Corpse in the Mead Hall

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Like most of Villmark, Haraldr's house was built in a Scandinavian modernist design, all long sleek lines with lots of south-facing windows. The gray wood panels of its exterior made only the smallest of contrasts with the snow piled up against it, and I felt the urge to sketch again.

Definitely on gray-scale paper. If only I had brought my supplies with me.

Haraldr lived alone, and as I waited for my knock on his door to be answered, I realized I had no idea if he was a widower or if he had never married at all. The only member of the council I knew much about was Valki, and that was only because Valki was the father of the Thors.

The door swung open and Fulla, Haraldr's assistant, stepped back to let me in, her long blonde braids swinging with her motion.

"He's waiting for you in the breakfast room," she told me as she helped me out of my parka.

"Not the library?" I asked. "I was hoping we could get the lesson part out of the way first."

"I believe he intends to do both at once," Fulla said, hanging my parka on a hook by the door. I slipped out of my boots, then followed her on stocking feet down the long hallway that ran down the center of his house. His library was on the north side, where the books and other delicate materials he stored there would be kept out of direct sunlight.

His kitchen was on the south side, the blond oak of his cabinets shining brightly in the late morning sun. The breakfast room beyond it, with its floor to ceiling windows on two sides, was sunnier still.

"Ah, Ingrid," Haraldr said, and my dazzled eyes finally found him. Even with the light behind me, the midday sun caught the sparse hair that he had left glow like a silvery halo around his age-spotted scalp. He gestured with his wizened hands for me to sit across from him. The table was already spread out for lunch, with stacks of crispbread, thin slices of meat and cheese arranged on a cutting board, and a variety of fruits and vegetables on square plates all around the board. "I'm afraid I have a bit of council business this afternoon that I wasn't planning for. But rather than cancel our lesson, I was hoping we could cover it over lunch."

"Are you sure that's enough time?" I asked as I sat down across from him. "There are always so many meanings on top of meanings."

"Yes, but most of that I find you've been teasing out on your own through your meditations and art," Haraldr said. "Do you feel the same?"

"Maybe," I said, although in truth I wasn't at all sure I was ready to join the accelerated class.

"Help yourself," he said, waving his hands over the food. I started to build an open-faced sandwich on a slice of the crispbread, but before I was quite finished, he slid a square of paper across the table to me. I sucked a bit of spicy mustard off my thumb before picking it up.

The rune looked a bit like a triangular flag flying at half-mast. I had learned F and U already, so that meant this letter in the futhark must be Th.

"I think your cat knew what we would be discussing today," Haraldr said.

"My cat?" Then I saw him sitting in the chair between the two of us as if he, too, were about to have lunch. "Mjolner? When did you get here?"

Mjolner said nothing. Haraldr picked up a sliver of meat and set it on the table in front of the cat. Mjolner gobbled it up greedily.

"This rune isn't about cats, is it?" I said. I couldn't remember any of the runes being associated with a cat.

"No, it's about hammers," Haraldr said.

I looked down at the rune again. It didn't look like a hammer. The flag part might be the blade of an axe, but if it were a hammer, it was more the kind they made in the Stone Age than, well, Mjolner.

"Okay," I said, but the word drawled out of me, all unsure.

"It follows the other two," Haraldr said. "Can you tell me how?"

"The first was the beginning of all things in sort of an undifferentiated form. The second was molding that creation into a form. So this is more creation energy?" I guessed.

"What kind, do you think?" Haraldr asked, then bit into his own crispbread with toppings. A slice of cheese started to slide off the back end, but he caught it with a fingertip and pushed it back into place.

I looked over at Mjolner, who was watching intently for that cheese to fall.

"Explosive?" I guessed. "If this rune is related to Mjolner, that means it has a power like thunder and lightning, right?"

"And what would you do with such power?" Haraldr asked.

"Fight giants," I said, and felt my heart clench again. Just saying those words made me think of Thorbjorn. He had taken a nasty head wound in a fight against giants that I had accidentally caused.

Or I was just going to have to admit that lots of things were going to make me think of Thorbjorn, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

"Ingrid?" Haraldr said.

"Sorry. Distracted," I said. "So this is a rune of war and destruction, then?"

"The god Thor doesn't fight giants to destroy them, or at least that's not his primary purpose. He is only fighting to assert the rights of humans to live their own lives, free from the interference of giants and trolls and those manner of creatures."

"So it's defensive," I said, picking up the card to look at the image again.

"To some extent," Haraldr said. "Is there anything about Mjolner you're forgetting?"

I looked over at my cat again, but his yellow-green eyes gave me no hints. It was almost like he was waiting to hear what I had to say.

"It's the opposite of destruction sometimes," I said, remembering a particular tale of Thor and the trickster god Loki where Thor had disguised himself as Freya and agreed to marry a certain giant who had stolen his hammer in order to get it back. "The hammer is put on a bride's lap during the wedding ceremony to bless the union."

"Indeed," Haraldr said as he assembled a second sandwich. "To bless a union with children. Like a lightning-struck tree. The lightning kills the tree, but it also allows something else to grow in its place."

I shivered. I had spent a night inside a lightning-struck tree quite recently. The Wild Hunt had been circling all around me. I wasn’t likely to forget that night anytime soon. But that tree had kept me safe.

"So it brings forth life and protects it," I said. "That sounds like a good rune to use."

"Well," Haraldr said, but trailed off.

"Not always, I'm guessing," I said, and looked at the card again. "Lightning can be dangerous."

"Yes, but more than that, unpredictable," he said. "Chaotic, as the elements themselves so often are."

"I could accidentally summon a storm?" I guessed. Having been caught out on the waters of Lake Superior in the teeth of a magical gale once, I was in no hurry to repeat the experience.

"Storms serve no master," Haraldr said. "They would be a danger to friend and foe alike."

"Right. Duly warned," I said. I tried to turn my attention to my own food, but something was bothering me. "This rune is associated with chaos?" Haraldr nodded, but his eyes were eager, as if he knew I was on to something. "Giants are creatures of chaos, aren't they?"

"Are you surprised that the rune associated with Thor would also be associated with giants?" he asked.

"It doesn't seem fair to lump them in together," I said. "Thor is trying to do good, right?"

"Yes, but this isn't about ends. It's about means," Haraldr said.

My mouth went suddenly dry, and I was more nervous than ever at the idea of trying to use this particular rune. I took a sip of water, then looked at the card again. "There are lots of kinds of giants."

"Yes. You've already felt the presence of one kind, although you didn't physically encounter it."

"Fire giants," I said with a shiver. "This rune would potentially draw the attention of... what?"

"You can call them storm giants," Haraldr said. "Their usual name is like the rune. Thurses."

"Right," I said. I had heard that name before.

"I'm sure I don't need to tell you that you'll need to take extra care with dampening your magical glow while working with this rune. Particularly now, when our Thors are away."

"Maybe I should wait-" I started to say, but Haraldr reached across the table to clasp my hand almost too tightly in his.

"We do not have the luxury of time," he said. "We need you, and that need grows by the day. Just, be careful."

"I will," I promised. But then I found myself blurting out, "what's the council meeting about?"

Haraldr frowned at me. It was the darkest look he'd given me since the two of us had started working together.

"I'm sorry," I said, but then backtracked again. "It's just, if you need me to move so quickly from beginner to master volva, shouldn't you also need me to be aware of what's going on?"

"Not in this," he said. "Not everything that happens in Villmark concerns you."

"Okay," I said. But I felt more than a little hurt. What didn't concern me in Villmark? Trading issues or contract disputes or something similar?

But anything like that, he could just tell me. He could safely rely on the boring nature of the business to kill my interest.

"I know you're distracted by your plans for the evening," he said as he wiped his hands on his napkin. I was suddenly sure the council meeting was about my planned evening down in Runde. But then Haraldr gave me a sharp look as if he knew what I was thinking and was really hoping he didn't have to say again that not everything concerned me.

"I have my afternoon wide open," I said, picking up the card and putting it carefully into my pocket. "I'll get started on this right away."

"Don't push too hard," he said, the severe expression on his face finally softening. "I said you'd earned a day off and I meant it. Just see how it feels to you today. The real work can start tomorrow, when you will be less distracted."

"I can do that," I said, and we both got up from the table. I expected him to hurry away, but instead he walked me to the door and watched as I bundled up against the cold.

"Make the most of your time this evening," he said. I nodded, but my mind was running overtime trying to analyze his tone. Did he mean to make the most of it because it wouldn't be happening again for a long, long time?

No, surely he just meant to enjoy it because I had earned it.

He all but shoved me out the door before I had quite settled on which of those two scenarios I thought were true.

I looked down to see Mjolner sitting on the doormat next to me, ready to go home.

The minute we were back in our house, he returned to his nap on the pillow by the fire. I headed to my easel in the corner of the room and clamped a fresh pad of paper into place.

But I didn't start drawing right away. Instead, I closed my eyes and focused on my magical glow. My raw power shone bright and had a tendency to attract trouble of the magic-seeing and magic-wielding variety if I wasn't careful.

Luckily, I had gotten good at being careful. But this time, I made extra sure that none of my magic was shining out like a beacon. The last thing I needed was to attract an army of storm giants.

Only when I was positive that I was contained did I open my eyes and look at the blank page before me.

I started with my darkest, angriest, smudgiest charcoal. It felt appropriate for chaos.

I drew the rune over and over, rubbing the charcoal into the page with the edges of my hands until the shapes of the letters overlapped into dark gray storm clouds. I could feel the power of it, immensely strong but nearly impossible to control.

A little shiver ran up my spine when I realized what I had just thought to myself. Nearly impossible. Not impossible.

Thoughts like that were likely to get me into trouble.

I tore the top page away and began again.

By the time I stopped at sundown, there was a small mountain of discarded pages all around my feet. And my hands were black with charcoal past my wrists and halfway up to my elbows.

But I felt good. I felt like I'd just spent hours exploring this new shapeless power, figuring out how I and it fit together. I was getting good at this rune thing.

I went into my bathroom to scrub the charcoal from my hands, then looked at myself in the mirror. I only wanted to know if I had gotten any on my face. Of course I had, but that wasn't what caught my eye.

I leaned in to examine my reflection. Did I look different?

I felt like I looked different. But I couldn't point to any one change.

My hair was a tangled mass of red curls I should really make more of an effort to brush out whenever I put on and then took off my winter hat. It wasn't a good look, but it sadly also wasn't a new one for me.

My eyes were the same. I scrubbed the charcoal off my forehead with the corner of a washcloth, but the skin underneath was the same as ever.

Maybe I just felt different. I certainly felt more confident than I had the last time I had been in Runde. I was getting the hang of this magic thing. I wasn't remotely ready to take up my grandmother's mantle, but I was also far beyond what I had been capable of the last time I had seen my Runde friends.

Were they going to be able to tell?

Would they find it off-putting? Maybe even frightening?

I draped the washcloth over the side of my tub, then turned away from the mirror.

If I were being honest with myself, I wasn't really afraid that my friends would be terrified of me.

No, it would be bad enough if they just felt like I had outgrown them.

Not that I felt like I had. Not remotely.

But if they thought I felt that way, it would be just as bad as if I actually did feel that way. There would be a distance between us.

I really didn't want there to be a distance between us. I remembered all too well when my high school friends who had gone away to college had come back to visit. And there I had been, living in the same house, working the same job in the diner, taking art classes at the local college.

I knew how that distance felt from the other end of it. It was crushing. I had hated to be the one left behind.

I really didn't want to be the one leaving.

I gave myself a little shake, then headed to my bedroom to change into more festive clothing.

Because there was really only one thing I could do. I would just have to make sure that my Runde friends knew how much I loved and missed them. They were still a part of my life. Right now that was just through the letters that Loke was sneaking to me, but soon enough we'd be able to meet out in the open again, and not just for one evening.

Somehow, I had to let them know all that. And sadly for this, I couldn't really use magic. Or art. I would just have to be a really good friend.

I was pretty sure I could handle that. A normal night of mundane things was just what I needed.

But just in case anything abnormal happened, I tucked my new bronze wand up my sleeve before I left my house.