CHAPTER NINE

“IT TAKES A RUNE…”

He could. But this wasn’t skiing as he knew it: whooshed to the top of a mountain in a gondola, shooting down, carried up again on a lift. This was hard work on long, narrow cross-country skis that, after the initial run in from the town of Lom, spent much of the time slung across his shoulders as they climbed up the snow-clogged forest path. Since they were also packing winter-camping gear and enough food for their stay, what would have taken them two hours in summer took closer to five.

They struggled up a last rise, breaking clear of the tree line into a valley. “There,” Sky panted, pointing up. “Top of the hill.”

They struggled up. When they’d come before, they’d pushed along paths through a fern sea, to a huge, flat rock on the summit. Now, in a world of concealing white, they just aimed for the highest point, reached it, dropped their packs and skis, looked around. It was the same land, transformed, the ice wall of the glacier beyond shutting off the valley’s end, the slopes dropping away from where they stood to their right, leading to other snow-capped hills in the distance, a forest in between. Four paths led into it.

“That one?” queried Kristin, pointing.

“Think so.” Sky looked down. When they’d first come here, they’d been guided by a rune carved into the rock—Othala, rune of ancestors, had pointed the way down one of the paths. But since that signpost was probably six feet below them now…

“Yeah, think so,” Sky repeated. “Shall we…” He pointed at the packs.

Kristin shook her head. “Nah, let’s come back for them. Check it out first. Let’s ski, man!”

It was great after the grind to just let go; to race each other, build up speed on the slope, barely slowing for the narrow path entrance between two silver birches. They were even laughing as they threaded between trees barren of leaf, branches lined in white. And then, all too suddenly, they were there, and the laughter died. Heat rose from their bodies, combining with their heaved breaths into columns of steam above them. They could feel, in their nostrils, on the tips of their ears, how cold it was. Still, for the longest time, neither of them moved, just stared at the hummock of snow that covered the burnt remains of Sigurd’s hut.

If the attic had been the beginning of the journey, this was where the path had led. To a dead grandfather who wasn’t; to the murder of a man and the stealing of a soul—the soul of the girl breathing hard next to Sky now. But in the end, this clearing in a wood in Norway hadn’t been a final destination either, just another way station on the road to more extraordinary things. And now they hoped a clue would be found here to point them toward the ancestor who would teach them what Sigurd already had learned: to possess and so to resist possession. Yet, as he looked around, Sky knew there was something else he sought here too: the courage to go back again.

Both shivered. Both knew it had little to do with the cold. “Come on,” said Sky at last. “Let’s get the gear, get a stove going, have some tea.”

“Tea,” laughed Kristin. “The answer to everything.”

“If only,” muttered Sky, turning his ski tips back.

In activity there was distraction from their thoughts. It was a race, too, because they knew that in the mountains of Norway the sun set early. Fueled by sugar-rich tea, they hustled. They stretched a tarp between branches, slanted it at forty-five degrees so it would catch and hold some heat from the fire pit they dug under it. The wood store—it was to the side of the hut and so had survived the blaze—was clear of snow, the logs dry beneath a covering of yew boughs. Kristin laid the fire while Sky set up the tent. With the beginnings of dusk graying the world around them, they heated canned stew and wolfed it down. Afterward they sat, side by side, staring at the flames, not speaking. Sky found himself slipping into “cave mode.” He’d spent a year in that oriu in the mountains near Cauria. Much of the time—all of the winter—he’d sat like this, making worlds out of flame and crumbling ash. He’d have been content to do that all night now.

But Kristin wasn’t. “C’mon,” she said. “Op igen, as they say in these here parts.”

“Which means?” he asked, though he thought he knew. His mum had said it to him as a kid anytime he fell over.

“Up again!” she said, rising.

He joined her, reluctantly. “It’s nearly dark,” he complained.

“So? We can’t just work in daylight—there’s only about six hours a day this time of year here. And what have we got? Five days before our flight back?”

“Yeah.”

“I think, given your recent ‘history,’ your parents were quite cool to let you go skiing at all. Even if you are with your ‘old friends’ in…” She looked around. “‘Switzerland.’ So you better not miss your flight because we haven’t looked hard enough.”

“You’re right. Let’s go!”

They hadn’t yet checked out the little stone shed behind the cabin. A delaying tactic perhaps; because if it wasn’t there, or was damaged, the whole journey was a waste of time. But it was still there, also buried in white. Digging revealed the double doors, the padlock locking them together. Which presented the next problem.

“Where’s the key?” she asked.

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Smash it with that?” She pointed to the spade in his hand.

“Too flimsy. But I’ve got something else.” He didn’t have Death Claw, Bjørn’s ax, used to kill again here that terrible night. But he did have a small wood-chopping hatchet.

It was no Death Claw, but Sky still had an axman’s skill; the padlock was soon hacked from the wooden frame. Sweeping the area clear of snow, they grabbed a door each and, on “three!”, jerked them open.

The shed was small enough, less than Sky’s height tall, about his height across. But they’d forgotten how much they’d packed into it—Sigurd’s long lifetime of studying runes and Fetches. They stared at books and folders, manuscripts and sheaves, plus thousands upon thousands of loose pieces of paper.

“Oh, crap!” Kristin muttered. “Do the words ‘needle’ and ‘haystack’ come to mind?”

“No. Because at least you know you’re looking for a needle. Here…we don’t even know what we’re after. A single sheet? A journal? And maybe we’re wrong. Maybe there are no clues here at all.” Sky sighed. “We’re bloody bollocksed!”

“We’ve got to try anyway. We’ve come all this way.” She leaned in, grabbed a wedge. “Come on.”

They returned with an armful each to the tarp under the trees. The light had gotten poorer, so Sky had to hang a lamp from a branch. It illuminated nothing.

“This is ridiculous.” Sky added yet another page of scrawled runes to the huge pile in front of Kristin. “Five days! We won’t get through this in five years!”

“I know!” Kristin sat back with a groan. “This trip’s a bust.”

Sky looked up into the silver birches. And maybe it was a trick of the fading light. Maybe just that Sky had been seeking some sign. But he saw it, in the curiously regular pattern of mold across the white bark. “Yew,” he muttered.

His cousin looked where he was looking. “Birch, you twit.”

“No,” he replied, pointing. “That mold on the tree. It’s a rune.”

She looked closer. “Oh, yeah. I see it. Eihwaz. The yew. Big deal.”

He sat up, went to the tree, ran his fingers down the line of mold. “I think it is, actually.” He turned back. “Isn’t there an expression: ‘It takes a thief to catch a thief’?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So maybe we need a rune to catch a rune.”

“Meaning?”

He gestured at the pile of papers before her. “We’ll never get through a tenth of what’s in the shed. Not with our conscious minds. But when have our conscious minds helped in all this? We need the runes.” He tapped the mold. “And, if you remember, this one, Eihwaz, is all about solutions.”

Kristin came to stand beside him. “Yes,” she said, “but I also remember it’s usually a solution delayed.”

Sky was undoing the flap of his backpack. “But runes rarely exist in isolation, do they? What if this one’s linked with runes that, you know…speed it along?” He pulled out the red woolen bag. The sound of stone on stone made him shiver. He shook it, to hear more clinks. “Shall we?”

She was as excited as he was now. “Do you want a cloth to lay them on?”

He fiddled with the leather neck cord. “Why? If the myths are anywhere close to true, then Odin took up the runes in a land of snow.” He smiled. “This is home turf!” And saying it, he opened the neck of the bag and spilled the stones out.

Gray on white. But that wasn’t why they stood out here in a way they hadn’t on the earth floor of his cave in Corsica. He’d fashioned each one there, granite from the Granite Island, each runestone invested with his beliefs, his prayers, his musings by day and night. Yet they hadn’t belonged there. The stone, yes, but not the symbols carved upon them. For they were from this land, a Northern world of ice and snow far removed from the maquis-scented warmth of the Mediterranean. And, just as Sky had felt when he’d first come here, under his spread palm he could sense the stones surge as he had surged, with the blood of ancestors, the secrets whispering in it.

These runestones, like him, had come home.

“Sky?” He heard a snapping nearby, looked up to see Kristin clicking her fingers. “Thought I’d lost you there! You OK?”

“Fine,” he replied. “Shall we begin?”

“Sure. Uh, how?”

“You’ve done runecasts before, Kristin.”

“Of course. But mine have usually been aimed at freeing my Fetch. Apart from the odd attempt, I was saving divination for later.”

“It’s the same deal. We seek something. We need help.” He stood. “So first we have to ask for it.”

He tipped his palms up; Kristin did the same. They closed their eyes. As one, they intoned the invocation: “Odin. All-Father, guide us now.”

He bent again, reached for the runestones. She still stood. “C’mon,” he said.

“I thought you’d want…you know…your stones and all.”

Sky smiled. His cousin was not often hesitant about anything. “After all we’ve been through, I think we’re in this together. All the way.”

“Right-ee-oh!” Excited now, she crouched. “Turn them all over?”

“All except this one.” Sky reached, set aside one stone. Eihwaz. He jerked his thumb to the tree behind them. “It’s already chosen itself. Now we need two more.”

Swiftly, they turned over all the stones that showed their faces, until all twenty-three were symbolless granite. Then Sky laid his hand upon hers, and they pressed down, cracking the crust of ice that lay on top of the snow. Each taking a deep breath, they began to swirl the stones clockwise, knowing that the other way, widdershins, was a swirl to send away something, not draw it toward them. They stopped as one, looked down. The stones had churned up snow, the heat from their hands causing some of it to melt.

They stared in silence at the unrevealing backs. “What’s our question?” Sky murmured.

Kristin frowned. “Help us to cut through these mountains of paper, so we can learn the secret of Sigurd’s journeys to the ancestor who taught him possession and—”

“Simpler!” Sky interrupted. “Everyone thinks the runes are so complex. But they were simple tools for a simple people who needed help with things like crops, or swords, or love. Magic was practical.”

She nodded. “So…‘Something’s hidden and we need to discover it’? Or ‘Help us find what is hidden’?”

“Perfect.” They each closed their eyes. “Help us find what is hidden.”

With eyes shut, they reached down, hovered for a moment, then picked.

They opened their eyes, looked at each other. “You first,” he said.

She placed her stone next to Eihwaz. “A diamond,” she said. “Sigurd gave you diamonds, right? But of course it’s actually…”

“Ingwaz!” they said together.

Sky leaned closer, peering. “And as you know, it means ‘seed sack.’ Holding what will be sown for the future harvest and—”

“Or ‘scrotum,’” she interrupted, smiling when he winced.

“Anyway,” he continued, “um, a place for storing power to be used.”

“And didn’t we say before: ‘Knowledge is power’?” She gestured in the direction of the shed. “That’s a storehouse of Sigurd’s knowledge, his power.” She nodded. “Good. We’re on the right track. Your turn.”

Sky opened his fist, laid the stone down. “Hmm! One I’ve never really used before. Jera, a harvest. So totally linked to the seeds in Ingwaz.” He shivered. He was cold but that wasn’t why. “It was also at the cult gathering.”

“Forget that. This is our cast, your stones. And a harvest is what you strive for all year, right? It’s, like, rewarded effort.” She looked at the papers piled up by the fire. “So where’s our reward?”

“In the hut?”

Snatching up the three stones, they walked over, stared at the piles of paper. Nothing had changed. A chill wind riffled them, nothing else.

Sky didn’t know what he was expecting…but nothing wasn’t it. It was Kristin who spoke. “Maybe…maybe we have to do something else.”

“Like what?”

“Well…” She bit her lip. “When we were in the hospital, and you…were two—uh, still deeply weird, by the way—you got back together by painting a rune, didn’t you?”

“And burning it,” Sky added excitedly. “Yes, we could try that. Have you got any paper?”

“Sky!” She gestured at the mound before them.

“Not his. If the journal was a fake, we don’t know what else is untrue here. You don’t do rune magic on lies.” He turned to their camp. “I haven’t any paper. But you must have some in your bag?”

“I’ve got toilet paper. And that’s it.”

“What? No diary, notebook, nothing?”

“No. But…” She waved at the trees. “How about birch bark? Might be more…appropriate anyway. Part of the land.”

Sky thought, Bark might work, except…what would he draw the runes with? A ballpoint pen? His own blood? He looked around…and saw it. Beyond the trees, over them. Everywhere. Another part of the land.

“Snow,” he said.

“Snow?”

He turned to her, excited now. “I know what we’ll do.”

“What?”

“This.”

         

Saying was one thing, doing another. He was no sculptor, his skill limited to slashing runes into stone. And the twilight played with his eyes, making it hard to define the white edges. But eventually three rough-hewn blocks of pure white, about knee-high and as wide, stood before the shed.

“Very Picasso.” Kristin stood with her head at an angle, studying the snow runes.

Sky blew on his hands. He’d had to take off his gloves for the final shaping, and his chisel—the one he always used for carving, the quartz chisel from Corsica—had frozen his flesh. “They’ll have to do.”

“Oh, I think they’ll do fine. But what now?”

“According to Norse myth, the world was formed from ice and fire.” He smiled. “So now we burn!”

At the still-glowing fire pit, he snatched up three branches of the yew that had covered the wood supply, their needles rust-colored, dry. “Here,” he said, offering one.

She didn’t take it. “You want me to…I thought…” She jerked her head toward the snow runes.

“I had to carve them myself. I think there can be only one carver. But as I said before: all the way!”

He pushed the stick closer, and she took it, thrust it into the flame. It caught immediately, sweet smoke rising, yellow flame running up needle and branch. He did the same, and together they bore the brands back to the shed.

He didn’t need to say anything. She knew what to do. And the All-Father had already been called upon. “Ingwaz,” she said softly. “Stored knowledge. Release it.” Then she jabbed the stick’s end into the top of the snow rune. Immediately, it began to melt.

Sky stepped up. “Jera. Harvest. Grant us our reward.” He drove the wood into white.

For a moment they watched each transform, snow returning to liquid, the red-flamed fire sticks sizzling, sinking into dissolving white. Then heat on his hand warned him. The last stick was being consumed fast. “I think I’ve been burned enough,” he said, turning to Kristin. “Shall we?”

Her hand covered his, as his had covered hers over the runestones. Together they lifted, brought the brand down hard, driving it into white, chanting as they did.

“Yew to yew. To Eihwaz. A solution…no longer delayed.”

They didn’t know how they spoke as one, just that they did. And as they did, the first two snow runes collapsed, their still-flaming branches sinking into icy water, snuffing out in a flash of steam. Only Eihwaz burned a little longer, until that, too, fell.

Its spluttering ended; silence came, the silence of the forest and the night finally, fully fallen. A waning moon was out, that and starlight etching the trees in silver. And then, out of the silence, came a sound. The crack of something giving way.

They stepped back, startled, as before them the paper horde shifted, then collapsed. Pages spilled onto the snow.

“The water! It will ruin them.” Kristin leapt forward, trying to snatch up what had slipped into the puddle left by the melted runes.

Sky hadn’t moved. “I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said softly. “See?”

Kristin stopped, hands full, looked where he pointed.

It was as if the top of a mountain had sheared off, revealing its core. At it, perched there as if set on a ledge, was a roll of parchment. A red-ribbon bow held it together. The paper had not been squashed by the weight of paper above it. It was as if it had just sheltered within a cave all this while.

Waiting.