All Things Devour

nine

Sonya woke in the late afternoon to Fiske knocking on her bedroom door.

He couldn’t communicate much past the odd Norse word grunted under his breath, but he mimed motions better than Sonya could, eventually leading her to a storage locker piled with clothes. They sorted through the eclectic mix, Sonya puzzled by the origins—until she realized it must have come from the humans the draugar fed from. She looked at the items neatly folded and stacked on the shelves and almost couldn’t bring herself to accept the linen trousers, turtleneck, and clean jumper Fiske pressed into her hands.

All things devour , Anton had said. She couldn’t decide if it made her less or more uncomfortable to know nothing was wasted.

Fiske took her to an updated bathroom with an attached water closet, pointing out where all the amenities got kept. After thanking him the best she could, Sonya ran the water and soaked in the hot bath for a long while, watching the misty, evening light pool on the sill of the small, shuttered window.

Tentative, she reached out and brushed her fingers through the light, pulling back when she felt as if she’d tapped a hot pan. She hissed and dunked her stinging fingers into the water.

Nothing in her appearance had changed. Sonya studied her face in the mirror after she left the tub, and the same girl as always peered back at her—if a bit peaky and bruised about the neck. Sonya held her eyes close to the lamp and found them the same dull blue, like the dismal English rain, and her teeth were small, white, and flat. Freckles dotted her nose and cheeks, and her gums appeared somewhat pale, but she attributed that to blood loss.

It’d only been a few days, but her life had already changed so much. She couldn’t begin to imagine what her life would begin to look like if they actually managed to find the man who bit her. It made her hands damp with nervous sweat just to consider what her life may look like. She couldn’t conceive it.

Sonya dressed, tugging on the borrowed clothes and her own boots, and left the bath, going in search of the kitchen once more. It wasn’t difficult to locate, being centered in the middle of the dark, sprawling turf house. No one was there, but Sonya found herself a seat at the table and waited.

Anton appeared first, dressed in his own clothes—or so Sonya assumed, given they fit him well. He wore a simple pair of trousers and a buttoned shirt, not unlike the trousers or shirt she’d found him in, really, though these were clean and relatively new. Over his ensemble, he wore a heavy, furred cloak with an honest-to-goodness chain clasp at the front, which was his only visible concession to the local Norse lifestyle. Sonya’s attention rose to his face, and she blinked.

“You have glasses,” she commented, for he did indeed wear a pair of spectacles with a thicker, tortoiseshell rim on the top and a thinner bronze rim on the bottom. “But that’s silly; you’re a vampire.”

“Oh?” Anton said with a grin, resting a fair hand on the table. “Is that so? Please, inform my eyeballs they have been so woefully uninformed about their improper form. How very uncooperative of them.”

Sonya’s skin prickled with awareness, and she pursed her lips.

“Go on. Make sure to lean in close when you do so.”

Rather than Sonya leaning in, Anton bent at the waist, still with his cheeky smile in place, and held his face near Sonya’s own. He smelled of clean soap, and he’d combed his hair back, revealing the full sharpness of his cheekbones, the symmetrical layout of his features. Sonya couldn’t help but think Anton’s eyes, though unlike anything she’d ever seen before, were lovely. He was lovely.

The color in Sonya’s cheeks darkened. Anton arched a brow, and his eyes dipped to her mouth.

“What’s the verdict?” he asked, breath brushing her face. It smelled of mint. “Do you find me handsome, hmm?”

She did find him handsome, so much so, Sonya considered whether or not she was suffering some form of trauma bonding. She couldn’t recall when she’d ever be so stricken by someone’s appearance that it made her mouth dry and her cheeks blaze pink.

“Well, that would explain why you were squinting so often before,” she said, clearing her throat, ignoring his question.

“Indeed.” His voice lowered, and it took him another moment to straighten. “Do you have everything you need? Is your room comfortable? I’m led to believe the indoor plumbing is a recent inclusion.”

“It’s very comfortable. I will have to thank Gudbrand.”

Anton hummed, distracted as he looked at her clothes—her trousers obviously male in cut, her jumper too long in the sleeves. “We can get you your own things once everything is…settled.”

When my fate is decided , Sonya thought with a grim sort of nod. She hadn’t considered life much beyond finding the vampire—the draugr—who had attacked her; she had very little idea of what that would entail and how her day-to-day routine would unfold here in Vidarheim. Did they have a draugr counselor? Career guidance for the recently returned? She was placing an awful lot of trust in Anton, and though he’d done nothing but help her so far, it was still frightening to depend so heavily on another.

“Gudbrand has told me there is to be a moot tonight. He has no plans to attend it himself, but he stays informed of these things.”

“A moot?” she asked, half in a daze. The enormity of her task hit Sonya, and she felt helpless, wanting to know what would happen if she couldn’t find the man who bit her.

“A meeting, a gathering—an excuse to get pissed and argue with one another about the same issues as they have for hundreds of years. I doubt anything has changed much in my absence. Most of Vidarheim will be there, and it’ll be a perfect excuse for you to look at the others and see if you recognize any of them.”

“Yes, I know what a moot is. I—.” Sonya’s hands fidgeted in her lap. “And what about your anonymity? Won’t you be recognized?”

Anton’s clever solution to that problem proved to be nothing more than a hood attached to his cloak, which Sonya had to admit was more ingenious than it sounded when first proposed in the kitchen. Outside, in the sputtering dregs of rain, Anton appeared unremarkable in his various gray and black hues, the dark red of his shirt covered by a simple shift of his cloak.

Sonya, with her light coloring, matched the locals fairly well, and she too was given a heavy furred cloak to keep warm. He braided back her hair and pronounced her fit for an early evening of clandestine affairs and draugr-watching.

Their destination proved to be across the bay, nestled at the base of one of the dark towers, past the gliding coils of Jormund coasting beneath the colorless waters.

“Who lives there?” Sonya asked as they traveled in a flat wooden boat, propelled by seidr once again. She pointed at the tower. “The Jarl?”

Anton turned a sharp look on her. The wind rippled against the hood enough to reveal part of his face, lightning bright in his eyes. Sonya noted her mistake the moment it slipped from her mouth and acknowledged having heard part of his conversation with Gudbrand in the morning. Anton grunted.

“ Nosy Sonya,” he grumbled, arms crossed. “No, the Jarl will have his own house on the main island. The towers, for the most part, are unmanned. The watchers walk them and keep an eye on the realm.”

“Can I ask about the former Jarl? Jarl Eerika? You sounded…upset when you mentioned her.”

For a moment, Anton kept quiet, his gaze fixed on the rocky coast ahead, and then he nodded. “She was my v?rdr —my master, you would call her. It is part of our…religion to call our masters our vardir , or our caretaker. It is their duty to follow their ward’s soul from birth to death and to care for it as an extension of their own. It gives the v?rdr certain strength over their charges.” He shrugged and tucked himself more securely into his cloak. “Jarl Eerika purchased me as a boy but came to care for me as her own son. I lived here as a human for many years. She had me changed by a seidkona—a much more reliable method than what you’ve endured, sweet girl. It involves purposefully igniting the, ah, spark after death rather than hoping the All-Father takes pity on you and brings you back. I’m afraid it’s a bit too difficult to explain beyond that.”

The topic came to a quick closed, a pall of foreboding hanging above it. Sonya couldn’t bring herself to think much of a woman who’d bought another person—a very young person by Anton’s inference—even if she understood the different conventions that had changed with time. She kept her opinion to herself, however, for Anton’s sake.

They reached the dock where other, similar boats had been tethered, and a bearded draugr half in his cups accepted a coin from Anton to tend to their vessel after Sonya and Anton clamored out of it. Heading toward the lights at the path’s head, Sonya heard a belch and then a sudden splash from behind her, the fallen draugr cursing loud as he emerged from the ice-cold water again.

Anton just shook his head.

A mead hall loomed large at the foot of the stone tower, crowned in black shingles and a carving like the great wings of a raven. Sonya’s initial misgivings dissolved as they neared the open doors and merged with others heading the same direction; laughter boomed from the hall’s depths, and most of the draugar seemed intent on getting something to drink as soon as they could. Anton tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, and as soon as they came across the threshold, he ushered Sonya to the side and up the stairs.

The upper balcony smelled heavily of char and damp peat, and most of the other draugar had left the space well enough alone in favor of the long, burdened tables surrounding the firepit below. As Anton had promised, it proved the perfect place to watch the hall from, and when he had them sit on a flat, wooden bench, they attracted no attention from the others.

Sonya couldn’t help but look at the food—and the cups and the goblets and pitchers being handed around by servers. Some held lighter colored mead or ale, and others….

“Don’t look so scandalized,” Anton murmured in her ear, taking note of where her attention had strayed. “We don’t lay humans out and bleed them at the table. How gauche.”

“I guess I wasn’t prepared to see it,” Sonya admitted as she watched thick, deep red liquid be poured from a warmed pitcher into a cup held up by a woman’s hand. It was all rather tame when she forced herself to remember she sat in a building crowded by vampires . They ate and drank with manners—for the most part, a notable exception being a pair already having a sloshed squabble. “Is there—?”

Anton had his hands folded between his knees, his head lowered and his eyes turned to the room’s head. A table had been set there with gilded candlesticks and a brightly patterned runner, and the large throne behind its middle held the backside of a broad, ash-haired draugr who was missing an eye in an eerie counterpart to the Norse god Odin. He wore a suit instead of the more traditional garb worn by the others, but that didn’t detract from the thick gold rings on his fingers, the circlet at his brow, or the furred cape on his shoulders. His cape was held together by a clasp quite similar to the one Anton wore.

Anton’s hands flexed and tightened where he held them together.

Not every person in the mead hall looked as the Vikings did. Several dressed in warm, casual clothes Sonya could picture on a London street. Some of the draugar had dark skin or warmer complexions from climes much sunnier than the brutal north, and she thought the woman seated by the one-eyed man might be Chinese or perhaps Mongolian.

Two men commanded the attention of a small, cheering crowd. Sonya could hear their voices growling and lilting from below, and she grinned.

“They’re flyting ,” she said with delight. “Oh, I never thought—well, never thought I’d actually see it done for real! We used to prepare little insulting poems for one another in a language class I took, and it always bordered more on the ridiculous than realistic—.”

She cleared her throat, halting her rambling, though Anton seemed unfazed. “You’re a clever delight,” he said with such sincerity, Sonya’s stomach flipped. No one found her a delight. “You really are. I’ve interacted with humans before, and they’ve never taken this all in such stride.”

“I’ve always been odd,” she replied, to which Anton harrumphed.

“Better odd than terribly dull.”

Resuming her inspection of the hall, Sonya caught odd bursts of seidr usage every so often and couldn’t help but stare. No one else noticed when a cup zipped by on its own or when a younger man without a beard flicked flames from his fingers and re-lit a sputtering torch. The draugr who’d fallen into the sea came stomping in, soaked in frigid salt water, and a dark-haired woman near the door gave a disgusted huff and dried him with a wave of her hand.

“That is so amazing,” Sonya breathed. “ Real magic. To think I’d get to see it with my own eyes.”

Anton nodded, but a small frown tipped his mouth, his brow furrowed. “It is beautiful. Strange, though. I would have thought to see more seidmenn in attendance….” He shook himself. “Nevermind. Do you see anyone you recognize?”

Sonya forced her mind back to the task at hand and scanned the mead hall again, letting her eye linger for the longest on those men who were blond and beardless. Each time she found someone who might meet her criteria, her heart gave a nervous leap and then plummeted, realizing her choices were too tall or too short, too skinny or too wide. She fixed the face of her attacker in her thoughts until it bled against the inside of her eyelids, bright and harshly colored, his face illuminated by the trembling beam of her torch against the lashing rain.

“ I’ll make certain the humans disappear without comment. ”

She must have made a slight, plaintive noise of dismay because Anton had her hand in his own again—such a warm, casual creature he was. “Take your time,” he said, thumb stroking calming circles. “If they are not here, it does not mean they cannot be found. They might not have returned to Vidarheim yet. What do you remember about them?”

“I just can’t be sure,” she told him, defeat straining her words. “It was dark and bloody storming. He was tall, I think blond—which describes half the men here.” She exhaled and rubbed at her brow. “He said…something. Forgive me, I can’t fully remember. There were others, but I didn’t see them at all, and he said…he told them to repair the breach. And then he mentioned someone named Radu I think.”

Anton, who’d been in the middle of stretching, stiffened at the name. “I beg your pardon—?”

It was the cry of a bird that silenced Sonya’s spiraling worries, and her gaze jumped to the rafters, the wood blackened and stained by decades and decades of banked fires below. The bird—a hawk—perched there above the room, having come in through the open gable, and it surveyed the draugar under its hooked beak with disdain.

“I’ve seen that hawk before,” Sonya breathed. “Back in Scotland, at the site. Before—.”

The hawk’s wings flared, and it flew down from the rafters, banking low enough to nearly cuff the heads of those in attendance before it landed by the head table. There, the hawk vanished into the looming obelisk of a man dressed in a familiar black cloak. He dipped into a bow, and when he straightened, gold hair fell by his ears—and Sonya stumbled to her feet.

“That’s—that’s him,” she stuttered in disbelief. It was more an instinct than anything, a sudden, pounding pulse on the side of her neck. “ That’s him. I remember! I—.”

Anton didn’t move. He might as well have turned to stone, and when he spoke, it was to choke out a single word; “ Shit .”