Thief Eyes by Janni Lee Simner
The mead had soaked deep into the sand, but steam still rose from the spot. Svan dug a couple of other items out of his bag—a raven’s claw, a dull black stone—and tossed them into the backpack as well.
“I don’t need that stuff. I—”
Svan reached for my shoulder, thought better of it, and let his hand drop. His expression turned almost gentle. “You are my kinswoman. I will do what I can to protect you. I will hold him off as long as I can. Only you must make it worth it. Destroy the coin. Not only for the land’s sake. I felt the fire within you—Hallgerd’s spell could consume you, too, if you do not end it.”
My fire didn’t come from Hallgerd’s spell, but even now I didn’t say so. “What about you?” What did I care about him, after the way he’d attacked me?
A sly smile crossed the sorcerer’s face. “I may be an old man, but I have a few tricks left in me.” He cast a wry look Ari’s way. “Perhaps I’ll see if my poems have more worth than yours. If nothing else, it should make a good story.”
The fog was closer now. I heard footsteps crunching over the sand. Svan thrust the bag at me and I zipped it shut. “Thank you.”
“Go!” the sorcerer said. He grabbed his staff and walked toward the fog. “Hello there!” he called, as if greeting an old friend.
Ari looked at me. “Now we run?” he said.
“No.” I remembered Katrin’s words. You must never run from magic.
So we walked away this time, even as Svan disappeared into the fog behind us.
Chapter 11
We followed the dirt road, while the earth stilled and our shivering eased. When I glanced back, I saw only fog, no sign of either Svan or Freki’s master. The fog disappeared into the distance as we walked on. The moon cast a bright path over the water to our left. To our right, boulders and jumbled rocks lay at the base of the dark hills.
A sudden roar made me jump. Ari and I scrambled off the road as bright lights blinded us. I backed toward the hills, knowing there was nowhere to hide—
A truck rumbled by, tires crunching over the gravel. Ari let out a nervous laugh. I laughed, too, though my legs felt like rubber. I’d forgotten there were cars. Did I think the entire world had disappeared when Muninn spirited me away?
Ari stopped laughing and ran into the road, chasing the truck and calling after the driver. It was some sort of emergency vehicle, blue lights silently flashing. The driver didn’t even slow down, and the truck quickly disappeared out of sight. “Ah, well,” Ari said as I caught up with him. “So much for our ride.”
“The man in the fog,” I said, because suddenly it seemed safe to talk again. “Who was he?” Aside from being someone who I knew, down to my bones, that I didn’t want to anger.
Ari looked uneasily back the way we’d come. “I’m not sure I should name him. Just in case that would—you know—attract his attention. Look him up when we get back. A one-eyed man with a floppy hat. Before this all happened, I’d have told you he wasn’t real, either.” Ari hesitated. “Speaking of getting back, where are we going, Haley?”
I swallowed hard. “To your mom.” I still didn’t want to go to Katrin, but even though Svan had bought us some time, no way was I casting his spell. “I’ll give your mom the coin. She can send it back to Hallgerd, like she wanted to before I ran.”
Ari nodded. The gravel crunched beneath our feet. He reached into his jacket and fished something out from an inner pocket. A cell phone.
“Wait—you have a phone?” I stared as Ari powered it up. The phone’s white light seemed as unnatural as the rumbling truck.
“I tried to call out while you were sleeping. Couldn’t get a signal.” Ari frowned at the display. “We’re still out of range. I’ll keep trying. If we can figure out where we are, Mom can pick us up.”
Whatever happens, you can always call me. I hoped Katrin meant that, because right now we didn’t have much choice. I looked at the phone display over Ari’s shoulder. Once we got a signal, we’d know the time—the year. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.
Ari powered down the phone. The wind started back up, but the coals deep inside me kept me warm.
Ari shivered, though. “I’m sorry about your mom,” he said.
“Yeah, me too.” We walked around a patch of slick ice that shone beneath the bright moon.
“Also, I’m sorry I was an idiot about the mead,” Ari said.
“I think that one’s more my fault than yours.” For all I knew, Ari wouldn’t really have drunk it. He’d only said he was thinking about it.
Ari glanced back the way we’d come. “There are more important things than writing good poems.” He gave a wry smile. “I should know.”
“Hey, I liked your poem!”
Ari laughed. “It’s good that someone does.”
“No, really. I think it’s cool you write poetry.” I’d never been much of a writer. Staring at a blank page or a blank screen made me feel restless, like I should ditch the computer and go for a run instead.
Ari shrugged. “They’re more like songs than poems, anyway. And like the sorcerer said—they’re not very good.”
“You’re going to take his word for it?”
“No, here, I’ll show you.” Ari pulled a small notebook—the notebook he’d had at Thingvellir—from his back jeans pocket and handed it to me, along with his flashlight. He watched nervously as I opened it.
The pages were swollen and brittle, the words smudged with water. I realized it didn’t matter. I stared at the writing by the blue LED light, trying to make sense of it. “I can’t read Icelandic. I can only speak it.” I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice. Getting to speak a whole new language is pretty cool by itself. But I wanted to read Ari’s poetry.
“Heh. I bet no one was writing yet when that mead was brewed. I’m spared from you reading my terrible words, then.” Ari took the notebook back.
“I bet you’re good,” I said.
Ari tried to smooth down the pages, gave up, and shoved the notebook back into his pocket. “You’ll lose all your money making bets like that.”
“No, I mean it. Can you sing something for me?”
“When we get home. I’ll sing—and play—for you then.”
“You play, too?”
“Keyboard, mostly.” He brushed his pale bangs out of his face, looking uncomfortable. “Did you mean what you said? About needing me here?”
“Yeah.” A rockslide blocked the road. We walked on the sand to get around it. “But—I don’t know if I meant it like that.”
Ari nodded, as if he’d expected as much. That made me angry for some reason. “I don’t know that I didn’t mean it like that, either,” I snapped. “I just don’t know. You know?”
“Yeah,” Ari said, as if that had actually made sense.
I drew my arms around myself. “All I know is that we have to deal with that coin. After that …” My fingers dug for my palms. I forced them away. How am I supposed to go home without Mom? I can’t do this. “I don’t know what happens after that. Okay?”
Ari nodded again, more slowly. “I’ll try not to be an idiot about that, too.” He stopped and looked into the distance.
“What are you thinking?” I asked him.
Ari smiled for real. “I’m thinking that looks like a farmhouse on that hill, and that maybe they’ll let us use their phone.”
Bits of jagged glass littered the ground around the house—all the windows were broken, and an entire wall was missing in the back, turned to a pile of concrete rubble and leaving a kitchen filled with broken dishes open to the wind. My throat went dry. Had I really caused the quake with the fire in me? I reached down and touched a piece of broken glass. It pierced my finger, and blood flowed from the wound.
Blood and a thin wisp of smoke. I pressed my finger swiftly to my mouth, fire receding as I focused on the pain. My blood couldn’t have been burning. … I drew my finger free. There was no smoke now, just a pinprick cut that had already stopp
There was a tent set up in the backyard, but no one answered from it when we called. “Maybe they left to stay with family.” Ari turned back toward the broken wall. “You think we can find a phone in there?” He set a foot on the pile of rubble.
I grabbed his arm. “That really would be stupid.” A metal roof arched over the spot where the wall had been. Who knew when it might fall in?
“Just trying to do something useful for once.” Ari stepped back. “Doesn’t matter. Phone’s probably dead, anyway.”
We ate the last of the malt balls and drank the last of the water as we walked on. My stomach rumbled. At least water wasn’t a problem. We refilled the bottle when we passed a stream that trickled down the hillside, after Ari said it was safe to drink.
The road turned to thick mud that coated my sneakers. The clouds cleared, leaving behind a sky full of stars, the white band of the Milky Way burning across them, visible even with the moon.
The mud began to freeze, slush crunching beneath our feet. The moon set, and the stars faded. Color slowly returned to the world, revealing bright yellow and orange grasses clinging to hillsides dusted with frost. The road veered away from the water, and the sun rose behind us. The frost glittered like diamonds, bright as the stars had been. I caught my breath. “Beautiful,” I whispered.
Ari smiled a little. “I’ll show you something more beautiful.” He pointed into the distance. Sun glinted off the windows of a long white building. “Maybe someone will be home this time.”
As we got closer, we saw people outside. We hurried up the building’s low gravel drive. “You have to understand,” a man was saying in English, “that it is very unusual to have earthquakes in the Westfjords. I don’t know how long it will take to get the all-clear to go back inside. We have no injuries, so we’re not a priority.”
“The Westfjords.” Ari nodded, as if he knew where we were. “That’s not so far.”
The building—Hotel Laugarholl, the bright red words painted on it said—didn’t seem damaged, even with its large windows. Maybe it hadn’t been a very large quake—or maybe the hotel got lucky, the way houses did in wildfires, when the flames spared some homes but not others. A half dozen people stood around in pajamas and jackets on the building’s yellow lawn. A few rumpled blankets lay on the ground. In spite of not being cleared to go inside, a couple of men were bringing out food and piling it onto a table.
Ari walked up to one of the men. “Excuse me, could we borrow your phone?” he asked in Icelandic. The man didn’t look at him, just set down a tray of sliced meat and headed back toward the door. Ari followed, repeating the question in English, but the man didn’t turn around.
Two women in jackets and jeans headed for the table, talking quietly in what sounded like German. Ari followed them. “Guten Tag, haben Sie ein Handy?” His German was more hesitant than his English. The women walked right by, as if they didn’t see him.
An uneasy feeling crawled down my spine. I thought of how that emergency vehicle had driven right past us. Of how no one had answered by the farmhouse we’d stopped at.
The other guests—two older couples—got into line behind the Germans. They were debating in English whether to still go on a hike they’d planned. I tapped one of the women on the shoulder. She drew her arms around herself but didn’t turn around.
Ari stepped right in front of a man carrying a couple of pitchers. The man kept walking, stumbling as he bumped into Ari. Thick milk sloshed over one of the pitchers. The man cursed himself for his clumsiness as Ari stepped out of his way.
They couldn’t see us. They really couldn’t. Just like—
A cloud drifted past the sun. Ari returned to my side.
“‘None shall remember you, beyond these stones.’” My voice sounded unnaturally loud. “‘None shall see you, comfort you, aid you. I leave you alone, alone, alone.’”
Ari’s eyes went wide. “We are like ghosts to them.”
“That’s impossible.” Even more impossible than everything else that had happened since I came to Iceland.
Ari began cursing in English and Icelandic both. I stared at the people piling food onto their plates. I didn’t feel like a ghost. How could anyone make the entire world forget us?
Ari stopped cursing and laughed a little. “At least if we do anything stupid now,” he said in Icelandic, “no one will know, right?”
In the distance, a gull cried out. Even if we made it back to Dad and Katrin, what if they couldn’t see us, either? What if they couldn’t remember us? What if no one could, not Jared or any of my friends at school or my grandparents or cousins? Panic rose in me. It made no difference how long we’d been gone if no one remembered us—knew us. “What are we supposed to do now?”
Ari shrugged uneasily. “Eat breakfast? I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. And, well, we should eat while we can.”
I forced the panic down. Sweat beaded on my skin. My stomach rumbled, louder than before. When had I last had anything but stale jerky and chocolate malt balls? “Can ghosts even eat?” I followed Ari as he got into line behind the hikers.
Ari lifted a slice of meat off the table and tasted it. “Yeah. They can.” He grabbed a plate and bowl and piled them high.
So did I. I wondered if the dishes looked to everyone else like they were flying through the air or if maybe they disappeared when we touched them—but when I glanced around to see how people were reacting, they all just happened to be looking in other directions.
The guests found spots to eat on the blankets on the ground. So did we. “Like a picnic, yeah?” Ari said.
“A freaky little invisible earthquake picnic, sure.” I tried to laugh, but my throat tightened around the sound. I’m not panicking. I am not panicking. I sat down by Ari’s side, balancing my plate in my lap.
One of the hikers spread a newspaper out beside him. I still couldn’t read the Icelandic, but apparently 19 September was the same as in English—and the year was our year. I let out a breath and pointed. “We’ve only been gone three months,” I said. More time has passed for Hallgerd than for us.
Ari nodded slowly, and his shoulders relaxed a little. “That’s something, at least.” He dove into his food.
I forced a slice of cold lamb past my lips. It tasted amazing—once I began eating, I couldn’t stop. I devoured the lamb, a couple of hardboiled eggs, several slices of bread with some kind of pâté, and even something I’d thought was yogurt but turned out to be more of the awful sour milk I’d had at the guesthouse.
We filled my backpack with more food: granola and hardboiled eggs, cheese and more lamb. I began to feel guilty—I reached into my wallet, pulled out the bills inside, and left them on the table, wedged beneath a serving platter. I had no idea whether that covered all the food we’d taken—or if anyone could even see my money—but it would have to do.
The German tourists pulled out a map. Ari looked over their shoulders. “I know where we are,” he said. “Strandir, on the coast—near Bear’s Fjord.” He gave a wry laugh. “I should feel right at home. Though I bet they just named it for Svan’s father, Bjorn. I think Svan lived around here.”
“How far are we from Reykjavik?” I asked. The tourists didn’t look up as we spoke.
“Two hundred, two hundred fifty kilometers south?”
I did the math in my head: maybe a hundred and fifty miles. Way too far to walk. “Maybe there’s a phone inside. We can call your mom from there.”
Ari nodded. Neither of us mentioned that the building wasn’t cleared as safe to enter, or that we weren’t sure Katrin would be able to hear us when we called. You couldn’t just forget your own kid, could you?
The wooden doors were propped open. Inside, the reception desk was buried in books and postcards and tourist brochures that must have fallen from the shelves behind it. Ari dug a phone out from beneath them, brought it to his ear, and frowned. “Right,” he said. “On the map, there were some towns. Holmavik is about twenty kilomet
I nodded. That wasn’t so bad—I could run twelve miles, if I had to. I followed Ari away from the hotel. The frozen slush was melting, turning the dirt road back to mud. I felt for the coin in my pocket. The coals inside me warmed at its touch. Did the ground tremble slightly? The trembling stopped when I drew my hand away.
I’d get the coin to Katrin. With any luck—if Katrin was right, if Svan and Muninn were wrong—the land would be safe from Hallgerd’s spell after that. As for the fire in me, well, maybe Katrin would know what to do about that, too.
The few clouds burned away, leaving behind a deep blue sky that reminded me of Tucson, except the sun was too low, its light too thin. A breeze caressed my neck. I thought of the hot desert winds at home, like a dragon’s breath against my skin in summer.
The coals in me sparked hot at the thought. The ground shuddered beneath my feet. “I can give you fire.” Not Hallgerd’s voice this time—the rough voice I’d heard in the fire realm. I unzipped my jacket and threw my arms open to the wind. Cold. I like the cold. A lie—I hated the chilly winter mornings back home—but the fire in me turned merely warm again.
“You okay, Haley?” Ari reached for my hand. His palm felt cool. I wrapped my fingers around his, as if I could soak up the cold if only I held on hard enough.
With his free hand Ari fished his cell phone out of his pocket and powered it up. “Hey, we have a signal!” His grip on my hand tightened. “Oh, look, I have four hundred eighteen text messages. I’ll check them later.” He dialed one-handed.
“Hello, Mom?” Ari’s voice was strained—he was angry at his mom, too, after all. “Hello?”
He pressed redial. “Mom? Can you hear me?” Ari fell silent. Very quietly, he shut the phone and put it back into his pocket.
“Dropped call?” I asked, but I knew better.
“No.” Ari swallowed hard, cursed softly. “She couldn’t hear me. The people at the hotel, they weren’t so bad—they don’t know us. But Mom …” His voice tightened.