13

Dreams

The train was trying to rock me to sleep, but it wasn’t helping. I lay in the narrow bed, watching out the long window as the boreal forest slowly passed by under the moonlit sky.

Doldastam—the capital of the Kanin kingdom—was located in the Canadian subarctic, nestled along the Hudson Bay. It was so far north, it was only accessible by train or plane, and train was the far cheaper option. It also took a lot longer. It was only my first night “riding the rails,” and I had one more night to go.

It wasn’t so bad, though. I had gotten an upper-berth bed, the upper window gave me a beautiful view of the Canadian wilderness in full summer bloom, and now I had plenty of time to worry about everything.

The last time I’d been this far north had been five and a half years ago, after the Invasion of Doldastam. Finn’s younger sister Ember had fought beside Bryn during the war, and she’d been killed during combat. After the war ended and the new Kanin King, Linus Berling, was crowned, he held a ceremony in remembrance of all the lives lost.

I had gone there with Finn and Mia, and we had stayed with Finn’s parents—who had lived in Doldastam then—for a few days. Most of the time had been spent grieving and helping the Holmeses, but I had snuck in a quick visit with Bryn.

That was the only time I had ever been to Doldastam. The handful of times I had seen Bryn since then had been when she came south to Förening, working as the King’s personal guard.

The village I grew up in, Iskyla, was even farther north and more isolated. The only road out of town went to a neighboring Inuit village, and it went no farther. They did trading with the humans by boat and plane—that’s how my foster father got his art books and travel magazines, and when I was older, that’s where I’d go to buy old paperbacks and movies from their meager store.

I had never been farther south than Iskyla, not since I’d been left as a baby. Not until Bryn rolled up in the middle of winter. My foster family—Oskar and Hilde Tulin—owned a small inn. In the winter, there were hardly any guests, and the few guests we did have were almost always townsfolk that needed a night away from their own home for one reason or another.

In the summer, we got the occasional lost tourist or adventurist hikers—I found no fewer than four different battered copies of Into the Wild forgotten in the rooms after they checked out of the inn—but most of the guests were workers passing through, from the southern cities to the mines and the lakes.

Bryn had come looking for the truth behind the dynasty controlling her kingdom, and she’d found the answer, with my help because I knew everybody in town. I was only fourteen then, but I knew the options in Iskyla—for work, for love, for friendship, for finding my parents—were very slim, and I saw a chance to escape, so I took it.

Mr. Tulin tried to give me a good life, but life in Iskyla is hard, and Mrs. Tulin never saw me as anything more than a burden. After I left, I kept in touch with Mr. Tulin, mostly through letters, but last winter, he stopped replying. A month later, Mrs. Tulin sent me a small package and a letter, telling me he’d passed away.

The package contained what little memorabilia she still had from my childhood. A few medical and school records, a few photographs, and a small painting that Mr. Tulin had done.

And now I was riding right back into my history, and it left me feeling sick and anxious. Lying in bed, staring out at the darkness, reminded me of the cold nights alone in the inn, listening to the wind howling at the feeble windows, with frost so thick over the panes, I couldn’t see outside.

On the train by myself, I felt sad and alone. I missed my friends, my family—both the ones I had and the ones I never had the chance to really know.

But the exhaustion of the travel wore me down. My earbuds played the Carpenters, and I cried softly into my pillow as I finally drifted off to sleep.

The sound of the ocean woke me up—the crashing waves and far-off gulls calling to one another, but faintly behind that, I still heard Karen Carpenter singing, demanding to know if a superstar still remembered her. I opened my eyes, and I was on the beach in Oregon, just beyond the city walls of Merellä, and the sharp drop-off around them. I looked back at the citadel, towering above me, and the only gap in the stone wall was the crescent-shaped arch that let the Forsa River flow easily underneath.

I’d gone through that once, walking along the narrow banks, out to where the dirt and mud became pebbles and sand. That’s where Hanna and I had found Eliana, hiding from a Shadow and a Dragon—Illaria and Sumi.

But now I was alone, with frothy waves crashing onto the rocky beach. A sharp pebble stung the bottom of my bare foot, and I felt the cool spray from the ocean. All the while, the Carpenters’ mournful melody played on, somewhere nearby.

“Ulla!” Pan’s voice was behind me, and I whirled around to see him standing there.

An unsure smile played on his full lips, and his warm, dark eyes were full of longing. He wore an amethyst button-up shirt, with the top few buttons undone. With the wind sweeping through his wavy black hair, he looked like a fashion model.

His hair was longer than I remembered it, curling just below his ears, and I had the strongest urge to run my fingers through it.

“Pan.” I threw my arms around him, and he held me to him and lifted me up off the ground.

When he set me back down, I pulled back so I could look him fully in the face. I wanted to study every part of it—his deep-set eyes behind thick lashes, his high cheekbones, and the subtle crooked smile on his lips that never completely went away. At least not when we were together.

“This is a dream, isn’t it?” I asked him sadly.

“Sort of, but I am really here,” he said with a wink.

“What?”

“It’s a lysa,” he explained. “I’ve only done this once before. Dagny had to walk me through the whole process, and I’m not very good at it so I had to wait until you fell asleep. There’s a way that you can pull someone into a lysa even when they’re awake, but it’s a lot harder.”

A lysa was similar to a persuasion, in that almost all trolls could do it and almost no humans could. I’d never had one before, but I had learned about them in school. They weren’t very common, since it was far more tiring to astral project somewhere than it was to use a cell phone.

It was sort of like a dream, if the dream was really happening on the astral field. Our bodies remained in the physical world but our essence could meet together in a psychic link. Meaning I could feel his touch and smell his skin as if he were right here with me.

“Cell phones are usually easier than a lysa, except with you and me it seems.”

“How long has it been since I’ve seen you in person?” I asked, staring up into his eyes.

He licked his lips. “I don’t know.”

I touched his arms and chest, and the feel of him—so strong and warm and here—made me flush with heat. “I’ve been worried about you. And Dagny and Eliana.”

“Well, you don’t need to worry about me. I’m fine. Dagny’s mostly fine, and she’s in good hands with Elof, and I’ve been checking on her.”

I smiled. “Good.”

“Where are you right now?”

“On a train in the middle of Manitoba. I’ll be in Doldastam the day after tomorrow.”

The wind picked up, turning icy, and the blue sky darkened—not with clouds, but like the sun was setting in a matter of a seconds. Not that there was even a sun in the sky. I shivered from the cold, and the seagull calls came out warbled and screeching.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“The lysa’s breaking. I’m sorry. I’m not very good at it.” He rubbed his hands on my bare arms, warming me.

“No, don’t be sorry. I’m just happy I got to see you.”

The song that’d been playing changed to something haunting and strangely familiar. It was a language I didn’t know—Nordic but more guttural with elongated vowels—but somehow . . . I knew exactly what it meant.

ennlindanna fjeur seern densolla

den orn av gullat svoavva ennung

on i ennsommora morgana guovssahas

doai fulla i vallihanna

the linden flower watched the sun

the bird of gold soared over the meadow

and in the summer morning light

the two fell in love

“Where’s that coming from?” I asked Pan.

His brow furrowed. “I thought the Carpenters were something you were listening to?”

“That is. But what’s the other one? About the flower and the bird?”

He shook his head. “I don’t hear anything else.”

The ground was shaking and the waves receded, leaving us floating on an island in the middle of nothing. The starless indigo sky engulfed us, and I grabbed Pan, holding him close to me while I still could.

Everything was rumbling, but still the song bled through—junggar enns morgda visavilla / singing his mourning song—I kissed Pan, fully, deeply, mouth on his and my fingers in his hair, holding him to me.

And then I felt him evaporate from my arms, his warmth replaced with cold air. I was alone in the darkness, with only the final words of the song hanging in the air—enn morgana fjeurn on ennsommora orn / the morning flower and the summer bird.

I sat up, alone in my bunk on the train, gasping for air. My foot still stung, and I pulled back the blankets to see it bleeding—exactly where the rock had pierced it in the lysa.