Sorcerer's Luck

  Tor’s eyes got very wide. “The ornament! That’s the only gold I’ve got, and it’s got runes all over it. I’ve always thought they must spell out an incantation. Huh. You might have answered the question. You’ve got talent, all right.”

  I arranged a fake smile. After a moment he shrugged and went back downstairs.

  When evening fell, we went on guard. I was dreading more illusions, not because I feared them, but because I hated the thought that I had the talent to dispel them. But although we stayed up half the night on watch against the waning moon, Nils never sent a single illusion our way.

  Sunday was the day when everything changed.

  Working the Friday ritual and then our broken sleep on Saturday had left Tor so spent that I did the grocery shopping that Sunday. Although he was reluctant to let me leave the house, I pointed out that in broad daylight in a crowded parking lot and supermarket, I’d be perfectly safe. “Besides,” I told him, “if you’re this tired, I bet Uncle Nils is worse off.”

  He grinned at that and agreed.

  Shoppers crowded the supermarket. Every time someone got too close to me, I reminded myself that I no longer needed to steal their élan. The relief was so profound that at moments I teared up, just because I was no longer afraid. I wasn’t going to run down and die. I wouldn’t feel my heart knocking desperately in my chest. Best of all, I was no longer a thief. That tempting slob of a teenage boy, the rude woman and her obnoxious kids—they were safe from me, and I was safe from myself.

  When I returned home, I drove the car into the garage, took out the two bags of groceries, then locked up. As I was carrying the bags to the side door, however, someone came walking down the driveway to meet me. He must have been seven feet tall or nearly so, a gangly thin kid wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves jersey and a pair of jeans that showed a lot of ankle, an attempt to disguise him as a basketball player, I assumed. His irises were a gray so light that the eyeball seemed almost uniformly white. His hair was dead-white, as were his eyebrows and the hair on his pale arms, but close up I saw the smooth, unlined face and soft jaw of a young teen-ager.

  I immediately thought he might be an illusion, Nils’ masterpiece, maybe, even though the sun was shining.

  “Hello, this is the sorcerer’s house, is it not? You are the sorcerer’s woman, yes?” His English sounded like a parody of a Wisconsin Swedish accent. “I have the note. You will take it in to him, yes? The runes above the door, they keep me out.”

  With a flourish he held out a square envelope of expensive cream laid paper. On the back I saw a lump of gold-colored sealing wax with a rune stamped into it.

  “You’ve asked me three questions,” I said. “I get to ask you three in return.”

  He took a sharp step back. “You are too clever.”

  “If you won’t give me three answers, I won’t take in the note.”

  He debated, looking down, scuffing the toe of his enormous running shoe on the ground like a normal teen might do. Eventually he looked up again.

  “Very well,” he said. “Ask.”

  “Why are you bringing a note?’

  “You asked to send the note. We heard you when the other sorcerer made the silly noises.”

  I did vaguely remember making a joke about a note. “Okay. How old are you?”

  “Thirteen of your years.”

  “Third question. Are you a rime jotunn?”

  Again the scuff, and this time he gave me an agonized look. Sweat beaded on his face from the hot sun. I could barely hear his answer. “Yes.”

  “I thought so! Now I’ll answer. This is his house, and I’m his woman, and I’ll give him your note.”

  I took the envelope from his huge hand and saw a line of runes on the front. As I tucked it into one of the grocery bags, I noticed the two family-sized bottles of cola I’d bought. I took one out.

  “You must be thirsty,” I said. “Here, try this.”

  He risked a trembling smile. I unscrewed the cap and handed the bottle over. He took a sip, grinned, and drank off a third of the bottle in one long gulp.

  “Careful!” I said. “It’s got air in it. It makes you—”

  He burped so loudly that the nearby window rattled. No, he was definitely not an illusion.

  “So good,” he said. “I keep, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He grinned again, took one step away, and disappeared. The bottle disappeared with him. He’d gone back to Jotunheim with a bottle of off-brand cola in his hand.

  When I got upstairs I found Tor sprawled on the couch asleep, a book open in his lap. He woke up, mumbled something under his breath, and sat up straight with a stretch and a yawn.

  “I have a message for you,” I said. “From the Rime Jötnar.”

  I set the bag down, found the envelope, and sailed it into his lap. He took it and stared at it without speaking for so long that I picked up the bag again and carried the groceries into the kitchen. I’d just set them down on the counter when Tor came hurrying in with the envelope in one hand and a piece of cream-colored notepaper in the other.

  “Maya,” he said. “You weren’t kidding.” He turned the envelope over and pointed to the broken seal. “See that rune? It’s Thuraz, thorn. It’s the sign of the Jötnar.”

  “Oh.” My voice shook. “Well, that’s what the kid told me he was.”

  “The kid?”

  “The guy who brought the note. He was a giant kid. Thirteen, he told me.”

  Tor stared at me.

  “He told me he was a rime jotun,” I continued. “Well, I pried it out of him, but he had to be telling the truth. He was all white, hair and all, but he was still a kid.”

  “He wouldn’t lie about that, no.”

  “How did he get here?”

  “I don’t know.” Tor hesitated, his mouth slack. “Unless uh. Oh shit!”

  “What?” I snapped at him.

  “We released a lot of power Friday night. That’s what the red lions mean. I might have opened something up. A bridge or something. To some place.”

  One of the beings I’d read about in the mythology books had crossed over that bridge and walked down our driveway. It finally dawned on me that I was frightened. I forced myself to concentrate on unpacking the grocery bags while Tor stared at the note. Now and then he sounded out a word or two. I put the last carton away in the refrigerator and turned to lean against the counter and look at him.

  “What does it say?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” He looked up wide-eyed. “It looks like the language on the gold ornament. Y’know, the one I keep in the safe, and it could be the same language you started speaking last month. During Nils’s attack. Proto-Gothic again. The only words I recognize are thief and bjarki. I don’t even know what case they are.”

  “What what?”

  “It’s a grammar term. Case endings, like the difference between he and him. They show you what the word’s doing in the sentence.”

  “Oh. That.”

  “Yeah, that. It could be real important. I wonder—one of my old profs at Cal might be able to help me read this, but shit, it’s summer, and he won’t be there.”

  “Do you think you can puzzle it out?”

  “Maybe. I’ll try, and if I can’t—” He shrugged. “I’ll wait, I guess, until the guy who can gets back.” He hesitated. “I’d better cast the runes. I’ll be in the other flat, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Good luck.”

  He gave me a sickly smile and left the kitchen. I’d believed from the beginning that Tor was a runemaster. I’d recognized him as a sorcerer, a vitki as he called it. He’d shown himself to be so powerful that I hadn’t realized he could make a mistake. Apparently he could and had. I had the horrible feeling that when a sorcerer made a mistake, it would be as powerful as he was, neither more nor less.

  I poured myself a glass of cola and went into my bedroom to fetch my laptop. On the writing desk the hermaphrodite stared out at me. Both of its faces were smili
ng.

  Chapter 11

  Even though the moon still hid in darkness, Monday morning brought me back to ordinary life, school, and the start of critique week. My nerves got me to class early. As I walked down the hall, I saw a small mob milling around the door to the painting studio. Students like me, I thought, also nervous. But as I walked up, I realized that our instructor stood at the front of the crowd. She always called herself by her last name, Harper, a tall woman, skinny, with rich brown skin and black hair that she kept in long dreads. That morning she wore her usual denim overalls and an old gingham shirt, as paint-spattered as any of her students’ clothes. She was talking with one of the campus security guards.

  I found Cynthia at the edge of the mob. “What’s happened?” I said.

  “I’m not sure.” Cynthia shrugged and held her hands palm up. “It can’t be anything good.”

  “Yeah, I guess not.” I glanced around and saw a man in a dark blue uniform striding down the hall. “Because here comes a real cop.”

  The Oakland police officer joined the security guard and our instructor at the door. They conferred for a few more minutes, while the crowd of students grew and began to spill down the hallway in a murmur of questions. Finally Harper turned to face us and held up her hands for silence.

  “We’ve got a big problem,” she said. “The room’s been vandalized. A lot of your work has suffered. Brace yourselves. We’re going to let you in a few at a time.”

  You probably could have heard the groans all the way across the bay in San Francisco. Those projects represented hundreds of hours of work and important grade points, too.

  Harper rose on tip-toe and looked over the crowd. “Cantescu,” she said. “You’d better come in first.”

  I felt too sick to say a word as I made my way through. The security guard opened the studio door just enough to let me and Harper slip in. As soon as I got a good look at the big, open room, I felt even sicker. Slashed canvases littered the floor. Thrown paint spattered what was left of them. Paint tubes, squeezed empty, lay everywhere among broken brushes. It took me some minutes to find the remains of my project. Rather than merely slash it, someone had shredded it. Tiny bits of paint-encrusted canvas lay on the floor like dead autumn leaves. The vandal had even broken up the stretcher bars, not an easy thing to do with that thick wood.

  “I got here early,” Harper said. “And found this. Yours is the worst mess of all, which makes the security people think someone particularly had it in for you. Though I dunno, the motherfuckers might just have grabbed yours first and then run out of steam later. They shredded a couple of others, too, just not so thoroughly.”

  “There had to be more than one person, you think?” I found my voice at last.

  “I’m just guessing. There’s bound to be fingerprints with all the lousy paint they threw around.” She sighed. “Unless they had the sense to wear rubber gloves.”

  “How did they even get in?”

  “Through the window.” She turned and pointed at one of the old-fashioned wood-framed panes. “They used a glass cutter to make a hole so they could reach that little gizmo that keeps it shut. Once they turned that, they could just push up the whole window and climb on through.”

  I squatted down and leafed through the shards of my dead painting. They could have ruined it with a lot less effort if they’d only want to cause trouble. Did they think it was dangerous, somehow, and so they had to destroy it? I picked up one of the bigger pieces, maybe three inches of the silver area that had once formed part of the model’s vinyl vest.

  “Can I take this?” I said. “Or will the cops mind?”

  “I doubt if they’ll care. Why do you want it?”

  “I dunno.” I stood up and pocketed the fragment. “Nostalgia, maybe?”

  She gave me a twisted smile. “You don’t have an ex-boyfriend who’d want to hurt you, do you?”

  “No. I’m living with a guy now, but the guy before him, he was the one who dumped me. I was single for over a year.”

  “Okay. Let’s go out. I need to make a general announcement. The good news is that I’ve already made notes on everyone’s work. Did it last Friday, just so I could compare my first impressions with the student critiques. So there will be grades.”

  “That’s a relief!”

  “I knew it would be particularly hard on scholarship kids like you if there weren’t. Don’t worry, you did a good job. I made sure the police know that no one’s failing this class. If someone was, I suppose they might have done this to get out of the critique, but no one needed to, especially not you.”

  “Thanks.” My eyes filled with tears. I snuffled them back. “God, this is so awful!”

  “Yeah, I know. Maybe it was just a class project, but you put a lot of work into that. And then the bastards tore your baby to bits.”

  I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice because I didn’t want to cry in front of her. A class project, sure, but art is art, and that painting contained a little bit of my soul.

  We returned to the crowded hallway. Pretty much the entire class had arrived, as near as I could tell, except of course for Brittany. While Harper told everyone what had happened, I made my way back to Cynthia.

  “There’s not much use in holding the last week of class,” Harper finished up. “I’ll post the course grades online as soon as I have time. Tonight, probably.”

  Harper went back into the classroom. The security guard and the police officer began letting people in to join her four at a time.

  “I’m in no hurry to see,” Cynthia said. “Shit! All that work!”

  “Yeah. They turned mine into confetti. Brittany’s was a real mess, too. I saw yours, though, and it could be patched. Just a couple of slashes.”

  She shrugged and made a small groaning sound. Was it Nils? I wondered. I wished that Tor were there. Somehow he’d know if his uncle were responsible, I thought, not that he could give the police information he’d gained through sorcery.

  “Where is Brit?” Cynthia said. “I suppose she’ll come dragging in later.” She began rummaging through her backpack. “I’ll call her, if I can find the damn phone in here.”

  I glanced around to look for Brittany. Instead I saw Tor, striding down the long hallway. For a minute I thought I was hallucinating, but he waved to me and hurried over.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  Cynthia stared at him in complete open-mouthed surprise.

  “I’ll explain later.” I was too shocked myself to think up a good lie. “Uh, Tor, let’s move over here, okay? Cynthia needs to call Brittany.”

  I laid a hand on his arm just to ensure that he was really there. I felt solid flesh. He caught my hand in his, and we walked some ten feet down the hall, away from the crowd. He dropped his voice to make sure no one could overhear us.

  “I picked up your message,” Tor said. “That you wished I was here, I mean, and I could tell you were upset. So I came over. Leapt the distance. You know.”

  “Thank you so much! Something awful’s happened. The studio got vandalized.” I dug into my pocket and took out the scrap of canvas. “Everyone’s work is ruined. Someone cut my project up into little pieces like this.”

  Tor took the scrap and held it between his palms. His eyes went unfocused, his entire face slackened. After a few seconds he scowled and shook his head.

  “Nils,” he said. “What do you bet? I’m picking up some kind of trace from him. I never should have brought you into the working. I’m so sorry. It was stupid of me, dragging you in.”

  “He must have seen me, then, when I saw him.”

  “Why else would he do this? He wanted to get back at you.” Tor scowled at the fragment of portrait. “His vibes, yeah. I’m sure of it. Fucking coward! Going after you instead of me. I bet he’s trying to drive you away.”

  “Why would he want to?”

  “He’s almost as strong as I am. You tipped the balance in that working. Without you around, he’d have a better chance at me.” br />
  Since I’d spent most of my life afraid of dying, I thought I was used to fear. The icy-cold terror I felt at that moment caught me by surprise. I gasped aloud. Tor threw an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.

  “I really wish,” Tor said, “that I could just go to the cops about this. They wouldn’t believe me. Magical attacks. Sorcerers fighting it out. They’d probably try to get me committed. And they might even be right about that.”

  I managed to smile. He kissed my forehead.

  “This is all my fault,” Tor went on. “My damned conceit again! Arrogance—yeah, you nailed it. I thought I was strong enough to punch a wasp’s nest and not get stung. I’m sorry, Maya. I really blew it.”

  “You don’t need to keep apologizing. He’s the one who attacked you first. I feel awful because he had to go and wreck everybody’s work. I feel like I brought all this down on my friends, y’know?”

  “Well, that’s not your fault. That’s his fault. You didn’t make him do anything. What a crappy thing! Do you remember when you felt like someone was spying on you at school?”

  “Yeah, I sure do. It must have been him, all right. He must have seen this studio room.”

  I was about to say more when Cynthia hurried over to join us.

  “I reached Brit,” she said, “and she’s on her way. She was just leaving the house, she told me, when I called, so she won’t be here for another half-hour.”

  “Late as always,” I said, just because it was such a normal thing to say.

  Cynthia glanced at Tor and raised an eyebrow. “On the other hand, you’re here early.” He nodded but kept quiet.

  “He needed to use the car.” Luckily I’d never sworn any vows to the runes against lying. “So he was just going to drop me off.” I glanced his way. “You must have seen the police car drive up.”

  “I wanted to know what was going on,” Tor said, and of course that was true. “Make sure you were all right.”

  “Well, thank heavens, we’re all okay,” Cynthia said. “But oh my lord, all our work! At least we’re going to get grades.” She tried to smile. “I suppose we should be grateful for getting an extra week off.”