by James Comins
Chapter Nine
Gone Missing
or, Don’t Ask Me, Dear, Ask the Icebox!
Blinking, Lenna somehow missed the moment when the lamp went back to its corner, returning all the light and shadow to their wash from the other end of the church. The gray halo around Aitta’s head cut through the illumination. It was still dawn.
Aitta stumbled to the front pew and sat heavily. “That’s all I know how to do.” She pressed her face into the meat of her palms and pulled her cheeks down. “They didn’t offer a way out. Nothing.”
“Aitta? May I ask you something that I truly, truly shouldn’t ask?”
“Yes.” Aitta nodded into her hands.
“So. So Binnan Darnan told you how I can see liars? That they have a black halo around their heads?” said Lenna.
“Yes,” she answered.
“But I’ve only seen a few people with a liar’s halo, Aitta. I thought there would be more. You don’t have a black halo. Not even a thin one. Instead you’ve got a gray halo. What is it?”
Aitta wrapped her fingers around her spiny dyed hair. “I keep faith, Lenna. This is the hardest thing anyone can do. I read the Book before bed every night. Every time, it’s a battle to believe the words I read. Some days I know I read the truth, and other days I read things that seem to be lies. I doubt. Do you see?” she finished.
“If you believed perfectly, would you have a perfect white halo?”
“You’re thinking too much, Lenna. Come along. We should walk back now.”
With a heavy little breath, the girl took her hands off the comfortable blue altar and fit them around her own elbows protectively. Thinking, thinking. Thinking thoughts and worries in flurries, she followed Aitta out into the crispy-fresh and almost-warm dawn.
Aitta had a selfish smile of wonder. Hadn’t she seen angels before?
Back across the frozen ground of the downs they marched. Patient. It was a morning for blusters of white snow buntings, a morning for the sound of a wren landing beside others on a thin polished branch, whose brass spring-joint collapsed in a huge flutter of wings. The wrens followed the buntings, and together they were the sounds of the morning.
They pushed the door of the hotel open. The woman who ran the place was shuffling things out from the back room for breakfast.
“Um, is there a piece of puffin for me?” Lenna asked.
“Don’t ask me, dear,” she said in not-quite-the-right tone of voice. “Ask the icebox!”
What was an icebox? It was a little irritating, not knowing how the world worked.
Feeling silly, Lenna rounded a corner to a chest of old oak drawers beneath a glass bubble with a chunk of blue glacial ice in it. A line of woven crystals thrummed in a panel below the ice. Faint memories made her wonder if these were crystals that Binnan Darnan had woven herself and sold, or if there were other crystal weavers in Iceland.
Now. Ask it?
“Do you have puffin for me, icebox?” she said aloud.
A clunking flipping followed, and a wooden drawer slid out. A dinner plate wrapped in copper foil sat inside the box of the wooden drawer.
Lenna brought the chilly plate to the dining room and sat beside Aitta in a booth. The front room was empty except for the innkeeper lady. It was too early for breakfast. “Would you like some?” Lenna asked Aitta. She unwrapped the foil and took forks from the inn’s service.
“Ok.”
They sat and ate cold puffin as the sun wheeled streaks into the room. Time was normal again, hooray. A painting of a wooden skeleton, dog-paddling itself through the waves, caught Lenna’s eye. The swimming skeleton was set against a reef of rocks and breakers booming. On the thing’s curving plank spine was a small flat platform, and on it stood maybe twenty sailors. One had a helmet with spiral antlers. Another wore a jacket of blue fur. They stood proudly, triumphantly, on the swimming horror, their hands resting on the hilts of swords, like conquerors.
“Is this a daedelus?” she asked Aitta, pointing to the painting.
She shook. “Boat,” she mumbled through a forkful.
Waiting, waiting. Lenna began to hum. When Kaldi and Talvi burst in through the front door and hugged Lenna with tears of relief, she and Aitta were both too startled to say anything.
“Oh, thank them all. Thank your God, too,” Kaldi said to Aitta. “Where did you find her?” Kaldi clung to Lenna as if she was the Holy Grail, his big arms and warmness around her and his shaggy hair against hers. His gold glasses smooshed a little against her forehead. Breath heaved from him.
“Em.” Aitta cleared her throat, embarrassed. “We tried to fix things with prayer. Binnan Darnan suggested that ...”
“You’ve seen her?” said Talvi quickly. “Binnan Darnan? You know where she is?”
“Not since yesterday afternoon. Is she missing?”
Kaldi nodded, breathless. Still overcome, he asked Lenna, “Do you know?”
“We had a fight,” she replied. “Then I came back to the inn.”
“Lenna, is there more to it than this?”
“She wanted to explore. She thought--” Lenna let her anger sieve away before she finished. “She thought she wouldn’t get into super trouble.” To smile or not? Not. “And she asked me to come along. But I didn’t.”
“All?” asked Kaldi seriously.
“All.”
“Come with me.”
They all went out to the ice fountain. Brugda sat, looking like someone who had been lost at sea and had floated back to land. As Lenna approached, Brugda jumped off her seat and hobbled up to the girl for a smothering hug. Lenna found that her hatred of the old matron had sunk to a grumble.
“Time for a working,” the bonneted woman declared. Deliberately her hands came together, clap, matter-of-fact. Brugda smelled of old linen and powder. Above her, a few silver and black filigree branches dusted with newfallen cotton swayed. The skinny trees dotted the perimeter of the square, their branches looking like clarinets.
“What spell will we do?” asked Lenna.
“Another summoning, child,” said Brugda. She took out her sharp piece of obsidian and scraped a triangle into the stone surface of the fountain rim. She chanted the whispery words,
Fær hana fyrr
Andi madur uppi
and waited while Lenna grudgingly followed. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t. Really promised. And she kept promises. But in the flurry of all the news, she had become more worried about Binnan Darnan than about keeping this promise. The words were quick, and even quicker was the prismatic shimmer that puffed away, pringinging! fliphth almost immediately.
“There must be a spell that’s keeping the magic from working,” said Lenna.
Brugda’s head sank into her hands.
“Can I try something?” Lenna asked.
“Anything,” wheezed Brugda, her shoulders bent to breaking.
Lenna spread her arms. “I command Binnan Darnan to be here.”
The air wiggled. A gray wisp sprang from the triangle they had scratched into the fountain and planted itself between the sisters. Binnan Darnan’s face squirmed out of the slate and filled the wisp, gray-blue and puzzled.
“What’s happening?” she said in an airy voice. “I’m dreaming.” Her half-visible eyes struck gold. “This is one of those dreams where anything can happen! Lenna becomes a dragon and I’ll teach her a new dance ...”
Lenna frowned. “Binnan Darnan, this is no dream.” She screwed up her face in frustration. “It’s never a dream! Binnan Darnan, you’re missing. Where are you?”
“This isn’t a dream?” the voice asked.
“No. Where have you gone? We’re looking for you.”
“I was looking over the side of a daedelus a second ago.”
“Oh, child.” Brugda’s voice shook with tears.
“Who took you?” Lenna demanded.
“They’re monsters and have no shape,” Binnan Darnan replied. “But they have such claws. If this isn’t a drea
m then I ought to be scared. Am I not in bed?”
“Talvi!” shouted Brugda in a collapsing voice. “Don’t--don’t you ever, ohhh, tell them to go off on their own. This, you ...”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Binnan Darnan. We’re coming for you. We’ll find you,” said Lenna.
“I was really kidnapped by monsters, Lenna?” the slate-colored face asked.
Lenna nodded. “Can you tell us who or where?”
“They spoke the language of the dragon’s riddle. Irish, I guess. Will I see you again?”
Brugda’s face reddened and her jaw shuddered as she held tears back.
“Of course you will, Binnan Darnan,” said Lenna. “We’ll find you in no time. That’s what we’ll do.”
“I don’t want to be here. I am scared after all.” The wisp began to scumble away to nothing. “I hope this is a dream,” she murmured. As she faded, a sound not quite like words erupted around her, like the dying sound of a bird.
This time, the almost-straight lines of the triangle that Brugda had scratched into the fountain scrubbed themselves away, erasing as if they had been chalk, leaving the granite smooth.
Brugda stood. “We leave for Ireland now, now, now. Talvi, get the empress. We’ll take it as far as the airport. Kaldi, bring what you can. Lenna,” she sighed. “Lenna.”