Thief Eyes (8 page)

“We have no bargain.” My memories were somehow tied to that coin. With it, maybe I could get them back on my own. Without it, my memories would still be gone—and I’d have nothing left to bargain with.

Muninn’s claws flexed against the stone. “You do not want the coin. If you remembered, you would know.”

“But I don’t remember.” I looked right into his eyes, not flinching as dizziness washed over me. I could handle lots
of things. “If you want to negotiate further, you’ll have to give me my memories.”

Muninn launched himself from the ledge, claws aimed right at me. I ducked. He circled once around the room, then disappeared down the tunnel with an angry krawk.

“We have no bargain!” I called after him.

And I had nothing at all, save for an old coin and a scrap of cloth and a few scattered memories.

Something brushed my ankles. I looked down to see Freki winding around my legs. I hadn’t seen him enter the room. “What do you deal in?” I asked the little fox bitterly.

“Only companionship. Muninn and I may share a master, but we have different roles to play.”

I had no more reason to trust him than Muninn, but still I knelt down and squeezed him tightly. The little fox didn’t resist, not even when I found myself sobbing into his thick musky fur.

I didn’t have time for crying, not now. Ari—the bear Ari had become—was still out there. With a shuddering breath I drew away. “Can you turn Ari back?” I asked the fox. “Can
you
give me my memories back?”

The tip of Freki’s tail brushed the floor. “I do not deal in memory. I’m sorry, Haley.”

“Can you at least help us get out of here?”

Freki looked at me through sympathetic brown eyes but said nothing. I was on my own.

Ari’s flashlight lay on the floor, casting a beam of blue light. I turned it off and put it in my pocket with the cloth. His backpack lay on the floor, too. I took it to the bed. Maybe there’d be something inside I could bargain with. Freki climbed up beside me, watching as I unzipped the pack’s small outer pocket. “Will you at least not try to stop me?” I asked him.

“I can no more bind you than Muninn can,” the fox said.

That was something, at least. I went through the pack. The outer pocket held a thin wallet and a United States passport. I opened the passport. Dark brown eyes—almost black—stared at me from beneath blond hair pulled into a high ponytail. My own hair was unbound, but I pulled a lock around, and it was the exact same color. This wasn’t Ari’s backpack—it was
mine
.

Haley Martinez
, the passport read. I’d been sixteen when it was issued, and there was only one stamp inside, saying I’d entered
Island
—Iceland—on June 21, but not that I’d left again.

Why was I visiting Iceland? As I tried to remember, a headache stabbed behind my eyes. I let it go—for now—set down the passport, and opened the wallet. It held a few multicolored bills and a handful of silver coins with fish stamped on them. Ordinary coins, cool to the touch. Freki sniffed them without much interest. Did that mean Muninn wouldn’t be interested, either?

There were some photos in the wallet: a man with his
black hair sticking out in all directions, grinning atop a rocky pink outcrop; a gray-eyed woman in a white doctor’s jacket, a small orange cat in her arms, one of its legs bound in a bright turquoise bandage; myself, standing beside a serious-looking boy with short dark hair, a large yellow-and-black king snake draped over our arms and linked hands. I guessed the man and woman were my parents, but who was the boy?

There were no pictures of Ari. Maybe the pictures were out of date. Maybe I’d always meant to take one of him.

I looked down the dark tunnel. What if I never got to take that picture? What if the boy who’d tried to rescue me was gone forever, turned to white fur and black claws?

No. I wouldn’t let that happen.
Whoever I am, no way do I give up that easily
. I opened the main inner pocket of the pack. It contained a small yellow notebook, an English-to-Icelandic phrase book, and beneath them—

Water! Freki sniffed disdainfully as I uncapped the bottle and took a long swallow. Cool liquid soothed my parched throat. I’d never tasted anything so wonderful—or maybe I had and didn’t remember. I forced myself to screw the cap back on before I drank it all.

I also found a smushed bag of malt balls. My stomach grumbled at the scent of half-melted chocolate. Freki nosed at the bag. I gave him a malt ball—he took it between his paws and nibbled it delicately—then gulped down a handful of my own. The grumbling eased. I put the malt balls back
into the pack beside the water and opened the notebook. A note was written on the first page:

Another name. Another person I couldn’t remember. Had Katrin tried to rescue me, too? There was a phone number beneath her name.

What had happened to my mother? How could I forget something like
that
? I turned the page.

The rest of the pages were covered with strange symbols—squiggles and circles and lines—with smaller writing scrawled among the symbols.

Had I run from magic? Was that why my life had needed saving? I reached into my pocket and drew out the coin, hoping that holding it would help me remember, like before.

Heat shot through my palm—too hot! I dropped the thing and it clattered to the ground. I pressed my hand to my mouth as the burning cooled.

On the floor, the silver coin shone in the lamplight. I didn’t dare lose it, no matter how much it burned. I reached into my other pocket for the cloth. A white handkerchief streaked with dried blood. My blood? I used the handkerchief to pick up the coin. The heat was fainter through the cotton.

I felt a powerful tug, as if the coin was trying to pull me from the room. For just a second, I caught an image of a boy with shaggy hair and a wool hat jammed down over his ears. The coin kept tugging. Leading me toward Ari?

My heart pounded. Not letting go of that coin for a second, I loaded everything into my pack. The wineskin Freki had brought me still lay beside the bed. No way was I drinking the mead, but if I found more water, I could use the skin to carry it. I tugged the cork free, meaning to empty it out.

Freki let out a single sharp bark and rose to his feet. “Don’t spill that! My master would not like it!”

“I thought your master didn’t walk in this world anymore.”

Freki made a strange sound, low in his throat. “And if you’re wise, you’ll not draw his attention back to it. If you spill his mead—if you deny his hospitality by letting it touch the earth—he will know.”

Right. No point pushing my luck. I corked the skin and put it into the pack. Maybe I could empty it later, when I got out of here.

Memories or no memories, I’d get Ari and myself both free. I zipped and shouldered the pack, took Ari’s flashlight in my other hand, and followed the coin’s pull into the dark.

Chapter 6

T
he tunnel was colder than the room. I pulled up my hood and zipped my jacket to the chin. The flashlight’s thin beam cast eerie blue light on the tunnel walls. Water dripped somewhere up ahead, and the air felt thick and wet.

Freki followed at my heels, to guard me or provide companionship, I didn’t know. Either way, his presence was comforting. Was that a sort of magic, too?

The tunnel branched left. The wrapped coin pulled me forward. I followed, but as I passed the branch, a gust of icy air blew toward me. A child’s voice whispered,
“Three shells in return for my poem, poem, poem.”
The words echoed off the stone walls.

I stopped short and peered down the side tunnel. “Hello?”

“I’ll toss my silver at them and watch them fight, fight, fight.”
An old man’s voice, carried by the same cold wind. I turned left, though the coin urged me away. There were pictures on the tunnel walls. They skittered like nervous lizards out of my sight as the light hit them.
A boat torn apart by the sea. A coffin washing to shore
. I squinted into the distance. I saw no old man, no young boy.

Teeth nipped at my ankle. I looked down and saw Freki’s mouth around my leg. “You hear memory, nothing more.” He drew back, the tip of his tail brushing the floor.

“The sea has stolen my sons.”
The echoing voice
sounded
real—real and incredibly sad.

“Muninn holds all the island’s memories here,” Freki said. “Follow them without purpose, and you’ll wander to the end of days and still not find your way back to where you began.”

I clutched the handkerchief-wrapped coin tighter. Bad enough to lose my memories—I didn’t want to spend my life lost among other people’s memories instead. “That’s a lot of tunnels.”

The fox’s whiskers twitched. “Only Iceland’s memories lie here. Other lands have their own guardians and their own mountains.”

A brief image flashed through my thoughts: jagged brown mountains beneath a hot blue sky.
My
mountains, I somehow knew. I tried to remember, but the mountains sank into the muddy darkness of my missing memories,
leaving behind empty shells of words—mountains, desert—with no images to go with them. My eyes stung. Muninn had no right to take who I was away from me.

I brushed my eyes, turned my back on the voices and the images on the walls, and let the coin lead me on, back to the main tunnel. Freki walked alongside me, his gait smooth and liquid. The tunnel branched again and again. Sometimes the coin urged me left, sometimes right, sometimes straight ahead. I counted the turnings, repeating them to myself to make sure I could get back.

“I have spun twelve ells of wool. You have killed a man. A fine morning’s work for us both.”

“I already must grieve for my brother. Is it not enough for you that I set a bowl of porridge before his killer?”

My hand clenched around the coin. I fought the urge to stop, to listen closer, to try to stare longer at the moving pictures on the tunnel walls. Scraps of mist drifted through the air, raising goose bumps beneath my jacket. Were all the memories in this place of sadness and loss?

“My father gone, my brother gone, only this price upon my head remains.”

“Yes, the girl is beautiful, and men enough will suffer for it, but I do not know how the eyes of a thief have come into our family.”

The coin flared suddenly hot. Smoke rose from the handkerchief. A woman’s voice, not in the tunnels but in
my own head.
“How dare Hrut speak of me that way!”
Anger in those words. A moment’s silence, then,
“Haley?”

Dizziness washed over me.
The other one
, I thought. The one whose spell had caught me. I ran from that turning, not sure what I was so scared of. My legs trembled, then settled into an easy lope, as if I was used to running. The light bobbed ahead of me. The coin cooled from hot to warm. I kept going, enjoying the feel of my feet hitting stone and cool sweat trickling down my neck. Had I liked to run before?