River of Shadows

by Karina Halle

  I try to swallow the brick in my throat. “He’s been captured?”

  She gives me a patient look. “Don’t tell me you thought you’d find your father waltzing around collecting magic? Shamans come here with a goal in mind. They either achieve it or they don’t, but their intention is always to return back to the Land of the Living. I don’t know if your father ever found what he was looking for, but I do know that Death found him first. He is being kept at Shadow’s End as a prisoner.”

  I put my hands over my mouth in horror. “Oh my god.”

  “Yes. And you’re lucky that the God of Death is so mercurial. It is only by chance and perhaps boredom that your father is still alive.” She pauses as she studies me closely. “You are most peculiar for a mortal, do you know that? I can sense a power inside you that I rarely see outside of a God.”

  I’m having a hard time believing that. “What kind of power?”

  “I don’t know,” she says after a moment. “It appears inconsistent, like it is just waking up. But it does seem to be fueled by love. Which is why I think you might have a shot at saving your father, so as long as you’re willing to sacrifice all that you have and all that you are. Including your life.”

  “I’ll do anything,” I whisper, my mouth going dry.

  Her thin blue brow raises. “You say that. But you won’t know the truth of it until the time comes.”

  Suddenly Rasmus lets out a loud moan and both Vellamo and I look over to him. He’s still in the water and his hands are fisted into the hair of a mermaid as her head bobs beneath the surface.

  “Oh my god,” I exclaim. “Is he…getting a blow job from a mermaid?”

  “Mermaids are fascinated with mortals,” Vellamo explains dryly as she looks back to me. “As are most Gods. If you ever can, I would use that to your advantage.”

  My cheeks go hot and I look away. I have to admit, there’s something thrilling about the voyeuristic aspect of it all, not to mention the whole mermaid thing, which would fit nicely in the monster erotica I read when I need a helping hand, but seeing Rasmus at any stage of sexual activity is just plain gross.

  “If you’re finished, we must be on our way,” Vellamo says curtly to him.

  He gives us a sheepish look and then zips up his pants before sloshing back onto shore, the mermaid swimming away. “Sorry. That one always likes me for some reason.”

  “Now you’re all wet,” I tell him. “I hardly think that was worth it.”

  Vellamo just shakes her head and holds her hands out, gesturing for me to put my hands in them. Her palms are covered in shimmery designs, like henna but in fish scales and pearls.

  “Wait, what’s happening?” I ask.

  “You’re to continue your journey on foot,” she says, gesturing again. “As I told Rasmus, you’ll never get a chance to dry and warm up if you stay on the boat, and I can’t offer you protection on the river. Just stay on the banks but don’t stray far into the forest either. The Hiisi control it.” She nods at the sword at my feet. “And bring your sword in case you run into any Stragglers. With it you should be able to handle them with ease. If you can’t, Rasmus can always call on Tapio, God of the Forest. Like me, he doesn’t mind doing mortals a few favors, but he may want something in return.”

  I try to suck up each bit of information she gives me but it just goes over my head, and I look over at Rasmus who has stopped at the highest point of the snowy river bank. Beyond him I just see mist, no forest, nothing.

  “Don’t forget the sword,” Vellamo says, her voice getting impatient.

  I nod and pick it up. I throw it and the sword goes sailing through the air like a silver bird, stabbing the snow perfectly. Then I place my hands in Vellamo’s, her touch cold and almost electrical, and she lifts me up out of the boat, placing me on the pebbled shore.

  “I will return the boat to Loviatar,” Vellamo says, gracefully climbing into the vessel. “I owe her a favor.”

  Then the mermaids surface around the iron ship and push it off the shore until it’s floating freely. They turn it around and the ship starts to move across the sea. Vellamo raises her hand in a subtle wave and then turns her attention to the bow as they get further and further away, disappearing into the mist.

  Then I turn around to face Rasmus. “What the hell is your problem?” I ask.

  “Me?”

  “Getting your dick sucked by a mermaid,” I sneer at him, stomping through the snow to my sword. “Right in front of me, I might add.”

  He shrugs, looking pleased as punch. “What do you care?”

  I roll my eyes, my hand tightening around the sword’s handle. “I care that I didn’t want to see that. If I had an annoying younger brother, I could imagine it would be the same.”

  He frowns, his lip curling in a snarl. “I’m older than you.”

  “It’s hard to tell sometimes.” I say that simply, enough to raise his hackles.

  He continues to glare at me, then turns and starts walking along the riverbank. “Come on. Vellamo is right. We need to make a fire, get warm and dry, then have something to eat.”

  Brush my teeth, take a warm shower, put on deodorant, I continue wistfully in my head, trudging after him. Get a fresh change of clothes, slap on some moisturizer, do my hair.

  We walk for a while—time seems too fluid here to keep track of—and eventually we come to a stop by a thicket of birch trees. As we walked, the land became less barren, with shrubs and bushes populating the low hills, eventually leading to scattered trees that look extra creepy in the ever-present mist, their bare branches skeletal. The snow has faded away too, only leaving a light dusting, like walking in icing sugar.

  “This will do,” he says, putting his backpack down in the middle of the birch trees, moss covering the ground. “Can you go and find some flame ferns? They look like regular ferns. Just don’t touch the mushrooms.”

  We hadn’t been speaking to each other for the walk and now I’m a bit wary of him sending me out into the forest alone to go collect some ferns.

  “Are the mushrooms poisonous?” I ask.

  “No, but they are sleeping. You don’t want them to wake up.” He turns his back to me and starts rummaging through his stuff. “Just don’t go far and bring your sword, just in case.”

  I sigh, having not let go of my sword for a moment, and walk beyond the stand of birch trees, their knotted eyes on the white bark seeming to follow my every move.

  “Fuck this place,” I mutter under my breath. I’m cold, tired, hungry, a little scared, and I have to be afraid of waking up sentient mushrooms now. I have to wonder how they would cause any harm but I’m not about to find out.

  Once I’m far enough away from Rasmus, I lower my pants and pee on a bare patch of ground, hoping I don’t wake up some sentient rock that’s napping or something, shuddering as I pull my wet jeans back on. So gross.

  I’m already feeling a little disoriented, the forest seeming to press in on me from all directions. Here the birch gives away to towering cedars and pine, with ferns and flowers peppered amongst the moss and rocks. Though the air is still cold, the snow is gone and everything is green.

  “Rasmus?” I call out uneasily, afraid that I’m lost already.

  “Yeah?” he answers, the sound coming from the trees behind me, the opposite way I thought I came.

  “Just checking!” I yell back. Something tells me I shouldn’t yell much in the forest, so I quickly go about collecting as many ferns as I can. There’s nothing about them that seems to warrant the name “flame fern.” In fact, they look similar to the ones I’ve seen growing in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve gathered as much as I can when I finally notice the mushrooms. They’re of all shapes and sizes, including the classic toadstools with the red caps and white dots, growing at the base of cedar trees and on fallen logs. At home they’d probably kill you or get you high as fuck, though here it would be the former.

  Thankfully they seem to be asleep and the more I stare at them, the more they
seem to move, like they’re all breathing in unison.

  Okay, creepy as fuck. Time to move on.

  I head back in the direction of Rasmus’ voice and luckily I’m back at camp in no time. He’s been busy, creating beds out of piles of moss and placing cairns of stones around the moss, like he’s creating a giant circle, with a few fallen logs in the very middle.

  “Are these the right ferns?” I ask, holding them out. “Because it’s all I found.”

  His eyes light up. “Perfect,” he says, taking them from me. He places most of them in the logs and branches, then hands me a few. “Here, stuff them in between the stones I’ve laid out.”

  I do as he says, then join him in the middle when he brings a pack of matches out of his backpack and lights one. He drops the match on top of the ferns in the fire pit and it immediately goes up in flames, enough that I have to jump back.

  “Whoa!” I cry out, the heat fanning my face.

  “Watch,” he says and grabs my arm. “And stay still.”

  One part of the fire starts to reach higher in the sky right above us and I want to step back, but Rasmus holds me in place. It slowly starts to curve over us, creating an arc of fire that has me both terrified and mesmerized, the flames so close to our heads. Then the reaching tip of the flame makes contact with one of the fern-stuffed cairns and it lights itself on fire, creating another arc of fire that connects each cairn to each other until all the ferns around us are lit.

  The flames then retreat back to a manageable size, the show over.

  “Flame ferns,” Rasmus says, clapping his hands together. “One of my favorite things about this place. I’ve brought them back to our world, but they aren’t flammable at all. Here they only burn if they’ve been cut or taken up from the ground, and the fire it creates will only ignite other flame ferns. Watch.”

  He suddenly puts his hand straight into the fire and I gasp as he removes it completely unharmed, his sleeve untouched. “It’s hot enough but it’s no danger. You try it.”

  “I don’t know…” I muse. Rasmus made it look safe, but every human instinct tells you not to put yourself in a fire.

  “Chicken?” Rasmus goads.

  I exhale shakily and square my shoulders. “Fine.”

  I stick my hand out, palm down, and slowly move it into the flames. It’s hot at first, tickling the undersides of my fingers like burning feathers, but it doesn’t hurt at all.

  “Oh man, this can’t be good for you,” I tell him, unable to take my eyes off my entire hand now fully engulfed by the flames.

  “See,” he says. “Now take it out.”

  I remove my hand.

  Except the flames are now growing from my fingertips, as if I was made of a flame fern.

  “Um!” I yelp, waving my hand around, the flames not going out. “What the fuck?”

  Rasmus just stares at me, dumbfounded, the flames reflected in his eyes.

  “How are you doing that?” he whispers harshly. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

  “Well it is! A little help? What the hell should I do!?”

  He just shakes his head. If anything, he looks a little pissed off.

  I grumble at him and go over to a cedar, trying to wipe it off on the rough strips of bark, but the flames don’t go out, and they stay lit when I try smothering it on the moss and in the dirt. The fire isn’t hurting me, and from the looks of it my skin isn’t burned, but still, I don’t want to be a walking flamethrower.

  Finally I just inhale deeply and blow on my hand.

  And as if they’re a bunch of birthday candles, all the flames go out at once.

  “Holy shit,” I say breathlessly, examining my hand up close. It looks the same as always. If anything it looks smoother, like my skin just got exfoliated.

  “Is your nail polish flammable?” Rasmus asks.

  “I’m not wearing any,” I say, wiggling my fingers at him.

  “I don’t understand,” he says, turning his back to me and going through his bag. “It’s never done that with me.”

  “Well maybe I’m just that special,” I say jokingly. “Or maybe I just have the feminine touch.”

  He grunts in response and brings out a tiny teapot and two wood carved cups from his backpack. I’m not sure why he’s grumpy again, you’d think getting a blow job from a mermaid would cure all your woes for a long time.

  But as Rasmus starts preparing dinner, or lunch, whatever time it is, he seems to get in a better mood. I suppose the idea of having actual food when you’re starving will do that to you.

  Since it’s not as cold anymore, I take our coats and boots and lay them out around the fire and between the cairns so that they’ll dry, then I scooch myself onto the moss right beside the fire. Too bad the whole lighting my hand on fire can’t be a party trick I can try back home.

  Dinner is as mundane and practical as it comes—cans of corned beef, a packet of chicken-flavored potato chips, a few oranges, and a Cliff bar for dessert, but nothing has ever tasted so good. I know reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when I was young made me think fantasy worlds were full of Turkish Delight, but the reality is oatmeal cookie energy bars taste just as heavenly.

  After dinner, Rasmus disappears into the forest for a few minutes and when he returns he has a handful of cedar needles and some gooey white substance which he places in the diffuser in the teapot.

  “Cedar sap,” he explains. “It will help your body and mind heal. It might make you a bit sleepy though, and your sleep will be deep and restorative.”

  “So now you’re drugging me,” I say.

  “Drugging us both,” he says. “Unlike you, I didn’t sleep last night. I watched over you instead.”

  I have to admit, I’m rather touched. “And if danger comes for us in the night?”

  “We’ll spring into action, feeling better than before,” he says.

  While the tea steeps he takes a stick and starts poking at the fire and my mind finally has a chance to slow down and wander, going over everything that’s happened. There’s been so much I feel like I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath.

  “Vellamo seemed pretty forgiving,” I tell him, holding my hands out in front of the fire. “You know, considering you’ve dicked her around before.”

  He raises a shoulder and pokes the stick in the fire. “Gods and shamans have a complicated relationship. On one hand, we’re always getting under their skin in our quest to gain power. On the other hand…we believe in them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that when humans first began to walk the earth, the Gods made themselves known. It didn’t take a lot of faith to know that the Goddess of the Sea was real when you saw her rise from the deep. People believed in them and worshipped them and you didn’t have to be a priest or a shaman to do that. But in time, more and more people were born, scattered around the globe, and most of the Gods stayed the same. Outnumbered. So some people saw the Gods, others didn’t, and those that didn’t found it hard to believe in them. Over time, they lost their faith, their belief, and the Gods lost their power in the Upper World, in our world. They stayed here in the Underworld. The shamans, which includes witches and wizards, never lost that belief and remain the one true link between the worlds.” He pauses. “Except for Death.”

  “No?”

  He gives me a tight smile. “No one has ever lost their belief in Death.”

  I wrap my arms around my knees, hugging them tight. “Have you ever met him?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I’ve heard stories, of course. That he always has to wear gloves because if he touches you, you’ll die. And that his face is a skull and he wears a cloak and he eats babies for breakfast.”

  “Let me guess, rides a skeleton horse?”

  “Skeleton unicorn,” he corrects me with a smile, my eyes going wide. “And it’s an ugly, nasty, bloodsucking beast. Those horns are dangerous.”

  “A unicorn? Seriously? What about dragons?”

  He
laughs. “No dragons. But there are a few species of dinosaurs wandering about.”

  “Dinosaurs!” I exclaim. “You got to be kidding me.”

  “What, so dragons and unicorns you’ll totally believe but dinosaurs, creatures that literally did exist on our planet, are far-fetched?”

  He’s got a point. “Well, since dinosaurs are real, what are mermaids and unicorns doing here?”

  “This is the Underworld for all the worlds. Not just our own. There are other worlds out there with creatures you can’t even imagine. This place is your best bet for seeing them. Eero once told me he saw an alien.”

  I frown. “You talked to Eero?”

  “Well, yeah. We all live or work at the resort.”

  “I don’t understand. If Eero was my father’s business partner, then why did he want to prevent me from rescuing my father, and, dare I say, try to kill me?”

  “Jealousy,” Rasmus says. “He didn’t want your father to become more powerful than him.”

  “So how powerful is Eero?”

  A dark look comes over his eyes. “Enough that he’s been reincarnated his whole life. The closest a shaman has gotten to eternal life, but not close enough. Not for him, anyway. Rumor has it that he’s actually the legendary shaman Väinämöinen, who is the hero of Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala.”

  Shit. That’s pretty big.

  “You know, I wanted to become Eero’s apprentice,” Rasmus admits quietly, voice hushed with shame. He picks up the tea pot and pours the hot, fragrant liquid into the wood cups. “But I’m glad he turned me away. Your father is a good man, Hanna. One of the best. If it had been Eero teaching me…”

  I study him in the firelight and for the first time I feel like I’m really seeing Rasmus. A contradiction. A boy on one hand, a man on the other. Someone who wants to be good, someone who craves the ability to be bad. Someone happy with something as simple as flame ferns, someone who wants all the power in the universe.

  He looks at me as he passes me my tea. “What are you thinking about?” he asks warily.