Gho blinked. “Interesting analysis.” He looked down at the girl’s dead body, and seemed about to say something else, but Mazatl propelled him out of the room, firmly.
It was only eleven antemeridian, and Sigrun’s to-do list was almost as long as her arm, and most of the entries on it had to do with refugees. They headed back to the main Praetorian building and Sigrun started to type her report on a large, electric-based calculus, which she was afraid to touch, lest she melt it by accident. So she begged a pair of rubber gloves from Ayala, who watched her from the doorway, with a curious and bemused expression, as Sigrun carefully tapped away at the machine.
Her mind wandered as she did. Memories from the last year came back at unexpected moments, and she wondered, sometimes, if that was why she kept herself as busy as she did. So she wouldn’t have the time or the energy in which to think. To dwell. The images from the girl’s mind returned to her, hauntingly. She had had a sorcerer’s senses jammed into her brain, as Sigrun had had othersight forced on her, and she’d killed herself, unable to cope with the powers. Untrained, poor damned thing. And somehow, Sigrun’s mind kept throwing Frittigil’s face into the mix, as the young woman had begged her for counsel about her power to raise the dead . . . at the cost of another’s life. None of us asked for what has happened to us, Sigrun thought, bleakly. But surely, there is some middle path. Suicide on one hand, acceptance on the other. Both forms of surrender. No. The only path open to me, is to fight. The damnable othersight. Freya’s teachings. And anything else. Resistance is all I know . . . .
A rap at her door startled her, and then Adam was there, smiling in at her, as she realized that her gloved fingers had stopped typing several minutes ago. “Lunch?” he asked her.
Sigrun stood, remembering to save her file just in time. “I think you have an admirer,” she told him, and held up Ayala’s file folder, waving it at him.
Adam made a face. “Turnabout is fair play. You’ve acquired a very large pet dragon that seems to have adopted you as a replacement for his mother, of late.”
Sigrun frowned slightly. “I don’t think that Nith sees me as a mother. And he’s not a pet, either. He is . . . himself.” Niðhoggr was a force of nature, and she had no explanation for his friendship, so far. Yet, Adam’s sudden deflection . . . . “Oh, so you were aware of the young lady’s infatuation with you?” Sigrun asked, raising her eyebrows at her husband, teasingly.
“She keeps bringing me coffee,” Adam muttered, looking annoyed. “I’ve told her, repeatedly, that she’s not an intern. I blame having a desk. If I didn’t have a desk, people wouldn’t think I needed coffee to put on it.”
Sigrun nodded solemnly. “That is a very rational explanation. We should get rid of our desks.”
“Then where would we put your shiny new calculus, which I can already tell that you love—”
Sigrun took off her rubber gloves, smelling the talc inside of them, and laid them over the keyboard. “Oh. Yes. I can feel the excitement of change and progress burning inside me.”
“Those are hunger pangs. Let’s go get that lunch, shall we?” He steered her out the door, one hand light on her shoulder. “I didn’t think you’d mind if I invited Tren and Kanmi. They’re meeting us at a place near the university.”
Sigrun’s entire body sagged for a moment with relief.
Once out of the office, and once Kanmi had, helpfully, warded their table against eavesdropping, Sigrun turned and looked at Adam. “Did you pick my team for me?” she asked.
Adam stirred his coffee. “Itztli, yes. Bat Elior . . . no, but I think she shows promise. Gho is . . .” He looked at the ceiling. “How do I put this?”
“Adam, he spent the morning telling everyone on the team the attractions of nieten women. Especially, I might add, the scaled and furred kind. I should take him to the north and let a fenris eat him.” Sigrun considered that, for a moment. “Though that would be unfair to the fenris.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kanmi said, raising his eyebrows. “It’s good to know that not everyone considers them hirsute freaks and monsters . . . oh, what am I saying? Of course they do. That’s the attraction, at least for now. In a generation, when it’s normalized . . . and it is going to become normal, isn’t it? . . . it won’t be such a fetish.”
Sigrun rubbed at her eyes. “The traits are breeding true,” she said. “Still random, more or less, but a nieten mother or father is mostly assured of having a nieten child. It could be worse.”
“How so?” Adam asked her.
“The ettin will be a single generation, and then die out, I believe.”
“Well, not that that’s not a good thing, but why . . .” Trennus paused. “They’re sterile?”
Sigrun grimaced. “That would be a mercy. No. Not sterile. Just . . . unable to reproduce.”
Kanmi frowned, and then got it. “Oh. Astarte’s tits. You mean the female ettin can get pregnant, but two heads don’t make it through a birth canal designed for one.”
Sigrun picked up her teacup, feeling a chill wash over her. “Precisely. Whenever I found one of them pregnant, I considered it a mercy to kill her immediately. Especially since we periodically found the dens of the dead mothers, who had died after . . . days or even a week of labor. Unable to pass what should never be born. They regenerate almost as well as jotun do. Their bodies wouldn’t let them die, until their hearts burst, or they suffered strokes to both brains.” She shuddered. “There are unconfirmed reports of ettin males reproducing with grendel females. They occasionally try to rape the female jotun, too, when they catch one alone. In any case, they . . . can’t pass on what they are. Not so long as there are two heads, anyway.”
The table was quiet for a moment, and then she made an effort to turn the topic back to work and the present. “So. Gho. You say he’s not so bad?”
“If it helps, I think he’s a thirty-two year old virgin,” Trennus offered, shrugging. “Not every sorcerer or ley-mage is as . . . well-adapted as Kanmi and I am.” He paused. “Then again, I’m not sure I could actually handle a woman who wasn’t a spirit, and Kanmi . . . well. You’re you.”
“I am the most normal person at this table, Matrugena, and you know it.” Kanmi bared his teeth in amusement. “I’m sitting at a table with a spirit-touched, a god-born, and a godslayer.”
Adam winced. “You sure that the privacy field is up?”
“Absolutely.” Kanmi looked at Sigrun. “Gho is probably a competent enough sorcerer. For a traditionalist.”
“What would it take for me to convince you to leave off paddling around in academia, and come back to work?” Sigrun tried to keep the plaintive note out of her tone, and then decided to play it up, instead.
Kanmi actually laughed out loud. “Oh, twist my arm.” He rubbed at his face. “Min wouldn’t even mind. And my students wouldn’t miss me. I’m the one who throws chalk at them when they aren’t paying attention.” He gave her a wry look, however. “You’re not the only one feeling like you’re a marlin in a minnow pool. I know I am. But . . . setting up a technomancy and sorcery department at this benighted excuse for a university—”
“It’s a very good university, in terms of math, chemistry, biology, and physics,” Adam pointed out, swiftly.
“—is important enough that I want to see it through, if I can.” Kanmi grimaced. “I’d be amenable to consulting, however.”
Sigrun nodded. “Actually, I did wish to speak to you about doing sweeps through the refugee areas. At least one girl developed a talent for . . . seeing magic, after Loki’s banishment. She . . . killed herself this morning. She didn’t know what she had. She just knew, lights, colors, sensations she couldn’t explain, headaches . . . .”
Trennus clasped his hands in front of him, and grimaced. “Damn it,” he said, with feeling.
“Not your fault, Matru,” Kanmi told him, with unexpected swiftness. “Wasn’t the result of the banishment. Was the effect of the wave of energy. Could even have been from Hel’s death.”<
br />
Sigrun was just grateful that they’d focused on that, and not the precise details of how she’d ascertained the information. Her report would require her to attribute everything to the testimony of the family, too, rather than admit that othersight still plagued her, interacting with her deathsense and truthsense. She cleared her throat. “With whom should I speak to set up screening for budding sorcerers among the refugees? This could have happened to adults too, after all. It might not just be the young.”
“There’s a bad thought. Adults don’t usually have the brain plasticity to be able to learn new skills easily. Teaching them to control their magic could be a very tricky thing.” Kanmi pursed his lips. “I know a few people who might volunteer. I’ll do some of it myself.”
“Thank you.” Sigrun’s tone held relief.
When the other two had left, however, Adam took one of her hands in his, and leaned across the table. “Now,” he told her, a hint of a tease in his tone, but an unexpectedly serious look on his face. “If you’d just push for a promotion or a command position, you wouldn’t be stuck breaking in rookies like Gho and bat Elior. Again.”
Sigrun smiled faintly. “Once upon a time, you were a rookie. That turned out for the best, did it not?”
“Well, I like to think so. But how many times do you really want to do the same thing, Sig?”
She pushed her plate out of the way, so she could twine the fingers of her other hand with his, a double clasp. “I go where I am sent, and I serve where I am to serve.” She paused. “The war in the north is a stalemate. And one to which I fully expect to be called once more. Not today. Perhaps not this year. But they are allowing me time away to be with you.” Sigrun looked down. She couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. The northern war was a task unfinished. Saraid still needed help with the wolves, too. And while she felt guilty at leaving the war in the north unfinished—though she had a sneaking suspicion that it would never truly end . . . she felt just as guilty that she’d left Adam here in Judea. So much wasted time. So I’m damned, no matter what I do, because everything I do is the wrong thing at the wrong time.
“I can’t tell them not to send you back north, no, but the ‘I go where I’m told’ part is crap, Sig. You could request—”
“I requested Judea.” She rarely cut him off, but in this case, she had to make her point. Parallel with all her other thoughts was the terrible knowledge that their lives were out of step, out of joint. Adam was ready for promotion, for command, for leadership. And from his perspective, she was older. Senior. “You have the military mindset, Adam. Up, or out. I’ll admit to . . . not feeling challenged. But I don’t really require promotion to do my job.” She shrugged.
“You shouldn’t be just idling in the same gear forever.” Upset, on my behalf? And yet, he . . . looks a little afraid, too. Why?
“Adam, do you remember a conversation we had years ago, when you were walking me to my apartment?” Sigrun’s fingers tightened on his. “You asked me if I would ever want to be like Heracles. Have my mortality burned away, and have nothing left but the god?”
His eyes were dark, and a little lost. “I remember.”
“My answer is the same now, as it was then. Fire hurts, Adam. I am happy with who and what and where I am, and I can live with what I am doing. I don’t want any more power or authority, and certainly I have enough responsibilities and duties for a lifetime. I’ll admit that it chafes when I cannot do everything that I want, when I want, but . . .” Limits are important. Limits and boundaries keep us human. “Who really ever gets to do everything that they want? Spoiled children and bad gods.” She swallowed. “The main thing is, I am with you. That’s what matters.”
Adam exhaled. “All right, Sig. Fair enough. Let’s . . . go back to work.”
September 2, 1975 AC
One of the things Kanmi had come to realize, in his many talks with Minori about history and the nature of ripples in space and time, was that sometimes, the event that started a ripple was so long in the past, that by the time it caught up with where someone currently was, they no longer could identify its point of origin. The human mind couldn’t keep track of them all, not with the interaction of waves out in the deep sea of time, crisscrossing each other as the energy from one storm’s wake entered the swell of an entirely different system.
That was never more true than today.
“Masako, clean your room. We’re expecting company any minute now.” Kanmi heard his wife call that up the stairs at their now-twelve-year-old daughter, and shook his head, climbing up the stairs two at a time himself. Masako had been training in sorcery almost since she was able to talk, instead of waiting to be ‘diagnosed’ as a sorcerer through a breakthrough event, as both he and Minori had been—but it still slightly unnerved him whenever he caught his daughter using her power for household chores. Most of him wanted to applaud: Excellent development of fine thaumaturgic control! But another part of him wanted to lecture her for wasting energy. Still, all things considered, in terms of ‘ethical use of power,’ her use of her levitation skill to tidy her room was far less bad than other things she could be doing.
So he stood outside her room and watched, with both his eyes and his sorcerous senses, as books, dolls, papers, and Baal-only-knew-what-else flew around, while Masako sat, cross-legged, on her bed, her eyes wide and unfocused. Looking at everything and nothing at once, her fingers twisting and a soft, susurration of whispered incantations spreading through the air. And when she was done, Kanmi poked his head in the door and told her, “Good job. Now dust—and not by pushing it all into a cloud in the air.”
“How do I . . . ?”
“Think about it. You don’t want it up in the air. It’ll just resettle, and you’ll have to do it again. Concentrate, form the incantation, and try it.”
After a moment, she decided to turn the dust into spheres of highly compacted gray matter. Kanmi corrected the incantation’s wording before she actually put her will into it, and watched as a half dozen tiny gray spheres wafted over to drop into the dustbin. “Good job.” He ruffled her hair, and told her, “Now, quickly, downstairs. Erida is bringing her son. You’ll have someone to talk to, at least.”
“He’s just going to be a dumb boy, Papa.”
Yes. Keep thinking boys are dumb. At least for a couple more years. Please. Trennus’ son Solinus is exactly your age. The boy clearly took after both his mother and his father, with copper-red hair, dressed back in Pictish braids, and Trennus’ fire-blue eyes. He’s going to be trouble. Not nearly as much trouble as Tasalus, but Tas is . . . several years younger. Praise the gods. Solinus had inherited Lassair’s ability to form himself into fire, and occasionally managed phoenix form, if usually unconsciously. Give it a few years, they’re going to be slipping out their windows at night to go visit. All the more reason she doesn’t need to learn proper flight just yet.
Kanmi directed Masako downstairs, where she sat down on the couch and waited. Neither he nor Minori would tolerate ill-manners or eye-rolling, but he also made sure that she had things to do while they were expecting her to act like an adult. Hence why, after a moment, he handed her a book on thermodynamic magic. “Papa, I don’t do well with fire.” She sounded unhappy. “Sol laughs at me when I try. They all do.”
“It comes naturally for them because of what they are,” Kanmi said, for what felt like the five hundredth time. “You’ll notice that most of them can do one or two of the things their mother can, but not everything? It’s because they’re not adults yet, haven’t come into their full powers, and haven’t practiced them. You? You have the capacity to be more flexible than any of them. You should be able to do more things than they can. They’re good at what they do, but they’re limited by what they are.” Kanmi realized he’d gone into lecture-voice, and grimaced at himself. “You just have to practice.”
Masako sighed and opened the book.
Ten minutes later, there was a knock at the front door of their house, and Minori went to
go answer it. Erida had written to say that she was bringing both her son and her lover, and that Kanmi should be prepared to see some changes in her. Kanmi had chuckled and written back that she hadn’t so much as sent a photograph to him since 1969, when they’d visited her home on the Caspian. She’d been both plumper and more motherly than he’d remembered her from the memorable events of the convention center in 1955. She was forty-six now, three years his junior, and Kanmi was expecting streaks of gray. Hard, firm lines around her mouth.
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