“Might as well ask if Meuhlnir is a great oaf.”
An arrow shot out of the darkness and Meuhlnir deflected it with his hammer. He held up his left hand, palm up. “Ehlteenk!” he boomed. Lightning! Thunder peeled in the sky above, and a bolt of white hot lightning lanced from the cloudless sky and struck the earth near the garden wall. Soil flew through the air.
During the brief flash of light, Meuhlnir spotted the assassin. The man wore a long, hooded cloak of dark gray over loose-fitting black cotton clothing and was squatting behind a bush to their right. “Ehlteenk!” screamed Meuhlnir, pointing at the assassin. Thunder shook the ground, and another bolt of lightning flew toward the earth. The bolt struck the assassin and dropped him like a steer at a slaughter house. Languid smoke wafted from the man’s head.
“Meuhlnir!” the queen shrieked.
He spun toward her and saw another assassin behind him.
The assassin had a bow fully drawn, moonlight glinting on the poisoned point of his arrow. The bow twanged, and the queen shrieked in terror.
There was only one thing Meuhlnir could do, and he did it without thinking about it. He leapt forward, roaring a mighty battle cry. He smashed into the queen, sending her sprawling in the dirt. He tried to fend the arrow off as he had the first, but he was too slow. The arrow slammed into his shoulder, spinning him in a half-circle.
He heard the bow twang a second time. “To me! Assassins in the queen’s garden! To me!” he cried. The second arrow hit him high in the chest, on his left side, and he could feel the sting of the poison biting into his blood.
“Ehlteenk!” he tried to scream, but all of a sudden, he had no air to scream with.
The assassin smiled a nasty, hateful smile. “Goodbye, clown,” he said. “You have failed your queen!” He nocked another arrow and aimed at the queen.
Meuhlnir felt weak, and his vision was going black. He tried to call down another bolt, but it was impossible; his mind was too scattered. He took a weak step forward and lifted his arm.
“Fool,” said the assassin, pulling the bow string to full draw, still aiming at the queen.
Meuhlnir threw his hammer with all his remaining strength and all his weight behind it; his own momentum flung him forward to his hands and knees. The hammer whistled as it spun through the air.
The assassin saw the hammer coming, his eyes growing large and round, and he tried to dodge it, releasing the arrow as he did so. The arrow sailed off over the garden wall into the night.
The hammer smashed into the assassin, striking him just below the chin. Blood erupted from the man’s throat, his wind pipe pulped by the head of the hammer. The assassin scratched at his throat as if trying to pull away a noose.
Meuhlnir grinned at him and shook his head. “I’ve killed you, coward,” he whispered. “I’ve killed you both, and saved my queen.” He collapsed at the same time as the assassin, both men falling forward into the dirt.
“To me!” shrieked the queen. “To me! Bring my healers!”
Meuhlnir tried to tell her not to worry, but he couldn’t draw enough breath.
She knelt at his side and took his hand in hers. “Hold on, brave Meuhlnir. Do not die, my friend.” She had tears in her eyes. “I command it.”
Meuhlnir wanted to tell her not to cry, but the effort seemed beyond him. Fire raced through his veins as the poison ate its way toward his heart.
“Where are they?” she cried. She looked into his face, and he saw her fear. “TO ME!” She screamed so hard her voice broke and cracked.
He could hear booted feet pounding toward them. Too late, he thought. They were too slow. He tried to tell the queen how much he loved her, but there were no words, and there was no time.
She was looking into his eyes. “Stay!” she implored, dashing tears from her eyes. “No, my truest friend, don’t go. I want you to stay.”
He wanted to obey. He tried to obey, but he could feel himself falling away from his life as if he were falling down a deep, black well. Her face seemed to look down at him from the top of the well, sorrow writ large on her features.
“I won’t allow this,” he heard her say. “Tvelyast!” she screamed, and power crackled in the air around her. Stay!
His fall down the well slowed. He saw her eyes widen in shock. To his knowledge, it was the first time she had ever attempted to vefa strenki.
“Anta!” the queen cried with enough force to make her voice crack and go silent on the last syllable. Breathe! Again, the power crackled around her.
Meuhlnir felt the hair on his arms buzzing with the potency of the queen’s magical command. His blood stirred, and he gasped a painful breath. He started to rise up the tunnel toward the light, toward his life and his queen.
“Lifa ow nee!” she shrieked, her voice sounded broken and ruptured. Live again!
The very air around them seemed to pop and glow with the thaumaturgical power she had spawned in her desperation. She was using strenkir af krafti to pull him out of the jaws of death, wielding power to change the skein of fate.
He felt stronger, no longer falling away from his life, but rooted to it by her will.
“You will not die today,” croaked the queen. She seemed to be in shock over what she had done and the success she had achieved. Her voice was cracked, weak and wrecked, but firm.
Finally, the Vuthuhr Trohtninkar stood in a ring around them, and he could hear the healer calling as she ran, demanding to know if the queen was injured.
Meuhlnir looked into the queen’s eyes and opened his mouth to thank her for saving him. He couldn’t draw enough breath to make the words, so he mouthed them instead.
She smiled at him, dashing tears from her eyes. She nodded and put a hand to her throat, grimacing in pain.
The healer ran up and started ordering everyone around, as she was wont to do. She took the queen by the arm and was trying to pull her away. The queen pointed at Meuhlnir.
“My Queen, come away so I can treat your wounds in safety,” said the healer, searching every shadow with wide eyes.
Queen Suel pointed again at Meuhlnir and tried to speak, but only a froggish croak came out. The healer continued pulling at her arm, the healer’s eyes were wide and kept stealing away to the bodies of the dead assassins.
Suel slapped the healer hard enough to make her stumble.
It was the first time Meuhlnir had ever seen the queen act in anger toward one of her subjects, and the casual brutality of it shocked him. It shocked the healer as well, and she finally bent to treat Meuhlnir’s wounds, tears filling her eyes above the bright red hand print that burned on her face.
The queen looked on with a strange expression on her face. She looked to be caught between remorse and a perverse contentment in the result of her violence. If Meuhlnir hadn’t known her so well, he might have wondered if she enjoyed slapping her healer the way she did.
“He will be okay, my Queen,” the healer said in a teary voice. “The poison burned itself out it seems. All that’s left is to deal with the bleeding.”
Seventeen
“She began to chant in the Gamla Toonkumowl to close the wounds made by the two arrows. The queen stood by and watched until the healing was finished.
“It was a full week before she could speak aloud again, and when she could, her voice was different. The musical quality of her laugh was gone—sacrificed in her desperation to save me.” Meuhlnir gazed at the fire, his eyes misty. “I often wonder if that blow she dealt the healer because of me was the start of her fall.”
He sighed and shook himself. “At any rate, two weeks later, the queen honored me before the court and presented me with this hammer. I’ve had it ever since. A reminder, you see.”
“Of your friendship,” I said.
“Yes, and the gods know I’ve needed that reminder in the years since. But more than that.” He cleared his throat, and the noise of it was harsh, angry. “You see this hammer reminds me that people can change. What was once pure and good may be s
o again, given the right motivation.”
“I see,” I whispered.
He looked at me and grunted.
I shrugged my shoulders and stretched my neck from side to side, enjoying the absence of pain. “What happened to the rich guy?”
“Rikur?” Meuhlnir smiled.
“Sharp, pointy stick?” I asked.
“Might as well ask if snow is cold,” said Meuhlnir with a brutal smile. “His treachery was repaid, I can assure you of that.”
I nodded. “Vengeance,” I whispered.
“Justice,” said Meuhlnir into his beard.
“So, you understand my position as well.”
Meuhlnir looked at me with irritation on his face.
We sat for a moment, watching the flames consume the dry wood in the fireplace. “What were those words?” I asked.
“Words?” Meuhlnir looked at me with confusion.
“Yeah, while you were telling the story, you said some words in what sounded like this Gamla Toonkumowl. You know, when you called down lightning, and when the queen was healing you.”
“Oh, those. We use the Gamla Toonkumowl to describe what we want to happen. It’s the same as the curse the queen put on you.”
“Magic words?” I asked, arching my eyebrows, and trying to hide a smile.
Meuhlnir shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain that to you. When the Geumlu shattered the universe, there was a war. A war that my ancestors won. One of the reasons my ancestors won was the power made accessible to them. The strenkir af krafti—the strings of power. We use their language to access them.”
“You said the queen had never used that power before that night. Can anyone do it? Access this power business?”
“Well, the queen is a natural vefari, a natural adept. The things she can do with her power are…beyond what one would expect. Think of it, her very first attempt to work the power that spins the universe was to fight death not only to a draw but to submission. I’ve no doubt that without her intervention I would have died before the healer arrived. No, that’s not quite it. I believe I was already mostly dead. I think she may have brought me back from the threshold of eternity.”
“So, can anyone do it, then?”
Meuhlnir turned in his chair and looked at me, a stern frown on his face. “So, you are a supplicant after all?”
I held up my hands between us, palms toward him. “Hey, just asking.”
“Might as well ask if Vikings like fish.” He laughed, the frown melting away. “You traversed a proo unaided.”
I shook my head. “I just lifted my feet and stepped through it. Not hard at all.”
He chuckled. “That’s what Suel told me when I asked her how she had been able to save me. ‘I just shouted what I wanted you to do and you did it,’ she said. ‘Not hard at all.’
“I will tell you what I told her: What is not hard for someone with a natural talent for archery takes a master archer years of practice. What is easy for a musical savant takes years of dedication for someone merely talented at music.”
I scrunched up my face. “With all due respect to you, your beard, and that big hammer of yours, I’ve never been able to make anything happen by wishful thinking. And believe me, over the past seven years, I’ve done a lot of wishing.”
“Hank, with all due respect to you, your puny little goatee, and,” he said as he looked me up and down, “your willingness to run around in the wild without a suitable weapon, you didn’t know you could. Even so, becoming a vefari requires…the right genetics and the right training.”
“Voodoo hoodoo,” I muttered, thinking of Jax.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just something my partner used to say.”
Meuhlnir flapped his hand like a little kid. “Sounds as good a phrase as any.”
“There were always people on my klith who claimed they could do magic.”
He nodded. “Yes, but they were charlatans, weren’t they?”
I shrugged and then nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”
“What was it you said earlier?” Meuhlnir’s forehead wrinkled as he struggled to recall. His face suddenly cleared and a boyish smile sprang to his lips. “Crazies! That’s it, right?”
I laughed at his obvious delight. “Yeah, crazies.”
“And the authorities, the men of science and the priests of your religions? Did they believe magic existed?”
“Sort of, I guess. Not the scientists, but the priests—except they called it miracles and said it only worked if you had enough faith.”
Meuhlnir nodded. “And did you ever meet anyone with enough faith?”
I shook my head. “I see your point, I think. On the other hand, except for that magical mirror I stepped through—which could easily be explained as a self-delusion on my part—what is there to convince me that this hocus-pocus is any more real than miracles?”
Meuhlnir nodded with a small smile on his face. “Don’t believe in fairies?”
I chuckled. “Well, I’ve never seen one.”
Meuhlnir nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Come with me.” He stood up and walked to the front door.
I followed him out into the frigid cold, shivering and wishing I hadn’t asked that last question.
Meuhlnir pointed behind me in the direction of the cabin. I turned and stared at it, feeling slow and stupid. It hadn’t been a trick of memory after all. The cabin looked to be about forty feet long and thirty or forty feet deep—square, and small. There was also no way a second floor could have fit beneath the low roof.
“Thoughts,” he asked.
“Smaller on the outside,” I muttered.
“Maybe bigger on the inside,” he said.
“Don’t get all Doctor Who on me now.”
He arched an eyebrow. “A man of science?”
I laughed. “Sort of. It’s too long to explain out here in the cold, and probably not very important.”
“Ah,” he said. He looked to his left, deeper into the woods. “Ehlteenk,” he muttered. The air shook with thunder, and a bolt of purplish lightning slammed into the ground about fifty yards into the woods. “Happy?”
I looked at the steaming hole in the snow out there in the woods, then back at him. “Ehlteenk is what you said?” I asked.
He nodded. “It means ‘lightning.’”
“You do enjoy lightning, don’t you,” I laughed.
“Might as well ask if Thor likes hammers,” he said. “But I think you are turning blue.” He put out his hand and turned me toward the door and gave me a little shove.
Back inside, I noticed that the door outside was a single panel, but inside, there was a twin standing beside it. “Okay,” I said. “How do you do the cabin trick?”
Meuhlnir laughed and hefted his hammer from the hearth. “Glamor, do you think?”
“Could be,” I said, “but I’m far from an expert.” A wave of exhaustion swept over me, and I leaned against the wall of the entry.
“Enough for tonight?” He stretched and yawned.
“Yeah, I think I’m done in.”
He nodded and pointed up the left set of stairs to the second floor that didn’t exist from the outside and then led me upstairs to my room.
Eighteen
I woke to the smell of cooking sausages and the sound of two women haranguing Meuhlnir in a language that sounded somewhat like the Gamla Toonkumowl. I stretched beneath the heap of thick furs that had served as my bedclothes. The fire had burned down to mere embers, but the room still had that pleasant smoky smell that permeates the air around a burning fireplace.
I threw the furs back, expecting a bolt of pain through my shoulders and was surprised, but pleased, when it didn’t come. Then I remembered what Meuhlnir had said—that I won’t feel ‘those’ pains while in his house. A nice benefit and he wasn’t even charging me room and board. Better than any doctor I’d been to on my side of the silvery mirror, the proo. I stood and stretched, luxuriating in the first pain-free morni
ng I’d had in seven years.
On the other side of the door, the talking slowed down, and Meuhlnir said something stern. Yowrnsaxa and Sif were silent a moment, and then all three burst into laughter. I was glad of that. I didn’t want to be the source of discord amongst them.
I pulled on my boots and went downstairs. I found Meuhlnir sitting in the same plush chair he’d favored the night before. A tin plate with the remains of what looked to be an extensive breakfast rested on the arm of the chair next to his knee. There was a blazing fire in the fireplace, and the heat felt grand. Of Yowrnsaxa and Sif, there was no sign.
“Sit,” he said. “Your breakfast will be here in a moment.”
“Trouble with the ladies this morning?” I asked. “I hope not because of me.”
Meuhlnir waved his hand in my direction. “Cooking dispute.” He grinned at me with a sly look in his eyes.
“Okay,” I said and grinned back at him.
Yowrnsaxa or Sif, I didn’t know which, came in with another tin plate. She patted my shoulder and then stuck her tongue out at Meuhlnir.
“Oh, you’re in trouble now, Hank. I think Sif likes you.”
The woman made a shushing noise at Meuhlnir and treated me to a pleasant smile. She said something in that sing-song of hers.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t understand you.”
She just went on smiling and looking at me as if she was waiting for something. I shrugged at Meuhlnir for help, but he was looking at me with the same expression as his wife as if he were waiting for me to realize something.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, it’s simple, really. We are waiting for you to understand that you do know what Sif said to you.”
I shook my head. “Long wait I guess. I don’t speak that language.”
“Really?” asked Meuhlnir, attempting to hide a smile. Sif didn’t even try to hide hers.
“What?” I asked, starting to feel like the butt of some joke I didn’t understand.
Sif shrugged. “Enjoy…” and two other words I didn’t understand.
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