Eternally Yours (32 page)

People gathered in the chapel, crying and praying loudly, sure that we were going to go down. They held hands and stumbled from wall to wall, over and over.

Incy and I were pissed; we wouldn’t drown, but if the ship sank, we were going to be frozen and miserable for who knew how long until another boat came along to sweep up the survivors and/or bodies. Besides being pissed, I was incredibly seasick, barfing a record twenty-seven times, long after I had nothing whatsoever in my system. It was, I promise you, an incredibly awful situation. The fact that the boat didn’t sink and pulled into harbor only one day late didn’t cheer up the passengers and crew nearly as much as you would think. People were still crying as they practically crawled down the gangway; more than a dozen collapsed on the concrete and kissed the ground; and I myself, finally standing still on hard pavement, got sick all over again at the lack of motion.

But it had not been that bad, compared to the crossing from Iceland to Norway. For one thing, as sick as I was on the cruise ship, I was inside, warm and dry. I had fresh drinking water at the ready, once I could lever myself up to the sink. If I had been able to eat anything and if I could have somehow made my way to the kitchen, I could have had food that was still good. And the storm part of that cruise lasted only a day and a half.

The trip to Norway was made right before trade stopped for the winter. And this was Iceland and Norway, so the weather already sucked. Add in the Little Ice Age effect of the Middle Ages (look it up), and we’re talking beastly, bone-cracking cold; searing, razorlike wind; dim, halfhearted days
that began at ten in the morning and ended at two in the afternoon.

It had been a narrow boat, maybe thirty feet or so in length, and a bit more than ten feet wide? Completely open to the elements: wind, ice, freezing rain, regular rain, salt water kicked up from waves, etc. There was no covered place anywhere, even for the captain. Dried and salted herring was the basic menu staple, but occasionally they served more herring, and sometimes for breakfast or dessert they dished up herring. I remember some people cheering when they finally broke into the rubbery, pickled shark meat. My own meager supply of half a loaf of bread and some dried apples had been drenched immediately and disintegrated into salty paste.

My bed was a double layer of sacking on the deck, and my pillow was the soaked cloth bag of my one extra overdress, my one extra apron, my one extra hair cloth. Instead of a day and a half of being tossed about and sick, this trip was almost three weeks of constant physical misery. All made worse by the fact that I knew no one in Norway, had no idea where to go, had almost no money, no real plan, except to try to get hired somewhere.

It had probably been the bravest thing I’ve ever done—leaving behind everything, everyone I knew, leaving behind my country, my past, and the person I had been. I took a Norwegian name, Ragnhild, the first name I had that wasn’t Icelandic.

The second-bravest thing I’ve done was to come here to River’s Edge, to try to save whatever Nastasya was left inside. Because anyone could have bet that it was going to be hard and I was going to hate what I saw. And I had.

The third-bravest thing was now, today, for me to stay. I was staying despite a frightening battle coming. Staying despite my lack of confidence in my own powers and skills. I’d known these people a bit less than six months, and none of them was related to me. One of them had been my family’s sworn enemy. A couple of them couldn’t stand me.

But here I was, and here I intended to stay. My first brave act had been to leave people; my third brave act was to stay with people. It seemed both brave and incredibly stupid, as so many brave things do.

Gosh, good thing I’m not paranoid, seeing danger everywhere, or this whole “traitor among us” thing would really get me down!

“Honey, you look so down,” said Brynne, putting a sack of dried beans on the kitchen worktable. “What’s going on?”

On a scale of one to ten, the desire to blurt out everything to Brynne was about a thirteen. Besides Reyn and River, she was the person I was closest to here. I trusted her.

“Besides the huge battle they think is imminent?” I filled a big pot with water, added some salt and pepper, and dumped a bunch of beans in to cook slowly all afternoon. Voilà—dinner. “Isn’t that enough?”

Brynne nodded while I grabbed my jacket, then the two of us headed out to the big barn. Since I wasn’t going to town anymore, it freed up a lot of time for me to work on my magickal skills. Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I was improving, strengthening, magickwise.

“Oh, Nastasya—Brynne.” Solis was just coming out of the herb workroom. Like the other teachers, his face looked tired and worried. “I’m glad to run into you, Nastasya. I would like to offer to teach you again.” His blue surfer-boy eyes were sincere. “I’m very sorry I had trouble trusting you before. So much has happened—it’s been a hard path to navigate. But if River has complete faith in you, then obviously I do, too. To make it up to you, I thought I could show you some interesting properties about stinging nettles. Or work with you on scrying with crystals.”

Hmm. I had been so mad—and hurt—when Solis had sided with River’s butthead brothers. Now he was coming back and admitting his mistake. The polite and trusting thing would be to accept his offer in the generous spirit with which it was intended.

Unfortunately I trust only a couple of people, and I’d stopped being polite back in the eighteen hundreds.

So I was comfortable with shutting him down.

“No, thank you,” I said.

He looked surprised. “Uh… I can see I hurt you more deeply with my thoughtless actions than I realized. I assure
you, Nastasya, that I truly regret anything I’ve done that upset you.”

I started to get pissed. He was a teacher here, and he’d done practically everything except wear a sandwich board that said
NO NASTASYAS ALLOWED
.

“I guess we’ll both get over it,” I said.

Solis glanced at Brynne, but she shrugged. A door opened down the barn aisle, and Anne and River came out, talking quietly with their heads bowed. Then the outside door opened and Jess, Amy, Daniel, and Reyn came in. Reyn was the last and the tallest, and just as he walked in, his head blocked a shaft of sunlight so that it made a glowing halo all around him. Stuff like that is so unfair.

Anne looked up and smiled. “This is well met,” she said. “I was just wondering if we should have a group meditation, and this would be a great group.”

Yay.

“I think not, dear,” said River, and Anne blinked.

“No?”

River looked uncomfortable. “Group meditations might be too emotionally charged right now. Perhaps just you and I and one or two other people? But nothing over four or five people, and I’d like to be present. Just in case. If someone needs me.”

This was weird, and I looked around quickly. River didn’t know who to trust. She didn’t want to take a chance that
one of us might be working against her. I don’t know if everyone picked up on that, but I saw speculation enter Reyn’s eyes.

After several awkward moments, Brynne said, “I’ll just go along to the workroom…” and left. Amy, Jess, and Daniel followed her.

River smiled at Solis and took his arm in hers. “Walk with us,” she said, moving toward the door.

He smiled easily as they went outside. “Delighted.”

Reyn and I stood there and looked at each other. Despite a couple of sword lessons, we really hadn’t talked about… what didn’t happen. I’d rejected his offer of love, and he’d rejected my offer of the rest of me. He’d been distant but not furious, quiet but full of thought. I kept waiting for him to throw it in my face or get mad all over again. It still stung, what he’d said to me about being a coward and so on. It stung, but instead of getting pissed and writing him off, I’d actually thought about what he’d said.

We just didn’t see it the same way.

“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?