by Cate Tiernan
CHAPTER 4
As it turns out, Ott wasn’t about to take that or anything else I hurled his way. The next morning as I came downstairs, I heard River and her brother arguing in her office. Naturally, I made my way quietly to the door and stood there, listening. I mean, just how good do you want me to be?
At first it was garbled and hard to make out—it was possibly really old Italian. Maybe. It switched around as they bickered—I picked up some form of German, then something that sounded of the Hispanic persuasion, but nothing I could instantly translate in my head. Which was a little weird, because I’m good with languages, picking them up easily, jumping back in when I need to. But River and Ottavio seemed to be drawing on older dialects. I can go back to the mid–fifteen hundreds in the Nordic tongues, and then the early sixteen hundreds with most of the Romance languages. And later for the others: the Slavic dialects, Russian, Japanese, a bit of Mandarin, English.
“You’re so pigheaded!” I heard River snap. That, I understood.
“You’re naive!” said Ottavio harshly. “Gullible! How do you know this girl is Úlfur’s heir?”
“Once more. I will tell you one more time. I’ve been inside her head. I’ve shared images of her past with her. Her story rings true. She has the tarak-sin.”
“She could have stolen it!”
This was hurting my tender, delicate sensibilities, and I wished they would switch back to old German or something.
“Où est-il maintenant?” Ottavio demanded.
“Avec Asher,” River answered wearily. “Il est cassé. Asher le répare.”
Yay, I thought, Asher is mending my tarak-sin. I decided to leave River and Ott to their argument. Because eavesdropping is wrong.
I was on milking duty that morning, so I trudged across the yard to the cow barn, which also housed a couple of sheep and a few goats. Jess was mucking out their pens and Daisuke was mixing up the feed, supplementing their hay with goat chow, sheep chow, and cow chow. He nodded and smiled at me as I came in with the sterilized buckets.
I’d felt weird after dinner the night before and had escaped to my room as soon as I could. Revisiting the tragedy of my childhood always made me feel like there was barbed wire inside my chest. Part of me wished I hadn’t shot off my mouth like that. And isn’t that a familiar feeling? Which was one reason I’d been self-medicating so determinedly over the centuries. Just to feel… less. Less pain, less anxiety, less self-loathing.
Since I’d come here, I was in fact feeling less of all of those things. Another decade or two and I’d be as good as new!
I grabbed the little three-cornered milking stool that looked like it had come original to the house, and set it down on the left of, yes, Buttercup. I think it’s some sort of farm law that if you have more than one cow, one of them must be named Buttercup. Anyway, the Cupster gave me a disinterested glance and swished her tail, but I was ready for that and leaned back quickly so it didn’t flick my face. Then I dove in practically under her side, set the pail in place, and began milking.
My tarak-sin. My amulet. It was heavy and solid gold. My mother had worn it almost all the time, and when I was little I’d loved looking at it, feeling the thick links of its gold chain. It was carved all over with runes, magickal symbols, sigils, and things I didn’t recognize. I had no idea how old it was—very? Like, really, really very? Back then I’d thought it was just a favorite piece of jewelry, but now I knew my mother had worn it to keep it safe, to not let it out of her sight. Now I knew that it channeled and amplified the ancient source of my family’s power, the power of the immortal house of Iceland.
I pulled at Buttercup’s udder with gentle firmness, hearing the warm milk hissing against the side of the metal bucket. As always some of the barn cats gathered around, watching intently, their tails whipping back and forth on the straw.
I sighed and pressed my head against Buttercup’s solid flank, and everything about my tarak-sin, my family, and Reyn came back to me in a rush. Because Reyn was inextricably tangled up in my whole family tragedy, with my tarak-sin, and with me—my family’s appalling end mirrored his own.
When I was ten years old, a horde of northern raiders broke through our city walls, then the bailey gate that surrounded my father’s hrókur—like a small castle. The chieftain of that horde was the aptly named Erik the Bloodletter, and he was Reyn’s father. Erik and one of Reyn’s brothers had smashed through the thick library door where my mother, my siblings, and I were barricaded in, weapons in our hands, even in my little brother’s. Háakon had been seven years old.
Reyn’s father and brother killed my sisters, Tinna and Eydís, slicing ferociously through their necks with curved, wide-bladed swords. My older brother, Sigmundur, had charged manfully, swinging the heavy blade my father had given him when he turned fifteen.
My mother, holding her amulet, worked dark and terrible magick and flayed Reyn’s brother, causing his flesh to fly off his body, right through his chain mail. The man had stood there, sluicing blood, a surprised look on his skinless face, his lidless eyes popping from their sockets. Sigmundur cut off his head, because flaying wasn’t enough to kill an immortal.
Then Sigmundur made a deep slice in Reyn’s father’s arm, forcing him to switch sword hands. But it hadn’t been enough, and Sigmundur’s head fell to the floor moments before his body collapsed like a Jacob’s ladder.
Terrified, I’d dropped my dagger and leaped behind my mother as the marauders burst through the door. And when her head with its long blond braids had tumbled to the floor, her body had fallen on top of me, hiding me in her wool skirts. I’ll spare you the long story of my escape, of finding out that my father and every other person in our castle had been slain.
But as it turned out, my family had their revenge: Erik, Reyn, Reyn’s two remaining brothers, and seven of Erik’s men had gone a mile or so down the road, where they could still enjoy watching my father’s castle burn. Then they’d tried to use my mother’s amulet, our house’s tarak-sin, weighty with centuries upon centuries of immortal power and magick. But they didn’t realize the amulet was broken—one half was with me, back in the burning castle—and their stolen magick backfired. Every man standing in that circle had been incinerated, literally turned to ash. Except for Reyn, who had fallen backward.
Their half of my mother’s amulet had burned itself into the skin on Reyn’s chest, giving him a permanent scar that matched mine but wasn’t identical. After I’d gotten back from Boston, Reyn had stunned me by giving me the piece that had marked him four centuries earlier. He’d kept it all that time, though it was useless to him. He’d told me that he kept it as a reminder not to want too much.
In a twist that had made Irony wait four hundred years for its completion, Reyn and I… had a thing. I didn’t know what it was yet, but we were caught up in each other and it was clear it had a long way to go to run its course. It left us both bemused, upset, torn by memories, conflicting feelings, longing, desire—you name it.
“I think that cow’s empty.”
I broke out of my sad memories to see Daisuke leaning against the slats of the pen. He pointed downward; my hands were moving but nothing was coming out. The cow had turned her head and was looking at me curiously, like, Um, excuse me? I’d been so lost in events that happened more than four centuries ago that I hadn’t even noticed the opportunistic cats that had crept beneath Buttercup and now had their triangular heads muzzle-deep in the milk bucket.
“Oh, shoo, guys!” I said, brushing them away. I pulled the bucket up and grimaced when I saw the few stray cat hairs floating on the surface. Well, those would strain out.
“Still only two gallons or so, I see,” Daisuke said. His voice was always calm and even—I don’t think I’d ever heard him raise it in either excitement or anger. “She’ll give more later in spring, after she calves.”
This was not my first time at the cow rodeo, so I said, “Yep,” and stood up. I realized that last night I hadn’t seen any kind of react
ion from Daisuke about Ottavio’s accusation, and with typical, not-recommended Nastasya impulsiveness, I said, “Daisuke?”
“Yes?”
“What do you think about what Ottavio said about me?”
His dark brown, almond-shaped eyes looked into mine, as if he could see right through my head. And who knows, maybe he could. I have no idea of what a really learned immortal can do. I waited, my throat feeling tight as the uncomfortable idea filtered in that I did actually care about what he thought. I hadn’t known that until just now.
“I think Ottavio is trying to protect his family,” Daisuke said carefully. “And really, all Tähti immortals.”
I slowly let out a breath. “Do you think I’m actually a threat to all this?” I held the heavy pail with one hand and gestured with the other, to encompass River’s Edge and all it stood for.
There was a long pause, and my cheeks started to heat as I began compiling smart-ass responses to whatever hurtful thing he was about to say.
“No,” he said at last. “I think you have a lot of baggage, and some of it may be dangerous. The people who come to River’s Edge tend to be weighed down heavily with it.” He gave a slight smile, looking down, rubbing his chin with one hand.
“I can’t imagine you with baggage,” I said frankly. Yes, I’m discreet. I don’t pry. I always think through what I say to make sure it doesn’t hur—
Daisuke gave a sad smile. “Appearances are superficial, as we all know.”
I wasn’t sure I myself knew that, but he seemed quite certain, so—
“I was born in the 1760s,” he said, “in Nippon. For some reason that I’ll probably never know, I was left on the stone steps of the local Buddhist monastery, still wet from being born.” Daisuke reached up to touch his hair, as if he could still remember the sensation. “The monks took me in, and I grew up there among them, not knowing I was immortal. First I was a ward, then a student, then an apprentice monk.” He gave another rueful smile, focusing his gaze in the distance, looking past me into his history.
“I was… not of a suitable temperament to be a monk. Over and over I was punished for fighting, for showing anger. I now understand that the monks thought my soul was in danger—so they did everything they could think of to set me on the right path. But at the time I saw only their oppression and what I felt was their cruelty.”
I’d wondered about Daisuke—his past was more convoluted than I’d been able to imagine.
“When I was eighteen, I ran away. I wandered, lost in both body and spirit, until I came upon a training house, a place to learn the art of bushido.” Laughing, Daisuke rolled his eyes. “If I thought the monks were tough, the master of the training house was fifty times worse. We were beaten, starved; we trained at all hours. I was there for eight years before I was given the honor of the title samurai. I was chosen to serve the most important shogunate in our district—the House of Five Peonies.”
Even now, when he had clearly renounced violence and pride and every other fun thing, Daisuke’s eyes gleamed as he recalled being first in his class, being chosen for the best shogun. I tried to picture him young and hard and tough, with a belligerent chin and fire in his eyes, and it wasn’t easy. Today he was so refined, as smooth as a stone worn down by the ocean for millennia. Can people really change that much, over hundreds of years? It was something I wondered about myself. And about Reyn.
“At the shogun’s house I became a bully over the younger samurai, the servants.” Daisuke swallowed, ashamed of his younger self. “I made their existence one of pain and dread and humiliation. It appeased something in me, something dark and ugly. Finally I left the house and became rnin—a warrior for hire.”
I looked at him, unable to reconcile this with the Daisuke of today.
“I worked for anyone,” Daisuke continued. “Traveling from town to town. I became morally weak, almost unable to tell right from wrong. It would have been far better for me to commit seppuku and spare the world my worthless existence, but that would have required me to recognize what I had become, and I… couldn’t. And of course, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Just made a horrible mess.”
I looked down. I too had tried to kill myself before I knew I was immortal. My husband had died; my family had been destroyed; I lost the baby I was carrying. There had seemed no point in going on. But an immortal is forced to go on. And on.
“I didn’t age, didn’t die.” His voice was a monotone. “I believed I was too evil to be granted another life in which to live more usefully. I lost count of how many murders I committed, how many treacherous acts I visited on strangers. The years blurred together; each life I took less important than the one before.”
My throat got the familiar tightness I felt when emotions hit too close to my heart. I swallowed and focused on a wisp of hay that stuck out from a crack in the pen’s boards.
“Then one night I was approached by a messenger. He wanted to hire me to kill the local lord’s two nephews, who were due to inherit their father’s land. If they were dead and the brother had no more children, then the lord would one day own the combined estates and become very powerful. The two sons were five and seven years old.”
Oh no, I thought, feeling his anguish. This was the person who I thought was the most advanced of all the students, the one who seemed the closest to achieving peace.
Kneeling, Daisuke picked up one of the barn cats and cradled it, stroking it softly. “That commission changed something in me,” he said. “I couldn’t do it, and it shocked me out of my miserable complacency. That day I gave away everything except the robe I was wearing and became a beggar, making myself the lowest of the low, the most humble of the unfortunates.”
I nodded sympathetically.
“One day, a monk in saffron robes came up to me. It was one of the monks who had taken me in, more than a hundred years before. An immortal himself, he had seen me as one when I was very small. I said, ‘Why did you never tell me?’ He said, ‘Because you never deserved to know.’ And he was right. But he took me in once more, and I began the long, painful path toward redemption. Eventually I met River. This is my fourth time here and the longest I’ve ever stayed—five years so far.”
“Holy moly,” I couldn’t help saying. Five years was a long freaking time in rehab.
“But you worry about your baggage—” Daisuke said, his face solemn. “Four years ago, a man came here to kill me.”
“Here to River’s Edge?” I asked.
“Yes,” Daisuke said. “He had suffered at my hands—one of the younger samurai I had bullied and tortured, almost a century before—and he came for retribution. He was immortal, obviously, and he’d spent a lot of his life looking for me, increasing his power for when he found me.” Daisuke’s voice trailed off.
“What happened?” I asked.
A thin, bitter smile surprised me. “He was still pissed. But he chose not to fight me one-on-one. Instead he bided his time and waited until I was in the hex barn—the one that was painted with a Pennsylvania Dutch hex pattern.”
I frowned. “There is no barn painted with a hex pattern.”
“Hiroshi locked me in the barn and set it on fire,” said Daisuke, ignoring me. “He set spells on the doors so they couldn’t be opened from the inside, even if we broke through the locks. He had planned it well—most of the household was at a local farmers’ market.
“Unfortunately others were in the barn with me. Asher, Jess, and two other students at that time, Ivan and Solidad. Soli raced up the ladder to the hayloft and jumped out the little window at one end. It was about twenty-five feet from the ground, and she broke a leg. Jess wouldn’t jump, and Asher wouldn’t leave Jess. So after Soli, I jumped, then Ivan, and we managed to finally put out enough of the fire so we could axe our way through the doors. The rest of the building was completely aflame.
“We flung open the doors. Thick, choking smoke poured out. Inside, both Jess and Asher were unconscious from smoke inhalation. Three horses were already
dead, and one’s lungs were so badly damaged by heat and smoke that he had to be put down. Soli’s leg was broken. Ivan’s hands were badly burned. Ivan and I were covered with burns. Hiroshi had disappeared.”
His face showed a wealth of regret and guilt and sorrow and horror, a mirror of how I had felt after following Incy to Boston.
“And that’s why there is no barn with a Pennsylvania Dutch hex symbol painted on the side,” he said. “And why we have only six horses in a ten-stall barn.” He straightened and put the cat down, then rolled his shoulders as though to roll away those years of torment. “So you see, Nastasya, you are not the only one who has drawn darkness to this place. And after you are gone, another person will come here. And he or she will be guilty. And have baggage.”
I was processing the tragedy of what he had described, but I looked up as he took a deep breath.
“And I think we’re late for breakfast,” he said, sounding more like himself. “And no doubt they’re waiting on that milk.” He held out his hand to me and I took it. I picked up the milk pail and we walked back to the house.
CHAPTER 5
We had missed breakfast entirely, so I grabbed some bread and wrapped it around some bacon. I was shaken by Daisuke’s story—the parallels to my own life were unnerving, though I hadn’t gone around killing people. At least not on purpose. That set me to wondering if all—or maybe just most—immortals shared similar traits in the patterns of their lives. Was anyone born good and just stayed good, all along? Had anyone lived who hadn’t needed saving, eventually?
I was pondering this train of thought and heading back into the kitchen for more bacon when Asher came down the stairs.
“Oh, there you are. Thought you were hiding in your room.” He grinned, and I gave him a smarmy smile in return.
“I’m telling you!” Ottavio’s voice rang out from the library, and Asher and I both turned to look at the doors as if he might burst through them. We heard River’s much quieter murmurs, and then, “Always were you insensible gibberish I couldn’t understand, old Italian, likely, words words and you see where it has gotten you!”