14

North

As the train slowly crept toward the station, I watched from the window, and lyrics from the song in the lysa repeated in my head. When I’d woken up, I’d written it all down in a hurry so I wouldn’t forget. But the song lingered in my mind, and when I closed my eyes, the words hung in the air, like the fading aftermath of fireworks in the night sky.

grotta insa ihkku

anda cieri insa saddjavvi

on fjeurn kvavarrid enn orn vandavar

And even though I didn’t know the language—it had an Old Germanic flair, not that dissimilar from Norse, but it was much more guttural and distant enough that I shouldn’t be able to understand it—it all made perfect sense somehow.

she wept all through the night

until her tears became a lake

and the flower drowned awaiting the bird’s return

It was a strange thing to have an ancient-sounding, bluesy a capella song stuck in my head, but here we were.

The train ended at the station in the human town of Churchill—the Polar Bear Capital of the World, if the sign was to be believed. Doldastam was nearly an hour-long drive away, so Bryn was supposed to be waiting for me with one of the Kanin’s vehicles.

I grabbed my duffel bag and kept my head down when I walked through the station, not that any of the humans seemed to notice me. I don’t know what kind of deal the Kanin made with the Churchillians or if it was part of their cloaking spell, but they didn’t bother me and that was good.

Outside, I squinted into the bright morning sun, and I spotted a guy leaning against a white Range Rover. His chestnut curls were cropped short, and he looked at me over the top of his sunglasses. When he smiled and waved at me, I finally recognized him as Ridley Dresden, Bryn’s boyfriend. They had been together for years, but I had only met him once, when I visited Doldastam.

“How are you doing, Ulla?” he asked as he stepped toward me. “Do you need help with your bag?”

“No, I’m good,” I said, and he opened the trunk so I could toss my bag inside. “How are you?”

“Good, good,” he replied. “Bryn’s busy with a work thing. She has the rest of the day off, but she had some meeting with the Högdragen she couldn’t get out of. So she asked me to give you a ride.”

“Well, thank you, I really appreciate it.” I offered him an apologetic smile.

“No problem,” Ridley said cheerily, and he opened the passenger-side door for me. He jogged around and got in. As he turned the car on, he asked, “Is Avicii okay?”

Upbeat electronica came out of the speakers, and honestly, I was happy for the reprieve from the haunting choir in my head—grotta insa ihkku / anda cieri insa saddjavvi.

“Yeah, it’s great,” I said, and settled into the seat. “It sounds like Bryn has been busy.”

Ridley chuckled. “That’s an understatement.”

He pulled out of the parking lot, and within minutes, we’d taken the main street past the shops and inns, and we were out of the town. On either side of the narrow road, the summer tundra of tall grass and wildflowers surrounded us.

“She’s the guard to the King,” Ridley went on, drumming his ringed fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music. “And the last few Kanin monarchs were murdered, or at the very least died under mysterious circumstances, and Bryn really does not want to continue with the precedent.”

“Her career’s always been important to her,” I said.

“That’s true. She’s passionate about her work, and she’s great at it. That’s one of the first things that drew me to her. I just wish she’d take more time for herself . . . and for us.” He shook his head, as if clearing it, then grinned over at me. “That’s why I’m so glad you’re here. Bryn’s cashing in some of her vacation time she’s stocked up, and she can kick back and relax for once.”

The smile I managed felt tight and sick, and I swallowed back my guilt and doubt. “I hope we can have a nice time.”

“I’m sure you will,” he said confidently.

As we drove—the flat landscape increasingly broken up with tall, slender pine trees—Ridley and I chatted about his life with Bryn in the Kanin capital. He’d worked for the kingdom, training trackers, but after the war, he retired and floundered for a while, like many of his fellow soldiers and citizens. Eventually, he’d landed on his feet, and he got a job working at a greenhouse.

“Fortunately, Bryn was so supportive of such a dramatic career shift,” he explained. “But I really love it. It’s so much more satisfying knowing that I’m helping feed our kingdom instead of working an elaborate grift.”

He was talking about changelings, the troll practice that involved kidnapping human babies and stealing their money. Ridley—as a tracker and teacher—had never been a changeling, but he’d helped bring dozens of changelings—and their stolen inheritances—back to the kingdom.

A decade of that work had really worn on him, and now he excitedly talked about the hydroponics they’d installed. They’d had such a great season last year, the food treasury had made a neat profit exporting pickled beets to the Skojare.

We had at least another fifteen minutes to go, and we’d run through all the small talk—he’d even talked to me about Bryn’s Tralla horse, Bloom, and suggested I go for a ride while I was here. Everything around us was completely overgrown with the looming evergreen hybrids the Kanin cultivated, with long weeping willow–like branches, helping to conceal the road and the city.

Ridley wasn’t talking, and the current song on his playlist was a quiet ballad. As I looked out the window at the leering trees, the lysa song grew louder in my head.

anda varrid ins om ennung / lindanna fjeura blommid anyo / enndast efdar deen orn varrid torrid was the latest refrain—until he bled on the meadows / linden flowers bloomed anew / only after the bird bled dry.

Finally, through the hungry branches scraping against the hood of the car, I saw the iron gate and the tall stone wall that surrounded the city. As we rolled toward it, the music in my head fell silent.

Ridley talked to the guard at the gate, who waved us through. The main road was narrow, winding through the rows of small cottages buried in overgrown bushes. Making matters even more slow going, the streets were lined with pedestrians—mostly trolls, but plenty of chickens, rabbits, goats, and several fat donkeys.

We turned in front of the palace—a large, stocky building of gray stone. The castle’s cold façade was broken up with stained-glass windows depicting various events in the Kanin history. The palace was on the far south side of the city, along the wall, and Ridley drove us around it, past a trio of modern apartment buildings.

He parked in front of one closest to the wall, and led me up the three flights of stairs. As he opened the door, he announced cheekily, “Welcome to the penthouse suite.”

Their apartment was small, but the ceilings were high and the sparse, light décor made it feel cool and open. White walls with clean lines, blond wooden floors, and potted plants were everywhere.

“We don’t really have a ‘guest room,’ but there’s a futon in the office.” He motioned to the open door off the living room. “The bathroom’s next to it if you wanna freshen up.”

“Thanks,” I told him, and I took him up on the offer. After I finished in the bathroom, I went to the office to drop my bag on the futon.

It was a small room with pale smoky gray walls, a narrow bookcase, and a sleek blond desk with a laptop, a succulent in a jar, and a notepad. On the walls, photos had been hung in copper frames—an older picture of Bryn with Ember, another of Bryn with a pudgy little boy, a silver Tralla horse, a few others with folks I didn’t recognize—but it was the ones of her family that gave me pause.

Bryn smiling brightly with her mother, Runa—blond, blue-eyed, a softer, older version of Bryn—and her father, Iver—black hair, dark eyes, olive skin, a quiet intellectual with little in common with the athletic, strong-willed Bryn. But no matter their obvious similarities—or lack thereof—one thing was abundantly clear as I looked at their picture with three smiling faces, their arms around each other: that they cared about each other.

From the office, I heard the apartment door open, and Bryn asking Ridley if I was there.

“Hi, Bryn,” I said as I came out.

She smiled at me, her hands on her hips and her blond curls pulled back into a slick ponytail. “Hey, Ulla. Sorry I couldn’t be there to pick you up. I hope your trip was okay.”

“Yeah, yeah, it was,” I said.

“So.” She glanced over to the kitchen. “I don’t know how you’re feeling or what you—”

“I think you’re my sister,” I blurted out.