Chapter 6
1148 Words
I tried to do as Haraldr asked me. I tried to meditate on the rune Fe, but nothing I did forged any feeling of connection within me.
I tried just sitting on the rug in front of my fireplace, the rune on its card resting on the floor in front of me, my eyes sort of focused on the flames of the fire as I settled into a deeper and deeper meditative state. But after more than an hour of that, I gave it up. Nothing was happening.
I ate a little lunch of toast and apple slices with honey, then went upstairs to see if taking a nap would help. I told myself this was because Haraldr had specifically mentioned dreams, but mainly it was just that after two nights of little sleep I was really tired.
When I got up again some time later, I felt rested, but had no memory of dreaming about anything in particular.
I got back into my coat and boots and headed outside to take a walk through the village. Haraldr had said I might find myself seeing the rune everywhere, but even when I was looking for things that reminded me of its shape, I saw nothing that struck any sort of magical resonance with me.
Still, I came home with a basket full of fresh food from the marketplace, and I had chatted with several of my fellow Villmarkers, so the afternoon wasn"t a complete waste. My Villmarker Norse was still far from fluent, but everyone was kind and perfectly willing to switch to English to help me out when I got stuck.
The sun was setting, and it was nearing dinnertime. I was tempted to head back to the mead hall and see if anyone was there, but in the end I decided not to. I needed to stick with my task, as futile as it felt. I looked over what I had bought at the market and decided to break out my ancestral cookware and make some potato soup.
The cooking felt normal enough. I had traded off that chore with my mother when she had been alive, and later with my grandmother down in Runde. I was no master chef, but I could make a range of basic meals. The routine felt normal. Homey.
But when I sat down at my table to eat with no one sitting across from me, that felt really weird. Like the house around me had suddenly gotten much larger, larger and emptier, its cavernous spaces echoing every scrape of my spoon against my bowl as I ate.
This was going to take some getting used to. It would help if Mjolner was there, but he had disappeared while I was talking with Haraldr and had yet to reappear.
Maybe he was in Runde visiting Jessica. That thought brought a stab to my heart, and I had to quickly push it away. Thinking of Jessica was going to lead to thinking about Andrew. And that would lead away from thinking about what I was here to do.
I drew a little Fe in the surface of my thick soup with the tip of my spoon and watched as it quickly filled back in. But even eating where it had been didn"t make me feel closer to it. Not that I had expected it would.
After dinner I did the washing up, then went back into the great room. I looked at the cat bed, still empty. Then I wandered over to the south-facing windows. I looked down the slope of the hill, past the edges of the village proper to the low, rolling hills beyond.
I could just make out the trees that marked the location of Loke"s house. I had yet to visit that house or meet his sister. I had neglected to ask about her when I had seen Loke the night before, but he had seemed in better spirits than he had been in for a long time. Surely that was a good sign. Perhaps I would meet her soon.
Finally, I turned away from the window and crossed the room to my art station. I clipped the card with the Fe drawing on it to the corner of my easel and looked at it for a moment. Then I looked over my supplies. Pen and ink seemed like the tools for this job. They were the ones I favored for my own work. I liked their unforgiving precision.
But after an hour or so, I had to admit I was not getting into my creative zone. I wasn"t drawing the rune; I was just repeatedly writing it. I put the ink away and mulled over my supplies grumpily for a minute before taking out my largest tablet of paper and my charcoal.
notI forced myself to see the rune as a collection of shapes and not like a letter I was trying to faithfully reproduce. It was not just another way of writing the letter F; it was something bigger.
I leaned into my work, using my fingertips and the sides of my hand to blend the charcoal as I drew the shapes that made Fe over and over again. This felt more like drawing than writing, at least. But the real creative zone was always just a little out of my reach.
Still, I persisted, filling page after page with dark, smudged drawings of overlapping Fe runes, large and small, backwards and forwards, right-side-up and upside-down.
I was vaguely aware that it had to be far past midnight. Weariness was starting to eat at the edges of my mind, and I knew that a third disrupted night"s sleep wasn"t going to be helpful at all.
But I felt so close to a breakthrough. Like my drawings were starting to almost get a little glow of magic to them. Magic that wasn"t coming from me, but was being revealed by my efforts.
It was the crudest outlines of a sensation, but I was afraid to turn my attention to it properly, like examining it too closely would make it all fade away. So I just pushed my tiredness aside and kept drawing, hoping that feeling would get closer and stronger.
I don"t know if that ever would"ve happened or if I was kidding myself. I didn"t get a chance to really test it. Because my concentration was shattered in an instant by a scream.
A woman"s scream. It tore apart the cold silence of the night like a sword slicing through an ice sculpture, leaving it all in pieces on the snowy ground.
And then, all too suddenly, it broke off, and the quiet of night came crashing back down like a pressure wave against my eardrums.
Someone was in trouble. And it might already be too late to help her.
I bolted for the door.
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