Chapter Text
“With the deepest regret, I report that the rescue ship arrived too late. The party’s vehicle is missing. It must have broken down, and they proceeded on foot with the precious books they had found. Though the brave explorers made it to the outpost for rescue, all perished in a battle with a swarm, perhaps as late as last night. They took the swarm with them as an honor guard to Valhalla. We have built their pyres as is right and proper and will return their ashes to their families. Trond, out.”
Static hissed and snarled in the momentary silence.
“We can’t let him say that.” Emil made a grab for the microphone, currently turned off.
Even as Tuuri pulled it away, Mikkel, crowded into the back of the office/radio compartment, reached across the desk to block his hand. “It’s not up to us to argue with him. We’re already dead, you and I.”
Tuuri shivered at those words in Mikkel’s deep, slow voice. She too wanted to argue with Trond, but … “It’s not up to us, either. Me and Lalli.” Lalli was asleep, but as always, she felt free to speak for him. “Onni’s our only family, and he knows we’re alive.”
Sigrun straightened; she had been leaning against the door frame. At her full height, she towered over Tuuri in her seat by the radio. “He knows? Did Braidy get through to him then?”
It was progress that Sigrun referred to Reynir as “Braidy” instead of “the baggage”. She was forced to accept him as part of the team, now and forever. Tuuri shrugged off that thought. “No, he still can’t. But Onni’s a noita. He knows his family, so he’d know if I died, or Lalli did. And Lalli would know if Onni did.”
“Would you know?” Once Mikkel accepted the reality of magic, he’d questioned her and Reynir about every aspect. It was just his bad luck that neither of them knew very much.
“No. I’m not a mage.” Not a mage, not immune, not much of anything, really. She pushed away the familiar thought.
“Guess it’s up to me and Braidy, then,” Sigrun said. “For me … Well, Dagny always wanted to be a general, and she’ll be better at it than I ever would.” She grinned, gazing from one face to another. “But she doesn’t get to explore the south!” After a moment, she sobered. “Yeah, but you should ask Braidy.”
As Sigrun backed out of the doorway, Tuuri rose and pushed past Emil to join Reynir, who was watching the monitors while the team listened to the radio. Though he was close enough to hear Trond’s words, she knew his understanding of Swedish was too poor to follow Norwegian interspersed with static.
“Trond is telling the world that we’re all dead,” Tuuri explained. “We’re close enough that we can argue with him, but we’re not sure that we should. Do you want us to?”
Reynir looked down at her, lips parted and eyes wide in shock. “My parents —” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard.
“You don’t have to decide now,” Mikkel said from inside the compartment, his voice gentle. “He’s pretending to burn our bodies, so he can’t leave immediately, and for the next few days, we should still be close enough to contact passing ships even after he leaves.”
“I — Yes, I need to think — I don’t —”
Tuuri patted him on the shoulder. “No hurry, then.”
“Will he come after us? To make sure?” Tuuri spun around at Emil’s question. She hadn’t even thought of that.
“No.” Mikkel switched off the radio, and Tuuri gave him a resentful glare. The radio was her responsibility.
In the sudden silence, Sigrun said, “Why not? Trond is ruthless.”
“Ruthless, yes, but also practical. He came here on a rescue mission. If the party is dead, there’s no reason to search for us. He’ll have to leave after pretending to burn our bodies.”
“But why declare us dead?” Tuuri asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s thinking at all.”
“We need to get moving,” Sigrun said. “It looks like more rain.”
Tuuri drove, and the others took their accustomed places: Sigrun and Mikkel on the passengers’ seat, with Mikkel by the window, Emil standing behind them and Reynir behind Tuuri, with the kitten on his shoulder. Lalli was sleeping in his den under Mikkel’s bed, as usual.
They were always quiet as Tuuri drove, but today the silence was deeper, sadder.
It’s not my fault. I didn’t ask them to stay. I asked them not to stay. I tried. It’s not my fault. As she maneuvered the tank around a washed-out section of the decaying road, she thought back to their arrival at the outpost in the afternoon, four days before.
By mid-afternoon, the emotion of the night before, the thrill of their decision to stay in the Silent World, had largely worn off. Lalli rode behind Tuuri, forcing Reynir to crowd in next to a displeased Emil. As they approached the triple fence blocking the narrow peninsula on which the outpost stood, Lalli pointed out a padlocked gate, and Tuuri guided the tank to park beside it. She saw a plastic box wired to the fence beside the gate; it would contain the key to the padlock.
“The gate’s not big enough for the tank,” Tuuri said, turning in her seat to address the others.
“We didn’t expect the tanks to reach this outpost,” Mikkel said.
Sigrun, already on her feet, cocked her head at him. “We? You were —”
“I mean the army, not me. We all knew the plan. We were supposed to take and clear the first island, then move on to the others over the years. These outposts would house scouts to inventory the local grosslings, map concentrations, that sort of thing.” He shrugged. “All that ended after Kastrup, of course.”
Sigrun shooed Reynir and Emil ahead of her so she could pull her uniform from the decontamination closet. “Right, then. Let’s get to work. We have a lot of books to carry, and it looks like rain.”
Mikkel followed her, reaching for his own uniform. “We may not have to carry them. There should be supplies here, and if we’re lucky, there could even be a wheelbarrow.”
They were lucky. The wheelbarrow was in a small, well-built, windowless warehouse that had withstood a decade of neglect without leaking. With it were treasures: a crate of canned cod (“Better than tuna, I guess,” Emil muttered), two crates of ammunition for rifles and pistols, and a crate of incendiaries. Tuuri thought they’d have to drag Emil away from that crate.
Working together, they moved four loads of books into the warehouse before the rain hit. Lalli, who had not helped move the books, found a tarpaulin in good shape. When Tuuri passed on the word to the others, they used that as a cover as they carried the crates to the tank. By the time they finished that task, Lalli beckoned them to another windowless warehouse, which proved to be full of split logs: firewood.
“We can’t fit all of this in the tank,” Mikkel said with genuine regret in his voice. “Not even if we take the crates out.”
“We can’t take the crates out! Or at least, not my incendiaries!”
Mikkel gave Emil a quick, sly smile, Sigrun laughed, and Tuuri found herself grinning wider than she had since … well, since she’d been scratched. Maybe this wouldn’t be too bad.
“We’ll take what we can,” Sigrun said. “There’s always more wood.”
“This is already split. And well-seasoned,” Mikkel said, running his hand over a log.
“You just don’t want to gather fuel. The exercise is good for you.” Sigrun feinted a punch at Mikkel’s abdomen, and he stepped aside without comment.
It occurred to Tuuri that Mikkel had lost the modest beer belly he’d had when they started the expedition. He would always be a big man, but now he looked quite trim. She’d lost weight too; her uniform hung loose these days, and she would soon need a belt to keep her trousers up. Had it really been only two months since they’d set out?
“Can we check out the bunkhouses now?” Emil was looking out the open door, disregarding the byplay between Sigrun and Mikkel. “I wish — I mean, as long as we’re here, we could try them out.”
There were two bunkhouses. The elements had gotten into one, joined by mold, insects, and mice, but the other was still weather-tight. In Keuruu, this would have been small and crowded, with its tiny kitchen, its cramped bathroom (no running water today), and its two rows of bunks (eight bunks in total) divided by a narrow aisle. Compared to the tight quarters of the tank, this was luxury itself, and Emil was not the only one who wanted to spend the night there.
There were no mattresses on the bunks, but a large, sturdy, vermin-proof wooden chest provided eight bedrolls. When the team collected their thin mattresses, pillows, and bedding from the tank, Tuuri stopped on her way out to apologize to Rosli and promise to return.
They enjoyed a supper of cod fried in tallow, sitting in heavy wooden chairs around a blocky wooden table while rain spattered against double-paned windows. After supper, Reynir washed the dishes and Tuuri dried them.
“You don’t have to stay,” Tuuri said, keeping her voice low so the others wouldn’t hear her over the rain. “You can go home and —”
Reynir returned a plate to the tub of soapy water and leaned close to her. “If I go home, my mom and dad will make me feel so guilty for leaving. They’ll never let me out of their sight again. I’ll just take care of sheep forever.” He lifted his head, looking past her at the window and the rain beyond. “And I’ll never know what happened to you.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Any of you.”
Tuuri wanted to say something more, but couldn’t find the words. She picked up a plate that was already dry and wiped it again. Reynir gave her another cleaned plate.
With all the plates put away, Tuuri talked to Mikkel. “I will not be rescued,” he said. “I have my own reasons.”
There being little she could say to that, she tried Emil. “I — I — I’m safer here,” he said. “Trond might — Trond is dangerous.” He bit his lip. “I’ll help you. We’ll be okay. We’ll, you know, we’ll explore the Silent World together.” He looked near tears, so she let him be.
Sigrun laughed. “You think I’d leave you here without a troll-hunter captain to protect you? No way! The story of this quest will be told by the hearth for a thousand years!” She waved away Tuuri’s weak objection that no one was going to hear about their quest. “Of course they will. You’ll write it down, and the gods will see to it that my clan gets the word.”
Tuuri’s last try was with Lalli, urging him to be rescued, to go back to Onni. He gave her one of his looks, the one that meant, “That’s a stupid question.” But all he said was, “Onni doesn’t need me. You do.” And he ran out to scout the next leg of their journey.
A branch scraped the side of the tank, a long drawn-out screech. Tuuri winced at the sound, even though she’d apologized one night for scratching the tank. Rosli had answered with a light blinking red in the darkness: “Don’t worry. It happens.” Rosli so seldom communicated that Tuuri suspected it was difficult for her, perhaps even painful. She wished that she could visit Rosli in a dream again, that they could explore Rosli’s haven together. Most of all, she wished that they could look each other in the eye as she thanked the woman who’d saved her from the terrors of the Rash.
Tuuri steered past a fallen tree, her eyes intent on the road. She was outside all the walls. She would write the tale of their travels, and one day, Sigrun’s gods would make sure the tale went back to the Known World.