Corpse in the Mead Hall

by Cate Martin

  "I'm far from having tried everything," she snapped, still sounding irritated. Frór just really rubbed her the wrong way, I guessed.

  But his warm voice was kind despite her tone. "Nora, I can see you've depleted yourself. You may have things left to try, but you don't have the energy to fuel them. And I won't watch you burn yourself out."

  "I'm fine," she said firmly, but the hand over her eyes was trembling.

  "Mormor," I said. "Did you try just getting to the lodge, or have you searched for magic here in the hamlet?"

  "Both," she said, lowering her hand to look at me. "The spell to drive off the Wild Hunt is what did me in. I'm not so frail as some may think."

  "I would never use the word 'frail' to describe you," Frór said.

  "No, but I know what words you would use," my grandmother shot back.

  "This isn't helping," Haraldr said to both of them.

  "Come on," Loke whispered close to my ear and tugged at my sleeve.

  The others didn't notice us slipping away. Thorbjorn had disappeared further into the shadows beyond the fireplace, either still brooding about his brothers or else engrossed in the argument between my grandmother and Frór that was just getting heated up. Haraldr was between those two trying to moderate their discussion, but I could see that he was doomed to fail.

  But I didn't listen to whatever the argument was about. I just followed Loke into the quiet of the living room.

  "You knew about all this," I said to him as we settled into the chairs by the fire.

  "You mean how those two are always instantly at each other's throats? Yes," he said.

  "Did you know seeing him would trigger my memories?" I asked.

  "No. Honestly, I always expected that Thorbjorn would be the one that would set that off. Color me surprised," he said with a shrug.

  "You honestly tried to get to the lodge? You're sure you can't?" I asked.

  "Yes and yes," he said. "But I don't think you need to worry too much about that. Whatever is happening, it's happening here, in this hamlet. This is the best place for us to be."

  "It would be if we were actually doing anything," I said glumly. We lapsed into silence for a minute, but then I asked, "Have you met the boy next door?"

  "He's nearly our age, so I'm not sure those of us who aren't older than time would want to call him a boy," Loke said. "But no. Not yet. Signi is very protective of him."

  We were quiet again for another length of time, and I realized that I was in the process of falling asleep there in that chair. But maybe a little nap would be just what I needed?

  I let myself drift, but instantly my not-quite-sleeping mind conjured up an image of that horse and rider that had been standing over me before my grandmother's spell had driven them away. I could see the wildness in the horse's red eyes, the hair of its face covered in ice from its own freezing breath. The man leaning down from the saddle had splotchy black skin, layer after layer of frostbite having necrotized his flesh.

  I jerked awake, my heart still pounding. I had never seen them. My eyes had been closed the whole time. And yet, I knew that vision was real.

  "Are you okay?" Loke asked me.

  "Geiri, next door," I said. "Do you know him?"

  "I was with Frór when he called on him," Loke said. "He's not fond of Frór and made no attempt to hide his contempt. But he seemed awfully milk toast to me. You think he's the guy?"

  "I want to talk to him," I said, but my eyes were drifting closed again.

  "Listen, they've stopped arguing in the other room," he said. "I'm going to see what they've decided. Why don't you just rest here for a minute, and I'll tell the others we have to talk to Geiri again. I really don't think he's capable of summoning the Wild Hunt to do his murderous bidding, but if there's nothing better to do, we should start with him. In the meantime, get at least a cat nap, will you?"

  "No," I said. But I waved him towards the kitchen. "Go, do what you said. I'm just going to meditate a bit. I'm not going to sleep. Because when I do, I don't intend to wake for days and days."

  "A proper Odin sleep," Loke said. "Another tea while I'm in there?"

  "Sure," I said. I wasn't sure I even wanted it, but it seemed the fastest way to get Loke out of the room.

  The minute he was back in the kitchen, I sat down on the rug before the fire. I closed my eyes and quieted my breathing and slowed my heartbeat.

  Then I felt a warm glow all over the front of me. But it wasn't from the fire. No fire could warm my very soul the way this glow was doing.

  I opened my eyes and saw Mjolner sitting pertly in front of me, tail wrapped around his paws, just waiting for me to notice him.

  The moment I did, he winked at me. Then he got up and went out through the entryway.

  Without another thought, I followed.

  28

  Mjolner must have done his walking through walls trick to get outside. I had to take the more conventional route, quietly opening and closing the door behind me. Then I stayed there on the porch for a moment, looking around for signs of trouble.

  My grandmother's spell had indeed disappeared, and the center of the hamlet was still and dark. With so many trees close around the cluster of cabins, the moon was creating more shadows than light.

  But even in the darkness I could see that Mjolner was hunting again, his tail snaking back and forth as he stalked with his face low to the ground. I watched as he made a large circuit of the center of the hamlet, but when he started zeroing in his attention on a smaller area, it was the same three cabins as before.

  One was Frór, and I already knew he was not our killer.

  The other was Signi's, with her mysterious, never seen house guest.

  And the last was Geiri's. Geiri, who had seemed benign when I had drawn him and who Loke didn't consider a threat.

  But he was the only suspect left. I couldn't just cross him off my list without being very, very sure.

  I took out my wand and waved it around while I unfocused my eyes. The fragments of the snaky spell were still lying all around like mystical confetti, the same as before.

  But this time I walked outside the circle of cabins. Waving my wand around in front of me, I walked a slow circuit around the outside of the hamlet.

  I sensed Mjolner stalking along at my side, but I didn't look down at him. I was afraid I'd miss something if I glanced away, even for a second.

  And I nearly did anyway. Not only was it subtle, it was far over my head.

  But as I stood under one of the tall trees, there was no mistaking the twists of magic that were caught in its branches. It looked like a long strip of something, maybe magical cloth.

  Or a strip of snake skin.

  "I'm not imagining this, am I?" I asked Mjolner as I stood at the bottom of the tree and squinted up towards the sky.

  Mjolner meowed in a way I was pretty sure meant no. He saw it too.

  "It went up," I said, looking off to my left, through the trees, to the rock where Mjolner had lost the trail before. "The snake spell thing. It ran along the ground from the lodge to that rock, and then it was up in the air. And somehow got disrupted over the hamlet, leaving all those fragments all over the place. Deliberate, I suppose, so we couldn't follow the trail. But that's not a confetti fragment up there. That's a real piece of that snake thing. Isn't it?"

  Mjolner meowed noncommittally.

  I looked around and found the cabin with all the lit-up windows: Frór's place.

  We were behind the cabin next to it.

  "Geiri's house," I said. Mjolner made a low yowling warning sound. "No, I'm not going in alone. I'll get the others and we can knock on his door."

  Mjolner gave a curt meow of agreement, then yowled his objection again as I tucked my wand away and reached for the lowest branches of that tree.

  "I'm not going in alone, I said! I'll get the others, I just want to check out what's up there first. Maybe I can see something more from up there. I don't need help climbing a tree," I told him.
r />   I pulled my way up the tree, branch after branch. It was a deciduous tree; I wasn't sure of what kind, but the branches were thick and could unquestionably hold my weight. They were also plentiful; it was an easy climb. After the day I had had, anything easy was something I was grateful for.

  But Mjolner still didn't like it. He didn't climb up after me. He just sat on the snow at the bottom of the tree and chewed me out worse than my grandmother ever could.

  At last I reached the level of that twisting bit of magic. I didn't try to grab it. Instead, I pulled myself up to sit on a nearby branch with the trunk at my back and my feet dangling. I held tightly to another branch and leaned over to catch on to the end of the glowing thing with my wand.

  It snagged on the wand easily, as if I were picking up iron shavings with a strong magnet. Then I held it before my half-closed eyes.

  I didn't really know what I was looking at. On the one hand, it looked like snake skin, the scales shining like polished bits of jade. It was beautiful, and it glowed so brightly I knew it was a finely crafted spell. Only my grandmother's mead hall with its layers and layers of spells had a brighter light to it when I looked for magic.

  But it was inert. It wasn't attached to anything and couldn't do anything. I let it go, and it drifted away as if on a breeze that I couldn't feel.

  Then I looked down. I was intending to see if the confetti formed any sort of pattern, but there was something much more obvious going on below me.

  Another snake was moving around the trunk of my tree, not at ground level but not so high as I was either. It was just curling around it, like the tree was an obstacle it had to slither past. It went past Mjolner's rock before plunging to the ground, then shooting much faster through the woods beyond.

  Towards the lodge. I knew that for a fact because my beacon still shone on the horizon. Even after everything that had happened, my spell was still working.

  I spun back the other way to see where the snake spell was coming from. There was no mistaking it. It was Geiri's house.

  Only so far as I could see, it was appearing out of the walls of the cabin itself, on the second floor.

  I blinked and looked with my normal eyes. It was hard to pick out details in the moonlight, but I was sure I could see the outlines of a bedroom. Not through a window, but through the wall itself. I could no longer see the snake, but I could see where it moved through the wall. It wasn’t an insubstantial thing passing through a solid mass. No, it was making that solid mass insubstantial to let it through.

  Or, I realized with a shiver, to let something inside out. Or someone. They could just step through a solid wall, or a barred and locked door.

  I thought I saw someone standing in that bedroom, but I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps I was looking at a coat rack or something. If it was a person, they were certainly standing unnaturally still.

  I waved my wand in front of my unfocused eyes and looked at the snake spell again. I tucked my wand away so I could use both my hands to support myself so I could lean in to look more closely. The spell was so intense, it couldn't just be coming out of nowhere. And yet from everything I could see, that was what was happening.

  The figure below, if it truly was a person, wasn't casting a spell. They had no glow of magic to them. And I saw no glowing artifacts anywhere in that cabin.

  What was going on?

  Suddenly I heard a loud crack. It took me a long, stupid eternity to work out that this sound came from the branch beneath me.

  Only then, as if I were some cartoon character who could hover until they realized they were standing on nothing, I started to fall.

  I reached out, trying to catch the branches around me. I failed to break my fall, but I banged up every one of my arms and legs on the way down. I managed to catch on one of the last branches, not for long enough to stop my descent, but just enough to redirect my body towards the thickest patch of snow below me.

  Then I met the ground with an audible slam.

  I lay still for a moment as the snow I had sent flying up into the air drifted back down all around me. I twitched my fingers and toes, then my hands and feet, and finally my arms and legs. My body hurt all over, and I was sure I was going to be stiff all over by morning, but nothing was broken.

  Not even my wand. I could feel the length of it pressed against my arm under my sleeve.

  But half of my vision was obscured. The fall had shoved my hat down over my eyes. I raised a shaky arm to push it back, but froze with my hand still on the fold of wool over my eyes.

  That sinister feeling was back. But it wasn't watching me from afar this time. It was standing right over me.

  "Geiri?" I said, trying to sound lightly conversational. As if we'd just happened upon each other in the middle of the night in his backyard.

  I still held out hope that my initial sketched impression of him hadn’t been wrong. That he was really an okay guy. The spell was coming out of the second floor of his house, sure, but if it were him doing it, how had he gotten outside so quickly.

  But my hopes were quickly dashed when he said, "Geiri? Not anymore."

  Which really weren't comforting words.

  I pushed myself up onto my elbows, then shoved my hat back out of my eyes. "Sorry for wrecking your tree," I said, still hoping to pass myself off as not a threat. He was standing over me, just as I had sensed, but he wasn't looking at me. It was hard to tell since he was just a black silhouette against the midnight sky, but I decided he was looking towards the lodge.

  "Not my tree," he said shortly, then raised a hand. Despite myself, I flinched, but his attention was still off on the far side of the forest. He made a movement with his hand like he was adjusting something, like a dial on a control panel only he could see.

  "What are you doing?" I asked him.

  "Making them pay," he said. "Making them all pay."

  "Making who pay?" I asked. It took a supreme effort, but I managed to sit up, then get my feet under me in a low squat. He still didn't seem to be looking my way, but I kept my motions slow so he wouldn't get distracted by movement in the corner of his eye.

  "All those women," he said with a sneer. "All those women who never had a minute for me when I lived here and certainly don't have a minute for me now."

  "I see," I said. I tried to get to my feet, but my legs just wouldn't do it. I rested a hand against the tree for support.

  And noticed for the first time that Mjolner was gone. Had he fled when I fell, or sooner? I couldn't remember at what point I had stopped hearing his nagging meows as I climbed. Where had he gone?

  "If you hate the women of Villmark so much, why did you come back here?" I asked, still looking around for any sign of my cat.

  "You think this is just about the women of Villmark?" he demanded.

  "All women, then?" I asked conversationally.

  "You know nothing," he said, then turned away from me as if dismissing me from his mind.

  Finally, I got to my feet and moved back into his field of view. "What do you have there, Geiri?" I asked him. I knew he had something in his hand, not the hand that was from time to time making more little adjustments, but the other one. But it was too dark to see with my normal eyes, and maddeningly, I saw nothing magical going on with my other vision, nothing save the snaky spell which was now far off to the south. I could just see the tail end of it slipping through the trees.

  "Nothing that needs concern you," he said.

  "Geiri, I'm the volva. This absolutely concerns me," I said.

  "Stop saying my name, volva," he said with real bitterness.

  "All right," I agreed. "But my point still stands. I don't know how you're doing this magic, or why I can't see it happening even now, but it has to stop."

  "You can't stop me," he said dismissively.

  "Maybe not," I conceded as I fumbled for my wand.

  "But I can," I heard Thorbjorn say. I looked up just in time to see him swing a punch at the side of Geiri's head. Geiri collapsed like a puppet
whose strings had just been cut.

  And then Mjolner, who had been perched on Thorbjorn's shoulder the entire time, gave a triumphant meow.

  "He had something in his hand," I said, trying to scrabble over the snow towards Geiri's inert body.

  "This?" Thorbjorn asked. He bent over the body and picked something up.

  It was like a thousand voices suddenly shrieking at once, all inside my head. I curled into a ball, wrapping my arms over my head for all the good that could do.

  I think Thorbjorn called out my name. I know he took a step closer to me, because those voices in torment grew louder.

  "Put it back!" I shrieked at him.

  I felt him hesitate. I rolled to sit up on my knees and lowered my arms to look up at him. I could see something in his hand glinting in the moonlight, some sort of arm ring fashioned from metal.

  It hurt to look at it, like those voices were somehow now screaming inside my eyeballs.

  "Give it to me!" my grandmother shouted, her magically amplified voice carrying even over the cacophony in my skull.

  Then everything suddenly fell silent. I could hear the snow shifting around me in the slightest of breezes, a slivery whisper of sound.

  "What was that?" I asked, my voice hoarse. I suspected I had joined in the screaming at some point.

  "Something he absolutely shouldn't have had," my grandmother said. Then she knelt by Geiri's side. First she touched the side of his neck to make sure he was still alive. Then she took something from his hand.

  I sat up and scooted closer to see what she had. She turned and showed it to me.

  It looked like a pouch made of black velvet, something jewelry might come in, or that someone might keep gaming dice in.

  "Do you see the enchantments worked into the fabric?" she asked me.

  I nodded. The traces were faint, but definitely there. Magic of some sort. But I didn’t know what they meant. "Why did he have that?" I asked.

  "To hide what he was doing from the two of us," my grandmother said. "Come, let's get back inside. There's been enough excitement for the night. It's time for you to go to bed."