Slaying on the Lake Shore

CHAPTER 1 In some parts of the world, March might be the beginning of spring, but on the shores of Lake Superior, it is still very much winter. The sun is higher in the sky, and the days are longer, but none of that seems to be enough to warm the bones. Take Frór's cabin, where my grandmother and I were staying as she recovered from overusing her magic. The cabin walls were of sturdy stone, the thick glass windows tight, and every room kept warm by its own fireplace. But that was because it had to be. Frór had built it on a promontory of rock that jutted out over the cold water. We were dozens of feet above lake level, but the chill Superior winds still whipped around us on three sides. If anything, they were stronger because of the height. You had to watch your hat on good days. On bad days, you had to watch for waves. Yes, even nearly a hundred feet up. It was too cold to mess with even a bit of spray wetting your clothes, but walls of water washing over the yard weren't unheard of either. Not that I had seen it. The weather hadn't been bad at all for as long as my grandmother and I had been there. It hadn't been warm or particularly sunny, but there had been no bad storms either. No drifts of snow taller than I was barricading the door or blinding winds making walking into town too risky because the road was so hard to keep in sight. But it was cold. Cold and gray. And not a lot of fun to draw. But even that was okay for me. I hadn't done a lot of drawing from my imagination since leaving St. Paul for Runde and the Viking-era village of Villmark that hid beyond Runde. There had been so much to see and sketch around me, I had just never gotten back to drawing my more customary illustrations of Norse myths and legends. Now I had a nice stack of finished work to add to my portfolio. And another stack of pen and ink drawings of the landscapes of the North Shore for my friend Jessica to sell for me in her café. All I needed to do was get them to her. But I had no idea when I'd be able to get back to Runde. It depended on my grandmother. I looked up from my work at my easel to where my grandmother sat in the window seat across the room from me. She was curled up in a woolen blanket, a mug of spiced cider in her hands, and a book spread open across her knees. My polydactyl black cat, Mjolner, was curled up sleeping on the window seat near her feet. But her eyes were, as they all too often were these days, staring out across the gray waters of the lake to the equally gray horizon beyond. Although they had an unfocused look, as if she wasn't really seeing any of that, anyway. Even her customary long braid of thick white hair was more loosely woven as it draped forward over her shoulder. Not untidy, just very relaxed. Which was weird for my grandmother. I was used to watching her run two towns in two different worlds, not chilling out with a good book. I sighed, filling my lungs with the fresh smell of wood smoke from the fireplace, a lovely smell that still never quite conquered the underlying mustiness of the old cabin. I picked up my mug and drained the last of my own measure of spiced cider. The apples used had been so tart that drinking the cider almost made me more thirsty than I had been before. But the sweetness combined with the spiciness of the cinnamon and ginger and cloves was warming. At least, when I remembered to drink it before it got chilled, like it had now. The pan of cider was still on the stove, gently simmering, but I opted not to get myself a second mug. The sun was dipping low in the sky, and it was nearly time for my evening walk. "Mormor, do you want a warm up?" I asked her. She took a long moment to tear her eyes away from the window before giving me a puzzled look. But then she glanced down at her nearly empty mug before holding it out for me. "Yes, thank you, Ingrid," she said. Then she looked down at the book on her lap as if its presence confused her as well. "I'll put what's left of last night's soup on the back burner before I go so we can eat when I get back," I said as I poured the last of the cider into her mug, then brought it back to her. It was a small cabin, one multifunction room below and three tiny bedrooms in a row across the loft above, but I didn't mind it. My grandmother was easy to spend a day with. She had a sixth sense for when I was in the flow with my work and shouldn't be disturbed, and when I was just going through the motions, or doing something fussy but not too mentally taxing when I could both draw and carry on a conversation at once. Maybe you'd have to be an artist yourself to understand how amazing and rare that ability is. But she had it in spades. My grandmother took the mug of cider from me and brought it close to her face to inhale the spices with a smile, but she didn't yet take a sip. "How is Andrew doing?" she asked me instead. "Everyone in Runde is doing great," I told her. "Of course they wonder when we'll be back, but they understand these things take time." I thought that was a pretty solid hint, but when my grandmother just hmmed and went back to staring out the window, I knew I had been too subtle. To my semitrained eyes, my grandmother seemed entirely recovered from where she had been after the spells on her mead hall had come crashing down. I couldn't imagine what more had to happen before we could go home. But my grandmother had been dodging even direct inquiries into how she was doing, so I had stopped asking. She would be ready when she was ready, and in the meantime, I had my studies in magic and my art to pass the time. But I couldn't shake the feeling that she was completely recovered. That she wasn't waiting to feel well again, because she already was well. That she was waiting for something else. But I didn't know what that might be. So I just took the container of leftover soup out of our rudimentary icebox and poured it into the cast-iron pot that always sat on the back burner of the gas stove. I left it on the lowest possible simmer, then headed to the mudroom to get all my wind-proof layers on before heading out into the fading day. Mjolner lifted his head to look at me briefly. Then he resumed his nap. I couldn't blame him. He looked really cozy there with my grandmother. The wind hit me at once, chapping the skin of my already reddened cheeks and nipping at my ears. I pulled my wool hat lower to cover my earlobes, then turned away from the road that led from town straight to our front door to follow a narrower track that worked its way down to the shore in a series of steep switch-backs. Since the promontory jutted out almost directly eastward, I was out of the rays of the setting sun the minute I started down the first leg of the path. But I was only getting the wind from two directions now and not three. Believe me, that made a difference. My hat stayed on, and my hood stayed up over it, with both my hands free in case I stumbled on the path. Which happened more than I'd like to admit. The rocks could get icy, but you'd never know it to look at them. It was a pretty treacherous walk to take every single afternoon. But the shore below was the only place my cellphone could catch a signal. And that was my only lifeline to my Runde friends. I could see ships on the horizon as I walked. Most were following the routes of cargo ships on Lake Superior, but others were of a different kind all together. Ocean-faring ships, and not modern ones. Not that I could see the details from so far out. But I could smell the salty tang of seawater and hear the calls of unfamiliar birds. The magic of this place connected a few different places. At least one had an ocean coast, but I had no idea which one. Not even my grandmother knew. Some months ago and quite a bit further inland, I had walked part of a road that led up into distant mountains and eventually to Old Norway, if only a very small part of that road. And I had watched my friend Thorbjorn and his four brothers fight trolls on a hillside that had felt like Icelandic volcanic ground to me. But I had no clue how to tell one body of water from another. Maybe if I caught a fish. I was distracted from my thoughts by the sudden buzzing of my phone in my back pocket. I didn't take it out. The closer I got to the shore, the icier the path became and the more I needed to stay alert with my hands at the ready. But I counted the buzzes. A lot of texts since I had been down here last the day before. I smiled. My friends missed me. Which was nice. Because I really missed them. At last I reached the shore. The waves were pretty calm at the moment, but even that was enough to leave a cold mist in the air. My windbreaker kept me dry until I found the nook in the cliff-side where my favorite sitting rock waited for me. Out of the wind, mostly out of the mist, and smooth enough to be comfortable if a bit cold. I settled in and finally took out my phone. All the texts were from Andrew, and I had a feeling I knew what they would be about before I even had my password typed in. Sure enough, the shadow box job he had agreed to do for Jessica had developed yet another wrinkle. I grinned as I scrolled through the texts. I had been in a similar place in a job I had done once for a friend, doing illustrations on spec for a children's book they had never actually published in the end. Jessica, like my writer friend, had given only a vague idea of what they were looking for, promising that whatever was delivered would surely be perfect, because Andrew, like me, was a talented artist. But with every conversation since it became more and more clear that Jessica, like my writer friend, had very specific ideas about what they wanted. They just weren't very good at communicating them. So I felt Andrew's pain. I had no idea that Jessica, who always seemed so laid back, was at the core a bit of a control freak. But I suppose you'd have to be to run your own business at twenty-four. He had included photos of the boxes he had made so far, and they were really lovely. Jessica wanted to put little knickknacks in them, antique souvenirs her mother had collected over the years from different places up and down the North Shore. What Andrew was doing—using found wood he sourced locally, each piece having a whole story behind it about where the wood came from and how it had been used before it had become a shadow box—was really quite cool. "If she makes you start from scratch, I'll buy those from you," I texted him. I didn't know what I'd do with them. They were far too small for art supplies to fit in them, but I could take up miniature painting or something. I even knew just where I'd hang them in my Villmark house. "I just might take you up on that," Andrew texted back, with an eye-roll emoji. "How's she doing otherwise?" I texted, then waited. I had a single bar here when I had any at all, and making an actual phone call had proven impossible the couple of times we had tried it. For his part, Andrew had to walk out to a particular stretch of shoreline near his house, so both of us were outside now, under the same darkening skies. "She's good. Michelle too. Loke says you're good when he sees you?" he answered. I chuckled, then typed. "You're wise to doubt him. It's been more than two weeks since he was last here. I have a stack of drawings for Jessica's café, but no way to get them to her." "Send me pics," he texted back at once. I scrolled through my photos. I hadn't taken pictures of them all, but I had one or two. I picked one I particularly liked of Freya in her chariot drawn by Norwegian forest cats. "Hope this works," I texted, because for whatever reason he had a better time sending pics my way than the other way around. And indeed, the text with the photo didn't go through. And that one bar disappeared entirely. I sighed and put my phone away. The stars were coming out already, but it felt like we'd barely spoken to each other. So much time was lost waiting for the messages to get across to each other. It was frustrating. But I reminded myself this was just one moment in time. Eventually, it would end. Even if it did feel like I'd pressed pause on my life just when it was getting interesting. Without the phone to distract me, the stone underneath me suddenly seemed much colder. I slid down off the rock, but my eyes were up on the sky. The stars shone brightly, the clouds that had been thick for days finally breaking apart and exposing large swaths of indigo skies. Somewhere to the south of me, Andrew was probably looking up at them, too. If only I could get them to carry messages for me. I snugged my jacket hood more tightly over my woolen hat, then started the long slog back up the promontory to the cabin above.