Stonewing Guardian

by Zoe Chant

  He smiled, looking out through the cabin's scratched glass with a practiced gaze. Although he couldn't have been out of his twenties, there was a network of fine lines around his eyes from squinting at the sun-glazed water, crinkling whenever he smiled.

  "Are you married?" Thea asked. She realized immediately, with a flush of embarrassment, that he might think she was hitting on him, but he seemed to take it in the spirit of friendly inquiry that it had been offered.

  "No, haven't found my mate yet," Tor said casually.

  It was an oddly old-fashioned phrase that made her think of Mace talking about soulmates. Maybe that was a folk belief here.

  He reminded her of a bear, she thought—a big blond polar-bear type.

  "Look," Tor said, and pointed out to sea. Thea squinted where he was pointing, shading her eyes. She wished she'd brought sunglasses.

  "What am I looking for?"

  "Dolphins, swimming along with the boat. There they are—see them?"

  "I do," she breathed.

  She was captivated for a few minutes, watching the sleek gray creatures weave in and out of the water. For a little while they seemed to be trying to keep pace with the boat, but quickly fell behind.

  "Do you see them often out here?" she asked.

  "Every now and then. Whales too. You know, seeing a dolphin is supposed to be good luck for sailors." He flashed her a grin. "Maybe you'll find what you're looking for."

  "How much did Mace tell you about what we're trying to find?"

  Tor shrugged. "He said you're looking for old Viking ruins. You're not the first. Every now and then, people come out here treasure-hunting for old Viking stuff. Don't think they ever found anything, though."

  "What sort of people?"

  "All sorts. University people mostly, or adventurer types with metal detectors and backpacks."

  "Any, er ... really weird ones?"

  Tor laughed. "Have you met the people on this island? You gotta be more specific."

  She didn't exactly want to come out and say "black-robed cultists" because it made her sound like a total loon, so she laughed along with him instead. "I get your point," she said.

  But it put a bit of a pall on the day, like a cloud going over the sun. It reminded her that while they were safe at Stonegarden, or at least Mace seemed to think so, they were vulnerable out here, away from the protection of the house and its magic.

  "You haven't ever found anything Viking, have you?" she asked, wanting to change the subject away from the matter of other treasure-hunters.

  "Not me personally, no."

  Thea looked at him swiftly. "Wait, does that mean you know people who have?"

  She hadn't thought to ask the locals about it, and now she was kicking herself. Local people were the best source of information on the whereabouts of supposedly lost ruins, and she ought to have remembered that. She just hadn't thought that anyone would know. She had assumed that if there were known Viking ruins out here, someone would surely have found them already. Wouldn't they?

  "My dad says he found an odd mine shaft one time when he was out ... hunting." There was an odd, brief pause. Thea had no idea why he would hesitate like that. "It seemed unusual, he said."

  "Vikings weren't really known for digging mine shafts," Thea said. "They smelted bog iron, that is, naturally occurring iron ore on the surface in swamps. And the kinds of bogs you have around here are perfect for it. We don't know of any Viking mining activity in North America."

  Tor rolled his big shoulders in a shrug. "I don't know about that. I just know what Dad said he saw. I can ask him where it was, if it'd help."

  "Sure," she said. "Thank you. That'd be great if you could." A slight shiver ran across the back of her neck, thinking about mine shafts, enclosed dark places in the earth ...

  Surely not. There are no lost Viking mines on Newfoundland. Whatever Mace might find, it isn't that.

  "Anyway, I think the place you want is right up ahead," Tor said, swiveling to consult a large nautical chart pinned below the cabin windows.

  Thea leaned on the wide shelf underneath the window and looked out as they rounded a headland and began motoring into a channel of water between steep bluffs. Out on the deck, Mace tucked his notebook into an inside pocket of his gray wool jacket and stood up.

  It was a very pretty place, jewel-green with splashes of wildflowers along the tops of the cliffs and in the numerous flatter places where the steep landscape had eroded into long sloping hills coming down to the water's edge. She and Mace had theorized that this fjord would look like familiar safety to early Norse sailors, and it did indeed look very similar to places she had seen in Scandinavia. At the far end of the fjord, there was a wide beach for pulling boats out of the water, and a sloping hill topped with a plateau where they could have grazed cattle or built houses.

  Tor throttled back the engine almost to nothing, puttering the boat toward the beach. He was keeping a close eye on a screen on the console that Thea, looking on curiously, realized was a depth monitor.

  "I can't take you all the way to the beach," Tor said. "It gets too shallow. You'll have to wade a little. Need to borrow some boots?"

  And so it was, a few minutes later, that Mace jumped into the shallow water past the boat's bow while Thea nervously stood in the bow wearing a pair of much too large fisherman's hip waders. Mace held up his hands, and Thea wriggled over the railing and hoped the boots managed not to fall off her feet. In one hand she held her hiking boots, tied together by the laces, and a long-handled metal detector in the other.

  "I've gotcha," Mace said. "Just slide off the edge."

  She did, and he caught her easily, as if she was weightless. She certainly felt weightless, with Mace's strong hands on her hips. He set her in the water and steadied her with a hand on her arm. The water was up to her thighs. The high walls of the fjord cut most of the wave action, but there were still small waves, including some stirred up by the boat, that caused her to sway as they tugged her back and forth.

  She and Mace waded ashore, and turned around to wave.

  "I'll pick you folks up in a few hours!" Tor called.

  The boat motored away from the shore, cutting a glittering V through the placid water of the fjord. Thea couldn't help finding herself profoundly sympathetic to early Vikings who might have stood in a place like this, watching the boats that had brought them to this land sailing away. At least she and Mace had confidence that their ride would be back to pick them up soon, rather than being swamped in a storm or lost on the way across the Atlantic.

  As the sound of the boat's engine died away, it was incredibly quiet. She had hardly ever been anywhere this quiet, certainly not since she'd stopped doing fieldwork. Even at Mace's country house, there were always sounds, whether it was boat engines down in the harbor or the distant sounds of people elsewhere in the house. There was a distant, far-off drone of a small airplane flying along the coast, but when it faded away, the only sound was the hum of bees and the gentle rushing of surf along the shore. The sun was hot on her shoulders.

  "We're at risk of being spotted now that we're away from the house, right?" Thea asked.

  It was so serene and beautiful here that it seemed impossible any danger could come from those sweeping, lovely green hills.

  "Possibly," Mace said. "But I don't think they can actually track me by any supernatural means. If so, I would have had a lot more problems with them so far. I think they've found us so far by using ordinary human detective methods, watching places I was likely to turn up and so forth."

  He sat on a boulder and began to change out of the borrowed fisherman's waders, back into his hiking boots. Thea sat down on a patch of grass and did the same.

  "Could they have followed us from the town?"

  "I'm hoping not. I'm keeping an ear to the ground about strangers hanging around the village, and so far there's been nothing." Mace smiled briefly. "It's extremely hard to be inconspicuous in a small town, and they can't possibly be monitori
ng every fishing boat that goes in and out of the harbor. They'd never get anything else done."

  "So you think we're pretty safe out here?"

  "I do. Especially since we don't plan to stay for long." He stood up, stamping his feet into his hiking boots. "Shall we go?"

  They left their borrowed waders tucked behind a rock out of reach of the waves. Mace took off his wool jacket and left it with the boots. He had brought along a backpack, which Thea had helped him pack back at the house with a picnic lunch and water bottles.

  "Sure you don't want any help carrying that?" she asked.

  "I've got it." He nodded to the metal detector. "You've got that, after all. You know, we really don't need it. If there's any metal around, I'll be able to tell."

  "It makes me feel useful. Better than just standing around." She did a couple of experimental sweeps on the beach, and almost immediately picked up something that turned out to be a flattened, mangled, and badly rusted fishhook. Thea held it up triumphantly. "Okay, proof of concept obtained." She tucked it into her pocket; it felt wrong to leave trash in a pristine place like this, even if it had been here when they got here. "Now we can start looking for—Whoa!"

  Her first crazy thought about the huge pale creature running down the hill toward them was oh no, a polar bear. But it wasn't; it was Gio, moving in long bounds through the wild grasses. His stone tail lashed around his sleek hips.

  Mace had gone into a defensive crouch, moving in front of her with his hands expanding and claws curling out of his fingertips. She only caught a glimpse before his hands returned to normal human hands and he straightened up.

  "How'd he get here so fast?" Thea asked. Gio reached them, and she gave him a cautious pat on one stone shoulder. "He couldn't have kept up with us along the shore, could he?"

  "Maybe, but I don't think it's that. I bet he stonewalked." Mace laughed aloud, looking delighted. "Of course he can stonewalk. It makes sense. I just hadn't realized it."

  Thea had never seen him like that before. In fact, she didn't think she'd seen him genuinely excited about anything since their talk at the restaurant that first night. It made her realize how subdued he'd been since Gio's near-death and transformation.

  "And he knew to stonewalk to us," she said. Gio might be the topic of conversation, but it was Mace she had her eyes on. She couldn't, in fact, take her eyes off him.

  "He did," Mace said. He punched Gio's stone flank lightly. "You're still in there somewhere, aren't you?"

  It was with a cheerful and optimistic attitude that they started climbing the hill. Thea took off her jacket and tied it around her waist, wishing she'd thought to leave it with Mace's, but she also had things in the pockets (granola bars, a small notebook and pen) that she didn't want to leave behind.

  The warm air was fragrant with flowers and green growing things and the fresh salt smell of the sea. Birds sang around them and rose from the meadow in small flocks as they passed, settling again nearby. The birds were tamer than Thea would have expected, seeming unbothered unless they came too close. It occurred to her that birds around here probably didn't see people very often.

  The top of the hill, which had looked as smooth and green as a pasture from a distance, was actually choked with brush. Thea scanned it visually for anything that might suggest the lines of an ancient, collapsed house or stone field wall, the metal detector dangling from one hand. Confronted with the vast sweep of this landscape, she was starting to appreciate the enormity of her task. How did she imagine they were just going to stumble onto lost Viking ruins in all of this empty space?

  Mace found an outcropping of boulders and placed his hand on it. He bowed his head and closed his eyes.

  Ah, right. Like that.

  Not wanting to disturb him, Thea wandered a little way off, sweeping the metal detector over the ground so that she could feel like she was doing something useful. Gio ambled beside her with his usual grace and near-total silence.

  Thea found herself studying him. Back at the house, there was always so much—books to read, maps to pore over, Mace's family to chat with. Gio had just been there, in the background, but he had shown little interest in interacting with anyone in a human way. She realized now that she had never particularly paid attention to him.

  Out here, where there were few distractions beyond the birds and the beautiful scenery, she marveled at the grace of the carven muscles sliding beneath his stone skin. He was not quite shaped like a living creature—not a lion turned to stone, but a stone carving brought to life, with a certain amount of blockiness where a real lion would have been more delicately formed. But other than that, he had all the small muscle movements and muzzle-twitches of a real animal. His stone eyes moved; his stone ears flicked as he listened to the wild land around them.

  "You really are very beautiful," Thea said. His ears twitched, swiveling to point toward her. "Mace is going to find a way to fix you. I'm confident of that."

  "But not here," Mace said, approaching them through springy, knee-high bushes. "I need to check a few more places, but I don't think this is our landing site."

  Thea blew out her breath. "I know I keep saying this, but it's just such a huge area to search. There wasn't much chance we'd stumble across it on our first try."

  "At least we can be fairly confident that I'd be able to sense it if it's near," Mace said. "With ordinary human tools, you could walk a few feet away from it and never know."

  "Thanks for rubbing it in." But she smiled to show that she was being playful.

  Unexpectedly, Mace swept her into his arms, bending her back over the heather for a kiss. "You sound as if you think you're unnecessary. Please trust me, that couldn't be any further from the truth. I came to you for a reason. Even with my powers, I wouldn't be able to search the entire island without you to narrow it down for me."

  "Oh really? Tell me again how indispensable I am."

  "Absolutely indispensable," Mace said, and kissed her again. His lips were warm on hers.

  Gio gave a little coughing grunt, a very lion-like noise, and went to lie down in the heather.

  Mace's arms were still around her, but he was looking in Gio's direction now with a sad expression. Thea kissed him lightly, more in comfort than desire this time.

  "We're going to find it, Mace."

  "I keep telling myself that." Mace slung the backpack off his arm. "We ought to hike a bit higher so I can try it again, but what about a little lunch first?"

  "Tell you what." Thea pointed to an outcropping of rock perhaps a mile above them on the gently sloping hill. "Let's walk up there, and you can do your rock-communing thing, and then we'll eat. It looks like we ought to have a gorgeous view from there."

  She wasn't wrong. Once they reached the top of the hill, Thea was huffing a little, but she was pleased to find that she wasn't as out of shape as she'd feared; taking the stairs a few times a day had apparently kept her fit. The entire near part of the coastline was spread out below them. Thea shaded her eyes with her hands, gazing out across the rumpled green landscape and the wind-ruffled ocean. She glimpsed Tor's boat, some ways out to sea.

  "What's Tor doing out there while we're doing this?"

  "Possibly checking the fishfinder, or scouting for possible harbors to hole up in if he's caught out by a storm. Possibly just napping in the sun." Mace smiled. "In any case, I'm paying him well for his services today. I have a longstanding arrangement with his family to provide transportation for goods and people when I need it. I typically stonewalk if I'm going to town, but they regularly bring me supplies."

  The mention of Tor's family reminded her. "By the way, Mace, Tor suggested a place we might want to look at, an old mine shaft that his father found somewhere on the island. Should we check it out?"

  "What do you think?" Mace asked. "You're the expert."

  "I think it's unlikely to be significant. Vikings didn't typically engage in extensive mining, especially not here. But in the interests of leaving no stone unturned, so to sp
eak ..."

  "No reason not to." Mace spread his fingers out on the lichen-crusted surface of the nearest boulder. "And speaking of stones, this will take a few minutes."

  "I can unpack lunch," Thea offered, holding a hand out for the backpack.

  On this high ridge, there were exposed stretches of sun-warmed stone that made excellent places to sit and eat. She unpacked cheese and cold chicken and crusty brown bread, pickles and sliced apples, and two plastic-wrapped slices of cake.

  "Do you need to eat, Gio?" she asked. The stone lion raised his head from sniffing at one of the exposed stone outcrops.

  "I don't think he does," Mace said, turning away from his examination of the boulder. "I don't, when I'm in gargoyle form. I'm not sure what would happen if I stayed like that long-term, though."

  Thea gave Gio a worried look. "Do you think he could get sick from not being able to eat?"

  "I'm not sure," Mace said. "I hope not. He doesn't seem to be suffering ill effects so far."

  If Gio understood their conversation, he seemed unbothered by it. He lay down on the outcrop he had been sniffing, head up and ears alert, looking out to sea. He made Thea think of a protective guardian statue at a tomb.

  "Still no cultists," she said, passing Mace a chicken sandwich.

  "Not a single one."

  "If they show up, we can feed them. There's enough food here for an army."

  "I'd be careful if I were you. They say if you feed a wild animal, it'll follow you home."

  Thea giggled. "Just what we need, a bunch of hungry cultists following us around, begging for scraps."

  Mace smiled. He took a pickle and added it to his sandwich.

  "Mace, what do you know about them, really? Where did they even come from? You can't possibly just have weirdos in black robes show up everywhere you go."

  "Well, I never used to," Mace muttered. He crunched on an apple slice. "They showed up along with my niece. They were looking for an old book and so was she."