“Sorry,” I said, trying and failing to shake off the dread I felt but couldn’t explain. “I will endeavor to keep my speech pure for the Sabbath.”
****
The church service was uneventful, if long. I said the prayers and made the responses as I always did though usually I paid closer attention to the sermon. Instead, my mind kept replaying what happened in the library as Melisande’s words echoed through the memories. The reverend’s words faded to a drone.
Laufeson had spoken of how ‘the spell still held’ and that he’d come to ‘collect me’. It was a choice of words more indicative of a magic user than a random mesmerist. Can Mellie be right? I wondered. Is Loki real? If so, what would such a being want with me? How could such a being exist?
Gertrude, ever the proper churchgoer, nudged me to bring my wayward thoughts back to the service. I straightened and did a better job of at least looking like I paid attention, though I didn’t, really. The irony of pondering the existence of a pagan god while I sat in a house of worship for the Christian deity wasn’t lost on me. I prayed the whole thing was an incredibly bizarre coincidence and asked the Lord for protection from future attacks and abductions while those around me murmured about forgiving trespasses and avoiding temptation.
Then the service was over, and flanked by my parasol-wielding companions, we made our way back to Towson House. The journey was, thankfully, without excitement. Laufeson made no appearance, and my protectors felt they’d done an excellent job keeping me safe. I thanked them for their efforts on my behalf, declined a vial of Gertrude’s neurotoxin, much to her dismay, and retired to my room.
I was bone weary. The worried thoughts that had occupied me during the reverend’s droning sermon had drained me, and that, combined with the poor night’s rest, left me wrung out like a dishrag. I plopped down on my bed with a thump. Melisande’s revelations about Loki, Laufeson’s attempted mesmeric abduction, what I’d done without knowing it in the pub in Penzance and repairing Sophie’s Enhanced arm all swirled about in my exhausted brain as I tugged on the fingers of my gloves to remove them. I dropped the gloves on the floor beside my bed and lay down, too tired to even bother undressing. Sleep grabbed me and I lost consciousness, grateful for oblivion.
****
“There you are,” someone called. “This is no time for slumber—wake up, girl!”
I opened my eyes and looked around in astonishment. It was night, and a full moon—oddly bright—illuminated a huge field of wild grasses and flowers that extended as far as the eye could see in all directions. Despite the light of the moon, the stars of the Milky Way galaxy twinkled as brilliant shining spots of light. Directly in front of me was the largest tree I’d ever seen, its leaves a dark forest green and in full foliage, vibrating with life.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she? It’s a shame so few people ever see her anymore,” came the voice.
I sought the source of the voice but seemed to be the only one in the meadow. A breeze wafted past, chilling me.
“Who are you, and where am I?” I called into the moonlit expanse of field and tree, clutching myself in an attempt to keep warm.
“The tree is Yggdrasill,” responded the voice, “and this is some northern region of your world, though I admit I pay very little attention to what you humans call your small bits of earth.”
I looked down at myself and saw that I stood in my nightdress, barefooted… in some northern region of the world. I seemed to recall lying down in my church clothes, but they were nowhere to be seen. Such was the random nature of dreaMs. “And you are…?” I asked the air around me.
A tall, breathtakingly beautiful blonde woman appeared before me, her deep blue eyes sparking with intelligence and wry humor. She wore a light blue gown of fabric that shimmered in the moonlight, with a simple silver necklace curved around her neck. Next to her stood the largest boar I’d ever seen in my life. It was grey and white with huge tusks, and it matched a pony for size. Intelligence sparkled in his eyes. I couldn’t help but get the feeling my presence in my night clothes in the midst of a meadow at night amused him. I gaped.
“I am Freya, she of the Vanir and now of the Aesir. This,” she indicated the boar, “is Hildisvini, my boar.”
I dropped a deep curtsey, feeling a bit of a fool doing so in my nightdress, but the woman who stood before me was obviously royalty of some sort. “A pleasure to meet you, my lady,” I said, “and… erm… you… Mr. Hildisvini?”
The boar inclined his head graciously in acceptance of my greeting. Freya smiled. “You have no notion what’s going on, do you?”
I opened my mouth to respond, thought better of it and shut it. I shook my head. My feet were starting to go numb and the air around us cooled down even further as the night deepened.
She looked at Hildisvini. “You were right,” she said. “The Pessarines were thorough. That Seneschal of theirs is almost as crafty as Odin himself. How delightfully unexpected.” The boar snorted in agreement.
Freya turned her attention to me. “You are Ariana Grace Trevelyan, are you not?” she asked, “daughter of Aiden and Elaine?”
Something oddly powerful about the use of my full name shimmered through my nerves. “Yes, my lady,” I said, hiding my unease.
“You and I are…” She paused, thinking, “…cousins, of a sort. It’s not an exact explanation of our shared heritage, but it will do for now. This tree,” she indicated it behind her, “is the conduit between the world you’re from and the world I inhabit. This is a place of great power.”
I looked up at the tree spreading its branches above us. It was beautiful in an other-worldly sense, and I felt that the part of the tree I saw was only one aspect of its presence in the universe. “What kind of a tree is it?”
“An ash tree. Yggdrasill is also known in mythology as the World Tree. Do you recognize it? This place?”
I blinked. “No. I’ve never seen this tree before, and I’ve never been here in my life,” I said. “Why have you brought me here?”
“Well, cousin,” she said as she absent-mindedly rubbed the top of her pet boar’s head, “I’ve been watching you from my home in Asgard and I wanted to meet you. The only way I could do that was by invading your dream. My power in the waking world is extremely limited.”
“Where is Asgard?” I asked.
Freya pointed upward. “It sits at the top of Yggdrasill. This,” she indicated the field around us, “is Midgard, where you live.” She pointed at her feet. “Below us are the lower realms.”
I rubbed my shoulders in an attempt to stay warm.
“How are we related?” I asked. “My parents have no siblings, and I don’t recall them mentioning your name. You also said ‘you humans’ earlier. If you aren’t human, what are you?”
Freya shrugged. “You look for your ‘one answer’ in this, as if figuring out where I fit in is a mathematics problem. Life is rarely that simple. I am essentially an ancient god whom few worship anymore since your Christian Jehovah holds sway among those who used to revere me. I still have some power, though I’m considerably limited in scope and influence. As to our kinship, we’re related in a sense that is more… symbolic than biological. We do not share a bloodline. We share something else.”
I tried to make sense of her words but felt another shiver start in my body due to the cold. I tried to keep my teeth from visibly chattering. If this being was a goddess, perhaps she had information I would find useful.
“Do you know Loki?” I asked tentatively.
“The Liar? The Tricker of Gods?” Freya responded, and then spat on the ground in disgust. “Yes, the Bound One is known to me. He suffers a just, eternal punishment.” Her brow furrowed. “How do you know of him?”
My shivering increased. “A friend told me about him.”
The boar snorted and indicated me with an inclination of his head. Freya looked down at him, then at me.
“You’re cold,” Freya said. “My apologies. Allow me to remedy that diffi
culty.”
Before I could say anything Freya waved her hand and replaced my nightdress with a high-necked, long-sleeved gown of soft, finely woven dark-blue wool. A golden belt cinched my waist, fur boots covered my feet, and my unruly red hair now dropped in a neat braid down my back. I brought my hand to my head and felt a simple circlet there, the metal curving gracefully across my forehead.
“That attire is much more fitting to a daughter of the All-Father,” she said, looking me over. “You should no longer feel the cold. When you meet with my kind in your dreams in future, this will be your attire, if it pleases you.”
I’ll be meeting with more beings like her? I marveled but remembered my manners. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”
“It’s the least I could do, having brought you here unprepared for the climate,” Freya said simply.
“Begging your pardon, my lady,” I ventured, “but how did I become related to an ancient god? Who is the All-Father? Of what are you a deity? What, if anything, does Loki have to do with me?”
“That isn’t important.” Freya beckoned me forward. “Come and place your hand on the trunk of Yggdrasil,” she said.
“It isn’t?” I moved forward as ordered, intrigued. “I beg your pardon, but it seems rather important to me.”
“I have little time. You must touch Yggdrasil.”
“Why?”
“The World Tree knows you,” she said, indicating the tree. “Come greet her, cousin.” Freya took my hand. Hers was cool to the touch and oddly calloused. In my mind’s eye, I saw her in armor, surrounded by armored men fighting a massive battle.
“Come,” Freya beckoned, tugging my hand. In two strides, we were at the base of the huge ash tree, covering the distance in the blink of an eye, the boar now beside me, warm and intent. Freya smiled gently and drew my hand to the tree trunk. “Do not be afraid,” she said and placed the palm of my hand on the tree. The bark was rough under my fingers.
“You know the blood of this woman, Yggdrasill,” Freya said, looking up into the tree’s branches. “Make yourself known to her.”
Images and sensations crashed into my mind. I tasted blood, coppery on my tongue. I saw the dark silhouette of a young girl, black against a huge full moon that was far too close to Earth to be astronomically possible. The girl, moving slowly within her bonds, hung from the branches of the great tree that surrounded me. I felt blood drip from my limbs to splatter on the roots of the tree. I felt the bone-weary exhaustion of the girl tinged with fear and a determination to be brave. Alarm spiked within me. Very little kept the girl from sliding away into death.
“Ari?” came a call from far away. I turned my head at the sound of my name. The dream-world I stood in shook like a massive earthquake around me, rattling my teeth in my head.
“Ari?! Wake up!” I opened my eyes to find Cora leaning over me. “Freya?” I asked, confused.
“Not hardly,” Cora snorted.
“I was having the oddest dream…” I muttered. “Big boar… big tree… blood…”
“A fine time for dozing,” she chided. “According to the schedule you gave me yesterday, we’re supposed to trek out to that infernal air shed in half an hour.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed, pushing myself to a sitting position. The details of the dream slipped away. “Quite right! Give me a few minutes to change into my work clothes, and I’ll be right down.”
Cora took a step back, shaking her head. “I’ll get Sophie up here to help you, and get the bicycles ready, shall I?”
“If you would. Thanks.”
Chapter Ten
Twenty minutes later I stood in the foyer of Towson House listening to the daily noises of my fellow students studying, chatting and drinking tea in the dining room as I prepared to leave. It was a pleasant, familiar sound and part of me regretted missing teatime, again. It seemed like I regularly missed tea for one reason or another. Pulling on my riding gloves, I read the new, hand lettered flyer tacked to the back of the front door. “Save Towson House” it declared. “Prevent the stodgers from driving women out of Cambridge! Strategizing meeting seven o’clock Friday evening, Drawing Room!”
I shook my head. This nonsense again? I mused. It wasn’t like women studying at Cambridge was a new innovation – females had attended classes at the venerable institution nigh on twenty years. Other universities with less ancient and regal reputations even allowed women to take classes and earn degrees, though Cambridge didn’t. Usually, it was some misogynistic faction of male students who mooned about, lamenting the presence of women as students at ‘their college’. Now, some of the older, tenured professors of our male-dominated institution, led by some particularly unpleasant gentlemen in the Physics department, lobbied to have the women of Towson and Girton—the other women’s college at Cambridge—denied access to Cambridge classes. I had no doubt the detestable Dr. Oberlin was involved in the campaign. If the flyer was to be believed, they’d gotten a surprising amount of support from professors in other departments, using the rallying cry “Deny the women and Enhanced, Keep our college far-advanced!” as if admitting women and the Enhanced would somehow regress the college as a whole.
I’d no idea why they wanted women out, other than the fact that we weren’t men, of course, but I knew it wasn’t because our scholarship was deficient. Towson and Girton women were rare birds who took their academics seriously and we could hold our own with the men any day. I also knew it wasn’t because we’d been behaving in an ‘unladylike manner’. Our houses were at least two miles from the men’s colleges, making unladylike behavior inconvenient at the very least. We also knew our behavior would have repercussions for the women who followed us, so we took great care to make no waves. It wasn’t the first time men had attempted to drive women from Cambridge, I knew, but this effort seemed oddly forceful. Tying the idea of women as students with the British dislike of the Enhanced was a new wrinkle on an old debate. Personally, I saw no reason why Enhanced folk couldn’t attend university, but I knew I was in the minority. So far as I knew, no Enhanced person was a student at Cambridge.
Cora joined me, dressed in her green bicycling clothes and carrying her matching gloves. “Bicycles are on the side of the house, ready to go, and I detected no signs of sabotage,” she told me.
I furrowed my brow. “Who would sabotage a bicycle, and how would Laufeson know which one was mine?”
“Doesn’t matter. I feel better knowing nothing was done to them.” Cora indicated the flyer. “You don’t want to get Mellie started on this ‘women out of Cambridge’ business,” she warned me. “She’s got the suffragette contingent armed and ready to confront the blighters and she’ll pin a ‘Keep Women at Cambridge’ button to your lapel as sure as look at you.”
I motioned at the flyer. “You going to the meeting?”
“Of course,” she huffed. “Bloody men. Why do we have to fight for every single thing?”
I made a mental note as to the time and day of the strategizing meeting. “I’ll go as well,” I sighed.
“Did you really dream about a big boar?” Cora asked.
I struggled to recall. “Yes, but most of the details seem to have slipped away. It had a name.”
“The dream?”
“The boar,” I corrected. “Shall we head to the air shed?”
Cora bowed slightly. “Your grace,” she intoned.
I rolled my eyes and opened the door to head out, my mind filling with what I planned to do that afternoon. I wanted to re-calibrate the barometer of the Bosch for a start and then try attaching a new gauge to the navigation console.
I took a step onto the front stoop and found my path blocked. Looking up, I saw a familiar face.
“Aunt Miranda! What—I mean, this is a surprise!” I stammered, “My goodness. I nearly knocked you over!”
“Indeed, niece,” my Great Aunt intoned, non-plussed by my flustered greeting. “Clearly you are on your way to something important. Have I come at a bad time?”
“Of… course not,” I said quickly, still stammering a bit.
“Hmpf,” she responded eloquently.
It wasn’t that I was unhappy to see her. I loved Great Aunt Miranda a great deal. Since I’d been five, we’d exchanged letters every two weeks, keeping each other up to date on our respective lives. Her letters were far more interesting than mine were, particularly since I’d taken great care to keep my airship activities out of my half of our correspondence. Aunt Miranda traveled widely and seemed to make friends wherever she went. Other travelers wandered about with their noses stuck in their Baedecker or Thomas Cook guides, refused to speak anything but English and saw only the ‘approved’ sights. My Great Aunt Miranda always had experiences beyond those of regular travelers. She dined with mystics in Istanbul, rubbed elbows with adventurers in Africa and took tea with rajahs in India. She managed these miracles easily, and her tales made for fascinating reading.
In many respects, Great Aunt Miranda was more of a grandparent to me than a distant aunt, particularly since my grandparents had all passed away when I was very young. She sent me fabulous birthday presents, slipped me pocket money for sweets—though I’d usually spent the money on mechanical bits and pieces—and always had peppermints in her reticule. I saw her maybe four or five times a year and her visits were always pleasant… but she’d never shown up out of the blue before.
I took a deep breath and tried again. “I apologize for my awkwardness, Aunt Miranda. It’s just such a surprise to see you here.”
My Great Aunt Miranda’s right eyebrow went up. “Of course it’s a surprise, child,” she said, her mild Scottish brogue tinged with asperity. “If I’d wanted you to know to expect me, I’d have informed you I was coming. I meant to ambush you.” She turned her attention to my companion. “Good afternoon, young woman,” she said. “I trust you are possessed of better manners than my grand niece?”
The Odin Inheritance (The Pessarine Chronicles Book 1) Page 8