Immortal Beloved

by Cate Tiernan

  “Um, I guess I’m just really untrained,” I said slowly, wondering if this was actually a good idea. “I’ve never really learned how to do all this stuff.” Had avoided learning like the plague, actually. “You know, so I usually feel—sick. Like I can’t breathe, like my head will explode or my heart will burst.” I was self-conscious, as if I was admitting a weakness. “Afterward I feel hungover. I mean, circles are cool, and that rush of power—but it just makes me feel sick, so I hardly ever do them.”

  River was silent. She was so close I could see her looking at me in the darkness.

  “Um, at least you’ll be here during this circle,” I said with lame politeness. “You know, I’m willing to try it. If you’re here.” I half expected her to send me back to the house to wash dishes or something.

  Asher and Solis had realized River wasn’t with them, and they came up almost silently and joined us.

  “What’s going on?” Asher asked, putting his arm around River’s waist.

  “Nastasya often feels sick when she’s in a circle,” River said quietly. “And she has visions. Asher, tonight you lead the circle, please. I want Nastasya to stand between Solis and me.”

  And there was that zoo exhibit feeling again. I felt stupid for calling attention to myself. I was already enough of a freak. I was hoping that River could fix my reactions for me, teach me what to do so I wouldn’t feel like death afterward. Even with my background, I couldn’t believe I was the only one who felt this way.

  We entered the clearing, which was about a hundred feet across, surrounded by tall trees. Dried grass flattened easily as we walked across it and joined the others.

  We were all participating, so there were thirteen of us, which I knew was a “lucky” number for a circle, though they could really be any size—there had been only nine of us at that sucky circle in Boston. Solis knelt in the middle of the circle and made a small stack of dried wood. He murmured a few words, made a gesture, and change-o presto, a bright, lively flame appeared and began to spread eagerly across the kindling wood. Now, there’s a useful spell, I thought. I’d love to know how to do that one—conjure fire out of the air.

  “We come together this night to celebrate the appearance of the new moon,” River said clearly. “Today separates this month from the last, giving us the opportunity to start anew. Today the moon goddess rests, and yet her magick is still around us.”

  Superstitious peasants in the old days had sometimes talked about the moon goddess, but I didn’t know much about her. The others looked comfortable and expectant: They’d done this before.

  As River had requested, I stood between her and Solis. I did feel protected, safer—and, to my surprise, I actually felt a tiny bit of anticipation. Part of the whole “will never learn” phenomenon, I guessed. Across from me, I could make out Anne’s careful gaze. I was bemused by how they were treating me, and I had a moment’s anxiety, wondering if I was going to levitate or something. That would be new and different.

  “Hold out your hands,” said River, “with both thumbs pointing to the left.”

  My left hand was palm-up, and my right hand was palm-down. Then I saw—when we came together, everyone’s hands fitted together perfectly, left on right, right on left. Cool.

  “You’ve done circles before, of course,” River said to me. “But they’re different, from group to group. Just follow along, and you’ll be fine.”

  The circle moved to the right around the fire. People first faced the fire; then on the next step, they turned so their left side was toward the fire. Then again face-first, then we all turned so our right side was fireward. It was left, forward, right, forward, left, forward, and so on. A couple of thoughts came to me, and I let them, even though I was supposed to be busy clearing my mind and focusing on the fire, getting ready to feel magick take me over, hallelujah!

  One thought was that no one had been gladder than I when court dances had finally fallen out of favor. I’m the biggest klutz in the world, with no sense of rhythm, zero ability to keep time, and a complete lack of understanding about where my personal space leaves off and the next person’s begins. And oh, my God, the number of humiliating dances I’d endured, fumbling all those gazillion precise steps. I’d been “the pretty one who dances like a bear.” In several different countries.

  But sandwiched between River and Solis, carried along in the circle, I wasn’t doing too badly. The fire illuminated each person’s face, making all of us look Halloween-y, and the contrast of the warmth of the fire and the cool night breeze around us made me feel like—like there were two of me, one warm, one cold. One light, one dark.

  As soon as I had that thought, I shied away from it and instead tried to concentrate on what was happening. People were singing now, but I’d never heard this song. It wasn’t at all like the singing Kim had done in Boston, which I’d been able to join. This had a different structure.

  As I listened, I realized that each person actually seemed to be singing something unique. All the voices and melodies blended together, but none of them were the same. Some sounded like words—I thought I heard a bunch of different languages—but some were just sounds, long drawn-out syllables, like they were singing in humpback whale.

  It was pretty, though, and more important, I began to feel its power.

  No one was paying attention to me—each person was lost in his or her own reverie, focus, sound, and movement. Very quietly I began to hum along.

  It felt okay, this humming along, so I increased it. In the few circles I’d been to, even Kim’s, the songs that called on power were, well, demanding. Harsh. Orders. Sometimes seductions.

  This felt like—a gift, not to get all Hallmark-y here. It felt like an offering to the sky, the woods, the new moon, each other. Now I could follow it; I could feel it welling up inside me. I took the leap from humming to opening my mouth and joining in the humpback song, just making sounds that blended with the others’ and didn’t stick out. Several of the voices sounded extra appealing, and I aligned my voice with those, following along without tripping anyone else up.

  And oh, yes, there, a few minutes later, I felt the rush, the flow of power filling me up, going through me like warm whiskey, the burst of happiness, the overwhelming feeling of power and joy and excitement. I was happy to give everything I had to whatever we were doing, happy to be a conduit. I would have been happy no matter what our purpose was, whether it was to make corn grow faster, hold off snow, or topple a nation. Anything was fine, everything was possible, and I’d never felt so incredibly hap—

  With my next breath, I was inside a small cottage. The walls were made of smoke-blackened boards; the roof beams were carved and painted. Outside I heard screaming, the thundering of horses’ hooves, men shouting. Oh, God, oh, God, I thought wildly. My heart was pounding out of my chest; my breath was caught in my throat. I’d done all I could—there was no preparing for something like this. With a shaking hand, I pinched out the single candle—perhaps the cottage would look empty—and crawled behind the straw-tick bed.

  The door crashed open. The screams of pain and panic grew louder. I could hear the horses as they squelched through the icy mud outside. Harsh voices. A man strode through the door, stood inside the cottage, looked around. His long gold hair was caught back in braids and spattered with blood, and drying blood arced across his chain mail. He headed for the hearth with its hanging pot, but the pot was empty, and he threw it across the room with a roar. The pot that I could barely lift myself. Our tankards were empty, and there was only a crust of old bread. In a fury, the marauder kicked over the small table and smashed a chair against the chimney, shattering it.

  We’d heard of them, of course, the raiders from the north—every village had horror stories. But no one thought they’d cross the steppes in winter; it would be a death march. We’d been wrong.

  The man swung to leave, but something stopped him, a small sound. He spun on his heel, hard eyes raking the darkened room. The chaos outside seemed to
dim as I held my breath.

  He found me in the next second and hauled me up by one arm. He could kill me if he lopped off my head and sent it flying—but he could also come up with many situations that would have me begging for death, praying for death, knowing my prayers were falling on a deaf God’s ears.

  He roared again, like an animal, and threw me across the bed. He was easily twice my size, covered with the stench of war—blood, sweat, other men’s fear—and I covered my face with my hands as he snarled and yanked up my skirt, my tattered underskirt. Just get me through this, get me through this, I repeated over and over in my mind.

  He grabbed the front of his pants, and then a small sound again drew his attention. Pinning me down with one hand, he skimmed the room again. We both heard it: a baby’s cry. I grabbed his arm as he headed for the noise, trying to remember any barbarian words I’d ever heard. Leaping after him, I grabbed his arm again, and he shook me off as if I were an autumn leaf.

  With his mud- and blood-caked boot, he kicked aside the old washtub I’d leaned in the corner. And found my son.

  He looked from me to my son, barely three months old, and his eyes narrowed. I broke down, knelt at his feet, ready to promise anything, offer anything, and then a new crashing sound on the door made us both snap our heads around.

  Another barbarian, barely recognizable as human, shouted something at my attacker, then shouted again, more urgently, as the raider hesitated.

  After endless moments that seemed frozen in time, my attacker hissed curses, knocked me to the ground, and strode out, smashing our clay ale pot on the way.

  I crawled over to my son and gathered him up, huddling there in the deepening darkness, as the raiding army marched by. I closed my eyes and sang lullabies, so quietly, and then—

  “Nastasya? Nastasya?”

  I blinked.

  It was dark, and I was on the floor of my—no, I was on the ground. On the damp, leafy ground, blinking up at River, Solis, Anne, and some others who were leaning over me in concern. I blinked and swallowed several times, sniffing the air for the rancid smells of battle and death, of burning homes and flesh and slaughtered cattle, and—

  “Nastasya?” River looked very worried.

  The air smelled fine. Woodsy. Clean.

  The circle came rushing back to me, my feelings of joy, the growing power, and then all hell had broken loose and I’d been thrown back four centuries.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I heard Nell ask. Someone said, “Shh,” and Nell said from a distance, “Everything is such a production with her.”

  “Do you know where you are?” Solis asked.

  I nodded and tried to sit up.

  “No, stay down,” said River. “Touch as much of your body as you can to the ground.”

  I shook my head. “Gonna hurl.” With that, I lurched to my hands and knees, then stumbled toward some shrubs unlit by the dwindling fire. And I threw my guts up, surprised that I wasn’t barfing up the watery porridge and the last of the season’s turnips from my memory.

  River came over and put her arm around my shoulders, brushing my hair off my forehead, murmuring words. With cool fingers she traced some symbols on my forehead, on my back, on my arm, and slowly I quit heaving.

  I stooped there, hands on knees, covered with clammy sweat, and panted, feeling hollowed-out inside.

  “Come, let’s go back to the house,” said River, helping me stand upright. “I’ll make you some tea, and you can tell me about it.”

  I nodded weakly, relieved to see that everyone except the other teachers had already gone. Anne doused the fire, making sure every ember was dead, and we crunched through the leaves toward the warm, lit, welcoming house that looked like a beacon of sanity and strength.

  I nodded again, but I knew I wouldn’t tell River or anyone else about what I’d seen. It hadn’t been a vision—it had been a memory. My son’s face—my baby. He hadn’t been immortal, and the son I would have done anything for that night had been dead a mere three years later, of influenza. Every time I remembered his round little face, it was a wrenching blow all over again. But that wasn’t all. For the first time in centuries, I’d allowed myself to see and recall what my attacker had looked like.

  It had been Reyn.

  CHAPTER 17

  I ended up going to bed that night, lying awake for a long time, shivering under my blankets. I couldn’t stop thinking about Reyn, and the northern raider, and the fact that my door had no lock on it. I wanted to feel my amulet again, to hold it, but somehow I didn’t dare take it from its hiding place.

  River tried to question me, gently, but I just wasn’t going to discuss it. My excuses were so lame and transparent that, in the end, she’d left me alone. I mean, logically, it couldn’t have really been Reyn, right? It looked like him, and it would explain his ephemeral familiarity, but it totally contradicted my attraction to him. And he wasn’t old enough.

  I gulped down my herb tea, and River did a small spell to help me sleep, tracing runes on my forehead with her cool fingers. I fell back on my bed, already half asleep, my fingers nervously pressed against my scarf.

  The next morning my eyes flew open a minute before my alarm went off. I did a quick scan of my room, as if I expected to see the northern raider there, from four hundred years ago and four thousand miles away.

  I’d suppressed all this stuff for so long. Now it was all escaping through the crack in my shell, like lava. Ugh. I crawled out of bed, noticing that dawn was coming later every day. It was cold in my room—the radiator was just starting to hiss and pop. I threw on jeans, a camisole, a T-shirt, and a flannel shirt over that, put on my sturdy shoes, and headed downstairs warily, afraid that if I saw Reyn I would shriek like a little girl.

  “Morning, Nas,” said Lorenz as I pushed through the kitchen door. He threw his arms open wide, holding a spatula in one hand. “Embrace the day! Embrace another beautiful dawn!” He burst into a bit of opera—something from La Bohème—and I smiled at him. Brynne, wearing an apron, laughed and snapped a dish towel at him. This was my new normal, and I had to say, it kicked my old normal’s ass.

  My name was on the board for egg-gathering, so I took the basket from its hook by the back door and crunched across the frozen grass to the henhouse, looking around me the whole time, as if a thundering horde was going to come up the driveway at any moment. First I opened the small hinged door, and squawking birds started tumbling out. Then I opened the taller, person-sized door and ducked inside.

  The only good thing about gathering eggs at dawn was that it was warmish inside the chicken coop, unlike the rest of the world, which was covered with spiky, lacy frost.

  Reyn was only 267 years old, Nell had said. He hadn’t contradicted her. My memory had been from back in—I don’t know—the late fifteen hundreds. Not quite 1600. It had been in Noregr—Norway. Back then it had been the Denmark-Norway kingdom. I used to know those dialects, but they were lost now.

  Obviously, if Reyn hadn’t even been born then, he couldn’t be the marauder from my memory. But I would swear that the raider had looked exactly, exactly, like the current Reyn. Except filthy, long-haired, covered with blood and gore, and wearing animal skins and rustic armor. Other than that, an identical twin.

  “Here, chickie, chickie,” I murmured, easing my hand under one hen. This one had never pecked me, though I was sure she was pissed that we kept taking her eggs.

  “You get lost?”

  Whirling, I shrieked and dropped an egg. Reyn filled the low doorway, the dim morning light making him a dead ringer for the raider’s silhouette on the threshold of my cottage. He peered in at me while every nerve in my body lit up with adrenaline.

  “Get out!” I hissed furiously. “Get out of here!” I was no longer a helpless villager—this was the twenty-first century, and I would run him down with my car or stab him with a kitchen knife if he threatened me again. Which would… definitely slow down an immortal.

  “What the hell is the matter with
you?” Reyn said with a frown. “Brynne is asking for the eggs—she only has a few from yesterday.”

  I was breathing quickly, wild-eyed, turned from an unpredictable loser to a certifiably crazy person in mere moments.

  He cocked his head, looking at me. “Are you okay?” He sounded curious, as if interested to see what the weirdo would do next.

  I swallowed, hating feeling like this. “How old are you?”

  “Two hundred and sixty-seven,” he said evenly. “Why?”

  “Where are you from? Where did you grow up?” I was asking him questions I’d refused to answer myself. Irony, anyone? Irony?

  “India, mostly. My parents were Dutch missionaries there. Some of the first.”

  It was possible. Why would he lie? Same reason you lie, a little voice inside me said. I squashed it, as usual. Slowly, keeping one eye on him, I leaned down and picked up the egg, which had fallen onto a clump of straw and was unbroken. I put it in the basket and glanced around, counting chickens. I’d gotten all of them, I thought, except the mean chicken, and the hell with her.

  “Okay,” I said abruptly. “Here.” I held out the basket, wanting him to take it and get away from me.

  He gestured—he was holding two pails of milk. River kept several dairy cows, but thankfully I hadn’t been put on milking duty yet.

  Reyn stepped away from the doorway, and I took a deep breath and ducked out into the early morning after him. We walked up to the house in silence, me several feet behind him, the leaves wet underfoot but crackling with ice. Our breaths made little puffs of smoke.

  Reyn looked Viking-y—much more Cossack/Russian/Norse than, say, Dutch. The Netherlands are closer to England and Germany, after all. His eyes were slanted slightly, more almond-shaped, and his skin was pale but with tan undertones. Not milk and cream, like a lot of Dutch people. His height was Dutch-like, but then the Vikings were tall, too. He was, maybe, six-one? Four hundred years ago he would have seemed like a giant.