by Cate Tiernan
“It’s a great idea,” said Anne. “I’ve often wished someone would do something with those shops. River, remember when we would always go to Schwalbach’s for their lunch special? And the watch-repair shop was right next door. Who was it who kept breaking all his watches?”
River thought. “Ted.”
“Oh, right, Ted. The man with the cursed wrist.” Anne shook her head. “Anyway, Nastasya, it’s a very ambitious project. Good for you.”
“Thank you. Is there dessert?”
“Pear cobbler,” said Asher. “And then you, Reyn, and Anne are on cleanup duty.”
Someday, grasshopper, someday, you too may experience the heart-pounding, burning frustration and excitement that arises from washing dishes with your crush. Maybe it’s the soapy, sudsy warmth, or the splishy-splashiness of the—okay, I’m making even myself ill. What I mean to say is Reyn up to his elbows in suds, doing dishes, was a huge turn-on. Of course, Reyn walking around covered in muck was a huge turn-on, too.
Anne had slithered out of cleanup duty by offering to make cookies. True, they were healthy cookies made with tofu and sesame seeds and whole-wheat flour, but they were still good enough to bribe me with.
“The more magick I do, the more I crave sugar,” Anne said, scraping dough off a spoon with her finger. “I noticed that maybe a hundred years ago. I wonder why that is?”
“I read that in a fantasy book,” I said, wiping a plate dry. I’d casually mentioned the efficiency of a commercial dishwasher several times to River, who had pretended not to hear me each time. “They kept eating muffins and honey.”
“I haven’t noticed it,” said Reyn, and Anne and I made faces at each other behind his back.
Anne slid one cookie sheet into the oven and started filling another. The kitchen windows were still boarded up, and thin streams of late-winter air whispered in around their edges. But with the oven going and all this hard physical labor I was doing, the kitchen was warm and cozy. This place, River’s Edge, seemed warm and cozy to me. (Okay, except for the three ancient Italians muttering grumpily in the dining room.)
I stopped drying for a second when I realized how much it felt like home, a real home. My home. Would I still be here three years from now? Would I be here long enough to see what happened with my shops? Buying them had been a commitment.
Not that I haven’t walked away from a thousand commitments, big and small, all over the place for hundreds of years. But time had yet to reveal whether I would walk away from this one. It would be interesting if I didn’t.
“So,” I said to Reyn, “are you up for helping me with the shops?” He’d been stiff and distant, or, I should say, stiffer and more distant ever since Joshua had arrived. During dinner he’d said not a word, and even here in this sudsy wonderland, he wasn’t getting into all the comforting domesticity of the scene.
“Why?” Reyn’s voice was, yes, stiff and distant. “You want me to be a creator, instead of a destroyer? Is that it?”
Anne and I exchanged a quick glance, and she raised her brows.
I rolled my eyes and took a plate from him. “Yes. Because helping me with these shops will make up for everything else you’ve ever done.” The plate joined its friends on the table, and I flicked Reyn’s arm with my dish towel. “What’s wrong with you?”
In that endearing way he had, he didn’t answer me, just washed plates and glasses with a bit more force than necessary. I let out a deep breath, kept drying, and directed all of my conversation to Anne. Gosh, he was a heartthrob.
I stood at my bedroom door, listening. I’d left it cracked just a bit and so far had heard Lorenz, then Rachel and Amy, then Solis, then Charles come up the stairs and pass my door. Finally I heard it. Or rather, I almost didn’t hear it: the faintest of footsteps. I got ready to put my plan into action, and then prayed this was Reyn, because I’m guessing Joshua would sound exactly the same.
I closed my eyes and held my breath for just a few moments, opening up my senses. Yep, it was Reyn. And… Dúfa. Every person (and apparently every dog) has a unique energy pattern, and when I concentrated, I could feel it.
Just as they were passing my door, I opened it, lunged, and grabbed Reyn’s arm. Of course he reacted instinctively, already snaring my wrist to break my hold even as I tried to drag him inside my room. Dúfa yipped and jumped around my feet as we fell clumsily through the doorway. I kicked the door shut behind us.
“What are you doing?” He sounded angry. “I could have killed you!” Dúfa gave a couple more yips, like, Yeah! We could have killed you!
Keep in mind this was a very young puppy that was probably still nursing.
“I know, you big bad warrior you. But I thought if I just asked you in, you might ignore me and stalk past.”
Golden eyes narrowed.
Now that I had him here, I had no idea what I’d been thinking when I concocted this stupid plan. I hadn’t really thought it through—just, oh, get Reyn somewhere private so you can talk. Now I was faced with actually having him in my room, and all coherent thoughts were running for cover. He made my room seem so much smaller.
Plus, you know, we were alone and there was a bed, right there. I’m just saying.
Long-legged, skinny Dúfa started sniffing around my room, and I cleared my throat. Time to pull out the gentle, caring sensitivity I’m not widely known for. “You seem even more uptight and angry than usual. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Muscles tightened in his jaw, and perhaps this was a bit late, but I quickly reviewed my most recent actions, weighing them for rage-worthiness.
Bluffing, I widened my eyes and raised my eyebrows in a Well? gesture, and when he continued to be all seethy, I picked up Dúfa and sat down on my bed so he wouldn’t see how unnerved he made me. Dúfa sniffed me and licked my chin.
“Good dog,” I muttered awkwardly, giving her narrow back a little pat.
Reyn stood very still, various unpleasant emotions crossing the rough, lovely, angular landscape of his face.
“Are you having trouble narrowing it down?” Oh, yes, there will be snideness.
His chin lifted. “Maybe this is a bad idea,” he said, his voice so low, I leaned forward to hear better. “You and me.”
My heart dropped down into my stomach and curled up into a cold little ball. I had not seen that coming. He’d been pursuing me with winter-raider tenacity for months, and for all my complaining and pushing away, I’d gotten used to him coming back, again and again.
“What?” I managed. Then I went from zero to pissed in a millisecond. “Oh, no, you don’t! You don’t get to wear me down for months and then suddenly back out.”
“I hadn’t really thought it through.” He was practically twitching with discomfort.
I stared at him, then pushed Dúfa off my lap, went to my wardrobe door, and yanked out my sword. “Do not make me use this,” I threatened. “You’re not weaseling out of this!” I pointed the sword at him, aware, of course, that he could snap the fine blade in two with his little finger.
His chin came up and the sudden crafty look in his eyes made me wary. “Weasel out of what?”
And that’s why he’d been able to have a long, successful career as an alpha male: He could think on his feet, effortlessly forcing me to define what he was trying to weasel out of. Which meant I had to give it a name. Which I’d refused to do, even to myself. The closest I’d gotten was “this thing between us.”
“This thing between us,” I said haughtily.
“Our relationship?” he pressed, and I almost gagged. The whole thing between us was so inexplicable. My psychological comfort insisted that it be kept as nebulous as possible. Something in me needed to be able to pretend this didn’t exist, partly because I still couldn’t understand it or justify it, and partly so I wouldn’t be hurt when it went wrong. Except now he was trying to get out of it, and I was mad and upset, so clearly I was already emotionally invested. Sparks of panic flickered around my brain, and I wanted to throw u
p.
“Ew,” I said, and sat down on my bed, the sword dangling from one hand. I hate emotional insights. Can’t we just keep the closet of my psyche firmly locked? Perhaps boarded up? I really think that would be better for everyone.
Reyn looked less bleak. “So you don’t want me to go?” “Less bleak” turned to “cautiously pleased,” and I began to realize how much I’d given away. Because I had pulled a sword on someone trying to break up with me. Crap.
“Of course I want you to go,” I said, unbearably vulnerable. “Just… when I say so. Not you.”
“Uh-huh.” Reyn pushed a hand through his hair and sat down on the end of my bed. Dúfa ecstatically climbed onto his lap to lick his chin. She sure was a licky little dog. “Okay, well, I don’t want to devastate you.”
Oh my God. Such a jerk. And I had brought this on myself. Goddamn sword.
“It’s just… sometimes I forget who I am,” he said. “And sometimes I remember who I am.” We were back to bleakness, and it came to me: Joshua’s arrival, even more than mine, had brought back memories, things he regretted, aspects of himself that he was trying to leave behind.
“That was who you were,” I said. “Not who you are today.” See how easy it is for me to tell other people the exact same things that I can’t hear myself?
“You don’t understand.”
“I know. I’ve never done anything I regret.”
That earned me a searing, golden-eyed look.
“Then help me understand,” I said. “Also, don’t let your dog chew on my sock.”
“How?” Frustration underlined his voice.
“Take it away from her.”
“No.” I heard the implied You idiot. “I meant, there’s no way to make you understand.”
Outside, the night wind was blowing against the windowpanes, but my radiator hissed with warmth. The clean-laundry scent of Reyn’s plaid shirt floated around me and obviously contained pheromones designed to make me want to knock him down and—
I got an idea. “There might be a way….”
CHAPTER 12
River and I had done this twice, so that I could see parts of River’s past that were intended to make me feel a weensy bit better about my own. And they had, because River had been—extremely ambitious. Ambitious and conscienceless. A bad combination.
This was almost certainly not a good idea. I was positive we weren’t ready to share anything but the most superficial of emotions. But maybe it would help him, the way seeing River’s past had helped me.
I got off the bed and slid beneath it, aware that I would now have to find a new hiding place. With my fingernails I pried off the piece of loose molding that hid the hole chipped out of the wall plaster, and the space behind it. My fingers tingled as I reached for the knotted handkerchief, and my breath felt shallower as I pulled it out and sat on my bed again.
Reyn was very still as I undid the knots with trembling fingers.
“I don’t think—” he said, his voice quiet but with a harsh edge.
“So many men don’t,” I muttered, and pulled out my amulet.
We stared at it as it dangled from its heavy gold chain, twisting slowly between us, this thing that had marked us both forever.
“Have you seen it repaired?” I asked.
He shook his head silently and didn’t reach out to touch it. It was so alive in my hand, vibrating with energy. Now I was going to make magick with it. Like a teenager with a learner’s permit deciding it was a great idea to borrow her dad’s Porsche.
I put the amulet around my neck, the first person to do so in 449 years. Even Dúfa seemed affected by the solemnity of the event, and sat on the end of my bed with her small white head cocked, her pink-rimmed hazel eyes watching us.
When River had conducted the mind-joining spell, it had taken us almost fifteen minutes to really connect, so that I could see her memories through her eyes. It was weirdly fast with me and Reyn, and it seemed that I’d barely started the form before I was startled by a flat, snow-covered landscape stretching endlessly out before me….
Horrifying images flashed in my mind, and I couldn’t stop them: I saw my mother flaying Reyn’s uncle, the bits of flesh tearing through the links of his chain mail—but it was different than I remembered it that night. It took me a second, and I blinked, confused, but then realized that I was seeing everything through Reyn’s eyes, through his mind. His emotions. It was surreal to see these devastatingly familiar scenes overlaid with a different viewpoint.
I saw Reyn’s father killing my siblings without a second thought. Reyn saw the gouts of blood arcing through the air, smelled the hot, coppery stink of it. He felt the cool stone hallways of the castle; the warm air in that room, rolling out through the doorway where he stood. My mother shouted harsh words he didn’t understand, but no one else made a sound: not Reyn’s father, even when Sigmundur had sliced deeply into his arm; not my sisters as their heads were lopped off. Reyn saw Tinna’s head and thought with a pang that she’d been vividly pretty, even in death, even as her golden hair landed in a puddle of blood.
Reyn had been told to stay in the hall and keep watch. He prayed for some of Úlfur’s men to run toward him so he could chop them down like trees and prove his worth. Though he’d been going on his father’s raids since he was fifteen, this was Erik’s most ambitious and had required days of watching and waiting as he plotted out the timing and the steps of the attack.
The scene changed suddenly: Reyn was on a sturdy, rough-coated white horse, its breath coiling in plumes from its nostrils as it ran on a road dense with hard-packed snow. My father’s castle, barely a mile away, was in flames that reached three times its height into the deeply black sky. Even before Erik’s men had ridden away, its large blocks of stone had been splitting from the heat with enormous cracks, like thunder from lightning close enough to touch. Reyn wondered if he was imagining feeling tiny ashes floating through the night air, landing on his hair and cheeks. He thought he could smell burning flesh. They’d left his uncle and his brother Temur in that castle, dead. They would be among the ones burning.
Reyn’s father and his men, Reyn’s two remaining brothers, and Reyn himself had raced from the castle on their horses, thick-boned and heavy-coated—proper warhorses—thinking that their decimation of my father’s castle was so complete that no one would dare to come after them.
Heavy leather bags full of loot swung against the side of Erik’s horse. Minutes later he reined to a stop, slid to the ground, and tipped the bags bottom up, dumping their contents onto the snow. The night was so still and quiet that they could faintly hear the screams of my father’s villagers as they watched their lord’s castle splinter.
“Strike a torch, you,” Reyn’s father directed, and a man named Selke did, the flame showing his mail spattered with blood that also striped his face and hair. “We left Nori and Temur behind. But let’s see what we brought away.”
Reyn’s brother Temur had been older than him by more than a hundred years. Reyn had been told that, but it was an idea he had trouble grasping. He’d heard people say that Nunc Nori was 520, but again that had seemed like ancient history. Reyn was twenty; his mother—his father’s fourth wife—was thirty-six. All their talk of ages and centuries seemed like fairy stories.
“Eileif, watch the road,” his father said, using Reyn’s birth name, and Reyn did but cast quick glances at what Selke’s torch illuminated.
“Books!” said his brother Gurban, so named because he was the third son. “Papi, you brought books?”
“Books can be more valuable than gold, nitwit,” said Reyn’s father. He set them aside in a pile and sifted through the rest. I almost gasped as Erik picked up my mother’s small wooden chest, beautifully inlaid with ivory, that used to sit on a special shelf in her room. When he shook the chest, gold jewelry I recognized and loose gemstones tumbled out onto the leather bag. The men laughed when they saw it—the winter would be easier with this wealth. I felt the men’s curiosity
and then dismissal as Erik held up my father’s celestial compass, entwined brass circles with animals and figures engraved on them: a bull, a man pouring water from a jug, a crab, a pair of twins. Reyn’s father, not understanding its purpose or significance, threw it aside.
It was becoming harder and harder for Reyn to keep his eyes focused on that narrow road, its blue-white snow disappearing in the distance. His father held up our red goblets carved from crystal and overlaid with filigree gold. “I want to drink mead from this!” he said, and his men laughed as my eyes burned with memories of my parents drinking from those goblets.
One by one Erik the Bloodletter picked up the objects and put them aside, as if he were looking for one particular thing. And then he held up the broken half of my mother’s amulet, a ring of gold hanging from a gold chain of thick, finely worked links. To Reyn it looked like another necklace, but his father was awestruck, tracing the patterns on the front with a thick, bloodstained finger. The back was smooth and plain and a brighter gold than the front.
“This is it,” he breathed.
“Aye?” Selke said, sounding doubtful.
“Aye,” Reyn’s father said firmly.
I saw Reyn, his face tense, insist that it wasn’t safe. But his father held a circle right there on the side of the road, where they would be visible as soon as anyone came around the southern bend. He put Selke’s torch in the middle, and they joined hands around it, like for one of their festivals. Reyn’s father put the golden chain around his neck and began to sing.
It was a bizarre sensation, feeling the bloodlust of battle begin to seep out of Reyn’s bones, leaving him cold and weary. He was hungry and thirsty and didn’t want to be on this road, so exposed, so vulnerable. His head started to ache as his father sang, and I felt the pressure increasing until it felt like someone had cut off the top of his skull, poured in liquid pain, and closed it up again. Risking his father’s anger, he broke from Sven’s hand and put his palm to his ear as if to keep his brains from spurting out. Through lightning-laced tunnel vision Reyn saw that every man there, including his father, also looked in torment. But the fierce mask of determination on his father’s face was one Reyn knew well: Nothing would stop him except death.