by Kari Maaren
The woman and the old men glanced back curiously at them every once in a while. They seemed more resigned to whatever was happening to them than afraid of their captors. Josiah and Ji had been talking to them a bit, despite the threatening motions the seven men kept making.
“Are they going to kill us?” asked Freddy eventually, since no one had said.
“How worried you sound,” snapped Josiah, who clearly hadn’t forgiven her for getting them captured yet.
“There’s no use in me being worried unless I know for sure they’re going to kill us,” she pointed out.
He was just ahead of her in the string of captives. He cast her what she could only really describe as a look over his shoulder. “There are fates worse than death,” he said. “I once spent a year trapped in a cave.”
“You said,” said Freddy. “In school. Are they going to kill us or subject us to a fate worse than death?”
He sighed. “Could be either or neither or both. It’s all a giant screwup, from what I can tell. They’re seven brothers. Ling and her uncles there have been taken because Ling’s son killed their eighth brother. It’s about honour and vengeance and other tedious things. I’ve been taken because I look like Ji, and Ji is known to be a companion of Ling, plus possibly some sort of demon. And you were with me. They didn’t expect there to be quite so many of us. It worries them.”
“It sounds like the Vikings,” said Freddy. “Are we going to walk into the middle of wars all the time?”
“I doubt it,” said Josiah. “But it’s a hazard of … the way we’re travelling. We can blame this on Three.”
“Enough with the cryptic,” said Freddy. “Tell me why we can blame it on Three.”
He twisted his head far enough around that he could look straight at her. “Now?”
One of the brothers jerked the rope again and barked something in Freddy’s face. She stuck her tongue out at him.
She hadn’t known she was going to do that. It wasn’t something she would normally have done. It was just … This doesn’t seem real, she thought. She was pretty sure the general feeling of unreality explained everything she’d done since she and Josiah had walked through the door into medieval Sweden.
The man stared at her, then appeared to decide that she wasn’t worth it. He said something to one of his brothers, who laughed a little weakly. None of them looked all that amused.
The woman in the string said something to Ji, who replied. Freddy poked Josiah, who had turned towards them to listen. “Is she Cuerva Lachance?”
“I think you’ve lost your mind. She’s Three,” said Josiah. “Ling. Qi isn’t around at the moment.”
“And Ling … Three … knows who you are?” said Freddy.
“Oh, yes,” said Josiah. “We always tell her eventually. This one’s known us since she was twelve.”
A brother jerked the rope again, this time so hard that Freddy felt the impact jar all the way up to her shoulders. One of the men waved his stone knife in her face and snarled something menacing. She considered sticking her tongue out again, but she wasn’t sure she would get away with that twice. Freddy fell silent and let herself be led on between the spindly trees.
* * *
It was hours before they stopped. Freddy wasn’t sure why she was still awake. She had dozed a bit in Sweden, but realistically speaking, she had been up now for more than a full day.
The sun was going down when one of the brothers called a halt. Someone tied the rope to one of the trees and pushed the first of the old men roughly to the ground. Since everyone was tied together, the rest of them had to sit, too.
Freddy and Josiah had been searched, not very carefully, when the brothers had first found them. Nothing had been found on either of them. Freddy did wonder about that. She knew Josiah had been using a knife at the Viking feast, and she hadn’t seen him drop it before they had been zapped away. However, if he still had it, the brothers hadn’t found it. She didn’t have anything in her pockets but her keys, and the brothers had missed those. She thought they may not have been familiar with the concept of pockets. They seemed to carry things on their belts or in little pouches slung over their shoulders.
Freddy and the others watched as the brothers built a fire, then sat around it and shared out food and water. They gave nothing to the prisoners, which was, Freddy decided, a bad sign. It was also problematic, as she hadn’t had anything to drink since the mead hall. Her mouth felt shrivelled and parched, and her headache was getting worse again.
“They’re definitely going to kill us,” said Freddy.
“Again with the tone of deep concern,” said Josiah. “And you’re just going to sit here and let it happen, are you?”
She shook her still-throbbing head. She did know she was acting strangely; she felt as if she had been continuously bludgeoned with the events of the last day or so. A few hours ago, she had tried to strangle Josiah against a rock. Now everything had gone slow and calm. She wasn’t sure why being in actual danger had banished her anger and panic. She began manoeuvring her tied hands into her right-hand pocket.
“You can tell me about Three now,” said Freddy.
Josiah just looked at her.
“Well, what else do we have to do?” She had managed to hook her pinky finger around the key ring. As gently as she could, she started dragging it out into the air.
“Your sense of timing is impeccable,” said Josiah.
“It freaks them out.” Freddy nodded towards the brothers. In fact, the men were looking at them askance, though they were making no move to stop them talking. Freddy didn’t blame them. They had been going about their business, kidnapping their neighbours for a bit of quiet vengeance, and these two strangely dressed people had appeared out of nowhere and started yakking at each other in a foreign language. It must have been disconcerting.
The keys were out. Careful not to let them jingle, Freddy ran her fingers through them. They were just keys, and keys had pretty blunt edges, but they did have edges. If she scraped one against the rope tied around her wrists for long enough …
Josiah could see what she was doing. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Okay, fine. We’ll be here for a while. Just … think of it like this: there are always three of us, but two of us never die. The third does, over and over. Sometimes she’s reborn as a woman; sometimes he’s reborn as a man. It’s always our job—mine and Qi’s—to find her and tell her who she is.”
Freddy was beginning to get an uneasy feeling about how all this related to her own time. “She doesn’t know until you tell her?”
“Generally not,” said Josiah, “though it’s different every time. Some of the Threes don’t have a clue, haven’t the faintest idea who we are, freak out when they see us, and throw things at us until we go away. Some dream about us. Some even remember us, though not until they see us. A few remember bits and pieces of their past lives.”
Freddy said, “Why do you have to find them?”
She could tell right away she had hit on a subject Josiah would rather have avoided. “What a beautiful campfire the brothers have made,” he said.
The campfire was a campfire. “Answer the question.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I think that’s not true,” said Freddy, “considering you’ve managed to get me tied up in a forest in prehistoric China.”
Josiah sighed. “Good point. All right, listen. You know Qi and I are … different.”
“I’d noticed something like that, yeah.”
“Well,” said Josiah, “we also have different kinds of … I guess you could call it power. Influence. Nothing you would notice unless you got too close to one of us, but we can … subtly affect the way the world is, I guess. Sometimes less subtly.”
Freddy thought of Loki manipulating the fire in the mead hall. “It didn’t seem that subtle in Sweden.”
“You mean Loki?” said Josiah. “That was Bragi’s fault. He chose Loki over me.”
Freddy said,
“Chose?”
“They all have to choose which of us will be dominant during their lifetimes,” Josiah explained. “Don’t pester me about why. It’s just the way things work. Some choose Qi; some choose me. We live with whatever the decision is. It all balances out in the end.”
“But Bragi was fighting Loki in the hall,” said Freddy.
Josiah shrugged. “Choosing one of us is a complex proposition.”
She had a feeling this whole situation was a complex proposition, and then some. “What if they refuse to choose?”
“We have our ways of persuading them,” said Josiah. “You may see some of those once we get back.”
It took only about a second for this to sink in. “You don’t think I—”
“No idea,” said Josiah. “Could be you. Could be Mel or Roland. We know it’s one of you, but you’re not making it easy for us.”
She stared at him, forgetting to work the key. He looked pointedly at her wrists, and she started again, more slowly.
“Here’s the thing,” said Josiah. “What happens is that after Three dies, there are ten to twenty years where we don’t know when or where the next Three is going to turn up. He—or she—won’t necessarily be born right away, though usually within a decade of the last Three’s death. Eventually, we get a sort of … trace. It’s hard to describe. We can follow it to more or less where Three is, but unless Three happens to be a hermit on a mountaintop, we can’t know exactly who it is. It’s now been sixteen years since the last Three died. We know this new Three lives in your house and is between ten and fifteen. We haven’t got any further than that.”
Freddy had so many questions that she couldn’t decide which one should come first. She had to settle for, “Why not?”
“I’d love to be able to answer that,” said Josiah. “It’s profoundly irritating. There tend to be clues. This time … nothing.”
“What clues?” said Freddy.
“Three’s … kind of creative.” Josiah’s voice was suddenly cautious again. Freddy thought he might be choosing what he said carefully, though she couldn’t see why he should.
“Like Bragi,” said Freddy.
“Right,” said Josiah. “And Ling here tells stories.”
Remembering something Josiah had said about Bragi, Freddy said, “Is she going to be famous, too?”
“Nope,” said Josiah. “Some of the Threes are. It’s unavoidable, considering. But most of them aren’t.”
Freddy said, “I think you’re wrong about us. We’re more sort of science-y.”
“I know, and it’s driving me crazy,” said Josiah. “I noticed your mum was an English prof, and I went … ah-ha! But you’re good at math, and Mel does science for fun, and Roland draws swords, but not well or as if he means it. Why does he do that, anyway?”
She almost told him about the role-playing games. Afterwards, she was pretty sure she intended to do so up until the instant she actually spoke. But what she said, to her own surprise, was, “He’s bored. It’s just doodling.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Josiah.
And now she was wondering if it was true.
Josiah had never really seen Roland and Mel gaming. Oh, he had walked through their living room during a session once, but she thought he had mostly been noticing the screaming and fighting and flying coffee tables. He may have assumed everyone was playing a board game. The kind of gaming Mel and Roland took part in wasn’t really like a board game, though. It was more like Roland made up adventures for the others to follow. He was always the GM, the game master. Mel had told Freddy once that Roland liked inventing his own campaigns from scratch. He acted out the non-player characters, the NPCs, himself. Mel had her own character, a sort of mystical priest with particular skills and attributes. And Mel made things into mysteries. They’re both creative, thought Freddy, glad Josiah wasn’t looking at her, as she wasn’t sure she was keeping her face blank enough. They just don’t seem like it on the surface. As for me …
She thought of how easy she had always found English class. She thought of that pile of books on the chair in the kitchen and the way she would have known who Loki and Heimdallr were even if she had never seen a single film with Thor in it. She thought of how many bookshelves she had in her room.
“Yeah,” said Freddy, “I don’t think it’s any of us.”
She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t telling him the truth. From what he was saying, Three just had to make one choice that didn’t make a huge difference in the long run. There was no reason not to help Josiah discover which of them it was. But … there’s something else here. Something he’s not saying. I can’t see what it is yet, but it’s there. She knew she was cautious and boring. Well, then, she would be cautious and boring, and she wouldn’t rush into things, and maybe she would be able to find out exactly what was at stake before she flung Mel or Roland or even herself into some situation she didn’t understand.
“Anyway,” said Freddy, “none of this explains the time travel.”
“Oh, that,” said Josiah. “That’s just sympathetic resonance.”
The key didn’t seem to be having much of an effect. Freddy took a firmer grip on it and continued to saw at the rope. “Symp…?”
“You should pay more attention in band,” said Josiah. “Say you have a stringed instrument, and you pluck one of the strings, and then one of the other strings makes a noise, responding to the vibrations of the first string.”
“Okay,” said Freddy, “sure.”
“It’s because the two strings have something in common, harmonically speaking,” said Josiah. “When one vibrates, the other vibrates, too. It’s why a soprano could theoretically make a glass break from across the room by singing a particular high note.”
“I think that’s an urban myth,” said Freddy.
“Physics doesn’t care what you think,” said Josiah. “At any rate, it works with Three. The Threes are all different people, but in a way, they’re the same person, too. They … vibrate to the same frequency. And so sometimes, one Three will have a thought that is exactly the same as the thought another Three once had … or will have.”
Freddy blinked. “Across time and space?”
“Yes, that,” said Josiah. “We’re riding the resonance. It makes a path we can follow. It sort of pulls us through. Theoretically, this should stop happening if we ever make it back to our own time. Bragi was in the middle of a flyting, and I’m expecting Ling was doing something similar: maybe flinging an especially well-crafted insult at the brothers. It would have been the same insult. It would also have helped that the opportunity for the insult was caused by two families feuding.”
Freddy felt something in the rope give. It was a very small something, no more than one strand. She paused for a moment to flex her fingers. At the same time, she was thinking hard. Josiah’s explanation sounded as if it worked, sort of, but it was a metaphor. Mr. Dillon liked talking about metaphors. “They’re useful but deceptive,” he would say pompously at least four times a year. “No metaphor is ever a perfect representation of anything. If it were, it would be the thing itself, and the metaphor wouldn’t be necessary.” “Sympathetic resonance” was a nice pat little explanation, but time travel wasn’t music.
“It’s an explanation,” said Freddy, “but it doesn’t make sense.”
He glared at her. “Don’t say that. Do you really want to convince me it isn’t logical what we’re doing? Do you want to be stuck here forever?”
“Would we be?” said Freddy.
“Haven’t you been listening?” said Josiah. “I only do things that can be done. If I decide they can’t, I can’t do them any more. I need you to be less logical than I am.”
She would have retorted to this, but she was brought up short by another thought. “Wait a minute. Do you mean we’re going to have to hang around various Threes until they think the same thoughts as various other Threes, then jump around randomly through time until we just happen to hit our own time …
if we ever do at all?”
“That sounds about right,” said Josiah.
“It could take forever.”
“If you have a better idea, do enlighten me.”
Another strand parted. The brothers had stopped looking over at them now. Freddy decided the incessant talking had lulled them.
She almost kept pushing. She opened her mouth to do it. But she shut it again before she could get the words out. Again, as with the “sympathetic resonance” explanation, there seemed to be something missing from what Josiah was saying. She needed time to think about it. It could literally take forever, or at least until she died of old age, for her to get back home by just crossing her fingers and hoping somebody’s mystic brainwaves would connect with somebody else’s mystic brainwaves at exactly the right moment. And it wasn’t as if they were just going to coast passively through history, was it? I mean, thought Freddy, we’re about to be murdered right now, and this is only our second jump. Josiah was being way too complacent, and she had no idea why.
She hadn’t really ever trusted him completely. He certainly wasn’t giving her a reason to start now.
“So how long will we be stuck here?” said Freddy.
Josiah hesitated.
She said, “Well?”
“You understand I remember a lot of what happens to us,” he said, “as I’ve already been through it … as the other me, so to speak. I should tell you as little as possible. I’m going to be second-guessing myself all the time; it’s best you don’t as well.”
Another strand. Another doubt. “You mean you’re almost always going to know what’s going to happen, and I never am?” You mean, she added silently, you’re always going to be the one in control?
“Do you think it’s fun to be sitting here going, ‘Last time, Person X did this, and then Person Y did that, and Person Z was me, so I’d better do what he did, even if I’d rather not’?” said Josiah.
“If you’d rather not,” said Freddy, “why did you do it in the first place?”