Thief Eyes

“I thought your master didn’t walk in this world anymore.”

Freki made a strange sound, low in his throat. “And if you’re wise, you’ll not draw his attention back to it. If you spill his mead—if you deny his hospitality by letting it touch the earth—he will know.”

Right. No point pushing my luck. I corked the skin and put it into the pack. Maybe I could empty it later, when I got out of here.

Memories or no memories, I’d get Ari and myself both free. I zipped and shouldered the pack, took Ari’s flashlight in my other hand, and followed the coin’s pull into the dark. 

Chapter 6

The tunnel was colder than the room. I pulled up my hood and zipped my jacket to the chin. The flashlight’s thin beam cast eerie blue light on the tunnel walls. Water dripped somewhere up ahead, and the air felt thick and wet.

Freki followed at my heels, to guard me or provide companionship, I didn’t know. Either way, his presence was comforting. Was that a sort of magic, too?

The tunnel branched left. The wrapped coin pulled me forward. I followed, but as I passed the branch, a gust of icy air blew toward me. A child’s voice whispered, “Three shells in return for my poem, poem, poem.” The words echoed off the stone walls.

I stopped short and peered down the side tunnel. “Hello?”

“I’ll toss my silver at them and watch them fight, fight, fight.” An old man’s voice, carried by the same cold wind. I turned left, though the coin urged me away. There were pictures on the tunnel walls. They skittered like nervous lizards out of my sight as the light hit them. A boat torn apart by the sea. A coffin washing to shore. I squinted into the distance. I saw no old man, no young boy.

Teeth nipped at my ankle. I looked down and saw Freki’s mouth around my leg. “You hear memory, nothing more.” He drew back, the tip of his tail brushing the floor.

“The sea has stolen my sons.” The echoing voice sounded real—real and incredibly sad.

“Muninn holds all the island’s memories here,” Freki said. “Follow them without purpose, and you’ll wander to the end of days and still not find your way back to where you began.”

I clutched the handkerchief-wrapped coin tighter. Bad enough to lose my memories—I didn’t want to spend my life lost among other people’s memories instead. “That’s a lot of tunnels.”

The fox’s whiskers twitched. “Only Iceland’s memories lie here. Other lands have their own guardians and their own mountains.”

A brief image flashed through my thoughts: jagged brown mountains beneath a hot blue sky. My mountains, I somehow knew. I tried to remember, but the mountains sank into the muddy darkness of my missing memories, leaving behind empty shells of words—mountains, desert—with no images to go with them. My eyes stung. Muninn had no right to take who I was away from me.

I brushed my eyes, turned my back on the voices and the images on the walls, and let the coin lead me on, back to the main tunnel. Freki walked alongside me, his gait smooth and liquid. The tunnel branched again and again. Sometimes the coin urged me left, sometimes right, sometimes straight ahead. I counted the turnings, repeating them to myself to make sure I could get back.

“I have spun twelve ells of wool. You have killed a man. A fine morning’s work for us both.”

“I already must grieve for my brother. Is it not enough for you that I set a bowl of porridge before his killer?”

My hand clenched around the coin. I fought the urge to stop, to listen closer, to try to stare longer at the moving pictures on the tunnel walls. Scraps of mist drifted through the air, raising goose bumps beneath my jacket. Were all the memories in this place of sadness and loss?

“My father gone, my brother gone, only this price upon my head remains.”

“Yes, the girl is beautiful, and men enough will suffer for it, but I do not know how the eyes of a thief have come into our family.”

The coin flared suddenly hot. Smoke rose from the handkerchief. A woman’s voice, not in the tunnels but in my own head. “How dare Hrut speak of me that way!” Anger in those words. A moment’s silence, then, “Haley?”

Dizziness washed over me. The other one, I thought. The one whose spell had caught me. I ran from that turning, not sure what I was so scared of. My legs trembled, then settled into an easy lope, as if I was used to running. The light bobbed ahead of me. The coin cooled from hot to warm. I kept going, enjoying the feel of my feet hitting stone and cool sweat trickling down my neck. Had I liked to run before?

In the distance, I heard a roar. I quickly slowed back to a walk. I was breathing hard, but that felt good, too. Freki caught up with me as the coin pulled me sharply left.

Up ahead, the tunnel ended abruptly. The bear—Ari—huddled against the far wall, his nose hidden beneath his enormous legs. My blue light shone on his white fur. Two terns perched on the ledge above him.

He looked up, through eyes that seemed more blue than green by my light, and growled.

“You may want to stop here,” Freki said.

“Yeah. Good idea.” I stopped, though the coin kept pulling me toward the bear. Did it want to kill me? Mist curled past the beam of my light. Around me I heard the memories of other roars and growls. The hair on my arms prickled at the sound.

“Are you still in there?” I asked Ari. He kept staring at me. He was trembling—maybe he was as scared as I was. Yeah, but it’s not like being trapped with a scared polar bear is a good thing. I looked at his long black claws. My light wavered, shining off the walls. I saw images of bears in battle, tearing through warrior shields and chain vests as if they were paper.

“Any ideas?” I asked Freki.

Freki wrapped his tail around his legs. “I am no spellcaster, and even if I were, it is not my place to interfere.”

I remembered something from the notebook in my pack. Other useful spells follow. Freki was no spellcaster, but what about me?

The coin kept urging me on. I stuck it in my pocket, keeping only the handkerchief in my hand. The pulling continued. It wasn’t the coin that wanted to kill me—it was the handkerchief. I should drop it and run away. How could I make a bear remember who he really was when I didn’t know who I really was?

Was I the sort of person who would run away? I seemed pretty good at running. Was I the sort of person who’d abandon someone who had tried to rescue me? Who maybe cared about me, and who maybe I cared about in turn?

To hell with who I was. That’s not who I am.

The bear kept growling. I shoved the handkerchief into my pocket and pulled the notebook from my pack. Freki lay down and buried his nose beneath his fluffy tail, watching me all the while.

By the flashlight’s blue beam I flipped past the pages I’d already read. A spell for restoring one’s own memories, the next page said. I hesitated, but the spell required a raven’s feather. Maybe I could find some way to steal one from Muninn—later. I turned the page.

A spell for returning berserks to their true form, whether they will it or no. “Berserks?” I said aloud. “Like crazy people?”

Freki lifted his head. “Warriors with animal shapes. Very powerful. My master valued them. Fearsome in battle, ill suited to life outside of it.”

The bear didn’t look like a warrior, pressed against the wall like that. I quickly scanned the spell.

Berserks do not respond as readily to runes and chants as others do to magic. Still, you may try reciting these words and see if the shifter wishes to change back.