The Viking Witch Mysteries: Books 4-6

Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I was expecting to have to knock more than once. Loke was expecting me, but the house was immense by Villmark standards. Without a doorbell, I wasn't sure if my mittened hand could knock loud enough to carry throughout that place.

But I heard the sound of a bolt sliding open, and then the door itself swung inwards. At first I couldn't see anything but gloom within and felt a twinge of trepidation in my stomach.

Then I would swear Mjolner gave me a look of exasperation before plunging into the house, tail up high, the top of it gently curving back and forth like a question mark and then a backward question mark.

"Ingrid," Loke said, and stepped forward from the blackness to a grayness that at least let me make out his roughest features.

"I got your note," I said. "Is everything all right?"

"Perfectly," he said. "I'm sorry about the darkness. Light is one of the things that triggers Esja's headaches. But your eyes will adjust once you're inside."

"Oh," I said, realizing he was waving his arm to hurry me in. I didn't see his sister anywhere inside, but I couldn't see much, and at any rate I knew how blinding the full sun was on the fields of snow. I hustled inside, and Loke shut the door behind me.

At first I saw nothing but the explosions of light against my retinas that were the aftereffects of that last look back at the snow. But slowly I started to see that I was standing in a front hall of a house nothing like any of the other homes in Villmark. This was more like an old English manor with two curving staircases before me, a marble floor patterned like a checkerboard below me, and open double doors to either side leading into further, even darker rooms.

"There's a coat rack behind you," Loke said as I untied my boots to leave them on the mat by the door. I say mat, but this wasn't the size of your standard doormat. It was more like a flying carpet. But it was clearly designed to deal with wet things. I turned to see the ornate wooden coat rack behind me, holding a single black coat that I recognized as Loke's. I hung my own beside it, hat and mittens stuffed in the pockets.

"It's just the two of you here?" I asked.

"Yes, currently," Loke said. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions, but let me give you what's probably going to be the most frequent answer up front. I don't know. I don't know why this place looks like it does, like it belongs neither to Old Norway nor to northern Minnesota. I don't know which of my ancestors even built the place. I don't know why it's so large. I've traced back my family tree, and no one in it ever had enough kids to fill a place like this."

"Does it bother you? All that mystery?" I asked. It would drive me crazy. I could never live with so many "I don't know" answers. I'd have to find out more.

But Loke just shrugged. "I've always lived here. It's not so strange to me. Of course, the place nearly burned down when I was a child." He waved for me to follow him into one of the side rooms, a sort of parlor with chairs gathered around an ornate marble fireplace. But he rushed through it to get to the far side, turning a key in a lock to open a second set of double doors.

I could smell the smoke from within even before I reached his side to look into the fire-damaged room beyond. It was an old smoke smell, and from what Loke had told me I'd guess it was smoke from two decades ago or more, but it lingered all the same. I could see where the fire had started at the corner fireplace, scorching the walls and charring the timbers that supported the ceiling.

"You've never gotten it fixed?" I asked.

He shrugged again. "It's easier just to lock the door, and the door to the room above it."

"That was your parents' room?" I said.

He looked over at me. I could see sadness in his eyes, but also I could see that he was impressed by my guess.

"Yes. Have you eaten?" he asked in a brighter tone.

"I had a cinnamon roll. Sort of," I said. I could remember taking a bite, but I was pretty sure most of it was still on a plate on my kitchen table back at home.

"I was about to call Esja down for breakfast," he said. "Nothing fancy, just porridge. She keeps to a bland diet. But there's honey and fruit and nuts for the rest of us."

"That sounds really good, actually," I said. "It was a pretty cold walk. Nothing like having a little something warm to eat to chase the cold out."

I followed Loke back out to the main hall and then towards the back of the house, through a pair of doors that had been hiding in the shadows between the staircases. We crossed a formal dining room with a table long enough to seat a dozen people, more if they were cozy. Sideboards waited on either end of the table to hold a buffet of dishes, and the chairs all had tall backs, the better to close in the space around the diners as they chatted and ate together.

But the chandelier over the table was thick with dust, and the table had a dull sheen to it, as if its wood surface hadn't been polished in... well, decades.

The far end of the room led into the kitchen. This at least felt cozy. The only light was from the open door of a wood-burning stove that sat in the center of the room, but at least it was a cheery light, not the gray through the dirty windows I had grown accustomed to. It was a large kitchen, clearly designed to let a crew of cooks work together to load up that massive table in the other room, but I could tell that Loke and his sister favored the space closest to that stove. There was a little table there, two matching chairs at either end with a third mismatched chair pulled up, I was sure, just for me.

But there was also a young woman there, setting bowls down on the table. She was wearing a long white dress that looked like a nightgown, soft and comfortable, but warmer than any nightgown I had ever owned. Her long blond hair was pulled back from her face by a white ribbon, then left to tumble down her back. It had only been haphazardly brushed; I could see the remains of tangles I imagined had been deemed too stubborn and left alone.

She looked up as we came into the room and smiled, just a soft curve to her lips, no wider. Nothing like her brother's exuberant smiles.

"Esja," Loke said, rushing to take the bowls from her. But she lunged for the table, setting them down before he could stop her.

"I'm not completely useless, you know," she said.

"I know," he said. "But this is not one of your uses, surely."

"As much as I would love to hear a full list of my many uses, we have company, brother," she said pointedly.

"Oh, yes. Are introductions really in order? No one is confused about who they're looking at, surely," he said.

"I'm Ingrid," I said, leaning forward to extend my hand to Esja. "Pleased to meet you."

"Esja, and likewise," she said, putting her hand in mine. It was cold and thin and I worried I might squeeze it too hard, but she had no compunction about squeezing mine. She was stronger than she looked.

"Porridge, then?" Loke said, heading towards the cookstove.

"I made tea as well," Esja said, crossing the room to fetch a pot wrapped in a tea towel from one of the prep tables. I sat down in the mismatched chair, the better to stay out of their way.

Soon we were all gathered together, and I had laden my bowl of porridge with blueberries, honey, slivers of almonds, and a sprinkle of brown sugar before pouring a little dollop of cream over it. It was like dessert for breakfast, really, but I needed the fuel. I ate a spoonful and followed it up by a sip of the surprisingly strong tea, and felt the warmth hit my stomach and then spread throughout my body.

"So, Loke," I started to say, but he caught my eye and gave a little shake of his head. He wasn't ready to talk yet. Fine. I could wait until after breakfast, or brunch, or whatever.

"Loke tells me that you're an artist," Esja said, her eyes bright.

"I am," I admitted, curious why he had said artist and not volva.

"Esja also likes to sketch," he said, as if reading my mind. "She even paints watercolors these days."

"I've just started trying that," Esja said, her cheeks flushing pink. "I don't quite have the hang of it yet. Mostly it feels like a good way to ruin a perfectly adequate sketch."

"Daily practice is usually the best remedy," I said. "I don't have time today, but I'd love to sit with you sometime and watch you work. I don't do much watercolor myself, but I did have a class in it at art school."

"Ooh, you've been to art school," she said, crushing her napkin in her hands and pressing it to her chin in perfect rapture.

"Yes, before I moved here," I said.

"I would love to go to school," she said wistfully.

"Art school?" I asked.

"Any kind of school," she said. "Business school, that sounds interesting. Or something technical like structural engineering."

"Structural engineering?" I repeated, a bit dumbfounded. Her list seemed a little random.

"I bring Esja books from the racks your grandmother has in the general store in Runde," Loke told me. I had completely forgotten that during the day, when it wasn't a mead hall, the Runde meeting hall was also a general store as well as a post office. And my grandmother ran it all.

And apparently that general store still sold paperbacks in spinning wire racks.

"I liked those books well enough, but now that there's an actual bookstore, Loke has been bringing me proper books," Esja said with great enthusiasm.

"Romance novels," Loke told me. "She liked the little dime store ones well enough, but Jessica has more modern ones."

"And the women have such interesting jobs!" Esja said.

"Like business management and structural engineering," I guessed.

"Yes! They live such interesting lives," she said with a happy sigh.

"Don't scarcely need the men to have adventures, do they?" Loke said, but low so that only I heard him. I smothered a grin. There was a certain irony, considering that Esja in this half-burned shambles of an ancestral home, was only missing a few more mysterious elements like a ghost in the attic or something evil in the basement to be living the exact sort of Gothic tale all those business women and structural engineers were reading in their spare time.

"Have you never been down to Runde yourself?" I asked. "Surely Loke would take you if you asked."

"He would," Esja said. "He would if I asked."

A pallor fell over the three of us. I had clearly asked the wrong thing and steered the whole conversation to a dark place. I wanted to bring us back to something lighter, but I wasn't sure what topic would do it.

"I would carry her there, if she asked me to," Loke said, but Esja put up a hand, begging him to stop.

"Are you all right?" I asked. It was hard to tell in the soft lightening, but she seemed to be getting paler, or grayer.

"I'll be all right," she said, but she looked slumped in her chair, like a stuffed animal that had been propped up for a tea party.

"It's been a lot of excitement," Loke said. "Do you need-"

But she put up her hand again, and he broke off at once. "I'll be all right. Please, stay with our guest. I know you have things to discuss. I know this get together wasn't about me."

"I wanted you two to meet," Loke said, half getting out of his chair as she put both hands on the table to leverage herself up to her feet.

"I'll be fine," she said. "I'm just going to lie down."

"Upstairs?" he asked.

"No. I'll be in the back parlor," she said. Then she looked up at me. "Ingrid, it was so very good to meet you. I hope I'll see you again soon, on a better day."

"I hope so too," I said. She smiled, then made her way across the room. She reached out for the back of this chair, or the edge of that table, before reaching the support of the doorway. She stopped for a moment as if to gather herself before continuing on. Then she was out of sight.

"Loke," I started to say.

"Not yet," he said. "I just need a minute." He was staring fixedly at his half-eaten porridge. But then in a burst of energy he started gathering up the breakfast dishes and carrying them to the sink.

"There's something you're not telling me," I said.

He scoffed. "There are lots of things I don't tell you, Ingy," he said. But his back was to me as he stood at the sink and I couldn't see his face.

"What's wrong with your sister?" I asked.

"Nothing that needs to concern you," he said. "Please, just give me a minute. Just one minute and then I'll answer every question you have about last night."

"All right," I agreed.

For the moment. The time would come when he'd have to open up to me about the rest of it. But for now, my focus was on Nefja and finding her killer. The rest would have to wait.