Sorcerer's Luck

  “Not a good atmosphere to grow up in. Jeez, I’m sorry. The girlfriend—do you have a stepmother?”

  “I guess. Not that she’d ever think of herself that way. She wouldn’t have done a thing for me and Roman even if we were starving at her door.” I smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “Not that we’d ever have asked her to.”

  “Too bad. She’s a bitch, huh?”

  I merely shrugged and scowled for an answer. Tor allowed me my silence.

  In my memory I could see my father so clearly, his narrow face with the high cheekbones, his dark eyes, his hair that had gone gray so early in his life, his droopy moustache. I remembered my stepmother, too, and her hatred.

  She’d hissed at me from the other side of his deathbed. “You’ve killed him,” she said. All I could do was stare at her. Her blue eyes glittered, her painted red mouth twisted in hatred. Even at my father’s deathbed she wore make-up.

  Hatred like Nils’s hatred, I thought as I looked back on it. It hurt her more than it hurt Roman and me.

  But I knew why she hated me. For years my father had robbed his own élan to feed me. He’d hunt, take a little of the life energy for himself, then funnel the rest to me. He’d kept his young daughter alive until she could hunt on her own. While he fed me, his own heart grew weaker. His own life ran dry like a well pumped one time too many.

  That night I had a dream that wasn’t precisely a nightmare, even though I found it deeply troubling. I was standing in the living room of the flat. I ran down the hall to my bedroom and found two rooms instead of one, mine with its familiar furniture and beyond it, an empty room. That’s impossible. It was one of those dream voices that come from everywhere and nowhere. I ran back the other way, crossed the living room, and found the bedroom I shared with Tor, but although the west window looked out on the usual view, wooden shutters covered the other window. I tried to open them, but they were locked.

  I woke in a cold sweat. That’s the way the flat really is. I knew it with the muddled certainty of someone who wakes from a particularly vivid dream. This insight, however, stayed with me instead of fading like dream-truths usually do.

  Beside me Tor lay on his side, his back to me, breathing heavily but comfortably. I slipped out of bed without waking him and made my way through the dark living room to the hall that led to my own room. I could see the open door to the bedroom and across from it, the door to my bathroom. The hall seemed to end just beyond those two doors. I walked down to the door into my bedroom, reached inside, and flipped the switch that turned on the floor lamp. The room itself extended well beyond the wall that marked the end of the hallway. Since from the outside the building had no odd bay or extension to hold that extra space, something had to lie behind the end of the hallway. I wondered if I was about to have a Bluebeard moment, but by then I had to know.

  I’d taken two steps toward the end wall when I heard someone walk up behind me. I spun around and screamed before I could stop myself. Tor stood blinking at me in the spill of light from my bedroom door. He’d put on a pair of jeans.

  “What the hell?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just—uh—well.” I was gasping for breath.

  “Were you sleepwalking?”

  “No.” I took a couple of deep breaths and steadied myself down. “I had a dream about the floor plan of this flat.” Saying it aloud sounded stupid, but I forced myself to continue. I pointed down the hall. “Like, is there something behind that wall?”

  “Yeah. A closed-off room. Do you want to see it? It’s probably dusty as hell.”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “Huh? That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  He flipped on the overhead light and walked down the hall with a wave to me to follow. He stroked one hand down the seemingly solid end wall, frowned, moved over a few inches and repeated the gesture. He grinned and pressed on something. As the door creaked open, I saw what had concealed it. Its vertical edges ran along the stripes of the wallpaper, and at the top it lined up with the bottom of the dado strip. The dim light at the hallway’s end had made the cracks invisible to a casual glance. Behind the door lay an empty room littered with dust bunnies. One wall held a set of cheap shelves with nothing on them. A light fixture with no bulb hung from the ceiling.

  “The guy who owned this place before me had weird ideas about storage,” Tor said. “You’ve seen the bank of drawers in that big closet downstairs. I found this room after I moved in, but I didn’t have anything to put into it. He must have kept something valuable here, though. Why else hide the door this way?”

  The explanation was perfectly rational and normal-sounding.. “But what about the shutters?” I said.

  “Huh? What shutters?”

  By then I had no idea what I meant. I turned away and hurried back down the hall. I heard Tor close the door to the hidden room. The overhead light went out as he followed me. As dreams do, mine was fading and breaking up into pieces of imagery.

  “But the room was real,” I said.

  “You’ve seen the downstairs. You must have noticed the door there, the one under the hidden one up here.”

  “Of course! And I must have made the connection without really thinking of it.” I turned around to look at him. I fought my memory, finally recovered the image. “What about the shutters in the bedroom?”

  “There aren’t any shutters.” Tor looked so puzzled that I figured he was telling the truth. I needed to be sure.

  “You didn’t install any magical shutters or find any ordinary ones when you moved in?”

  “No, none. But they might be the point of the dream. There’s something you’re not looking at. You’ve shut something away from yourself.”

  As soon as I heard the words, I knew he was right. “Now I’m afraid to go back to sleep,” I said.

  “You need to start drawing these things. The things you see in your dreams, I mean.”

  I stayed silent. Tor cocked his head to one side. “Why don’t you want to?” he said. “They’re just dream images. Nothing’s going to jump off the paper and bite you.”

  “That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  “Okay. What are you afraid of?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to figure that out first.”

  “Fair enough.” He yawned again. “Let’s go back to bed. I need more sleep.”

  We returned to the bedroom. The first thing I did was check the windows, but of course, there weren’t any shutters. When we lay down again, Tor fell asleep almost immediately. I lay awake and listened to the hum of the air conditioning. I heard voices in it, talking to me, but in a language I didn’t know. When I finally fell asleep I had no further dreams that I could remember in the morning.

  Chapter 12

  Bryndis Leifsdottir and her son Orvar Arngrimmsson lived in a tidy little house in the middle of the Westlake neighborhood, a lot of other tidy little houses just off the freeway in Daly City. As we drove through the development, I noticed four basic architectural plans, turned on their lots to add variety to the look of the place. Each house had a bay window, and each sat behind a short green lawn. Over the years, though, the houses had acquired some character thanks to different paint jobs and plantings. Bryndis’s freshly-painted white house sported a flower bed, blooming with purple flowers, under the bay window. Over the front door I spotted a wooden plaque with runes carved into it. Tor smiled at the sight.

  “It’s basically a kind of prayer to keep the house safe,” he told me.

  When we rang the bell, Bryndis herself, a white-haired woman with piercing blue eyes, answered and ushered us into the warm yellow living room, set with a sofa and two recliners upholstered in a vaguely Jacobean floral pattern. On the coffee table she’d set out little plates, some cookies, a loaf of homemade rye bread, and a bowl filled to the brim with butter. We introduced ourselves and shook hands all round.

  “Sit down,” she said, smiling. “I bring the coffee now.”

  To
r obligingly sat on the sofa, but I stayed standing for a moment to look at a little pair of shelves on the wall. They held china figurines, some from the early 19th century, all of them antiques of one kind or another. She had good taste. I sat down next to Tor just as Bryndis returned with a tray laden with cups and a glass carafe of coffee.

  For a few minutes we chatted—had we found the house easily, what foggy weather Daly City has—that kind of thing, while we drank the very good coffee. Bryndis cut the loaf of bread, sliced us each some, and buttered each slice so thickly that my teeth left marks in the butter when I bit into it.

  “This is awfully good,” I said. “Thank you so much!”

  “Would you like another slice?”

  “Yes, please, but could I have less butter?”

  “What?” She smiled at me. “You don’t like butter?”

  I realized that she was teasing, just gently. “I do,” I said, “but in moderation.”

  Bryndis laughed, but she did put less butter on the slice. She sat back in her chair with her coffee mug clasped in her hands and considered the pair of us.

  “Well, Torvald,” she said. “Your mother has finally told you about Nils.”

  “Under duress,” Tor said. “Liv pried it out of her.”

  “I don’t know why it embarrassed Sirin so much.” Bryndis glanced my way. “Have you met her yet, Sirin, that is, Tor’s mother?”

  “Not yet, no,” I said. “She’s moved back to Iceland.”

  “That’s a long way, yes. No doubt she’ll come for the wedding. But what was I—oh yes. Sirin was very embarrassed, but it wasn’t her husband that had the illegitimate son, only her father-in-law, and no one held a high opinion of him as it was.”

  “That’s for sure,” Tor muttered.

  “Uh, please,” I put in. “I’m getting confused. Sirin’s father-in-law is your grandfather, Tor?”

  “Yeah, my father’s father,” Tor said. “Halvar Svansson was his full name.”

  “He was in many ways a hard man,” Bryndis went on. “He was Thorlak’s father, and also Nils’s father. My friend Gerda was Nils’s mother, and Sirin is Torvald’s mother.”

  “And my dad was Thorlak,” Tor said.

  “I’ve got it now,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Bryndis gave me a quick smile, then continued in a serious tone of voice. “Halvar could be very cruel. He was cruel to Gerda, you see. He slapped her often. Never more than one slap at a time, but still, that is wrong.”

  I winced and shivered in agreement.

  “Finally she left him because of Nils. She didn’t wish her son to grow up seeing his father treat his mother so badly. I was afraid that Halvar would try to hurt her, but no, he let her go, the kindest thing perhaps he ever did for her.”

  “I’m real glad she got away from him,” I said.

  “Gerda?” Tor put in. “That’s not an Icelandic name. It sounds German.”

  “It is.” Bryndis nodded in his direction. “But she was Swedish. Halvar met her in Sweden and brought her home with him. As if he had bought a dog from a shop, the way he treated her! But she stayed because she was glad to be out of Sweden.” Bryndis turned toward me. “Do you know the history, the babies that Swedish women had with Nazi officers? The pure Aryan babies, another German lie?”

  “I don’t, no.”

  “It was when the Swedes collaborated with the Nazis. The German men in the occupying army wished to get women they considered pure Aryans pregnant—”

  “Wait,” Tor interrupted. “It was worse in Norway. The Lebensborn movement, I mean.”

  Bryndis gave him a totally sour look and continued as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “—and then raise the children to be the new overlords of Europe. All that nonsense about Aryan blood, and there is no such thing, of course! But some Swedish women were duped and had affairs with these enemies. Gerda’s mother was one such. Gerda’s father was a German officer. She never knew his last name. He was later sent to Norway. I think her mother told her that it was to take charge of a supply train. The Resistance shot and killed him there one winter.” She paused to set her empty coffee mug down on the table. “Gerda’s mother’s name was Rosilde.”

  I felt Tor turn tense and heard him catch his breath. I would have asked him what was wrong, but Bryndis sat back in her chair with a shake of her head.

  “It was very sad for the children,” Bryndis continued. “After the war the Swedes turned against these women and put them in prison. They took the children away from their mothers. Gerda was one of them, and she was impounded. The children had nothing to do with their mother’s treachery, but they were very badly treated. Many of them killed themselves after they grew up. Gerda did the same when she was sixty. She wrote me just before and said she could not bear to be old, but I think it was the way she was treated, thrown into a stockade like an animal, shunned and mocked and not properly fed after the war. She could never forget.”

  My eyes filled with tears. I wiped them away with my fingertips. Bryndis handed me a paper napkin and made a clucking sound, sort of like tchah!

  “Oh dear, I’ve upset you!” she said. “But you can see how his mother’s—”She hesitated to search for the word. “–his mother’s melancholy would have infected the boy. And why Gerda never wished to go back to Sweden.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I can see it, all right. This is the kind of thing we need to know. Please, don’t worry about upsetting me. It’s just all so totally sad.”

  “Yes, very. Torvald mentioned that Nils was still angry about Halvar’s will,” Bryndis continued. “I doubt if it was the money. He wanted to be included in his brother’s family.” She nodded at Tor. “His brother, your father, of course, both of them Halvar’s sons, but so different in what they had! Being left out of the will must have upset him for that reason, that he still hadn’t been allowed into the family. He had money of his own, or so Gerda told me some years ago. He was a stockbroker, yes?”

  “An investments manager,” Tor said. “On Wall Street. Yeah, he must have done pretty well.”

  “He was like his father in that, then. Halvar did understand money. But people, no. I remember that when Nils was sixteen, Halvar considered bringing him into the aett.” She smiled at me. “That is a very old way of saying, taking someone into your family, to bring them into the aett. But Torvald, your father refused. Nils was older than he was. Your father didn’t want an older brother over him. Halvar was a very poor father. Thorlak only received little scraps of love and attention, not enough to share.”

  “Yes,” Tor said. “He told me a lot about that.”

  I was beginning to seriously dislike Tor’s grandfather. Slapping his mistress around, ignoring his sons—what a bastard!

  Bryndis talked to us for another hour or so. She had a lot of memories of trying to help Gerda but also of good times they’d shared when both of them had young children. She brought out a photo album and showed us snapshots of her daughter and son along with Nils as a boy. I noticed that in the pictures he always posed a little apart from the other children and rarely smiled. I might have felt sorry for him if I hadn’t kept remembering the scene in the art studio, my shredded canvas, and his liquid insult.

  By the time we reached the end of the album I realized that Bryndis was growing tired. I prodded Tor, made our apologies, and thanked her profoundly for everything.

  “It is nice to see visitors,” Bryndis said. “If you do talk to Nils, I would like to see him again too, one day.”

  “No,” Tor said. “You don’t want to do that. I’m afraid he’s really—” He considered his words. “He’s not doing real well mentally. I don’t think he should ever know that you talked to me about him. I mean it. It could be dangerous.”

  Bryndis’s eyes grew very wide, and she laid a hand on the silver cross pendant at her throat.

  “Very well, then,” she said. “I’ll tell Orvar what you’ve said, too.”

  “Please!” I put in. “Maybe he s
hould delete your pictures from his blog. I found you on the Internet. Nils can, too.”

  Bryndis looked at Tor. “You think Orvar should do this?”

  “Yes.” Tor’s voice was quiet but urgent. “I’d hate to see something bad happen. Just never let Nils know where you are.” He paused, then said something in Icelandic.

  She nodded and answered in the same. As we all walked to the door, they continued the conversation. I did recognize a few words, like runar and vitki. When Tor and I stepped outside, Bryndis turned to me.

  “Well, I’m sorry, we are being rude,” she said. “It is a comfort, speaking the old language.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “I guess I should start learning Icelandic.”

  “Torvald can teach you.” She smiled. “I hope to see you again. At perhaps the wedding.”

  With that she closed the door and spared me from having to commit to marrying Tor right there and then. I walked a few steps down the concrete path through the lawn, but Tor lingered on the porch. He was studying the plaque above the door, I realized. He raised his right hand, and he was tall enough lay a fingertip on the runes. For the briefest of moments I thought I saw them glow, but that might only have been some trick of the light. Tor nodded in satisfaction and hurried to join me. Together we walked to the car.

  “What were you saying?” I asked. “There as we were leaving.”

  “Oh, I just repeated that I thought Nils was having a breakdown. I wanted her to realize that he could get real nasty. And I asked her if I could charge her runes. She said yes.”

  “She knows you’re a sorcerer?”

  “Of course! My grandfather and father were, after all.” His tone of voice implied I should have known. “So she figured it’s been passed down in the family.”

  “I thought you said she’s a Christian.”

  “She is. So?”

  He sounded so puzzled that it dawned me you could believe in religion and sorcerers, too. Why not? The early Christians sure did.

  On the drive home Tor said very little, and I didn’t feel much like talking, either. I resented feeling sorry for Nils. I wanted to hate him, just like I’d wanted to hate the people whose élan I stole, but I couldn’t. I knew what it was like to live with a parent who suffered from depression, and Gerda must have been seriously depressed. My father fell into depression from time and time—his black dog, he called it, and our entire life revolved around his mood whenever the dog came to stay.