Thief Eyes

drank—the mead of poetry?” He sounded like he was trying to get his brain around a difficult idea. That made two of us. How could some drugged alcohol teach me a whole new language—not to mention mend broken bones?

“Even my master’s mead can only do so much. Given the gibberish Haley spoke when she arrived here, it’s a wonder we got her speaking intelligible words at all.” Freki flicked an ear toward me. “You’ll have to handle the poetry on your own.”

“I’ll cope.” I kept using Icelandic so Freki would understand. “Do you have the mead of memory lying around someplace, too?”

Freki’s whiskers twitched again—because he thought that was funny or because there really was such a thing, I couldn’t tell. “You’re no help,” I told him.

The little fox stretched his legs out in front of him, unconcerned.

“And they say Icelandic is hard to learn,” Ari said wryly. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stick to my own language from now on. English is not so easy for me, you see.”

His English sounded awfully good to me, but what did I know? Not much, at the moment.

“If Haley doesn’t want that mead next time, you can give it to me,” Ari told the fox. “I’ll give you poetry complete with a solid bass line.”

Freki didn’t answer that, just headed down the hall ahead of us. I thought of the mead in my pack. Ari probably wouldn’t be half as interested in it if he knew it would put him to sleep.

He gave a rueful laugh. “And to think I once told my mother all her sorcery talk was nonsense. If we make it out of here, I owe her an apology.”

I heard a whisper of memory—in my head, not in the air around me. “But you said it wasn’t sorcery you were sorry for.”

A pained look crossed Ari’s face. “You remember that?”

I tried to remember more. My thoughts slid away; my head began to hurt. A drop of water dripped from the ceiling and trickled down my jacket. “What were you sorry for?”

Ari drew a sharp breath. “See, answering that question is one of the things that got us into this mess.” He pulled away from me. “Thanks, Haley. I think I can walk on my own now.”

I missed the weight of his arm on my shoulders, but I didn’t say so. I gripped the flashlight tightly as the tunnels whispered on. “Take me abroad with you, for it is not Iceland that I love, love, love.”

“Of course he didn’t take her with him.” Ari scowled. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry with me or himself. “He went abroad and flirted with the pretty Norwegian girls, and so she married his best friend instead. And then both men died. A tragedy, just like in Shakespeare.”

I’d gone abroad, too. Had I left someone behind? More water dripped in the distance. “What happened to the woman? Did she die, too?”

Ari shook his head, white hair falling into his eyes. “Nah, she remarried and lived to a ripe old age.”

What kind of romance was that? A bit of mist floated past the beam of my light. “Didn’t take her long to get over him, did it?”

“What makes you think she got over him?” Ari plucked a strand of hair from beneath his cap, squinted at it, and frowned. “It’s not that simple.”

But it was simple: Either you loved someone or you didn’t. Yet as if to mock me, the air around us whispered, in the same woman’s voice, “Though I loved him best, I treated him worst.” Ari laughed, a pained sound.

In the distance, I heard the faint beating of wings. I froze and switched off the light. Ari’s shallow breathing seemed loud beside me.

Freki twined around my legs. “There are no secrets here,” the fox said. “Muninn knows where you are, just as I do, and he comes or not as he chooses.”

The wingbeats grew closer, then faded. I waited until they were completely gone before I turned the light back on and continued walking, Ari close by my side. I wanted to reach for him; I clenched my free hand into a fist instead. Nails dug into my palm. I forced my hand open before they could break skin. Why did I keep doing that? You’d think I wanted to hurt myself. I glanced at the scars there and wondered if I did.

We reached the final turning. I shone the light down one last tunnel and saw a round room with a stone bed at its center. The room was empty, no raven waiting for us there.

“Right. I can take it from here.” Ari took the light. He glanced suspiciously at Freki, then back at me.

I shrugged. “He says he won’t try to stop us.”

“Is that true?” Ari asked him.

The little fox silently stared up at us with his small brown eyes.

“Yeah, you expect us to trust you just because you’re cute, don’t you?”

Freki didn’t answer. Ari laughed to himself and started walking. He led us past several familiar turnings, then turned sharply right. I followed him, Freki a silent white shadow at my side. We began a steep climb. Ari panted with effort, but my legs made their way uphill easily enough, as if used to working hard.

Images flickered around us. The voices whispered on. “You shall not hew!” one of them said.

“Like in the Lord of the Rings,” Ari muttered.

I remembered that movie, and the book, too. Only there the line had been, “You shall not pass!” which wasn’t the same at all. Great—I could remember lines out of old movies but not whether I had a boyfriend.

“Hey, weren’t Arwen and Aragorn twentieth cousins, too?” Ari laughed softly. He glanced at me, but I had no idea what he was talking about. He quickly returned his gaze to the sloping tunnel.

Whispers of vengeance and battle gave way to whispers of bad weather and lost grazing, of failing crops and starving livestock.

“I have committed no crime. A charm to keep foxes from lambs, nothing more!”

Freki sniffed disdainfully. “There is no charm that can keep a fox from a lamb.”

“Hear my innocence. By God and Christ I swear I used sorcery against no man.”

On the walls I saw images of flames lapping at wood and skin. I saw a woman bound and thrown into deep waters.

A memory flickered through my thoughts: A pool of water, turned bloodred by the sun. The memory slid away as I tried to focus on it. I bit my lip to keep from crying out with frustration. Maybe it’d be easier to remember if I began with the small things, the ones that didn’t matter so much. TV shows. Old movies. Like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. “Hey!”

Ari looked back at me.

“You are so not Luke Skywalker!”

Ari’s mouth quirked. “You prefer Han Solo, then?”

“I …” I didn’t know. I remembered Star Wars, sure, but I didn’t remember whether I liked it, or the actors in it. I remembered only the parts that had nothing to do with me. When I tried to get at what I’d actually thought about anything, I hit more darkness. I wanted to scream. Instead I gave a shaky laugh. “You’re not Han Solo, either.”

“Ah.” Ari nodded knowingly. “That leaves only Darth Vader, then.”

Chill mist drifted through the air around us, thicker than before. “Darth Vader was kind of cute when he was younger,” I said. At least, I thought so now—who knew what I’d thought before?

“Darth Vader was a jerk when he was younger,” Ari said without heat.

“As opposed to his old age, when he had a productive career blowing up planets?”

Ari laughed, and the sound echoed off the walls around us, making the corridor feel just a little less cold than before.

We reached a dead end. Ari shone his light on the wall, and I saw depressions in the gray stone, evenly spaced, like a ladder. Ari put the flashlight between his teeth and began to climb. The light faded above me. I found the first foothold as much by feel as by sight.