I’m sure it is terrific. I’ll have a Kobold nanny rocking a cradle made by Ulfhednar. If you would have told me a year ago that this would be my life, I would have had you institutionalized.”
“Sweetheart, you’ve seen the people I live with. I think that would probably be redundant.”
They both chuckled as Donata followed Astrid down the hall to her old room. Her heart clenched as she walked in the door; it felt so much like coming home.
“Is Magnus around?” she asked in as casual a tone as she could muster.
“Oh, no, dear. Didn’t he tell you? He and the other new Ulf are taking part in a traditional cleansing ritual before their ceremony. Most of the other clans are already here, and each of them has their own sweat lodge and camping space, where they’ll keep separate from all the others until it is time for the investiture. That way no one knows the exact number of any other clan until the moment of truth.”
“Oh,” Donata said, disappointed. “That’s why Magnus said he’d have to pick me up a day early if he came for me himself. He didn’t mention he wouldn’t be here tonight.” She brightened at a thought. “So none of the clans will know who has the most Ulf until the actual ceremony tomorrow?”
Astrid’s eyes got a wicked glint in them. “No, they won’t. And I think the badgers are in for a very rude surprise, thanks to you.”
The winter solstice celebration began as the sun rose on the shortest day of the year, and would continue until it rose again on the following morning. A huge bonfire was set up in the meadow, to be started with the remains of the Yule log from the previous year. The fire would burn for the next twenty-four hours, and then a piece of this year’s Yule log would be set aside for that same purpose next year. The Ulfhednar still followed many traditions from the old country. Donata found it charming, if chilly.
The mid-December air was cold against the few exposed parts of her body, but like the others, she was dressed in warm but festive clothing—in her case, a crimson cloak worn over a long deep-forest-green velvet skirt and tunic, with fleece-lined boots that went up to her calves. She wore her hair loose for once, under a garland of green holly leaves and their bright red berries. Thankfully, at two months along, she could still fit into all of her clothing. She was enjoying it while it lasted.
Donata stood with the Torvald family at the edge of the clearing, along with some of the other Gimle folks. The other locals were scattered around the bonfire, playing hosts to the visiting dignitaries. Otherwise, most of the people there were grouped together by clans; all the boars in the southwest quadrant, the wolves in the northeast corner, and so on.
As the sun rose over the edges of the trees, Thorsen, the huge black-haired Chieftain of all the Ulfhednar, lit the bonfire to officially begin the ceremonies. A huge roar went up fro
m the crowd as flames shot toward the sky, and children rang bells or beat noisemakers together, as excited as Human youngsters on Christmas morning.
Young men and women from the six different clans walked out from separate sections of the woods. The newest Ulf were clad only in leather pants and vests, each of them wearing the freshly tattooed emblem of their clan totem animal on their upper arm, where all present could see. Donata’s heart beat faster when she saw Magnus standing with the remaining members of his training group, his face proud and solemn but his eyes gleaming with barely suppressed joy.
As each set reached the area around the bonfire, they were joined by the existing Ulf of their clans, at least any who had been able to make it for the formal rites. Those who had obligations elsewhere were represented by their clan’s head Lawspeaker, who held a staff decorated with one ribbon for each absent member. Donata could see people in the crowd counting silently, their lips moving in the cold.
Thorsen held up his own staff, the insignia of his office, a massive piece of oak as thick as Donata’s forearm. “Welcome, Ulfhednar!” he roared. “Welcome to you all, and especially to the new Ulf among us. It is my honor and my privilege as your Chieftain to officially recognize your hard-won status and to make the count that will determine which clan leads the rest for the coming year.” He raised the staff in the air and brought its ironclad base down against a rock with a clang. “The clan with the most Ulf, thanks in part to the most recent batch from right here in our host town of Gimle, is the bears!”
“You lie!” said Oluf, stepping out of the group of badger clan members. “Your numbers can’t be that high. We heard that two of your Ulf trainees had to drop out due to injury and another died, in this town alone.”
“That is true,” Halvor said, moving to the front of the bear Ulf. “But we still have six who completed the tests successfully, including my son Magnus. Added to the Ulf from other towns, we have a larger total than the wolves by three and the badgers by two. This is the way our law works. Try not to be a sore loser, Oluf.”
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