“Now you’re getting into the spirit of it,” Hugh commented, his words again eerily relevant to Thor’s thoughts.
“Here’s my guess: you’re trying to get me as disoriented as possible,” Thor said. “Then you’ll leave me someplace on my own for a couple of days, so I can sit and think about the universe or whatever, maybe receive a vision about my patron animal or power chakra or something, thanks to the gnawing hunger.” He rested a hand on his protesting belly, trying to intrude upon the conversation. “Except that I won’t be entirely on my own, not really, because you’ll be hovering somewhere not too far off. Watching me.”
Hugh grunted in approval. “The old trickster was right. You’re not as dumb as you look.”
Thor puffed out his chest at the compliment, but his smile vanished quickly as Hugh’s words sank in. He grabbed Hugh by the shoulder, halting his forward progress and forcing the guide to face him. “What old trickster?”
Hugh broke into a wide grin. His teeth—dark, almost gray—looked a lot older than his face. Thor wondered what the man had been eating to cause such unsightly enamel stains.
“Nothing you need to concern yourself about just now,” Hugh said. “There are mischief makers everywhere. One’s pretty much the same as the next. I’ve been known to stash a few hijinks up my sleeves myself.” Hugh pushed up the frayed cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt and winked at Thor.
Then Hugh stood still, watching Thor watching him. The amusement on the guide’s face never wavered. Finally, Thor sighed and stepped back. “We might as well get on with it.”
“Excellent,” Hugh replied with a nod. “Do you know where you are, right now?”
Thor inhaled the sharp scent of damp pine and glanced around at the surrounding forest. There was no pattern to the trees that he recognized. He looked overhead to try to gauge his position by the sun, but he was centuries out of practice.
“I’d say I’m somewhere in Central Oregon. In the forest,” Thor added with what he hoped was a comical gesture toward the evergreens.
Hugh’s grin flagged but didn’t disappear. “We’ve got a ways to go then.”
Hugh continued onward, though Thor couldn’t tell if the guide was pressing forward or possibly backtracking along the rabid rabbit trail he’d been forging. Thor blew out a long, loud breath.
It wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, too much longer, Thor assured himself, before they’d reach wherever it was that he was supposed to sit in reflective meditation. He’d cool his heels by a woodland stream and take a series of long, blissful naps. He’d commit to memory a single dream—significant or not—and call it good. He was beginning to warm to the idea of a vision quest, if only it were catered. At the very least, he’d be rid of Hugh for a little while.
“Come on, now!” Hugh waved him along. “You don’t want to get lost, do you?”
Not a bad idea, actually. Thor hurried forward to keep pace with his guide.
It had been several hours since the sweat ended, leaving the lodge to take its time cooling down. Odin and Frigga had returned to their homestead. Heimdall’s truck and Tim’s Subaru were the only vehicles at this particular edge of the Central Oregon wilderness.
Heimdall and Rod peeled another layer of damp deerskins off of the dome’s frame. Tim had doused the steaming rocks with several gallons of cold water, and many of the stones cracked. Tim then buried them just inside the tree line. It wasn’t the normal way of doing things, Tim explained, but these rocks wouldn’t be used again. Not for another sweat, anyway. The Earth would absorb the energy of the ceremony and allow the stones to rest.
Rod and Heimdall developed a quiet rhythm as they worked in tandem to slide the skins off the frame and then lay them on the ground to dry in the mid-day sun. Slowly, the wooden bones of the small dome emerged—an elaborate nest of slender, curved branches tied together with sinew.
Tim went about dismantling the frame, branch by branch. After spreading out nearly three dozen deer skins on the dry scrub, Heimdall and Rod sat back among the steer’s head, lupine, rosy pussytoes, and other native plants of the natural xeriscape, and watched.
“So, Tim,” Rod called out. “I guess you’ll never do anther sweat like this one.”
Tim crouched on the ground next to the frame, working from the bottom up as he carefully freed another branch and wound the sinew in a loose coil around his fingers. He tossed the branch onto a growing pile behind him and then smiled at Heimdall. “Unless you decide to take an Indian for a bride.”
“Maggie might have something to say about that.” Heimdall looked down the dirt road. Things with Maggie were better—better than they had been—but the frigid wall that had risen between them in the aftermath of her accidental immortality had yet to be breached. Now Frigga and Odin were dropping hints about Maggie and Heimdall assuming leadership of the Lodge, but it was something Heimdall couldn’t quite envisage. And it wasn’t like Frigga and Odin were going anywhere, unless they were planning a rare vacation to a tropical paradise or some Arctic ice hotel.
A vehicle was approaching, still a good distance away and kicking up dust. Heimdall made out the shape of a mini-SUV. He rose to his feet. “You expecting anyone?”
“Can’t say that I am.” Tim freed another branch and added it to the pile.
Heimdall motioned for Rod to get up and stand beside him. “Did you tell anybody about this?”
Rod blinked at him. “Did I tell anyone I was doing a ritual shamanic sweat in the high desert with ancient gods of the Norse pantheon?”
Heimdall gave him a hard look. Rod shrugged. “No. I didn’t tell anyone. I think you’d know me better than that by now.”
Heimdall nodded an apology, then tilted his head toward the approaching vehicle. “So, random adventurers trespassing onto sacred land?”
Rod clenched his jaw. “Anything in the truck we can use as weapons?”
“Plenty.”
The mini-SUV continued its dusty approach. Heimdall and Rod moved quickly to Heimdall’s pick-up. Rod pulled a fire axe and a two-foot wrench out of the truck bed. Heimdall reached into the cab for a dented baseball bat.
Rod frowned at the aluminum bat. “Since when is that your weapon of choice?”
“Just something I found in the woods.” Heimdall spun the bat in his hands. “And you took my axe.”
Rod held out the axe in an offer to trade, but Heimdall waved him off as the RAV4 pulled in behind the truck.
Keeping a firm but easy grip on the bat, Heimdall approached the driver’s side of the mystery vehicle. The car might have been red beneath the thick dirt, and the license plate was impossible to make out. Through the tinted, mud-splattered windshield, Heimdall spied two figures in the front, two more in the back.
Heimdall raised his bat. “State your business,” he called out.
The driver’s door opened, and a pair of slender hands shot out in surrender. “Heimdall, it’s me!” Bonnie poked her head out from behind the door just as a clump of caked mud the size of a grapefruit fell out of the front left wheel well.
Heimdall sighed and lowered the bat. “What are you doing here?”
Freya exited from the passenger side. “What do you mean, what are we doing here? You can’t start without us.”
The back doors opened and a Native American man and woman got out—both just beyond middle age, their dark hair streaked with silver. The woman sported a yellow sweatshirt advertising the Kah-Nee-Ta Resort in Warm Springs. The man wore a matching baseball cap.
“Sorry we’re late. Really, really late.” Freya frowned at the dismantled sweat lodge.
“There was a multi-car pile-up on 97 coming into Redmond,” Bonnie said. “We tried to reach you guys, but I guess the cell service is spotty out here.”
Heimdall reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone. No Service. It could have been the location, or just his crappy phone plan. When one of the Einherjar kids had gotten a job as a rep for Weasel Wireless, Frigga had switched them all over—and eve
r since, family communications had been a maddening symphony of dropped calls, garbled texts, glacial data transfers, and mysterious roaming charges. Heimdall made a silent promise to outfit everyone in the Lodge with robust satellite phones once the Weasel contracts expired, or at least to never again subscribe to a mobile service named for a rodent.
Looking away from the skeletal remains of the sweat lodge, Freya surveyed the scrub and the nearby tree line. “Where’s Thor? Are Sally and Opal hunting for plants already?”
Heimdall planted the heavy end of the bat on the ground and rested his weight on it. “They headed into the woods a couple of hours ago.”
Freya stared at him, her frown of alarm deepening. “What?! How?” She gestured behind her at the two Indians. “Why would they go without their guides?”
Rod laughed in nervous confusion. “But they went with their guides.”
Dumbfounded, Freya looked between Rod and Heimdall. Then she took a breath and studied Tim, still pulling apart the last ribs of the sweat lodge frame. “But these are the guides, right here.” Her guests stepped forward to stand on either side of her. “I told you I was bringing them.”
Heimdall looked at the dark-skinned man and woman flanking Freya. They smiled back at him, seeming to ignore the bewildered agitation in the air. The muscles in Heimdall’s jaw twitched as he tried to process the mix-up. Could Freya have accidentally arranged for two pairs of guides? She hadn’t been the same since the loss of her brother. None of them were. And she hadn’t formally mourned, since there’d been no report from the Valkyries about Freyr’s arrival in Valhalla. No one could prove one way or the other if Freyr was truly dead, and she hadn’t allowed any official memorial for him. For all anyone knew, Freyr still lingered in Badbh’s underground cauldron, awaiting rebirth at some vague future date along with the rest of the Tuatha de Danann.
Heimdall watched his cousin. The lines in Freya’s face were chiseled deep, almost transforming the goddess of love into a worried crone. It was understandable if Freya’s mind slipped a little. But this was a pretty big slip.
Bonnie stepped toward Heimdall. “Wait a second. You said Thor’s already in the woods? You mean I missed him?” Tears welled at the corners of her eyes. As the wedding weekend approached, she was more frazzled from one day to the next, and now she was wringing her hands and pacing in place. Heimdall took an unconscious step backward.
“But I wanted to see him off!” Bonnie sniffed. “I even brought him a blanket I made, so he can stay warm on his quest.” She gestured toward her vehicle as though invoking the handmade quilt could make Thor appear before her.
“So, umm, if these are the guides, who were those other people?” Rod looked to Heimdall. “Hubert Black Feather and Half-Moon Coppertree?”
Freya turned to the man beside her. “Frank?”
Frank scratched the thinning hair beneath his cap and shrugged. “I am not familiar with these names.”
The willowy woman on Freya’s other side shook her head. “Those aren’t any Warm Springs Indians I’ve heard of,” she said. “But if you folks don’t need us here, we could take those ridiculous hunters into the woods instead.”
Frank sighed in apparent agreement.
“What hunters?” Rod asked in alarm. “If our friends are out in the woods and they’re not wearing blaze orange—”
Frank waved him off. “Not that kind of hunter.”
“These idiots want to track down Bigfoot.” The woman giggled.
Frank gave her a broad smile. “It would almost be worth the hassle, to take their money and lead them around for nothing.”
The woman laughed harder.
“Siatco.” Rod shoved his hands into the back pockets of his slim-fit jeans. “If there’s other guys roaming around the woods, Thor won’t be happy about that.”
The woman shook her head. “We turned them down. No self-respecting Indian would consider associating with such fools—”
“Alma,” Frank cut her off. “Sometimes a job is a job.” He tapped his wristwatch. “Maybe we can still catch them.”
Freya gave Frank a sharp look. “No one’s going anywhere until we sort this out.” She looked to Heimdall. “Which way did they go, exactly?”
“Exactly?” Heimdall made a vague gesture toward the woods. “They took off sort of that way, but I wasn’t tracking them. I didn’t know I needed to. I don’t understand what’s going on here.”
Freya looked off toward the forest. “I think someone just hijacked our friends.”
3
After a long and tireless push into the wilderness, Moon finally stopped in a small clearing somewhere deep in the woods. After so many turns, Sally had no idea where they were. It felt like they’d hiked for hours with scarcely any breaks, and the fresh blisters on her heels were painful and juicy. She hoped there wouldn’t be too much more hiking for the rest of the trip, but from what Moon had said about each of them taking “solo time,” there was a fair amount of moving around yet to do.
“See this moss here?” Moon waved Sally and Opal over to the base of an old-growth tree. They huddled close and peered over Moon’s shoulder.
“What can you tell me about it?” Moon looked at Sally.
Sally scrunched her face into an embarrassed frown. A pop quiz so soon? She glanced at Opal, certain her studious friend would have the answer on the tip of her tongue.
“You mean, what kind of moss is it?” Opal asked. “Because it looks like a springy form of—“
Moon shook her head. “I am not asking for scientific names or biological profiles. What I am asking you to consider is the moss’s character. What does its location indicate? Not just where on the tree, but where in the forest? What about the color? How does it feel beneath your fingers? What does this moss tell you today, at this time, that might be different from what it would tell you later this evening, or yesterday afternoon?”
Opal leaned heavily on her shaman staff. “Well, it tells us cardinal directions, because moss always grows on the north side of the tree, right?”
“Fallacy!” Moon shouted as she rose quickly to her feet. Sally jumped backward in surprise and nearly knocked Opal over. Righting herself, Sally let out an involuntary hiss as her blistered heels slammed against the stiff, unforgiving leather of her boots.
Moon pointed at the rich soil beneath their feet. “This is not a time for the sort of knowledge you can read in books. To learn the wisdom of the woods, if you truly want to understand the energies running through and sustaining this creation that supports you, you will have to learn it for yourselves.”
“Okay.” Opal played with her grip on her walking stick. Her eyes narrowed, the turning of her mental gears visible in her face. “So, you mean, like this little patch of moss has its own personality or something?”
A look of disgusted impatience froze on Moon’s face. “We must start from the beginning, I see.” She sighed heavily. “Both of you on the ground, now.”
Sally and Opal exchanged worried glances as they started to shuffle out of their backpacks.
“No dawdling!” Moon shouted.
Sally dropped her pack and sat down on the ground. She squirmed and pulled a stick out from under her hips, then leaned back against her pack for support.
Moon gestured toward Opal, who was treating her pack with greater care. “We are waiting.”
Opal rested her walking stick against a tree and then sniffed in wounded indignation as she lowered herself to the ground. Sally was exhausted and Opal looked to be on the verge of tears. It had been a strenuous hike, and Sally wondered if Opal—even with all of her painstaking preparations—might be in greater pain than she was.
Sally rolled her shoulders back and felt the aching tug of muscles she hadn’t known she had. “You don’t have to be so brusque about it.” She looked up at Moon. “I mean we’re here to learn. We’re willing . . .”
Moon sighed again and Sally fell silent. Opal glanced at Sally and gave her a sympathetic nod.
> Moon crouched down again beside the moss-covered tree. “Now. Take off your shoes.”
Sally started unlacing her boots, but Opal hesitated.
“Do you want to connect with the Earth or don’t you?” Moon’s voice was stern and uncompromising.
Sally pulled off one of her boots and moaned in relief when her toes were released from their rigid prison. She went to work untangling the knot holding the other boot’s laces tight.
“Yes, of course,” Opal stammered.
“Do it, then.” Moon looked at Sally. “You, too.”
“Working on it.” Sally replied with an unintentional whine. “I don’t see what the hurry is,” Sally muttered as she picked at the knot in her boot laces. “It’s not like the Earth is going anywhere.”
Opal cracked a smile and for a second, so did Moon. Sally was about to try to lighten the mood with a joke, but sudden storm clouds darkened Moon’s expression.
“This is no laughing matter, little one.” Moon glared at Sally. “You of all human beings should have more respect for the energies at work in this sacred ground.”
“We’re on sacred ground?” Opal looked up as she slid her feet out of her boots. “Are we in some kind of forested temple?”
Moon’s scowl lightened, but only a bit. “All ground is sacred. Even the land hidden beneath so many layers of concrete in the cities, and under long stretches of highway. The humans have forgotten this.”
The knot finally gave, and Sally slipped the boot off her foot. Once more, her toes rejoiced in freedom, but she worried about what agony might await when it came time to shove her feet back into her boots again. She said a silent prayer that this stop would be a long one.
“Now your socks,” Moon commanded. “Remove them.”
Opal and Sally obediently pulled off their cotton socks. Sally winced at the spots of blood on hers, then stuffed them into her empty boots.
Raven Quest (Valhalla Book 4) Page 4