The sunny little thing shines in my hands. There’s no root to it, but it’ll do. I place it gently on the spot where my sister once was.“Vaxa. Líf.”
The daisy warms in my hand, straightening, strengthening itself until it’s become one with the ground below, its sunny heart lifting for the heavens above.
“Dveljask,”I tell it.
Stay.
Though I didn’t create it, somehow this little flower is the perfect sentry, standing tall so I’ll always know where Alia left me.
Will and I walk in silence, the only sound between us thethunk thunk thunkof the pistols slapping my legs with eachstep. While I’m grateful for the respite, after a few miles, even the silence is getting to me.
“You’re different than you were at the castle,” I say. “That boy could talk my ear right off my head.”
“I am different when I’m in a setting like that,” he concedes with a brisk laugh. “People with titles always want a show. They don’t want the farm boy from Aarhus who wakes before dawn to feed the chickens; they want the boy who cleans up nicely and bows and chuckles at all the right times.”
“Well, I’d like to get to know the boy from Aarhus. Who is he? Besides a daisy creator.”
“He talks like a common person and looks like one too. The distance between the nobility and the commoner has grown slimmer than is comfortable for someone who’s been born into a title their family’s held for hundreds of years.”
It’s strange thinking of things in human years—hundreds of years under the sea can mean one ruler. Like Father.
“If I were to show up to a soiree straight from chores, they’d shoo me out, terrified. I’m a walking warning that class lines are blurring. The people like their nobility accessible and human—the Øldenburgs are particularly good at that—but they don’t want them dirty.”
“You don’t want the title that came with your name, William Jensen?”
Will shrugs. “Doesn’t make me any better a person to have it. I’m still the same boy with chicken shit on his boots. The real me is in the name, not the title.”
I think that’s true, though until my time on land I’ve never had the opportunity to live it. “So this is the real you?”
“It’s the me I know best.” Then, he looks me square in the eye. “Is this the real you?”
I tell him the truth. “At the moment, yes.”
“Fair enough, Runa.”
We stick to the coastline, the massive cliff angling down, down, down, until the beach meets the line where the sheer face of rock once was. Then, the coastline is flat as far as the eye can see, summer-stale pasture thick and rolling.
“It’s just up here,” Will says. I look ahead but see nothing but more than grass meeting the shore.
We come upon a hill that’s molting a bit. Instead of going up it, Will goes around, and I follow.
But as we swerve around the mass, I realize it’s not a hill at all—it’s a house, built into the countryside. From this vantage, an old stone foundation peeks out beneath thick hatches of hay disguising the front. There is a small brown shutter covering a window, and an equally brown door beside it. From a distance it would look like nothing of consequence worth exploring.
“Stay here,” Will says. He steps up to the door and does a very specific knock—two slow and measured taps, one pause, and then four quick raps.
The window shutter creeps open.
“Who’s the girl?” a feathery voice asks.
“A friend. She’s one of us.”
It’s strange, the non-use of names, the level of trust missing. If I weren’t standing with him, this exchange would be different. Maybe. In wartime, trust is something else altogether than in peace.
But that’s enough for the woman inside, and we hear the sound of locks twisting. The door gives, and Will enters first. I follow, my eyes adjusting poorly to the shadows; the whole place is nearly dark as night.
Somewhere, a light flickers on, a match meeting a lamp. The woman with the whispery voice is awash in light. Her hair is that of a lion’s mane, Viking blood deep within her, and her face isn’t as old as her voice would suggest.
Katrine.
