Thief Eyes

Foolish woman! You must never run from magic, least of all magic born of fire. Thirty generations is not time enough to forget that.

The fire returns, roaring around us both. The ground lurches. Flames leap at the woman. They burn through cloth and skin to ignite the bones beneath. She has no time to scream—in moments the fire consumes her.

My sight clears. I kneel once more in this small cave, my hand yet immersed in boiling blood. I draw it free and overturn the bowl. Blood stains the dark rocks. My hand is whole and unburned, save for a band of red where the ring, woven of my own hair, used to be. The coin is gone, sent through thirty generations of time only to be dropped and lost in a single instant.

I touch the band of red and find it warm. I close my eyes. Flames roar up once more behind my lids. “Free!” an inhuman voice cries, somewhere deep inside me. A fiery hand strokes my face. “We will be free.”

I know then that the spell is not through. The fire will consume me as well, and the powers that wield it will be released into the world. Yet through the flames, I see something more. One last daughter, with yellow hair and strange dark eyes. The fire’s roar is loud; I cannot hear her whispered anger. She reaches for the coin where it fell into the dirt. The earth trembles once more as her fingers close around the silver.

The flames subside. The land grows still. I feel the power of the fire realm burning in me yet, but it is contained now within my hair—the same hair in my ring, the hair I gifted to the realm of fire—and also in the coin this new daughter now holds. My spell has been mended. My life has been spared.

Does this woman—no, this girl, for she is younger than I am—seek escape as well? I reach for her. She leans toward me, and I know the spell remains alive between us. Yet it is weaker now. The girl was not its target. I cannot simply take her place.

Not yet. Instead, I look at this daughter of my daughters and ask, “What is your name?”

Chapter 1

Icy rain blew into my hood and dripped down my neck as I knelt on the mossy stones. The sky was gray, layers of cloud hiding any hint of sun. The wind picked up, and I shivered, missing the hot desert skies of home. It was way too cold for a June day.

Not that Dad noticed. He grinned as he traced a crack running through the rocks. “Amazing, isn’t it? You can almost feel the earth pulling apart.”

“Yeah. Sure.” I looked down into the small fissure and saw nothing but endless dark. I shifted my soggy backpack on my shoulders and rubbed my eyes, gritty from a night spent flying across the Atlantic. I’d never been much good at sleeping on planes. Yeah, Dad, I followed you four thousand miles to Iceland so we could stare at holes in the ground.

I got up, stretching stiff legs. Beyond a metal fence, the cliff where we stood dropped down to a grassy plain. A gray river braided its way through bright green grasses, and a few wet geese hunkered down by its shores. The geese looked cold, too. Probably they were thinking the same thing I was: the sooner they could get somewhere warm, the better.

“So this is where it happened?” I tried to sound casual, like I didn’t much care.

Dad looked up. His dark eyes were shot with red—he wasn’t good at sleeping on planes, either—and his hair stuck out from beneath his windbreaker, dripping water. “You mean the rifting? It’s happening throughout this valley. The North American and European tectonic plates meet here, and they’re forever pulling away from each other. Only the pulling doesn’t all happen in any one place, so—”

“That’s not what I mean.” I fought not to let my frustration show. You know that’s not what I mean.

Dad sighed. “No, Haley, this isn’t where it happened.” His sleep-deprived eyes took on the lost look I’d come to know way too well this past year. The look that made me decide Dad didn’t need to know if I’d blown another test at school, or fallen asleep in class because nightmares had woken me in the middle of the night again, or was tired of peanut butter and jelly for dinner but just as tired of cooking if I wanted anything else.

I’d come four thousand miles. This was more important than a few bad dreams or missed meals. “Where, then?”

A couple brushed past us, clutching the hands of the toddler who walked between them. Dad looked at the cracked earth. “Logberg. Law Rock.”

“Where’s that?” Rain soaked through my running shoes, turning my socks clammy and cold. Back home, we canceled track meets for weather like this—but I was the one who’d asked Dad to bring me here. He’d wanted to stay at the guesthouse and catch up on his jet-lagged sleep.

Dad sighed again. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

Let this go? I dug my nails into my cold, damp palms. No need for Dad to hear me screaming, either. When your mother disappears without a trace, you don’t just let it go. “I want to see. Is that so much to ask?” I kept my voice calm, reasonable—the same voice I’d used to convince Dad to take me to Thingvellir today, because I really wanted to visit the national park that was the site of Iceland’s ancient parliament and in the middle of a rift valley and, oh, yeah, just happened to be the place where my mother disappeared last summer.

“Fine, Haley.” Dad got to his feet, and I knew for once I’d won. I followed him away from the lookout, my running shoes squishing on the wet gravel path. Dripping tendrils escaped my blond ponytail and clung to my cheeks. I slowed to match Dad’s pace. I’d grown taller than him this past year, which still seemed strange.

The path cut down through a cleft between blocky stone walls that formed a perfect wind tunnel. Goose bumps prickled beneath my damp sleeves. Dad looked up at the rocks. “You can almost see how they must have fit together once, can’t you? Before the rifting tugged them apart.”

What I saw was my father hiding behind another geology lecture. Maybe Dad couldn’t help it. Maybe when you spent your whole life studying rocks and earthquakes, you forgot how to talk to people.

The stone wall to our right dropped away as we reached a grassy outcrop. The wind let up, and Dad stopped at the base of a walkway that led to an overlook. Some tourists stood on the walkway, huddled beneath umbrellas, listening to a tour guide in jeans and a T-shirt. The guide was soaked, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“Here?” I asked. Dad nodded.

Even without the wind, I felt cold. “So what’d you two fight about?” My voice came out too loud, with a squeak at the end. So much for sounding casual.

Dad leaned down, picked up a black stone, and turned it over in his hand. “Obsidian,” he said. “It’s funny how the names of rocks translate in Icelandic. Obsidian is literally raven flint, while lignite—brown coal—has something to do with the fire giants, out of Norse mythology—”

“Dad!”

He dropped the stone but didn’t meet my eyes. “No, Haley.”

“No what?”

“No, I’m not going to answer your question. Some things are none of your concern.”

It’s my concern more than anyone’s! Dad never answered, no matter how often I asked. I dug my nails deeper into my palms, felt the familiar pinch of nails breaking skin. I whirled away and stomped up the wet walkway, past the tourists. Mom would have run after me, but Dad just let me go. I reached the overlook and leaned on a railing, staring out at the river. A goose made its way into the water, followed by two fuzzy goslings. I watched them sail by. There should have been squirrels here, too, chipmunks, something—but Iceland wasn’t big on native land mammals. A few arctic foxes, the occasional stranded polar bear—that was it.

My palms began to sting. Behind me the guide talked cheerfully about all the old stories that were supposed to have happened at Thingvellir. Mostly they sounded like a long list of who killed who, though at least one guy