I spent the rest of the morning going through the scant records that the Omte had on Orra Fågel, but it was just as Bekk had warned me—there wasn’t a lot there. Birthday 1 September 1969, full name Orra Fågel, her high school diploma, and a long list of relatives, both parents and four older brothers, all dead. They didn’t even have her death certificate here. Bekk explained that most royal certificates were kept at the palace, although even she had to admit that the cousin of the Queen Regent barely counted as royalty.
“Plus, it usually goes the other way,” Bekk said. She closed the drawer of a long filing cabinet, after a fruitless search through death certificates.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Usually it’s a non-royal bragging about alleged distant relations to the crown,” she elaborated. “A third cousin telling everyone how their dad’s death certificate should be kept at the palace with other royalty, but it’s not included, and the crown doesn’t acknowledge them.
“But this is someone who should be overlooked—no offense.” Bekk glanced at me, and I shrugged. “And she’s all locked up in the palace.”
“That is weird,” I realized.
“Kinda.” She grimaced and put her hand on the small of her back. “But Bodil is rather paranoid, even by Omte standards. In her defense, having your most trusted adviser betray you and commit treason will have that effect on you. She really cleaned house after the war, changed up a lot of the staff, relocated records, and reduced public access to information.”
Even with the concerns about the Queen’s anxiety/paranoia, Bekk was able to deliver on her promise to get me a meeting with her. Before I left for the day, she managed to get through to the Queen Regent’s secretary and set up a meeting for the next day at ten A.M.
I had taken up enough of Bekk’s time—and I’d already exhausted all resources in the records office—by noon, so I called Pan, and he and Rikky zoomed over on the airboat to pick me up. On the way to her house, Rikky stood at the back of the boat, steering with a lever as we whipped through the trees. I didn’t feel stable standing up, so I sat on the wooden bench seat next to Pan.
“How were your adventures today?” I asked Pan, nearly shouting to be heard over the large caged propeller—or fan, as Rikky called it—that powered the boat through the swamp.
“I don’t know if they were adventures, but I think we had a productive day,” he said.
“Yeah? Did you find anything about the First City or Eliana yet?”
He let out a short, tired laugh and ran a hand through his windblown hair. “Not quite yet, no. But I did spend the day knee-deep in musty books reading up on strange superstitions and ancient obsessions.”
“That sounds intense,” I said.
“You have no idea.” He leaned closer to me, so he wouldn’t have to shout so much over the fan. To steady himself, he put his right arm behind my back, his hand on the bench on the other side of me so his fingertips grazed my thigh. “They were doing all these weird old rituals you’d associate with the Dark Ages, like seriously demented things. And it’s not even that long ago. Some of it took place in the 1800s, but most of the worst stuff was in the 1960s and ’70s.”
As he spoke, he moved in closer. My blouse had ridden up some, exposing the skin of the small of my back, and his forearm gently pressed against my bare skin. I tried to focus on what he was saying—it was important and very interesting to me—but when his warm skin touched mine (not an exciting place, sure, but a private one that rarely had skin-to-skin contact with anyone else), it made my skin shiver all down my spine, and my stomach filled with delighted heat. Even though I so badly wanted to listen to him, all I could think about was how his arm felt strong and warm, and how he smelled like summer sun and cedar and something sweet but earthly, like fresh herbs and lemonade. Suddenly the boat lurched to the side. Pan’s arm slid around my waist, catching me just in time to keep me from flying out into the murky swamp. Water splashed up over us, soaking my “nice” clothes.
“Sorry about that!” Rikky shouted from where she stood behind us. “Animals can jump out of nowhere out here, so it’s best to hang on.”
I dutifully sat up straighter and hung on to the bench. As much as I enjoyed flirting (or even attempted flirting) with Pan, I valued not flopping around in dirty water or being eaten by alligators even more.
When we got back to Rikky’s I called dibs on the shower, which would have been enjoyable if not for the major moral dilemma that arose when I came face-to-face with a spider.
Behind the showerhead, in the corner underneath the rusting eaves, was a fat garden spider in a huge web. My stance on most living things was one of “live and let live.” And I was determined to abide by that despite my very real fear that the spider would leap into my face and bite me.
This led to a terrifying, lukewarm, seven-minute shower. The one good thing was that I was so focused on the spider that I didn’t have any time to worry about whether or not anyone could see me naked through the shower curtain.
When I finished, I found Pan and Rikky sitting in the main room. A ceiling fan made from old car parts languidly cooled the room, and Fleetwood Mac played on the record player. Both of them were lounging on the couch and drinking dark liquid out of green mason jars.
“Ulla! Come join us!” Rikky exclaimed as she saw me. “Have a drink!”
Before I could respond, she flitted over to the table and poured a glass from a big jug. She thrust it at me, and I tentatively took it from her. “What is it?
“Omte sangria,” she said with a laugh.
Pan rolled his eyes. “It’s blackberry wine and eldvatten, which is a fancy name for Omte moonshine. It’s good, but pace yourself.”
I sniffed my drink, and the smell was a tart mixture of Jolly Rancher candy and kerosene, so I decided that I’d work up to it.
“We were talking about all the disturbing crap we learned today, including living sacrifices and helifiske.” Rikky did exaggerated air quotes around the final word.
“Helifiske?” I repeated. “I don’t think I’ve heard of that before.”
Rikky sat on the couch next to Pan and pulled her feet up under her. “Before today, neither had I. But you may know it by the more anglicized name—sacred recruitment.”
That clicked with me because I’d only learned of it recently. Calder had gotten a book for me about the followers of the Älvolk—the legendary guardians who protected the Lost Bridge of Dimma—and it had mentioned something. The book was mostly a series of commandments and a few simple parables and poems, and there were key phrases repeated throughout. Lots of references to blood, “magick,” supremacy, and getting to a magical land of riches and reward.
One of the ways to gain access to this utopia was to commit acts of service. Most of them were simple and made sense, like setting aside pursuits of gold and following the orders of the Älvolk leaders. But there was also talk of “payments in blood and flesh,” as well as the importance of “sacred recruitment” and “blodseider magick”—but neither of the terms had been specifically defined in the text.
“If you’re ready to get into it all, you might as well sit down and make yourself comfortable.” Pan motioned to a pile of cushions and ikat pillows on the floor, between the record player and the birdcage that housed the sleeping squirrel.
I peeked in the cage, checking out the fat gray ball of fluff, before settling down on the cushions. “Okay. I think I’m ready.”
“It’s sex,” Rikky said bluntly, then laughed at the shock on my face. “Helifiske. It’s the sacred act of using sex to seduce prospective converts into joining the cult. Or, I’m sorry—they prefer to be called Freyarian Älvolk or Guardians of the Lost Bridge of Dimma.”
“There is a lot more to it than that,” Pan admonished her. “Yeah, helifiske is a part of the teachings of the Freyarian Älvolk, but it is more than a recruitment. I read about a lot of rituals that mentioned sacrifice and sex with blodseider magick, but most of them had nothing to do with attracting new members or proselytizing of any kind.”
“What were the points of the rituals, then?” I asked.
I decided it was finally time to sample the “sangria,” sipping it slowly and inconspicuously. That turned out to be a very smart move, since it tasted like battery acid mixed with sugar. I managed to keep my expression neutral as it burned down my throat, and I forced myself to focus on Pan’s explanation.
“I don’t know exactly,” he admitted. “Pleasure? Power? Delusions?”
“It all starts with Frey,” Rikky interjected. “The Älvolk in general buy into the whole Alfheim creation myth. You know, the one that says ‘god’ or ‘gods’—depending how closely you follow the orthodoxy—all live in Alfheim. They either came from Alfheim and created the earth, or they lived on earth and created Alfheim as a paradise for the gods and heroes.”
Pan took a long drink of his sangria while Rikky was talking, and he shook his head as he swallowed. “No, no, that’s not quite what the Älvolk believe. I don’t think they know who or what created Alfheim and the earth and universe. They think that Alfheim is a better place to live with a higher quality of inhabitants. Whether Alfheim is another kingdom, continent, planet, or maybe entirely made up is anybody’s guess.”
“So maybe a real place or maybe a paradise of the gods?” Rikky asked with a teasing smile.
“Okay, it’s basically the same thing, but I want to be precise with my language. It’s one thing to believe a place is a utopia, and it’s another to believe that it’s an afterlife that you must do good deeds to gain entrance to,” Pan clarified.
She held up her hand. “You’re right, you’re right.”
“So how do the Älvolk and the helifiske fit into finding Eliana and the First City?” I asked.
“Áibmoráigi was built near the Lost Bridge of Dimma to guard and conceal it,” Pan said.
“Other stories say that the bridge was supposed to be a secret, and that trolls built the First City too close to it,” Rikky added. “And that’s why they ‘lost’ the bridge, to protect it.”
“No matter how you slice it, the First City and the Älvolk are connected,” Pan said. “Many of the legends diverge at certain points, but there is a lot that is similar. Trolls and humans lived separately for a long time—with the trolls alluded to as being on Alfheim, and the humans on earth. There was a bridge between the two worlds, although the exact descriptions of what the bridge looked like or how far it spanned are usually vague and frequently contradict each other.”
“Yeah, I read on Trollipedia that some historians thought that tales of the bridge were created to explain natural phenomena like the aurora borealis because of how often the bridge was described as bright lights that were gone in a matter of seconds,” Rikky said. “But then I read several passages today that described it as a dark tunnel that took forty years to pass through.”
“It could even be that they’re talking about two separate things but the folklore got all mixed up together,” Pan said. “But the main point is that there was some mystical bridge that connected the troll world and the human world.
“And also, just to be clear, they don’t use the words troll and human,” he went on. “Those from Alfheim are álfar, and those on earth are called ekkálfar, so really the bridge connected the álfar world and the ekkálfar world.
“A city sprang up around where the bridge met the earth, like many ports that eventually grew into bustling centers of culture and life,” Pan said. “And that’s exactly what Áibmoráigi did, eventually becoming the First City and the birthplace of troll society.”
“But then something happened.” Rikky’s thick eyebrows bunched together, and she stared up at the skylights for a moment. “There isn’t a clear record of what transpired, but something changed.”
“The most consistent explanation that I’ve heard is that old nursery rhyme,” Pan said. “The one with a bird and a fish and a bunny and, I don’t know, some kind of big cat or something. And they’re all pals until this giant worm, of all things”—he rolled his eyes at that—“messes everything up. It’s basically a Norse Tower of Babel.”
“Tower of what?” Rikky asked.
“My bad.” He laughed to himself. “I forgot you guys grew up so isolated from humans. I doubt that there’s a lot of copies of the Old Testament floating around in nightstands around here.”
“Anyway, it was all sunshine and Towers of Babel,” Rikky said helpfully to move the story along.
“But other than the giant worm stirring up trouble, I haven’t got a clue about what caused the rift between Alfheim and earth, but for some reason the álfar decided they no longer wanted to keep the Lost Bridge open,” Pan said.
“They didn’t call it the Lost Bridge back then, though,” Rikky said. “They hadn’t lost it yet, so it was called Bifröst.”
“And it became ‘lost’ when the álfar tried to destroy it, but it couldn’t be destroyed,” Pan went on. “The best they could hope for was hiding it away. That’s where the Älvolk came in. They were the álfar who stayed behind to guard the bridge and keep anyone from crossing it.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you said this was all because of Frey, and so far he hasn’t come up.”
“Oh, we’re getting to that now.” Rikky sat up straighter. “He was an álfar, and he decided to stay on earth after the bridge closed. His followers say he stayed because he was fond of everyone on earth and he wanted to help us get back where we belong. His detractors argue he stayed because his trollian abilities like telekinesis and persuasion made him like a god among the humans.”
“You studied Norse, right?” Pan looked to me. “How much do you know about Frey?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t studied the myths that much. Just the language. All I really know about Frey is that he’s the god of love … or fertility? I think?”
“More like the god of sex,” Pan said.
Rikky lifted her glass and winked. “And wine.”
“A regular party god, then?” I said, and she snickered.
“As you can imagine, a secret group of monk-like guardians had a difficult time keeping up their numbers,” Rikky said. “A bunch of old dudes living a life of sacrifice and solitude protecting something that nobody really knows about didn’t attract a lot of members.
“Then, suddenly, old writings of Frey’s surfaced, where he details his life of debauchery.” Rikky did jazz hands to show her faux-surprise. “And now these texts instructing ‘ritual orgies’ as a means of getting to paradise are no longer viewed as crude stories but instead as literal instructions on how to open the bridge and get to Alfheim.”
“That’s how the Freyarian Älvolk began,” Pan said. “When the Älvolk tilted away from a simple life of service to a really twisted, zealous doctrine. But this was way back in the late 1800s. The Freyarian cult rose and fell through the years, until a particularly resilient sect took hold in a Trylle community in Northern California in the 1970s. This latest wave differentiated itself from the past iterations by having an overt mission to convert trolls and prepare for the discovery and reopening of the bridge.
“This is also the group that took the calls for blood and flesh to the most literal and most disturbing degree,” he continued and grimaced.
“The records we were reading, a lot of them were partially censored.” Rikky shivered involuntarily. “They were deemed too graphic for public consumption.”
“So, if the Lost Bridge even really exists—if it is a tangible place that we can get to and not an allusion to the northern lights—it’s currently being guarded by a group of psychotic monk warriors?” I asked.
“Yep. And that’s the good news,” Pan said.
Rikky scoffed. “How is that the good news?”
“Because at least we were able to find out more about the Älvolk. We learned something new,” he reasoned. “The bad news is that we don’t even know where the First City is. The location of that has been hidden for centuries, and the bridge has been lost for much longer than that. And we still don’t know if the bridge is even real or just a myth about the northern lights.”
“Yeah, that is bad news,” I agreed and gulped down my sangria.