Our Infinite Fates

FOR THE FIRST TIME, I was reborn near enough to a previous life that I could return to visit my old loved ones. Unfortunately, those loved ones were altogether spooked when a tall, pale girl with waist-length blonde hair darkened their doorstep, claiming to be their daughter who’d died seventeen years ago. Especially when said daughter had been short and slight, with hair the colour of a roasted walnut.

The journey from Kuopio to Finnmark had been an arduous one atop a stubborn horse’s back. I had stolen her from a neighbouring farm, and she’d resisted my command for the first hundred miles. The map I’d copied down was also woefully out of date, and, despite pilfering the finest compass I could find, I’d taken several accidental detours into western Russia. It had been a long, hungry few months, but there had been nothing left for me in Kuopio. I was an only child to two parents who had died of smallpox within days of each other, and my heart was tugging me towards the last place my soul had felt at home.

Little did I know that Vard? would be in the middle of quite a serious witch trial by the time I returned. Paranoia had tucked itself into all the dark nooks and crannies of my old hometown, panic lapping at the island’s shores.

Despite sitting on top of the world, the port was ice-immune thanks to a warm and steady North Atlantic drift. By the time I finally arrived, the midnight sun was a dusty pink behind the village kirke, washing the treeless tundra and sprawling fortress in a soft lilac light.