Chapter 36
The banging on the door dragged Linnea up out of the best sleep she had ever had.
For one second, she didn't know where she was. Furs. Fenris curled around her back. The fist hit the wood again, three hard knocks.
"Morning, apparently," she said, voice rusty.
They dressed quickly, and Linnea pulled the ward down with a flick of her fingers, opening the door onto a wall of sound.
The hall was full of people. Figures lined the benches and crowded the long tables, eating, talking, waiting. The smell of roasting meat and fresh bread hung thick in the air. It had the look of a feast or a family reunion, which set several alarm bells ringing.
A shade peeled itself off the nearest wall and drifted to meet them, gray and see-through, its face moving like a reflection on water.
"This is the Hall of What Was," it said, and the voice came from everywhere and nowhere. "Here, the dead come to sit with you one more time. Sit, or don't, wanderers. They will find you either way."
It was already happening before the shade finished talking. Linnea had not taken a single step, and the group was coming apart around her, each of them drifting off in a different direction like leaves in the wind.
Von sat on a bench across from a teenage boy with pink hair, the two of them instantly deep in some story that had Von's hands dancing.
A cry went up near the far wall. Two people had risen from a corner table, a lean man and a strongly built woman, their arms already open.
Ciara was across the hall at a dead run with Layla half a step behind her.
They hit the embrace all together, a tangle of held faces and gripped hands, and the laughter that came off them was real and helpless.
From the shouts, Linnea realized they were Ciara's parents.
She could see the hunter training in their movements and Lachlan's smile on the woman's face.
Something in Linnea's chest unknotted a little at the touching moment. Ciara and Layla deserved to have a good memory of Niflheim. Somebody had to walk out of this hall with a gift, and the animal part of her that sensed danger was already certain it wouldn't be her.
She turned to find Fenris, to say so, and the words died in her mouth.
Tor had gone rigid halfway down the hall, the whole great bulk of him was motionless, his eyes fixed on a big silver-haired man rising slowly off a bench by the fire.
Linnea's stomach turned to water. She would have known that man in any crowd in any world, the set of those shoulders, the cruel patience in the way he stood and waited.
Skari.
Tor turned on his heel and walked straight for the door, fast, his hands in fists. Arne went after him without a word. Skari smiled maliciously and followed them both out into the gray, unhurried, certain of being obeyed.
Linnea did what she'd learned to do before she could write her own name.
She stepped in close behind Fenris and made herself small, putting his body between her and her father, forcing herself not to bolt.
Skari never glanced her way. He never did, unless he was looking for something to break, and he had Tor for that.
She had never mattered enough to scan for.
Her father went out the door, and for one breath, she let herself believe the worst of this place had already passed her by.
Beside her, Fenris stopped walking, his attention fixed on something halfway down the hall. Linnea followed his line of sight to a small table set for two.
A beautiful woman sat there alone, hands folded on the wood. She had long, dark hair and skin pale as ivory in the firelight.
"Sunniva," Fenris said, so quietly Linnea almost missed it.
The name went down her like a stone down a well. This was his human wife. The one who had come before her and meant so much that he had willingly been bound to protect her.
Across the hall, the woman raised her eyes and found him. She looked at Fenris for a long moment with a face Linnea couldn't read. She gave him a small, grave nod and lifted one hand a few inches off the table in invitation.
Fenris crossed the hall to her without a word or one glance back at Linnea, as though she had stopped existing the moment that woman lifted her eyes. He lowered himself onto the bench across from Sunniva, and he bowed his head as they began to speak in voices pitched too low for the hall to carry.
Linnea's wolf, who had walked into the literal underworld with her teeth out, lay down and curled into a tight ball.
You're being ridiculous. She is dead, and you are not. This could be a gift to him, too, like the Ironwoods are getting, she tried telling herself. It was foolish to be jealous of a dead woman.
Linnea sat down hard at the nearest empty table and tried to focus on the intricate knotwork carved on the roof beams, but her eyes kept drifting.
Fenris's back was all she could see, the tilt of his head, angled down toward Sunniva, listening intently.
Sunniva reached across the table and took his hand in both of hers.
Her mouth moved on and on, her thumb tracing slowly over the back of Fenris's knuckles.
Fenris didn't pull away, did not lift his head, did nothing at all but hold the hand of the wife he had loved and lost.
Some cruel part of Linnea made her keep looking. This was the real woman Fenris loved and chose. Whatever Linnea had been to him in the warm and the dark, it was not this, and it was never going to be.
She had let him hold her last night. She had handed him the worst memory she owned. The whole time there had been a Sunniva-shaped hollow in him that a girl like her was never going to fill. She had known better than to forget that.
Linnea dropped her eyes to her own knees, because looking at them was its own kind of bleeding. She was concentrating hard on the weave of her leggings when the bench across from her creaked under a new weight.
She looked up at the woman across the table. She had Linnea's eyes set in a face older and harder than the one in Linnea's earliest memories and still, unmistakably, the face she had spent her childhood looking up at.
Her mother, Inga, folded her hands on the table, looked at Linnea with mild interest, and gave her a smile with nothing behind it.
"There you are," she said like they had arranged to meet. "I wondered what you would grow into." Her gaze went down Linnea and back up, taking inventory. "Not much, I see."
Linnea opened her mouth, and nothing came out. She had a lifetime of things she wanted to say to this woman. Not one would come. Her throat had closed the way it used to close when she was small and had learned that talking back only ever made things worse.
Inga didn't need her to talk. She had come to deliver something, and she said it the way another woman might read out a shopping list.
"You'll want to know why I left. I'll tell you, since we're here," Inga said plainly. "Your father was a reason. A person can only be hit so many times before leaving becomes less about cowardice and more about sense. That was only half of it, though, and I think you have always known that."
Linnea didn't say anything. She was too shocked to move, to fight back, to fathom seeing Inga again.
"The other half of the problem was you," her mother charged on, gesturing at her.
"I mean, a daughter who couldn't shift? Do you have any idea what that was like in a pack like ours?
The shame of it. Skari's whelp, broken from birth, and every wolf in the clan was looking down on me.
There was your brother as well, too proud to take the place he was born to, too full of his own principles to put this family where it should have been.
I looked at the three of you, did the math on how long I could keep stomaching it, and left. I never regretted a day of it."
She drew back into herself, neat and done, and those gray eyes, Linnea's eyes, settled on Linnea's face with the flat indifference she might have shown a stranger's child across a train carriage.
"I still don't care," Inga said with a lift of her shoulders.
"That isn't why I sat down. I wanted to give you closure, in case you ever wondered whether the reason I left was you, so here it is: You were the reason I left.
Skari was only ever the excuse. I could have tolerated him and dealt with Tor's attitude.
You were the last straw that broke me, and I had a choice. I chose me."
Linnea couldn't breathe. There was only a roaring where her thoughts should have been. From somewhere far away, Sunniva was laughing softly at something Fenris had said.
Out, her wolf demanded. Out. Now. Get us out.
Linnea stood up and went for the door because if she stayed in this hall one second longer, she was going to break apart on the floor in front of all of them. She would rather be eaten by the wraiths in the woods.
Linnea got out the door, and the cold hit her lungs, forcing her to gasp for breath. The relief of being out of the hall lasted exactly as long as it took the shouting to reach her.
Tor and Arne stood twenty feet down the slope with Skari, and all three were yelling. Tor's voice cracked raw in a way she had not heard since they were children, Arne's hand on Tor's shoulder, holding her brother back from a thing that would cost him everything.
Skari saw her, his lip curling. "There she is. The runt that ruined her mother and made a coward of my son. I died for you, girl. Your brother put me in the ground over you. You should be the one rotting down here, not me."
There it was. The thing she had braced against her whole childhood, said out loud at last in her dead father's voice.
Linnea strode toward him, all of her hurt and rage burning her up, and did the one thing she had never managed to do while he was alive. She lifted her chin and looked her father dead in the eye. She didn't flinch or make herself small the way she always had.
"You can fuck right off, you piece of shit. I hope whatever horrors that live in this place torment you for all fucking eternity for how you treated your own children," she said and spat in his face. "The only thing wrong with me is the fact that I came from your flaccid little cock."
Fuck the wolves that whelped us, her wolf said, with a snarl.
Skari's face went slack in shock. She didn't stay to watch it turn to rage. She had had enough of that for a lifetime. She walked into the gray, her boots eating the ground, her eyes fixed ahead, dry and burning.
Linnea walked into the dead country alone and let out the scream that had lived in her chest her whole life. The power of it tore out of her, lashing off branches and chunks of bark from the black pines. She screamed until she emptied her lungs and fell forward to vomit up last night's bread.
Behind her, the hall full of the loved and the hated carried on without her.
Let it.
Every last one of them could have their reunions. Inga could go back to not caring. Skari could rot in whatever hole Tor had dug for him. Fenris could hold Sunniva's hand until the end of the world.
They could all fuck right off.