A young couple came up the stairs. Hirka wasn’t sure whether to scream for help or tell them to run. They quickly realized that something was wrong. They whispered to each other, turned around, and went in another direction.
Graal took a step closer to her. Naiell did the same, as if they were pieces in a game. Stefan’s eyes darted between them, panicked. He had one hand by his belt, and she knew he was going to draw his gun. She had to do something.
The book. He mustn’t get the book.
Slowly, she started edging closer to the display case. Graal gave her a broad and brilliant smile. A powerful smile. Hirka tasted blood and realized she’d bitten her lip.
“You are mine. What does he say to that?” Graal asked.
His voice was deep. Rough and guttural, like Naiell’s, yet somehow more real. And he had revealed the truth. The secret she’d been desperate to keep from Naiell was out. There was no going back now.
“I haven’t told him yet,” Hirka replied, inching even closer to the book.
Graal threw his head back and laughed. “Told him? Blood of my blood, he knows very well who you are. We know when our own are near. How else do you think he found you?”
Hirka hesitated. Locked eyes with Naiell. He slowly shook his head. She knew what he was trying to say. That she shouldn’t listen to this monster.
Graal nodded at Naiell. “He’s awfully serious, isn’t he? Have you ever seen him laugh at himself?” Hirka didn’t reply. “No, I didn’t think so. Still the same. It’s shameful, not changing at all in a thousand years, don’t you think? So what else hasn’t he told you, blood of my blood?”
“He’s told me enough,” Hirka said. She was standing right next to the book now. But she knew that as soon as she lifted the glass, everything would happen at once. Stefan and Naiell were standing a couple of steps away from her. In the middle of the glass floor. A desperate plan started to form. She glanced down at the book.
“Now, now. What do you want with that? You don’t even know what it is,” Graal said, killing what little hope she had of surprising him.
“I know it can help you open the gateways,” Hirka said. “And that’s enough.”
He laughed again and took a step toward Naiell. “The raven rings are already wide open. To anyone with the Might. Our people are free to enter Ym every single day, and there is nothing you can do to stop them.” He looked at Hirka again. “He knows that, too. That’s why he’s here. What do you think our people would do if they got hold of him? The man who betrayed them all?”
“Enough!” Naiell screamed. People turned to look at them. Someone came running from behind the counter by the entrance. This wasn’t going to end well.
So do you want to live or die?
Hirka pushed the display case over. The lid shattered in front of Graal. She grabbed the book before it hit the floor. Graal moved toward her. She flung herself at Stefan, grabbing his gun. He shouted her name. She pointed the gun at the glass floor and pulled the trigger. There was a bang. Several bangs. Her arm jerked. People screamed. The floor fell out from under her. Shattered. She was in free fall. An alarm blared. She hit the floor and rolled.
For a moment she couldn’t move, uncertain as to whether she was even alive. But she was. Alive and in one piece.
Stefan!
Stefan came crawling on all fours, his hand leaving a trail of blood in its wake. The glass crunched. She was kneeling in a sea of glittering ice. Naiell was already on his feet and heading for the exit. Hirka hugged the book to her chest and looked up at Graal, who stood looking back, broken glass jutting out like teeth around him. Hirka crawled toward Stefan, between the legs of people screaming and running for their lives. Stefan leaped to his feet and grabbed her, pulling her through the crowd toward the doors.
Hirka threw a glance over her shoulder. Graal had jumped down through the hole in the ceiling. He stood motionless in a sea of people, watching her. Wild black hair. Black eyes. Her father. Her death.
She could have sworn he looked proud.
NEW BLOOD
They had driven across the sea. Over a bridge that never ended. Driven into a blue nothingness, with no destination in sight. North. Always north. Toward Stockholm. They kept to the backroads. Argued about where to go. Argued about what had happened. Whether or not they were on what Stefan called “the radar.” They’d had cameras at the museum, he said. Making pictures of them. The whole world was going to know who they were. What they’d done.
Hirka didn’t really care. And she had no idea what the radar was. They could have all the cameras in the world, for all it mattered to her. Those realities belonged to this world. Not hers. She wasn’t one of them. Didn’t belong here.
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me to take it easy?” Stefan said over his shoulder as he drove. “And you’re supposed to patch me up. Isn’t that what you do? Patch things up? I’m bleeding here!” He took his hand off the wheel and showed her his palm. She didn’t respond.
“And what about you?” he continued, looking at Naiell in the mirror. “Where the hell were you? Christ, a rat would have been more help than you!” Naiell didn’t respond either, but he certainly would have, had he understood what was being said. “Tell him what I said! You hear me?” Stefan had reached breaking point.
“Stop,” Hirka said, but he didn’t hear her. Two lights came toward them on the road, and he veered away.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
“Stop!”
“We can’t stop! We can never stop again! You’ve fucking ruined me, girl! Ruined everything.”
He swore again and took a sudden left turn. The road narrowed and disappeared into the trees. Hirka suddenly smelled something strange. Something foul. Stefan stopped the car in front of a wire fence. He sat staring at his hand. “Dammit, I’m never going to get these bits of glass out!”
Hirka tore open the car door and jumped out. She tucked the book under her arm and ran toward the fence. She found a gap where one of the posts had fallen over and squeezed through. She heard Stefan shouting at Naiell. Shouting that he should stop her. That they couldn’t stay there.
She looked back. Naiell tore up one of the fence posts and came after her. She wasn’t scared of him anymore. If he’d wanted to kill her, he’d have done it in the car. She just wanted to get away. Away from him. Away from all the things he hadn’t told her. Things that now threatened to overwhelm her. He’d known. He’d known all along. Who she was. And that the blind were still in Ym.
With Rime.
She’d left for no reason. Left him. Left Ym. Left everything she loved. For nothing.
She stumbled and fell forward. Crawled up a mound and stopped when she realized what it was. Garbage. A mountain of garbage. Several of them. Filling the landscape. It stunk. Scraps of food. Boxes. Bags. Broken toys. Newspapers. Things she couldn’t begin to describe. Crows and ravens hopped around, pecking at all manner of things. What was this? Where was she? And who did all these things belong to?
The rot. It’s the rot. The world is dying.
She got up and backed away. Straight into Naiell. He spun her around and wrapped his pale hands around her face. His claws were sharp against the back of her head. She stared up at the beautiful blindling and knew she would have given anything for him to be someone else. To be Rime. No one else was allowed so close to her. No one.
“You lied to me,” she snarled.
“No. I didn’t lie to you. I refrained from telling you something I knew would destroy you.” She tried to squirm free, but it was useless. “Listen to me, Hirka! If I’d told you who you were, would that have made things simpler? Well? Would being stuck here have been any easier, knowing you were my brother’s child?”
She nodded. “Everything’s easier when you know! Everything! But what do you know about that? What do the deadborn actually know?”
He growled at the word. His hair fell in long, black tangles over his chest. One of the buttons on his shirt had popped. “We know more than
humans and ymlings combined. We are Dreyri! We have blood of the first. And you’d do well to remember you’re one of us.”
Hirka swallowed. She was one of them. One of those now laying waste to Ym. One of those—her chain of thought ground to a halt. She realized she knew nothing more about them.
Naiell pulled her closer. Black ink danced in his eyes, converging in a pulsating ring. “And who lied to whom? You figured it out, but you didn’t say anything to me about it either, did you?”
“You would have killed me!”
“Are you not still alive, Sulni?” he hissed.
“I am. But what about Rime? What about Ym? Or have you razed everything?”
“I’m not them!”
“But you knew! You knew the blind are still there! You knew that I came here for no reason, and you said nothing! You didn’t say a word, you brute!”
He tightened his hold on her and gave her a shake. “And now you know! Does that make it any easier? Well? Answer me that. Is it easier being here, knowing who you are? Knowing you can’t help them?”
She wanted to cry, but her body felt drained. Dry. Dead. “That’s how you found me,” she heard herself say. “You knew. Even before we left. As a raven. You found me at the Alldjup as Kuro, because you knew …”
“We smell our own blood, and you were an impossibility.”
It wasn’t fair. She’d been an impossibility in Ym, but everything was supposed to be different here. She wasn’t supposed to be impossible here. Not with the humans.
He let go of her. Her feet fell out from under her and she crumpled, landing on a black garbage bag made of that loathsome material that never went away. It would lie here long after she died. Maybe even long after the world died. Lie here smelling rotten.
She saw Stefan by the fence. He was running toward them. The car was behind him, with the doors wide open. The crows shrieked under heavy clouds.
“I’m not impossible, Naiell. I’ve never been impossible. I’m here, aren’t I?”
He sat down next to her. Not the way Stefan would have done. Or the way Father used to. Naiell wasn’t there to comfort her. He wasn’t the type. Maybe blindlings weren’t the type.
Am I the type? Haven’t I been comforting people my entire life?
“I knew you were my brother’s child. I just didn’t understand how that could be.”
Stefan stopped in front of them, out of breath. He rested his hands on his thighs. “So, what could you two possibly be talking about? About how you’re sitting on a mountain of garbage, waiting for the cops? Is that what you’re talking about? What the hell is wrong with you two? It’s like reality doesn’t apply to you! What do you think is going to happen when they find us?” He straightened up. Ran a hand through his hair. His gaze wavered. He didn’t know the answer to his own question.
Naiell leaned back and rested on the garbage. He didn’t seem bothered by it. Maybe it was like the food he ate with his fingers. Just parts of a bigger whole. Nothing was moldy or fresh. Everything was made of small, small parts. Too small to see, but still of use.
Hirka looked up at Stefan. “He knew who I was, Stefan. But he didn’t say anything.”
“You knew it too, and you didn’t say a word to me! And I’m human. What the hell is he? You can’t seriously be shocked that he can’t be trusted?”
She suddenly felt so stupid. He was right, of course. Could anything so different be trusted? Hirka stared up at the sky. It had grown darker. The first stars were out. Stars. Like they had back home in Elveroa. Were they the same stars that shone every night, fading every morning as the gulls screeched at the fishermen returning with the catch?
Naiell sat up. “Graal shouldn’t have been able to continue his line. They chopped off his manhood before he was sent here.”
It took a moment for Hirka to realize what he meant. Manhood was such an old-fashioned word.
“You’re joking.”
He didn’t answer.
“You castrated him?”
“They stopped the bloodline,” he snapped. “That was his punishment.”
“For what? For losing a war?”
A war he lost because of you. The Seer …
She didn’t dare say it. She looked at Stefan. “He says Graal is … that he can’t become a father. That he has no …” She glanced down at his crotch.
Stefan dug a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. His fingers were shaking. “So he’s dickless? The guy we just ran into?”
Hirka wasn’t sure what the word meant, but she nodded anyway.
“Nice work, then,” he said, taking a drag before he went on. “Having you, I mean.”
“That’s what Naiell says, too. He didn’t think it was possible. I didn’t either.”
Stefan shrugged. “You can become a father without … as long as you have … as long as everything’s still functioning on the inside. You know? People have kids without sleeping together all the time. Test-tube babies. Surrogate mothers. Things like that.”
Hirka blinked. Tried to make sense of the words. Stefan blew out some smoke and threw away the cigarette he’d only just lit. Maybe he was trying to quit?
“I mean, as far as making babies is concerned, it’s what’s on the inside that matters. People have children all the time without being able to … How old are you again?”
“Old enough,” she answered dryly. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed that he was uncomfortable discussing this with her. She turned to Naiell. “Stefan says it doesn’t matter. You can become a father without sleeping with anyone. He says they do it all the time. Test-children. I don’t know …”
Naiell got up and jumped down from the mountain of garbage. He started pacing back and forth in front of them. It was the first time she remembered saying something that interested him. “So he’s found a way to open the bloodline. A way to be a father, without being with a woman? Surely he needs a woman?”
“I’d think so.”
“Ask him!”
Hirka asked. Stefan looked at them like they were both out of their minds. “Yes, Jesus, obviously you need a woman.”
My mother. I had a mother. A human. Half-human, half-blindling.
Naiell tapped his claws against his chin. “But why? He still won’t be able to use the gateways,” he said, mostly to himself.
“I thought that’s what he wanted?”
“Of course that’s what he wants, but it shouldn’t be possible! They scorched his blood to trap him here. Forever. If he uses the gateways, he’ll die. Every drop of blood in his veins will ignite, and he knows that.”
Hirka shuddered. The darkness felt like it was creeping ever closer. The ravens screeched above them. This was blindcraft. Scorched blood. Castration. What kind of world was it, really? How dark was it, the land of the blind? The thought was so horrifying that she couldn’t even bring herself to tell him off for keeping yet another secret from her.
“So if he can’t use the gateways, how is he going to do what you say he’s going to do?”
Naiell’s lips pulled back, baring his canines. “I don’t know!” he hissed. “We could spend days sitting around speculating. Maybe he’ll send an army from here to Ym. Maybe he’s found other gateways. Gateways he can use without his blood catching fire. Or maybe he’s found someone who can fix him, however unlikely that may sound. Or maybe he’s content to stay here and just needs you as a slave with blood powerful enough to run errands between worlds. Take your pick, Sulni, but we have no way of knowing!”
Hirka pulled away a little. Whether because of his anger or his theories, she didn’t know. Both were equally horrendous.
But he was right. They knew nothing. The book that was meant to help them made no sense.
Stefan was getting impatient again, so Hirka translated. “He says Graal can’t use the gateways himself. They … they did something to him. After he came here. They ruined his blood. Burned it, he says. Poisoned it. I don’t know.”
“Seriously? Tha
t’s what he’s going to use you for?”
“What do you mean?”
“New blood? If you’re his child, then he can use yours, right?”
Hirka stared at him. Had he finally cracked? “You can’t use other people’s blood, Stefan.”
Stefan wiped his bloody hand on his trousers, then cursed when he realized what he’d done. “Listen. I don’t know what kind of world you’re from. But I’m starting to think it’s in the stone age or something. Do you have hospitals? Do you even have medicine? Of course people can have kids without sleeping together! And of course you can use other people’s blood! Christ, girl, they swap out people’s blood all the time. Cancer patients, for example. Out with the bad, in with the good. Blood transfusions? What do you use? Leeches?” He sounded like he was on the verge of hysterics.
Hirka was stunned. What little energy she still had left drained out of her. She looked at Naiell. “He says …” She swallowed, then tried again. “He says they can swap out people’s blood. At hospitals.”
Naiell cocked his head. “All of it? Really?”
This was the first time she’d seen him accept anything anyone had to tell him, but she derived no pleasure from it. “Really,” she whispered.
Stefan looked at her and Naiell in turn. He hunched his shoulders. “What? What did I say?”
Neither of them responded. Hirka stared down at a rotten apple core. Broken glass. A newspaper page with a picture of a skull half-buried in the ground. Death. Death and decay. Then Stefan started to laugh. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about?” He laughed even louder. A despondent noise that cut right through her. “You’re a blood bag!”
She knew exactly what he meant even though she’d never heard of it before. Some things transcended language. It had to be the most horrible thing she’d ever heard. Blood bag. She was a blood bag.
New blood for old evil.
TO SLOKNA
“Sneaking in the back way, eh, councillor?” Eirik boomed from somewhere above Rime. “Were you afraid we wouldn’t let you in?” The chieftain’s laughter echoed across Blindból, setting his companion off as well. Rime looked up at them as he continued to climb. After several days traveling through Blindból, it was good to hear people’s voices.
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