Winter Lost

“He has to forget to protect the spell,” I said, understanding why that was. It was the same reason I couldn’t pay too much attention to ghosts without making them more real. Hrímnir’s knowledge of the Great Spell might make everyone remember. He held that kind of power.

“Victoria and Able,” said Hugo deliberately. He didn’t want to talk about Hrímnir. Their relationship was complicated and painful. “You were going to explain what their role was.”

“You know what role they played,” I told him involuntarily. “But this story is mostly for me, anyway.”

“I am not sure of that,” he said. “I…I don’t always remember, either. ‘Compartmentalize,’ you said.” He laughed then; it sounded awfully close to a sob. “Compartmentalize. So talk. For both of us. Explain it to me.”

“Right,” I said. “As the shortest day of the year approaches, the stronger the call.” I’d gotten that from Liam, I thought, but I wasn’t sure anymore. “People who are needed for the marriage remember, then they come. Or they come and remember. But the Great Spell is not sentient. Not quite. It runs more like an if-then conditional on a computer program. If you know about the spell—and the artifact, the harp, is the embodiment of the spell—then you are called here. You are invited to the wedding.

“Victoria and Able didn’t know about the wedding or the Great Spell or anything like that,” I said. “But they were sent to steal the artifact. They knew about it. When they abandoned their unsuccessful mission, they were called like everyone else.”

“Yes,” agreed my guest. “Yes.”

“Ymir hired them to steal the artifact and bring it to him, so that Ragnarok”—I was having trouble enough with English sounds, I couldn’t be bothered to pronounce “Ragnarok” the way Zee would have wanted me to—“so that Ragnarok would begin and he could break free and bathe in the blood of his enemies. You know what I don’t understand?”

“What?”

“How did Ymir know about the Great Spell?”

“I told him about it,” my visitor said. “I called him on the telephone a couple of months ago, when I understood what was going to happen. I called him and told him how to bring about the end of the world.”

Timor mortis conturbat me.

“Okay,” I said. “That explains Ymir.”

I’d never have figured out that one without help.

“Anyway, Able and Victoria were called to Looking Glass,” I said. “So they weren’t truly refugees of the storm.”

I clutched my pillow to my face and dried the pain-driven tears leaking out of my eyes. Hrímnir was right when he said there wasn’t much time.

“The goblins were guests,” my visitor said, sounding a little impatient. “But not refugees.”

I nodded my head into my pillow. “Victoria and Able, right.” I wondered how long I’d been sitting without speaking.

“This place is a refuge,” I said. “And people who come here in need, people like you, are protected.”

Instead of agreeing with me, Hugo said, “You aren’t a refugee, either.”

I took a breath.

“Not a refugee,” I agreed, then changed the subject. It wasn’t time for that yet. “But Victoria and Able didn’t know about the wedding, they only knew about the lyre—”

“The harp.”

“They didn’t understand why they were here. But they thought they figured it out when I told them that the artifact they were supposed to steal, the one someone else had stolen, had been brought here. Ymir, the power they served, would have been capable of herding them here—or they thought so. Dylis heard the lyre—”

“Harp,” said Hugo firmly.

“In the walls. Your room—a room in the back of the greenhouse where you sleep when you stay at the lodge—shares the back wall with Dylis’s room.”

“Yes,” he said.

“The goblins waited until everyone was out shoveling snow. They broke into the greenhouse and stole the lyre.”

“Yes,” he said. “I was asleep.”

I opened my eyes to see an older man sitting on the chair by the window. He was a little stooped and his eyes were red-rimmed, as though he’d been crying. He sat a little sideways, so I only had a clear view of the side of his body facing me.

“I have another story to tell you,” I said, “if you can bear with me just a few minutes more.”

He gave me a faint nod. He didn’t want to come to the end of our conversation any more than I did.

“My father is Coyote,” I said. “Once upon a time, he was wandering in the world and grew bored. So he put on a mortal body and lived as a young rodeo cowboy, Joe Old Coyote. Joe was a bull rider and amateur vampire killer. He didn’t remember that he used to be Coyote. He met my mother, conceived me, and then died under the fangs of some vampires he was hunting. Joe was dead, but Coyote? Death doesn’t hold any surprises—or permanence—for him. He dusted off his jeans and went back to wandering around the world. He remembered being Joe the cowboy and he remembered my mom. But he wasn’t Joe Old Coyote. My father—with all of his hopes and dreams, his love of my mother—that man was dead.” I paused. “I told my brother that story. I think he must have told it to Hrímnir.”

“I have a story, too,” Hugo said.