14
When Iris woke me it was late morning. My worries kept me awake. As did Adian’s pacing. So despite the fact that I slept, I didn’t sleep well, or for long.
Iris and the doctors reported that Karal was awake and well. So was Víðarr. Both of them were out in the main area, eating breakfast. After little contemplation, I decided to join them. Adian didn’t hesitate to follow my lead. He was hungry, but even more than that, he needed to get out of that room.
Víðarr had little to say. He picked at his food, mindlessly, and I watched him for a few moments before interrupting.
It turned out, his memory wasn’t his own. He had no recollection of ever coming to my realm. No memory of reading the scroll, or anything other than being attacked on his way home from his forge. He was from Queen Madb’s realm in the east. When told the date, he stared at us in wonder. For him six days had vanished.
“Where is Fenrir?” I asked.
Iris peered at me over the lip of her cup of tea. “In your room, sleeping I believe.”
“My room?” I asked. “Why?”
Iris set her cup down. “I believe he is hoping to be attacked," she said, and then added with a sigh, "which has all of the guards miffed."
For anyone else that could have been a joke, but my memory of the wolf known as Fenrir, suggested that was simply the truth. I took a sip of my tea. “He better not mess up my sheets. I like those sheets.”
Karal coughed into his fist, and Adian suddenly found the wall of medical instruments interesting.
“Knock it off, both of you,” I told them.
“What’s the deal with you two?” Karal asked. “I remember the day we were attacked, and you were separated from the group. Your mother led the defense, and the counter attack. Then she ordered us to the Keep. When she found out you weren’t with us, she paled, but even distraught she ordered everyone to the Keep. Once there, she sent her best warriors after the Raiders, to hunt you down and bring you back. Alive or your body, was her order. I remember her relaxing when they reported that Fenrir wasn’t with us either.”
I remembered being terrified back then, but felt a weak smile on my lips as I thought back to that day. “She knew Fenrir could run faster than any horse.”
Looking up, I found anticipation on their faces, all of them. I never talked about it then, and now? Hell, now, who had time for daydreams, and thoughts of young love?
“Fenrir wasn’t one of my mother’s men,” I began. “He traveled with an older wolf-shifter, who was an adviser, and close friend of mother. Fenrir rarely came into the Keep when they visited. Only long enough to greet my mother with his mentor, and then he left, outside the walls. So, I didn’t know much about him from personal encounters. He was old though, I knew that much. Of course, to a twelve year-old, you didn’t have to have grey hair to be ancient.
“I remember several of the maids gossiping and whispering things they wished he would do with them. Some of them I didn’t understand at the time. Even some of the priestesses would ask about him, and laugh together, blushing when they spoke of him. So, because of this I was interested in him. After all, there were plenty of other shifters around. Why him? What made him special?”
Adian nodded. “I recall that as well,” he said. “I liked being around the temple, listening to the maidens of the Goddess - long before I understood the attraction.”
Karal spoke up, interested but not one hundred percent pleased with the appeal of Fenrir. “Sure, I remember him as well, but what happened with you two that day?”
“We walked right into the attack. They ambushed us good, hitting the middle of our column hard, and then the rear.” I looked back to that time through memories red with panic. “My horse was shot in the flank and bolted. I wasn’t strong enough to rein it in, and it ran right into the woods, away from the raiders. I remember looking over my shoulder and seeing five of the raiders riding after me. My wild thought was they were idiots. My horse was going to kill me, running through the woods like that, and they were going to die trying to follow.”
All attention was fixed on me now. If a riot broke out right behind their ears, I doubt they’d have heard it.
“Checking back only a moment later, all I saw was one, riding hard back toward the road, and I thought; see, told you! A moment after that, my horse slowed and then came down on its knees, and there was Fenrir. He scooped me up from my saddle and started running the same way my horse had been going. We were only half a day from the Keep, but he went north.
“When I asked him, after he stopped, and put together a small fire, he told me there were other raiders down the road waiting. It wasn’t safe to try to get to my mother or the Keep. His answer surprised me. Every knight or guard I knew, human or shifter, would have gotten caught up in the challenge. Even though the challenge was only perceived. I brought this up to him the following night, when again he refused to rush getting me home.
“He told me that getting ‘caught up’ as I put it was a good name for the action and thinking that cost many lives. To get ‘caught up’ however, required imagining the future, specifically, what people would say or how they would treat him once he had returned. To report that he hid, and scurried from tree to tree could be measured as cowardice. But he didn’t worry about the future. The further he allowed himself to look into the future, the worse it got, he told me. It was never grand or good. Always something to go wrong and get worse. He just didn’t do it. Since he didn’t, he didn’t get ‘caught up’ either.”
After I didn’t say anything for more than a minute, Karal asked. “Is that it?”
I smiled, looking back on the four days, and nights I had with Fenrir. “Yes. He would not risk my health or life to keep a good reputation. He hid us, and nothing happened. He brought me home safe, and unharmed. That’s it. A boring story, but one that gives me strong confidence in him now.”
That wasn’t the full story, that wasn’t even close, but they didn’t need the other details. Especially since those details were of a twelve year-old attempting to get an adult man to notice her, and failing miserably. Failing in ways, which still blushed my cheeks, and shivered my spine to think of them. Flashing breasts I didn’t have, showing legs, with all of the appeal of a spider’s, and swishing hips that still had sharp edges. At least I hope I failed. If he did notice, I shiver at what he might have thought…of how much he might have laughed.
I did remember him trapping several groups of raiders by hiding me, and then going out and sitting on a fallen tree. Sitting on the log he would use his knife to carve something from a branch. Nothing special. He did manage a chain once. He never kept his carvings, though I wanted them very much.
Sitting there, out in the woods, some of the raiders would come across him. Of course, he already knew they were close by. He could hear them, and smell them. When they tried to capture or kill him, he would attack, and win with little fuss. He made fighting raiders look boring. If I didn’t hear the tales of men who had failed against them, I’d have thought they were a big fuss for nothing.
The last group Fen battled with, he kept one of them unharmed, promising to let him go if he gave good information. Then he questioned him about the route north. Were the raiders there? Were they looking for him north of where they were? After he let the man go, he gathered me up, and went west for a time, then hid us. That night he heard the raiders riding hard for the north areas he asked about. That was our last night together. In the morning he took me home.
Years later, I figured out how much he taught me. At the time it felt like he was just pointing things out; as someone might point out stars and constellations. It didn’t feel like he was teaching me anything.
What do you see? He would ask. I would tell him, and he would say, what about the broken branch? Yes, I would tell him, but I didn’t think to mention it. So a man passed by here, because deer don’t have shoulders that high. I didn’t think of that, but it would make sense.
The next day I would say I see a man passed by here. He would nod, and say, why do you think he was walking his horse? And so on, and always in an easy conversational tone. Years later I would find, while writing in my journal, that he taught me from the time I woke up, until I slept again.
That’s a big bear, he would say, looking at marks on a tree, but not an infected one.
There is a home close by, with children.
A deer had a fawn.
Going to rain tonight.
Why do zombies always make a mess? (then a sigh).
"Hunting boar is tricky," he told me. "Especially wild boar, or like the pig around here which are closer to razorbacks than bacon. What makes it tricky is when you strike one, you have to kill it clean with the first strike. You do that, and you and I have bacon to eat for the next couple of days. If you don’t, and it starts squealing… well, then you and I are going to be up in the trees for the next couple of days until the herd finds something else to chase."
If he wasn’t teaching me like this, he told me stories - about everything. Later I would recall being drawn into his stories. Perhaps because he always described how things smelled. He would talk about farms, and the scent of plowed earth. The sharp scent of ponderosa pines, the sweet vanilla and lemon smell of Jefferson pines. Clear smells like ice, and fog. Burdensome smells like bogs, and swamps, and tar.
In these stories he talked mostly about people, and what they did. How they believed, what they believed. About babies being born infected from healthy parents; and being left near the wastelands - given to the elements. He talked about iron workers, and steel. Tools. Electricity. Books. Dreams. He told me south of our realm there were vast plantations of fruit trees, with food rotting on branches, and fallen fruit on sweltering dust roads. Never about the past, or the future. Only the now; always into the ever present now.
My mother gave me a journal with leather covers, and a shiny lock when I was fourteen. I didn’t know what to write about. What do you think about most? she asked me. Boys - but I didn’t tell her that. After more thought, I recalled Fen’s stories and began to write them into the journal. Later I added similar stories about our lands and our people — and our smells.
“My queen.” Iris’ voice intruded my thoughts and I looked up, my eyes meeting hers.
“The sun is up,” I said, raking stiff fingers through my hair. The action was a nervous one, but who could blame me? “Fen should be awake. How is Mark?”
“Oddly, pleasant,” Iris said, brushing back her dark hair from her triangular face. Her hair was what poets called true black. So black, in the sun the highlights were blue. She was said to have been born with that color, and the highlights gave her her name. She doesn’t remember attacking Karal. Karal also doesn’t recall her attacking him. He remembers opening the door and finding everyone dead.
“Pleasant? Mark?" I said with false alarm. "Then I better get over there. He’s never pleasant, unless he’s preparing to ambush someone.” I was watching Adian, mostly, because he was studying Iris and Karal. His nostrils flared when Karal spoke. He narrowed his eyes with Iris’ smiles. Víðarr he ignored. Víðarr was lost. He followed us because he was not told to do different.
We walked across the grounds. Iris had sent word out that the Keep was safe. She had also radioed messages to Beth and Madb and Kate.
The pieces were flowing around and around in my head. I could see them spinning when I closed my eyes. They were at once like puzzle pieces, and gaming dice.
Mark greeted us, and he did seem pleasant. Overly pleasant, if I were being honest. He followed me to the planning room, where we had been looking at the maps. The same room where Víðarr came with his scroll - which he doesn’t recall.
“… if they had known three or four other things,” Mark was saying, “this could have been an ugly morning.
I heard the dice rolling, and then all the pieces fell into the shape of war.