Winter Fire

by Laurie Dubay

  We were still, impossibly, in the air, the trees on the far side of the run too distant yet for me to spot our landing.

  I started to turn toward him and stopped when I realized how close his face was to mine. “If one of them even looks up…”

  “We’re moving too fast,” he said.

  At first I didn’t understand. Bren was fast. I had seen him all but leave flames in his wake. But I did see him. Everyone did. Then I remembered Frey’s run that morning…watching from the lift as the ramp stretched endlessly beneath him and he turned to a blur in my vision. I looked down. There were lots of people on the run, but they were the same people I had just seen – a man skiing behind a little boy, three teenaged girls in colorful hats with pom-poms, a guy in a blue jacket cutting a sharp turn on his board, his arm stretched out behind him. They were not moving.

  “Oh God,” I said. Then I caught my breath and said it again.

  “It’s okay,” Bren said in my ear. “Just physics. Everything will be in sync again when we stop.”

  “When will that be?” I asked, my voice rising sharply on the last syllable as we avoided a small oak by inches and stomped down.

  His laugh was a whisper in my hair.

  I figured that we were about two-thirds of the way up the mountain, and cutting a horizontal path along the face. We had passed all the trails for the raceway and terrain parks, the trails leading to the bunny hill, and those heading down to the base lodge. Now I saw that the last of the hotel buildings and condos on the other side of the lodge were streaming by in small glimpses through the trees, and I knew that the bonfire site and the glades were nearly beneath us. I stiffened with the memory of the night before, though it seemed impossibly long ago now.

  Bren’s arm tightened around me once again, his other hand cuffing my upper arm for a moment as he pulled me against him.

  “Almost there,” he said, so close that I shivered.

  Once we passed all the landmarks I knew, we began to glide up the mountain at what felt like a leisurely pace and I wondered if we were still outrunning time. We wove in and out of trees and avoided rocks, firmly on the ground now despite its shifting intermittently to allow our progress. There was a stream somewhere to our right -- I heard the water bubbling, and ahead, a copse of unusually tall evergreens so densely cropped that there appeared no way to get through. Naturally, this is where we were headed.

  As we approached the two tallest trees directly before us, the bottom branches folded up like an umbrella turned upside-down and we slid through the opening. I heard rustling behind us and turned to see the boughs settling back into place. Bren kept his hold on me as we slowed to a stop, but remained silent as I gazed around.

  We stood in a snow-covered clearing surrounded by looming evergreens, taller than the largest pines I had seen on the mountain. Their boughs were dusted with frost and glittered even in the ashy day. The stream I had heard ran into the circle ahead of us – at about two o’clock – and ran out again at about five. The black water jumped over stones scattered on the bed and banks. Also on the banks, and in several places throughout the clearing, were little shrubs with tough-looking leaves of blue and deep green and red, their flowers all shapes and colors – blue, white, yellow, violet, pink – reminding me of the earliest spring blooms as they struggled against the snow, though it was still January.

  A little off to the left, about halfway between us and the far side, was a stone fire ring. It was about the size of our kitchen table in the suite and was surrounded by wooden stumps and short, thick logs that I guessed were used for seats. A few charred bits of wood lay in the center and I assumed they had been pulled from the pile of logs stacked against the trees behind it.

  Directly across from me, one tree stood out. It was a bit off line, as though it had taken a step forward, and its needles were a dusted blueberry color and shimmered like they were lit from within. I gazed up at the sky, still dim and spitting snow, then back at the tree. As I scanned its length, I noticed a snow-capped boulder behind it. It was as though a piece of the mountain had jutted out to make a small cliff, pushing the tree forward.

  I let my eyes roam around the perimeter of the circle again, craning my head to see behind me and taking in the details of the stream and shrubs and snow once more. Everything had a little sparkle here - even my own breath as it escaped in a warm rush.

  “Wow,” I said.

  Bren smiled, gazing into my eyes for a moment, then bent and yanked us out of our bindings. I left my board behind and crept into the middle of the circle, rotating in place, my eyes lighting from sight to sight.

  “This is…” I had no words.

  “Ringsaker.” Bren said from behind me. “That’s what we call it. Kind of a code name.”

  A code name. And then I remembered. The fires I had seen in the night. Last night. I glanced down at the charred wood in the fire ring and back at Bren.

  “The fires were yours.” I said.

  “You knew that,” he said, taking a few steps toward me. His expression challenged me to argue, but I just looked down at the snow until it blurred my vision. “We need somewhere to talk and check up on things.” He said. “Without being seen.”

  “Check up on what?”

  “Things in Asgard.” This time he looked down. He put hands on his hips and shifted his weight from one side to the other.

  I watched him for a while, and then the sound of the brook caught my attention. It was an almost ordinary sound, with only the faintest bell-like trill above the chatter of the water. And it was an almost ordinary sight, with just a bit too much gleam in the small surges rushing over the stones. But somehow it was nothing like the brook I had seen from the lift this morning, before I had traveled a thousand miles. I walked over to the bank and dropped down on a huge rock, pulling off my gloves and stuffing them into my pockets. The stone wasn’t cold beneath me, as I had expected it to be, and I wondered if it was enchantment or shock. After a moment, Bren followed and sat beside me.

  “I feel like I’m in a dream,” I said, watching the swirl of a tiny whirlpool that had formed behind a stone.

  “I knew you’d think I was crazy when I told you,” Bren said. “This was the only way to make you believe me.” He looked across the stream to the pines on the far bank. “I’ve never told anyone.”

  I looked up at him. “Never? Not anyone?”

  “No one human.”

  The way he said human turned something over inside of me. I was looking at someone other than human, and I supposed that somewhere in my subconscious I had known that from the first morning I’d seen him riding over the crest of the mountain. But now he was regarding me with the most human expression I had ever seen, soft and motionless except for the wide eyes moving over my face.

  “What is it?” I asked. He didn’t answer right away, and instead reached out and touched the back of my fingers. I flipped my hand and slid it into his. He glanced down at this and back at me.

  “I wasn’t sure if you were…you know…going to want to deal with this.” He said.

  I thought about that. I didn’t know what being a god meant, in physical terms, or in any terms. But the warmth of his skin against mine, the amber gleam in his eyes, the way tufts of his hair shifted in the breeze still stopped my breath. When he saw this, he smiled an awkward half-smile I hadn’t seen before - his usual arrogance mixed with relief - and I knew I didn’t feel any differently. Not about him.

  He squeezed my hand and I felt the hard press of his ring against my fingers. I stared down at it.

  “So, what are these rings all about?” I said.

  Bren watched me run my thumb over the metal. It was as warm as his hand.

  “Val forged them from Asgardian silver, right before we left. Since we’re not as strong on Earth as we are there, we have to stay together to keep from being hauled back. We swore an oath on them here at Ringsaker when we arrived – we do it everywhere we go. It’s a sort of a pact that binds us. Allows us to us
e the rings to communicate when we’re not in direct contact.”

  “Communicate how?” I imagined some holographic Skype session.

  Bren sighed. “The best I can explain it is that it’s like vibrations…like energy. In my head I can see images of where someone is and what they’re trying to show me.”

  “Hmm.” I tried to absorb that, letting my thumbnail fall into the tiny break in the silver. “Why this little gap here?” I asked.

  “It’s sort of symbolic,” he said, but he didn’t explain. I wondered if he thought I would come to the answer on my own. I pictured the ring with its tiny gap. A circle with a rift…a break. “The break in the cycle.” I said.

  “Ragnarok.”

  “Am I right?”

  He nodded once.

  I paused to think again. “So Skye,” I said. “She’s a bit of a loner. Is this how you know what she’s up to?” I tapped his ring.

  He nodded again. I spun the ring on his finger until it looked whole.

  “Is this how you found out what happened with Tyler?” I asked.

  He eyed me for a long time, but I didn’t look away.

  “Did you see what she saw?” I asked. He didn’t speak, but his jaw tightened. I drew into my jacket and looked away. When I began to draw my hand back, he tightened his grip.

  I remembered the sight of Tyler on crutches with the reddish-blue gash in his cheek. His father screaming at my mother and Mr. Neil.

  “You know, it wasn’t exactly fair.” I met his gaze again.

  “What?”

  “What you did to Tyler. I mean, did you really need a bunch of…you… to beat up one kid? Doesn’t that seem a little…I don’t know…bullyish?”

  “What he did to you was bullyish.”

  He was right, but it seemed different in some way I was struggling to voice.

  “He got off easy.” Bren said.

  I shook my head. “Yeah, I guess you guys could’ve killed him if you’d wanted to. Really, he should be grateful he was only pushed down into the ravine and mauled.”

  Bren laughed his deep chuckle and I shrank at the coldness of it. “Even if he deserved it,” I said, “I’m not sure it’s that funny.”

  “No,” he said, “Nothing about Tyler is funny. But you know what is?” His expression was still intense. “Frieda actually saved him – all of us, really.”

  “Frieda?” I pushed back a long strand of hair that blown across my face and stared at him. “How?”

  “It’s true that we went after him,” he said, glancing at the water to avoid my gaze. “The four of us. We chased him down the raceway.”

  “At normal speed?” I cut in, a sprinkle of sarcasm in my words.

  He nodded and peered up at me before casting his eyes back to the brook. “I wanted him to see me coming.”

  This gave me a chill, but I kept quiet and waited.

  “So he saw us, and he kept looking back. Probably trying to figure out what we were doing on the raceway. When he realized we were there for him, he tried to outrun us and he got sloppy. I was still a few feet away from him when he went off the side and rolled down into the ravine.”

  “He fell?” I said, leaning toward him. “He said you pushed him.”

  “Of course he did.” He glanced up at me again. “Anyway, I took my board off and went down the bank after him.” He shook his head and paused for a moment. “I’m not going to lie to you, I had every intention of...” but he caught me watching his face, listening to him struggle to keep the anger from his voice, and spared me. I became aware of our intertwined fingers. Strange to hold his hand while he was talking about this.

  “At first, when he looked up at me, he was scared,” he continued. “But before I could decide whether or not I cared, he changed. He pointed at me and he said, ‘I didn’t touch her.’”

  “But he didn’t know you and I knew each other.” I said. “Not until this morning.”

  Bren nodded, and I realized that Tyler had just assumed that they were there because of me. He knew what he had done, and it seemed he was used to defending it.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “So, his skis were in the ravine. He was hauling himself up off the ground, trying to stare me down, but I was coming at him pretty fast. Then his face dropped.” Now he smiled a little. “And I see this blur fly past me, and in the next second Frieda throws a right hook and he goes back down. Hard.”

  “What? Frieda did this?” I stared, not sure if my expression conveyed amusement or disgust.

  He nodded. “So she’s standing there glaring down at him and he’s completely stunned, trying to get back on his feet, and I just stop dead in my tracks. I didn’t know what to do.” His smile was brighter now as he ran his hand over the top of his head. “So Tyler gets up, and he looks at me – doesn’t even glance at Frieda – and he says, ‘so you let the girls do your fighting for you?’” Bren’s whiny imitation of Tyler’s voice was so bad it was cute. “And I start to walk toward him again, and he realizes he has no choice but to fight. I can see it in his face. So without even looking at her, he says to Frieda, ‘move, bitch.’”

  I sucked in a breath and Bren laughed. “Yeah, that was the wrong thing to say to Frieda. She kicked him.”

  I threw him a puzzled expression. “Kicked him?” I pictured a little girl kicking a man in the shin.

  “No. Kicked him.” Bren said.

  I stared at him for a moment longer and then got it. “Oh,” I said, cringing. “Well. If there was ever a reason for that...”

  “Nah, it’s not her style,” he said. “She did it to get me out of trouble.”

  I thought about how that would work, about the difference between what she did to Tyler and what Bren had planned.

  “She knew you wouldn’t go after him when he was down like that.” I said.

  Bren shook his head. “Not like that. It wouldn’t have been…honorable.” I loved the way he said that word, or maybe just that he had said it at all. “She knew if I’d gotten hold of Tyler,” he said, “we would’ve been thrown out of here and who knows what else. So by doing what she did, she shut us down. She also figured Tyler wouldn’t tell his dad he was attacked by a girl.”

  “But he lied.”

  “Yeah,” Bren waved a dismissive hand, “But if they asked us about it, Frieda would’ve told them everything and he would have looked like an idiot.”

  I imagined Frieda outrunning Bren just to punch Tyler in the face, and laughed.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth at your place?”

  Bren scratched at his forehead and gave me a flat, apologetic smile. “Frieda doesn’t really have any girlfriends. Skye isn’t exactly - you know - the tea and shopping type. Frieda likes you. She was afraid you’d be mad at her for getting involved at all. So when you came in yelling at me and I saw her face, I couldn’t rat her out. I figured it didn’t matter anyway since I started the whole thing.”

  Poor Frieda, sitting there with tears in her eyes while I refused to even look at her. “So,” I said. “Skye wasn’t involved in any of it. Today.”

  Bren shook his head.

  “She still shouldn’t have gotten you involved in the first place.”

  “I would’ve killed her if she didn’t.” He said. And then another thought occurred to me.

  “Who is she?”

  “What?” Bren’s eyes flicked to mine, his brow creased.

  “When you told me about the gods, you mentioned Frey and Frieda, Val and Dag. So who is Skye?”

  “Skadi,” he said. “She’s known as the Goddess of the hunt. Of winter and the mountains. You heard us say that she can make people forget. But it’s not a threat like you said.” He grinned and I remembered assuming this. “We all have certain talents, just like people. Skye can affect thoughts and memory.”

  “That’s scary,” I said.

  Bren laughed. “She doesn’t use it for anything bad.”

  I watched the river flow and lather around the
slick stones, smelled the crisp tang of the water. I knew the air was cold but didn’t feel it next to Bren, here in his magic circle, even with the heavy snow blowing around us. I tried to savor the peace of it all, take a long breath and clear my head, but my thoughts crowded in.

  “Bren?” I said into the silence. My voice sounded strange to my own ears.

  “Hmm?”

  “Who are you?” I realized I had been avoiding the question as soon as I asked it. “You didn’t mention it on the bridge.”

  He was quiet for a few seconds, then he said: “I did.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I told you. I had to come with them to keep them from being taken back.”

  I stared at him. His eyes were closed now, his chest rising with his breath.

  I thought back. “You’re. Him. What was his name?” I felt myself tremble a little and tried to keep my hand from shaking against his. It just made it worse.

  “Ullur.” He exhaled the word. “God of snow.” He opened his eyes and stared into the trees. “But it’s a little more complicated than that.”

  Finally, he turned to look at me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It was easier for me to tell you about them. I haven’t had to think about it for a long time. Not since we got here.”

  The words rang in my head. He was so young to me. I hadn’t considered that he may have always been this way. “When was that?” I waited for another blow.

  “1850s. Not here at Yew Dales,” he gestured vaguely behind us. “We’ve moved around a lot.”

  1850s. I let the words bounce off me. Bren’s shoulders were tense, as if he was waiting for this to finally break me. Since I was numb, I thought I could at least ease his mind about that. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” I said. “From what you told me, you’re older than dirt anyway.”

  He smiled and relaxed a little. “I said I was older than time, not dirt.”

  “Right, sorry.” I smiled, pretended I was over it already and changed the subject. “So why is your name here so different than what it was there? Ullur?”