by Karina Halle
“I don’t understand!” I’d tear my hair out if the adrenaline wasn’t propelling me forward. “Where is he? Why were you in the casket? What were they trying to do to me?”
“Plenty of time to answer those questions later,” he says. He glances over his shoulder and frowns. “They’ll be out any minute now.”
I guess he didn’t kill them. I look behind me again but immediately eat shit, falling right into a snowbank, snow sinking into my sweater and jeans. Rasmus hooks his arms under me and pulls me up like I weigh nothing at all.
“Almost there,” he says. “You can do it.”
My mind seems to empty out, the cold finally getting to me. I have this vague sensation that I’ll die soon if I don’t get inside somewhere, if I don’t get warm, and that death wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
“Fight it!” Rasmus barks at me. “Don’t let them in your head!”
Don’t let who in my head? I don’t even know who we’re running from. I don’t even know where I am. Who I am.
My sight starts to turn gray at the edges.
“Fuck,” Rasmus says. “Hold on.”
The lights from the hotel fade away, like they’re being snuffed out, and everything is turning black. I’m falling for a moment and then I’m being lifted up in the air. Carried. I hear the rasp of Rasmus’ breath in the cold air, his legs as they plow through the snow.
Then, somewhere in the distance I hear. “Rasmus! Hanna!”
The voice doesn’t even sound human. It’s sinister and macabre and strikes fear in the deepest part of my soul.
Hanna. That’s my name. I’m Hanna.
I’m…trying to survive.
I gasp, as if just being pulled from drowning, and open my eyes to find myself being placed on a low, two-person sleigh, blankets piled high around me.
A sleigh attached to a fucking reindeer.
I stare at the animal for a moment and it turns its head, staring right back at me with brown liquid eyes, as if wondering who I am.
Holy shit.
“Sulo!” Rasmus says to the reindeer as he pulls up several blankets and animal hides from behind me and starts draping them over me. “Go!”
The reindeer starts running, the sleigh tugged through the snow until it finds the tracks left from before. Rasmus tries to steady himself while keeping me as warm as possible, but no matter how many blankets he puts on me, I don’t feel any warmer. I’m iced to the bone.
“Where are we going?” I ask, teeth chattering. I want to point out how nuts it is that a reindeer-pulled sleigh was his preferred escape vehicle over a car, but Sulo is really picking up the pace and we’re gliding along deeper into the pine forest. I look over my shoulder at the hotel and I barely make out the lights at all. I certainly don’t hear or see either of them.
I’m just heading off into the darkness with a stranger and a reindeer.
Once again I’m hit with a wave of fatigue, but this time I don’t think it’s anyone in my head. The adrenaline is starting to wear off.
“We’re going somewhere safe,” Rasmus says. “Your father’s house.”
Chapter 3
The Cottage
I wake up to the smell of fresh cedar, cardamom, and baker’s yeast. For a moment I’m back at my father’s cottage on the lake, when I used to wake up in my tiny room with the heavy wool quilts at the foot of the bed, simple watercolor paintings of flowers on the walls, and smell the tinctures he was preparing for the day, along with the pulla bread he’d make me for breakfast. It’s a nostalgic smell, one that makes me want to curl up under the covers and go back to sleep again, content.
But when my fingers pull on the covers, I realize I have no idea where I really am, and all the strange and horrific images from last night come crashing into me.
I gasp and sit straight up, nearly hitting myself on a low log beam from a slanted ceiling. I’m in an attic of sorts, weak gray light coming in through the small windows at either side of the house, ice and snow at the corners of the frames.
“Are you awake?” I hear a voice from downstairs and it takes me a moment to place it. Names flip through my head until I find one that makes sense.
Rasmus. That voice belongs to Rasmus.
But who the fuck is Rasmus and the what the hell happened to me?
I start to pull off the covers but something makes me stop and stare. There’s such a familiar feeling to them in my hands, such a sentimental weight. I stare at them in the dim light, taking in the blue and red pattern of snowflakes and squares, then look at the rest of the blankets that are all folded at the foot of the bed, and fuck…I’m not imaging things. These are the same blankets I had as a child, growing up in the house in Savonlinna, and then later at my father’s cottage. These are his blankets.
I throw them back and am relieved that I’m still wearing my jeans and sweater, then get out of bed, careful not to hit my head on the low ceiling, go over to the ladder and poke my head over the open space. The soothing smell of butter, sugar and cardamom comes floating up, along with cozying warmth.
I go down the wood ladder and find myself in a small living area with an even smaller kitchen just beyond it. Everything about this place is both familiar and strange, making me uneasy and yet comforted. The knotted walls house many rough-hewn shelves made from birch bark. On them are an assortment of books, both leather-bound and hardcovers, as well as worn booklets with tattered covers, held together with loops of golden twine. Crystals of all sizes and colors are peppered between the books alongside tiny glass jars stuffed with herbs, and wooden cups with feathers, twigs and paintbrushes sticking out. Above is an impressive reindeer-antler chandelier that dwarfs the place, and across from me is a roaring crackling fire. I spy the mantle above it with framed photos, and am about to walk over to it to get a closer look when Rasmus says, “Good morning.”
I whirl around to see him in the kitchen, which I swear was empty a moment ago. He’s pulling a tray of buns out of the oven, the warm smell of spices filling the room. I stand there and stare at him for a moment, trying to wrap my head around the weirdly domestic scene.
“Where am I?” I ask.
He nods at the mantle. “As I said last night…”
I turn and go over to the pictures. There, in tarnished gold and silver frames, are pictures of my father. One of them he’s with Rasmus beneath the northern lights with a bottle of vodka in hand, in another he’s standing in front of the hotel, looking proud. But all the rest of the photos are of me. Some are of the two of us, like the self-timer he took of us when he was dressed as Santa Claus, but the rest are just of me. There’s me at a dance recital when I was eight, there’s me in Swan Lake when I was sixteen—the last recital I would do—an elaborate headdress of swan feathers on my head. There’s me at Venice Beach with Jenny, another one of me joking around at work. I have no idea where he got all these, then I realize they’re all on paper. He must have printed them out from my Instagram account.
“Papa,” I whisper, a lump forming in my throat. I pick up the photo of the two of us on the dock. “You did all this?”
“I told you he talked about you all the time,” Rasmus says from behind me. “I know you don’t know me from Adam, but that’s why it feels like I know you. Here.”
I twist around and he’s handing me a ceramic plate with a chip out of it, a warm bun on top. “You need to eat. It’s pulla. I’m sure you’ve had it before,” he says before he walks back to the kitchen. “Your father’s recipe, by the way.”
I eye the bun stuffed with cinnamon and cardamom, sprinkled with big shiny hunks of pearl sugar. My stomach growls ravenously. There’s a slight chance that Rasmus is trying to poison me, but if he wanted to kill me he could have just left me behind with Noora and Eero.
At the thought of them I shudder. It’s enough to squash my appetite. I take the plate over to the couch and sit down, watching as Rasmus tidies the kitchen.
“So,” I begin, trying to form my thoughts and keep the panic at ba
y. “I hate to be blunt, but now that I’m awake and apparently in one piece, you need to tell me just what the fuck is going on here. Because I can’t tell if last night was a jet-lag infused nightmare or not, but either way you have a lot of explaining to do.”
Rasmus sighs and then comes over to me, holding two mugs of something hot and places them on the tree-trunk coffee table in front of me.
“What’s that?” I ask, nodding at the mug.
He raises a brow. “I’m not poisoning you, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He sits down on a leather armchair. “It’s pine needle tea.”
I peer down in the mug to see a few pine needles floating as well as a couple of tiny flower buds. They’re dusky pink in color, yet when I move the mug and the water jostles, the flowers look gold, like they’ve been painted with a metallic sheen.
“And the flowers?”
He takes a sip of his tea and then smiles. “Frost flowers.”
“What are frost flowers?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
I stare at him for a moment. “Can you fucking blame me?”
“You swear a lot too. Your father didn’t mention that.”
I ignore that. “Tell me where he is. Then tell me why we’re in his house. Tell me how you’re his apprentice. Then tell me what the fuck Eero and Noora wanted. In that order.”
He lets out another low sigh, tapping his fingers on the leather armrests. “I’ll tell you everything. And it will be the truth. But I need you to drink your tea first.”
I stiffen, eyeing the tea for a moment. “Why?” I ask hesitantly.
“Because it will open your heart and mind. What I’m about to tell you will be hard to believe at first, but it’s imperative that you believe. The tea will help.”
“How do I know this tea isn’t going to make me forget everything you say?”
He chuckles, looking positively boyish, and I’m briefly trying to place his age again. He could be eighteen. He could be in his mid-thirties. He might even be in his eighties since he just used the word imperative. “There’s another tea for that. And I don’t want you to forget a single word. I’m going to need you to remember. The truth will serve as fuel.”
I stare at him to go on, my patience already threadbare.
He stares right back until I relent. I pick up the tea and have a tepid sip. It’s hot, but not scalding, and the fragrant scent of the pines seems to wake me up. The tea itself tastes like sugared lemons, and before I know it I’ve finished the whole thing.
He clears his throat. “Good.” Then he looks into my eyes, so deep that I feel like I’m being pushed back into the couch cushions, my body melting. “Hanna, your father was dying of cancer.”
I didn’t expect him to say that. The words are sharp and cold and they seem to puncture the air.
“What?”
He grimaces. “He didn’t want to tell you. He didn’t want to tell anyone. Only I knew. Eventually Eero and Noora figured it out, but he didn’t want them to know either.”
It feels like I have a vice placed over my heart, the pressure coming slow and painful. “What kind of cancer?” God, why didn’t he at least tell me?
“I don’t know, he never said. He did go to a doctor in town. They gave him six months.”
“And how long ago was that?” my voice shakes as I speak.
“Six months ago.”
I try to take in the information but it’s not sinking in. Not sure if this tea is working since it just doesn’t seem real. How could my dad have had cancer?
“So he wasn’t found frozen in the woods?” I ask absently.
“He wasn’t found at all,” Rasmus says.
I look at him sharply. “The body in the casket.”
“There was no body. You know that. Noora and Eero, they made you see it afterward. They put me in there as a base, and built your hallucination on top of it. I tried to stop them but sometimes, when they work together…”
I press my fingers into my temple, as if to keep my brain from unraveling. “Built my hallucination?”
He gives me a steady look before taking a sip of his tea, swallowing with deliberation. “Okay. Here we go.” He clears his throat. “Eero and Noora are powerful shamans. Eero most of all. I’m a shaman as well, as was your father. That’s why I was his apprentice. He was teaching me. The entire resort was founded in the hopes that one day the Sami people, and other indigenous peoples around the world, could come visit and practice their beliefs in private, in a learning environment. There was a time where the shaman here had to travel to Brazil, into rainforest communities, or to the Southwest of the United States, to the Navajo tribes, in order to practice without judgment or persecution. Your father’s idea was that there would be no need for running away. That we could find peace here.”
My father was a shaman? Somehow that isn’t surprising. Maybe the tea is working after all. Still, I say, “I can’t believe he kept all of that from me.” I hate how fragile that makes me feel. He didn’t trust me enough with the news of his diagnosis, nor did he let me in on the whole shaman thing.
“How long was he…practicing?” I ask awkwardly.
“Since long before you were born.”
Now I’m surprised. “He’s been a shaman my whole life!?” I exclaim.
Rasmus nods firmly. “A very powerful one. I was lucky he agreed to take me on. I’ve been training with him since I was ten.”
“And how old are you?”
“Thirty,” he says. “Don’t let my boyish good looks deceive you.”
Now I understand Rasmus’ involvement. He’s been with my father for twenty years, a couple of years before my mother moved me to California.
“I must have seen you when I was younger,” I tell him, trying to think of any older boys who might have been hanging around our cottage.
He shakes his head. “Your father was very discreet. He did everything he could to keep it a secret.”
“So my mom never knew?”
Rasmus gives another tight smile. Oh, of course she knew. That’s why she left him. That’s why she did all she could to stop me from having contact with him, even though it didn’t work in the end.
“Look, we will have plenty of time to talk about this,” Rasmus says. “But I believe time is of the essence. Eero and Noora will be here soon.”
Their names bring me back to the present. “So if my father’s body was never found, why did they tell me he died of exposure after getting lost in the woods? Why not tell me he had cancer? Why put on an elaborate fake funeral?”
And why the hell did they seem to want to kill me last night?
“Because they don’t want you to discover where he really went.”
I blink, growing more confused by the second. “Well? Where did he really go?”
“Tuonela,” he says after a beat, a darkness coming over his eyes.
“And where is that?”
“It’s the Land of the Dead.”
Another slow blink from me. I almost laugh. “I hate to tell you this, but that tea isn’t working. It almost sounded like you said the Land of the Dead.”
Rasmus’ eyes remain stone-cold serious. “Tuonela is the place where the dead go after they die. It’s accessible only through a few shamanic portals within the Arctic Circle, and one of those happens to be close to here. Your father went there, hoping to either barter with Death in order to have more life, or to break into the Library of the Veils at Shadow’s End and find a specific spell.”
I can only stare. Learning that my father was a powerful secret shaman his whole life is one thing, but this, whatever the hell this is, is on a whole other level entirely.
I clear my throat and start picking at the pulla on the coffee table. “Let’s just pretend for a second that everything you said has made perfect sense, and that you didn’t just talk about something tantamount to Frodo strolling into Mordor.”
“Tolkien was very inspired by Finnish folklore,” he points out.
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br /> “Yes, I know,” I say impatiently. “So again, let’s say this is all real. That my father traveled to another realm to go barter with…Death? Like, the Grim Reaper?”
He nods.
“And how exactly does one barter with Death? Does my father have something he could trade him?”
“Trades happen all the time between the mortals and the Gods.”
Wow. I didn’t think he’d have an answer to that. Especially not that answer.
“Fine,” I say slowly. “So he’s gone there to do that, go to a library, get a spell to live longer. What the hell does any of that have to do with Eero and Noora?”
“They’re afraid you’ll go into Tuonela in search of your father. That you’ll gain power and wisdom yourself, and that you’ll bring him back, possibly with immortality.”
“And you?”
“And I’m hoping that’s exactly what you will do.”
I take a bite of the pulla and try to think, the delicious taste distracting me for a moment. Rasmus must be in shock. I do believe my father was a shaman and that the two were very close, that perhaps Rasmus looked to him as a father figure. If that’s the case, that could explain why he’s not handling his death very well. And I don’t think I am either, considering I’m sitting here in this remote cabin and entertaining all this nonsense with such calmness.
“You realize you sound crazy,” I tell him after a moment.
“I know,” he says softly. “And I know that there’s nothing I can really do to make you believe me…unless you see it for yourself.”
I swallow down the pulla and get to my feet, walking over to the window which nearly vibrates with the sub-zero temperatures. Outside is a fresh blanket of snow covering the boughs of the pine tree. In the distance is a small shelter with two reindeer outside munching on hay that’s been scattered about. One of them must have been our transportation last night.
“Those your reindeer?” I ask without turning around.
“Your father’s,” he says.
Another secret my father kept from me. I would have loved to know he had reindeer.