Riveted (33 page)

“Yes, but what does my coming from Hannasvik tell you? Nothing at all. What have you found out now? That I want you to lick between my legs. But it wouldn’t hold true for everyone from Hannasvik. Some women don’t like to be licked. Some think it should only be discussed privately, and others think such things are better discussed frankly. Some do not want to lie with women, some do not want to lie with men. Some want to leave, some don’t, some dare to leave, some don’t. Some are brave, some are vain, some are pious, and some of us just speak of the gods and know in our hearts that they only exist in Hanna’s stories. Manhattan City is not the reason I love to sew clothes, and neither is Hannasvik. It is not the reason I love smoked fish. It is not the reason for anything about the way I am.”

He’d have to remember to rile her up more often. God, she was incredible—her color high, her eyes all but sparking.

“Having smoked fish available in your village might be why you like it,” he pointed out.

“But that’s not why I love butter candies or maize bread, which I never had before I left Iceland.” She narrowed her gaze at him. “Are you poking at me?”

“Yes.” And enjoying the hell out of it.

Her expression softened. “Then tell me why it’s so discomfiting not to know, when a few conversations would tell someone far more about
me
? Why is everyone in the New World so obsessed with where everyone else came from?”

“You’re obsessed with concealing it.”

“For good reason. What is their good reason? What is it about being born in a certain place that somehow allows people to immediately sum me up? As if I can only believe one thing, support one idea.”

David had no answer to that. “It’s polite. A quick way to discover common ground. It’s well intentioned.”

“But ultimately false. Everything they think they know is based on assumptions that will be overturned the longer the acquaintance lasts.”

Their acquaintance had lasted long enough that he could guess why this roughed her nerves so much. She loved her people and missed her home yet had had to disavow them. The common ground was as false as the assumptions she disliked.

“And every time someone asks, you’re forced to pretend Hannasvik doesn’t exist again.”

“Don’t try to be clever.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Pfft.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “Everything I said is still true. People always ask, and they think it means something. Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed it?”

“I suppose I do it all the time,” he said. “I have noticed this: You are irritable after you wake.”

She grinned suddenly. “My mother called me Annika the Sleeping
Dragon because I was such a danger in the mornings. But I never feel as if I get enough.”

And she truly hadn’t in the past week, David knew. A heavy shift rotation, without the nanoagents to help her along as they did him. It was no surprise she’d dropped off so easily inside the whale, then again the previous night. “And what is your mother like?”

A laugh rolled through her, and she dropped her head back into her arms with a groan. David resumed rubbing the tense muscles along her spine. He didn’t know which pleased him more: that she welcomed his touch, or her blissful sigh as she did.

“Stubborn,” she said. “The only argument I ever won was when I told her I was leaving to look for Källa. She eventually agreed that I had to, or I’d never be able to hold my head up at home—and the guilt would crush me. How could I be happy like that? I would be as miserable as she was.” Her lips pursed, her expression pensive. “I think she might be happy now.”

David frowned. “Because you’re gone?”

“Oh, no. I think she’s much like your aunt—often sad. There are pieces of her life that gave her joy, however, and I am one of those.” Annika bit her lip. “That’s probably why I liked Lucia so well.”

Who’d begun a friendship under a false pretense. “She’s sorry.”

“I know. I knew it then. But I needed to be angry first.” Annika looked up at him. David wanted to turn his face, present his good side. He didn’t. “I’ll miss you so much. I wish we had more time. There are so many things I want to know about you.”

There were many other things he wanted to know, too. He suspected that a lifetime wouldn’t be long enough.

At this moment, he wanted to know her taste. He wanted to feel her wet and trembling beneath his mouth, to give her even a fraction of the pleasure she’d offered him.

Not yet. Not until these knots beneath his fingers had loosened.

He bent, kissed her nape. “I’ll be improper later.”

David never got the chance. The distant thrum of an airship
engine alerted him after noon. It flew south of them—heading west. Returning to the rail camp, and hopefully abandoning the search.

He looked for the airship again as the sun set. The sky was clear. Annika stoked the furnace, and soon the troll’s nose steamed, the engines huffed. He watched her ease into the driver’s seat, still stiff. God, David hated that he couldn’t help her.

She must have caught his look. “It’s not far,” she reassured him. “Only an hour and a half.”

He nodded, took his place on the ladder behind the head to serve as her eyes—though she wouldn’t need him as much tonight. Few clouds scudded across the sky. The moon shone bright over the snow, illuminating a clear path along the river.

David remained on the ladder, anyway, watching over her shoulder. She started off at an easy pace. Only an hour and a half. There was too much to ask, too much that he wanted to know. She must have thought so, too. Every breath not spent driving the troll was answering his questions or asking her own.

The low plains rolled out ahead. Too soon, they reached the shoreline again, the black sand strewn with rounded stones. They spoke less now as Annika had to navigate around basalt flows, to head away from the beach and behind high cliffs, waves crashing at their base. The dogs were everywhere. Not the same ones as at the waterfall, trotting alongside for a while before slinking off into the dark.

“It used to be hares.” Without a break in the rhythm of her pumping feet and pulling arms, Annika wiped the sweat from her face. “A hundred years ago, when Hanna and the Englishwomen first came, they couldn’t keep a garden because the hares would eat
the greens as soon as they shot up out of the ground. It hardly mattered, though; the women got fat on rabbit.”

A hundred years ago. “After the fissure eruptions?”

“Not long after.”

A grimace of dismay suddenly pulled her lips tight. She’d realized what she was revealing, he thought.

“I still don’t know where it is,” he reminded her. “Everything else hardly matters.”

She nodded. “About two generations ago, they started speaking of the dogs, instead—how many there were.”

A few dogs left by the early settlers, and a bounty of hares. It was no surprise that their population had exploded, but that couldn’t last forever. “They’ll likely die off, too, after they eat all of the hares.”

“They already have. That’s why the dogs have been so bad, we think—why they began attacking us and the flocks eight or nine years ago. They never used to be such a problem.”

“So the women of Hannasvik aren’t eating hares now?”

“Sheep, now and again. Mostly fish.”

“So you’re on the coast.”

Her jaw clenched. After a moment, she said, “Lake fish.”

He kissed the side of her neck. “Trust me.”

“I do. But I shouldn’t be stupid—so careless. That was why Källa left in the first place.”

Then he was glad that Annika had been careless. He wouldn’t voice that, though.

She slowed the troll, looking ahead to another cliff, its face jutting into the sea. “We have to go up around those, then Vik should be in the hills beyond it. Do we drive in?”

Her instinct was to hide the machine, he knew. But as another cur darted in front of the troll’s feet, he shook his head. “We don’t have much choice.”

She nodded. Only a few minutes more, then. He fell silent, saying
as much as he could with kisses to her shoulders, her neck, breathing in the scent of her hair. He would let her go. He
would
let her go. It wasn’t forever. Just for now.

God, he was terrified that it would be forever.

Annika stopped on a snowy rise overlooking the small town. Her breath hitched. She reached back, brought his hand to her mouth. His throat closed when she pressed a warm kiss to the center of his palm, when she vowed, “I
will
write. And visit, as soon as I’m free.”

And he would try to make that day come more quickly. “I’ll help you search.”

“Yes.”

For a brief moment, her lips trembled against his fingers. Then her shoulders straightened, and she reached for the foreleg pulley again.

Composed of a handful of houses and shops nestled on the rolling lowlands, Vik was a stone’s throw from the ocean, overshadowed by the rise of the cliffs to the west and the highlands to the north. The town didn’t possess a harbor, but David expected to see more flat-bottomed boats drawn up to the edge of the beach. Only a few were tied upside-down, their keels buried in snow.

The town lay quiet. Not the deathly stillness of Heimaey, but it still struck David as strange. Though it was early, warm lamplight only glowed in a few windows.

“No sheep. No ponies,” Annika said. “Though they have fences to keep the dogs out.”

But not a troll. Slowly, they passed an outlying farmhouse, and followed sled tracks onto the main street through the town. A long rectangle of light suddenly spilled from an open door. Annika stopped the troll. They both recognized the woman coming out into the street, a pistol in hand, and the man behind her. Vashon and Dooley.

Relief rushed through him. So at least some of the passengers
and crew from
Phatéon
had arrived safely. Now, where was his aunt? The captain appeared to be shouting. He couldn’t hear a word over the huff of the engine.

Annika pushed up out of the driver’s seat. He helped her down the ladder, opened the chest hatch, and dropped down. Snow crunched under his feet. Vashon stared at him over the barrel of her gun, astonishment widening her eyes. Dooley let out a shout and came forward, clapping David on his back, laughing. More people emerged from the house—some crew he recognized, others he didn’t know. Finally, there was Lucia, rushing to him with tears standing in her eyes.

She caught him in a fierce hug. Annika disappeared into the troll again, Vashon behind her. His chest tightened. Already out of his sight. He’d known it would happen. He’d hoped it wouldn’t happen so quickly.

Lucia stepped back, wiping her face. Beside her, Dooley was shaking his head.

“We were thinking that we’d lost you. A few of the aviators didn’t make it to shore.”

His gaze swept the gathered men. “Where is Goltzius?”

“His glider brought him in, then he got himself chewed up by dogs.” Heavy concern lined the older man’s face. “He saved that Lusitanian girl’s nurse when they chased after her, then went down under a tangle of them. It took four of us to beat them off.”

And Dooley’s own hand was bandaged, David saw. “Was it bad?”

“He’ll be all right, especially as Miss Neves hasn’t left his side. I’ll tell you, she’s a formidable woman. Goltzius will heal or perish by her wrath.” He looked up at the troll. “Where’d you get this?”

“We stole it from di Fiore’s camp.”

Neither Dooley nor Lucia appeared surprised when he said the name. Behind him, Vashon emerged from the troll. Annika came next, her mouth set, her eyes wide and shining. She looked to David.

“Some more has happened,” Lucia said quietly. “Come on in where it’s warm. We’ve got a decision to make.”

The small house wasn’t much warmer than outside, and
David thought most of that heat was due to the number of people in it—aviators, and a few women and children who must have been local to Vik. He recognized the ship’s senior staff from the wardroom. Elena caught Annika up in a tight embrace, laughing. Annika returned it, though she only smiled and her posture was stiff.

He was steered toward a wooden table in the hearth room. Annika sat across from him a moment later, with Vashon at the head, her uniform still pressed, her posture regal. Lucia took the chair beside him, and everyone who didn’t sit crowded around.

It didn’t take long for Annika to recount everything that had happened after the whale took
Phatéon
. When she was done, Dooley introduced the owner of the house—a thin Norwegian woman who appeared on the edge of exhaustion.

“They’ve been almost starved out here. No supply ships have reached them in four months—and most of the men in town are dead. The whale swallows up their boats when they take them out fishing.” He looked to the pale woman again. “They’ve lost others, too. Her husband, then her son. He and five others struck out for Smoke Cove and Höfn, seeking help. That was a month ago. They’ve been getting by on rationed stores, but those are about to go dry.”

And they’d go faster with an airship crew and passengers here.

Vashon sat forward. “The coal is about to run out, too. So we put as many people as possible into each house—fewer houses to heat, fewer stoves to fire. And today, Vik received a visit from Lorenzo di Fiore.”