A Solstice Journey (2 page)

I’d been walking for a while and figured I should have gotten to the other side of the Public Garden by now, even if I hadn’t been following the walkway. The place wasn’t that big. I could have gotten turned around when I was daydreaming about Christmases past, but I hadn’t stumbled across the lake or any of the other landmarks or statues. I knew enough to keep walking until I found some sort of landmark so I could figure out where I was and then where the nearest MBTA station was. I needed to get home before the system shut down. When I’d looked at the weather report earlier, it had mentioned snow, but not this much. The drifts were getting to be a couple of feet deep, and it didn’t look like it was going to stop anytime soon. At this rate, the entire city would shut down before I managed to get home.

I was still walking when I heard something besides the crunch of my boots in the snow as I waded through deeper and deeper drifts. The wind had died down, and I didn’t know how long I had been walking, because I didn’t want to take my phone out to check. I was chilled and knew I’d be colder if I stopped moving. I was lost—I felt like an idiot—and welcomed the sound of someone else because I was beginning to get worried. I knew a little about surviving in the snow, but nothing more than someone would pick up from watching a documentary or a reality show. From what I could tell, the noise sounded like a horse galloping. I didn’t think Boston had any sort of mounted patrols. I hadn’t seen any in the month I had been there. And no one but an idiot would be doing that sort of thing with a horse in this weather, unless he wanted to injure it.

I stopped, trying figure out where the thudding was coming from. It was quiet, too quiet, as stupid as it sounded. I wasn’t hearing the background noise a city produces, the cars and trucks, people and the noise they make, even the sound of planes overhead, though Logan was probably closed because of this weather. For a long moment, I wasn’t even hearing anything that wasn’t me, and that scared me more than I expected. It took a few seconds, but I could again hear the horse. It was coming closer, with some sort of jingling, too, as if there were bells on the horse—horses actually—because now it sounded like more than one. It sounded like there was a whole
herd
coming toward me. I quickly looked around, wondering if I could find something like a tree or a rock to hide behind. Not that I didn’t want to be found, but I didn’t know if the riders were going to see me in this snow. My coat was dark, but the snow flurries seemed heavier the closer they got, until I swore it was swirling around me like a small snow tornado. I shivered, feeling colder than I thought possible and wanting nothing more than to be home, safe, and most importantly, warm.

The horses sounded like they had slowed down to a walk, and I took a step in the direction of the soft thuds. It felt like I was walking through taffy, an almost impossible task to get my right foot off the ground and take a step forward. The snow was suddenly to my thighs, and I felt I had been walking for a thousand years…. I resisted the urge to fall to my knees when two horses appeared—out of nowhere, I swore—in front of me.

The horses were white, somehow paler than the snow, with a silver sheen to them. Their eyes shone blacker than coal and their bridles and saddles looked to be made of pure silver. The horse on the right snorted, and I was relieved to see its breath frosted in the air, because these horses didn’t look real to me.

And the riders were as unearthly as their mounts.

I assumed they were men because of the armor they were wearing. It was also made out of silver or some metal that looked like it, because even I knew that silver wasn’t a good metal to make armor out of. It was pretty, though, made from tiny, tiny chain links that seemed too fine to be real.

They seemed to be tall, or maybe that was because they were seated on horses and looking down at me. The horsemen’s features were fine, with long noses, and their eyes were almond-shaped. They were blue, almost the same blue as mine. I couldn’t see the color of their hair because their helmets hid it.

The horseman on the right looked down at me and demanded in a cold voice, “Do you know where you are,
Álfr
?”

I stared at him, confused, rolling the language and especially that last word around in my mind for a second or two. I had been expecting some sort of law enforcement or Good Samaritan coming to rescue me, not someone looking at me like I was the dirt beneath him. And the word was close enough to Icelandic for me to guess what it was: Elf. The man was calling me an
elf
. I didn’t know what he was speaking, but it did sound like Icelandic, and it wasn’t one of the other Northern languages, either, instead an echo of all of them.

“Boston,” I told him slowly in Icelandic. “The Public Garden.”

That earned me a bark of laughter from the two of them.

“We know not this Boston that you speak of,” the other horseman announced. “You are in the lands of
Sút
.”

I blinked in shock. Winter, I was in the lands of Winter, if I was understanding him correctly. For a moment I wondered if I had actually passed out because of the wine at the party and was slowly freezing to death in the Public Garden. It wasn’t like anyone was going to miss me. The office was closed until after Christmas. My mother would miss me on Christmas when I didn’t call her, but that was about it. And that was three days from now.

It was all so unreal.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I told them, my teeth beginning to chatter. I didn’t know if it was because of the cold or the shock. I was shivering now, and I knew I needed to either get moving again or get on one of their horses, because I was exhausted and needed to get out of the cold. “I was walking to get the train home and then there was all this snow.”

The two horsemen looked at each other and then at me. “Then we should take you to shelter,” I was told, grudgingly. “Do you know how to ride?”

“I don’t,” I answered.

More laughter from the two of them. I wanted to ask if they knew how to use a computer, because that was a lot more useful to me than dealing with an animal to go from one place to another, even if it did smell better than public transportation in Boston. But I wasn’t going to argue with them, because this was the only rescue I could expect. As insane as it sounded, I almost believed them when they told me I wasn’t in Boston anymore. It was true, this didn’t feel like Boston. The air smelled different and the snow
felt
different too. It seemed fake, like it was whatever was used in the movies for snow, but it was cold enough to kill me if I stayed out too much longer.

“You will ride pillion behind me,” one told me, as if he expected me to argue with him. I was grateful for the ride out of there. It wasn’t like I knew how to ride, so having someone else controlling the animal wasn’t an insult.

He looked me over critically and then got off his horse gracefully, like he was a gymnast dismounting from a balance beam. “You are going to need help up,” he said, sounding annoyed.

Had I been warm enough, I would have blushed. I felt really stupid, but he helped me onto the horse, and I managed not to fall off on the other side after I was up there. I sat on my coat, and it was a little bound and bunched up underneath me, but I was warm. My savior managed to remount while in armor and with me sitting there like a bump on a log, with the same grace he had shown climbing down. He settled into the saddle, and I sort of guessed what to do, because I had ridden on the back of an old boyfriend’s motorcycle while in high school. I shifted a little and leaned forward so I could grab him if I needed to. I was strongly of the opinion I was going to fall off as soon as the horse started moving.

“My name is Celyn,” he called back over his shoulder. “And yours,
Álfr
?”

I wasn’t going to get upset about him calling me elf until we got to someplace warm. Principles were nice, but living was a lot better. If I got him mad at me, he might dump me back into the snow. “Gunnar,” I said, wondering if I was bold enough to grab onto him if I started to slide off the horse. “Gunnar Dagviðurson.”

I got a grunt at that, and then the horse began to move. I couldn’t call it a trot or a gallop, the thing just moved. It was a smooth ride, though, so I didn’t do much more than hide my head against Celyn’s back. The ride reminded me even more of a motorcycle because it seemed so fast and smooth.

I couldn’t see where we were going, because every time I looked up, the scenery around us seemed blurred. I had no idea where we were, but I was finally convinced I wasn’t in Boston, no matter how crazy it was. I felt a little panicky, but I wasn’t freezing to death anymore. I was tired, though, and was fighting the urge to nod off now that I was warm, because I didn’t know what would happen if I fell off the horse. Would it be like a fall off a motorcycle, which could be deadly? Or actually be like slipping off a horse’s back, painful and embarrassing, but not deadly. I didn’t want to find out and just hung on.

We eventually arrived… someplace, because the horses stopped. Celyn dismounted easily, and then he turned to look at me, a slight smile on his lips. I slid off the horse more than climbed, but I landed on my feet without hurting myself. I thought he was impressed. As I straightened out my coat, I became aware of how warm it was, so I unbuttoned it. My suit was probably a mess, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to make a good impression on these people in a plain blue suit, not when they ran around in silver armor.

We stood in the middle of what could have been a village green. I didn’t understand, one minute we were riding and the next we were stopped. The place was pretty. The ground seemed to be covered by a mixture of clover and grasses, soft underneath my feet. I looked around in amazement. We seemed to have been dropped into the middle of an ideal medieval village, with people moving about their business. Houses dotted the landscape, small one- or two-story whitewashed buildings, with what I guessed were thatched roofs. Most of them had a small stone wall around the yard, and I could see that was for keeping the chickens out of everyone’s way. Right next to us rose a large building built out of stone that could have been called a castle, it was so big.

People came to lead the horses away to be taken care of, I guessed. The silent horseman was staring at me—staring right
through
me would be a better description, and it was eerie.

“Stand down, Bleddyn,” Celyn said with a grin. “I’m pretty sure that the
Álfr
is harmless.”

I bit my lip at that, but these people seemed to be some sort of medieval warriors, so next to them, I probably did seem harmless, even if I could make two of them in size. I didn’t know how to use the muscles I had. I wasn’t out of shape, since a lot of dating in the gay scene depended on how good you looked. I had learned fast when I started dating in college that the pretty men were always picked up first and very few people were comfortable around a guy who looked like he bench-pressed small cars as a hobby. I didn’t look like that, not really, even if I did lift at the gym so that I avoided getting a gut while sitting behind a desk all day.

My heart skipped a beat when I got a closer look at my rescuer as he took off his helmet and shook his braid loose. He stretched a little and then tucked his helmet under his arm. It must have been a long ride for him too. He was a lot prettier with the helmet off, and I noticed his ears had a rare delicate curve and were almost lobeless. But what I really noticed was that he had a sword strapped to his hip, and he moved like he knew how to use it. He was pretty, dangerous, and very out of my league. I didn’t even know why I was thinking of that. This had to be some sort of weird hallucination.

Bleddyn nodded and fell behind Celyn, at his right shoulder. He looked like he was some sort of guard dog for a second, protecting Celyn from me.

“Is that what
Álfr
wear?” Celyn asked me with a laugh after looking me over.

“This is what I wear most of the time,” I said dryly. “I don’t know what elves wear because I’m not one.”

“You have the look of them,” he replied, his voice light. “Not their tongue, though. You speak the language of the
menskr.
”

Humans, I spoke the language of the humans, or man, if I understood him correctly. “Thank you,” I told him, in Italian, just to see how they responded.

They looked confused. I repeated the phrase slowly in a couple of other languages. Besides Icelandic and English, I knew enough in several different languages to make myself understood before one of us got frustrated and switched to English. It was usually someone I was talking to and not the other way around. I finally said thank you in Icelandic, and they seemed to understand it.

“What were all the words that you were speaking?” Celyn asked.

“‘Thank you’ in a bunch of different human languages,” I said. “The tongues of man, I guess you would call them.”

They appeared confused and a little worried, I thought.

“They are many now?” Celyn asked. “So many that they don’t all speak the same tongue? We had not known that the nation of Man had grown so many over time. We ride less and less into it, content in our own lands.”

“Yes,” I said shortly, wanting to avoid explaining that there were six billion people on Earth. I thought that wouldn’t be something they could understand. Something told me they thought a gathering of fifty or so people to be large. “Iceland, the nation that I come from, is considered to be very small. Boston is a city in what is called the United States, which is one of the larger nations on Earth.”

Celyn and Bleddyn looked at each other, wordlessly communicating, it appeared, before Bleddyn bowed and marched off. It couldn’t have been called walking, because he moved and people got out of his way.

“If I may ask, where are we now?” I said, once I realized Celyn wasn’t going to tell me, not that he had to. I was a guest, and there was such a thing as privacy.

Celyn smiled. “It is called
Ísshamr
.”