Murder on the Lake

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

This was going to be the last halfway warm day of the year, I just knew it. I could feel it in my bones. So instead of heading straight inside the meeting hall to find my grandmother as I was supposed to, I veered instead off towards the bank of the river. It was the best place I'd found so far to sense the magic of the world around me, but soon it would be too cold to sit there for more than a minute or two.

I was early to meet my grandmother anyway, and the sun was going to sink under the western hills soon enough. I could take a moment to bask.

Not that it was warm enough for sunbathing or anything. I was wearing a windbreaker over my hoodie for a reason, and the brisk breeze that had nipped at my cheeks from the minute I had stepped out of my grandmother's cabin was even brisker when I approached the water. But any Minnesotan knows to make the most of Indian summer, because winter is never far behind.

I found my favorite flat boulder, high enough over the river so I didn't catch any of the spray from the water churning over the rocks below, but not so high that I couldn't hear that churning water's song. I sat down, crossed my legs, and closed my eyes.

The sun on my face felt warmer, although I could still feel the breeze twisting through my loose hair. It glowed redly through my eyelids, especially when I turned my face up to drink it in.

The smell of dried leaves slowly turning to dust filled the air. They had all lost their color some time ago, and there had been no rain in weeks, so they just covered the ground in a dusty, dry blanket. There was something to the smell, like a longing for that rain. Was there an opposite to the word petrichor? Because that felt like what I was smelling.

That, plus a hint of something else. Something like ozone after a lightning strike, but very faint, as if from long ago and far away. It eluded me when I tried to pinpoint it, but when I focused instead on the leaves around me it sneaked back into my perceptions.

Rather like the sounds of trucks passing on the highway bridge overhead, barely discernible over the sounds of the river before me, very easily ignored. Most days it was easier to hear the lake from where I was sitting, but not today. The breeze playing through my hair had no interest in stirring up that still water. Only the smallest of waves marred its dark gray surface.

But that wouldn't last. I could feel a pressure in the air, like something was building. Like a storm was brewing, although the skies were as calm as the water for as far as could be seen from the shore.

I had mentioned this feeling to my grandmother just that morning, and she had laughed it off. Storms didn't brew over the lake and then blow ashore; they came in from the west, from over land.

I supposed she was right. She had lived here all her life, after all. But still, there was a pressure against my eardrums that had been building all day. Something was about to happen. Something was about to change.

Without consciously deciding this was the moment to do so, I sank into a deeper state. The cold of the stone beneath me faded away, as did the sounds from the river. The red of the sunlight against my eyelids became something else, a ghostly tracing of forms around me. The trees on the bank on the far side of the river. The fish darting between the rocks below me.

After weeks and weeks of working so hard to master this skill, it was easy now, as automatic as smelling the leaves in the air. It was just there, this whole magical world. Once I had glimpsed it, it had become a part of me. Every living thing was something golden and beautiful, because every living thing had something of magic within it.

The bridge above me and the cars and trucks it carried over our little lakeside village didn't show up, save for the little magical glow from the humans and occasional live cargo they contained. In this state, it was as if I were sitting on the riverbank as it had existed for all the centuries before people had settled here. Just me and life itself.

But there was a brighter glow from behind me that bathed everything around me. This was entirely people-made and the strongest magic of all: the Runde meeting hall, soon to be transformed into the mead hall that served Runde and Villmark both. The only thing I had yet seen that held more magic was the sacred fire in the cave behind the waterfall. The fire that my ancestress Torfa had created centuries before.

That fire generated its own magic now through a means even my grandmother didn't understand. But the meeting hall did not. That had to be renewed, the spells recast every day at sunset.

I felt a shiver dance up my spine, and the wind in my hair had a decided chill to it now. I blinked away the magical tracings, found the more mundane red glow no longer shining through my eyelids, and opened my eyes to see the sun had gone down behind the hills.

Time to help my grandmother recast those spells.

I got up from the rock, dusted off the back of my jeans, and headed back up the narrow path from the river bank to the empty meeting hall parking lot.

The meeting hall was a drab place during the day. The old tables were all off-balance, tipping under any weight at all, and every chair sported multiple duct tape repairs, holding the plastic seats together over the scant padding. Brown water stains of various sizes marred the ceiling tiles above, and the light fixtures were equipped with the most horrific of fluorescent bulbs, bathing everything in a sickly greenish-yellow light. I would be hard-pressed to imagine a less welcoming-looking place if I tried.

Somehow, the Halloween decorations that Michelle and Jessica had helped me hang earlier that afternoon just made it all look sadder. Like the grinning Jack-o'-lanterns and bright bundles of multicolored cobs of corn were just trying too hard. This was no place to throw a warm and festive party.

"Ready?" my grandmother asked me as I stepped up to her bar. She was sipping at a mug of what I guessed was hot cider. I could smell cinnamon and cloves.

"I still feel that storm brewing," I said. "You're sure there's nothing going on?"

"Weather has its own power," she said, then took one last sip before setting the mug aside. "It's not magic. Well, not usually. You're noticing it more because you're still new to this. Everything probably feels like it's shouting at you." She raised a questioning eyebrow, but I just shrugged. The only thing grabbing my attention lately was whatever was brewing just out of sight over the eastern horizon. "Definitely keep turning your attention to it when you're meditating. Knowing what you feel now and comparing that to what happens in the future, that's how you'll build the sort of experience I'm talking about."

"Makes sense," I said. "Should I be keeping a journal or something?"

My grandmother blinked at me in surprise. "Aren't you already?"

"What?" I asked. "You never told me to."

"No, I mean, you sketch in your book. I've seen you drawing multiple pages in a rush every time you go upstairs to your room after we meditate together," she said.

"I do," I said. "I guess that is a journal of sorts."

"For you, it's ideal. You are a more visual thinker. It suits you," she said.

"And you?" I asked. "Do you keep a journal?"

She gave me a sly grin, then tipped her head towards one of the cut-outs of a witch with HAPPY HALLOWEEN scrawled on a banner that rippled over her pointy boots. "A witch never tells all her secrets," she said. "Now, shall we?"

I nodded and headed to the center of the room. My grandmother could cast these spells from anywhere, but I still liked to feel centered first. It didn't matter much in the drab meeting hall, with each of the water-stained tiles much like the others in an endless grid overhead. But in the mead hall I would be in the center of the space, between the two long tables with their benches, equidistant between the roaring fire on the hearth to the north and the mountainous pyramid of beer barrels stacked against the southern wall.

The first spell changed the look of the space around us. It wasn't casting an illusion, though. Neither the meeting hall nor the mead hall was a mirage; they were both totally real and they both really existed in this spot where we were standing. I still couldn't quite wrap my head around that. The closest way to describe it is holding two overlapping film negatives up to the light. By focusing on one or the other, it was just possible to tune out the other one, but they were both always there. Our spell was really just a way to make everyone who entered the hall focus on the same image.

Not everyone was affected the same. That had been the second mind-blowing thing my grandmother had dropped on me. The fact that some Villmarkers came down from their village to visit what looked to them like an ugly pre-fabbed pole barn several decades past its prime was hard enough to imagine. But as my grandmother said, they were looking for the exotic, and that was what their minds stubbornly insisted they see.

But the residents of Runde who also saw only the drab hall they knew from the daytime? What was the draw for them?

Just the beer and the company, my grandmother had said.

Not that it mattered much what the people of Runde saw when they came after dark, because the second layer of spells we worked together were spells of forgetting. No one in the modern world could be allowed to walk around remembering that the night before they had been in a Viking long house drinking with actual Vikings. Not if we were going to keep Villmark safe.

Keeping Villmark safe was the sworn duty of the volva. That was my grandmother's office currently, and someday it might be mine as well, so we put extra care into maintaining those spells. But still, it was a little sad. All of my Runde friends visited somewhere amazing on a regular basis, but aside from some vivid dreams, they never recalled it the next morning.

There were more spells after the forgetting layer was in place, but they were smaller. Spells to keep the cold and wind out and the warmth in, spells to keep the beer fresh and the barrels never-emptying, spells to keep violence at bay. Patrons might get annoyed with each other, but no disagreement ever came to blows, not when my grandmother was in charge.

At first my role in this casting had been more as an observer, but the last few nights my grandmother had passed more and more of the work over to me. I could feel her magic supporting me, like her hands over mine on the rolling pin when we had baked cookies together when I was a little girl.

I felt that support again as I wove the spells together, but then all of a sudden it was just gone. I wanted to open my eyes and make sure my grandmother was okay, but in my magical sight I could see the spells starting to pull apart, unravelling like a scrap of knitting.

I couldn't sense my grandmother, and that had never happened before. But I had to lunge for that spellwork first. We didn't cast spells anew in the evening. Everything we did built on what was already there. If I let it go now, years of work could be reduced to nothing. Decades, even. I had to hold it together, finish each spell off and ground it into the hall itself, before I could even think of turning my attention to my grandmother.

But the back of my mind was still capable of worrying. Even as I traced patterns with my hands, moving in the physical and the magical worlds at once because I was still too new at this to do it all in my head, I worried.

My grandmother was old, older than I knew. She was in amazing shape and looked like she could continue on until the end of time, but surely that wasn't really true. Someday even she would falter with age. But surely not today?

I double-checked all my work before finally opening my eyes, sucking in a breath as if coming up from a deep dive far under water.

And saw my grandmother standing there, as healthy as ever, grinning at me.

"That was a test?" I asked.

"That was a test," she agreed. She was looking around as if at the rafters that supported the thatched roof above us, but I knew she was really checking my spells.

"Did I pass?" I asked.

"Of course you passed," she said. "Look around you. Self-assess."

"Well, obviously," I said. Everything looked like it should, and I could feel the warmth of the fire at my back even halfway across the room. The air smelled of the beer that never washed out of the wood of the tables and floors, and faintly of roasted meat, although nothing was currently cooking. "I know I didn't fail, but how well did I do?"

My grandmother just tisked and turned to head back to her bar to check on her mead.

I wasn't fishing for compliments; I swear. Just a little bit of feedback, that was all I wanted.

But as usual with my grandmother, I had to get by without it. I hadn't failed. For now, that was good enough.