Glittering Shadows (10 page)

“Horrid.” Mrs. Stangler shuddered.

“I still don’t see how those people can burn their own loved ones,” Mrs. Rasp continued. “It’s barbaric. No rites, no attempt at a proper burial at all?”

Wilhelmina was uncharacteristically quiet.

“
This
just doesn’t seem like anything good people would do,” Mrs. Rasp continued. “This seems like heathenism to me.”

“I think we should be responsible for proper burial,” Wilhelmina said, poking at her salad. “We promised free cremation for the poor, and we dragged them from their peaceful
death instead. It’s the least we could do, not to let these poor souls decompose in the gutter or toss them in a mass grave.”

“Oh, I suppose now you’ll act like you had no part in this,” Mrs. Rasp said. “Wasn’t your husband the one who destroyed the tree?”

The tree
.

Marlis had never heard anything about a tree, and yet she sensed it was important. But if it was significant, wouldn’t Papa have told her? Didn’t he tell her everything
important?

She was beginning to wonder.

Wilhelmina shot Mrs. Rasp a stern look. “You know you shouldn’t be talking about this.”

“It’s all going to come out,” Mrs. Rasp said, tugging on her earrings fretfully. “It’s all going to come out, and they’re going to twist everything we did.
We’ll be lucky to have our heads a few weeks from now.”

“The rebels are not going to behead anyone,” Wilhelmina said firmly.

Marlis kept thinking of the speech she’d given. She’d said those words on the radio, and everyone heard them. The more she considered it, the more they jumbled inside her. They
didn’t feel true. And what Papa said to the people was a lie. Coming after him, she might as well have given his speech, too.

You know it’s just politics.
She tried to swallow that thought along with her cold cuts.

What will become of me if I stand on the wrong side? Everyone will know I lied
. But what could she do if Papa wouldn’t listen to her ideas? She wouldn’t turn against her own
father. Better a liar than a traitor…right?

“And now I hear the worst kind of rustics are pouring across our borders and no one is there to regulate them. They’re going to join up with the revolution. God save us from whatever
dark magic these forest folk have dreamed up,” Mrs. Rasp said.

“My cousin said when she was in Irminau as a young woman, she met a girl who was possessed by demons—cursed for sleeping with a married man,” Mrs. Stangler said. She always
liked a bit of gossip when her children were out of the way. “Her family turned her out, so she lived on the streets. If she touched you, you’d get warts, they said.”

“Yes, demons, mind control, curses.” Mrs. Rasp shook her fork. “I would rather be hanged than have anything to do with demons.”

“Oh my,” Mrs. Rosen said, sounding almost amused.

“People
are
born with magic here, too, you know,” Wilhelmina said. “So if it’s true, we might as well be suspicious of our own citizens. I’d rather they come
here than join King Otto’s army.”

“Or, they could be Otto’s spies,” Mrs. Stangler said, undeterred.

They knew nothing, really. They all had the same vague reports and occasional news from their husbands. The border breach seemed far away compared to the pictures of the revolutionaries and the
pyre of the dead on the front page of the newspaper. Freddy’s lifework, all of the city’s hidden power, reduced to a pile of dirty dangling limbs and grainy black-and-white faces.

Marlis approached Wilhelmina after the meal. “Thank you for lunch,” she said. “I appreciate you hosting all of us.”

“Of course.” Wilhelmina smiled gently. She was not that gentle of a person, and her smile was disconcerting. “I’m sorry about the conversation. They’re just
scared.”

Marlis wouldn’t admit she was scared. She liked to think she wasn’t. An uncertain, unpleasant feeling kept turning around inside her. She thought of the speech one minute and Freddy
the next, then the protestors and the car blowing up with Ida inside it. Ida’s light, flirtatious manner had often annoyed Marlis, but now she wished for her company, to keep her mind off
things. Ida would have laughed at Mrs. Rasp’s nonsense. “What do you think will happen, really?” she asked, in a voice barely above a whisper.

Wilhelmina paused. Marlis, unfortunately, knew that pause. Her mother had paused that way when Marlis asked her if she was going to die. “I think your father and my husband and all the men
taking care of this country are trying their best to keep things together in a difficult situation. But some of the decisions that were made…” She looked at Marlis for an uncomfortably
long moment. “We took it too far.”

“What was Mrs. Rasp speaking of? The tree?”

Wilhelmina squeezed her hand. “Dear, at this point, the less you know, the better.”

“Father always tells me things,” Marlis said. It sounded petulant. She was going crazy with being pent up.

“We could be brought to trial. It’s better if you can’t answer questions.” She drew away from Marlis, returning to the other women across the room, who were conversing in
voices that occasionally grew heated.

Marlis lingered alone in the empty half of the room, catching sight of herself in a decorative mirror. Although she was not especially pretty—she’d once heard her great-aunt describe
her as “all bones and nose”—she had always liked her appearance. She thought she looked intellectual and older than her years, with her dark bob and straight bangs framing serious
brown eyes behind round glasses.

Right now she saw only vulnerability—slender shoulders and full lips slightly parted in worry. She pressed them together, staring at her reflection.

But behind her own eyes, she thought she saw a flash of someone else.

Urd
.

She covered her ears reflexively, then lowered her hands quickly. She felt silly. No one had spoken. It was just nonsense in her mind, the fancies she usually smothered surfacing in these
traumatizing days.

W
hen Nan woke that morning, Thea was still sleeping. Nan stared at her peaceful face for a long moment. If Ingrid had enchanted Thea, she owed it
to her friend to dig deep until she found out what was wrong.

First, she needed some fresh air. The thought of spending time close to Ingrid was repellent. Deep down she knew something was very wrong: Ingrid was not the Skuld she had known. But if Nan
reached for answers, she might become Verthandi. Maybe she wouldn’t even care about her friendship with Thea anymore. It seemed logical to assume that Yggdrasil’s destruction had given
her a closer connection to other people, even if it was hanging by a thread.

She hurried from the room, heart pounding with guilt, and found Sigi downstairs eating breakfast.

“Do you still want to go to your father’s place and find a camera?” Nan asked.

“Oh yes.”

She thought the guards might try to stop them leaving, but they just told them to be careful. The only sound on the street was the rustling of dry leaves in the wind. The smell of smoke still
lingered in the air, and Nan tried not to think where it had come from.

Sigi had her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her black wool coat. She was short, and these were men’s coats they had swiped from a dusty closet, so the hem grazed the tops of her
boots, and the broad shoulders swallowed her. While it might have looked comical, nothing about Sigi was comical just now. She looked pensive, the wind tossing a wild dark lock across her brow.

“You know when someone dies,” she said softly, “and the world keeps turning even though it feels like it should stop, because you’re so sad? The way the city looks today
is how I thought it should look when someone dies. Everything’s stopped.”

Nan nodded.

“I don’t like it much after all,” Sigi said.

They had walked to the end of the street now, passing the boarded-up subway station. The air was sharp, the sky overcast. It seemed too early for snow, but Nan wouldn’t be surprised to see
a few flakes. A policeman on the corner regarded them as they passed.

The next corner marked the boundary between the residential district and a row of shops with apartments above. Here, a lamppost was plastered with papers describing missing people. Although the
disappearances had been going on for a long time, Nan had never seen so many notices about them. They were all written on crisp new paper, probably posted since the night the workers escaped.

“So many missing.” Sigi grabbed one of the papers, with a girl’s graduation picture taped to it. “I remember her underground, I think. A tall girl who never talked. She
lived in the bunks below ours.” She squinted up and down the street. “Do you think they’ve cleared all the bodies out of the square?”

“You don’t want to go there, do you?”

“Not really. No. It would be awful. But I have this feeling like I need to do
something
, and I’m helpless.”

“I think they probably have cleaned things up by now,” Nan said. “They’ll want to hide as much of this as possible.” She understood the desire, realizing she had
been unconsciously scanning the landscape for bodies left behind, as if she simply needed confirmation that the events of last night were real.

Sigi walked in a silence Nan didn’t disturb for a block and a half. Sigi kept looking all around, even up at the top stories of the buildings, as if she was searching for some sign.

“Do you want to walk by the square anyway?” Nan finally asked. “Maybe it would provide some closure. We could pay our respects, or something.”

Sigi shook her head. “No, but—maybe we could get a drink. Toast to them. I feel that being sad doesn’t do anyone any good. Even though I am sad, I want to pretend I’m
not.”

“Sure.”

Usually Parc was one of the brightest of streets, where wealthy people drove their automobiles up and down the boulevard and parked to shop for clothes and jewels and trinkets only they could
hope to afford. On this quiet afternoon, mannequins in the latest fur-trimmed coats and winter gowns posed in dim windows next to shuttered doors.

“I hope he’s home,” Sigi said, looking ahead to a modern apartment building. The front of the building was a clean white edifice rising above the overhang of the lobby, with
curved white balconies bending behind like an abstract paper sculpture. “It’s nice to see something familiar.”

The lobby was a large spare room with big windows, everything made of angles. The doorman acknowledged Sigi with a nod of recognition. She laughed quietly. “My father must not have even
told the doorman I died.”

They rode the elevator to the fourth and highest floor. The doors swung open onto a white hallway with electric lights in diamond-shaped fixtures edged in black. There were only two apartments
on this entire floor, with the hall leading to the exit stairway. Sigi knocked. Her brow was sweating.

The door swung open. “Sig? By god, ’zat you?” The man standing in the doorframe shared Sigi’s stocky build and dark curly hair. He was swarthier, with a suggestion of
beard and mustache, and wearing an untucked cotton shirt and matching trousers. They looked like clothes rich people brought back from cruises to warmer climes, and they had fresh paint stains as
well as older, faded ones. Nan wondered how colorful he was to other people’s eyes.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Your mother kept saying you were still alive.” He hugged her in a very ordinary familiar way. “Come in. Who’s your friend?”

“This is Nan. She’s…” Sigi trailed off, apparently deciding not to explain at all. His eyes looked Nan up and down with approval.

“You girls want something to drink?” He was in the kitchen now—the apartment was very open, the spaces partitioned by half-walls in a way that seemed fashionable, though Nan
was not too familiar with fashionable apartments.

“No. Well, I don’t know. Wine, maybe. Just a glass,” Sigi said, shedding her coat onto the back of a chair.

“So were you never really dead?” He took out glasses.

“I
was
dead.”

“You didn’t really kill yourself, did you, Sig?” His voice was almost a whisper now.

Sigi twisted away from him and Nan both. “I’m sorry….”

He took off his glasses and wiped them off, like he was avoiding eye contact. “Your mother’s in so deep, I wondered if maybe someone killed you to get to her, and she was trying to
cover it up. But however it happened, how did you come back?”

“That’s the thing—” She locked eyes with him as he handed her the wineglass. Her bottom lip quivered slightly.

He put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. Mother’s dead. She gave her own life for me.”

He looked taken aback for a moment, as if he didn’t know how to process this and maybe didn’t even believe it. “She was probably knee-deep in trouble,” he said, trying to
reason through it. “All that revolutionary business. Would’ve gotten herself shot if she hadn’t—Not really surprising—”

“It just feels like—” Sigi broke off, as if deciding he wouldn’t understand.

He hugged her again, his eyes wide. “Sweetheart, your mother was crazy. Don’t feel bad about this. Don’t feel bad.”