Dustin Long - Icelander

Several days passed without a lead. Eventually, though, Emily managed to stumble across a needlessly baroque smuggling scheme being run out of a small haberdashery in Stromness, the other big town of the island. Someone was trying to replace the local megaliths with concrete replicas and move the originals up to Norway. He might have succeeded, too, if his henchmen hadn’t been quite so inept. At least he was wily enough to not get captured, himself.

Between keeping an eye on accident-prone Prescott and escaping from drunken Norwegians, Our Heroine grew rather fond of Angus. The entire family did (excluding Jon Ymirson, of course, who believed that Angus had designs on Emily). Prescott was just impressed by the man’s ability to pull coins out of people’s ears, but Our Heroine even opened up enough to let him read some samples of her own early forays into the realm of fiction. It was with considerable trepidation, then, that she first began to suspect him of involvement in the smuggling ring.

Eventually, to her great relief, the mastermind behind the plot wound up being one of Surt’s former lieutenants of crime, who also happened to have been a lower-classman from Valison and Angus’s upper-classman days. He’d apparently held something of a grudge over the years for all of the sophomoric abuse that he’d suffered at their hands, and his extended plan had been to frame the two of them for stealing the megaliths, thus achieving his revenge while at the same time providing the police with a scapegoat for his crime. It had been he who’d summoned Valison to the Orkneys, and he’d also abducted him soon after his arrival. Emily’s intuition had once again wound up proving true.

Angus had been called away to Glasgow to pray at the side of his dying mother before the family even figured out where Valison was being held, but not before he had been cleared of suspicion in Our Heroine’s eyes. Their parting was a tearful one on both sides, and the two of them had never quite lost touch with each other. In later years, she’d even introduced him to Shirley MacGuffin, who came to regard the man as something of a mentor, though she rarely had the temerity to let him read any of her writing. But he’d liked her too much to offer useful criticism, anyway.

Our Heroine followed Vico Road west, farther from Main Street and the stations of Bean Day and back in the direction of her home. She needed a place to sit and think things through logically. It was impressive, she mused, that Angus had managed to hear about Shirley’s death and make it all the way to New Crúiskeen from the Orkneys in less than two days. And he had helped Shirley somehow with her Hamlet project while she was in Denmark, so—Never mind. She looked forward to seeing him tonight. It had been too long. And, besides, it was best to focus on other things for now, anyway.

If, for instance, there really was some connection between Hubert’s disappearance and Shirley’s death, as she was beginning to suspect—Well, she didn’t need to investigate it, but at least she could put together all the pieces that she had. No more distractions.

At least the clear streets away from Main were boring enough to repel all but the most intrepid of tourists. Of course, the most intrepid were the ones whom she should have been trying hardest to avoid, and as she neared the end of Vico, a crowd of people in Refurserkir costumes turned the corner. Their fox-fur shirts made them seem more high-fashion than stealthy, but she had to admit that they looked surprisingly like the real thing.

They spotted her right away and moved as a group in her direction. She didn’t notice the Gerd impersonator in the midst of them until they were already upon her, blocking the entire sidewalk so that she had no easy way of continuing onward.

“Hi. You probably want an autograph, right?”

The Gerd impersonator smiled. She, too, looked a lot like the real thing.

“We wouldn’t want to trouble you,” she said. Even her voice… Our Heroine squinted and looked a bit closer.

No. She seemed a little too young to be Gerd.

Unless she was just incredibly well preserved.

“That’s a really nice costume,” Our Heroine said. The woman was wearing a long black robe that seemed to suit Gerd’s sense of style. “So, I guess you’re supposed to be my arch-nemesis.”

“I guess that is indeed what I am supposed to be. Yet we are in a hurry. No time to play at being nemeses now. I’m glad to have had the chance of seeing you, though.” She smiled a genuinely friendly smile. It couldn’t be Gerd.

“Yeah, well, have fun with all the dressing up and stuff,” Our Heroine said, and she stepped onto the street around them all, not looking back as she turned the corner onto Telegraph—toward the campus.

She passed shops that catered to the student crowd: record stores, cafés, and copiers. It was early in the semester, and students were lining up to buy course readers, chugging lattes and hot apple ciders to compensate for the cold. Our Heroine considered a quick tea herself. Students might stop her, though, and she’d had enough conversation for the time being. She hurried on.

With cold feet she headed up Dalkey Road, where the wind seemed thicker. Away from downtown, from Hrothgar’s, toward home. Perhaps Hubert would try to call again, and this time she’d find the phone. Screw him. She crossed the footbridge over Inwit Creek. Perhaps she’d refuse to answer.

So. It wasn’t that she was searching, but she’d just ended up with these random pieces. Not of a puzzle, necessarily, but pieces of something . She had no surface on which to scribble this down. Just repeat it in her mind, then. Rearrange the fragments until they made sense.

Things that began with H: Hubert, Historia Danica , Hamlet —some versions, at least—Hrothgar’s, Heidrun. Not now.

Things that she did not know: what Angus was doing in town tonight, whether that Nathan fellow had anything to do with all of this, whether there was a “this” to begin with…

Things that must be kept secret: what happened to Shirley in Denmark. Just the one thing, really. It had been the last thing that Shirley had asked of her—to keep it secret, particularly from Blaise. And if anyone deserved to know, it was he, so how could she tell anyone else? Besides, it might help but it might not. And if it were unrelated, then she would be betraying Shirley’s trust for nothing. Better to honor her will than to get her an unasked-for revenge…

There were also things that she knew but could not say—things she had not yet found the voice to express.

Then she looked up at the sky and saw a column of black smoke. The color of Gerd’s hair. More like a blaze than someone’s chimney-flow. Black tree branching in the sky. At least it was a bit too far away to be from her house. But something was burning, and it was probably something that she didn’t want burnt. She could feel sick already, imagining all the things it might be.

Skellington Road veered more directly toward home, but Our Heroine decided to continue down Dalkey. It was getting on toward two o’clock, and Bean Day pilgrims would be gathered round her house, and that was not something that she wanted to deal with. Though it might be worth braving through them just to get out of the cold… No. She could hear sirens, now, and curiosity tugged her hardest.

“Is my father all right?”

His library. The smoke had been coming from his library. The burning brought sensation back to the rims of her ears.

“Is my father all right?”

“I don’t believe there was anyone inside, miss. Now you’ll have to stand back.”

Ash floated up out of it like negative snow.

“Oh, God, I have to find my father.”