Slaying on the Lake Shore

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

The next day was Wednesday, the day someone always brought us supplies from Villmark.

That "someone" was supposed to be Loke and Roarr. They had volunteered for it. And for the first two weeks, they had come through.

Then on week three, it was just Roarr on his own with a vague story about Loke being tied up with something else. I didn't mind the lie. I knew Loke's sister was often unwell, and I also knew that Loke didn't like to talk about his family with others. I figured he had told a tale that I would see the truth in, but wouldn't require him to let Roarr in on the secret.

Then, on the fourth week, neither of them had turned up. Instead, two Villmarker young men had guided the ox cart up the track. I hadn't recognized either of them, and they hadn't offered their names.

They weren't as openly unfriendly as Raggi and his friends who advocated for a Villmark that never interacted with Runde at all. Those guys resented my grandmother and me both, although more so me since I had grown up outside of Villmark and only recently returned. But they weren't exactly friendly either.

They had a similarly vague story about Loke's absence, but neither of them knew anything about what was going on with Roarr. Perhaps he had just grown bored with a tiresome chore.

So as I walked out to the crossroads at the head of the promontory for the fifth time, I had no idea who I was actually waiting for. If it were finally Loke again, or even just Roarr, I could give either of them my drawings to deliver to Jessica. But I didn't bother getting my hopes up.

I left the wind and crash of waves behind me as I followed the road towards the mainland. As always, I felt an uneasiness in my stomach as I crossed the narrowest part of the promontory, where the rock was barely wider than the path. Eventually, all of this would give in to the wind and waves and fall away. A big chunk of Pictured Rocks on the Michigan side had fallen into the lake just a few summers ago. As much as that was almost certainly centuries away from happening here, if not millennia, I still hated walking across that particular bit.

Geological changes aside, it felt too much like a sudden burst of wind could carry me away. And it was a very long way down to a brutally rocky shore below. Long enough, I feared, time enough to regret tripping before meeting the rocks.

But after that narrow point, I was out on solid ground. The meadows around me were still snow-covered, but the hardy birch trees that dotted the side of the road here and there had shaken off their own white mantles. Their grayish-white branches reached up to the clear blue sky, as if stretching out before getting to the real work of growing green buds.

Soon. It would be spring soon.

I reached the point where the road to the cabin branched off from the main road that hugged the coast from the meadow over Runde to unimaginably distant points to the north, where the magic was stronger.

There was a stone marker set by the side of the road, although if it had ever had any writing on it, that had been worn smooth long ago. It wasn't large enough to sit on, but I stood beside it, leaning on the walking stick I had brought with me, and scanned the world around me for signs of life.

I saw someone walking from one patch of woods to another, but the gentle rolling of a few hills between me and them obscured all but their bright green hat. But it didn't matter. I knew who I was looking at.

It was Leifr, the boy who had been lost as a child and returned as a rather disturbed youth. He lived in the hidden village outside of Villmark, where the refugees who had returned from the modern world kept their own separate community. He lived with Signi, who had been a psychiatrist during her time in the modern world and still wrote articles from time to time.

I had never actually met him, but I was sure it was him. Villmarkers seldom came this far north, and never alone. But from what I had heard from others, Leifr had no fear of what lurked in the north. He might have been trapped there, but he hadn't been helpless.

Having a chat with him when I was back in Villmark was pretty high on my wishlist. But since coming out to the cabin, I had seen him from afar pretty much every time I had walked out to these meadows. The boy was restless, that was for sure.

I raised a hand in greeting, but as usual, he didn't seem to notice me. Or he didn't want me to know he saw me. I didn't know if he was shy or people-averse or if Signi just felt it was best to keep him away from others while she treated him for the trauma of his misplaced childhood.

I really wanted to talk to him.

"He sees you. I guess he just doesn't like you," a voice said out of nowhere in strongly accented Villmarker Norse. I jumped and yelped, spinning to see an old man standing with feet spread wide as if guarding the path to the north behind me as I had gazed to the south. He had a long, twisted staff planted on the ground in front of him, and the wind from the lake was whipping at his long cloak and the equally long garments he wore beneath. His battered, wide-brimmed hat was pulled low against that wind, and his face was mostly in shadow. All I could discern was a silvery-gray beard so long he wore it tucked into his belt.

More unsettling, he seemed to have only one eye. One eye that glinted too brightly out of the shadow under his hat brim.

"Do I know you?" I asked, more rudely than I had intended.

"I should hope so!" he said gruffly, but didn't go on to identify himself at all. If I had ever met him before in Villmark as an adult or during my childhood summer spent there, I couldn't recall him at all. And he looked like someone I would definitely remember.

"Do you know me?" I asked.

"Lost daughter of the oldest line. Scribbler of silliness. Dabbler in danger. Amateur wielder of paltry powers. Half-literate misinterpreter of runes. Or, if you will, Ingrid Torfudottir," he said, ending with a dismissive huff of breath.

My blood burned. But there was nothing I could say that wasn't going to sound childishly defensive.

I mean, he was actually pretty accurate. Cruel, but accurate.

"As if your presence weren't ruination enough of this fine spring day, here come these two layabouts. Wastes of space. Dodgers of dangerous crimes," he grumbled, far too loud to be speaking to himself.

I turned to look south again and saw the ox-cart of supplies just emerging from the wood on the far side of the meadow. A single ox plodded along at the yoke, head down as it worked. Walking on either side of it, minding the wheels as they tumbled in and out of the road's many ruts, were Loke and Roarr.

I turned back to the strange old man, still nameless in my mind. "What crimes are these?" I asked.

He just scoffed out another breath, as if the question was beneath his dignity to answer.

I left him standing there to run to the cart. Loke was underdressed as usual, in shirtsleeves with no hat. The wind tousled the waves of his chocolate brown hair but brought not a hint of color to his pale cheeks. And, as always, he was dressed all in black.

Roarr at least was dressed for the weather, if more like a Runde fisherman in modern work boots and a waterproof down jacket than the Villmarker he was.

"It's about time you turned back up," I said to Loke as soon as I was close enough to be heard. "I have a stack of drawings for you to take back to Jessica. As you promised."

"I know," he said. "Roarr and I are back on the job now."

"For this week, anyway," I grumbled.

"For as many weeks as it takes," Roarr swore dutifully.

But Loke was grinning at me. "How many weeks, do you think?"

"I have no idea," I admitted. "She seems better. And yet she never speaks of going home. Does someone from the council have to come out here and examine her first or something?"

"Gah, I hope not," Loke said with a grimace. "No one could know better than Nora when she's recovered. And no one is less inclined to lie about the state of things than she is either."

"She hid how poorly she was doing for a long time," Roarr pointed out, then gave me an apologetic look.

"No, you're right," I said. I was about to say more when Loke finally noticed the old man still standing in the middle of the road south of the fork.

"What's he doing here?" he asked in a harsh whisper.

"Whatever he pleases, Loke Grímsson," the man said, his voice booming over the whistle of the wind.

How had he even heard what Loke had said? It didn't seem possible over that distance. But I had seen stranger things since discovering Villmark.

"Who is he?" I asked Loke.

"His name is Odd Oddsen," Loke told me. "Some claim he was among the first settlers who came over from Norway with Torfa. And by 'some' I mean 'him'. He claims that."

It wasn't hard to tell that Loke didn't believe this was true. It didn't mesh with anything I'd learned in my magical studies, either. If living such an extended life were possible, surely my ancestress Torfa would've done it herself.

Unless it had taken all of her power just to protect Villmark. Although what she was protecting it from, I still didn't know.

There was so much I still didn't know.

Odd didn't speak to us again, but to my immediate displeasure he fell in step behind the ox-cart when we turned it towards the cabin. As annoying as the thought of him always guarding the northern road was, the idea of him being in the cozy cabin I shared amiably with my grandmother was even worse.

But as we drew closer, I saw my grandmother dressed in her warmest coat standing outside the cabin door. She had a wool hat pulled low over her head, and she was casually sipping at a mug of coffee as she watched us approach. But her white braid was once more down the center of her back, and very tightly plaited.

She wasn't waiting for us. I knew that in my bones. She was waiting for this Odd fellow. And she had braided her hair like a Valkyrie expecting battle.

"Nora," Odd called, touching the brim of his hat as he approached.

"Odd," she returned with the slightest of nods. "Ingrid is staying in your usual bedroom, but I'm sure you'll have no objection to the northern-most room." That last had a ring of command to it. She would brook no objections.

Odd grumbled to himself, but just nodded and pushed his way inside the cabin.

"He thinks I know him," I said to my grandmother. "I don't remember him at all."

"Not all your memories of your childhood days here have returned," she reminded me. But then she frowned. "Even so, I don't recall the two of you ever meeting. Odd always comes back to Villmark, but years go by between visits. Your time here was in one of those gaps."

"But he knows me," I said, and to my horror, heard how strangled those words sounded. My throat was too tight. But his assessment of me had really hurt.

Which was weird. As an artist, I knew how to deal with rejection, even brutal rejection. But this felt different. Why?

"He knows of you," she said. "Try not to let him disturb you too much. His visits are always short. Short, but troublesome."

I looked over to where Roarr and Loke were working together, unloading crates of food from the back of the cart and stacking it by the door for me to bring inside later. I stepped closer to my grandmother to whisper, "Loke says he's one of the first settlers here. Like, from the time of Torfa?"

"So people say," she said, more whimsically than I would've liked.

"Is it true?" I asked.

But she just smiled at me and shrugged, then went inside the cabin.

"Someday you'll be like that," Loke said with a grin. "All maddeningly vague answers and knowing smiles."

"You're one to talk," I shot back, then took the crate of milk bottles he held out to me to carry it inside the house.

I hoped my grandmother was right, that this Odd fellow's visit would be short.

But I was afraid her second prediction would prove right as well. That his visit would be troublesome. The mood inside the cabin was already inverting the world outside. While the sky had gone from stormy to clear, the homeyness of our snug little cabin had become downright claustrophobic.

I could see a lot more walks in my future.