by Cate Tiernan
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With love to my readers—you guys keep me going.
CHAPTER 1
UPPSALA, SWEDEN, 1619
Vali! Vali! Where is the girl?”
I heard my employer’s voice and scrambled up from the storage cellar.
“Here!” I said breathlessly, setting the heavy box of gold thread on the counter. The wooden steps to the cellar below the shop were barely more than a ladder; I’d had to hold the box with one hand while the other kept me from pitching head over feet. In time I would become as nimble as a mountain goat, but I’d been here only a month and these stairs were, even by Scandinavian standards, steep and narrow. Factor in the long skirts and petticoats and you had potential disaster in the making.
My employer, Master Nils Svenson, gave his customer a smile. “Vali is new here; she’s still learning the stock.”
I made a little curtsey, keeping my eyes down.
“She’s doing very well, though, aren’t you, dear?” Master Svenson nodded at me approvingly, then turned his full attention to the man who was deep in the throes of deciding whether large ruffs were truly going out of fashion or not.
I took a feather duster from my apron pocket and began to dust the bolts of fabrics lining two walls. My master was one of the most sought-after tailors in Uppsala, known to have the finest fabrics: finely woven wools, smooth to my hand and dyed in deep jewel tones; plain and colored linen in various weights, from moth-wing gauzy to the heavy, sturdy cloth for breeches and bodices; unbelievably fine silk from the Far East in bright, parrot colors that were completely exotic and out of place in this country in November.
The silver bell over the shop door tinkled, and a very elegant woman came in, her hat trailing a turquoise ostrich plume that I knew cost as much as what I earned in six months.
“Hello, my dear,” said the man, turning and lightly catching the woman’s gloved hand to kiss. “I apologize for being late.”
“I’m not inconvenienced in the least,” she said graciously. “You finish your business.” She seemed to glide across the shop on fine kid shoes that made barely a sound. Moments later she stood near me as I flicked the duster and tried not to stare at her beautiful storm-gray cloak, chain-stitched all over with black flowers.
“What exquisite fabric,” she murmured, gently touching a peach-colored watered silk, its silver-thread embroidery making it heavy and stiff. She turned to her husband. “My dear? You really should have a waist—”
I don’t know why she looked at me just then, but she did, her clear blue eyes skimming absently across me and then sharpening and locking on my face like a magnet. She stopped in midword, her eyes wide. Her hand gathered a bit of silk and held it, as if without it she would fall down.
“Yes, my dear?” her husband said.
She let go of the silk and gave a shaky smile. “One moment.” She gracefully turned her back to the two men and looked at me again.
“You,” she said in a voice too low for them to hear.
“Yes, mistress?” I asked, concerned. Then—I don’t know how to describe it. I still can’t. I don’t know how we know or what it is. But I met her eyes, and there passed between us an instant of recognition. My mouth opened, and I almost gasped.
We had seen each other for what we were: immortal. I hadn’t met another person like me in three countries, eight cities, and almost fifty years.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“My name is Vali, mistress.”
“Where are you from?”
The decades-old lie came easily to me. “Noregr, mistress,” I murmured, hoping that there were in fact immortals in Norway. I hadn’t met any when I lived there.
“My dear?” her husband called.
With a last penetrating look, the woman left me and joined her husband. Soon they went out into the dark, cold afternoon—it was only three thirty, but of course the sun had set already, this far north.
I stood still, my mind turning wheels, until I realized Master Svenson was looking at me. I started busily dusting again.
The next day my master called me over from the glass-fronted display of silk ribbons that I’d been arranging.
He was wrapping something in brown paper, folding it neatly and then tying it with waxed twine. “I need you to take this to Mistress Henstrom,” he said. “She’s requested several cloth samples.” He took up his pen, dipped it in ink, and wrote her street and house number on the paper in his educated, slanty script. “Make haste, Vali. And here—buy yourself a bun on the way back.” He handed me a few copper coins.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. He was a genuinely kind man, and working for him hadn’t been at all bad so far.
I retucked the scarf I wore always, pulled on my own loden-green rough-wool cloak, and hurried out. This Mistress Henstrom lived about a thirty-minute walk away. I dodged street filth, horses, and people crowding the high street’s shops, and was glad again that I lived in a town and no longer in the countryside. Uppsala was by far the biggest town I had lived in since Reykjavík. In the countryside, night closed in on you like a bell placed over a light, silent and grim. Here even at midnight you could occasionally hear the clopping of horseshoes on the cobbles, a baby’s wail, sometimes the off-tune and bawdy singing of men who’d drunk too much. And here, in this town, lived at least one other immortal.
The streets twisted and turned, and more than once I had to backtrack and take a different route. I walked as fast as I could, mostly to keep warm, but the damp, misty chill slipped under my cloak and through my ankle-high boots. By the time I found the correct house number, I was chilled down to my fingernails and shaking with cold.
The house was large and fine, made of brown brick with other colored bricks set into a pattern, and it had a false front with ziggurats. It was four stories high, with the entrance up a tall flight of stairs. I struck the lion’s-head heavy brass knocker several times. The black enameled door was opened almost immediately by a big, round woman wearing a spotless white apron. She had the reddened, work-roughened hands of a servant but also an unmistakable sense of importance. So the head housekeeper, maybe.
“I’m from Master Svenson’s shop?” I said. “With fabric samples for the mistress.” I held out the package for her to take, but she opened the door wider.
“She’s waitin’ on you in the front drawing room.”
“Me? I’m just the shopgirl.”
“Go on then.” The housekeeper nodded toward a double set of tall, paneled doors painted dove gray.
Inside, a woman sat before a white marble fireplace carved with fruit and garlands. Blue and white tiles with ships on them surrounded the firebox, and I wanted to kneel down and look at each tile, enjoying the fire’s delicious warmth. Instead I stood uncertainly in the doorway, and then the woman moved and I saw her face. My heart sped up: It was the woman from the shop the afternoon before. The immortal.
“Oh, good—the samples from Master Svenson,” said the woman, her voice smooth and modulated, the accent refined. “I need you to wait, girl, while I look at them. Then you can directly return my choice to your master.”
“Yes, mistress,” I said, bewildered.
“Thank you, Singe,” she said to the housekeeper, and the woman reluc
tantly backed out, clearly curious and disapproving of a shopgirl in the fine drawing room.
When the door had quietly clicked shut, Mistress Henstrom beckoned me closer. “Forgive the deceit, but I couldn’t call on a shopgirl,” she said in a low voice, and I nodded. “You said you were from Noregr?”
I nodded again. “And you, mistress—where are you from?” I asked boldly.
“France,” she said. I knew so little about immortals then that I was shocked. Were there immortals all over? In every other country?
I’d been in my early twenties when I was first told what I was. I hadn’t known it before then. After all, I’d seen my whole family slaughtered in front of me; they had died, and so, clearly, I could die also. But after the death of my nonimmortal first husband when I was eighteen, I’d made my way to Reykjavík and become a house servant to a large, middle-class family. I learned that they too were immortal. The mistress there, Helgar Thorsdottir, had first instructed me about our kind. At the time I was actually young, so the concept of going on endlessly had no meaning for me.
That had been fifty years earlier. As time passed, first slowly and then more quickly, it started to become real for me: to look into a piece of shined metal or the occasional real looking glass or the still water of a pond or puddle, and see the same me. Decade after decade. My skin was unlined; my hair, though light enough to be almost whitish, had no gray of old age. I was the same, always.
“How old are you, my dear?” Mistress Henstrom asked. She neither asked me to sit down nor offered me refreshment; I was just a shopgirl.
“Sixty-eight,” I said faintly. And still looked barely sixteen.
“I’m two hundred and twenty-nine,” she said, and my eyes widened. She laughed. “Surely you’ve met people older than I.”
I didn’t know how old my parents had been. I wasn’t sure how old Helgar or her husband had been, though from things she’d said she seemed about eighty. Back then. So she would be about 130 now.
“I don’t think so. I haven’t met many others like us.”
“But my dear, we’re everywhere!” She laughed again, and a small spaniel I hadn’t seen before came out from under her chair and jumped on her lap. She stroked its silky head and preposterous butterfly ears. “France and England. Spain. Italy. Here in Swerighe,” she said, gesturing out the window.
I waited for her to say “Iceland,” because that was where I’d been born, but she didn’t. I hadn’t been to any of those other countries, but that one instant, that moment, stood out so sharply against countless moments, because right then I knew that someday I would. The thought caught my breath, opening up a future I had never contemplated. In fifty years, the idea of being something more than a servant or shopgirl or wife, the thought of living somewhere besides these northern countries, had been a dream so without form that I had never grasped it.
Likewise, questions I hadn’t asked Helgar, things I’d wondered about, uncertainties that had simmered in my brain for years now boiled to the surface, and I could hardly get the words out fast enough.
“Do you know many other—people like us?”
Mistress Henstrom smiled. “Yes, of course. Quite a few. Certainly the ones who live in Uppsala—which was why I was so surprised to come across one I’d never seen.”
“Your husband?”
“A mortal, I’m afraid. A dear man.” Sadness swept over her lovely, porcelain face, and I understood immediately that one day he would die, and she wouldn’t.
“Are all the ones you know like you?” I waved my hand at the damask wallpaper, the furniture, the house. I meant rich, fancy.
She tilted her head to one side, looking at me. “No. We’re at all classes of society, at each level of birth, education, breeding.”
I’d been born to wealthy, powerful parents. We’d had the biggest, most luxurious castle in that part of Iceland—made of huge blocks of stone with real glass in the windows; at least fourteen rooms; walls hung with tapestries; servants, tutors, musical instruments; even books. When I lost my childhood, I’d lost everything about it.
“The nature of the thing is,” Mistress Henstrom said, “that when one lives quite a long time, one has quite a lot of time to fill. With educating oneself, in whatever way you can. With meeting people—influential people. With taking a small occupation and being around long enough for it to grow. Money grows over time. Or it does, at least, if you’re not silly about it.”
“I don’t have any money.” I hadn’t meant to say that, but I had absently given voice to my thoughts. I blushed because it must have been glaringly clear that I didn’t have money.
Mistress Henstrom nodded kindly. “Have you never been married?”
“Twice. But they had no money, either.” I didn’t want to think about them, not the sweet, uneducated Àsmundur I was married off to when I was sixteen, or the awful man I’d thought I could make a life with, some forty years later. They were both dead, anyway.
“Perhaps you married the wrong men.” Mistress Henstrom wasn’t being sarcastic—it was more like a suggestion. She waved her hand toward the room, much as I had done. “I have money of my own, but I also take care to marry wealthy men. And when they die, their money becomes mine alone, do you see?”
I gaped at her. “Do you mean… I should try to marry a wealthy man?”
“I think marrying poor ones did nothing to advance your position,” she said, stroking her little dog. “You have a lovely face, my dear. With different clothes, a hairstyle au courant—you could catch the eye of many a man.”
“I have no family, no connections,” I sputtered. “I’m an orphan, with nothing. Who would want to marry me?” Not to mention I never wanted to get married again.
Again Mistress Henstrom tilted her head to one side. “My dear—if I told you I was the fifth daughter of a wealthy English landowner, how would you determine it was true? The world is so big—there are so many people. No one knows them all. Letters, inquiries, take months and months. Create a family for yourself, a history, the next time you’re scrubbing a floor… or dusting bolts of fabric. Then be that person. Introduce yourself that way. Become a new person, as you’ve no doubt done before—don’t just be the same person with a new name.”
Her words tore through my brain like a comet, leaving room for new ideas, new concepts. Then my limited reality set in again. My hands plucked at my rough cloak, my plain skirt with its muddy hems. It was all too much. I didn’t know where to start. It was frightening. “I don’t—” I began.
Mistress Henstrom held up her hand. “My dear—it’s November. Stay at Master Svenson’s while you think of who you want to be, if you could be anyone—anyone at all. I’ll send for you in March.”
“Yes, mistress,” I said, overwhelmed and scared and… exhilarated.
And in March Mistress Henstrom did indeed send for me. I left Master Svenson and took the money I had scrimped and saved in the last six months and went to the Henstroms’ country house, a good ten miles out of the city. Her personal seamstress was there, and under the lady’s direction, three new dresses were made for me, indulging my particular whim of keeping my neck covered. They were much fancier and grander than anything I’d had before, but not so fancy as to arouse curiosity.
As I looked at myself in the mirror, my sunlit hair coiled in complicated braids, my blue dress so much nicer than anything I had owned since I was a child, I met Mistress Henstrom’s—Eva’s—eyes as she smiled with approval.
“May I ask…” I began hesitantly.
“Yes?”
“May I ask why you’re doing this for me? It will likely be years before I can pay you back.”
A thoughtful look came over Eva’s face. “Because… more than a hundred years ago, I was very like you. Twice the age you are now but no further advanced. I was ignorant, with no dreams for the future. And then I met someone. And she—took pity on me. She simply wanted to help me. She was the oldest person I had met—well over six hundred then.” Mistress
Henstrom smiled, somewhat wistfully. “Anyway. She did for me much the same thing that I’m doing for you. I’ve always wanted to help someone myself, as a way of paying her back.” Another gracious smile. “This is my good deed. Take it and enjoy it, my dear.”
A lot happened after that, up and down, but a mere twenty-eight years later I was Elena Natoli, middle-class owner of a lace shop in Naples, Italy. I could have been much richer, with a much more leisurely lifestyle, but I just couldn’t bring myself to marry again.
I’ve never again seen the woman who called herself Eva Henstrom back in the early sixteen hundreds. If I did, I would thank her. She changed the course of my life, the way a storm can make a river jump its banks and surge ahead.
CHAPTER 2
WEST LOWING, MASSACHUSETTS, USA, PRESENT
Okay, raise your hand if you’ve ever (1) dropped food or ice cream or a drink in front of (or on) someone; (2) realized you had a big stain on your clothes and it has apparently been there all day and people must have seen it but no one said anything (extra points if it’s related to a female cyclic event); (3) realized after an important dinner with someone that you had a big crumb on your lip and that’s what they kept trying to subtly signal you about but you didn’t pick up on it; (4) mispronounced an obvious word in front of a bunch of people.
I could go on. The point is, those kinds of things happen to everyone. I bet you’re still upset or embarrassed about it, right?
Well, you can freaking get over your lame-ass, sissy-pants, drama-queen self.
When you’ve run away from people who were only trying to help you; taken up with a former friend who everyone (including yourself) knew was bad news; hung out with him even as he showed signs of being certifiable; and then witnessed his complete meltdown, which, unlike some meltdowns, did not simply involve quaintly taking off his clothes and dancing in a public fountain, but instead featured huge, dark, horrifying magick, kidnapping, dismemberment, and death—well, when you’ve done that and then gone back to the people who were only trying to help you… you call me, and we’ll talk. But until you’re there, I can’t deal with whatever pebbles you’ve got in your shoe today.