Raven Magic

by Jennifer Willis

  Rod patted Thor on the back and pressed him forward. “It’s all going to be okay. Just one foot in front of the other.”

  Odin shifted his position and knocked his ankle against the rock. He gritted his teeth and bit back a wincing hiss.

  “Seriously, you have to let me look at it.” Sally bent down to examine his injury, but she kept her hands to herself—she didn’t dare touch Odin without permission. “Let me get Opal. She’s really good with this stuff. She got me patched up.” Sally looked at the angry red stripes on her wrists. “Mostly.”

  Odin waved her off, again. “There’s nothing for you to do, young one.” Then he offered her the gentlest smile she’d ever seen on his grizzled face. He looked older and more tired than she’d seen before, too.

  Sally fidgeted as she sat next to him. His stern voice and one-eyed glare normally had her scurrying out of his way. She used to avoid even being in the same room with him, not that they were frequently thrown together. Training the Rune Witch was Frigga’s domain, and Sally usually spent her time at the Lodge with her or with Maggie or Freya—except when Thor was tasked with minding her, when they popped popcorn over the hearth fire and streamed old movies like Gone with the Wind.

  But now Odin rested close to her. Was he badly hurt? Or maybe he was grieving, too, like they all were. There had been no further sign of Freyr or Nanitch after the volcano accepted Sally’s blood. The mountain had immediately stilled. The peak was suddenly peaceful, beautiful even, as though the turmoil and threat of eruption had never been.

  And the heat had dissipated, leaving Sally drenched with sweat and in danger of hypothermia. Opal had draped her own sweater around Sally’s shoulders and tended her crispy skin with a jar of home-harvested aloe. Now, with her hair full of ash and her damp and smelly clothes pocked with burn holes, Sally shivered against the cool boulder. How much was actual chill, and how much was nerves?

  She glanced sideways at Odin and was relieved that he wasn’t looking at her. His eye was trained upward on something far away. She thought she heard a faint cry of ravens, but the sky looked empty. She was still blinking away the afterimages of lava, so why not a few auditory hallucinations, too?

  For years, she had been full of questions she’d never worked up the courage to ask. Now that Odin was finally available, her mind was dull with probably the same trauma that was keeping Odin silent. When she set off into the woods, she’d never heard of lava gods, or whatever they were really called. Three days later, she’d seen one die and helped a new one to come into being.

  Sally tightened the strip of cloth Opal had bound over the cuts on her hand. She tried to formulate a constructive question or wise observation, something to get a meaningful conversation started.

  Instead, she repeated Odin’s words: “Blood for blood.”

  Odin sighed in apparent agreement. “The mountain wouldn’t have accepted him without Nanitch’s sacrifice. There wasn’t enough of Freyr left. Even the blood of the Rune Witch wouldn’t suffice, alone.”

  Sally chewed on this. If she’d tried to resurrect Freyr, would Nanitch still be alive? But if she hadn’t released Freyr from the Black Pool at all, who else could have taken Jonathan’s place? Sally kicked the heels of her boots against the rocky soil, and her mind spun in a pointless cycle of conjecture and judgment. If she hadn’t conducted the memorial ritual, she might not have attracted Jonathan’s attention in the first place. She and Opal might have had little more than a strange and strained wilderness weekend identifying plants and meditating in the dirt, and the Three Sisters would be slumbering undisturbed—or whatever those seriously deranged volcano spirits normally did. And Nanitch would still be watching over the mountains and the land.

  Now, according to Thor and Grace, the forest would never see another of Nanitch’s kind.

  Opal shuffled down the path with Grace, their walking sticks tapping together in time. Sally caught snatches of their conversation—something about feathers and sage smoke.

  “You okay?” Opal looked down at Sally and chanced a furtive glance at Odin. She rested her shaman’s staff next to Odin, and he accepted the loan with a subtle nod.

  “I think so. Yeah.” Sally sniffed back exhausted tears. She even tried to smile. “You go ahead. We’ll catch up.”

  Grace pursed her lips as she took visual stock of Odin slumping on the rock. Her eyes were hard as they met his gaze, then softened with a subtle lift of her eyebrows. A question.

  Odin shook his head. “Go.”

  “This is not over.” Grace hooked her arm through Opal’s and continued down the mountain, picking up the thread of their conversation as though there had been no interruption.

  “Get Frigga to show you the best gathering spot for sweetgrass,” the old woman said to Opal. “The best for your purposes, anyway. The difference might seem subtle, but don’t you cut any corners.”

  Sally watched them pivot around a steep switchback and then descend out of sight. Odin placed a large, craggy hand on her shoulder. If she hadn’t been so weary, she probably would have jumped.

  “You did well today,” he said.

  She thought she detected a glimmer of admiration in his eye. Sally looked away. Tears spilled down her cheeks. Did she really have to cry all the time? Weren’t there other options? She tried to wipe the tears away without Odin seeing.

  With a pained grunt, Odin pushed himself away from the boulder and leaned on Opal’s staff to regain his feet. He rested a light hand atop Sally’s head, even as she kept her face turned away.

  “Come, little one. We still have promises to keep.” He hobbled a few steps down the path, looking like his feet had fallen asleep. Then he found his balance and limped along at a more steady pace.

  Sally wiped her face on her sleeve and stood up to follow.

  They found Nanitch’s cave toward the bottom of the mountain, nearly a quarter of the way around to the east from the path they’d been traveling.

  Thor’s face was raw with scratches from the scraggly, low-hanging branches. Though the cave mouth was precisely where Nanitch had said it would be, and though Thor had followed the siatco’s directions to the letter, it had still taken him forty minutes of scrutinizing his surroundings to find it.

  Setting down Opal’s pack, Heimdall came to stand next to Thor as he stared at the low, wide mouth of the cave. Grace and Opal waited a respectful distance behind them, in the shelter of the tall evergreens, while Laika paced in an impatient figure-eight around a pair of trees. The entrance was obscured by a pair of young fir trees and a mass of mountain hemlock and sweet woodruff. There was no real clearing at the mouth of the cave, just the abrupt scar in the rock.

  “Not what I would have imagined as the lair of a siatco,” Heimdall said.

  Thor, too, had a hard time envisioning the big yeti squeezing his way through the shallow opening. He guessed Nanitch lost a lot of hair in the process, but there were no tufts of fur caught in the rock. And no massive footprints—the kind Bigfoot hunters liked to make casts of.

  “Hiding in plain sight, all these years,” Thor said. But he had no idea how old Nanitch had been. What was a siatco’s life expectancy, compared to that of a mortal man, or a god? The topic hadn’t come up while they were tramping about in the woods, arguing and even coming to blows—and when Thor told that particular story later, he’d assure his audience that he landed a solid right hook on the siatco’s wide jaw before being knocked unconscious himself.

  “Go on, then.”

  The big god jumped, not realizing that Rod had crept up to stand at his elbow.

  Rod laughed as he freed himself from the straps of Sally’s backpack and let it slide to the ground. “Didn’t mean to startle you there, big guy.”

  Thor waited for some ribbing about how he was losing his edge or about how wily handymen can be. Instead, Rod rested a hand on Thor’s shoulder. “Whatever’s in there must have been pretty special to your friend.”

  Friend. Thor supposed Nanitch had been a fr
iend at that. A comrade in arms, at least. And now both Nanitch and Freyr were gone, vanished into that lava pit . . .

  Rod gave Thor’s shoulder a squeeze, and it dimly registered in the thunder god’s mind that for the first time in his memory, he wasn’t shrinking away from Rod’s touch.

  Thor stepped toward the cave entrance, planting each footstep with care. What if Nanitch’s treasure was so precious—or the siatco so clever or paranoid—that the place was boobytrapped? He stopped a few feet from the low fissure and scanned for any sign of defensive measures. He studied how Nanitch had trained the living fir and hemlock branches to drape together in front of the cave mouth, and how the sweet woodruff had similarly been coaxed into camouflage. Even the scattering of rocks and twigs on the ground seemed carefully placed.

  But Nanitch wouldn’t have sent Thor into a trap without warning. At least, that’s what Thor told himself as he took a deep breath and bent to push the greenery aside. He poked his head through the tight opening and wondered how in the world he would get the rest of his hulking form through.

  “Well?” Rod asked from behind him. “What do you see?”

  “Not much,” Thor replied in a low grumble he was pretty sure Rod couldn’t hear. The cave widened immediately beyond the opening. As near as he could tell without a headlamp, the space extended much deeper into the rock than he would have guessed.

  Thor rested his hand on the smooth rock by his head. There was no way he’d be able to fit so much as his shoulders through.

  “Want me to go in?” Rod offered.

  Thor felt his neck reddening as he backed out of the tight entrance, and he turned on Rod with a hard look. “Why? Because I’m more bloated than a stuffed goose?”

  Rod’s eyes went wide. “No, I—”

  “Because I’m the fattest god on two legs?” Thor wasn’t sure where the sudden surge of irritation was coming from but it felt good to yell at someone, even if he did feel a twinge of guilt as Rod stumbled backward. Thor beat a fist against his chest. “I’m the pudgiest Viking meatball around. A big-boned, slow-witted lunkhead. It would take a whole squadron of Valkyries to help me up from the Barcalounger, yeah? I’m a ginormous lard mountain who has to get his mother to let out his extra-extra-large jeans for him. Right?”

  Rod stood in front of him, shaking his head vigorously.

  Thor’s breath felt ragged in his chest, and he was hot. He tugged at the collar of his sweatshirt and pushed up his sleeves as he looked past Rod to cast his accusing glance at the others. “Because that’s what you all think of me, right? You think fat-shaming is funny? You think I don’t know I’m a big guy?” He turned back to Rod. “Size is strength, you little twig-necked—”

  “Have you expended quite enough breath on your waist size?” Grace called out from her place beside Opal in the shade. She didn’t make a move to approach Thor but commanded his attention all the same. Thor shut his mouth. “Is this really the time or the place for this tantrum?”

  “Probably not.” Thor balled his hands into fists and swallowed. He tried to keep his voice calm. He wasn’t yet sure of Grace’s favor, and he didn’t want to risk yelling at her directly. “It’s just that after years of remarks about my size . . . I’ve had enough of it.”

  Grace smiled, and it caught Thor off-guard. “Has it never occurred to you that there is in fact no shaming going on? That instead your family and friends simply know how to get an entertaining rise out of you?”

  Thor opened his mouth to respond but found he didn’t have anything to say. He looked quickly to Rod, who was now bobbing his head in apparent agreement with Grace.

  “I was just offering to help,” Rod said. “That’s all.”

  Thor cleared his throat. “Right. Not just yet.” He turned back to face the cave and took a moment to cool off. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief that Heimdall had elected to stay out of the conversation. In his unexpectedly tender state, any words from his brother—heartfelt or in jest—might well have undone him.

  “Of course, that lunkhead business is another matter,” Grace chuckled.

  “I can help with tailoring your pants, too, if you want,” Rod offered.

  Thor ignored them both. He ran his fingers along the entrance’s surprisingly soft surface. His hand came away dusty with dirt. Thor frowned as he rubbed the grit between his fingers, then he laughed. “You brilliant, hairy thing!”

  “What is it?” Heimdall was just behind him now, hand on his brother’s shoulder as he leaned down to peer inside the cave.

  Thor waved his brother back and gripped the edge of the cave mouth and started pulling at it. What looked like solid rock came away easily in his hands. Thor laughed harder and tore away larger chunks of crumbling earth.

  “Mud!” Thor shouted through a wide grin. Nanitch had grown up in this wilderness. He’d have known every trick there was when it came to blending in. Thor would have bet a fistful of silver ingots the siatco had even invented some new concealment strategies of his own.

  Dried mud piled up around Thor’s knees as he widened the cave mouth enough to accommodate his girth. Light spilled into the cave, and he could make out animal skins lining the rocky floor. A few artifacts nestled against the rock walls—a couple of wooden bowls, eating utensils, and some kind of textile carefully folded and resting on a shelf.

  A shelf? Thor blinked. As his eyes adjusted, the interior of the siatco’s lair came more sharply into focus. There were indeed shelves hewn into the rock wall near the cave mouth—shelves filled with blankets, blades and other tools, and books. Thor’s jaw dropped. “By the Nine Realms.”

  “What is it?” Rod crowded in and tried to peek inside the cave. “Is it wonderful?”

  A mystified smile spread across Thor’s face. “It’s a wonder, that’s for sure.” He motioned for the others to stay back. He could hear the questioning voices of Grace and Opal and a few excited yips from Laika, and he knew his father and Sally would be along shortly. Thor pushed himself through the cave entrance, and even more dried mud yielded to his bulk. Chunks of bark flaked away from Nanitch’s clever façade, and Thor imagined the cunning siatco had probably mixed in animal droppings, too, to dissuade curious forest creatures.

  He tripped over the lip of the cave—it was still difficult to distinguish actual rock from Nanitch’s cover—and landed on his hands on the nearest animal skin. Deer. It was soft and inviting, and after the long stretch of misfortune and mishap, Thor was sorely tempted to surrender to gravity and settle in for a nice snooze in the cozy cave.

  Instead he cautiously straightened upright, feeling for the ceiling, and was surprised that he could easily stand in the space without danger of braining himself. The cave was a good foot or two higher than the top of his head, though Nanitch would have had to stoop inside his own lair.

  Thor headed toward the bookcase. He crouched low to examine the volumes Nanitch had collected, then whistled through his teeth in appreciation.

  “Some of these look like first editions,” he called to his friends outside. “Faulkner, Hemingway, Wharton, Butler, Browning.” His bibliophile bride would consider a single shelf of Nanitch’s library the discovery of a lifetime. Were these books Nanitch’s treasure? He pulled out a leather-bound copy of Leaves of Grass—a mid-twentieth-century reprint—and thumbed through Whitman’s poetry. The yeti had read poetry.

  Sadly, Thor didn’t think Cammo Man or his junk media crew would be impressed.

  The pages were crisp between Thor’s fingers, not damp or moldy as he would have expected from a cave library. That’s when he noticed how warm it was inside the lair. Warm and dry.

  Thor was about to call in Heimdall and ask his opinion on the siatco’s collection of classic literature, and to wonder aloud where Nanitch had found these books to begin with, but then he spied the creased spines of other volumes lining the lower shelves. There were dictionaries—English, Spanish, and a few Asian-looking languages Thor couldn’t name—and books on ecology and conservation dating
back to the late 1800s. Sitting alongside were worn copies of popular works like The Hunger Games, Twilight, and the Harry Potter series. There were even a few steamy romance novels, which gave Thor a good chuckle.

  The bottom shelf was tight with children’s books, from Dr. Seuss and an old copy of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales to reading primers, middle-grade history books, and volumes on mathematics and science experiments for kids.

  Thor pressed his lips together in a thin line. None of this made sense. Nanitch hadn’t seemed the sentimental type. With limited shelf space, why would he hold onto primary books after he’d mastered their lessons?

  Thor stood and frowned down at Nanitch’s odd library. It seemed unlikely that the siatco’s last request was about books, even though Thor could probably make a few hundred dollars selling the older titles to Powells for their rare book room.

  “Why did you bring me here?” he asked aloud.

  A rustling sound came from the back of the cave.

  Thor pivoted toward the sound and sank into a defensive stance—knees bent and fists raised to deflect an attack. The susurrus came again from the shadows, accompanied by a faint moaning. The outside light didn’t reach all the way to the far wall of the cave but whatever was back there, Thor felt it waiting for him.

  When Thor emerged from the cave with the deer-skin-wrapped bundle in his arms, everyone turned to him in expectation.

  The small form shifted in his arms and let out a pitiful moan. Thor took care to pull the warm fur tighter and held the bundle closer to his body.

  “Hush now,” Thor found himself cooing. Cooing! But it felt kind of good. “Everything is going to be all right.” He allowed the others to circle around him. Even Laika pushed her furry head into the huddle.

  “Everyone,” Thor said in a rough whisper, trying not to disturb the creature in his arms. The baby’s bones were long and his muscles strong, but Thor didn’t have any context for comparison. He imagined the babe in his arms would nevertheless grow up to be a good-sized bruiser. “I have here Nanitch’s—“