by Mur Lafferty
“All I could think to do was solve the problem I had at the moment,” Freya continued. “Run from the mobs. Get something to eat. Find a safe place to rest. I didn’t have time to look for the portal. Every time I thought about backtracking to find it, something got in my way. Usually a blaze. Sometimes a chicken.”
Alison grimaced, the expression having nothing to do with her stiff neck. “You couldn’t think about the big picture. When everything’s so big that you can’t pick out which one’s important, you just deal with the little stuff.”
“Because you can control the little stuff,” Freya said, nodding.
“Yeah,” Alison said. “I remember.”
“How long has it been?” Freya asked.
Alison thought. She hadn’t really been keeping track of time, but the sheep had escaped three times, and they had ruined Max’s mom’s farm, and Mr. Hatch’s ranch, and there had been time for Max’s mom to build and then tear down the tower she’d made for Alison.
“A few months, maybe?” she ventured. “I’m not sure, really.”
“It’s been about six months for me,” Freya said, “although it’s really hard to judge time down here. No sun.” She glanced up, toward the ceiling. “That’s one of the things I miss.”
“I figured you’d miss a bed,” Alison grumbled.
“Well, Bunny Biter is a good pillow, and a good guard wolf,” Freya said. “I don’t need much.”
Alison wanted to tell her she needed more than a mushroom farm and a wolf pillow, but didn’t feel like getting into an argument. “It’s weird that we’re so different,” she said instead.
Freya stroked the wolf’s shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“We’re dealing with the same awful situation,” Alison said. “And you’re running through the Nether on an adventure, and I just went to a friend’s house in the woods and wondered whether I should fix the sheep pen or let them go.” She paused and sighed, not ready to keep talking but knowing she had to get this out. “I’ve been so afraid, and so sad. And compared to you, I’ve had nothing to worry about. Freya, you’re so strong. You live in the Nether.”
“Nothing to worry about? You just said Max’s family lived out in the woods,” Freya said. “Don’t you still have to deal with the occasional creeper or skeleton? Certainly spiders.”
Alison thought for a second and remembered the lava cave and the skeletons. She remembered the creeper that had blown up and ruined their portal. “Well, yeah, but I didn’t really think about that when it was happening. I only thought about what to do next to survive. I didn’t worry about my…my situation.” She still had trouble saying my dead family and my destroyed home.
“Sounds familiar,” Freya said.
The realization hit Alison then. Freya was afraid of confronting her own problems. That was why she was living in this incredibly dangerous world. Who worried about dead parents when deadly monsters were behind half the doors in your house? She felt conflicted; part of her felt sorry for Freya, that she was unwilling or unable to deal with this emotional trauma, and part of her was kind of jealous that Freya didn’t have to deal with it. Still, Alison didn’t want to have to live in the Nether to run away from her problems. No problem was that bad.
“I haven’t thought about what would have happened if this had happened to me in the Overworld,” Freya said. “But we didn’t really have a permanent home anyway, so I would probably be doing the same thing, just with better food and more company.”
“And a bed,” added Alison. “And I don’t know how I would have reacted if this had happened to me in the Nether. Situations are unique that way, huh?”
“You don’t think you could have handled yourself here, if you’d been equipped?” Freya asked. “I guess you’ll never know. And I hope you never have to.”
Alison laughed, the bitter sound surprising even herself. “Well, I’m without my family and I’m stuck in the Nether, so I guess I have more in common with you than I thought. We just got here in different ways.”
“Guess you’re right,” Freya said.
“Come back with us,” Alison blurted. “When we find our way home. You can have a bed. You can have security. Water. Colors! Oh, I miss green,” she added with sudden surprise.
“And,” Max said, his voice thick from sleep, “we have almost no lava compared to you.” He sat up, blinking, rolling his previously injured shoulder that showed no sign of an arrow wound.
Freya shook her head. “No, I already decided, this is my home now.” She sat up and looked at the room that had recently spawned enough skeletons to easily kill them.
“But home isn’t a place,” Alison said slowly. “It’s wherever you are comfortable enough to sleep.”
Max made a face at her and looked pointedly at where each of them was trying to get quick, uncomfortable rest.
She frowned and shook her head. “No, I don’t mean napping on a stone floor. I mean real sleep, where you don’t think anything is going to kill you. Sleep where you’re comfortable enough to sleep all night, where you trust the people with you, where you wake up happy and wanting to share breakfast and then go and rebuild the garden you accidentally destroyed with lava yesterday.” She missed Max’s mom, then, and knew that she must be going mad with worry right now.
“That’s weirdly specific,” Freya said, closing her eyes again. “But I guess I get your meaning.”
“So, you’ll come back with us?” Alison asked hopefully.
“No,” Freya said, settling back into Bunny Biter’s soft belly. “And if you want to see exactly why I won’t, go and look around this room and ask yourself if you could leave it. Now be quiet. I need sleep.”
“Freya,” Alison said quietly. Freya cracked her left eye open again and regarded her. “I don’t think we can find our portal on our own. You know the mobs and the terrain. We’ll die out there without your help. And we want to go home.”
Freya sighed and sat up, resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going to get any sleep. “I’ll help you find your portal, or another one,” she said. “After that, I can’t promise anything. But we’ve got to sort through our loot and get you some proper equipment first.”
THE ENCHANTER WITH NO NAME
Once cleared of monsters, the basement workshop was really a thing of beauty, making the Enchanter’s crafting room look like Max’s parents’ storage shed.
Now that he was feeling better and there weren’t any mobs trying to kill him, Max could take a more leisurely trip around the room. Freya’s fortress had four enchanting tables, four brewing stands, five furnaces, and the walls were lined with alternating chests and bookcases, most of the books glowing or glittering with ripe enchantments. Basic crafting workbenches lined another wall.
“Did you build all these?” he asked.
“I carried a few tables with me into the Nether, but most of these were here when I got here,” she said, busying herself at a brewing stand.
“Then who built them?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I assume the same person who built the fortress. There are buildings all over the place; some of them have equipment in them, some don’t.”
“Where do you think the person who built this building went? Why build in the Nether?” he persisted.
“I don’t know, Max,” she said, putting down her flask and looking at him. “I didn’t really think about it while I was looking for a safe place to rest, where things wouldn’t kill me.”
“I was just asking,” he grumbled. “It’s a valid question.”
At the far end of the room were twelve chests lined up under torches. Eleven were regular torches, but the twelfth was lit with redstone, giving off a dire light.
High on the walls were more carvings, some of blazes, others of skeletons, endermen, or, bizarrely, chickens.
Freya moved along one wall, pointing to e
ach chest and bookcase. “That has food, more than mushroom soup. I try to ration it, so don’t gorge yourselves. That one has all different kinds of metal, that one has gemstones, and that one has different woods. The last chest has all the crap that won’t fit in the first several.
“The books aren’t as organized. I can’t find any reason why they’re on any specific shelf; I only know that they don’t want to be shelved anywhere but where they are. Try to move them and they just pop back out. And those”—she pointed to the torchlit chests on the far side of the room—“are for finished items.”
“What’s in the red one?” Max asked immediately. His hands itched to open the chests, but he knew better than to go rummaging through them. He’d tried it once, and had definitely learned his lesson.
“I haven’t been through that one yet,” Freya admitted. “I figured the red torch was a warning.” She grinned at him. “But you’re welcome to try.”
Max started forward but Alison caught his arm, dropping the helmet she had been inspecting. “Are you kidding me?” she hissed in his ear. “Of all the chests in the room, you have to go for the most dangerous?”
“You don’t know it’s the most dangerous,” he said, jerking his arm away.
“So why are you in the Nether anyway?” Freya asked, going to a chest by a brewing stand and searching through it.
“Max wants to rescue someone,” Alison said, heading for the chest that Freya had said held metals, clutching the helmet under her arm. “I just want to get home.”
“We can get home after we find the Enchanter,” Max said, looking at the twelve chests greedily. “The portal won’t be going anywhere.” He wondered what each chest held, but paused. What if the last chest was dangerous after all? He reached out for the latch on the red-lit chest, but froze when Freya and Alison spoke at the same time:
“Have you come across anyone else since you got here?” Freya asked, as Alison said, outrage rising in her voice, “What do you mean, ‘The portal won’t be going anywhere’? Are you saying we aren’t looking for the portal?”
“No, have you?” Max asked Freya, ignoring Alison.
She shook her head. “Not really. I haven’t seen anyone except you, my family, and that one old guy.”
“Max—what’s more important than us finding the portal home? You don’t even know this Enchanter person!” Alison shouted.
Max motioned for Freya to keep talking. “What old guy?”
“He was in the same canyon as you two,” Freya said, adding something to the brewing stand. “He was carving a symbol in the canyon wall when blazes attacked him. I got him out of there and tried to give him a place to stay and some food, but he turned me down, saying he didn’t deserve it, or something.” She frowned. “He was weird. Kind of sad. I asked what kind of person didn’t deserve help in the Nether and he didn’t answer. He accepted food and stayed here for a night to take care of his injuries, but then just ran away. I figured he must be a madman, or some kind of criminal.”
“Am I talking to myself?” Alison asked. “Hello?”
“What did the symbol look like?” Max demanded. “The one that he was carving? Did you erase it?”
Freya looked at him with irritation. “No, I didn’t erase it. But a lava spring did cover it. It was—”
Max interrupted her, pulling the journal out of his pack. “Did it look like this?” he asked, holding it up to her: the Enchanter’s symbol burned into the cover.
Freya glanced up and then back at her brewing stand. “Yeah, that was it. He was really upset about some—”
Max dropped the book with a resounding thud. Bunny Biter looked up from where she had been gnawing on a skeleton leg bone and made a small whine deep in her throat. “When was this? Where did he go?” he demanded.
“A few weeks ago, I guess,” Freya said, looking up and frowning at him. “It’s hard to judge time here, you know. And I have no idea where he went.”
Alison stared at him. “What is wrong with you? Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. Nothing is okay,” he said, running his hands through his hair in agitation. He’d been so close. And he hadn’t even thought to ask if the Enchanter had been there the moment they’d met Freya. They’d let themselves get distracted, and now there was no clue where he was.
Max scrubbed his face with his hands. He stood abruptly and left the room, heading back up to the Hub.
Only when he reached the top of the stairs did he realize that he had no idea where his sword, Bone Bane, was.
* * *
—
“What was all that about?” Freya asked, turning to Alison, whose head had disappeared back into the metals chest.
“He’s been single-minded in his quest to find this Enchanter person ever since he found that journal. I don’t know why, really, since the journal is terrible. The guy was a really bad enchanter and alchemist. Now Max wants to find him more than he wants to get home. I don’t get it.”
“It sounds like he’s taking this personally,” Freya said. “Did he know this Enchanter guy or something?”
“No, he’s never even said if he knows the name…” Alison looked up, covering her mouth with her hand. “Oh. Oh.” She chewed on her lip a moment. “Did the old guy who came here give you his name?”
“Nicholas,” Freya said.
Alison turned and went running after Max.
LIES AND SOUP
“Is that architect coming over tonight?” The cross voice came out of the attic. Grandma Dia was spinning wool in her small bedroom, which she liked to do in the afternoon when the light was “just right.”
“All the architects are coming over, Grandma,” Alison said. She liked teasing her grandma, knowing exactly whom she was talking about. Max’s eccentric Uncle Nicholas and her grandparents knew each other from long ago, but didn’t seem to have been friends. Their time together had apparently been filled with a lot of arguing—but they never talked about the details.
“I’m not coming down if he’s coming over!”
“You’ll come down, Grandma. Dad is cooking mutton. There will be pie.”
There was silence. “Pumpkin?”
“Pumpkin,” Alison confirmed.
“All right, then,” she said, like she always did.
Later that night, Alison broached the topic yet again. “When did you two meet? It had to be way before Dad was born,” she said, as her grandma was finishing off her second piece of pie.
“It is impolite to ask a lady about her past,” Grandma said primly.
“You and your ‘lady’ stuff,” Uncle Nicholas said. He focused on the kids, a wicked grin on his face. He had long, wild white hair, and his hands were callused from years of building. He had kind blue eyes, and Alison had always liked him. “Ask her anything she doesn’t want to answer and she’ll say it’s impolite to ask a lady that. It never fails.”
Grandma Dia looked like she was about to hit him. “That is untrue. And it’s impolite to spread rumors about a lady.” Then she turned redder as the rest of them laughed. She dabbed her face with a napkin. “Your Uncle and I,” she said, speaking directly to Max as if Nicholas weren’t there, “went to school together. We had some of the same friends. He introduced me to your grandpa.” She focused on Alison with this last point. “Which I admit I appreciated. But he’s never been my favorite person.”
“We have a pact,” Nicholas said, winking. “There are secrets no one can ever know.”
“What did I say about spreading rumors?” Grandma said. “Do not put ideas in the children’s heads.”
“I could tell them the truth,” he teased. “Then they wouldn’t have to wonder.”
“You promised,” she said sternly. She got up stiffly, turned her back to him, and said a polite goodbye to the rest of Max’s family. She took her cane and gave a pointed look at Uncle
Nicholas, then limped heavily out of the room. They heard her slow, plodding footsteps climb the attic stairs.
“Your grandma holds a grudge like you wouldn’t believe,” Nicholas said, watching her go. He smiled as he said it.
Max and Alison speculated, of course. Had they once been in love? Did he leave her at the altar? Were they secretly related? They tried to figure out what kind of cousins they would be if Max’s uncle and Alison’s grandmother had gotten married, but it was too confusing.
“Doesn’t have to be romance,” Max said thoughtfully. “Maybe there was a cheating scandal at school and she covered up for him. Or she tore his blueprints and then he retaliated and shaved all her sheep.”
“We’ll probably never know. But I am sure that they were once best friends,” Alison said. She’d seen the same amusement on Max’s face when he infuriated her just for fun.
* * *
—
Alison shook her head to clear it of the memory as she approached Max. He sat on the bridge in the Hub, morosely swinging his dangling feet over the lava. Alison dampened her impatience and went to sit beside him. Idly she wondered if their shoes would fall off and burn away into the lava below, but that was possibly the least of their problems.
“When did he disappear?” she asked.
“Couple of weeks before your tree blew up,” he said miserably.
“Couple of weeks,” she said thoughtfully. “You mean around the time you almost drowned?”
He winced. “Yeah.”
“I can’t believe how you knew all along who we were looking for and you didn’t tell me. And why isn’t the rest of your family here, if he’s missing? Why is this your job to do?”
He sighed and hung his head.
“You were right, you know: he’s a terrible enchanter. It was his hobby, though. He loved it more than anything.”
