by Cate Tiernan
“Are you going to one of the workrooms?” I’m known for my scintillating conversation. Not really. But you knew that.
He raked one hand through his hair, making it stand up a bit. I tried not to think about his hair brushing my chin as he moved down… I gave a little cough, hoping my face wasn’t red. Since it felt like I was standing next to a fire, that hope was slim.
“I guess I’ll go to where you aren’t,” he said finally.
He wasn’t trying to be mean, I was pretty sure. He was being straight-up, and I shouldn’t blame him for feeling that way.
But of course I did blame him. In an ideal world, I should get to say or do anything I want, and everyone else around me should understand it and agree with it and there would be no repercussions. I’d had 450 years of being disappointed on that score, and grimly I realized that I probably had another century, at least, of continuing to be disappointed.
“Well, okay then,” I said, wishing I had a snappier comeback. I raised my chin. “I think I’ll go to the barn!” Ha! His own domain!
Golden eyes narrowed and his lips flattened, but when he spoke his voice was even. “Okay. Then I’ll go to a workroom.”
I kept my chin up and my expression cool. “Maybe we could have a sword lesson later.”
Slowly he shook his head. “I just don’t think… I can today.” He looked so pained that it was clear he wasn’t just trying to thwart me. It looked like being around me at all was hard on him, and getting harder.
I mean, so many people feel that way about me, but for other reasons.
Not feeling victorious at all, I headed out into the spring sunshine and went to the barn.
Here’s something that will crack you up: I decided once again to meditate. I hoped this time I wouldn’t have Ottavio’s beady eyes staring at me as I did. But where could I go?
Six horses in a ten-horse barn meant four empty stalls. The devil-chicken was in one—every day we peeked over to see if her hell-spawn had hatched yet, but so far nothing. River was starting to think that the eggs had died when the other chickens had.
Molly, Dúfa, Henrik, and Jasper the corgi had staked out another stall and were asleep on the hay-covered floor. One stall held the barn tools, like pitchforks, wheelbarrows, and wide push brooms.
Which left one stall free. I didn’t want to go up to the hayloft; besides all the emotional short-outs my brain had even thinking about it, part of me was afraid that meditation could still turn out to be like a bad drug trip. I didn’t want to be twelve feet off the ground if I became convinced I could fly.
Lit candle + hay-filled barn = fire hazard, so I’d brought a hunk of amethyst to focus on. My mother’s—my amulet was warm under my sweater. Inside the stall, I pulled the sliding door mostly closed, then sat down in a corner where I would be out of sight of any casual passerby. I bunched up a small mound of hay, glad that my butt wouldn’t be on a freezing floor for once. I sat down, wiggled to get comfortable, and set the amethyst on the ground in a patch of sunlight. It glowed with a sparkling, inner purple light. I kept my eyes locked on it, reminding myself over and over again to pay attention, to not get distracted by the dusty air, the prickly hay under my legs. I breathed in and out slowly, batting stray thoughts from my head like flies. At one point a barn cat came in and sniffed me, actually standing on one of my legs and getting so close to my face that its whiskers almost made me sneeze. But I breathed in and out, and soon the cat wandered off.
Minutes passed, and the more I stared owl-eyed at the chunk of amethyst, the more it began to seem like I was looking at a photograph of the cosmos—a vast, deeply purple plain pricked with twinkling lights that had existed millions of years ago.
Show me what I need to see, I thought. In the skyscape, I myself was an infinitesimally small mote. My unnaturally extended life on this earth meant I was a star that twinkled for a hundredth of a second instead of a thousandth of a second, like other people.
And there it was: Sirius, the Dog Star. The brightest star in the sky, the main star of Canis Major. It was interesting but unexplainable why the eight major houses of immortals in the world were placed as closely as possible in the same formation as the stars in Canis Major.
I was lost in the sky, floating among the pointy lights, and yet dimly aware of myself sitting there, my legs crossed, every muscle relaxed. As I looked at the cold, distant stars, it seemed the sky slowly changed. Now I was looking down on the world from a great distance. A chill wind blew my hair about my face. I was floating, but moving closer to Earth with every second. The star constellation became a rounded, 3-D model on Earth’s surface, with the world spinning to show the placement of the eight houses.
What did that mean?
I was plummeting to the ground but felt no fear, only a kind of wondering curiosity. Below me the world turned on its axis so that now North America was below me, then Europe, then Russia. The eight houses had become rivers, each one branching out. Not actual rivers with water and currents, but lines, with more dark lines spiking out from them in all directions. Some lines ended abruptly; others forked. Some had been forked but came back together. Some lines became a lighter blue, and some doubled back on themselves to meet up with their star-center.
The lines were now a fine web covering the land surface of the world. It looked like a coral reef, dense and complex in some places, sparse in others. Deeply colored sometimes but with splotches bleached white in irregular clumps. The web was dotted with glowing, twinkling lights, making it look alive and vibrant, pulsing with energy.
I was over Iceland, seeing the ragged edges, the deep inlets where the frigid sea had bitten into the brittle land. It still amazed me how relatively accurate early mapmakers had been, measuring distances from mountaintop to mountaintop, putting spits of land into perspective.
And there was our land, my father’s kingdom: the narrow bay, the larger inlet, the patch of ground between sea and mountain that had been my entire world for my first ten years. Was I going to drop down, right onto the scorched and deadened ground where my father’s hrókur had been destroyed?
No. The land below me was flattening, paling. I no longer saw ocean and mountains; I no longer saw the Dog Star and its rivers of long lives. It was a… drawing, on a table, in the library here at River’s Edge. A drawing on old, old parchment, fragile and darkened with age. It showed a tree whose gnarled black roots seemed to clench the ground they were in. The tree’s trunk was covered with deeply carven bark, shaded from peach to dark brown and looking almost exactly like a landscape itself.
The branches were twisted and few. Many had been lopped off—some quite short, others longer. The tree had been so severely pruned that it looked deformed—unbalanced and leggy.
Oh, and there I was. On one side of the tree, a single branch hung dejectedly alone, its end sprouted like a broccoli stalk. Names began to bleed through from the underside of the parchment, and I saw my name, Lilja, etched beneath one curling vine. My vine had six leaves growing from it, though one leaf had fallen, and a line joining mine with a name I couldn’t read.
To either side of my vine appeared the names of my brothers and sisters; these had been bluntly snipped. To the left were my mother’s name, Valdis, and my father’s name, Úlfur, and to the left of those were other branches of different lengths. One or two had been hewn short, but there was a great waterstain blurring the image, melting ink into clamshell hems and obscuring the whole top right quarter. The water spread rapidly, soaking the parchment, blending bark and root and branch into one big, gray swirl. I tried to snatch it up out of the water, but my hands grasped nothing—
—and that was the movement that brought me quickly out of my meditation. I sat on itchy hay in a barn stall and was breathing heavily, my eyes wide. What had I seen? What had all that meant? I needed to go lie down and think about all this before I forgot.
My heart was pounding; I have to get up, I thought. But as I was trying to coordinate my muscles into synchronized movement
, Dúfa pushed her way through the gap of the sliding door and dropped a dead rat at my feet.
With a startled gasp I made sure it really wasn’t moving, then stared at the puppy. She sat in front of me panting cheerfully, looking incredibly pleased with herself.
“Dúfa?”
She turned at Reyn’s voice and gave a small yip. When Reyn pushed open the stall door, he saw me sitting on some hay in the corner with a dead rat in front of me.
There is no etiquette school in the world that could prepare one to have just the right words at a time like this.
Reyn scanned the stall in a split second as though to get more context clues to help him figure out what the hell was going on. Finally he looked at me.
“Nice rat.”
“Dúfa just dropped it in front of me,” I said, my voice sounding odd to my ears.
Hearing her name, she bent down and picked up the rat again, shaking it fiercely as though to rekill it.
“Ew,” I said, and finally managed to get to my feet. If she let go of it and it sailed into my legs, I was pretty sure I would jump and scream like a little girl. “Maybe—take it away from her?”
Reyn shook his head. “No—it’s her kill. She’ll probably eat it.”
“Ah.” Yuck. But okay, full disclosure—I myself have eaten rats. Present me with enough of a famine, have me living on peeled bark and grass, and I would eat rats again and be glad of it. But would I play with it first? No.
“You okay? Why are you in here?”
I picked up the amethyst, careful to stay out of shook-rat range. “I was meditating.”
He showed no surprise. “Oh. It’s dinnertime.”
“Already? It’s still light out.”
Nodding, Reyn stood aside so I could leave the stall. “Well, spring,” he said.
Yes, I thought. Spring, blessed spring after a winter a hundred years long.
We walked back to the house.
CHAPTER 26
After dinner I stood at the sink, automatically swishing a soapy sponge over the plates, stacking them to be rinsed. My mind was still full of everything I’d seen during my meditation. I hadn’t gotten anything anywhere about who among us might possibly be working against us, but maybe it had been there and I just hadn’t figured it out yet. Or maybe there was just no way to tell.
At dinner Asher, Solis, and Ottavio had discussed ways to make this place physically safer—planning escape routes in case of fire, setting whatever spells they could think of to ward off whatever they could imagine. Daisuke, Joshua, and Reyn had asked if we should work on battle skills, fighting techniques, and determine who might be the front line and who would be the water boy and gun loader in the back. Not exactly—but kind of like that.
I had been the one to suggest that we all pack up and head to some beach somewhere, soak up some sun, have drinks with umbrellas in them. Just avoid this whole shebang.
Anyway. Here I was on kitchen duty. I mean, if we were really in imminent danger, would we still have to do dishes? No, right? Shouldn’t I be stockpiling toad wort or bloodstones or something? Still, the quiet rhythm of washing dishes was kind of soothing. My mind was running through a smorgasbord of thoughts, but my hands were doing something useful.
Swish, wipe, stack. When I’d first come here, there had been only thirteen of us. After all the additions and subtractions, we were now fourteen. Fourteen plates.
“Hello?”
Startled, I looked up to see Amy smiling at me.
“Huh?”
“You must be deep in thought,” she said. “I asked if you wanted me to take over, since you’ve already done most of them.” She pointed at the sink.
My immediate reaction was, God, yes! Then I realized that it had been peaceful, standing here swishing, and that it seemed to help me think. Like having something to do freed up my brain power, such as it is.
“Oh, thanks,” I said, stacking another plate. “But I guess I’ll just finish up. Maybe you could start putting stuff away?” I nodded at the clean and dry serving bowls from dinner.
“You betcha,” said Amy, and picked up a heavy, cast-iron casserole.
She was still dogging Ottavio, forcing him to speak to her whenever she could. From being completely oblivious, he’d moved into irritation, then prickly caution, and nowadays he seemed mostly on guard but not angry. This is what we do here instead of watch TV.
My hands in their yellow rubber gloves felt the heat of the water; I could smell the water itself, its traces of minerals coming from our well, and the lavender scent of the dishwashing soap. The kitchen window, newly installed and double-paned, didn’t radiate cold the way the old one had. It was black and chilly outside.
I was busily scrubbing an enameled pot when it hit me: Today I had meditated on purpose by myself for the second time, and now I had chosen to finish washing dishes instead of escaping at the first chance. My hands stilled; the thought was so shocking that I had to approach it a little at a time. When I’d first come here, I’d hated everything River made me (and everyone else) do. The plan was always just to do it till she would relax and let me weasel out of it, maybe a couple of weeks. She’d told me the value of it, experiencing every moment, paying attention to whatever you were doing. Though I’d nodded to humor her, I’d known it was a bunch of touchy-feely crap that I would dispense with as soon as possible.
But here I was. I had drunk the Kool-Aid. She’d gotten to me after all.
Huh. This realization was rocking my world. It might seem small to the innocent outsider, but to me this was a tidal wave of change that I’d never, ever thought would be possible. Or desirable. Or tolerable.
Suddenly I felt like I were back on that Norwegian trade boat, but without the nausea and the herring. Just—at sea, leaving behind everything I had known, facing an unwritten future that might be wonderful, a whole new life, or might be a hard, painful, horrible disappointment.
As awful as I had been when I got here, as deeply necessary as I knew change was, still, now that real, bedrock change was here, it was shocking and scary. I knew the awful Nastasya—knew how to be her. This was a Nastasya that I didn’t recognize. If this was good, part of being healthy, then it was positive. But I didn’t know how to be this person. I didn’t know how to be good every day, all day long. I didn’t think I even wanted to try.
“Nastasya, what’s wrong?” Daisuke leaned over and put some glasses gently in the sink. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Uh…” I was freaking out, full of terrifying self-knowledge, and it was taking every sinew in my body to not:
1. Run away.
2. Run away.
3. Or run away.
Daisuke’s question solidified into concern. I was frozen at the sink, hands still in the suds, feet cemented to the ground. My eyes were wide and panicked, but I couldn’t put two words together. A man of action, Daisuke took my hands, ditched the gloves, and then propelled me forcibly out of the kitchen. Amy and Jess watched with surprise, but no one interfered.
My skin was cold, and I was breathing fast and shallowly, as if I were about to faint. Out in the hall, he called for River, and she came out of the front parlor immediately. Not even asking what was wrong or what had happened, she took one look at my face, then got on my other side and together she and Daisuke steered me upstairs and into my room. It was ridiculous; I felt horribly conspicuous and self-conscious, and yet everything inside me was locked up, jammed, and I couldn’t do a damn thing.
Quietly Daisuke backed out and closed the door behind him. River pushed on my shoulders till I sat heavily on my bed. Shaking, I leaned sideways as River pressed me down onto the mattress and pulled my covers up over me. She turned my radiator up; the comforting hiss of steam told me my room would soon be a cozy haven. Then she sat on my bed, put one hand on the lump of me under the covers, and she waited.
Staying here, being in my own bed, my mind screaming, I realized that panic (I mean panic without an outside physical cause,
like a marauder) doesn’t last as long as I thought it did. My panic, which I assumed would consume my life and thoughts for the foreseeable future, lasted about half an hour. I’d never sat with it long enough to know that.
Gradually I quit shaking, the room’s warmth and River’s presence getting through to my animal brain. As I calmed down, my synapses started firing more in unison, and soon actual words were scrolling through my consciousness.
Finally I looked at River. She looked back at me.
“Two things,” I said, with a dry throat. She went to my little sink and got me a glass of water. I drank it, feeling like a lettuce leaf being revived.
“First.” I took her through the whole meditation: purple sparkly, falling to Earth, landscape, tree, missing names, etc.
“I don’t see how all that could be any clearer,” she said, when I was finished. “That is, I don’t know why you saw the eight houses, but it’s significant, and I’m going to think about it. The tree is obvious, especially your family tree with your parents and siblings cut off too soon.”
“What were the leaves on my vine? Am I supposed to start six more houses? Was the one fallen leaf my father’s house? Or was it, like, what I should have been doing with my power but failed at?”
Her face grew gentle. “No, my dear. The one fallen leaf was your son, who died.”
The usual stone arrowhead of sadness wedged itself in my heart.
“No,” I said after a minute. “I don’t think that’s it. Remember the five other leaves?”
River just looked at me.
“No,” I said again. “Because there were five of them, remember? So it’s not children. Obviously.”
River bit her lip and looked at the wall.
“River, there were five of them,” I said stubbornly. “I’m not ever going to have any more children. Ever.”
“Well, it was your vision, not mine,” she said. “It’s a shame so much of it was ruined by water. It’s like you either didn’t know or didn’t want to know what the rest of the tree looked like.”
