The Lost Sisterhood (55 page)

The women exchanged glances. They were clearly upset by the news, but there was more to their silence than that. I could see in their eyes they were angry, not only at us, but at Otrera as well. They had never wanted us there, I realized; in all likelihood, they had advised against the invitation, and now reality had proved them right.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know Reznik was here,” said Nick, undaunted by the cool reception. “You’ve been watching us all day.” He looked at them one by one. “Who’s driving the KTM? Doesn’t it attract a little too much attention here in the winter?”

His brazen manner accomplished nothing but to agitate the Amazons further. At length, the woman in the black turtleneck said, with heavy Slavic deliberation, “Finnish men are not afraid of strong women. Only weak men want women to be weak. What about you?” She ran her dark eyes over Nick’s body, pausing at all the major muscle groups. “Are you afraid of women who can kick your ass?”

“I’d prefer that you kick someone else’s,” he replied. “Aren’t there people out there who deserve it more?” He cast me a poignant glance, as if to say, “Better not provoke these ladies any further.”

“You may think of us as outlaws,” said the woman with the scar through her eyebrow. She spoke with defiance, in a canorous Swedish accent. “The truth is, we
are
the law. Not the whiny, counteractive, impotent law sitting around in big volumes on fake mahogany shelves, but the law that lives in the human heart. The law that says bad people will be punished. The law that says might is not right, and that murderers and molesters will not walk free.”

“There are police officers out there,” interjected the woman in black, “who pray that
we
will find the creep before
they
do.” Her eyes narrowed in a menacing smile. “We don’t grant parole. And we’re not slowed down by a titanic, gluttonous bureaucracy.”

“I’m all for limiting the power of the state,” said Nick, “but aren’t you worried that your vigilante justice is going to take down a few innocents?”

At this, Otrera finally weighed in, speaking with unbending resolution.
“We may make mistakes, but not in that. Those who rape the rights of others forfeit their own. But now is not the time for political philosophy. Pitana—” She looked keenly at the woman with the scar. “We need a plan.”

“It’s too bad,” said Nick, ignoring Otrera’s impatience, “that you’re missing so many people tonight.” He nodded at the throne-like chair at the head of the long dinner table. “Who sits there? Your queen? What’s her name, I wonder?” He looked intently at the Amazons. “Myrina?”

His words were met by a silence so profound you could hear a drawer closing upstairs.

“Come!” Otrera took both Nick and me firmly by the arms. “I have something to show you. Katherine, stay here.”

As we walked away from the others, Otrera shook her head and said, “It is not easy for us to open our house to strangers.”

I saw Nick frowning. “Is that what we are? Strangers?”

Otrera gave him a long look. “Your father changed his name when he left Oxford. We had no idea who you were.” She broke off to let us through a back door with an old-fashioned bolt. “It wasn’t until Reznik’s masquerade that we began to suspect the truth. Someone noticed you in the crowd and thought you looked—”

In the brief quiet of Otrera’s unfinished sentence, I was reminded of the cat woman who had glared at me with inexplicable hatred in Reznik’s powder room and who had later—according to Nick—been part of the break-in. Even then, in the flux of everything happening around me, I had found her dark, penetrating eyes eerily familiar. Now it finally dawned on me where I had seen them before. They were the eyes of the man walking right behind me.

“But that didn’t stop your people from beating me up at the Idingshof Hotel,” Nick pointed out as we followed Otrera into a dark, musty-smelling corridor lined with overclothes and footwear.

Otrera turned on the lights. “Our German chapter is very efficient. They did what they felt was necessary. At least, after that, we knew who you were.”

“How? Because I fight like my dad?”

Starting down a narrow basement staircase, Otrera said over her
shoulder, “How do you think? We have a lab. All they need is a drop of blood—”

“They certainly got
that.
” Nick pressed past me and followed her closely down the staircase, apparently not sharing my apprehensions about our underground destination. “And then what? You have my DNA, you know who my parents are. What comes next? Are you going to show me a box with my old teddy bears? Is that what we’re doing down here?”

Instead of replying, Otrera continued ahead of us through a narrow basement storage space with spears, bows, axes, and snowshoes either hanging on or leaning against the walls. As we walked past a door slightly ajar, both Nick and I paused to peek into a room that had an entire wall covered with television screens set on different news channels. Oddly, the only sound coming from the room and its maelstrom of flashing images was the rhythmic trot of a strapping woman running on a treadmill with a headset on, intently observing the changing screens.

Realizing she had lost her retinue, Otrera came back toward us with a strained smile. “Obviously, we have to know what’s going on,” she snapped, mostly to Nick. “But we have no computers online in this house. Our research team is one hundred percent mobile and operates exclusively out of random Internet cafés. But please come with me. We don’t have much time.”

Walking ahead once more, Otrera took a large key out of her trouser pocket and stopped at the end of the armory to unlock a massive door. “There,” she said, pushing open the door with her shoulder and flicking on a light switch inside. “This is our sanctuary.”

We followed her into a vast dimly lit room, which had the temperature and feel of a crypt. The only light came from illuminated shelves on the walls, and the darkness in the rest of the sanctuary was so pervasive it took me a moment to make out the presence of an enormous ironclad coffer in the center of the stone floor. At least five feet wide and three feet deep, the coffer was sealed with a medieval-looking padlock, and despite Otrera’s impatient waving, both Nick and I had a hard time wresting our eyes from it.

“What’s in there?” asked Nick. “The Amazon Hoard?”

Seeing she could not coax us away from the enigmatic receptacle, Otrera came back toward us again, folding her arms against the cold. “It’s not what you think.” She looked at us intently, almost nervously. “It is not gold.”

My pulse quickened. “But it
is
King Priam’s treasure?”

Otrera hesitated. “We believe so.” She put a hand on the coffer’s lid, as if to ensure it remained closed. “Only the queen has the key.”

As much as I knew she was uncomfortable with the subject, I could not walk away. Here I was, a faithful Amazon believer, within arm’s length of a treasure even
I
had dismissed as a legend…. It was too wonderful. And so I nodded and said to Otrera, “I understand. But at the same time, I must take issue with the idea of safeguarding history in this manner. Assuming King Priam really did entrust the Amazons with the most valuable artifacts of Trojan civilization … well, why did he do that? Presumably he wanted to ensure they weren’t destroyed. And he was wise. The Greeks annihilated the Trojans so completely we’re not even sure what language they spoke. To this day, the nature of Trojan civilization is one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world. In fact, for hundreds of years, scholars believed Troy and the Trojan War were nothing but a grand fantastic myth. Was that what King Priam had in mind when he asked the Amazons to safeguard his treasure? That his realm should be erased from human history for three thousand years? No!” I slammed a palm against the lid of the coffer and saw Otrera jump at the sound. “It would be his greatest wish, I am sure, that these things be known to the world. For if they are merely festering in a frozen basement on the fringes of nowhere, they might as well have been destroyed by the bloody Greeks.”

Otrera recoiled at my exclamation, then said, stiffly, “I did not invite you down here to discuss mythology. As you can see, this is a place for memories and meditation.” She gestured at the illuminated shelves all around us, and only then did I notice that the objects on display were bronze urns in different sizes and shapes. “Vabu Rusi and all her girls are at rest here. I am the last one. Come.” She took me by the elbow and walked me over to one of the shelves, which held seven urns. On the
wall behind them hung a framed black-and-white photo of a somber lady seated in an armchair with seven young women clustered around her. “There!” Otrera pointed at a girl in the picture. “Do you recognize that little angel?”

I leaned closer, expecting the girl to be Otrera herself. But instead, I saw a face with two serene eyes that I instinctively knew.

“My sister, Tyyne,” said Otrera. “She was your grandmother.”

The revelation came as such a shock to me that I could not hold back my tears. It was not just the photo and the sudden realization that
this
was why Otrera had invited us…. Most of all it was the unexpected weight of finality. Granny was dead. I had suspected it ever since I received her bracelet in the mail, but now I knew it for certain. Here was the urn with her ashes. I touched it with a profound sense of loss.

Overcome, I wanted to embrace Otrera and thank her for making this moment possible. Beating me to it, she slipped a hand into her trouser pocket, took out a small, sealed envelope, and held it out to me, as if to prevent me from coming any closer. “Take it!” she said, clearly in a hurry to quicken the transaction. “Writing to outsiders is strictly against our rules. But Tyyne—or Kara, as she was called here—was a rule breaker. She made me swear that if you ever came to Suomussalmi in search of her, I would greet you as family and give you this letter.”

Nick put a comforting arm around me, perhaps sensing how overwhelmed I was. “You call us outsiders,” he said, “but we are your relations, even if you don’t think of us that way. There must be others like us—especially male children like me—who have tried to find you.”

Otrera shook her head. “It is extremely rare that we consort with men. No one wants to risk conceiving a boy and having to make a terrible choice between the child and the sisterhood. But sometimes Nature takes over.” She smiled at us both, as if to say she understood the power of romantic love even if she had lived her life in defiance of it. Then her expression changed. “Oh, that reminds me.” She held out a hand toward me. “The jackal bracelet. Tyyne gave it to you, and therefore it is yours. But she did not intend you to wear it like a piece of jewelry. It represents a pact, Diana, and it comes with rules and responsibilities. Yours is one of the original bronze jackals; we only have
a few of those left. Some of us wear an iron or silver jackal, and some wear bronze replicas, but more and more, we are moving away from metal. It is too detectable. Most of our younger operatives choose a brand or tattoo these days. The queen still wears a bronze jackal, but she takes it off on missions.” Otrera gave Nick a knowing look. “At least she does
now.
When your father met her, she was still in training and wore her bracelet wherever she went. I’m guessing that was what gave her away.”

Nick’s arm tensed around me. “Correction: She gave
me
away. Is that part of the queenship test, choosing the sisterhood over motherhood? Myrina clearly passed with distinction.”

Her patience running out, Otrera turned to me with a frown. “Here.” Taking my arm, she pulled up my sleeve and removed the bronze jackal from my wrist in one expert movement. Then she handed it to me with a grave nod. “Should you ever choose to wear it again, Katherine Kent will be your contact.”

I barely knew what to do with the bracelet. “Do you think that was what my grandmother wanted?” I asked. “That I become one of you?”

Otrera gave me an obscure, sideways glance, before starting back toward the door. “I don’t know. As I said, Tyyne was a rule breaker. And when she returned to us after all those years, she was scarred. But she was still the best mentor our girls ever had. Unpredictable, yes.” Otrera smiled at me over her shoulder. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell
you
this, Diana. She was a brilliant teacher, and I want you to know that her last years here with us were very busy, and very rewarding.”

“How did she die?” I asked.

Otrera paused to look at me with a tender smile. “The way she always wanted: She died riding.”

“Did she ever talk about me?”

Otrera began walking again. “All the time. But read the letter. And when you have read it, please destroy it.”

“Wait!” said Nick. “What about me? Don’t I get a letter?”

Otrera stopped to pull open the heavy door. “Human hearts are complex, unpredictable mechanisms.”

“She’s here, isn’t she?” He glanced up at the house above us. “Why
doesn’t she want to meet me? Is the noble Queen Myrina embarrassed about her past?”

Leaning against the open door, Otrera turned to look at him, sympathy and austerity at war in her face. “What she did to your father was no worse than what men have done to women since the beginning of time. Just be happy she let you live.” With that she turned off the lights and waited for us to follow her upstairs. “Clear your minds. We need to prepare for battle.”

T
HE OTHERS WERE STILL
assembled in the dining room. As soon as we entered, Pitana came toward us, giving the impression of a pirate captain with her tall boots and the scar running through her eyebrow.

“Any news?” asked Otrera.

Pitana replied with a curt nod. “Breakdowns and delays. None of the teams can be here before morning. If Reznik comes tonight, we can’t attack him head-on until we know what he’s got.”

“Of all the nights.” Otrera took a deep breath. “So, what’s the plan?”

Pitana turned to the Slavic woman in black who had taunted Nick earlier. “Pen?”

Penthesilea stepped forward, a challenge in her eyes. “That depends on you two,” she said, looking from me to Nick with cautious expectancy, “and how willing you are to fight with us.”