Giants of the Frost (17 page)

"Victoria, meet Matthias and Nina," Magnus said, introducing them one at a time.

"Hi, nice to meet you," I said, offering what I thought was a child-friendly smile.

"They're a bit wary of speaking English," Magnus told me, when the children had worn speechless blank expressions for longer than was comfortable. "They're here for a week, hopefully to improve their English if you wouldn't mind helping them."

•

"Um… I suppose not," I said, and thought about saying my one much-practiced Norwegian phrase, but changed my mind when I spied Frida.

"Magnus, I found your pen."

"Mmm, good."

Magnus said something to the children and they ran off down the jetty shouting to each other, Magnus trailing them. Carsten and Frida got off together and I noticed a shiny new ring on her engagement finger. Josef, Gordon and Alex were arguing with one of the sailors over his rough handling of a carton of

"expensive Swiss brandy." Gunnar ambled down the gangplank and I thought he might give me a hug so I turned my shoulder and pretended I was watching Maryanne run away from Magnus and his children.

"All is not well," I said.

"They had a fight when we were boarding at Ålesund. It's been a long ten hours." He touched my shoulder lightly. "How are you?"

I shook my head. "Fm… I can't even describe it. I suppose I'm all right. It's been a very strange week."

"Magnus got into a lot of trouble for leaving you here alone."

"He did? He said nothing to me on the phone."

"He wouldn't. He would think it a sign of weakness." He indicated his suitcase. "I'm going to unpack and have a coffee back in my cabin. Want to join me?"

"Yes, that would be nice."

I was very relaxed in Gunnar's company and the day brightened. If Gunnar saw signs that I had spent a few nights cowering under his bedclothes or that anything had been borrowed, he made no mention of it. Instead we drank coffee while he unpacked, and he told me about how many stoned English tourists wandered the streets of Amsterdam, and how his best friend had announced he was getting married, and how he'd thought himself mortally sick after a particularly long night of varied drinking. I listened, and I laughed in the right places, and he cheered me up with his reassuring ordinariness. I offered him help with cleaning up his cabin, and as we picked clothes up and washed coffee cups and dusted furniture, he finally said to me, "So, I didn't hear from you again after our last phone call. I assume you decided you weren't being stalked?"

I laughed and shook my head. "Turns out I was perfectly safe."

"No more weird happenings? Visitations from ghostly creatures?"

"No. And don't make fun."

"I'm not making fun," he said with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. "I'm serious. It must have been the protection rune. Once you had that—"

"I didn't keep it," I said dismissively.

"No? Where is it?"

"I kicked it off the slab."

He dropped his cleaning rag and grabbed my hand. "Come on, let's go find it."

"Gunnar—"

"Come on, just for fun."

I followed him out his back door and around the lattice to my cabin. Following his lead, I dropped to my hands and knees in the dirt of the forest's edge and started hunting through dead pine needles and tough undergrowth.

"Is this just a way of putting off tidying your cabin?" I asked.

"Maybe. But if a ward falls into your hands, you should keep it. You never know when you'll be alone on an island with the bogeyman."

"Stop teasing," I replied. "It was hard for me to call and be so weak."

"I'm not teasing you." He sat back and smiled at me. "Victoria, we're mates, aren't we?" I lifted my head and blew a strand of hair out of my eyes and thought about how I hadn't mentioned Vidar to him. "Yeah, of course."

"So let me be your mate."

"All right, all right, I'm being overly sensitive, I know," I said, "but you've got to understand my history. My mother is completely mental and I don't want to be the same. You can tease me about anything else, just not that."

"But you know you're nothing like your mum. You know you're not mental." I thought about the past week: the hysteria, the mania, the imprudence. "Umm…"

"There it is!" Gunnar leaped forward, then stood up, holding out the ward.

"You found it, great," I said, feeling oddly relieved.

He inspected it. "Oh, Vicky, this one's incredible."

"Why?"

"See this hole?"

"I guess that's for stringing it on a chain."

"Yes, but it's not man-made. A man-made hole would break the magic. It's worn through, probably by water." His pinky finger indicated the smooth, fine edges of the hole. "It's the luckiest charm there is."

"In what way?"

"Wards found in water are lucky, wards with an eye are doubly lucky, wards with a protection rune scratched on them are luckier still." Gunnar's fist closed over the stone and he shoved it, nonchalantly, in his pocket. "Well, if you don't want it…"

I opened my mouth to protest, but stopped myself. It was all superstitious nonsense after all. "Keep it," I said. "I don't need it."

I picked up my mail from the station. I had a letter from Samantha with photos of a new boyfriend she had met in Florence, a confirmation of my remote study status from my university and, of course, a letter from my mother.

Dear Vicky,

I know why you didn't phone me back, and I know you are afraid of what's happening to you and how it makes you feel. I took an old scarf of yours to Bathsheba for a reading. There is good news and bad news. I'll start with the bad.

Bathsheba says you are in way over your head, especially as your skepticism has left you unprotected. There are wild elementals loose around you, and they are interested in you and malevolent. The good news is that there is a helpful spirit looking out for you. You should trust this spirit. The other good news is that Bathsheba says you have definitely already met the man you are going to marry and spend the rest of your life with.

Please, please, please be careful, and phone me very soon!

Love, Mum

I put the letter aside with a roll of my eyes. Well, maybe Bathsheba was right and Vidar was The One, though I wasn't sure if the dates matched up. And anyway, nobody who called herself Bathsheba should be trusted for any kind of advice, much less the psychic variety. I lay back on my bed to daydream about Vidar.

I hadn't got far when there was a knock at the door. Magnus stood there, and about three feet behind him were his children, wide-eyed and tight-lipped.

"Ah, Victoria. I wonder if I might ask you a favor?"

"Certainly." I was worried. Magnus had applied his most charming smile.

"I know you've been working seven days in a row, and I know I promised you four days off when we returned, and… I was rather hoping that Maryanne could watch the children this afternoon, but she's busier than I'd anticipated and I'm sure you can appreciate I've got a lot of paperwork to get through after being away for so long—"

"You want me to look after your children?" Insult upon insult.

The tone of my voice gave him pause. "Just for an afternoon. You could help them practice their English." Matthias said something in Norwegian to Nina, who giggled. Magnus turned to give them a stern look.

"I don't know anything about looking after kids," I whispered, leaning forward so the children couldn't hear me. "What if I break one?"

Magnus shook his head. "These two are indestructible. Just take them to the rec hall and make them some afternoon tea, and speak to them in English." He sensed I might be ready to yield. "Please, Victoria. You'd help me out of a tight spot."

I was annoyed. I was a scientist, not a babysitter. However, Magnus was my boss and I was stuck on a remote island with him, so it would probably pay to keep him happy. "Certainly," I said.

"Thank you so much," he said in a voice that sounded so sincere it must have been faked. "Matthias, Nina, you stay with Victoria this afternoon and you speak only English." They watched him go with mournful eyes while I fetched my coat. I locked up behind me, and said,

"Come on."

Outside smelled like pine needles and the salty sea. I took a deep breath. "How long are you staying?" I asked as they shuffled behind me to the rec hall.

Matthias and Nina exchanged glances, looked at me and shrugged. Perhaps their English wasn't that good after all.

"How old are you?" I tried, very slowly.

Nina gave me an innocent smile and shook her head.

"Right, let's just get some afternoon tea," I muttered. I led them into the rec hall and sat them down. "Wait here," I said, pointing at the chairs. '

Matthias nodded. He said something to Nina in Norwegian and she giggled.

Maryanne was in the kitchen, sharpening her knives.

"Hi, Maryarme," I said lightly, shouldering open the door to the cold room. I emerged a minute later with chocolate cookies and milk.

She peered at me with flinty eyes. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Making afternoon tea for Magnus's children."

Maryanne snorted. I think it was meant to be a bitter laugh. "Oh, he's passed them on to you, has he?" I poured two glasses of milk and arranged the cookies on a plate. "He said you were busy."

"Busy! That has nothing to do with it. I refused, point-blank, to look after those little shits again. They come four times a year, and he can't stand them, so he dumps them on me. I told him on the boat, I'm not looking after them this time. He can ask somebody else." Her knife sharpening reached a frenzied speed. I took a step back. "He's too afraid of Frida to ask her, and God forbid that he should ask a man, so look who's next on his wish list, the pretty new trainee. Well, enjoy yourself with the nasty beasts, Vicky."

I took a couple of seconds to process this diatribe. "Did you and Magnus have a fight?"

"He's a bloody pig."

"What did he do?"

Maryanne dropped her head and examined the knife blade. "I'd rather not talk about it." To my horror, she began to cry. I put a hand on her arm. "I have to go, Maryanne, but if you need somebody to talk to…"

"No, no, I'm fine."

I backed away slowly with the kids' afternoon tea on a tray. When I entered the rec hall, they were sitting exactly where I'd left them. I set the tray on the table and they helped themselves, giggling and talking to each other in Norwegian, and giving me sly looks. I decided to try one more time with the most basic English sentence I could think of: "How are you today, Matthias and Nina?" More giggles. Then Matthias, in perfect English, said, "Our father is your boss. He tells you what to do." I swallowed the retort I wanted to spit at him. "Oh, so you
do
speak English well."

"Naturally," Nina said, reaching for another chocolate cookie.

"So why didn't you answer my questions before?"

"Because they were stupid questions," Matthias said.

Nina, impersonating my pained pronunciation with mortifying precision, said, "How long are you staying?

How old are you?"

I set my teeth and forced a smile. "How about this then. What is the mean distance between two random points in a unit square?" And when they didn't answer, "That shut you up, didn't it? Now, eat your cookies."

More Norwegian dialogue passed between them. I'm sure most of it was insults aimed at me but I didn't mind. They were only kids after all. Magnus was the one who should have known better. A staff meeting and drinking session had been organized for after dinner that evening, presumably when Matthias and Nina were watching videos in Magnus's cabin and no longer in need of English lessons. I sat in the rec hall with Josef and Alex to wait for the others. The station was so different now there were people around. The spaces seemed warmer, better insulated against the weather outside; the buildings seemed safe and sturdy, rather than abandoned shapes being reclaimed by the forest. While this was a good thing—it put my recent brush with gullibility firmly behind me—it also saddened me. The loss of Vidar was tied up with the loss of the haunted feeling. He had been strange, he had been part of the forest and the bare night sky. All the ordinariness around me underscored his absence. Magnus bustled in last, apologizing and blaming his lateness on getting the children settled.

"Now, this meeting will be neither long nor boring," he promised, then in the next hour and twelve minutes set about breaking that promise.

At eight-thirty, just as Maryanne was bringing out a bottle of scotch and nine glasses, Magnus held up his hands, and said, "Wait, wait, one last agenda item."

The collective groan was inaudible but palpable.

Magnus smiled. "Trust me, this one is interesting. I was talking to some of the other station commanders in Bern, and they all have social club events that go beyond getting drunk every Wednesday night. Would you like to hear?"

Glances passed around the room. Gunnar said, "Go on."

"I propose a monthly social event, for which we all pay a nominal sum from our wages, to go toward funding our Christmas party. So it acts as a fund-raising event as well as a team-building experience. Now we should probably discuss this at length because—"

"That sounds great, Magnus," I said quickly.

"A wonderful idea," Carsten said. "I'll vote for that."

"Me too, me too," Frida said. "No need to discuss it."

"Good," said Magnus, pleased with himself. "Any ideas for our first social event? Considering that we are stuck on an island in the middle of the Norwegian Sea."

"How about a picnic?" Gunnar said. "The days are getting milder."

"In the clearing," Frida suggested.

"No, by the lake," Josef said.

"Ah, the lake," Magnus said. "Good idea."

So the picnic at the lake was set for the coming weekend, various tasks were assigned, a levy was agreed upon, and we finally started drinking the scotch.

And long after everybody else finished drinking, I was still going. My need to decompress was greater than my determination to behave prudently. I simply didn't want to go to bed. I didn't want to close my eyes on the day that I lost Vidar and have the next day be an ordinary day. I wanted the world to be wild and thrilling and, that night, alcohol was the nearest shortcut to hand. Gunnar, who had overindulged on his holiday, was the first to bed, followed by Gordon going off to the night shift, followed by Alex and Josef, whom I was starting to suspect were lovers, followed by Frida and Carsten—who still hadn't officially announced their engagement—which left Magnus, Maryanne and me in the rec hall with Maryanne's Cat Stevens CD on repeat-play.