Sorcerer's Feud Read online

  He held out his arms, and I hurried to his embrace. Neither of us mentioned the issue again.

  Sunday morning Billy called to tell Tor two things, that he hadn’t seen any more Frost Giants, and that the girlfriend loved the rune art. He was thinking of getting a tattoo, and would Tor draw him up a couple of designs?

  “Of course I will,” Tor told me. “If he’s going to keep hanging out with me, he probably needs some kind of permanent ward. Aaron and JJ, too. And you.”

  “I can’t stand needles. It makes me sick to just think about it.”

  “I could draw them on you.”

  “No, can’t you make me another pendant? An anti-giant rune stave?”

  “That’d work. Okay, but if and only if you promise me you’ll wear it whenever you leave the house.”

  “Don’t worry! I’ll promise you, swear on anything you want.”

  We went downstairs together, Tor to design the wards, and me to work on the problem of representing snow wraiths in paint. I tried Maxfield Parrish’s technique of using a turquoise blue underpainting. Under white, I figured, it would reproduce the icy glow and oddly fluid sense of solidity I’d seen. On a small canvas I laid in a ground of dead grass yellow, modeled to indicate the terrain, added an underpainting of dilute thalo blue, and built up the snow field from there. Then came the turquoise underpainting and finally, for the snow wraith herself, white with icy shadows. She most definitely did not look like a Halloween decoration. Thanks to the related blues of the underpaintings, she looked of the snow yet separate from the snow, a being, not an illusion.

  Tor knocked on my door. “I’ve finished the talisman.”

  I opened the door and waved him in. He handed me a smooth round of oak carved with a bindrune: a reversed Thurisaz, the rune signifying the jötnar, guarded round with Tiwaz and Elhaz. He took a leather thong out of his shirt pocket, threaded it through the roundel, then tied the ends together. When I slipped it over my head, it hung just below my collar bone.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Remember, wear it whenever you leave the house. I’ve done the designs for the guys. I’m going to call them and see if we can get together at the tattoo parlor on Monday. I don’t want to waste any time with giants hanging around.” Tor was looking over the studio as he talked. “What’s that on your easel? Can I see?”

  “Sure. It’s kind of a portrait.”

  He studied the she-wraith for several minutes. First he stepped back to get a long view, then moved closer to study the details of her face, the pale blue lips and eyes, and her hands with their ice chip nails.

  “Whoa!” he said. “That’s really good. And frightening. I wouldn’t trust a word she says, if she appears to you again.”

  “She kept her word to Mia.”

  He raised an eyebrow in my direction. When I told him about Mia’s death, he listened with the same serious attention he’d paid to the portrait.

  “You need to go farther back if you’re going to understand this,” Tor said when I was finished. “How you got connected to the wraiths in the first place.”

  “Farther back into my past lives, you mean?”

  “Yeah. That. Start with Magda and see if you can go beyond her. Backwards, I mean. And remember that the Nazis tried to wipe out the Romany tribes, too.”

  He’d given me just the boost I needed. She’d been a Romany girl, Magda, sold by her father against all of her tribes’ traditions and laws because he’d fallen into a desperate alcoholism. I drew like a madwoman. I started with her affair with Kristjan, then tried working backwards to her childhood. In a week I’d filled a large sketchbook with pieces of a life that was at least mostly Magda’s. As I drew, it hardly seemed important how accurate, measured against some objective reality, the images were. They held meaning for me and, I was willing to bet, would have been meaningful to her.

  During that week I hardly touched my senior project, although I did realize that I could use some of the Romany imagery for it. While I worked upstairs, Tor worked down below on taming the cave bear spirit. After their battle, she needed coaxing, he told me, but he felt her presence close by.

  “I can’t follow her out, is the problem,” he told me. “She belongs to another world, one of the eight beyond Midgard. If I can tame her, she’ll be my guide and take me there, but until I do, she can always hide from me.”

  Now and then, as I sat drawing in the living room, I heard him chanting galdrar. The deep vibration of his voice, reaching me from a distance, made me imagine ancient shamans sending their messages to the spirit world. I started to sketch one of them, based on some illos I’d seen of modern shamans in Siberia, but the image made me so uneasy I stopped. Something evil had happened to me, not out on the steppes of Siberia, but in the northlands of Europe, where they chanted as Tor was chanting, invoking runes. The only other thing I remembered in connection with this possible memory was the feel of leather thongs biting into my wrists.

  I had just started a new sketchbook when I saw an image of a different past life: a dark, dirty doorway in some city, maybe in the 18th century, maybe Paris. As I drew it, I realized it led to upstairs rooms where I lived with my parents. I tried every trick I knew, but I never got another image that fit with that one, only a memory of burning with fever. I must have died shortly after.

  Over the next few weeks, I filled that second sketchbook with pieces of imagery, some of them solid scenes, like a birch tree by a spring, some of them incomprehensible patterns of light and shadow. In between these extremes were fragments, such as a crude wooden cup, a frog sitting on a wet stone, a man’s hand missing a couple of fingers, a slice of dark bread on a cracked plate. They could have come from anywhere and any time. All of them indicated poverty, a hard life somewhere in the countryside. No wealthy noble ladies or famous artists for me! My soul must have lived like the vast majority of people have always lived—on the edge of civilization, dying young, working hard to grow enough food to keep working.

  When Tor asked, I showed him the images. He agreed about the hard lives.

  “Me, too,” he said. “I always hoped I’d been part of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople, or sailed with Leif Ericson, but no such luck. A couple of lives farming and herding cattle, and some in a warband, and then I was a wanna-be Viking killed on his first raid. After that it was merchant families all the way to Kristjan.”

  “Nothing glamorous. Me either.”

  “But y’know, you might have had an incredible talent for art in one of those lives. You would never have had the chance to develop it.”

  “Sad but true, yeah. You must have had some contact with rune magic.”

  “Everybody did. In the old days, magic wasn’t shoved off to the side of life. It wasn’t a big secret, not until the Christians got control, anyway. Then it hid in the dark, but now we can work in the sunlight again.”

  We. Not just him, but me, included in that we. I thought of the Old Girlfriend, and her nasty crack about Tor and me belonging together. She was right enough.

  “I guess I must have some contact with some kind of magic, too. Tarot cards, probably, if I was a Romany child. But I’m sure not getting anything more about snow wraiths.”

  “Keep working at it. They must have known you from somewhere.” He frowned, thinking. “It could have been pretty far back as we measure time. The wights—all the different kinds—live in worlds that we’d consider timeless. I’ve got no idea how they judge time or if they even do.”

  “The snow wraith who knew me, y’know? He did tell Mia he was meeting her again. And he said, ‘at last’, too.”

  “Which shows some idea of ordering events, yeah. And a sense of duration. Who knows how precise either one of those is, though?”

  A big help—not. Still, it gave me a line of thought, a slender thread that might, if I followed it carefully enough, lead me back into the past.

  We also went to the City to visit my brother in the hospital a number of times during th
ose weeks. Finally, on a Tuesday morning, Brittany called me with the news we’d been expecting. Roman had healed to the point where the hospital needed to move him into a VA rehabilitation facility. The only place that had an opening was in Palo Alto. Tor and I drove in that afternoon for a conference with Dr. Mellars. I was relieved by how good Roman looked. He sat up normally in bed, and his eyes were alert and clear. Mellars came straight out with his opinion.

  “I’m not worried about you regaining muscle strength,” Mellars said to Roman. “It’s the morphine that’s going to be the problem, isn’t it? Getting you clean and then off drugs for good?”

  Roman winced and nodded a yes.

  “I know the therapy group you’ve been in,” Mellars said. “It’s a good one, but there’s a limit to what they can do. Do you really want to clean up, Cantescu?”

  “Sure.” But Roman kept looking down at the blankets on his bed, not at any of us. “For Brit’s sake if nothing else.”

  “Idea,” Tor said. “What about a private rehab facility, like that Sonoma ranch? The one that thinks it’s Betty Ford North.”

  “Wonderful idea,” Mellars said. “But he doesn’t have any insurance. Do you know what that place costs?”

  “Yeah, actually, I do. I can pick up the tab.” Tor turned to Brittany. “You won’t be able to visit him there, not at first.”

  “I can live with that if it helps him.” Brit was watching Roman. “Can you stick with it?”

  Roman raised his head to give her a crooked smile. He was shaking, I realized, an uncontrollable tremor in his hands and around his mouth.

  “It won’t be easy,” Mellars said. “But you’re a Marine at heart, damn it. You’ve got the guts, if you want to go for this.”

  “You saved Maya’s life,” Tor put in. “I owe you.”

  Roman caught my glance. I mouthed the word “please.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ve lived through worse things.”

  “Good.” Tor turned to Mellars. “Let’s get the paperwork done. You’ll need to call for the referral.”

  “Come to my office. I’ve finished my hospital rounds, and I’ve got some time.”

  They left, talking quietly of official decisions. Brittany perched on the edge of the bed and took Roman’s hand. He smiled at her, but he went on trembling. None of us spoke until Tor came back. He had a handful of papers for Roman to sign and a second handful for Brittany to read. As the three of them discussed the move, I realized that by going into the therapy program, Roman was basically signing his freedom away. He’d be as much out of his own control as he’d been when he’d enlisted in the Marines. I could only hope he’d stick it out. Settling everything took a couple of hours, partly because Roman would have to travel in an ambulance. The VA, or so a hospital admin person told us, would pick up the tab for that.

  Once Tor had settled everything, I gave Roman a hug, the first time I could hug him without worrying about the wound on his back.

  “You can do this,” I said.

  “Sounds like I’ll have plenty of help.” Roman took a deep breath. “What the hell, it sure beats Iraq.” He turned to look at Tor. “Hey. Thanks.”

  “Welcome,” Tor said. “I mean it. I owe you.”

  They shook hands, and we left. On the drive home, a question nagged at me. I waited until we’d gotten clear of the bridge traffic to ask it.

  “Tor, how did you know how much this rehab place costs?”

  “A while ago I paid someone else’s fees.”

  I waited. He never told me more.

  Family matters, especially Halvar’s various legacies, remained very much a part of Tor’s present. A couple of days later, Joel sent him email to say that he was coming west to settle up a last few details of his father’s will. He was hoping “to get together, maybe at that Indian restaurant where I ran into you.”

  “Can you face him, Maya?” Tor said.

  “Sure, out in public like that.” I hoped I was speaking the truth.

  “ I found some things I need to give him. Stuck in one of Halvar’s journals. Some pictures of Joel as a kid with—I guess—his mom. The old bastard gloated over having another grandson.”

  “I guess he wasn’t all bad, huh?”

  “Maybe. Who knows what plans he had for us? Me and Joel, I mean. Spare parts for his old age? Could be.” Tor paused to bring up the lunar calendar on his laptop. “Okay, Joel’s visit. He’ll get here before the full moon, so we can have dinner.”

  “You’re still worried about the moon? Do you think you’ll turn into the bjarki again?”

  “I’m hoping I won’t, but let’s plan for the worst.”

  That afternoon Tor put a deposit down on my engagement ring. I would have been perfectly happy with something from a franchise jeweler in the mall, but Tor heaped scorn on that idea. He took me to a shop down in Berkeley, a narrow slice of a store between two larger ones, where he knew the craftsman personally. The sign painted on the glass door read simply “Diego’s Jewelry.” The place looked empty when we walked in—nothing on the recycled wood-paneled walls, one glass case doubling as a counter down at the far end. A curtain hung over an opening behind the case. A man with black hair just touched with gray at the temples twitched the curtain aside, saw us, and came out smiling.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while, Tor,” he said.

  “I’ve been busy finding the right girl. This is Maya, and she’s got some ideas for our wedding rings.”

  “Well! Congratulations to both of you!”

  When I handed over my sketches, Diego laid them on the counter so he and Tor could study them. I looked over the merchandise in the glass case below the counter—some nice silver work pins, a few gold pendants, some strands of turquoise hishi, a lot of empty black velvet trays. I got the distinct impression that most of Diego’s work came from commissions.

  “I like these,” Tor said. “Open-ended.”

  “No one owns anyone, huh?” Diego said.

  “That’s what I had in mind, yeah,” I said.

  I’d designed the wedding rings as spirals of gold, two twists around the finger so they’d be secure but not symbols of captivity. I did compromise on the engagement ring, though, and made that a regular band, because of the diamond. Tor insisted on a diamond, and I didn’t want anything that expensive slipping off my hand. It would fit below the wedding rings once we were married. The stone’s mount would overlap the bottom twist of the spiral and tie the two rings together.

  “I’ll need at least two weeks for the engagement ring,” Diego said, “because I have to find the right stone. I’m not going to mount just any old diamond. This is an important wedding.”

  “Yeah,” Tor said with a smile. “It sure is.”

  Diego took our sizes, then brought out a contract form. The quoted price for all three rings nearly made me gasp, but Tor kept smiling and handed over his credit card.

  “Tell me something,” Tor said. “I’m looking for a chunk of white stone I can shape into an animal figurine. It needs to fit into my closed hand. Do you know a good place to buy something like that?”

  “Depends. How good a sculptor are you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried it before.”

  Diego rolled his eyes. “Then don’t buy anything expensive. Practice on Ivory soap. Cutting stone isn’t like wood carving.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Do you have to start from scratch? I’ve got a tray of Native American sculptures in the back. Some Navajo alabaster pieces, and then some Zuni work by a guy who studied with Leland Boone.”

  Tor went very still, and his eyes stared out at nothing. Diego smiled a little.

  “Anything call to you?” Diego said.

  “Yeah. You’ve got a bear back there. Want to bring her out?”

  Diego did just that, and some of her friends for good measure, beautiful little animal sculptures, some in marble, some in striped native stone. The cinnamon-brown bear, as sleek and stylized a
s a Bufano sculpture, stood about three inches high. Tied to her back were a tiny turquoise arrowhead and a coral bead. Tor picked her up and closed his hand around her.

  “Mine,” Tor said quietly. “Name your price.”

  “Two hundred.”

  “Put it on the card.”

  You don’t haggle over magical objects. I read that somewhere, and I was seeing how true it was. Diego took the other fetishes into his back room and returned with a small cardboard box and tissue paper. Tor wrapped the bear in the tissue but spurned the box. He put the sculpture into his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap over her. Jealousy stabbed me. Why was he buying something for the sow right in the middle of getting our wedding rings? I realized that I had a feud of my own underway.

  As I was driving us home, Tor’s phone did its howling wolf number. He answered it and made arrangements to meet someone at our house.

  “That was Aaron,” Tor told me. “He’s on his way over to give me some printout, because he wanted to wipe the data off his box as soon as possible, and he didn’t want to put it on mine.”

  “Oh my god! He really did manage to hack into the police department.”

  “He called it easy pickings.”

  Since Aaron couldn’t drive, JJ brought him over. They only stayed a few minutes, just long enough for Aaron to hand over an inch thick stack of paper. JJ kept looking around him as if he expected cops to come bursting out of the walls.

  “I feel like an accessory to a crime,” JJ said.

  “You are.” Tor gave him a grin. “And thank you.”

  After they left, Tor and I settled down in the living room to read Lieutenant Hu’s write-ups on the case and various relevant emails. Tor started, then handed me pages as he finished them.

  The core of it: at the beginning of the investigation, Tor was suspect number one, all right, with Valdez a close second. At first Hu and his team had suspected drug dealing, thanks to Roman’s habit. As the investigation proceeded, Hu decided that neither Tor nor Valdez could be implicated in drug trafficking, which led to a question of motive. In the early reports, I was Cantescu, perhaps what—not who, but what—the men were fighting over. By the later emails I’d become “the girlfriend”. The last few never mentioned me at all, not even as a prize in the fight between uncle and nephew.