Sorcerer's Feud

  I heard a shout, but only in my own mind, not audibly, a man’s voice, screaming two words, over and over, but she leapt off anyway, the woman on the pier, and drowned. I drowned. I’d heard Björn’s voice speaking what must have been Danish, “Nej, stop!” But I hated him, and I let the ocean claim me.

  Another voice summoned me: Kristjan’s. But he’s dead too, I thought.

  “Maya?” Tor was standing in the kitchen door. “Dinner’s ready.”

  I stared at him, my mouth slack, the Conté stick clutched in dirty fingers.

  “Are you okay?” he said. “I called you twice.”

  “No.” I tossed the stick back into the box. “I was remembering.”

  He strode over and took the sketchbook from my lap.

  “Do you recognize that island?” I said.

  “No. Ugly kind of place.”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  He waited for me to say more, but the memory hurt too much to describe aloud. The cabin belonged to some friend of Björn’s, a wealthy man who used it as a vacation spot in the summers. Björn took me there after Kristjan’s death. No one would hear me scream when he raped me, is why. Or I should say, as they did in those days, when he “claimed his marital rights”, his privilege no matter what his wife thought about it.

  Tor laid the sketchbook down on the table and considered me. For a moment I thought he was going to speak, but he just shrugged and led the way to the kitchen and dinner. Over the doorway the new runes glistened red, as wet as wounds. He’d put a line of runes over the breakfast bar, too.

  After we ate, I cleaned up the kitchen, and Tor got out the vacuum and swept up all the paint chips and splinters. We pretended we were a normal modern couple, sharing the housework. I started the dishwasher and returned to my sketchbook while Tor went downstairs and set magical wards. Not so normal after all. This time, when I started working, my fingers followed orders and drew what I wanted, memories of snow lying on tree branches or streaking the trunks, details for my senior project.

  Since I was born and raised in California, I’d only experienced snow a couple of times in my life. Once, when there was a freak winter storm that dropped snow on Mount Diablo, my father pulled me and Roman out of school and drove us over to play in it before it melted. He was as excited as we were, laughing as he tossed snowballs and helped us build a snowman. By the end of the afternoon, Roman felt exhausted from the cold and wet, but both Dad and I had so much energy that we could barely get to sleep that night.

  When I was a freshman in high school, my parents decided to split up. For the holiday break some family friends took Roman and me on a ski trip at Tahoe. They wanted to give my mother time alone to deal with the divorce. Even though our parents’ break-up grieved both of us kids, the trip did help. Roman learned a new sport, skiing, while just playing in the snow soothed me and gave me a mega-dose of élan. I never seemed to get cold. My friends kept nagging me about wearing a parka because I kept running outside in a pair of jeans and a sweater. I even kept forgetting to wear a hat.

  Now, years later, the experience finally made sense. Niflheim on Earth.

  Tor came back upstairs and sat down next to me on the couch. I laid the sketchbook aside and slid over to snuggle against him. He put his arm around me, and my human side felt safe again, warm against his strength.

  “I was wondering,” I said, “if we could maybe go up to the snow during Christmas break. Tahoe or Boreal, maybe.”

  “Sure! Great idea! We’ll have to plan it so we go between full moons, is all. Do you know how to ski?”

  “No. I mostly want to take photos—references for my senior project. I bet you ski, though.”

  “Yeah. I love it. We’ll have to get you some proper gear. None of my stuff would fit you.”

  “Oh, I don’t get as cold as most people.” I didn’t want him spending wads of cash on buying me expensive ski clothes.

  He pulled a little away so he could turn and look at me. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I don’t suppose you do. But we can get you a few things, anyway, just in case there’s a major storm.” He suddenly grinned. “Maybe you can attract snowstorms if we find the right galdr. We could rent you out to ski resorts. Make sure they have plenty of powder.”

  I laughed and turned my face up for a kiss. Tor bent his head, kissed me, then abruptly pulled away. He let me go and stood up fast.

  “What?”

  He held up a hand for silence. He turned, very slowly, until he faced the wall that held the door leading to downstairs. He was staring as intensely as a cat spotting prey at a spot next to the door—the heating vent, I realized, that went straight down into the lower flat. Slowly, a bare inch at a time, he raised his other hand, paused, then swept both hands through the air in a tight ritual gesture. I heard a muffled sound, a dull thump as if something blunt had slammed against the wall. Tor grinned in satisfaction.

  “Thor’s hammer,” he said. “I need to show you how to sign that. Defense as a good offense.”

  “Something was there.”

  “Oh yeah. I never thought of the heating vents, but they need runes, too. My mistake. I’ll do it now. Go sit in your bedroom, okay? Till I’m done. You’ll be safe there, because it doesn’t have a vent. We know now that the runes keep the damn `geist out. The vents are weak points, and I’ll fix that.”

  I gathered up my drawing stuff and fled. I sat down cross-legged on the bed in the Burne-Jones bedroom and considered the drawing of the island. It lacked something. I remembered that a scraggly tree, bare-branched for winter, stood next to the cabin. As soon as I drew that in, the drawing felt complete. I could almost feel the cold, crisp air, smell the dry mineral smoke from the coal—no, I could feel the cold. I held my hand over the picture and felt the tingling chill in my palm and along my fingers. The smoke alarm on the wall over the bedroom door pinged. Its tiny red light came on as it sensed the coal smoke. Somehow the picture of that place I’d hated had come alive.

  I tore the drawing out of the book and ripped it to little pieces. The alarm fell quiet. Its light darkened to off. I got up and walked over the writing desk. On its shiny black surface, the alchemical barometer showed an image of a red lion, its mouth open, its head tipped back for a roar. I knew I should tell Tor about the exhalation of cold and the smoke from the drawing. I was planning on telling him as soon as he finished his spell. But as I watched, the lion image changed color, turning a muddy brown, then a greenish neutral, and finally a bright green as the lion’s mouth closed.

  Something had drawn off its power—my power. Tell Tor, I reminded myself. But as soon as I stepped away from the desk, I forgot what I wanted to tell him. Since I’d torn the drawing up, it no longer seemed to matter.

  In the morning we heard from Joel again. Tor sat down next to me at the breakfast bar and showed me the email while I was eating. The police had searched Joel’s apartment and given him their report. The burglar had entered through a rear window protected by an outside wrought-iron safety grill. The burglar had bent the bars until they broke, then reached through and opened the window.

  “Seriously scary dude,” Joel wrote in his email. “They found fingerprints all over the bars. I guess this guy didn’t even bother to wear gloves while he was twisting solid metal. Nothing to it, ho ho ho. Shit! The prints were huge, the cop told me. On beyond one of those iron man types on that ESPN show. The cops think they’re fake, left there somehow to throw them off. I don’t see how anyone could do that, and neither can they, but I guess they gotta say something.”

  Tor quirked at eyebrow at me and waited for my reaction. I pushed the laptop back toward him.

  “Frost Giant?” I said.

  “Who else? Or what else, I should say. What’s ESPN?”

  “A cable sports channel. Not that you’d know.”

  “TV sucks.” Tor put the laptop into sleep mode before he continued. “Typical jötnar thinking. Smash whatever’s in your way. Deal with the consequences later, if there are any.”

/>   “They wouldn’t know about security systems, either, would they? What if that prowler who was up behind our house was a jötunn? Those signs from the security agency wouldn’t mean anything to him.”

  “You’re right. He probably thought they were magic symbols. Huh, when the lights and siren went on up there, he must have freaked. The vitki’s spirits were attacking him, is how he’d see it.” Tor reached for the laptop. “I’m going to email Joel. Tell him to be careful. And tell him that if anyone phones about those papers again, he should make sure they know he doesn’t have them. If they insist on knowing who does, he should just lie and say the lawyer didn’t give him the name.”

  It turned out that Joel had done that already. He answered Tor’s email only a few minutes after Tor sent it. “I’m home today,” he told us. “I’m taking a couple days off work. I’ve got to clean up the fucking mess the guy made of my crib. Landlord’s coming to fix the back window, too. With steel bars, this time.”

  “Leaving a mess sounds like a rime jötunn, all right,” Tor said to me. “Not that I can tell Joel that.” He got up from the bar stool. “I’ve got to finish reading through Halvar’s journals. Say, are you going to campus today?”

  “No, but I’m going to the mall. I need some female supplies.”

  “Okay, but be careful. The poltergeist is probably bound to this house, but you never know with these things.”

  “Is it the same as the dead vitki?”

  “No, but I bet it’s something he created.”

  When Tor went downstairs, I put the rest of my yogurt back into the refrigerator. I’d lost my appetite.

  Before I hit the mall, I stopped at the post office. A few weeks back I’d gotten a post office box because Tor had taken over my mail. I don’t mean he would have read personal letters—I never got any anyway—but he insisted on paying all my bills. I’d been so far in debt from school and the crummy part-time job I’d been working that my credit rating had hit bottom, so he’d paid off all my credit cards and given me one on his account instead. Before you say “sounds great!”, you need to realize this means he could see everything I bought when the statement came in. If I ever watched a TV show on my laptop, he’d bitch about it.

  So to re-establish credit I’d applied for a charge card at the fancy department store in the mail. I could buy small things and pay them off each month. I was counting on the way those expensive places hand out credit, and sure enough, my new card had arrived. I tucked it into my wallet and threw the envelope away in a public trash can. Then I went to the mall, bought what I needed at the drug store with Tor’s card, and bought myself a red cotton tank top with my new card.

  When I got back home, I put the car into the garage and locked the door after me. As I headed back to the house, I saw the Frost Giant kid magically appear at the end of the driveway. A wisp of fog blew across the lawn, formed an oval, and disappeared, leaving the boy behind. It all happened so fast that someone passing by might not have noticed, or if they had noticed, they would have assumed that something must have gotten in their eyes or come up with some other excuse to explain it away.

  The young giant smiled, waved, and hurried down the driveway to meet me. I kept my keys in my hand and waited for him right by the side door of the house, in case I had to make a fast exit.

  “I have come with a message,” he announced. “Will you take it to the vitki?”

  “I will if you answer a question for me. But first, let me tell you that I don’t have any elixir to give you today.”

  “I see this.” He heaved a sigh. “Too bad. Very well. I will answer your question. Here is the message.” He looked away and let his eyes go slightly out of focus. From the stilted way he spoke, I got the impression that he was repeating the exact words that had been given to him. “Why have you not answered our note? We have given you the note as you wished. Will you do what we want? Answer soon.”

  I considered telling him that Tor couldn’t understand the note’s language, but to do so meant admitting a weakness. In the old sagas powerful men never admit weaknesses, even when they should.

  “I’ll give him your message,” I said. “Here is my question. Where did you learn English?”

  “My grandmother taught us. She is from the island where they speak it. Here in your world, that is. My grandfather stole her heart many years ago, and she came home with him to live among us.”

  “So you’ve got human blood.”

  “Only a little!” He gave me a jutted-chin scowl.

  “Do the other kids tease you?”

  “Yes.” He looked down with a sigh. “We have fights.”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with that. You had to defend your honor, right?”

  He looked up with one of his goopy smiles. “Yes,” he said. “You understand.”

  “I’ve got human blood too,” I said.

  “True. But you are not all human, yes? I smell this. You smell like ice and beautiful rain, not apes.” He frowned. “But you are very small.”

  “I’m not a jötunn, no. Is your grandmother tall?”

  “Short for us, very tall for humans. Even for a Jorvik woman, she was very tall. But, she tells me, since she has lived with us, she has grown much taller still.”

  I heard the scraping sound of someone raising the screen on an upstairs window. I looked up just as Tor stuck his head out.

  “Maya!” he called out. “Is the jötunn still here?”

  The Frost Giant yelped and pointed. “The vitki! I go now.”

  “No!” Tor shouted. “I heard you ask a question. You stay for my answer.” He leaned further out of the window and pointed at the jötunn. “Stay!”

  The boy stayed. He was trembling so hard that when he tried to speak, he only stammered.

  “Here is my answer,” Tor continued. “No. Understand? Just no.”

  The boy tried to speak, stammered again, then managed to force out, “I tell them this.” He took one step back and disappeared.

  Tor laughed and left the window. My own hands shook as I unlocked the side door, which led to the staircase. I hurried up and found Tor opening a bottle of dark beer in the kitchen.

  “You must have deciphered the note,” I said.

  “No.” He took a swig from the bottle. “It just never pays to agree to do what a giant asks you to do.”

  “Say what? You don’t even know what they want, do you?”

  “Yeah, so? I mean it, Maya. It doesn’t pay to give in when the rime jötnar demand something of you.” He had another swallow of beer. “So I won’t.”

  I made a squealing sort of noise in sheer frustration.

  “Besides,” Tor went on. “I’ve got a good idea of what the note said. Give us back our gold plaque.”

  “That would fit with the stuff Joel’s told us.”

  “Yeah. It’s the only thing I can think of that they’d want. We always wondered who could wear the thing, it’s so heavy.”

  “I thought it was maybe for horse gear, but it would suit a giant, too.”

  “Sure would. Look, while you were at school this morning, I read more of Halvar’s journals. I focused on the ones from the last couple of years of his life. He never came right out and used the words rime jötnar, but he kept writing things like ‘they want it back,’ or ‘they made another demand’. He did talk about Nils, who was still living in New York then. Nils was pissed off because he wanted the same thing that the mysterious ‘they’ wanted. Halvar refused to give it to either of them. He sent it to my dad instead.”

  “And either Nils or the ‘they’ killed Halvar. For the ornament?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. There were a lot of people who had reasons to hate the old bastard. He didn’t get rich by playing fair.” Tor considered the beer bottle with a small frown, as if it could tell him the answer. “But I’d put my money on the Frost Giants being the killers if we were going to bet on it. They’re like that.”

  “And you just royally pissed them off.”

&n
bsp; Tor grinned and shrugged. I took a deep breath to keep from screaming at him.

  “Why won’t you give it back, if it’s theirs?” I said.

  “Because first, we don’t know if it is theirs. Yeah, it probably was at some point, but we’re not a hundred per cent sure. They could have stolen it from someone, anyway. Second, it might help me control the bjarki.”

  “Might?”

  “Why else would Nils have wanted it so bad? I bet it’s because he knew it had something to do with were-creatures. I can’t throw that away. And finally, it’s mine now, and I don’t give in to threats.”

  Tor finished the beer, wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve, and set the empty bottle down on the counter. With a crack and crackle like gunfire it shattered. Glass sprayed. I yelped and jumped out of the way. Tor stepped back, wincing. A couple of pieces had stabbed the back of his right hand. Skinny runnels of blood wound their way between his fingers.

  “I left the kitchen window open,” he said. “Shit, this is what I get for being stupid.”

  I ran across the room, pulled down the screen, and slammed the window shut. Tor very carefully stepped clear of the broken glass on the floor and crossed to the cabinet where we kept clean dishes. He took down a saucer and let the blood on his hand drip into it, glossy red blood, oozing élan.

  “Too valuable to waste,” he told me. “I’ve got to carve some more runes.”

  “Whatever.” I forced myself to look away before I salivated. “I’d better sweep up all this glass before one of us gets cut.”

  “The bleeding’s stopping.” Tor was frowning at the back of his hand. “If you get me some Band-aids, I’ll rinse this off and then get to work.”

  Going into the bathroom for the Band-aids, away from the sight of blood, was a relief. When I came back into the kitchen, he was drying his cut hand off on a couple of paper towels.