He steps close to me, his hand out. His eyes are intense, icy blue like the fire that encircles us, blazing bright. The instant his skin touches mine, we plunge into darkness of the well, and my stomach rises to my chest, my hair lifting upward like a cloud. I open my mouth to scream, but Ethan squeezes my hand and I open my eyes. We’re still in the cavern.
“What was that?” I whisper.
“What was what?” His eyes betray nothing.
“What are you doing?”
“Choosing a side.”
“Easier to do when you’re not in chains,” I tell him, as I take my place in the circle, staring down at the never-ending pit below.
*
Anders moves up to the dais, several steps below Miriam and the stone table she stands behind. Sonja’s mother murmurs, hands working around a small iron pot that holds a normal orange flame. She throws a handful of something into it, and pungent smoke roils out, swirls into the cascading water, and disappears.
“What is that?” Julian whispers.
“It’s a recels-pot, with thyme, and maybe birchwood. It’s used for cleansing a sacred place.” Faye’s eyes are stark black in the blue light, darker than the blood that has dried on her face. “She knows her stuff.”
“Of course she does, you little fool,” Anders snaps at Faye. “She invented this magic.”
The woman walks around our circle, close to the flames that reach out to her, waving her little cauldron on silver chains like a bishop with a sensor. She mutters words I don’t understand. “It’s rue, actually.” Miriam says to Faye, as she ascends back to her altar.
“But that’s for antimag—”
“Hush, child,” the witch says, with a long look and my roommate closes her mouth, biting her bottom lip, hard. Miriam recites in measured guttural syllables, pausing to translate each line.
“We come through the appointed doors to make the required sacrifice.
The bloodline is assembled, the power of Odin to be restored.
The just reward to come to the god Yvengvr Earth-walker,
Once bound, never to separate, the gifts of the All-Father.
Prepare for the awakening, the might and main of these harbingers,
And let the door to Asgard open for Odin’s murder.”
Anders shouts his approval.
Miriam leaves her burning pot, walking back with a bundle of twine in her fist. She stops behind me to lay a rune at my throat, now free from its bracelet and hanging from rough thread. Her long nails are sharp against the skin of my neck as she ties the knot.
“Mannaz,” she intones. “Muninn. Memory, who the All-Father kept so dear.” Despite myself, I wait for a flash of something, the same white light that shocked into my brain when Ethan kissed me that first time, but nothing comes. I’m still myself, a freaked-out girl chained to my brother at the edge of a pit, while my deranged teacher watches like the grand poobah at some extinct secret society’s pagan ritual.
“Ansuz,” Miriam says, “Thought. Huginn, who flew so high and far.” Julian pulls our chained hands up to touch the pendant hanging at his neck. I itch to pull it off and fling it into the hole, but he shrugs, and shoots me a glance to say, “Isn’t this silly?” I reach out to him, and he takes the hand already chained to his, thumbs locked in the other’s palm, like always, since we were children.
“Perth. Magic, of the runes he mastered.” Faye is still as bone, watching Miriam.
“Kaunan. Wisdom. Born of love and sacrifice.” Sonja’s mother touches her daughter’s cheek, a tender and maternal gesture so out of place with this insanity that I want to laugh, except that the blood on Faye’s face isn’t funny, at all.
“Tyr,” she says. “War.” She slips the thread around his neck, and it drops inside his shirt, the pendant hidden.
“Take hands, my children,” Anders says with a smile. “Become the flock you once were.” He closes his eyes, and flings his arms out, palms up.
Ethan takes Sonja’s hand, and I fight the flare of jealousy that surfaces in my chest, but his face shows no shock of awareness, no other vision through her eyes. He holds his hand out to me, the broken link in this chain.
I stare at it, rough with callouses. He’d touched my skin and my sex last night, and betrayed me the next day. I clasp his hand.