Fire (12 page)

‘Terrific,’ Ida says. ‘You can see from miles away that this grave has been messed with.’

‘Wait,’ Nicolaus says.

He kneels once more and pushes his fingers into the soil. At first, nothing happens. Then, small green dots appear on the disturbed surface. The dots grow. Minoo can smell the grass. It is spreading over the grave. Minoo watches Nicolaus who trembles with the effort as the blades of grass grow taller, centimetre by centimetre, until the grave has become covered by a mat of fresh green grass.

They can ‘shape and control different kinds of living material’. That is how the principal had described the power of the element wood. Elias’s element. And Nicolaus’s.

Nicolaus stands on shaky legs, brushing his trousers with his hands.

Who is he, truly? Minoo thinks.

And what if the Nicolaus who has regained his memories is someone she cannot like?

They are scattered in Nicolaus’s living room. Linnéa is sitting cross-legged on the small sofa. Nicolaus has not uttered a word since they left the cemetery. Now he is standing in front of the silver crucifix, looking at it in silence.

Linnéa is not reading his mind, but senses that his consciousness has changed. As if it has healed.

‘I don’t know where I should begin,’ he says.

‘The beginning seems a good place,’ Linnéa says.

He turns to her.

‘I shall try. Of course I shall. You have already had to wait for too long for answers from your guide.’

He looks at them, one by one.

‘The beginning,’ he repeats. ‘Yes. Almost four centuries have passed since then.’

‘What do you mean?’ Minoo asks.

‘Since I was born. And I should have died … I should have died more than three hundred years ago.’

A deep silence fills the room.

Linnéa tries to take on board what Nicolaus is saying. It is impossible.

Ida opens her mouth before anyone else.

‘What are you telling us?’ she asks shrilly. ‘Are you a
vampire
?’

‘Of course he isn’t,’ Anna-Karin says.

‘How do you know?’ Ida snaps. ‘Witches and demons exist. Why not vampires?’

Linnéa moves in.

‘Like I said, it would be good if you started from the beginning, Nicolaus.’

It would be faster to read his mind. But she has promised never to do that again.

He nods and wearily goes to sit down on the empty wooden chair next to Minoo.

‘I was born here in Engelsfors. My father was the minister and it followed that I should take the cloth as well. When my father died, I took over his parish. I liked the post and married the woman who was selected for me. Hedvig. She, too, was one of us …What I mean is … One of the families that belonged to the Council.’

‘Are you a member of the
Council
?’ Linnéa asks, uncrossing her legs and putting her feet on the floor.

If Nicolaus is one of them, she’ll get out of here and never come back.

‘Not any more,’ Nicolaus replies.

Linnéa scrutinises him. Is he lying? The temptation to read his thoughts is stronger than ever.

‘But I was one of the most faithful of the Councillors,’ he continues. ‘Then, as now, the members controlled all use of magic powers. But their primary function was to find, protect and train the Chosen One. There were various prophecies pointing to different places all over the world where the Chosen One might be found. Engelsfors was one such place. It was my family that was given the honourable task to watch over the region. We were to await the next era of magic and see if the Chosen One was here.’

‘And so she was,’ Minoo says. ‘Did you know her?’

Nicolaus nods slowly. Lowers his eyes.

‘She was my daughter.’

Linnéa doesn’t quite believe her ears.

‘Your daughter?’

‘Matilda. She was our third child. The first two were dead at birth. Matilda meant everything to us. She was intelligent and strong-willed. And beautiful. Hedvig and I were both natural witches and, from early on, we realised that Matilda, too, had a powerful, inborn talent for magic. But it was when she was fifteen that her powers truly blossomed. We didn’t dare let her leave the house because she saw visions and caused supernatural phenomena. She started a rainstorm in our bedroom once. We couldn’t risk letting something like that happen in public. In those days, people were hunting for witches everywhere.’

Linnéa looks at him, trying to imagine him as a father of a family and a minister of the church. As someone alive in the seventeenth century. It is amazingly easy.

‘One morning, we found her, outside the vicarage, frozen to the bone and covered in dirt. She was raving about
a blood-red moon, about walking out into the forest and having had her fate foretold. We immediately informed the leader of the Council in the capital city. They arrived here a few days later and, after certain … trials … it was proven that … Matilda was the Chosen One.’

A scene, an image in Nicolaus’s memory, flickers briefly to life in Linnéa’s consciousness. A girl screams. Blood splatters on a stone floor. Linnéa shies away, won’t know, won’t see.

‘They carried out some kinds of test, right? Like the school principal, with our hairs?’ Minoo asks and Linnéa could shake her for being so naive.

‘The Council has adopted more refined methods since then,’ Nicolaus replies. ‘In those days, they were more … primitive. I ought to have intervened at that stage. But I was blind. I believed it was to be for the good of mankind. The good of Matilda. She was already close to sinking, forced under by her powers.’

In Linnéa’s judgement, this sounds like a poor excuse. But she decides to give him a chance. Let him finish his story.

‘How do you mean?’ Minoo asks.

‘You now know, of course, that a witch can master only one of the elements,’ Nicolaus says. ‘But it isn’t quite true. The Chosen One controls every one of them. All six elements.’

‘Shouldn’t the principal have said something about this?’ Minoo asks.

‘She might have good reasons to conceal it from you,’ Nicolaus replies. ‘Or else the Council has forgotten. That wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.’

‘But if Matilda was in control of all six elements … wouldn’t she be, like, fit to explode?’ Vanessa asks.

The grimy streak across her forehead, left when she wiped
the sweat off during the dig, is still there.

‘Theoretically, yes,’ Nicolaus says. ‘But, as you also know, the Chosen One is surrounded by a special, protective magic that keeps her powers together and keeps her from being found by the demons. Still, it was a heavy burden to bear. The Council claimed that they could help her and I was forced to trust them.’

Linnéa can’t keep quiet any more.

‘You were not forced. You chose to do what you did.’

A shadow passes over Nicolaus’s face.

‘Yes, I did. I made a choice. And, for all eternity, will wish I’d chosen differently, believe me.’

Nicolaus’s remorse is so great that Linnéa can’t avoid capturing a sense of how he feels. And the expression ‘all eternity’ takes on a special status when it is uttered by someone who has lived for four hundred years.

‘One night, I woke suddenly. I felt that something had happened to Matilda,’ Nicolaus continues. ‘She wasn’t in her bed. I found her at a place in the forest where she used to go when she was little. She was barely alive, in a much worse state than during the night of the blood-red moon. I carried her home. And, already, I felt sure of a difference in her. When she woke, I became certain. Her magic was exhausted.’

‘Exhausted?’ Ida asks quickly. ‘In what way “exhausted”?’

‘She had no powers left.’

‘So it can be done! One can get rid of one’s powers!’ Ida exclaims.

Linnéa glances crossly at her. No one has failed to notice that Ida wants to get out of being one of the Chosen. And, as ever, Ida’s first concern is Ida.

‘Yes, it’s possible,’ Nicolaus says. ‘But I don’t know what brought it about. She refused to tell Hedvig and me about it.
She only insisted that she had acted for the good of everyone, that she was herself too weak to fight the battle. Then, the Council’s emissaries arrived …’

He falls silent. Looks down at his hands. And Linnéa goes cold inside. Even though she doesn’t know exactly what happened, she has followed Matilda on her journey to death. The others have done this, too, in their dreams.

‘I was a fool,’ Nicolaus says. His voice is very quiet. ‘I ought to have hidden her, protected her. Instead, I left her in the hands of the Council. They accused her of gambling with the fate of the entire world. Matilda insisted that another Chosen One would be born sometime in the future and that this he or she would be stronger than her and defeat the demons once and for all time. But the Council argued that she had betrayed them. And disloyalty is the one thing they will not tolerate …’

Nicolaus pauses briefly.

‘In those days, witch-hunting was at its height in this country. It goes without saying that no real witches were affected. That is, except those who the Council wanted to dispose of. They saw to it that Matilda was imprisoned and tried, accused of having learned her witchcraft from Satan. The court found her guilty.’

Now, the guilt that fills Nicolaus so overwhelms him that it flows into Linnéa and she has to fight to keep her mind clear of it.

‘I had known the judge since my student days. He was a very senior Council official, though of course the rest of the court had no idea. I begged him to be lenient and he told me that if Matilda confessed, mercy would be shown and the execution called off … I and my wife trusted my old friend.’

Nicolaus falls silent again and swallows hard before he can continue.

‘In this country, the practice was to behead convicted witches first and burn the body afterwards. But Matilda was marched straight to the pyre and tied to the stake … I went to speak to her. I said that they would set her free if only she would confess. And she obeyed me. I was so relieved. My friend nodded to the executioner. I was convinced that he would start to untie her ropes. Instead, he reached for the flaming torch …’

Tears are pouring down Nicolaus’s cheeks. Linnéa can hardly breathe.

‘I leapt towards the fire. The guards grabbed me and pinned me down. But they didn’t catch Hedvig … She threw herself into the flames. Their screams …’

He presses the backs of his hands against his eyes. Linnéa smells smoke from a fire. She is not sure if it is her imagination or if it comes from Nicolaus’s memory.

‘That very night, I opened the
Book of Patterns
and asked it to show me how to atone for my crime, but also how I could avenge my wife and daughter. The book answered both pleas. It showed me how to live on and help the next Chosen One, in order to make up for my betrayal. But for such strong magic, great sacrifices are required.’

He wipes the tears off his cheeks.

‘Matilda and Hedvig were not allowed to be buried in sacred ground. Not a witch and someone who had died by her own hands. But I bribed the executioner and he let me have their remains. The book instructed me to bury Matilda in the spot where I had found her that night when she lost her powers. The place you now call Kärrgruvan. I hid my wife’s bones. The most powerful members of the Council had attended the session of the court and they still remained in Engelsfors. They gathered for a meeting in the church. I locked the doors and set fire to the building. It was a wooden
church and burned quickly down to the ground. I had drawn circles around it and for every life that was consumed in the flames, my own life was lengthened. Then I torched the vicarage as well. The scorched bones that were buried in my name belonged to my wife.’

Linnéa recalls the words of the principal from just one year ago.

The church and vicarage burned down in 1675, and a great many very important documents were lost.

‘The principal told us about the fire,’ Minoo says.

‘I heard her,’ Nicolaus replies. ‘You may remember that I stood outside her office and listened. But I am pretty sure that the Council is no longer aware that its leading figures died in the Engelsfors fire. Well, at least not members at Adriana’s level.’

‘But how could they forget?’ Minoo asks. ‘It must have been a huge trauma that affected the whole organisation.’

‘Perhaps that’s exactly why they have forgotten,’ Linnéa says and looks at Nicolaus. ‘Powerful people hate admitting that anyone can get at them.’

‘Precisely so,’ he says. ‘The Council hates losing face. They want to be seen as invulnerable and all-knowing. The failure over the Chosen One was bad enough, inexplicable and embarrassing. As for the fire … I didn’t dare go near the Council, of course, not after what I had done but, during my wanderings, rumours reached me now and then. New leaders stepped in and immediately suppressed all talk about the scandal in Engelsfors. Those who remembered kept their mouths shut. And grew old and died. The prophecy about the role of Engelsfors was just one among many prophecies. This must have been why the Council was so unprepared for all of you showing up just here. They had forgotten.’

Linnéa recalls how she picked up what went on in the
principal’s mind last year. And how, as time went by, she had realised that Adriana knew much less than she pretended.

‘But what about your own memories?’ Minoo asks. ‘What did happen at the grave?’

‘Human beings are not meant to live for as long as I have,’ Nicolaus says. ‘I knew my forgetfulness would increase. That I would grow ever more lost. The book told me how to store magic in the grave, magic that would one day let me recover my memories. Some of them were stored in my familiar, memories that I hoped would lead me on the right way when the time came.’

‘As if you pulled together a backup copy of yourself and left it in safe storage here in Engelsfors?’ Vanessa says. ‘And then the magic kind of rebooted your brain?’

Some of the old confusion returns to Nicolaus’s eyes.

‘I am not entirely sure what you mean, but a copy kept safely … yes, that is right.’

‘So what have you been doing these past few centuries, then?’ Linnéa asks.

‘I drifted here and there, all over the world. Observed, as eras of war and peace passed. I carried the silver crucifix and it protected me. There were times when I became more lucid and remembered my task, and my crimes. Such periods allowed me to learn from my contemporaries, find out about their habits and language usage. Understand new things. But sooner or later I would slide back into the mist. I returned a few times to Engelsfors to store new clues for myself. Like that damned bank deposit box. And the letter.’