The Extremely Epic Viking Tale of Yondersaay (33 page)

As he stood there, a slender arm came from behind him, reached in, and took out two oranges, an apple, a carrot, and something green that Hamish did not recognize.

Hamish turned to look at the person who owned the arm.

“Smoothie?” Alice Cogle said and smiled.

Hamish shrieked like a schoolboy and recoiled in fright. Then he just stood there, staring. Alice moved to the kitchen counter and started preparing breakfast. She was wearing Hamish’s shirt.

“Not yet,” he said eventually, looking her up and down. He came over and scooped her up in his arms and kicked the fridge door closed. Hamish Sinclair, who believes real men eat only meat and the occasional Cadbury’s creme egg, picked up a squirming and giggling Alice Cogle, who believes meat, all meat, is murder and kissed her.

“Hello! Hello!
Hello
!” the fifth twin said when he woke up on Christmas morning. “Is anybody there?” As his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he looked around and could not for the life of him figure out how he had gotten here. The fifth twin was in a very dark, cave-like tunnel. Once his eyes were accustomed to the dim light, he spotted a tiny purple flower a few feet down the slope from him. He crawled toward it. A bit farther was a minute yellow flower, and beyond that was a teensy cornflower blue flower. The twin followed the colorful flowers, on all fours, all the way into the light.

Finally, he made it clear of the tunnel into the bright Christmas morning. “How am I going to explain this at home?” he said as he took himself in and saw that he was dressed in strappy sandals, a leather miniskirt, and a fringed string vest.

Dani and Ruairi could not stop talking to each other and to their parents. Dani told them about Rarelief and the whirlpool spitting them out and about the tarantulafish. Ruairi talked about the oracle handling bloody guts and then passing sandwiches around. Mum said she could remember her time as a Viking but was still struggling to come to terms with everything that had happened to her and to her family on Christmas Eve. They were talking, but they were subdued. Mum decided the best way to take their minds of Odin’s traumatic end was to get stuck into Christmas Day preparations. They all got involved, finalizing the decorating, arranging presents under the tree, getting the food ready

All except Granny Miller. Try as she might, she was not feeling the Christmas spirit. She listened as her great-great-great-grandchildren recounted their adventures for their parents, but she did not feel up to talking herself. Granny tried her best not to think of the boy she had grown up with. She tried her hardest not to dwell on memories of her dear friend Eoin Lerwick who it turns out was Odin, father of all the Vikings. Eoin had entered Granny’s thoughts the same way he had entered her heart—irreversibly and without her even noticing, and he would remain in her heart forevermore.

She would hold a little ball of anger in her for the treacherous Silas Scathe for eternity. If he should ever cross her path again …

When no one was looking, Granny moved away from the others and sat alone in the window that looked out onto the village. From the window seat, she idly watched her friends and neighbors go about their Christmas morning business. It was clear they hadn’t an inkling concerning what had happened the day before.

“You miss Mr. Lerwick, don’t you?” Dani appeared beside Granny.

“I do.” Granny nodded. “There is no doubting that he went willingly. But his loss leaves an ache in my chest I fear will linger for a long time.” Dani hugged her.

Ruairi came up and stood with them. He wanted to say something comforting to Granny to make it all better. He wanted to tell her it didn’t matter or it wasn’t real or she would feel fine again soon. But he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. He put an arm around her shoulder and sat with her on the window seat. Dani mirrored him and sat on the other side. Ruairi saw the fresh snow covering the tracks of the day before. He saw some Yondersaanians Christmassing in the usual way. Then he saw a fleck in the sky. He looked closely, and it moved. It broke apart in front of him. He watched as the flecks moved closer.

“Look, Granny,” he said, pointing into the sky. “Look!”

Dani and Granny turned their gaze upwards and saw what Ruairi saw. Ruairi and Dani jumped to their feet. “It’s Thought and Memory!” Granny said, stumbling and falling off the window seat onto her feet. She was right. The flecks were not flecks; they were two sparkly black ravens—Thought and Memory. There they were clear and in plain sight, fluttering in synchronized patterns all over the northern-most sky.

Dani grabbed Granny’s arm and squeezed it tight. Ruairi hugged her. Ruairi and Dani jumped onto the window seat so they could get a better view.

“They are part of Odin, they can’t survive without him,” Ruairi said. “‘You must release your prisoners, all your prisoners,’ that’s what Odin made Scathe promise. All his prisoners, including Odin. It was a trick. By making Scathe promise that, he made it impossible for Scathe to kill him.”

Granny eased herself back onto her seat and raised her face to the sky. Her shoulders relaxed as she broke into a smile. “You must release your prisoners, all your prisoners, and leave the island, never to return,” Granny said. And then she put a hand over her stomach, and allowed the tiny knot of tightly-wound pain that had been building there unwind, disintegrate, and disappear.

Silas Scathe woke up early on this crisp, clear Christmas morning. He was alone in his castle. All his men and all the islanders had returned home to their families and their habitual lives. He could not be their jarl for another year—the spell of Christmas Eve was broken.

Usually, on Christmas morning, this would make Scathe’s stomach turn over a little, the realization that it was all done with for three hundred and sixty-four more days. Usually, on Christmas morning, he would have breakfast and go back to the village, blend in, and begin his nightly search for the buried treasure of Yondersaay all over again.

Usually, on Christmas morning. But not today. Because on this particular Christmas morning, Scathe had bounded out of bed as cheery and optimistic as it was possible for him to be. Today was different. He, Silas Scathe, had single-handedly—indeed single-mindedly—defeated that despicable old fool Odin and had forced him to surrender his treasure. To him. Silas Scathe. The one and only. The victorious!

Scathe took his espresso on the terrace. It was a beautiful morning, crisp and clear, if cold. Something was different—he couldn’t put his finger on what exactly had changed, but
he
was different now;
he
had changed. This must be how the Victorious feel every day! The sun was bright, if not warm, and the ice gave off a subtle purple hue. Scathe sipped his coffee, had a croissant, and went inside to get dressed in his ordinary, everyday, non-Viking clothes.

When he was ready to leave, he turned off the lights and locked the doors. He remembered to empty and unplug the refrigerator. As he was carrying out his chores, Scathe was getting more and more excited thinking about the treasure that was finally his after all these years.

He gathered up the old warrior’s battle-ax from the armour in the Great Hall and his wooden spade, remembering that Odin had said they were crucial. How could he have been so foolish all these hundreds of years? How could he not have realized that the ancient skalders’ poems, which sang of using the battle-axes of warriors and spades of wooden construction in the uncovering of the earth’s greatest treasures, applied to Odin’s great haul?

Scathe closed the heavy front doors and took one last look at Violaceous Hall as he descended the mountain. He was singing to himself as he walked. He was swinging his battle-ax, chopping the heads off flowers and shrubberies as he went, no longer pretending to be gentle and kind. He could not hear their cries of pain or protest anyway; it was no longer Christmas Eve—they no longer had a voice. Nor would they for another whole year.

And he’d be long gone by then.

Scathe decided to stroll along the Beach of Bewilderment one last time and to approach his treasure trove from the River Gargle. He ascended the dunes and crossed the bridge between the whirlpool and the waterfall. He sauntered to where he remembered the Tree to be. The Tree he now knew as Rarelief the Splendiferous. The Tree with the purple leaves and the purple ribbon tied around it. The Tree with the treasure buried among its roots.

Scathe approached the entrance to the Crimson Forest. The birdsong echoed his feelings of joy and triumph. Usually there was only such voluminous and various birdsong in his back garden. How apt that they would sing for him down here like this today!

He cast his mind back, before the sauntering and the strolling and the one last look and the locking up. He was sure there was something he was forgetting … He drank his espresso and ate his croissant and cleared out and unplugged the refrigerator. Then he had glanced out over his icy courtyard, he had seen the purple glint off the ground and the peaks of the mountain, but something was different. He was sure of it; something he wasn’t able to put his finger on was missing.

Scathe stopped and finally looked ahead of him into the Crimson Forest. Then he realized what it was, that little something not quite right.

His battle-ax dropped heavily to the ground, and his spade fell beside it. He took a small step forward, and then another one; his jaw went slack, and his mouth fell open.

There, in front of Silas Scathe, at the entrance to the Crimson Forest, was not one oak but thousands of oaks. Not two elms but thousands. The forest was replete. It was living and thriving. All his trees were there, back where they had first been all those hundreds of years ago. Every tree that he had had his men uproot and transport to his private courtyard in the topmost part of Mount Violaceous was back, here, in the Crimson Forest.

All around were trees, encroaching onto the banks of the River Gargle, sidling halfway up the mountain, creeping forward toward the village and backwards over the dunes to the sea. Densely packed: hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.

Scathe dropped to his knees and flung back his head. The scream came from such a deep and black place; it was so piercing and so pained that it affected all the island creatures no matter who or where they were. Every last bird in the forest took flight in terror; creatures ran for cover. Babies shivered, and grown men wept.

The sound that emerged from the rankest, most fetid place within Scathe came at the precise instant, the very millisecond he realized something else was desperately, desperately wrong.

Tied tightly so it could not float away, fluttering in the early morning breeze was a purple ribbon. Not just on the Tree, but on
every
tree—every oak, every elm—on every one of the thousands and thousands of trees that encroached all around and up and beyond. Toward the village, scaling the mountain’s slopes, even receding over the dunes to the sea. A purple ribbon on every tree. Literally.