Thief Eyes

What do you think an angry polar bear would do to an airplane, anyway?” He laughed uneasily. “Bear on a plane. It’s like a movie.”

Images of the bears in national parks, tearing the roofs off cars to get at coolers, flashed through my head. We didn’t even know what made Ari change into a bear. Was it when he got angry, like with Svan? Anger seemed to feed the fire in me as well. “Maybe the bear spell will end, too, if we leave. We should call Jared, anyway. Let him know what’s going on.” Jared should have called us back by now.

Ari handed me the phone. I dialed, but it went straight to voice mail. Maybe Jared’s battery died. Or maybe he’s still talking to Dad.

We reached another road, right at the edge of a deep blue fjord. Fog hung over the water, though the sky above was clear. We turned right again, following the fjord inland. The fog thickened.

“So your boyfriend,” Ari asked abruptly. “What’s he like?”

“He’s—” I hadn’t told Ari he was my boyfriend. Then again, you didn’t exactly say “love you” to a casual acquaintance. “He’s Jared,” I said. It’s none of your business, I thought. Yeah, right. When you kiss someone and hold his hand and then he finds out you have a boyfriend, he’s going to be just a little bit curious. People are funny that way. “Jared and I—we’ve known each other forever. Since the third grade, anyway.”

Ari raised a pale eyebrow. “You’ve had a boyfriend since the third grade?”

“No!” A flush crawled up my face. “We only started dating this year, but we’ve been best friends since we were little kids.” Jared had always been there, just like Mom and Dad. We talked about everything. I thought of his serious brown eyes when he listened to me. I thought of the way his T-shirt clung to his sweaty skin on the soccer field, and my face grew hot. I forced my thoughts back to the road and the thickening fog. The air felt damp against my neck and face, and I could only see a few feet ahead of us now. “So, you have many girlfriends?” I asked Ari. Maybe he had someone waiting in Reykjavik for him, too, someone he couldn’t call because of Muninn’s spell.

“Oh sure, hundreds of girlfriends,” Ari said. I looked at him, and he gave a wry laugh. “No, actually, I’m between girlfriends right now.”

“How long—”

“Have I been between girlfriends?” Ari paused, as if thinking about that. “Roughly—sixteen years, yeah.”

“Wait, you haven’t—” Was that his first kiss? I glanced at him, at the way his white bangs fell into his face. I thought of the worried look in his eyes when I woke up, not remembering who he was. “I find that hard to believe,” I said.

Ari seemed suddenly very interested in the road beneath his feet. “The girls I’ve asked out didn’t share your point of view.” He shrugged uncomfortably, but then a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Hey, you can’t write good songs if you don’t get your heart broken, right?”

I managed a laugh. I’d known Jared forever, but right then I wanted nothing as much as to reach for Ari’s hand again.

Was that what had happened with Dad and Katrin? A stray thought—only Dad had followed where it led? That was different, though. Mom and Dad were married. Still, I kept my hands to myself.

Farmhouses disappeared into the mist. A row of sheep slowly crossed the road ahead of us, little more than shadows, the fog giving them a strange dignity. As we kept walking even Ari grew indistinct, a shadow seen through the gray. He took another step, disappeared—

“Ari!” I grabbed for his hand after all and felt his cool fingers grasping mine. He was still here. Of course he was still here. I could see him now, just barely, through the fog. I held my other hand in front of my face. I could barely see my own fingers. Tendrils of wet mist curled around us, soupy-thick. The road was barely visible, and I couldn’t see the water.

“Right,” Ari said. “Perhaps we should stop for a while.”

We got onto the shoulder of the road, huddling down amid damp rocks and springy mosses. Water beaded on my skin and jacket and the backpack I set down beside me. Fog swirled around us, coating the stones. The gray air felt clammy against my neck. Inside me the fire grew a little, keeping me warm. I reached a hand toward the fog. At my touch it sizzled and burned away, leaving a small clear area around us. Beneath us, the ground began to shake.

“Haley!”

I drew my hand into a fist, digging fingers into my palm, not quite breaking skin. The ground grew still. The fog settled back in, but the faint scent of sulfur lingered in the air. I forced my fingers apart.

Ari touched the back of my hand. “You’re so warm. Ever since we jumped through the fire. The creatures there—they didn’t touch me, but they touched you. Your hair—” He reached for my short hair, drew away. “What happened there?”

I drew my arms around my knees. Damp moss soaked through the seat of my jeans. “I told the fire spirits to leave you alone. They wanted some sort of payment for that, just like Muninn wanted payment for my memories. They asked for my hair, so of course I said yes, because we were both about to be burned alive.” Sweat beaded on my face at the memory of that fire. “Only the fire spirits said they were giving me some of their fire in turn. They seemed to think it was a trade.”

For several heartbeats Ari didn’t speak. The fog made the world seem very small, just the two of us in a gray cocoon. I stared at the mist clinging to Ari’s white eyelashes, wondering what it would be like to kiss him now, with all my memories intact.

“This rescuing thing—I think maybe you’re better at it than me,” Ari said at last. He pulled up a tuft of wet moss, examined it thoughtfully. “So we have two problems—sending the coin back to Hallgerd, and stopping you from setting off earthquakes everywhere you go.”

“The coin first.”

Ari nodded. “Is there anything in Mom’s notebook for this?”

“I don’t know. I kind of got stuck on the page about turning bears back into boys, you know?” I unzipped the pack and pulled out the notebook. The pages weren’t smudged and swollen like Ari’s notebook had been. Of course not—Katrin had used one of her waterproof field notebooks. The paper was a little wrinkled, nothing more, and the words were clear. She’d probably used a waterproof pen as well. She’d done all she could to make sure I wouldn’t lose the words she’d translated.

I flipped past the pages I’d already read. A spell for restoring one’s own memory. I wondered whether we could apply that to the entire island—but the spell had to be cast by the one who’d forgotten. A spell for returning berserks to their true form.

The spell for sending back the coin. I stopped and read that spell. There was a list of things it needed, like the ingredients in a recipe book. A wooden bowl. A black fire stone. (Lignite, Katrin called it in parentheses.) A raven’s claw. All the things Svan had given me, only he’d given them to me for a different spell, one I had no intention of casting. A spell that also needed—

“Shit.”

Ari looked to where I was pointing in the spellbook. The blood of a white fox, it said.

“This spell needs it, too.” I pressed my lips together. There had to be another way.

“Wait.” Ari pointed to the bottom of the page, where in smaller script a note read: If the spell’s hold is not too tight, strong drink may substitute for blood.

“How the hell are we supposed to know if the spell’s hold is too tight?”

Ari shrugged. “I don’t know, but I think it’s good you didn’t spill all that mead.”

I pulled the mead from the pack. It felt about half full. Would pouring it into a bowl count as spilling it? Freki’s warning had been against letting it touch the earth. At least we knew it was strong.

It had to work. No way was I casting the spell otherwise.

Ari frowned. “What if we call your Jared, have him call my mom and ask her what to do?” Ari pulled his phone from his pocket and opened it. His frown deepened. “Battery’s dead.”

I returned the notebook and the mead to the pack. The fog remained thick around us. My eyelids grew heavy. I closed them, saw flames behind my lids, and forced them open again. I didn’t want to dream.

Ari glanced at my hands. They were shaking. “We’ll figure it out, Haley,” he said.