by Ellen Mint
With an exasperation at either her digging into the sticking point between them, or perhaps at his own father’s eccentricities, Emeric was the one to pluck the frame off the wall. He tried turning it around in his hands as if that might reveal an answer, or a date, but none seemed to be had. “The supposed War to end all Wars.” He snickered at the foolish thought so many bought into.
“My father certainly thought as much,” Nadire confessed. “Even if he’d never admitted to visiting the trenches during combat.” God’s nails, if she’d known…! But no, she was studying then, in the mountains away from nearly all aspects of the war save the rations. She had no idea what her father was up to. In truth, she was trying to avoid the macabre nature of planning Christmas in the midst of so much death.
Reaching a finger out across the gap, Nadire drew the tip against the old silver frame. She circled her father’s face smiling as if the dogend the soldiers offered him was the sweetest cigarette in the world. There was hope. Despite the darkness creeping down the dug-out pits of Europe, an end was in sight. When the Great War became WWI, that was extinguished.
“I imagine your father was never fooled,” she whispered to herself before staring up into Emeric’s melting eyes. In the reminiscing, she didn’t realize she drew so close he was but a whisper away. Barely even a neck stretch for a kiss.
“You’d be surprised,” he said, his lips pursing as if he was fighting against the urge to kiss her or throw her out. Maybe the reminder of his father’s existence, of hers getting in their way, slammed down between them again like a steel wall. Either way, Emeric pulled back and busied himself by placing the picture on its hook.
Rubbing a hand against her arm as an unexplainable chill crawled over her, Nadire gazed around the room. “I have to admit, this wasn’t what I pictured.” It felt like the vacation home of a devoted grandfather who had to put every single picture of his loved ones on the wall. While Mirek was in many, she’d swear at least half held Emeric and a woman she’d guess was his mother.
“What were you expecting?” Emeric asked, chuckling in his thigh-trembling baritone.
Trying to swallow down the lust so her voice wasn’t breathy with hunger, Nadire said, “In truth, more weapons and perhaps naughty lists stretched across the walls.”
“Ha, my father was never one to write much down.”
In swiveling about, Nadire’s gaze landed above the door she entered. A simple steel sword, with no ornamentation in the hilt, no etchings across the blade, hung above the frame. “I guess you do have a weapon after all.”
“Ah, yes, that was the first sword my father ever made.”
At that Nadire’s eyes opened wide, her head snapping back to Emeric. “He’s a smith?”
“Was. Hasn’t been in…years. Not much call for a blacksmith anymore. Not one that specialized in blades and armor anyway.”
She’d never have guessed. Sure, both of the Hellswarths were built like Hephaestus, with shoulders that could fell a tree in their bare hands. But something in Mirek’s seemingly scattered attention convinced her he’d been more a cleric or the like before joining with her father. Most of the others were.
No wonder the pair of old crafters got along.
Used to get along.
“You had no idea?” Emeric seemed shocked as if his father’s blacksmithing days were well known. After shaking her head negative, he laughed. “I assumed everyone did. It’s in the name, Hellswarth.”
“I’d thought he assumed the name after becoming, you know…”
“My father wore the mantle of Krampus before Hell was designated as such, so no. It’s…” Emeric shook his head, his body drifting towards the couch that still held remnants of whatever he was working on. “Do you want to know why my father became the Krampus?”
She hadn’t thought of it the same way Nadire didn’t question her father’s existence. He was Santa Claus, had been centuries before her birth, and would continue to be for centuries after. It was as certain as the dawn of the sun to her. But, as she stared around the strange cabin of a man with more heart than she’d ever have expected the dreaded mythical child-kidnapper to have, Nadire nodded.
“Perhaps we should…” Emeric waved a hand to the couch. With a tiny smile from him seeming to suddenly remember the etiquette for having a guest pop by, Nadire perched herself upon the edge of the sofa.
Or at least she tried to. As her weight fell upon it, the cushions themselves seemed to sucker her inside. They cradled not only her posterior but her back as well, causing Emeric’s papers to come racing for her lap. With a gulp, the pair grabbed them both and tried to pile the mess together. In doing so, his hands cupped against the back of hers, their eyes meeting across the madcap race to rescue research from the abyss of the couch cushion.
“Do you…wish to sit?” she asked, struggling to break her plunge into his icy pools to gaze at the seat beside her.
Emeric’s hands released off of hers, his body staggering back. A hand moved to swipe through his hair, his face stricken as if he kept pulling himself back from the edge by sheer willpower. With a gulp, he turned to the antler armchair at the side. “Here will work,” he said, plopping down into it.
Trying to take no offense at his avoiding being near her—no doubt his father was close at hand—Nadire said, “So your father was a blacksmith?”
“For the army.”
“Which one?”
Emeric blinked at that, his tongue rolling through his mouth before he responded. “He never said. I don’t think he wanted me to know, to dig into any of its history. At the time he thought the job an honest work. Armies needed smiths, armies were happy to pay smiths because good smiths kept the armies alive.”
Tapping his fingers to his knees in a slow rhythm, Emeric continued. “The problem was the soldiers themselves. Lax commanders wouldn’t police them, would let them run amok through towns doing the most despicable things young men trained to kill could dream up. And those soldiers would brag about such sins in front of the blacksmith they never thought was listening.
“At first my father said he ignored it. The coin was good, the work was steady, it wasn’t his place. He just let them continue with their raping and pillaging, committing war crimes before they were labeled such because he didn’t think it his job.”
Nadire pursed her lips so tight she could feel them turning white. “What changed?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there was a particularly horrific crime that pushed him over the edge. I can…” The lawyer closed his eyes tight. “I can hazard a guess as to what, or worse. One day my father lit up the bellows and forged for himself those.” It was to a glass case placed beside the fire that Emeric pointed. Nadire’d been so enthralled with the paintings and pictures she missed what looked like a set of iron claws designed to extend over the fingers. They were attached by rings to a mechanism that fit over the back of the hand. In total two pairs, one done in black, the other a faded brass rested in the case.
“Claws from the forge of the blacksmith,” Emeric explained. “He caught one of the soldiers stumbling out to take a piss while fully drunk. And, with those, slashed into his skin the word ‘rapist.’”
God! Nadire tried to peer closer while remaining rooted in the spot. Despite it being impossible to tell at this angle, she could swear she saw blood clinging to the razor-sharp ends.
“He kept at it, every night. Pulling those who bragged of such misdeeds by day into the dark and punishing them. At some point, he wore the mask, as much to hide himself as to bring the fear of demons into them. Slowly, he worked through an entire encampment, then the army itself. Eventually, he began to trek clear across the Holy Roman Empire.”
Emeric paused to scratch at the back of his neck, his nose wrinkling. “He says he has no idea when he began to sense people’s sins or found he was no longer aging. Just that time seemed to pass slower and he was able to cover ground quicker than any other human. Until he met your father.”
“Was
that when he switched to children?” Nadire gulped. It was one thing to punish grown adults for crimes that’d never see justice done, but to go after children was a whole other tale. Yet, that was what the Krampus was known for. Not a vengeful blacksmith forcing armies to behave lest they find themselves with their sins carved into their chests. He was a kidnapper of children, a leaver of switches, an ever-looming presence to remind those young ones to keep in line or fear the consequences. He wasn’t a good guy.
Emeric seemed to sense her less than kind thoughts on the matter, his lips pursing as he shifted on what had to be his father’s chair. Would Mirek grow angry at his son claiming such a spot? Nadire knew her father’d grumble if she ever sat in his place by the fire.
“It wasn’t like that,” Emeric said, causing her to flinch as she struggled to realize he wasn’t referring to the chair situation but his father’s choices. “Saint Nicholas didn’t precisely begin with children either.”
True. Somehow the holiday that was once about generosity to those in need became a time of merriment for children. While the Myras maintained their charity as best they could, Santa Claus himself stopped being an aspect of that, leaving adults in the dust.
“My father thought,” Emeric sighed, “still thinks that, in order to stomp out sin in the world, you have to catch it in the cradle.”
“Meaning?”
“Teach the children to behave, give them not only a gift for being good but punishment for being bad, and maybe there would be less cruel adults in the world.”
“But he stopped?” Nadire asked.
“He did because he thought he wasn’t making a difference. He grew jaded sometime in the midst of the expansion of colonization and the height of the slave trade that despite all his efforts, none of it mattered. So he quit,” Emeric admitted to the woman he was trying to sue to get his father reinstated as Santa Claus’ number-one bad guy.
Growing uncomfortable from the pregnant cloud of unspoken resentment between their two families, Nadire shifted on her legs. The once welcoming couch grew cold as she said, “And he thinks the world’s gone bad because he stopped.”
“Hasn’t it? While my father stepped away, yours leaned into rewarding everyone. There’s no such thing as a naughty list anymore, only gifts for the people who must love him for an eternity.”
“That isn’t true!” Nadire was tempted to leap to her feet and scratch up the old argument, but she kept in place, her temper tempered.
Emeric seemed to sense it, his chin pivoting as if he was trying to read her sins. When that didn’t work, he asked, “When was the last time your father ever gave out a piece of coal?”
“A few years back to that woman who insisted Santa Claus had to be white,” Nadire said off the cuff. Oh was he spitting hot tacks over that. It took all she had to convince him to not flood her fancy stark-white living room with nothing but coal.
Emeric laughed at her confession, his cheeks brightening from their dour turn at reviving the past. “Yes, I imagine that one didn’t sit well with Nicholas of Myra.”
“But,” Nadire whispered, her fingers knotting together. With her head bent low, she inched off the couch, closer towards Emeric Hellswarth. “Otherwise, you’re right. It just…stopped. One day we ceased needing coal altogether. Round about the sixties come to think of it.”
Her father’s naughty lists grew shorter and shorter until it was only a few pages long. At that point, the elves in charge of scrounging up the coal grew perturbed at their lagging work. Elves could be mischievous bastards, but they also prided themselves on trading honest work for honest whiskey. With so little to keep them occupied, Nadire found different jobs and the coal department ceased to be.
“It happened so slowly I didn’t…” she confessed, painful tears brimming in her eyes. “I never even noticed. Maybe that was why…”
Warm hands reached across the cold gap, swaddling her useless fingers in his safe hold. As she tried to swallow away the fault in her soul, she looked into the face of a man who wasn’t screaming he told her so. Who wasn’t laughing at her too late realization. No, instead, he was rubbing his thumbs over the back of her hands and gazing at her as if he was ready to fully embrace her at a moment’s notice.
She should take her hands out, slip back further into the couch. Keep up the wall they had between them or else…
There was still a job to do.
“I…” Emeric’s pinning gaze turned behind him to what Nadire assumed was the kitchen. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Okay,” she said, hating that she felt sad when he released her hands. “Who?”
“You’ll see, but it’s…it’s chilly out. Do you need a coat?” Emeric staggered for a coatrack loaded in furs probably from before the dodo went extinct.
Nadire chuckled. Opening up her bag, she dug inside and got a grip onto a sleeve. As she tugged, out came a middle-weight jacket, as bright red as Santa’s coat. With a laugh, she cinched the jacket around herself and said, “A Myra is always prepared.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WHAT WAS SHE doing here?
To get him to drop the lawsuit? To try and suss out what his next tactic would be against her father? To deliver the official papers to start that countersuit they threatened them with?
To talk.
That was all she said, and she seemed unwilling to elaborate more. So what was Emeric’s brilliant suggestion? To pull her out into the back garden to see the tree.
Nadire bundled up the magical jacket, her curling hair dancing against her cheek. As the winds turned cross, a tendril bounded to her lips, seeming to stick to her lipgloss. Without pause, Emeric reached over to slide it off and behind her ear. It wasn’t until his finger slipped away from the soft lock that he realized what he did.
Gulping, he wasn’t certain what her reaction would be. But she blushed, wrapped her hand to the back of her ear, and mumbled, “Thank you.”
Hard to say if that was good or bad. Why was she here?
To put the final nail in this holly-decorated coffin? To tell him to his face that it was over and there’d never be another moment together? To see if he’d already brought Katarina or any other woman into his life in the month since they were caught?
To try…?
“Who are we meeting?” Nadire asked, her lips twisting up in consternation. He’d assumed it the cold at first, but as she glared around the cleared forest floor, brown grass picking at her ankles, Emeric began to wonder if she didn’t think the answer would be his new girlfriend.
Taking a steadying breath to smooth out his voice, Emeric stepped beside the silver fir tree that stretched over thirty feet tall and was climbing ever higher to the sun. It was alone in the yard, all the rest of the forest cleared from the grounds devoted to the Krampus. Nadire drew her fingertips over the branches, delighting in the glint of the silver edges in the sun.
“Since I was afforded the opportunity to meet your mother, I thought you should meet mine.” Emeric couldn’t stop the wince, his throat constricting even as he kept the tears at bay. Confusion claimed her beautiful dark eyes until he stepped to the side of the stone.
Hand chiseled by a man who had hundreds of years to perfect his craft, it was of a striking black and white marble. Gold was inlaid into the words, telling the world the name of the woman who bore him and how little time she got on the planet.
Nadire stepped closer, her knees bending as she traced her finger over the German. As if she needed to touch it to understand what Emeric was telling her, what he had to explain to the daughter of immortals. “Your mother…?” She stared up at his heart in his eyes. Her eyes.
“My father buried her at home, and…” He too cupped his fingers along the silver pine needles that never pricked him. “And her body fed this tree. Every day it grew stronger and stronger. A reminder that…” Damn it, he hated feeling so weak for this eternal reminder that some part of him was as fragile as anyone else on this planet. “That she’s neve
r truly gone.”
“Emeric, I…” With a hand cupping her mouth, Nadire staggered back staring skyward at the pine tree that had over eighty years to grow undisturbed in the black forest. Others of its kind were chopped down, harvested for the winter festivities. But not this one. This one had as long as the earth supported it to grow and prosper.
Nadire was stricken by his move, her face wan as she chewed on the side of her nail. “When you mentioned her, I thought that…”
That she was but a plane trip away, same as hers. That he hadn’t watched his mother slowly waste away as age drained what had been the pillar of his soul while he remained obstinately young. Curling a hand to the marble stone, he was surprised at how it never cooled. Even in the rising winter, warmth radiated from the sun’s kiss against his palm.
“She wasn’t gifted immortality the way my father was. The way I am. Just a normal woman he…he fell for.” His mother was tight-lipped about their meeting, but his father would extoll on and on about this tenderhearted nurse that found the Krampus with a thorn in his paw. Not literally, Mirek was a man at the time, but he’d stupidly stepped in a bear trap. And from a tiny cabin hidden in the woods came a young woman, Brigitta insisting she not only bind his wounds but keep him in her bed until he healed.
His father claimed he fell in love the moment their eyes met, his mother would tell Emeric it took a few weeks. The grateful Krampus was often stopping by the young widow’s cabin with gifts—fuel, food, word from the outside world. While she’d been studying to be a nurse, the death of not only her first husband but father sent Brigitta on a spiral of pain and she retreated from the outside world. Barely even twenty when the world turned against her and who should stumble into her path but the old goat himself?
That was how Emeric grew as well, alone in his parent’s cabin away from society, from questions of how Mirek never aged. It was happy, damn near blissful for the man who wanted to retire from the world, until reality settled in.