Aurora’s Verdict

CHAPTER FIVE: THE SUMMER CABIN Ⅰ

The stolen Jeep Wrangler carved through whiteness like a blade through frozen flesh. Stella watched the GPS screen—a lone green dot pulsing in digital emptiness, marking coordinates her father had etched into paper, then into Hunter’s memory, now into this stolen vehicle’s navigation system. N64°08'23", W19°01'17". The summer cabin. The origin point.

On her lap, the aluminum case seemed to have gained its own gravity field. She knew its precise weight: 3.7 kilograms. She’d lifted it enough times in the cellar to memorize the heft. What she couldn’t quantify was the metaphysical weight—twenty-eight names, twenty-eight terminated lineages, all curated to make her the sole inheritor of a legacy built on graves.

Hunter drove with the focused stillness of a predator moving through familiar territory. Every ten minutes exactly—she’d timed it—his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, not the left or right one. Only the center. Assessing the road behind for pursers, yes, but mostly reading the weather. The storm had its own language, and he was fluent.

“Wind’s shifting northeast,” he said at 6:22, his voice barely rising above the heater’s fan. “Gaining speed. We have two hours, maybe less, before this track disappears.”

Stella’s own watch, a Cartier Tank her mother had given her for passing the bar, read 6:23. The numerals glowed faintly in the gloom. Two hours. In London, she’d have used that time to review a merger clause or prepare cross-examination questions. Here, it was the difference between reaching shelter and becoming another statistic in an Icelandic winter mortality report.

“Tell me about the cabin,” she said. Not looking at him. Looking at her own reflection in the side window—pale, sharp, a ghost floating over the rushing white.

Hunter’s gloved fingers tightened on the steering wheel. The leather creaked. For three kilometers, he said nothing. Then, as they began a slow ascent into treeless hills: “My aunt Li Xia rented it every July from 1992 to ’95. She was writing her Master’s thesis on spatial metaphors in the Völsunga saga. Your father was her advisor.”

A pause. The Jeep’s tires found black ice, slid, caught.“I visited once. July ’94. She was eight weeks pregnant but didn’t show yet. They sat on that porch—” he gestured ahead, though the cabin was still invisible “—drinking coffee from enamel mugs, arguing about whether the ‘ninth world’ in the Eddas was a physical place or a psychological state. I took photographs with my first real camera. A Nikon F3 your father helped me buy.”

Stella turned from the window. “The black sand photo was later.”

“August ’94. The day after she told him.” Hunter’s jaw worked beneath days-old stubble. The scar on his left hand, visible where his glove had ripped during the fight, seemed darker in the dashboard’s green glow. “In the print, they’re laughing. But if you look at the negative—which I still have, because your father asked me to keep it—her left hand is resting just below her navel. A private gesture. A claim.”

The GPS chimed softly. Destination: 500 meters.

Through the snow-veil, a shape materialized: a traditional Icelandic torfbær cabin, its turf roof buried under a metre of snow, only the dark wooden front wall visible. No lights. No smoke from the stone chimney. Just a structure kneeling in the gathering dark, waiting.

Hunter stopped the Jeep fifty meters out, killed the engine. The silence was immediate, profound, and somehow louder than the storm. He checked the fuel gauge—a habit Stella now recognized. “Three-quarters tank. He filled up before coming after us. Their mistake, our advantage.”

Then he checked the handgun’s magazine. “Seven rounds left. Make them count.”

Stella pulled on the oversized parka he’d given her in the cellar—it swam on her frame, sleeves covering her hands until she rolled them back. It smelled of stranger: woodsmoke, old sweat, and something faintly chemical like gun oil. But it held warmth like a promise.

Hunter saw her adjusting it. “The man I took it from was 190 centimetres. You’re what, 168? It’ll trail in the snow. Tuck the excess into your belt.”

She did as instructed, the movement practical, survivalist. The Stella of forty-eight hours ago would have refused to wear a dead man’s coat. The Stella now understood that morality had different rules at -18°C.

“We walk from here,” Hunter said, zipping his own coat. The movement pulled at his sutured shoulder; fresh blood bloomed through the bandage, a crimson Rorschach against the grey fabric. “If there’s anyone waiting, I don’t want to announce us with engine noise.”

“You think she’s here?” Stella asked, though she already knew the answer.

“Your mother?” He shook his head. “She doesn’t wait in cold places. She sends invitations to them.”

They stepped out into the breath-stealing cold. The temperature gauge had read -18°C; now, with wind chill, it felt like -30. Stella’s face went numb in seconds. Her breath crystallized mid-air, fell as ice dust.

Their footsteps made no sound in snow knee-deep in places. The world had been muted, rendered in monochrome: white ground, black sky, grey shadows. The only colour was the faintest green smear on the northern horizon—the aurora, waking.

The cabin’s porch steps groaned under their weight, the sound obscenely loud in the silence. Hunter tried the iron latch. Unlocked. He looked back at Stella, held up three fingers, then two, then one.

He pushed the door open.

Darkness. And a smell that shouldn’t have been there: lemon oil and beeswax. Cleanliness.

Hunter found a hurricane lantern on the table, lit it with a matches from his pocket. Light bloomed, revealing a space preserved with museum precision.

Everything was clean. Immaculately so. The wooden floorboards, pale pine, showed recent sweeping marks. The small windows were clear of frost or dust. A woollen blanket—traditional Icelandic lopapeysa wool in black and white patterns—lay folded perfectly on a chair. Books stood arranged by height on rough shelves: sagas in Old Norse, geological surveys, a well-thumbed copy of The Poetic Edda with her father’s Cambridge bookplate.

And on the central table, positioned as if for ritual:

A cello bow.

Stella recognized it instantly—the specific curve of the frog, the mother-of-pearl inlay at the tip, the slight discoloration on the winding where her mother’s fingers had rested for three decades of performances. It was polished to a deep, liquid shine, as if freshly maintained.

Under it, a single sheet of music manuscript paper. On it, in her mother’s elegant, vertical hand, four measures of a cello suite. Stella didn’t need to read the notes to recognize it: the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor. The piece her mother played before every important performance. Their secret signal before school recitals: You are ready.Beneath the staves, a message:

Dearest Stella,

If you are reading this, you have found the nursery. Every masterpiece begins somewhere—in a sketch, a first note, a single brushstroke. This is where yours began.

The birch tree is out back, where the ground remembers. Bring the bow. Your sister has been waiting twenty-eight years for this duet.

With all my love,

Mother

Hunter took the paper, held it close to the lantern flame.

“The ink is still drying in places. She was here within the hour.”Stella picked up the bow. It felt exactly as she remembered from childhood lessons—the particular balance point three-quarters down the stick, the slight stickiness of the rosin her mother preferred (Pirastro Goldflex, always), the ghost-impression of fingers that had held it for thirty thousand hours. A lifetime of discipline, of control, now placed in her hands as both weapon and offering.