Bloodshed in the Forest

Chapter 1

1

For January in northern Minnesota, we hadn't gotten much snow yet. Face-biting cold, on the other hand? We had had more than our share of that.

But if you dressed for the weather, it really wasn't that bad. The sun was shining brightly, and while it didn't lend the world below any heat, it did sparkle off of the snow in a way that warmed the soul. The sun glinting off of individual flakes in the drifts of snow created bright hints of silver and blue to what would otherwise be overwhelming whiteness or even grayness on an overcast day.

And the forest I was walking through was mainly firs and pines, their limbs as green as ever under their thin blankets of snow.

The glinting snow and the bright sun were probably why I didn't feel the slightest bit afraid, although I knew I should at least be a little nervous. Sure, I had been in these woods before, but never alone. And I had promised Thorbjorn never to walk to my little cottage in the forest clearing without him.

But I was breaking that promise now.

Not that my goal was getting to my cottage, although I was heading that way. No, the point of this little walk was to prove to myself that I could do it safely.

I had no weapons with me, but that didn't matter. The danger that I worried about in that moment came from within myself.

If I didn't learn how to contain the radiating attraction to supernatural beings that emanated from my own growing magical power, I wasn't going to be safe anywhere for long.

Nearly summoning fire giants into the village of Villmark had taught me that lesson all too clearly. Which was why I couldn't bring myself to tell Thorbjorn that I was breaking his promise now. I wasn't ready to tell him about my part in his encounter with those fire giants. I wanted to be sure, very sure, that I had solved the problem first. I wanted to be able to tell him with total confidence that it would never happen again.

It had only been a few weeks, and this was my first real test. But to my surprise, I was feeling more confident in myself than I had expected, given the circumstances.

My mentor Haraldr had no magic himself, which was a huge obstacle in his teaching me how to control my own magic. But he had read every single text in the village that pertained to magic as we volvas practiced it, as well as other tomes which I had no idea how he had acquired. Did he have an antique bookdealer somewhere in the modern world who found them for him?

Because they weren't from our Nordic ancestors; they came from cultures all over Europe and some from even further away. And they were clearly very old.

Most of them were written in languages I couldn't read, so I relied on him to tell me what they said. And for his part, he didn't understand the concepts he had read about in any visceral way. He had to rely on my personal experience, limited as it was.

It was like he was a blind person trying to describe color based just on what he'd read. He could connect a bunch of ideas, like knowing which paints to mix to get the color he wanted, but he didn't really know what the experience of implementing those ideas would look like. He couldn't see what he was painting.

But I could see it. So after a little trial and error, the two of us had worked out what I needed to focus on to keep my magic within a tight sphere around me. I still glowed to anyone who could see such power if they were close enough to me, but I no longer radiated like a pillar of light up to the sky and through even the densest of forests, visible for miles around.

It felt very strange, holding my magic in like that. As if in sympathy to that muffling, I walked with my head down, crunching through the icy snow. Powdery sparkles kept raining down on me from the trees as I passed under them. It was like I was in the world's largest snow globe.

The surrounding forest absorbed every sound so that my own footsteps seemed like they reached my ears from far away. There was no birdsong, no chattering of squirrels, nothing.

At least my own breath was quiet in my ears, because it literally was muffled. The air was hurt-your-face cold, so I had wrapped layer after layer of wool scarf around my head. My parka was zipped up to my nose, and my hat rested low on my eyebrows, but I had wrapped that scarf around both as well as nearly everything in between, leaving just a slit for my eyes. It was cozy under all that, even if it smelled like damp wool from the moisture of my own breath.

And I kept getting fibers from it stuck on my tongue. Wet wool is definitely not my favorite flavor.

At last I reached the clearing where my cottage stood. It looked so different since the last time I had seen it. All the wood carvings were gone, leaving nothing but an expanse of white snow. That undisturbed snow ringed by birch trees bereft of leaves made the clearing seem larger than before.

But there was one thing that was the same as the last time I had seen it.

Loke was there.

"Hey, you," I said. I'm not sure he heard a bit of that, so I pulled down my bottom layers of scarf and tucked them under my chin. "I haven't seen you in days."

"I'm sorry, Ingy. Esja told me you needed my help," he said. He was still dressed all in black, if a bit more warmly than usual in a long wool coat with a tall collar buttoned up over the bottom of his face. He even had a black knit cap on his head.

"I did. Days ago," I said. "But then I'm sure Esja has filled you in on everything."

"Indeed. You've been by every day, she tells me," he said. "Now you are heading out to the secret hamlet west of here, yes?"

"Trust you to already know all about a secret hamlet," I grumbled. "But, yes."

He made a gesture inviting himself to accompany me, and I nodded, then pulled the wool back up over my face. My cheeks were already aching from those few seconds of exposure to the frigid air.

"I don't suppose you'll tell me where you were?" I said.

"I had some things to attend to," he said vaguely. I barked out a laugh, and he looked over at me, both eyebrows raised high.

"Sorry," I said. "It's just when you say that, I remember how Gandalf kept disappearing when Bilbo needed him. It seemed random at the time, and it annoyed me more than it did Bilbo when I read that book as a kid. But when I got older and read the other books, I realized it was because Gandalf was fighting a greater danger than Bilbo ever knew. So tell me, have you been fighting ancient evil?"

"Nothing so exciting as all that," he said with a laugh, but then fell silent without telling me more.

"Are you coming on the hunting trip?" I asked.

"The big to-do with the Thors and their cousins the Freyas? Not really my sort of thing," he said.

"The Freyas?" I asked.

"You don't know your hosts?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I know that Thorbjorn's mother and her sister inherited the lodge from their parents, and that they bring all their kids there every winter just after Jule to hunt. But that's it."

"Thorbjorn has five cousins, all girls," Loke said.

"All named some derivative of Freya," I guessed.

"Freyja, Freydis, Freylaug, Freygunnar and Frigg," he said. "Apparently four deep is as far as Jóra would dig down the Freya well."

"I've not met any of them yet," I said. "You don't like them?"

"I never said that," he said. "It's just not my scene." He looked over at me. "You'll probably fit in with them just fine. But a couple of them are married to the sort of men who hang at Aldis' mead hall."

"If that's the case, I'm not going to fit in," I said, suddenly miserable. I had been looking forward to this trip away from Haraldr and his daily lessons, but now I wasn't so sure this was going to be the break I wanted.

"You know, you might be looking at this thing all wrong," Loke said.

"What do you mean?"

"I know it's hard because they are prejudiced against you, and that's a big obstacle. But if you can win those guys over, no one else in Villmark will ever speak against you," he said. "You already have the council in your corner, after all. With these guys behind you too, you'll have the support of all of Villmark."

"But that's just it. I don't think I can win these guys over," I said glumly. "They still look at me like my Villmarker Norse is an assault on their ears."

"You just need the right opportunity," he said with a shrug. "A chance to show them what you can really do."

"It sounds to me like you're wishing trouble on me," I said. "Right after you told me you won't even be there if I need you."

"I never said that," he said, pretending to be offended. "I'll be there if you need me, and if I am able to answer your call. But for the hunting and feasting and the telling of tales around the fire? Sorry, I'd rather give it a miss."

"This isn't the way we went before," I said, suddenly realizing the surrounding forest was not what I remembered. The trees were all tall pines, the lowest of the branches high overhead. And we weren't walking up and down rocky slopes. The forest floor here was pretty flat.

"No, when you were following Solvi to the troll pass, you went nearly straight north," he said. "As much as such things mean anything in this part of the world. But that's a dangerous path, and not the way we're going. Look, see the sun up there?"

I nodded.

"We're going west," he told me. "The Villmarker families with hunting lodges all have them directly west of the village, scattered throughout the hills in that direction. Since we turned west after reaching your cottage first, we're north of all that, but not so far north as to be straying into troll territory. And that's where the outcasts hide."

When he said the last, he pointed straight ahead of us. It took me a moment to make out the outlines of a cluster of log cabins built in a rough circle, almost completely cloaked by tall pine trees with wide, dense branches that wove together as if to protect those homes from view from above.

"And there's Haraldr," I said, raising a mittened hand to wave hello to the old man waiting at the end of the path through the snow we were now following. He returned the gesture very briefly, then huddled back inside his voluminous cloak.

"You're here to see Signi. That's her cabin there," Loke said, pointing to the cabin just behind Haraldr.

"How many people live here?" I asked.

"Only about a dozen," he said. "A few couples share a cabin, but no one here has any children. They aren't happy people, Ingy."

"Why do they live here and not in Villmark?" I asked.

"I imagine if you asked them that, they'd all have a different answer," he said. "Some even have family back in town who think they're either long dead or gone for good, lost to the modern world. And yet here they are, all so close to home but never setting foot there."

As we trudged over the snow to Haraldr, a man appeared out of the forest to our left. He had a couple of dead rabbits slung over his shoulder, but no sign of a weapon. I supposed he must've trapped them. He stopped to speak with Haraldr at the side of the path.

"Hello," I said to Haraldr as we drew near enough for words. "Are we interrupting?"

"No, please," the man said, gesturing for me to take his place before Haraldr. Then he touched the edge of his hood like a man tipping his hat, and said, "thanks again," to Haraldr. He walked towards the center of the circle of cabins, then took a moment to get his bearings. All the cabins looked alike, with the doors and the windows the same size and in the same locations. It was like every cabin had come from the same kit, all matching with no hint of color or individuality at all. But at last he nodded to himself and walked up to one of the buildings, opening the door to disappear inside.

"That's Geiri," Haraldr told us. "He's our most recent returnee from your world. He’s only been back here from the Twin Cities for a few weeks."

"How long was he out in the world?" Loke asked.

"Let me see," Haraldr said, tapping his mittened fingers against his lips. "Nearly two decades."

"How's he readjusting?" Loke asked.

"Well enough," Haraldr said absentmindedly, as if his brain had already gone on to something else. "Were you planning on joining us today, Loke?"

"Oh, no," Loke said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I was just catching up with Ingrid. Don't mind me."

But as I followed Haraldr around the side of the cabin to the front door that faced the center of the circle of cabins, Loke stayed in step close beside me.

"Are you up to something?" I asked him suspiciously.

He looked like he was pondering his answer, and I stopped walking to turn and face him. Haraldr was tromping up the steps to the cabin door behind me, but I kept my own focus trained on Loke.

Then I heard a door slamming open. Not the one behind me, but the one from the cabin next door. Loke and I both jumped at the sound, turning our heads to watch a giant of a man dressed in layers of furs kick the door closed behind him before heading across the circular clearing to disappear into the woods on the far side of the little village.

"Didn't even say hello," Loke said with mock hurt.

"Who?" I asked.

"Oh, never mind," he said with another little wave. "I'm sure you two will cross paths soon enough, although I did hope to be here when it happened. Well, I still might. But in the meantime, Haraldr is waiting for you."

"Loke, what are you hiding from me?" I demanded.

But he just grinned. "Me? Hiding something? As if I would."

Then he turned and walked away. He disappeared from view long before someone wearing all black in a winter landscape should be able to.

But I wasn't frightened. Knowing Loke, his little secret was just some bit of mischief. Nothing of real danger.

I turned to follow Haraldr into Signi's cabin.