by Cate Tiernan
Very dimly I was aware, as Reyn was, of the horses shrieking in panic. I heard them break free and run off into the woods. Reyn wavered on his feet, about to faint. Suddenly there was a horrible splitting sound, as if God himself had struck an axe into stone. A sudden burning punch to Reyn’s chest knocked him breathless backward into the snow, and as he struggled to get up, a humming white tornado of flame roared up from Selke’s torch and gathered every man in, like a mother cradling children to her breast. By the time Reyn had blinked twice, everyone was… gone. The flame died and sputtered out. There was nothing except a perfect circle of scorched earth, fifteen feet wide. Months ago Reyn had told me what happened, but seeing it right in front of me through his eyes, feeling his shock and fear, was so much more horrible than I’d ever imagined.
Reyn struggled to his feet, his chest numb with a searing pain. In shock he looked down and saw a hole right through his thick leather breastplate, the one hard enough to deflect almost anything except a spear or a broadsword.
There’s a children’s game where one turns in a circle, looking for hidden clues, and Reyn felt like that now, dumbly staring at the untouched trees, the melted snow running over the scorched ground. I felt his disbelief as he looked but couldn’t find even lumps of melted chain mail. Not a trace of burned books. Not a splinter of rent crystal. No skin. No bones. No gold. As if none of it had existed.
Reyn sat back down in the snow, his mind reeling, ill with confusion and a burning agony he couldn’t escape. His chest felt as if someone had rammed a red-hot spear through it. It took minutes to unbuckle the leather straps at his shoulders with trembling fingers, but at last he eased the armor off, dropping it in the snow. Beneath it he wore a fur jerkin. There was a hole in it, tinged by blood. Even though he was shaking with shock and cold, he took it off. Beneath it, his linen undershirt was soaked in blood, and through a hole in the cloth was a circle of raw, charred flesh that hurt more than anything he’d ever felt, hurt enough to make him feel sick and faint.
Reyn thought, I’m going to die here, tonight. He had no horse, no companions. He was numb and ill and close to passing out. Any minute now someone would come down the road, either from the next village to find out what the fire was, or one of my father’s terrified villeins, what few there were left, fleeing the site of devastation and horror.
All he had to do was lie down. The cold and snow would do the rest. He’d heard it was a peaceful, relatively painless death, freezing. You just got sleepy, you quit shaking, and then you drifted off. He’d seen enough of our kind die to believe that he, too, could die, and maybe that easily.
At that moment, that sounded like what Reyn should do. His father was gone. His brothers. His father’s men. Why should he be left alive?
Then he saw it.
Stuck to the inside of his leather armor was the gold ring his father had been so impressed by—the broken half of my mother’s amulet. It was what had burned through the leather, the fur, the linen, and his skin. With a jerking hand he dumped snow on it and waited a minute, then swept off the snow and picked it up. It was unmarred, but its heavy chain was missing.
I felt Reyn wonder what it was and if it had truly caused this tragedy. Why was it the only thing that had survived? It… and him.
Holding on to a smooth, black-barked tree, he slowly got to his knees, then stood. He put his jerkin back on. Scooping up a handful of snow, he packed it against his raw skin through the hole in the fur. The freezing snow increased the pain, and he saw stars, acidic bile rising in the back of his throat, but soon it would numb everything.
He put his armor back on and started walking. Within three steps his boot chinked against the gold chain from the amulet. One ring was twisted open. He put it and the amulet into the small leather pouch tied at his waist, not sure why he was keeping it except that it was all he had.
They’d left their boats moored on the southern shore—Ìsland was an island. Reyn didn’t know if he could sail the smallest boat alone. Probably not. But there was nothing else he could do.
The middle of my chest had started aching as if I had heartburn, and then I was floating back to the here and now. Reyn and I were separate people again, sitting on my bed. I blinked, disoriented, and quickly looked at Reyn. His face was solemn, the blades of his cheekbones drawn with vividly remembered anguish and pain.
As for me, I’d witnessed the deaths of my family all over again. Then, joined with Eileif, had gone through his personal horror as well.
Letting his breath out slowly, Reyn leaned back against the wall, his long legs stretched out. Dúfa had curled up in an angular lump at the end of my bed and was asleep, impervious to the shredded emotions in the air around her.
“How did you get off of Ìsland?” I asked.
He was silent for a minute, and I wondered if he’d refuse to answer me. Those aged golden eyes roamed my room, as if to reorient himself.
“I traded boats with a local.” His voice was raspy, and he cleared his throat. “I’m taller than my father, and blond. I took after my mother—he’d captured her in the west. Far west. My father—you saw—was shorter, darker, looked more Asian.”
I nodded. Yes, I’d seen.
“I told the local I was Norse and that my crew had mutinied. We traded boats, and I sailed his much smaller boat back to Noregr. Crossing the northern countries took three months. It was spring when I got home.”
The amulet was warm in my hand. How shocking it had been to see its power misused—its effects. I crossed my legs under me. How shocking to see—feel—Reyn so young, not jaded, not cynical, not damaged.
“You went home and you were alone, with no father,” I said. “What did people say?”
Again a long hesitation. “I was… a mess, still, after three months. That goddamn burn never healed, felt like acid eating a hole to my heart. My mother believed what happened, but she was… so uneducated. All she knew was how to wash clothes, make a bed.” It was said without disrespect: a simple acknowledgment.
“All she knew was that she was free, a widow. Some people thought I’d killed everyone myself.” A flush of anger and shame rose on his face. “Some felt strongly that I, as the youngest and most expendable son, should have died also, or never come back. It was… such a bad time. I was heartsick, shell-shocked, and in constant pain. I couldn’t sleep, could barely eat. But all around me, the hunters were making plans.”
Reyn and I had never, ever talked like this, so openly and without guile or defense. I sat very still, not wanting to break the spell. He spoke slowly with lots of pauses—was he translating the memory? He would have remembered it in his original language.
He went on: “Then, about a week after I got back, my uneducated mother came to me, angry. She said, ‘You are the chief of this clan, but you lie here like a woman, moaning? Don’t you see how the wolves circle around you?’ I stared at her dumbly. ‘Your father was awake when he was awake,’ she said. ‘And awake when he was asleep. An insect couldn’t cross this land without him knowing it. And now your cousins plot to kill you in front of your face, and you do nothing!’ ”
Reyn smiled wryly. “I think she hit me with something, her slipper. Whacked me in the head. So I got up and tried not to look sick. I stepped out of my tent and almost immediately saw what my mother had meant. My father had been chieftain for a long, long time—and my mother was right: He knew everything that went on. My whole life I’d been living like—not an heir, because I was the fourth son. I knew I’d never inherit, and I hadn’t paid attention to anything. But now I was a grown man and, unexpectedly, the heir. I strode around our camp, looking stern, and by the end of the day I knew that I had two choices: I either had to step up and become a real chief, with all that that implied, or I had to pack up, steal a horse, and get the hell out of there forever. If I did nothing, I would surely be killed, probably within a day or two.”
You know, I’d always thought that my life hadn’t been a picnic. I’ve been in some terrible situations
, and a couple of them had involved the handsome work of art sitting next to me. I’d been poor, starving, at the mercy of a man to live, more than once. And of course losing my family. Losing my first husband. Losing my unborn baby, and then later losing my only child, my son, my sweet little Bear. I’d felt—hardened by all this, lacquered over with a brittle shell that almost nothing could get through. I’d also felt that I deserved a good time, after going through all of that. My money gave me freedom, and I wanted freedom from pain, from feeling anything. But pain is like lava—it wants out.
Hearing about Reyn’s anguish made me realize that though I’d known parts of his story, it hadn’t felt real to me, certainly not as real as my past. Having lived through it, through his eyes, it now felt terribly real. Right now I was… truly empathizing with someone else.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Oh, I wanted to banish myself forever. I didn’t have it in me to be chief.” Reyn wasn’t looking at me—maybe he wanted to pretend he was talking to no one, sharing this with nobody. “As I understood what being a chief would entail, I—my heart sank. I’d never realized the constant guard my father had lived under, the constant manipulation and plotting he’d used. It was complicated and exhausting, and I’d never wanted to be chief anyway.
“But if I didn’t become chieftain, one of my cousins, or maybe someone else, would. And would they do a good job? My father had worked for hundreds of years toward amassing the amount of land and power he had. Would it all get broken up? Still, escaping was very appealing. But… what would my father think if I did that?” Reyn gave a short laugh.
“He would have been furious, disgusted. He probably would have killed me for being weak. I… couldn’t bear that thought.” His face was still, his eyes trained on a spot on the wall. I didn’t even breathe.
“The next day I walked up to my two cousins as they ate dinner with their families, and I slit their throats.” His hands moved in the air, miming grabbing someone’s hair from behind, and slicing a blade across a neck, left to right.
Oh God, how awful.
“Their blood sluiced through the air, and it was like writing the strength of my power, right there. And I took control of my clan, immortal and mortal alike. And I ruled with an iron hand, for a hundred years.”
I didn’t know what to say. I knew some of what that clan had done, to me, my neighbors, other villages. Anyone hearing my stories—including me—would feel that there was only one way to see it, one way to judge it.
But to even this, even this destruction and murder and ruthless control—there was another side. River had told me once that what has a front has a back. And the bigger the front, the bigger the back. I saw what she meant, finally.
The old Nastasya would have made a sardonic remark here, turned this story into a joke, because that would be so much better than feeling the anguish or admitting that bad things existed and affected us and hurt.
As the new, possibly improved, probably boring Nastasya, I had no idea what to say. Or maybe I did.
I put my hand on his knee and looked into the face that was so easy to lose myself in.
“I’m so sorry.”
CHAPTER 13
You might think that after our mind-meld, Reyn and I would be skipping around, holding hands, radiating rainbows of shared joy. Sadly, neither of us was normal enough for that. We settled back into a cautious truce, some sword practice interspersed with the occasional hot kissy-face—getting out of the farm truck, against a wall, in the barn, weeding the garden. Cold, dirty, wearing gardening gloves, my nose running? Apparently irresistible to the Viking wonder.
Valentine’s Day came and went, and Amy made a pretty heart-shaped cake, red velvet with poured ganache frosting. Ottavio ate two pieces while she watched him, her gaze sharp as a knife. Something was going on there, but I didn’t know what.
Once, in the twenties, a nice guy who was smitten with me had showed up with a lovely Valentine’s Day card and a heart-shaped box of chocolates, which were hard to come by back then. In my caring, sensitive way, I believe I laughed, ate a chocolate, and tossed the card over the back of the couch because Katy was in the middle of a hilarious story that I don’t even remember now, except that it had a duck in it. Later the guy was gone, and I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t missed him. I ate some more chocolate.
That pretty much excuses me from eligibility to ever receive a valentine from anyone ever again in my whole life, I think. So I didn’t even hold my breath about whether Reyn would surprise me with anything. And he didn’t. Which was fine. I still spent a lot of my waking hours picturing him with his shirt off.
To help take my mind off jumping him, I became busy-bee Nastasya: continuing to study spellcrafting with Asher and River and meditation with Anne. Daisuke was helping me get a tiny bit of a handle on herb magick, I actually had most of the star stuff under my belt, and Rachel was my homegirl for crystals and gems.
Ottavio, Daniel, and Joshua seemed to settle in for a nice, long family visit. How. Lovely.
Ottavio had decided his mission was to watch me like a research scientist, and I soon got used to him scouring my lesson plans, looking at my books. I started tucking postcards of the Kama Sutra into my texts, watching from a distance and snickering like a third grader at his tight jaw and looks of disapproval.
One day in late February, I staked out a spot in an unused classroom in the big barn and settled in to voluntarily meditate, lighting a candle and putting four crystals at the four compass points to help me concentrate. Unbelievably, Ottavio came and sat before me, coldly and silently daring me to protest.
I decided to meditate about being a woman, the power that we have to create life, the monthly cyclic event that ties us so primally to the earth, and took a fun-filled foray into a memory of how women have dealt with that monthly cyclic event through the ages. Reusable cloths that you have to wash and dry, anyone? Wads of dry moss?
He lasted five minutes.
His surveillance was irritating as hell, but I was determined not to let him get to me, not to run to River complaining about her meanie-mo brother. I sucked it up and went about my business.
As for Daniel, I saw that he was beginning to grate on even River’s nerves a bit. She and I were dusting in the front hall when he came out of River’s office, her carefully kept ledger in his hands.
“What on earth are you doing with that?” River asked.
Daniel squinted down at the book. “What’s this here?” he asked. “I can’t quite make it out.” River looked from him to the book, then said, “That was for a delivery of feed cake for the cows.”
Daniel frowned. “Why is it so much? Feed cake is surely cheaper than that, isn’t it?”
With an air of disbelief, River answered, “I order the organic feed from Peter Sorensen. It’s better.”
“Organic feed? For cows?”
River had practically smacked his hands away from the book, her face tight as only an older sister’s face could be.
Later that same afternoon I heard him ask Asher whether they had gotten three estimates for the broken windows, as he’d suggested, and whether it would be better to get a new, more efficient farm truck instead of repairing the one we had.
When I saw Asher more than an hour later, his face still looked pained.
And Joshua. At least this brother mostly kept to himself and didn’t talk much. He seemed to be there as an extra body in case of trouble, and besides giving me the occasional wary, suspicious eye, didn’t bug me much. I saw him around, repairing things, trimming tree branches, patching holes in the chicken-coop roof. Making himself useful. I wished Ottavio would also find a more worthy occupation than stalking me.
Fortunately, after about a week, River started putting them on cooking teams, barn chores, etc., so that was fun, seeing ol’ Ott shoveling horse poop in inappropriate Italian sportswear. I wondered where the fourth brother was, and what was taking him so long to come here and be disapproving of me, but no one me
ntioned him and, God knows, I wasn’t about to ask.
Regardless, I made progress, even successfully scrying to find where the devil-chicken had been hiding her eggs lately. (Rather brilliantly, in the small lean-to housing one of the water heaters.) Chicken and eggs were now ensconced in an empty stall in the barn.
In my “spare” time, I started work on my shops in town.
Hiring a bulldozer and turning them into a parking lot was, I admit, a temptation, once I realized how much work I’d gotten myself into. But that would look bad.
River suggested I try going to the local unemployment office, to see if I could find help. So on a Friday afternoon I pulled open the glass door and was confronted with men and women who all looked as if the rug had been pulled out from under them. And I guessed it had.
“Uh, hey,” I said, and a few heads turned. “Um, anyone here know carpentry? Construction? Plumbing?” I thought for a second. “Probably roofing? Floors? Electrical stuff? Anyone know their way around a paintbrush?”
No one understood why my “dad” was letting me have a whole project for myself and why in the world he would give me a fat budget, but when it came down to having a paycheck or not, they were happy to be hired by a crazy teenager who was offering decent wages.
Toward the end of February, I was having the construction process explained to me by Bill, a weather-beaten man probably in his mid-fifties who looked a lot older. He’d come with his own hard hat, which I thought was so cool.
“First you have to have a plan,” Bill said. “So you can tell people what they’ll need to do.”
“Plan, check,” I said. I guessed he was implying more of a plan than Fix this up.
“Then you take care of the roof, the foundation, the windows, and the outside walls.”
