Sorcerer's Feud Page 18

  I was watching a woman struggling to run uphill. She wore a long brown skirt and a sweater and high boots, no jacket, no scarf, and no hat over her touseled blonde bob. The snow clotted the hem of her skirt, clutched at it as if it were trying to slow her down, to stop her insane climb in the freezing weather. Mia. I knew what she was going to find. I tried to call out and warn her, but the wind blew my words away. I could feel the élan of Niflheim swirling around me and breathed deep. It strengthened me, but it also called to me. We are Isa incarnate, it whispered. Escape to the ice. Leave your life and lover behind. The wraiths are waiting where you belong.

  “No!”

  I spun around. I could see a narrow space like a door that led back into the studio. I turned and ran for it, dashed through and nearly rammed myself into the work table in the process. The room felt warm and real. The landscape was only a painting. But my feet and ankles were soaked with snow melt. I sat down on the floor before I fell down and shivered, but not from cold.

  Footsteps came pounding down the hall. Tor rushed into the room. I looked up gape-mouthed. Words had deserted me.

  “The nisse came and got me,” Tor said. “What happened? Wait—what? How did you get so wet?”

  “Snow.” I pointed at the painting. “It swallowed me. Or something. I went inside it.”

  Tor whistled under his breath. He glanced around the studio, grabbed the charcoal stick from the work table, and walked up to the easel. With the charcoal he drew a pair of runes on the sky of the painting: Sowilo and Othala.

  “Try to go into it now,” he said. “I bet you can’t. I’ve marked it as the sun’s odal land.”

  I got up and stood staring into the painting, made myself remember Mia’s run through the clinging snow. I could remember the cold—my wet ankles and calves took care of that—but I stayed where I was.

  “Thanks.” Dumb thing to say, but I had no energy for eloquence. “I need to discuss this with Liv.”

  “Well, you could tell me about it first.”

  “She’s the one who knows about image magic. Obviously you don’t, or you would have warned me this could happen.”

  “Hey! Why are you so pissed off?”

  “You wanted me to develop my talents.” I felt like hitting something, someone, anything. “Well, I did. Thanks a lot! How am I supposed to paint if this is going to keep happening?”

  “It’s not going to keep happening.” Tor smiled in full arrogance mode. “You’ve got me to—”

  “Fat lot of good that’ll do me.”

  He kept on smiling. I picked up the paint rag and threw it at his face. He ducked, and it draped over his shoulder. He picked it off, tossed it back onto the table, and made a serious mistake.

  “Maya,” he said, “be reasonable.”

  “Oh go to hell!”

  I strode past him, and as I went out of the door, I flicked off the lights and left him in the dark.

  “Hey! What?”

  I slammed the door, too, and nearly whacked him with it because he was right behind me. As I headed for the stairs, I heard him following. I ran up the stairs, but with his longer legs he caught me in the living room. By then I was panting for breath and feeling more than a little stupid. We sat down facing each other on the couch.

  “Okay,” Tor said, “what is all this?”

  “I told you. I feel like you pushed me into something I can’t handle.”

  “You can learn to handle it. All I was trying to say is I’d show you how to get control of it.”

  “It’s the fucking arrogant way you say it.”

  He winced.

  “Hah!” I said. “You’ve heard that before, haven’t you? From your old girlfriends.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and looked into the empty fireplace.

  “Besides, if it wasn’t for the nisse, you’d never have known,” I said. “And maybe I’d have been stuck there.”

  “I already knew something was wrong.” Tor kept his voice level. “It merely told me where to look.”

  Thanks to his vow, I knew he was telling the truth.

  “Besides,” he continued, “you got out by yourself, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yeah.” The importance of my escape finally dawned on me. “I did. I really did.”

  “Okay.” He uncrossed his arms, but he gave me one of his smug smiles. “You want to know why you’re so angry?”

  “I know damn well why I’m angry.”

  He went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “You summoned a lot of magical energy. And you must have absorbed a lot of élan from the snow. But you didn’t earth it out once you got back. Because you don’t know how.”

  I considered hissing and snarling at him. Yet I could feel the extra energy simmering in my blood, seeking an outlet—rage, magic, whatever. Any outlet would do.

  “Okay, Mr. Mighty Sorcerer,” I said. “How exactly do I do that?”

  “There are ritual gestures you need to do when you finish a magical operation.” He grinned, but in the way I loved, with his cute dimple and all. “But I can think of something even better.”

  “I’d rather you showed me the ritual.”

  “You’re sure?” He slid over next to me and slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Tell me to stop, and I’ll let you go and teach you the gestures.” He bent his head and nuzzled the side of my neck. “Just say no.” He laid a hand on my breast.

  ‘No’ refused to leave my mouth. He kissed me and sealed it in.

  After we finished making love, Tor fell asleep. I got up, dressed, and went into the Burne-Jones bedroom to fetch my laptop. On the alchemical barometer, a pair of doves flew in a clear sky, surrounded by a ring of butterflies.

  “Doves are totally aggressive birds, despite the bill and coo,” I said. “Or is that your point?”

  The desk remained silent, probably out of fear of incriminating itself. I returned to the living room couch and settled in to write a long email to Liv. I’d just sent it off when I heard a wolf howling: Tor’s ringtone. I hurried into the bedroom and saw him sitting up cross-legged on the bed with the phone.

  “That’s real strange,” Tor was saying. “I’m glad you told me.” He paused to listen. “Yeah, you bet I’ll try to figure this out. Be careful, will you? Don’t go out at night alone.” He listened for a moment more, then clicked off.

  “What?” I said.

  “That was Billy. He looked out of his bedroom window and saw a Frost Giant standing on the lawn, staring at him. He opened the window and yelled at him, like a jerk. The jotunn disappeared. This time.”

  “Oh my god! Billy doesn’t live alone, does he?”

  “No, he shares a house with a couple of other guys. But there’s not a lot the three of them can do against a twelve foot high dude with a battle axe.”

  “Twelve feet?”

  “He had to stoop to see in the window.” Tor laid the phone down on the nightstand. “I’d better get dressed. Get downstairs. I need to cast the runes.”

  Tor said nothing about the reading once he’d finished. I picked up the vibe that I shouldn’t ask. First thing next morning, though, and fortunately it was a Saturday, Tor called Billy. While I finished my breakfast, they squabbled back and forth. Billy wanted to drive over to our house, while Tor insisted that he stay inside at his place until Tor could get there. Eventually Tor won.

  “I’m going to jump over,” he told me. “That’ll scare any giants shitless if they’re watching. A display of vitki power.”

  “Are you going to draw runes and staves on the house?”

  “Yes. And on Billy.” He grinned at me. “You’re catching on.”

  “Don’t cut yourself again, will you? It’s so icky.”

  Tor rolled his eyes and refused to answer. I went downstairs with him while he assembled his weapons, as he called them: the rune knife, the special paint, and some Sharpies, because their ink wouldn’t wash off easily, for drawing runes on Billy.

  “You shouldn’t use that kind of ink o
n skin,” I said. “It’s dangerous to humans.”

  “Angry giants would be worse.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “What are you going to do while I’m gone?” Tor said.

  “Work on my senior project.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I might have Billy with me, I might not. Depends on how sensible he’s willing to be.”

  Tor kissed me goodbye, then jogged outside to the back yard. I watched him through the sliding glass doors in the library room. First he drew a sprawling equal armed cross with a piece of chalk on the patch of cracking concrete at one side. He slung his backpack over one shoulder and took three precise steps that brought him on top of the symbol. At the point where the arms crossed, he vanished.

  I went to my studio and considered the landscape sitting on my easel. I needed to add Audo’s dead body, the last important compositional element. Besides the white slope and the distant peaks, I’d added the dark masses of forest to either side of the snow, but I’d done the trees as figures from a German Expressionist silent film, distorted shapes, leaning inward, toothed and jagged forms, as though Life longed to despoil the purity of Death. At the moment the whole thing really did look too much like a still from a Disney movie, but the corpse would fix that.

  I hoped, anyway. I made sketches on paper, then transferred the best of them to the right location, a slight hollow partway up the slope, close enough to the hypothetical viewer to allow me to add detail to the form. I did an underpainting in pale blue to tie the corpse in with the snowy background, which I’d also underpainted to produce faint spectral shadows. Before I went any further, the underpainting had to dry. I stepped back and considered the overall composition.

  I’d placed the body correctly, but did it look like him? I can’t articulate why, but making a portrait of that final moment mattered. I remembered him as lying on his back, one arm flung out to the side, the other cradling an empty whiskey bottle to his chest. Did I have it right? I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter, but I wanted the painting to be perfect.

  I picked up the paint rag and wiped out the runes Tor had drawn on the sky. Immediately I felt the cold air rush out from the snowscape. I dropped the rag and took a step forward. Once again, I was standing in the snow, knee-deep this time. Élan swirled around me, succored me, gave me the strength to stand in the freezing cold even though I was wearing a pair of white shorts, an old tee shirt, and nothing more.

  I heard someone down the slope cry out: Mia, babbling in German. I understood nothing but her tone of voice, so angry, reproachful that he’d died without her. Like a drift of snow carried on the wind I floated downhill until I stood among the snow wraiths who had come to watch. Although some of the wraiths glanced my way, no one objected to my presence at my previous death. Yes, I’d drawn Audo’s pose correctly. That was my main concern as I stood and observed my former self ready herself for suicide. Around me the wraiths murmured and wrote their crystal voices on the air. The she-wraith stepped forward and knelt by Mia as she lay down next to her dead love.

  Far down the hill men shouted. The villagers were coming. I turned and looked back the way I’d come and thought of the studio, thought of Tor, as well, and the way I loved him. The tunnel-door opened to lead me back. I slogged uphill through the snow, reached the gateway, and hurried inside to my studio room. In front of the easel, a scatter of snow lay melting on the floor. I could just make out a shadow-image of the actual, physical painting hovering in the tunnel mouth. I grabbed the charcoal from the table and drew Sowilo and Othala in the sky that somehow was also a surface.

  The air turned warm around me. The snowscape snapped back to existing only as acrylic paint on canvas. Despite the élan I’d gathered, my legs were blue and shaky with cold. I rubbed them, then hobbled out and headed down the hall. By the time I reached the stairs, the feeling had returned to my skin and muscles. I made a mental note to dress properly if I ever needed to go into the snow again. If I got wet, or if the snow touched bare skin, I’d feel the cold just like anyone else. My twisted DNA could only protect me so far.

  I put on my sweatpants and one of Tor’s flannel shirts. He’d left some coffee in the carafe. I warmed it up in the microwave and sat at the breakfast bar to drink it. Once the aching cold left my body, it dawned on me that I might have stumbled on a way to get the élan I needed, even if I couldn’t summon it the way that Tor did.

  I took my coffee into the living room, where I’d left a sketchbook and a box of Conté sticks on the coffee table. I concentrated on the memory of the day my dad had taken me and Roman out of school to go to the snow. I summoned a clear image of a pine tree, its branches loaded with snow, that grew near a white drift over rocks. As soon as I sketched in a jagged line to represent the trees farther up the hill, I felt cool air and smelled the rich honey and roses scent of élan.

  For a few minutes I breathed deep and luxuriated in the energy oozing from the drawing. How to turn it off? I found a piece of charcoal in my box of implements and drew Sowilo and Othala in the sky. The scent vanished and took the spray of cold air with it. Worked like a charm, I thought, and then realized I had indeed just worked a charm. Once my success would have creeped me out, but this particular magic meant too much for me to get all drama queen over it.

  Since I’d finally warmed up, I changed into my old jeans and a dry tee shirt, then practically ran down the stairs to my studio room. I found a canvas board small enough to carry in my backpack and did a colored drawing in acrylics of the snowscape I’d previously sketched. A thick coat of gloss medium covered a patch of sky, so I could draw and wipe off the runes as many times as I needed to stop or release the magic. People with breathing difficulties have to travel with cumbersome oxygen tanks. I was lucky enough to have what I needed come in a convenient package. Eventually, maybe, I’d be able to conjure élan from the natural world like Tor did. In the meantime, I no longer needed to ask him for it. I no longer needed to steal it, either, from the people around me.

  For the first time in my life, I was free.

  I wept in a flood of tears, but out of joy.

  Chapter 10

  “I can’t figure out why they’d spy on Billy,” Tor said. “Unless they wondered if he’s another vitki.”

  Tor had returned late that Saturday afternoon. It had taken him hours, he told me, to carve and paint all the necessary runes on Billy’s rented house. The roommates had objected until Billy promised to reimburse their shares of the cleaning deposit. When the landlord saw the damage, and you know he would, sooner or later, he was going to raise hell.

  “The place is filthy anyway,” Tor told me. “I don’t know why they’re worried. They’re not going to get one single buck back when they move. Anyway, I drew a protective rune helm on Billy, and I hope he doesn’t wash it off. He’s got a hot date tonight, he told me. I made him take his shower before I started decorating his back.”

  “If things get interesting, I wonder what she’ll think of the runes?”

  “That’s what’s worrying him.” Tor looked briefly sour. “I told him, body art’s a trend. Run with it. But anyway, I’ve been gone a long time. You must need élan by now.”

  “No, actually, I don’t. I’ve figured out how to get it for myself.”

  Tor blinked a couple of times. “Already?”

  “Well, it’s kind of a kludge, but it works.”

  He sat up straighter, his neck rigid, his head tilted a little back, and his face became utterly expressionless—just for a few seconds. He smiled and said, “Yeah? I mean, hey, that’s great!”

  I didn’t believe his enthusiasm for a minute. “I’ll show you if you’d like.”

  “Sure. I mean, that’s really wonderful.” His smile turned as fake as a Halloween mask.

  “Tor! What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh come on!”

  He sighed and looked away. “Okay, sure, I’m disappointed. I really get off on feeding
you. You always look so happy.”

  “You can keep on doing it if you want to. Your way is lots faster, and I enjoy it, too. It’s kind of like you’re kissing me.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

  What would have been a whine from someone else was only another dodge. At that point I realized that I was seeing through a new kind of illusion. I was afraid to call him on it.

  “No, I’m not! I told you, the trick I figured out is clumsy. Slow. It just means I can feed myself if you’re gone or doing something you can’t stop. Y’know, emergencies.”

  “Okay.” He finally smiled for real. “And I can teach you how to harvest it from the air. Well, if you still want me to.”

  “Of course I do.”

  I kissed him, then got up to fetch the colored drawing for my demo. When I finished, he spent a couple of minutes studying the drawing. I studied him and saw in his unguarded expression a welter of feelings, hard to untangle, but one stood out. I gathered my courage.

  “Tor?” I said. “I love you. You don’t have to use the élan thing to make sure I stay with you.”

  He raised his head and looked at me, his eyes wide, his lips half-parted.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? Control?”

  “Yeah.” He handed me the drawing and stood up. “I’m going downstairs.”

  He stomped off before I could think of what else to say. I put the drawing away. I was just wondering if I should follow him down when he returned.

  “I’m sorry,” Tor said. “You did something really cool, and I acted like a jerk.”

  “Do you really think it’s cool?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”