A Plague of Shadows (2 page)

But it was one specific flower that drew her attention. The flower was orange, velvety, and opening even as she watched. Inside wasn’t like any other flower, there was no pestle, no stamen. Instead there was a fluff of something that looked like cotton, and a naked woman with short dark hair and milky skin.

She’d heard the tales. At the end of time, when all had crumbled back into darkness, two humans would survive the destruction. A man and a woman. Lif and Lifthrasir. This must be Lifthrasir.

But it didn’t make sense. Those were just stories. Even though the priests said the end time was coming, no one
actually
believed them . . . did they?

Again, Abagail wasn’t certain.

But there wasn’t any time to think about that, because as she watched, Lifthrasir began to stir. Abagail’s sight was diverted from the woman who had survived the destruction of the cosmos because another flower was opening, this one blue. It unfurled and shrugged open to the noon-time sun, and exposed a male body, curled in a ball, his back to her.

But he was close enough to her that she could see the golden hair shimmering along his legs and the way the muscles were bunched under his tan skin, and the golden wash of hair that adorned his head.

Abagail blushed and turned back to the woman in time to see her sit up, stretch the biggest stretch one could imagine, and yawn like the roar of some waking bear.

But it wasn’t the yawn that startled Abagail. No, what startled Abagail the most was that the woman who emerged from the flower, the same woman who had survived the end times in order to repopulate all of the nine worlds, was herself.

The leaves of the great tree started to shiver. The image of herself turned to Abagail, and it wasn’t until Lifthrasir turned more toward her that Abagail was able to see the vine that attached to the figure’s bellybutton like an umbilical cord.

A wind stirred behind Abagail, cold and harsh, as if blowing from across a great expanse of ice. In the wind a word was carried:
Helvegr.

As the word slithered over the tree, the bark where the cold wind touched darkened, and leaves and flowers withered. Lifthrasir stirred, and made to go to Lif, but the wind caught them both, freezing the two that were meant to populate the nine worlds where they rested.

The cold bit into her extremities, and she cried out in pain. Abagail tried to move away from the wind, maybe to the other side of the tree so that she would be sheltered from the gale, but she couldn’t move. It was like her feet were stuck firm to the well. When she looked down it was to see a ring of ice had formed around her feet, slowly creeping up her legs.

Abagail’s scream chased her out of the dream.

Abagail gasped awake, the image of the tree emblazoned in her mind. Whenever she’d heard of the Tree at Eget Row, it was something of wonder, of peace, something that filled the dreamer with delight and serenity. None had ever seen it in person, that’s partially what made it so mysterious. Abagail had doubted before that the tree even existed.

But now she’d seen it. Now she knew that it was real, and the images she saw therein caused a chill to crawl up her spine, despite the warm room. If she closed her eyes she could still see the well, stretching up twice the height of herself with the towering tree above, so she didn’t close her eyes. She kept her eyes rooted on the ceiling until they started to water.

She couldn’t tell Leona what she’d seen. Her younger sister was always given to flights of fantasy. She’d tell Abagail that she was gaining the vision. Leona thought that she could see the future herself. In fact, she thought that the doll she carried could tell her what was coming.

Skuld
, Abagail told herself.
If she hears you calling Skuld a doll, she will throw a fit.

Abagail groaned. She tried to get Leona to stop with the seer nonsense, if someone heard her, or worse,
saw
her talking to her doll about the future, that would be disaster for all of them.

Only the All Father can see the future
, or his priests by invoking his Sleeping Eye.

No, she would leave her dreams to herself.

But it still worried her. It worried Abagail as she wiped herself clean that morning and donned a fresh tunic and trousers. She was silent through breakfast, even though Dolan and Leona talked about the daily chores. Abagail couldn’t stop thinking about the people in the tree, herself and someone else, a man. So much like the myth she’d heard before of Lif and Lifthrasir, the two who would survive past the destruction of the world and into the next to repopulate the nine worlds.

Her stomach soured at the thought. What if the world
was
going to end?

Abbie, don’t be ridiculous, you sound just like Leona,
she scolded herself.

“You’re on bee duty today,” Dolan said. “The suit is upstairs in a tangle where you left it last time.”

“So I’m on untangling duty
and
bee duty?” Abagail asked.

“Well, just bee duty if you’d taken care of the gear properly last time,” Dolan chided her with a grin.

She was nineteen summers old, she should be out making a life of her own with a husband, but her father needed help. Ever since the tree he felled last Autumn had crushed his leg, he just wasn’t up to doing as much as he should be able to.

It worked fine for Abagail, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to figure out how to be a
wife,
not after helping her father with all of his chores. She couldn’t cook, or mend, and certainly didn’t know the proper way to clean. Dolan saw to all of that since he was too lame to do much of the outdoor work.

“Finish your breakfast first,” he told her as she made to stand.

“I’m not very hungry,” she confessed.

“But you’ve barely touched your sausage,” Dolan argued.

“I’ll eat it for her,” Leona chimed in.

“Have it,” Abagail told her sister, sliding the plate over the worn wooden table closer to her. She turned from the table before her father could protest further and made her way down the hall to the stairway that lead up to the second floor, where her father slept.

The moment Abagail crested the top of the stairs, she could feel a difference in the second floor. She’d never been afraid of coming up here, even though it always felt strange to intrude on her father’s floor of the house.

Abagail’s body shivered with the feel of the upstairs. The atmosphere was different somehow, darker. She pressed her back against the wall so she could see everything in front of her and
knew
nothing was sneaking up behind her. Her heartbeat hitched, and she swallowed heavily, trying to calm herself.

The stairs opened up into a large sitting room. The ceiling, floor, and walls were nothing but rough wooden planks. Abagail wasn’t even sure if they’d ever been sanded down so many burrs and splinters stuck up all over the place. Large windows took up the wall the stairs faced, opening out onto the sunlit forest beyond. They were dirty, grimy, letting in a filtered light that dappled the floor and danced when a cloud skirted before the sun.

To the right her father’s bedroom door stood open, the bearskin rug turned with the jaws of the great beast facing the door. His bed was much too large for one person. Abagail hated going into her father’s room because of the rug, it freaked her out. Her younger sister might have not cared for the rug because of the poor bear that gave up its skin, Abagail just couldn’t stand the rug.

To the left was the door to Dolan’s study, a room that was always locked and the girls were never allowed to go into. Abagail had tried many times when she was younger to work her way into the room, but the door had never opened for her.

Outside the wind picked up, drawing her attention away from the room, and to the windows where she watched the surrounding pines dance fitfully in the breeze. She remembered the wind from her dream, and there had been a word on the wind. Abagail couldn’t remember the word, but all the same, the memory of the dream wind made her shiver.

Her gaze fell on the bee keeping gear. It looked hot outside already, and Abagail dreaded putting the uniform on.

She knelt before the clothing and started sorting it out, casting glances around her as she did. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something, or
someone
was up there with here. The netting had become twisted up in the rest of the clothing, and before long Abagail sat down to unwind the mess.

When a door clicked open, every hair on Abagail’s head stood on end. Though she recognized the noise as a latch on a door, Abagail couldn’t believe that she’d actually heard it. The only door that had been shut was her father’s study. She looked up in time to see the door crack open on noisy hinges.

She eased up to a crouch, not sure what was inside the room to have opened the door. It was absurd to think about, no one had seen a darkling around here in ages, and that’s the only thing she could imagine might be lurking in the depths of the mysterious room.

You’re being foolish, Father probably left a window open in there.
But Abagail wasn’t even certain the room
had
a window. Furthermore, she’d never really seen Dolan use the room, so she wasn’t sure he’d ever gone in
to
open a window. Likely it was the memories of the dream, still lurking in the back of her mind with her mindless chore, which made her jump at shadows.

When no ghost or ghoul from beyond the grave leapt out of the room, Abagail relaxed. She waited for her heart to stop hammering, and listened a few moments to see if Dolan had heard the noise.

She could still hear him and Leona downstairs laughing and joking over breakfast cleanup. They hadn’t heard the door.

As much as Abagail wanted to be mature about the room, and just shut the door respecting her father’s privacy, something of the child who yearned to see the inside of his study remained inside.

Before she could stop herself, Abagail was standing before the door, her hand paused on the latch. She could go in, or she could close it.

But really, what’ she keeping inside that’s so secret?
Abagail eased the door open, trying her best to make no noise. Her heart thundered again, and there was no telling if her father had heard her cross the floor to the room. She hoped he hadn’t, and slipped into the room before she could change her mind.

She pressed the door closed, leaned her back into it and closed her eyes. Abagail took several deep breaths and brushed the short locks of hair out of her face. When she opened her eyes it was to a dusty room that looked more like a storage shed than anything else. Books and paintings and scrolls lay haphazardly all over the place. Through the dirty window, which wasn’t open Abagail noted, a filtered blue light came, as if it were nighttime outside instead of daylight. Why was the light so strange in that window?

Abagail would have inspected it, but there were too many stacks of various junk before the window to get close. Though she couldn’t see, Abagail couldn’t help feeling that just beyond that window she would find some otherworldly scene where it was nighttime instead of morning.

The thought made her shiver.

Her eyes landed on the only surface that was clean of both dust and debris. It was a large, round wooden table, so large that it was almost impossible to maneuver around. That was, if she even
wanted
to maneuver around it.

In the center of the table stood a large black mirror, easily as tall as Abagail. The smooth surface reflected her image in a ghostly fashion, almost as if it wasn’t really her that looked back through the glass, but a specter. The edges of the mirror was etched with silver runes, much like the edges of the table were.

She stood there for some time, not completely understanding what she was looking at. It was rumored that darklings possessed such devices as this mirror, and used them to call beings through from beyond the grave. But her father was much more like one of the Light Guard than anything related to a darkling. He was more likely to help
kill
darklings than he was to harbor them.

Maybe he has it to keep track… of what?
What would be the purpose of having such a device? Abagail didn’t know. She tried to shut out the gnawing thought that Leona often spoke to her doll Skuld, thinking the wooden figure gave her news of the future.

“You’re being silly,” she whispered to herself to break the silence of the room. But as she started to look away something moved under the surface of the mirror.

Abagail’s heart leapt into her throat, and she backpedalled into a stack of scrolls that cascaded in a hollow kind of drumming to the floor. Her eyes refused to stray from the surface of the mirror. Something lurked underneath.