Garún quickly grew to despise going to Mass. Not only was it difficult to walk with her mother through town with people staring at her, she was also afraid that the children leering outside her house would catch up with them. And the Mass itself was more often than not a hateful sermon of the downfall of the huldufólk, their pride and hubris and lust for entertainment at the cost of the suffering of other, lesser races.
Sometimes she saw the other children on the street, the blendingar hiding behind tubs of fish or stacks of pallets. They stared at her and she stared at them. These were Fjóla’s kids, the strays she’d taken in. Hulda told Garún that they had just been left on her doorstep through the years. Orphans from the city. Maybe if Fjóla hadn’t been there, they would have been carried out into the wilderness and left there. Garún couldn’t believe that someone would do that to an infant. It broke her heart every time to think about it.
She often asked her mother about her father. Who he was. Why he never visited. If he was dead. If he knew she existed. Her mother didn’t respond. The only answer she got was being told to keep quiet and not to be insolent, and that was that. When she asked her grandmother, she was told not to reopen old wounds.
On just one occasion had Garún managed to get something out of her mother, when she came home drunk one night. Garún was eleven. She didn’t know why she felt compelled to ask at that moment. She had reached out to Hulda, and found a profound sense of tenderness and sadness. Alcohol usually made her mother harder, not softer. The feeling was so new and overwhelming that Garún jumped back in surprise.
“Liljurós,” her mother had responded in a slurred voice, perhaps too drunk to have noticed Garún reaching out to her. “He called himself Liljurós.”
Then she went to bed and fell asleep.
Garún kept the name deep inside her, like a fragile treasure. She didn’t even dare to whisper it out loud, even though she was by herself and no one could hear her. It was too delicate, too precious, to risk it.
Later in life she would better know what feeling it was that her mother had felt that night, usually buried too deep within her for anyone to find a trace of it. It was grief.
* * *
Garún began trying to get out of attending church. At first she tried crying, but that didn’t work as her grandmother took to silencing her quickly with a slap. Worse would be coming if she kept on, Snædís had told her.
“You are too old to cry and I’m not about to let you spoil all the hard work your mother has done on your behalf. Be thankful.”
And that was the end of that.
It was a general rule of Garún’s childhood that she grew up too fast – or was made to grow up too fast. They lived in a rickety shack in Huldufjörður. It was a small village and gossip spread fast. Garún’s mother was not about to let it be known that her daughter didn’t go to church, after all the trouble they had gone through. She had a responsibility, Hulda had said. To make things better for the ones that would follow. Snædís never went to church.
“The old world is gone,” she would say every time Hulda invited her along with them. “I’m not about to spend my Seiðday grovelling by its ruins.”
The world of the huldufólk had ended quickly and violently. There were many stories about how it had happened. Thaumaturgical wars, ecological catastrophes, divine punishment. How it happened wasn’t that important, only that it had happened. In the end, every story reached the same conclusion. They all blamed the arrogance and depraved urges of the huldufólk, the privileged, corrupt world they had made for themselves. Their world had been one based on limitless desire, beauty and greed. For centuries the huldufólk had used gateways into other worlds to lure people in and feed upon their memories. Their supernatural charisma, allegedly heightened by the thaumaturgy of their own reality, coupled with their other-worldly display of riches, could lure in any kind of creature. The huldufólk made them into pawns in their cruel games. They stole away children, elders, teenagers, human and non-human alike. Supposedly their reach had encompassed countless realities. The feasts could last for months, where groups of extravagantly dressed ladies and lords would feed upon the succulent minds of their captives until nothing remained. Delicious morsels of fear and suffering, tender love and compassion – everything tasted exquisite to their refined palates. Revenge was practically impossible, no one could utilise the gateways except the huldufólk themselves. Their weapons and sorcery assured their absolute dominance. They were beautiful and cruel, and the other worlds were created only for their amusement.
Until
