“Why didn’t she?”
I shrug awkwardly, bobbing her head. “I think she…liked me, too. We spent that whole first night kind of just staring at each other. You’ve never seen anything like her. She’s all moonlight and silver and diamonds, a perfect grown crystal with clear purple eyes like amethysts, and black diamonds growing in a sharp ridge along her cheekbones.”
Kasja touches her own cheeks, as she’s done before. Her eyelashes flutter.
“That’s why I thought she was a goblin, but she quickly disabused me of the notion. She used elf magic to heal my broken arm.” I raise my left arm, my shield arm, to show Kasja the long streaks of elf gold embedded against the brown skin from my wrist to my elbow, like a tree. “The gold makes me stronger than even Dad’s blood, and thrums sometimes with energy. Or just when there’s gonna be snow.”
She reaches across my chest to touch the tip of the scar nearest my hand. I feel her warmth soak into the gold. “It sings,” she murmurs, “like the gold in the van. I’ve never noticed before.”
There’s something like awe staining her voice, but I chuckle. “You haven’t had so much time to notice.”
“Do you love her?” Kasja leans up and into my chest, gaze right on mine.
I want to kiss her and start up all over again, but thinking of Eirfinna and staring at Kasja makes something sharp come alive in my chest. “I don’t know.”
It seems to displease her.
I add, “She’s wild, but not like you’re wild, where it’s something you contain inside you. Eir is inhuman, alien…she is….” I shake my head. “You can’t love something like that, because maybe her heart is made of the same diamonds as her cheeks and finger claws.”
For a moment, Kasja’s mouth shifts as if she’s going to snarl at me. Her fingers dig into my shoulders. But then she drops her head onto my chest. Her shoulders tremble. Tentatively, I put my hands up around her, stroking the long lines of her bare back.
She says softly, “Unrequited love.”
That startles me into laughing. “You think Eirfinna loves me?”
Kasja lifts her head and offers a playful smile. “Why else would she put up with you for so long?”
“Nice, jill, after I’ve been so good to you!” I laugh and shove her off me, but not with force, and pin her to the bed. She pretends to struggle, hissing like a cat, and I have a strange double-vision of her with sharper teeth and paler hair. I blink, and she uses my distraction to slip away.
“I’m putting on pants and getting us something to eat,” she says, sauntering toward the dinky bathroom.
I listen, stretched out on the bed, as she turns on the sink and ruffles around with clothes. For all my afternoon was truly ragged, I feel stupid content right now, and fall into a doze.
SEVEN.
I wake heaving and retching, but strong hands help me lean over the bed to puke in a tin bowl. My stomach knots and my sinuses are a sieve of fire, blinding me. Cold cloth on my neck and against my forehead, a low, soothing murmur. Sleep.
• • •
There’s sunlight the next time, and a dull hammer in my skull, but I’m not still sick. My body is heavy, though, and needs a stretch, water, and some ragging bacon and potatoes. I grunt as I roll on my side to push up. The place smells of sweat and fresh air. I can hear the road and something like a squeaky wheel on a laundry cart.
The door of the room is open to the parking lot.
And Captain Sune Rask sits in the only chair, beside the TV stand.
I fly up, but grip my head as it swims with the sudden motion.
He doesn’t move. Through narrow eyes, I stare at him, trying to find a thing to say.
Despite the shabby chair and the worn paint behind him, he sits straight, uniform unwrinkled. He watches me right back with those hooded pale eyes, mouth pursed thoughtfully, one brow cocked. His hands rest on the arms of the chair, tense and still. Everything about him is sharp; a man built out of knives. But there’s a brilliant red bruise arcing around his left eye, and split skin on the same cheekbone, a slice down his bottom lip, pluming it up like a pout.
Almost makes me smile.
But rag me sideways, I remember him helping me last night. It was Sune who put the cloth on my neck and held the bowl for me to be sick in. I might be sick again right ragging now. “Where’s Kasja?” I manage, though not so demanding as I intended.
One finger lifts, and he points out the door. “With your missin’ van, I wager.”
“She stole my…what?” I sink back onto the bed, head in hand. Where my fingers press into my skull, the ache eases. “No way. You’re so full of skit, Rask, what’d you do to me?”
“Kept you from swallowin’ your own vomit.” His tone is even, but he goes all tense again.
“I don’t get sick.”
Now he picks up a thin, clear vial from the pressed-wood TV stand. Holding it delicately between his fingers, he says, “Smells like thorncherry leaves.”
It’s from my own stash. A hallucinogen when smoked, but mildly poisonous ingested. Knocks you out, only kills you if you asphyxiate or choke. My eyes unwillingly go to the remains of the dinner Kasja brought back last night. Foil from the wrapped burritos and two giant honey sodas. She could’ve spiked it before bringing it in. And probably she knew it wouldn’t kill me, with my constitution.
I get up again and slam into the bathroom. It’s not until I’m leaning over the sink that I realize I’m buck-ass naked. My pants are out there on the floor—rag and rutting jack-licker skit. I twist the shower on high and get in despite the ice-cold water. It heats up too gods-cursed slow, but I grind my teeth and shake as I try not to punch the tile.
She played me.
And I bet she has the Mask. It’s never been elf gold I smelled like to Glory the Fenris Wolf or Sune Rask’s etin-sniffers. It was always Loki’s Mask of Changing, sitting on Kasja-I-don’t-even-know-her-ragging-last-name’s face.
I let her do it.
I liked her.
My palms itch to pick up a hammer and bash it into something. Instead, I let the now-scalding water strip me down, burning the little scratches she left on my shoulder, the raw ache in my skull. I get out, flinging water everywhere, and drip onto the cold tile floor. There’s water beaded on my oily hair and I slick it off, then tie it all back in a knot with shaking hands. I wrap a towel around myself and thrust open the door.
Sune turns to me from where he’d been leaning against the outer doorframe, watching the parking lot. There’s a slip in his sure face when he sees me, and his mouth parts as he flicks those cursed all-seeing eyes up and down me before he reigns in. I ignore it all and say, “You’re gonna take me with you to find her.”
• • •
We head out in his Army Jeep, which bends in its shocks when I climb in. He’d come after me last night, Sune says, because something wasn’t sitting right with him, and he thought he’d use the excuse that I’d been at Bright Home when the Mask was stolen to question us further. “All professional-like,” he says. “I called the guard at Bright Home, and do you know, there was nobody on the guest list or catering list or any other approved list named Kasja anything?”
“I know now,” I say darkly.
“You really didn’t know she had it? You met her there and just whisked off together for a love drive?”
“No, I didn’t know, and at the time, it seemed a shiny idea.” I grip the side handle and stare out at the passing desert. After stopping for coffee, we’re headed north on highway 15, because Sune put a BOLO on my van, and it was seen heading across the kingstate border into Idahow. Nobody’s supposed to intercept Kasja as long as she keeps to the main roads, just radio him her progress. We’ve got a load of kingstate troopers at the ready, and the Idahow Army Depot is dispatching some trucks from Boise to meet us.
“Let me know if you have any more shiny ideas,” Sune drawls.
We ride in silence for a long time, past scrappy desert mountains and walled towns. My coffee?
??s cold before I can bring myself to drink it. I keep thinking back over the last few days—about meeting Kajsa at Bright Home, and how she knew my name right off, her bitter disdain for the gods of Asgard, the sympathy for the trolls, and even the little metaphors she used that were so full of diamonds and caves. Kasja’s questions last night about Eirfinna, her reaction when I said Fin can’t be loved. And this road we’re on, it’ll take us up into Montainia unless we cut over into Cheyenne, where the Yellowstone Caldera, my secondary elf gold drop-off point, is.
“Rag me,” I say, leaning forward to stare at the horizon, as if I could see my van if I tried hard enough.
“What?” Sune asks.
“I know where she’s going, and once she gets there, she’ll be gone from us and your justice forever.”
He slides me a right skeptical look. But I’m so dead serious, he must read it easily in my eyes. “Where? Can we get there first?” he asks.
I nod. “But we’re gonna need to fly.”
• • •
Sune pulls over immediately to argue and it takes me five minutes to convince him Kasja’s real name is Eirfinna Grimlakinder, and that she is an elf from under the Rock Mountains who I’ve been trading with for years. She’ll be at the Yellowstone Caldera, because there are only two places where she leaves and enters her underground caverns, and the supervolcano is the only one north of here.
The captain stares at me with his brow low, one hand on the steering wheel, the other settled loose on his thigh. If it was me, I’d be picking at my pants or tapping a finger or something, but he’s completely still except for the tiny motions of his eyes as he studies mine. “You definitely believe what you’re saying,” he says finally.
“I’m not crazy,” I cry, thumping a fist against the dash. Since the car’s been off, the cool winter air has crept in, and our breath steams the windows at the edges.
“Elves are gone, Amon,” he says flatly.
“They aren’t, you just don’t have the clearance to know about them or something. They’re hiding in the mountains; that’s where the gold comes from, dumbass.”
“Be careful,” he warns.
“You gonna let me beat on you again if I keep it up?”
“I think you’d like getting your hands on me again, Amon.”
It’s crushing how he says my name with that accent. I grind my teeth and bite back any retort. “Look, Sune, she’s getting away, and what I’m telling you is true. You’ll never get the Mask back once she’s underhill. Then what about your career? I’ll be telling my dad your name when I tell him how you kept me from catching her.”
“I’ve never had any evidence for trusting godlings.”
Breath rushes past my teeth, all frustration. What can I say?
Sune glances out the windshield, then back to me. “You hide so much, lie to yourself and others, it must have been easy for her to lie to you. All those lies—what should I believe?”
“I….” I leave my mouth hung open, reaching for something real to say. “I don’t lie to myself.”
He scoffs. “You hit me for those lies.”
And not just girls, apparently.
He’s right about that and why I punched. I lower my chin, study my hands the way Kasja—no, Eirfinna—did. For a second, I give up. She deserves to escape, to get away from me and all of New Asgard, to do what she wants with that Mask. She stole it from a master stealer, fair and right, and whatever my old elf friend wants with it, maybe she should win.
Sune Rask touches my jaw, and I don’t jerk away. He takes my chin in his long fingers and turns me back to face him. I don’t breathe. He studies me for a moment, then slides his fingers slowly off my skin and reaches for his radio to order us a heliplane.
EIGHT.
The Army pilot puts us down across the rough switchback road, ten miles ahead of Kasja and the van, and gestures when we can get out. Sune starts talking, but I tear off my headgear and toss it onto the narrow, uncomfortable seat before piling out the open side of the heliplane. The rotary blades push battering wind down at me, and I shield my eyes with my hand as I jog down the center of the roadway. There’re no cars. The Army and local militia were shutting down any traffic behind Kasja, which is light anyway this late in the season. Most of the upper trails and passes are already closed with snow. No more battle matches are scheduled until spring, and that’s the largest tourist draw to Yellowstone Park: the professional battle guild matches. I’ve seen a few myself, historical reenactments and the more entertaining mummer battles, when one army takes on a goblin or giant role and the outcome isn’t preordained. Those crowds make me great customers.
Even as the heliplane’s blades slow, the wind takes its place, streaming across the steep slope of yellow grass. The valley dips away from the road toward a crystal blue stream before rising again into the Specimen Ridge and, beyond that, the Amethyst Mountain—that’s her ultimate destination, more than ten miles off-road. She’ll have to leave the van in one of the pull-outs or picnic spots and go the rest of the way on foot, unless she’s got a horse in her pocket. Our drop spot was at a lone petrified tree northeast of here, along one of the public trails. There’s an elf cup carved into the stone stump. I stop and cross my arms over my chest, wincing against the brilliant sunlight. A few puffed clouds sit high in the deep sky dome, and it all shines like diamonds.
Sune joins me, hands clasped behind his back. The wind snaps those long tails of his uniform jacket and his eyes tighten, but otherwise, you’d never know if anything bothered him. The tips of his bare ears are pink from the cold, though. I see he’s strapped double-bladed axes to his back with a cross baldric. And his gun’s at his thigh now. He says, “I thought all the volcanoes around here would keep the mountains from being good for underhill castles and caves.”
“Eirfinna told me they can build in any stone, and there are natural caves around here. Not to mention the hot spots that elves and goblins have always craved.”
“The natural gases, you mean?”
“And hot springs. She said they create vents to go where they want. Can build their forges anywhere.”
“I thought goblins had forges and elves had…magic.”
I shrug. “She talks about it all in the same breath. Elves and goblins aren’t so different from each other as maybe they used to be. They joined to survive.”
“So it’s a fallacy to believe the Battle of Sanctus Helen’s truly rid the world of their kind.”
“Propaganda.”
“He doesn’t do that,” Sune says, more offended than I’ve heard him, but showing it only in his taut voice.
I laugh once. “Sure, Thor might not, but men do.”
His shoulders roll very slightly, only to push back more square. Then he says, “What can you tell me about her strength and speed? I know nothing of elves.”
“Well, Sune,” I say in my best afternoon-special voice, “she’s very strong and very fast.”
In answer, he opens his gun holster with a flick of his thumb.
All the breath goes out of me. “You can’t kill her.”
Sune frowns at me, eyebrow rising as he takes in my expression. I grip my elbows tighter across my chest.
“Amon, she betrayed you,” he says like to a child. “Lied to you and stole from you and used you. But you still feel loyalty to her?”
I feel my muscles will creak with the force of my grip. “Yes. She must have had a reason and will have thought the Mask mattered more than—than us.”
“Maybe you’re more your father’s son than I thought,” he mutters, turning back to face the road.
“I’m not a giant ragger, or troll kisser, you skinny rag-ass bastard.”
Both his eyebrows shoot up, but he does not look at me. “I meant the loyalty piece, but take it as you will, I suppose.”
Shame floods my face with blood. I can feel the heat of it.
Our unfortunate silence only lasts a couple of minutes, both of us staring down the rough road. Once or t
wice, I glance at his sharp profile: long nose, low brow, thin lips, all strong and sleek. He’s a weapon. My father’s weapon. I can perfectly see the raging red of the bruise, and the darker mottles blossoming slowly since this morning. Guilt tears at me. There was no call for that, just because he read me so easy.
The van, my sky blue home on wheels, appears, nosing around the switchback below us, then slowing up the approach. She stops a few meters back. I can see her through the windshield, despite the sunglare. For a moment, she does nothing but turn off the engine. Then the driver’s door pops open and she hops down. She’s in her ruined loafers, the Walton jeans, and one of my sweaters hanging off her shoulder, all cockeyed and sexy. Red curls slicking over her breasts. My mouth goes dry. Last night was ragging meaningful, and then she just ragging left. She should have told me then, even if I said she couldn’t be loved. Maybe she could’ve proved me wrong.
My head shakes in denial. Kasja—Eirfinna—doesn’t even glance at Sune, but keeps her gaze on me as she approaches. “I’d have left your van where you could find it, Amon,” she purrs, “no need to chase up here after me.”
“That’s not why,” I say, too much emotion beating up the words.
“Why then?” She shrugs that bare shoulder so my sweater falls farther down her arm, revealing her thin purple bra strap and the edge of lace.
“That’s—that’s what I want to know. Why.” Gods curse it. I hug myself to keep from grabbing her. From punching her.
Sune says, “In the Thunderer’s name, Eirfinna Grimlakinder, give me the Mask of Changing.”
Her mouth opens, and she laughs delightedly. “My name!”
“Fin,” I plead, but I don’t truly know what I’m pleading for.