Immortal Beloved

by Cate Tiernan

  I had stopped. I had stopped in time.

  I felt clammy and cold. Old Mac and Meriwether were still duking it out, two aisles over. I stood up, feeling shaky with nerves, and picked up a box of Tampax Pearls. Heading over to their voices, I strode up as if I’d been in Timbuktu and hadn’t heard the shouting.

  “Hey, does anyone know—” I began, then feigned surprise as two heads turned to look at me. Meriwether’s face was splotched, and she had tears running down her cheeks. Old Mac was so red that I wondered if he was having a heart attack. I guessed I’d find out if he suddenly keeled over.

  “Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt,” I went on with fake cheer. “But do either of you know”—I held up the box of Tampax, its effect on Old Mac being similar to the effect of a cross on a vampire—“does this come in a larger size?”

  Meriwether, whose head must have been spinning, pulled her wits a bit together. “Like, a seventy-eight pack?”

  “No,” I said, as Old Max started to back away, his eyes on the ground, muttering to himself. “Like, this is a junior size. Then there’s regular. Does it come in a jumbo, or super size? Like, for overnight, or… maybe… bigger people?”

  Meriwether could barely think straight, but she valiantly tried, which got me madder at her stupid-ass father. “I think it does,” she said faintly. “Have you looked in the back?”

  “Ah,” I said, seizing this brilliant suggestion. “I haven’t. I’ll go do that. Hey, it’s almost noon. I’m not hungry—you go eat lunch, and then I’ll go when you get back. Okay?”

  Meriwether bit her lip, then grabbed her coat and fled the store.

  Old Mac was back in the medicine area, slamming small boxes around, muttering. I’d bought Meriwether a half-hour reprieve. I wished I could just—fix her situation. Hers and Dray’s.

  I cared about them. I wanted them to feel better, to live better lives. And then it occurred to me—I cared about myself. I wanted me to live a better life, too. Caring about myself was allowing me to care about others. River had been right again.

  How annoying.

  And I also knew—I had stopped myself from making dark magick. I had chosen not to. That was progress. It definitely was.

  That night I was on dish duty, and I was focusing on the now, which meant really feeling how much I was not loving dish duty.

  “Have you thought about an industrial dishwasher?” I asked River as she brought me another stack of plates. “They have ’em that do a whole load in two minutes.” I swished my little handled brush over a plate, dunking it in the hot, soapy water. I’d forgotten to wear rubber gloves (let’s all say Of course, all together, okay?), and my hands were chapped and reddened. They were the hands of, like, a Swedish fisherman. A man. An old one. I thought about Nell’s soft, white girly hands, her manicure always perfect, and felt bile rising in my gut.

  River smiled and brushed her hand along my back. “I know how important it is to you to save time. ’Cause you just never have enough of it.”

  I groaned, and she laughed.

  In all seriousness, this whole past week had sucked. Nell seemed to be upping her warfare. I couldn’t get Reyn out of my mind, reliving the terror of my memories of him, both as he had destroyed my childhood and now as he currently destroyed my peace of mind. I remembered our fevered kisses, remembered how horrified he’d looked when he recognized me. He had been appalled both that I was a “bad girl,” who might make him backslide again, and also about the part he and his family had played in my life. His worlds were colliding, too.

  Old Mac had been insufferable. I felt bad for both Meriwether and Dray. It was winter, my least favorite season, with the sun rising late and setting early, the endless cold, the snow, the ice. Why couldn’t River have settled in, like, the Bahamas? Couldn’t she rehabilitate souls there? Yes. She could have. She chose not to.

  “Maybe I just can’t do this.” I didn’t even realize I’d said it out loud until River turned and said, “What?”

  Now that it was out, it was out. I gave a plate an angry scrub. “I’m washing dishes and getting pecked by hens and targeted by two-faced bitches and making friends with kids whose lives are more miserable than mine and, oh yes, I’m here partying with the psycho who killed my parents—I mean, could it suck more?”

  River looked at me.

  “I’m not cut out to be an immortal Girl Scout,” I said tiredly. “All this studying and accepting the past and examining my innards and this friend-being and shelf-stocking—this isn’t me.”

  River didn’t say anything, and after a minute I steeled myself for what I might see in her eyes—disappointment? I looked up and saw… I don’t know. Compassion?

  “What do you want?” she asked softly.

  “I want to feel better,” I said, like I had before. “To not be in pain.”

  “No—what do you really want?”

  I clenched my teeth and blew out a breath. “I want to… feel like I’m not a total waste of a person.”

  “No.” She seemed quite sure. “What do you really want?”

  I wanted to scream and break this plate on the stone sink. “I want to not be dark.” I almost whispered the words—I’d never said them out loud before.

  River didn’t say anything, but I got the distinct impression that that still wasn’t the right answer. After a couple of moments, she brushed her hand over my hair and then left.

  If Nell had come into the kitchen just then, I would have broken a plate over her head.

  Instead I remained alone and finished washing the freaking dishes. Then I went upstairs, did my door-lock spell, got into bed in all my clothes, drank my tea, and cried until I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 29

  The next day was Saturday. I had to groom two horses. I’d been assigned to Sorrel and Titus. Sorrel was a trim, neat quarterhorse that was used only for riding; Titus was an Irish Draught horse that occasionally got hooked up to wagons or carts or whatever. They were both nice animals, in that they were patient and calm, unlike, say, the chicken from hell.

  I put Sorrel in the crossties and started in with the rubber currycomb. She whuffed into my hair as I went over her coat, loosening up dirt and hair.

  Horses. I don’t even want to talk about horses. It’s impossible to overstate how crucial horses have always been to people, until literally the last hundred years. For thousands of years, horses and cows are what kept people alive, enabled people to travel, to cart heavy things, to farm enough land to support a family. I’d always been around them. One of the times I’d lived in England, like in the mid-eighteen hundreds or so, I’d been horse crazy, rode every day, owned horses, had custom saddles. But they were like everything else: They died eventually.

  Anyway, I’d gotten over them. Now I mostly avoided them. Their knowing eyes, their sensitive natures—they can see through bullshit, just like dogs, cats, and little kids. I tried to avoid all of those. Plus, as soon as I smelled a horse, it brought back so many memories, so strongly—the way scents do. Sometimes I can be in the exact same building or airport or see the exact same view from a bridge and not even remember it, though I know I’ve been there. But if that memory is coupled with a smell, it all floods back with excruciating detail. The smell of roasting peanuts in Manhattan. The smell of the Mediterranean Sea in Menton. Newly mown hay in Kansas. Snow in Iceland. Crushed grapes in Italy. Fried beignets and coffee in New Orleans.

  And horses.

  Sorrel stamped her left foreleg gently while I tried hard not to think about the hayloft just twelve feet above me. For a couple of minutes, I had been happy up there.

  First the currycomb, then the dandy brush, then the body brush, then the towel. Sorrel looked like a postcard when I’d finished with her coat. I got the hoof pick and cleaned under her shoes and I was done. As I unclipped her crossties, she nuzzled my hair, her breath warm and hay-scented.

  “Okay, horsie,” I muttered, and put her back in her stall.

  Titus was bigger and heavier, bu
t nowhere near as big as, say, a Percheron or a Shire horse. I’ve seen Shire horses that are truly enormous. I clipped Titus into the crossties and picked up the rubber currycomb with an arm that was already aching.

  Draft horses.

  My father had had warhorses—not huge and heavy, like in Europe, designed to hold men and armor weighing four hundred pounds. But still, big, powerful horses bred for war. Not for children to go near. He’d also kept what they called lady horses—smaller, lighter, usually dams, for me and my mother and my siblings to ride. I was put on one when I was three. By the time I was six, I would ride my horse—I don’t know how to spell the old Icelandic name, but it meant starfish, because of a funny marking she had. My sisters and older brother and I would ride our horses sedately out of the bailey and pick our way down the trails to the rocky beach. There we would practice standing on our horses’ backs, holding the reins in one hand, the other hand thrown dramatically above our heads. We thought it looked incredibly dashing and daring.

  After I lost everything and lived with my foster family, and they married me off to Àsmundur, his father gave us a small draft horse as a wedding present. It was a princely gift—our own horse! Her name was—the translation is Mossy, because of her mane and tail. She was small but very strong and brave, and a hard worker. I loved her, though I could never ride her—when she wasn’t working, she had to rest. Then Àsmundur died, and it was Mossy who carried his coffin to the burial field. Little Mossy pulled the flat wagon with Àsmundur, and the rest of us walked behind.

  I’d had to sell Mossy after that—I couldn’t afford to feed her over the winter, and I couldn’t run even a tiny farm by myself. Plus, if I stayed in that community, it wouldn’t be long before they found me another husband. A young, healthy widow—I would be snapped up like gold. So I’d sold Mossy and packed what I could carry on my back, and said good-bye to Momer and Pabbi and to Àsmundur’s family, who didn’t want me to go. Later I realized they had another son, only fourteen at the time, but I would have been convenient to marry him off to.

  I rode in a neighbor’s hay wagon to the next-largest town, Aelfding. It took all day and some of the night. I cried the whole way, partly for poor Àsmundur but mostly for lovely, brave, strong little Mossy, whom I never saw again and missed for more than fifty years.

  In Aelfding, I looked up Mother Berglind, who lived in an attic above a stable and earned her keep by weaving rough linen cloth for aprons and the like. She was very old and almost blind, working her loom mainly by touch. I had to go very close for her to see me. When she saw me, she squinted and cocked her head. I had changed—I was now eighteen, a woman, a widow, and the last time she’d seen me I was ten years old. But when she recognized me, she looked afraid and drew back.

  “What do you want, child?” she asked.

  “You remember me? I was… an orphan, and you placed me with a family, farmers, in the valley. Gunnar Oddursson?”

  She hesitated, squinting at me, as if weighing whether to deny it or not. “Yes,” she finally said reluctantly.

  “My family’s home was near Heolfdavik,” I said. “Do you know if anyone is still there?”

  The old woman looked around, as if someone might be listening. She seemed unhappy and upset at my visit. I had wanted to thank her for arranging my foster family, but she seemed anxious to have me gone.

  “No one is there,” she said.

  “Are there still people in the village?” I persisted.

  “No! No one lives there!” She seemed angry now, turning away from me, hobbling back to the bench before her loom.

  I didn’t know what to say and felt embarrassed by her discomfort. I turned without a word and hurried down the narrow, slanting steps and out into the cool air.

  I guess it was natural to go back. It wasn’t as far as I thought—when I was little, it seemed like an incredibly long distance from my father’s hrókur to Aelfding and from there to the Oddurssons’ farm in the valley. But I walked it in about six hours, the road narrow and rutted with mud.

  I remembered this road, vaguely. I’d only been down it this far a couple of times, but I remembered it as being wider, smoother, much more trafficked. In some places I had to practically break a path through overgrown brush. It had once been a thoroughfare between Heolfdavik and Aelfding, passing right by my father’s lands, our village. It was odd that no one had been using it.

  I barely noticed the turnoff that led to my father’s lands. Only some rocks, shattered and overgrown by steppe grass, made me realize that this had once been our village gate. I headed down that road, and after half an hour, when my feet were sore and my shoulders ached from carrying my few belongings, I saw my father’s bailey.

  When I was little, the bailey was enclosed by stone walls maybe eighteen feet high, and over twelve feet thick, at the bottom. Now all I saw were fragments of broken stones.

  Back then, any city that was more than four or five huts clustered together had a wall around it, to make it harder for raiders. It wouldn’t stop them—nothing stopped them—but it would slow them down a bit. In our village we had the village wall first, with the gate I’d gone through, and then inside the walled village we had houses and huts and little patches of ground where people had goats or pigs or sheep, the occasional horse. Little plots of vegetable gardens. At the top of the hill was my family’s big—the translation is castle, but it was a small castle. It was the biggest and most elaborate building for a hundred miles, but it was still rough, made all of stone, instead of wood or daub-and-wattle.

  My father had been the king of this land, like his father before him, and his father before him. I had been born into royalty, royalty on a smaller scale than European kings and queens, though royalty who wielded a lot of power—the magickal power of the Fourth House of the Immortals. The House of Úlfur. The wall around our house probably enclosed about five acres. It was taller and wider than the village wall, and had places for soldiers to run along the top. Enormous wooden gates, studded with iron spikes, opened outward, to make it harder for them to be broken in by a battering ram. Right inside the gate was a thick wooden platform, covered with packed dirt. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d walk right over it. But it could be pulled out of the way, in case of an attack, and it led down to a deep, deep hole. At the bottom of the hole were hundreds of wooden spikes. I guessed some of Reyn’s men had ended up down there, that night.

  It wasn’t a castle like Versailles or Windsor castle—it was much rougher and older—but castlelike, with narrow arrow slits in the walls, curving stone stairs, and so on. The bailey was the yard enclosed by our wall. Our servants lived there, in little houses lining the walls, and we had our own horses and goats and pigs and sheep. Our own gardens. If raiders were attacking, the village people would grab whatever they could and run for my father’s hrókur. The tall wooden gates would shut after them, and then we’d all hunker down and wait out the attack. Raiders had never gotten through my father’s walls. Until they had.

  That day it was almost nine years after the attack. I didn’t know what I’d find. I thought perhaps the village would have been rebuilt. Maybe even a new lord established in the repaired castle. But what I found that day was nothing.

  I saw the rubble of the village gates, and more rubble at our bailey wall. My father’s house had been built of huge stones, cut right from the ground at an inland quarry. But as I stared at the site where it had to have been, the biggest rock I saw was maybe the size of a gourd. As if the stones had been pulverized, like Nell’s sodalite. Now I knew that Reyn’s father had tried to use my mother’s amulet, the tool that helped focus her magick. But he didn’t have her knowledge, her spells, and he had apparently been vaporized by an explosion of some kind of power. Reyn had seen his father and brothers and their men turned to ash in front of him. And he bore a burn, as I did.

  Raiders always destroyed towns—setting fire to everything, taking or killing the livestock, taking or killing the people. But there were usual
ly skeletal remains of cottages, foundations, chimneys. Sometimes the damage wasn’t complete, and people would rebuild, but not often. Back then everyone believed that dangerous trolls followed in the wake of the raiders. So the village would be abandoned to the trolls, and a new village set up somewhere close by.

  But this—I’d never seen anything like this. There was nothing left, and it had been a big stone structure with at least fourteen rooms. And unlike the road leading here, where my family’s hrókur had been, nothing had grown back; not even nature had reclaimed the spot. I walked the outline of the house—the ground itself was charred, scorched. But things always grew back after a fire, sometimes even better.

  I had set down my sack and sat on the ground. I had come back for nothing. No one was here to help me learn what had happened. Secretly I’d hoped that I’d find some of Faðir’s books, maybe a little singed, but hidden under the rubble. Or my mother’s jewelry, whatever the raiders hadn’t found. Instead it was as if no one had ever been here. I rubbed the back of my neck. This was where I had lived for the first ten years of my life, where I’d had a real family. We’d been rich; my father had been powerful. Important people had traveled great distances to see him. We’d had servants and teachers and books and musical instruments and horses and a little cart, drawn by goats, for my baby brother.

  Now there was nothing. I had nothing. I had no one.

  That night I’d seen my father’s head drop down the chimney and roll across the floor. I’d seen my mother flay someone alive, seen Sigmundur cut his head off. I’d run to my mother, leaving my next-oldest sister and my little brother, and I’d clung to the back of my mother’s skirt. The scene was all choppy images, roaring, broken sounds. There were men, so many men, out in the hallway. The castle was on fire, everything outside in the bailey was on fire. Horses and sheep were screaming. Children—the children of my father’s men—were crying. Sometimes I heard their cries suddenly cut short.