Charlee could feel her mouth trying to open, and kept it shut with effort, staring at him.
Asher’s face tightened. “No,” he said flatly, clearly understanding more than she did and not liking it, either.
Koslov took a step closer to them. “Look—”
Torger growled deep in his chest. It was an unsettling sound. Koslov looked at him and took a hasty step backwards. “Look,” he repeated, spreading his hands for emphasis. “You’re the only Einherjar around. You’re the only one I know of, anyways. I don’t know where you live or nothin’ but you walk through the tunnels, so you know what it’s like for most people. They’re dying. Bad food, no food, no heat, no medicines. I ain’t seen nothing like it since I was a kid and I thought we had it bad back then, but it’s nothin’ like it is now.”
“I know,” Asher said tightly.
“So, you could be leading them, fighting to take out the Alfar!” Koslov made it sound like it was the most natural thing in the world. The most obvious thing.
“Lead humans?” Asher clarified, sounding winded.
“They want to fight, man,” Koslov said earnestly. “They just don’t know where to go or what to do. You could show ‘em. You lead them and they’ll fight to the death, because if they don’t, death is all they have left. But that death is slow and miserable, and hard.” His jaw flexed. “They don’t want that. No one wants it. They’re angry and getting angrier.” He looked Asher in the eye. “They’re ripe, man.” It was one leader speaking to another. He had made an assessment about the caliber of the potential fighters.
Asher shook his head. “They don’t know how to fight. The Alfar would slaughter them.”
“Anger overcomes most shortcomings,” Koslov said flatly.
“You have no weapons, no training and as you say, everyone is weak and getting weaker and sicker. How are they going to go up against the Blakar, who are bred to be slaughtering machines without mercy? What about the Myrakar, who make a dozen Blakar look weak? The Asmegar and Sinnar will eat them for dinner, probably literally.” Asher shook his head. “You can’t win. What would be the point of trying?”
Koslov took another step closer and this time he ignored Torger’s growl. His jaw flexed again. He was angry. “The point of trying is to try,” he said flatly. “We should just hunker down inside this fucking shield and die? Christ!” He whirled on his feet, his wound-up emotions sending him three paces down the path. Then he turned back again. His fists were tightly held at his side. “I’m not talking about a dozen boys from the ‘hood. Do you know how many people live in the tunnels and are scattered through what’s left of New York? Thousands of them! And I’m not talking about men now. Women and kids and old folk. Thousands and thousands. If they thought there was even a tiny chance they could get out of here, they would fight with teeth and nails and bad breath and they would never give up.” He threw out a hand. “They just need to know what to do.”
His chest was heaving.
Asher swallowed. “It would be suicidal,” he said, his voice very gentle.
Koslov took another deep breath. “Are you telling me that even with thousands and thousands, that sheer numbers wouldn’t do the trick?”
“The Alfar have sheer numbers,” Asher pointed out. “Even if you could round up hundreds of thousands and could coordinate them all, the Alfar would still have you outnumbered.”
“We got a TV station,” Koslov muttered. “We could coordinate them that way.”
“It’s working?” Asher asked, surprised.
“Nah, but I gotta guy that says he could run it if it had juice.”
“And who has working televisions to listen?” Asher asked gently.
Koslov slammed his fists against his thighs. “There has to be something!” he raged.
Charlee bit her lip and looked at Asher for guidance. Koslov’s fury over his helplessness and that of his friends was painful to witness.
There was a fluttering sound overhead and all three of them looked up sharply. The sky overhead was filled with fluttering, turning, drifting sheets of paper.
“Christ!” Koslov muttered.
“The Alfar are dropping notices again,” Charlee muttered. She reached up to snag a sheet and had to jump sideways as the breeze pushed it southward. She reached for one that was closer, flipping it over and turning it around.
The writing was ill-formed, as if it had been carefully imitated, and the English was strained, but it was quite understandable.
TOMORROW AT NOON,
HROAR BRYANNARRSON, ANNARR OF HERLEIFR,
TO BE EXECUTED
BASE OF NORTH FOOT OF EYRY,
UNLESS ASHER STRAND IS TO ALFAR IMMEDIATELY,
OR HIMSELF IS AT PLATFORM TOMORROW.
ALL HUMANS FOUND BY ALFAR WILL DIE
UNTIL ASHER STRAND TO US GIVEN.
Koslov looked up at Asher. “Why are they so hot for you?” he demanded. “They’ve got themselves the real leader of the Kine, but they want you instead.”
“I don’t know,” Asher confessed.
Charlee stayed silent, her heart aching.
Koslov grinned and jerked his head toward the flurry of sheets that covered the sky wherever they looked. “Word is going to spread, man. You thought you were hot before this. If the Alfar kill a single human after the deadline is over, they’ll tear you apart themselves, then go after the Alfar.”
Charlee fought to stay silent. She had no idea things were so bad.
Asher crumpled the sheet in his hand. “How do I contact you, Koslov?”
“You’ll do it then?” Koslov’s expression brightened with hope.
“Something has to be done.” Asher shook his head. “I don’t know what, yet, but I don’t want your people going off half-cocked either. I need to consider this, to talk to some people.” His gaze flickered toward Charlee, and she knew that she was one of the people.
Koslov started explaining where he was located and how to reach him, and how to pass through the layers of security surrounding him and the people living with him. Charlee let Asher take it in, while she thought about the relentless Alfar search for her and Asher.
Noon, tomorrow.
Time always runs out.
Chapter Forty-Four
“You can’t possibly be considering doing it?” Lucas asked, sounding stunned.
“Handing myself over? No,” Asher said flatly, looking down into the empty mug cradled in his hands.
“Leading untrained, unprepared phalanxes of human cripples, women and children on some stupid crusade to give them meaning in their life,” Lucas shot back.
“The Alfar have Roar,” Asher pointed out. “I don’t know where Eira is, but the rest of the Kine will be with her. She can lead—probably better than Roar. But she would want to fight. Koslov should have asked her.”
“Eira has always felt betrayed because she was made a Valkyrie, not an Einherjar,” Charlee added. “She led armies of men in Roman times, when women fighting was absolutely unheard of. She has never adjusted to life as a Valkyrie, even as the leader of the Valkyrie. She would absolutely fight, if she had an army at her back.”
“The humans inside the shield are not warriors,” Lucas replied. He pulled the big pitcher of mead closer to him with a sigh. “Asher is right. Any attempt to storm the tower would just be a pretty form of suicide.” He poured. “That doesn’t solve the basic problem. They have Roar.” He filled Asher’s mug. “Why do they want you so bad?” he asked.
Asher shook his head and drank deeply.
Charlee shifted on her chair. “I think I know why.”
Both men looked at her.
She pressed her lips together. “Darwin told me about a prophecy a long time ago. The Nine Worlds Prophecy.”
“Prophecy?” Lucas repeated, sounding stunned. “You’re saying the Alfar are turning heaven and earth over looking for you two because of some stupid tea leaves?”
“Prophecy is a serious matter in the other worlds,” Charlee said g
ently, trying not to laugh at Lucas’ outrage.
“You haven’t noticed how many soothsayers have been discovered among the humans since the auras were opened?” Asher asked. “There’s a reason why, of all the talents the auras can enhance, prophecy is the most common among all the worlds. But the Vanir were the best at it, and everything they saw and predicted has a way of coming to be. Most of their predictions were lost when the Herleifr descended upon Midgard, but we tried to write down the ones we remembered the best. The Nine Worlds Prophecy was one of them. Something about a saint-like king and queen.” He drank again.
Charlee recited the prophecy she had memorized long ago. “Topple the saintly king and merciful queen, the raven king shall, to usher in the king of kings with the branded bloom, to face the wrath of the worlds.”
“Gibberish,” Lucas shot back.
Asher was staring at her. “Sindri….” He said slowly.
“The Raven King,” Charlee said in agreement.
“Then Stefan was the saintly king.” Asher sat up and rubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Gods,” he whispered.
“That makes Eira merciful?” Lucas asked. “How? You’ve both always talked about her like she was a complete ball-buster, and if she was leading a Roman legion back in the dark ages, she would have to be. There’s nothing merciful in a queen like that.”
“The prophecies can’t be taken literally,” Charlee told him. “They’ve been interpreted and re-interpreted. The original version was in Old English.”
“How does it connect to you and me?” Asher asked softly, watching Charlee. “You’ve thought it through. Tell me.”
“This is the awkward bit,” she confessed. “It’s so hard to believe.” She sat up, too, and pulled the empty mug Asher had put on the table for her closer and reached for the mead. “Darwin asked me, one day, quite out of the blue, what my name was. My full name.”
“Charlotte Rose Montgomery.” Lucas shrugged.
“Rose,” she repeated for emphasis, then touched her cheek. “A branded rose.”
“The branded bloom,” Asher said softly.
Lucas laughed. “So that makes you...what?” he demanded of Asher. “The king of kings?” He thrust to his feet with a jerky movement. “This is crazy! The Alfar are going to commit genocide because they think you’re going to live up to some prophecy made when the British were wearing woad?”
“Actually, the British didn’t start speaking Old English until the Anglo-Saxons invaded, about three hundred years later,” Asher said mildly. His gaze was unfocused. He was back to thinking hard.
“I don’t give a fuck!” Lucas cried. “This is so fucking crazy I want to shoot myself so I can wake up in the next life and get away from it. Shit!” He threw his hands up.
Charlee tugged on his belt. “Sit, Lucas. Have a drink.”
Asher topped up his mug, and Lucas blew out his breath and sat down heavily. Reluctantly.
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe in the prophecy or not,” Asher said, still speaking quietly, contemplatively. “What matters is that the Alfar believe it. They believe it, and it makes them afraid enough to happily exchange the current leader of the Kine for me, because they think taking me off the board will abort the prophecy.”
“He’s not the current leader,” Charlee pointed out. “He wasn’t appointed by acclaim. Eira coaxed him to take up the responsibilities, but he’s not officially the Annarr.”
“It still doesn’t matter,” Asher said patiently. “The prophecy itself doesn’t matter except that it explains why the Alfar are so determined to find us. That puts this thing tomorrow into context. Otherwise, we can forget about the prophecy.”
“But you said these things are taken seriously!” Lucas cried.
“They are, but….” Asher sighed. “Prophesy is slippery. Let’s say I was a seer, and I told you that tomorrow, you’re going to step out onto the road and get hit by a bolt of lightning. What do you think you would do?”
“Think you were soft in the head,” Lucas replied instantly.
“But you wouldn’t go outside if there were thunderclouds, would you? You’d play it safe. Just in case. Even though you don’t think the prophecy is real and I’m a charlatan. Because of my prophecy, you would change your future behavior.”
Lucas squinted his eyes at Asher, thinking it through. “Reading the future changes that future?”
Asher nodded. “But sometimes you can change your behavior so much, you put yourself in the path of the prophecy.”
“Do you?” Charlee asked. “Or are you simply doing what the prophecy predicted?”
Asher looked at her. “You believe you’ve lived your life according to someone else’s predetermined course, Charlee? Or would you prefer to think you have free will?”
“I am self-determining,” she told him. “But because I am, I am becoming what they expected me to be. If I had not controlled my own future all these years, then that could not have happened.”
“You’re saying you have free will at the same time you’re saying you’re living according to a prediction,” Lucas pointed out.
“It sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not,” Charlee assured him.
Asher considered her. “Something is bothering you,” he said softly. “Koslov?” he guessed.
Charlee pressed her lips together. Then she sighed. “He was old.”
“That tends to happen to people,” Lucas pointed out.
“Yes, I know,” she said patiently. She touched her cheek. “I got this twenty-seven years ago. Twenty-seven,” she repeated slowly. “Koslov would have been in his twenties. I was in junior high and you were in high school, Lucas. I looked at Koslov today, and it reminded me of something that I have forgotten in all the years that I lived with the Kine.” She reached out and touched the hair at Lucas’ temples. “You’re going grey.”
“True,” Lucas agreed.
“You turned forty-four this year.”
“Forty-three, thank you very much,” Lucas said gruffly.
“Asher, look at him,” Charlee urged. “Really look at him.”
Asher shook his head. “What should I see?”
Charlee sighed. “While you were away, I ran into an old friend of mine, from when I was in high school. Elizabeth—do you remember her?”
Both of them nodded. Lucas grinned. “I thought about trying to go out with her once or twice. She was a pretty thing. But she favored the rich kids with prospects.”
Charlee nodded. “She knew her family wouldn’t settle for less. Elizabeth was very smart in that regard. She survived the occupation and she is just barely hanging on. She was driving in from Long Beach when the Alfar invaded and was caught inside the shield.” Charlee pressed her hands together. “Asher, she was, gods, she was old. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, and I know there’s no hair dye left, but that wasn’t all of it. She had wrinkles. Her skin was sagging, and I swear she was shorter than I remember. I didn’t recognize her. Not even after she said who she was and started talking about high school and her ex-husbands.” She reached up and undid the clip that was holding her hair in place and shook her hair out. “Look at me. How old am I?”
Lucas sat back. “Nu-uh. I’m not playing that game. Last time a woman asked me to guess her age I ended up with a black eye.”
“Asher, you’ve spent a long time watching humans age,” Charlee told him. “Look at me. Really look at me and tell me how old you would think I was if you met me in the street and didn’t know my past.”
Asher’s gaze flickered over her face and her upper body. He glanced at Lucas. “She looks like a very young twenty year old,” he said.
“I don’t have a wrinkle. Not a grey hair, nothing is sagging,” Charlee said.
Asher smiled and she hit his arm. “Behave,” she told him and Lucas snorted.
“Both of you,” she added and pinned up her hair again. “I know you barely keep track of such stuff, either of you, but I turned thirty-nine last b
irthday.”
Lucas sobered. “I’d say impossible, except I know how old I am, every freaking decade. I can tell when I get out of bed in the morning.” He glanced at Asher. “She’s right. You’re right. She doesn’t look a day over twenty-two. Fresh and dewy. What gives?”
Asher shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. The Amica do enjoy a long life, generally void of sickness. But it’s not an extraordinarily long life.”
“The Eldre live much longer than normal humans,” Charlee pointed out. “But I am not a Valkyrie.”
“Is that why the prophecy talks about you?” Lucas asked. He licked his lips. “Not that I’m saying I believe it or anything, but if the Vanir really do know their stuff, why did they single Charlee out? Because she’s, I dunno, not human?”
“Charlee is very human,” Asher said. “We aren’t going to get answers to this tonight. Let’s move on.”
“No, let’s go back,” Charlee insisted. “What are you going to do tomorrow, Asher?”
Asher pushed his hand through his hair. “What do you want of me? You want me to lead a poor man’s army on a quest that will most certainly fail? That will make you feel better?”
“It will make them feel better,” Charlee replied. “But I don’t think you should do it.”
“Why not?” Lucas asked curiously.
Charlee kept her gaze upon Asher. “The Alfar want you to make a move. They want to locate you. Dangling Roar is one way. If you make any overt move against them, they will get what they want.”
“My location,” Asher said.
Charlee took a sip of her mead and wished briefly they had equipment to make long mead. She liked the bubbles. “You have to look at this from thirty thousand feet. We don’t know what is happening out beyond the shield.”
“For all we know, humans have been completely overwhelmed by the Alfar, who now rule the world,” Lucas said.
Asher shook his head. “They would have dropped the shield, if they controlled all of Midgard. They would have nothing to shield against anymore.” He looked at Charlee. “You think they’re losing.”
“I think they’re hurting,” Charlee said. “The Kine outside the shield and the human armies—I think they got together and for the last few years they have been kicking butt as hard as they can and the Alfar have been forced to take a step back. Not defeat—not yet. But they can see how they might lose. It’s on the horizon of possibilities. So now they’re covering all the bases. Anything that will help them, and that includes getting rid of the Vanir’s king of kings.”
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 68