by Cate Tiernan
“What do you mean? What was wrong?”
With surprise I saw River’s hands in her lap, folded together as if she was trying to keep them still. Her knuckles were turning white.
“What was wrong?” Her voice was almost a whisper.
“There were—” I didn’t know how to describe it and didn’t want to criticize something she’d worked so hard on. “Like, chunks missing. Like it was a tapestry, and the design of the tapestry was perfect, and the finished weave was almost perfect, but here and there, there were little patches of wool missing, tiny little bare patches. Or places where something was patched over. I was surprised—I didn’t mean to do that, but maybe I did. Everything in me—all of me wanted to be part of the beauty. But since I wasn’t supposed to be there, maybe adding my voice damaged the structure somehow.”
River let out a breath and sat back in her chair quickly, as if I had slapped her.
Alarmed, I scrambled for something to say. “I’m so sorry, I was wrong, I didn’t—”
“Shh!” River said, waving a hand at me, and my jaw snapped closed like a marionette. She almost leaped from her chair, hurried to the door, and opened it. “Asher! Asher!”
Oh God, she was going to get Asher to physically throw me out! This was so much worse—I should have realized how bad this was—I should have admitted it right away. I’d been lying to myself, trying to convince myself that it wasn’t so bad, that she could forgive me, that she would never ask me to leave.
Hot, embarrassed tears sprang to my eyes as I stood up. “You don’t have to get him—I’ll go!” I choked out. “I’ll just go, right now!”
That got River’s attention, and she turned to look at me. “What are you talking about? Sit down!”
Shakily I sat and wiped my sleeve across my eyes. Okay, first there would be a yelling at. Accusations and censure and whatnot. Well, I deserved it. I’d done wrong, and I would sit there and take whatever they threw at me. It was the least I could do. Then I would get out of there or do whatever she wanted me to do. I could only imagine how tired she must have been of trying to fix me.
In just a minute Asher came, looking concerned as River closed the door behind him. He took her hand, then saw me sitting miserably in the chair at the window, trying not to cry.
“What’s wrong, love?”
River pulled him over to the window and grabbed a low stool for him to sit on. “Nastasya, tell Asher everything you just told me. Don’t leave anything out.”
So I had to humiliate myself again. Sniffling, I nodded, and then in a low voice that kept cracking, I went through my whole stupid tale of how I had ruined everything.
“Tell him about the missing parts,” River said.
“I guess—it was my fault,” I said. It must be, if River was making me tell Asher about it. Not meeting their eyes, I repeated my tapestry metaphor. When I was done they sat back and looked at each other, not saying anything. This whole scene was starting to seem kind of bizarre.
“Huh,” said Asher at last.
“No one else felt it,” said River breathlessly.
“Except you and me,” said Asher. “And Nastasya.”
“Should I go now?” I asked in a tiny voice. “I just need to get some stuff.”
“Go where?” Asher asked, confused.
“Uh… leaving? River’s Edge? Because I ruined the spell?”
“Tsk—I forgot to clear that up,” River said. “You didn’t ruin the spell.”
I repeated her words in my head, but they still didn’t make sense. “I never got a signal to join in,” I reminded her. Had she missed that part?
For the first time River gave me a slight smile. “You did, sweetie.”
Whoops, there I went, right through the looking glass again! “Wha-huh?”
“Your overwhelming feeling of wanting to be part of us,” she said gently. “Your refusal to be left out. The desire to join so strongly that you took a chance and stepped in. That was your push.”
Okay, speechless here.
“Were you expecting a voice in your head?” Asher asked. The corners of his eyes crinkled, though he still wore an air of weariness and worry.
“Yes?” I mean, yes, obviously that would have been good.
“Everyone’s push is different,” River explained. “It can be quite striking or more subtle. The signal you got was actually quite strong—you described it as being overwhelming, didn’t you?”
Still had no clue what was going on. “Uh-huh.”
“So you got an overwhelming feeling, and you joined,” said Asher. “What part of that seems unclear to you?”
“Besides all of it? It was just a feeling! Feelings can be wrong! It was just what I wanted.”
They looked at me, and I felt even more clueless and dense than usual. Which, as you know, is really saying something.
“No, my dear,” River said at last. “When you’re honest with yourself, in touch with who you are, and you know what your goals are—then, no, feelings can’t be wrong. And what you want will make sense.”
I felt like they’d hung me upside down by my ankles and shook me. I’d been feeling awful for weeks, every time I remembered what I’d done. They were saying it wasn’t me.
“Then—what made the spell not work?” I blurted. “It was so strong! But things are still happening. It doesn’t feel safer here than it ever did!”
Asher and River met eyes again, speaking without words. I remembered how Asher had said they’d been together for more than sixty years.
“We don’t know,” said Asher. “Clearly it should have worked. Except that during it, River and I both felt the missing pieces of the pattern, as you did. It wasn’t you—but we haven’t been able to pin down who it was.”
“Like, someone working on it from a distance, like the other stuff?”
“It was someone here, Nastasya,” River said. “Someone here deliberately ruined the spell, and so skillfully that almost no one would ever notice.”
Oh my God. My brain started firing on all cylinders as I processed this information and its implications. Someone here? “Ottavio?” I tried to keep the hope out of my voice.
River gave me a weak smile and shook her head.
“Someone who knew what they were doing,” I said, thinking.
“Yes.” River nodded sadly.
“Someone very strong.”
“Yes,” she said again.
“I’m not strong enough and don’t have any idea of how to do it.” Let’s just rule me out right now. Quickly I ran through the people here, determining whether they were strong or knowledgeable enough. Of course I didn’t know them as well as River and Asher did—no doubt they’d already gone through this painful exercise.
“Not Lorenz or Charles,” I said, and they nodded. “Not Jess. Not Brynne. Daisuke could, but he didn’t.” Somehow I was sure of that.
“Right,” said Asher, looking depressed again.
“I’m guessing Rachel could, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t.” How weird—to be summing up who I thought they were and how well I knew them. Having gotten rid of the easy ones, the people who were left required more thought. “I don’t think Reyn is strong enough. I’m sure he wouldn’t do it.” A northern raider has standards, after all.
River and Asher looked at each other.
Uncomfortably I realized I didn’t want to narrow it down any more. The thought that someone here, someone I’d eaten with, done chores with, studied with—it suddenly hit me much more strongly.
“Oh my God,” I said slowly. “It really was one of us. I, like, just got that.”
River nodded. “It’s a hard concept to accept.”
“I need two things from you,” said Asher. “I want you to think back and carefully examine your memory to see if you picked up on any clues of who it might have been. And two, I’m asking you to keep this to yourself. River and I haven’t mentioned our suspicions to anyone except each other.”
So if word got out, they
would know where to look.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
And that was it. My big confession. Their big revelation. And the sure knowledge that someone among us was dangerous.
CHAPTER 25
In the late 1570s I had saved up enough money to buy a one-way boat trip from Iceland to Norway. When I was little, my father had shown me on a large, beautiful map where Iceland was and Greenland and where Norway and Sweden were. He talked of other countries as if they were incredibly compelling and yet to be avoided at all costs. I asked him if he had ever been to any of those places, and he’d said yes. When I asked if he would go back to them someday, he’d said no, he never would, by God’s will.
After my husband died in 1569, I’d made my way to Reykjavík and became a house servant. My mistress, Helgar, had been the one to tell me the shocking news that I was immortal (immortal!) and offer up some of what she knew about our powers, habits, history. Which wasn’t much. Her unquestioning, untroubled belief of the inherent darkness of all immortals had followed me for the last four hundred plus years.
When their stable groom had started to pursue me too strongly, I panicked and left—gathering up my things in a cloth bundle, sneaking out in the middle of the night like a mouse. The stable groom wasn’t a bad man—he was offering marriage, and he wasn’t unkind. No one could figure out why I would refuse him—they literally couldn’t understand, like being married would save me from something. But I never wanted to be married again.
Reykjavík was a port, and it was easy to secure a place on the next trade ship headed for the mysterious, exotic, foreign… Norway. That trip was indescribably awful. There’s no way to truly get across just how bad—I mean, to put it into perspective: Once, Incy and I were on a cruise ship off the coast of Australia. A huge storm came up that the ship couldn’t avoid. It was actually really bad—this huge, heavy, luxury liner being tossed around on much huger and more powerful waves. The ridiculous power of the ocean.
People gathered in the chapel, crying and praying loudly, sure that we were going to go down. They held hands and stumbled from wall to wall, over and over.
Incy and I were pissed; we wouldn’t drown, but if the ship sank, we were going to be frozen and miserable for who knew how long until another boat came along to sweep up the survivors and/or bodies. Besides being pissed, I was incredibly seasick, barfing a record twenty-seven times, long after I had nothing whatsoever in my system. It was, I promise you, an incredibly awful situation. The fact that the boat didn’t sink and pulled into harbor only one day late didn’t cheer up the passengers and crew nearly as much as you would think. People were still crying as they practically crawled down the gangway; more than a dozen collapsed on the concrete and kissed the ground; and I myself, finally standing still on hard pavement, got sick all over again at the lack of motion.
But it had not been that bad, compared to the crossing from Iceland to Norway. For one thing, as sick as I was on the cruise ship, I was inside, warm and dry. I had fresh drinking water at the ready, once I could lever myself up to the sink. If I had been able to eat anything and if I could have somehow made my way to the kitchen, I could have had food that was still good. And the storm part of that cruise lasted only a day and a half.
The trip to Norway was made right before trade stopped for the winter. And this was Iceland and Norway, so the weather already sucked. Add in the Little Ice Age effect of the Middle Ages (look it up), and we’re talking beastly, bone-cracking cold; searing, razorlike wind; dim, halfhearted days that began at ten in the morning and ended at two in the afternoon.
It had been a narrow boat, maybe thirty feet or so in length, and a bit more than ten feet wide? Completely open to the elements: wind, ice, freezing rain, regular rain, salt water kicked up from waves, etc. There was no covered place anywhere, even for the captain. Dried and salted herring was the basic menu staple, but occasionally they served more herring, and sometimes for breakfast or dessert they dished up herring. I remember some people cheering when they finally broke into the rubbery, pickled shark meat. My own meager supply of half a loaf of bread and some dried apples had been drenched immediately and disintegrated into salty paste.
My bed was a double layer of sacking on the deck, and my pillow was the soaked cloth bag of my one extra overdress, my one extra apron, my one extra hair cloth. Instead of a day and a half of being tossed about and sick, this trip was almost three weeks of constant physical misery. All made worse by the fact that I knew no one in Norway, had no idea where to go, had almost no money, no real plan, except to try to get hired somewhere.
It had probably been the bravest thing I’ve ever done—leaving behind everything, everyone I knew, leaving behind my country, my past, and the person I had been. I took a Norwegian name, Ragnhild, the first name I had that wasn’t Icelandic.
The second-bravest thing I’ve done was to come here to River’s Edge, to try to save whatever Nastasya was left inside. Because anyone could have bet that it was going to be hard and I was going to hate what I saw. And I had.
The third-bravest thing was now, today, for me to stay. I was staying despite a frightening battle coming. Staying despite my lack of confidence in my own powers and skills. I’d known these people a bit less than six months, and none of them was related to me. One of them had been my family’s sworn enemy. A couple of them couldn’t stand me.
But here I was, and here I intended to stay. My first brave act had been to leave people; my third brave act was to stay with people. It seemed both brave and incredibly stupid, as so many brave things do.
Gosh, good thing I’m not paranoid, seeing danger everywhere, or this whole “traitor among us” thing would really get me down!
“Honey, you look so down,” said Brynne, putting a sack of dried beans on the kitchen worktable. “What’s going on?”
On a scale of one to ten, the desire to blurt out everything to Brynne was about a thirteen. Besides Reyn and River, she was the person I was closest to here. I trusted her.
“Besides the huge battle they think is imminent?” I filled a big pot with water, added some salt and pepper, and dumped a bunch of beans in to cook slowly all afternoon. Voilà—dinner. “Isn’t that enough?”
Brynne nodded while I grabbed my jacket, then the two of us headed out to the big barn. Since I wasn’t going to town anymore, it freed up a lot of time for me to work on my magickal skills. Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I was improving, strengthening, magickwise.
“Oh, Nastasya—Brynne.” Solis was just coming out of the herb workroom. Like the other teachers, his face looked tired and worried. “I’m glad to run into you, Nastasya. I would like to offer to teach you again.” His blue surfer-boy eyes were sincere. “I’m very sorry I had trouble trusting you before. So much has happened—it’s been a hard path to navigate. But if River has complete faith in you, then obviously I do, too. To make it up to you, I thought I could show you some interesting properties about stinging nettles. Or work with you on scrying with crystals.”
Hmm. I had been so mad—and hurt—when Solis had sided with River’s butthead brothers. Now he was coming back and admitting his mistake. The polite and trusting thing would be to accept his offer in the generous spirit with which it was intended.
Unfortunately I trust only a couple of people, and I’d stopped being polite back in the eighteen hundreds.
So I was comfortable with shutting him down.
“No, thank you,” I said.
He looked surprised. “Uh… I can see I hurt you more deeply with my thoughtless actions than I realized. I assure you, Nastasya, that I truly regret anything I’ve done that upset you.”
I started to get pissed. He was a teacher here, and he’d done practically everything except wear a sandwich board that said NO NASTASYAS ALLOWED.
“I guess we’ll both get over it,” I said.
Solis glanced at Brynne, but she shrugged. A door opened down the barn aisle, and Anne and River came out, talking quiet
ly with their heads bowed. Then the outside door opened and Jess, Amy, Daniel, and Reyn came in. Reyn was the last and the tallest, and just as he walked in, his head blocked a shaft of sunlight so that it made a glowing halo all around him. Stuff like that is so unfair.
Anne looked up and smiled. “This is well met,” she said. “I was just wondering if we should have a group meditation, and this would be a great group.”
Yay.
“I think not, dear,” said River, and Anne blinked.
“No?”
River looked uncomfortable. “Group meditations might be too emotionally charged right now. Perhaps just you and I and one or two other people? But nothing over four or five people, and I’d like to be present. Just in case. If someone needs me.”
This was weird, and I looked around quickly. River didn’t know who to trust. She didn’t want to take a chance that one of us might be working against her. I don’t know if everyone picked up on that, but I saw speculation enter Reyn’s eyes.
After several awkward moments, Brynne said, “I’ll just go along to the workroom…” and left. Amy, Jess, and Daniel followed her.
River smiled at Solis and took his arm in hers. “Walk with us,” she said, moving toward the door.
He smiled easily as they went outside. “Delighted.”
Reyn and I stood there and looked at each other. Despite a couple of sword lessons, we really hadn’t talked about… what didn’t happen. I’d rejected his offer of love, and he’d rejected my offer of the rest of me. He’d been distant but not furious, quiet but full of thought. I kept waiting for him to throw it in my face or get mad all over again. It still stung, what he’d said to me about being a coward and so on. It stung, but instead of getting pissed and writing him off, I’d actually thought about what he’d said.
We just didn’t see it the same way.