Secrets in the Tower
They stop in the kitchen to grab Dagfinn a bowl of soup, and then the washroom for fresh linens and a clean chamber pot. Then it’s time to ascend the tower.
Euphemia has only been up here once.
Yet in many ways, it is the place in the manor she knows best.
The twisting stairs. The narrow passage. The carvings around the doorframe.
Kelda unlocks the door but holds it close. “I am allowing you to enter this chamber with me, and with me alone. You may not return here on your own or with anyone else. And even if you did, you wouldn’t be able to enter.” She removes her key ring, jingling it for emphasis. “Understood?”
A pulse of excitement thrums through Euphemia.
She swallows it down. “Yes.”
Kelda pushes the door open and enters, Euphemia shuffling in behind her.
The room is identical to when she last saw it, only this time it’s bathed in early morning sunlight.
It looks more like a sickroom than a shrine to desperation.
The walls, the bed, even the windowsill are crowded with objects.
Candles, herbs, and trinkets Euphemia cannot make out line nearly every surface.
Kelda makes her way toward the bed in the center of the room, where the man beneath the linens and furs is barely visible.
Setting the linens down on the edge of the bed, Kelda turns to Euphemia. She points at the hearth and the fire that has slowly withered throughout the night. “Get the fire going again, will you? And don’t look this way until I say so.”
“Of course,” Euphemia replies.
She shuffles over to the hearth, her neck a stiff rod holding her curious gaze forward. Nothing could bring her to break the trust Kelda is showing her. No matter how badly she wants to catch a glimpse of the man underneath the sheets.
Instead, she listens to the ruffling off linens and furs being stripped away. Hears the quiet grunts of Kelda as she lifts his body, maneuvering him. Hears the stream of liquid that pours into what she assumes is the bedpan.
And Euphemia realizes then that Kelda doesn’t keep him sequestered because of control or fear. It isn’t for the sake of secrecy either.
It’s all for modesty.
Human decency.
So that when he comes to, she can reassure him that no one saw him at his most vulnerable.
Euphemia moves slowly around the fire, stacking a few logs atop the crumbling embers. Even as the flames catch, she busies herself. Pokes the coals with the wrought-iron rod. Keeps her back turned.
“Good,” Kelda says after she’s tossed the contents of the bedpan out the window and finished washing Dagfinn’s body. “Now, come. Help me change the linens.”
This will be the first time she’s actually laid eyes on her husband.
Euphemia spins around with eagerness at first.
But that same thought also makes her feet still. Makes her chest ache with something she knows is treacherous.
Her gait slows as she approaches.
The burning candles and bushels of lavender Kelda has arranged around the bed posts do little to soothe her nerves.
Euphemia braces herself for the worst. For atrophied muscles and bedsores. For urine stains, unkempt toenails, and a sickly pallor that will surely churn her stomach.
She tells herself that no matter what he looks like, she is not to react. Not in front of his grieving mother.
Approaching Dagfinn’s bedside, Euphemia sucks in a shallow breath.
She forces her gaze upon him and—
The tension eases from her chest.
He is beautiful.
Dagfinn’s complexion, although pale, is not the mawkish green of the ill or dying.
It is more like the glow of the morning sun as it crests over the horizon.
Even his hair is as vibrant as an autumn’s harvest, his locks healthy and luminous instead of matted and dull as she would have expected after being bedridden for months.
Most surprising of all, perhaps, is that he is not a bag of bones rotting away in a bed.
His shoulders are as broad as a ship’s bow, his body long and powerful beneath the sheets.
Once she lays her eyes upon him, she cannot tear them away.
This man—her husband—is attractive in a way that feels almost cruel. Striking and harsh, like the storms that plague these lands.
“It is astonishing, isn’t it?” Kelda asks from across the bed.
Euphemia’s cheeks tinge with embarrassment for being caught staring. But Kelda isn’t even watching her. She simply stares down at her son, her voice as ragged as a storm.
“You wouldn’t know it at all by looking at him that he’s been like this for months. He just looks…normal. Like himself. Like he might open those eyes of his and shout, tricked you, any moment now, and we could all go back to the way things were.”
Kelda’s shoulders shudder with her next breath.
If she was closer, Euphemia would reach out and place a comforting hand on her shoulder, though she doubts Kelda would allow it.
Instead she asks, “Are you any closer to knowing what happened to him, or how to undo it?”
Kelda motions to the blankets and together they draw them back, revealing Dagfinn’s bare legs beneath his long tunic. “Some days I think I am. Then I try something else to cure him and I realize I’m nowhere closer than when I started.”
Once the blankets are removed, Kelda lifts Dagfinn onto his side.
With haste and without instruction, Euphemia starts dismantling the sheets from beneath him. She tosses them in a pile on the floor to be retrieved later.
“What all have you tried?” she asks.
“Just about everything at this point. We started with the things that made the most sense: prayers to Odin for wisdom and guidance. Prayers to Frigg for protection. Prayers to Eir for healing and strength.” Kelda’s mouth twists. “All were unanswered.”
Euphemia bristles at the subject of prayer.
After what her God took from her last night, she’s not sure she’ll ever pray again. Not after begging and begging for another chance, only to have it presented before her and stripped away again.
As she listens, Euphemia grabs the fresh linens they brought upstairs and remakes the bed underneath him, Kelda turning him from one side to another as she works.
Kelda’s laugh comes humorless and harsh. “I know what you’re thinking. That I should’ve prayed to your god instead.”
Euphemia stiffens. It only serves to further implicate her, even though she couldn’t be farther from the truth. “I never said—”
“You didn’t have to. It was written all over your face.”
Euphemia worries at her lip. She wants to argue and set Kelda straight, but at the same time, she’s starting to realize it didn’t even bother her that the woman mentioned different gods.
After everything Euphemia has seen—in her dreams, in Helheim, even here in the waking world—she is no longer certain she knows what is true and what is purely belief.
Her eyes drift to the wall above Dagfinn’s bed and the items hung there.
Bones etched with runes carved.
Bundles of sticks bound together in strange shapes and formations.
Bulbs of garlic.
Red thread knotted in intricate patterns.
And perhaps most surprising of all, a wooden cross in the center of the wall.
Euphemia’s brow crinkles in confusion. But the longer she thinks on it, it’s not so confusing at all.
Her eyebrows bob to the wall of memorabilia. Of hope. Of desperation. “Clearly, you tried praying to my God, as well.”
A sad smile tilts Kelda’s face. “Indeed I did.”
Kelda’s grip around Dagfinn is starting to shake.
Euphemia finishes flattening the sheets just in time for the widow to gently set him down.
As she settles him into position, Euphemia cannot help but notice his jaw is clean-shaven, despite months of unconsciousness.
All this time, Kelda has been maintaining the appearance expected of him. Just in case.
When she’s finished, Kelda stands back and wipes a bead of sweat from her brow. Euphemia doesn’t want to pry, but she is eager to hear more. Eager to see if there is anything they may have missed.
“And when prayer didn’t work?” she asks, earning a long sigh from Kelda.
“We tried everything else. Cold water. A slap to the face. Anything I could think that would rouse him. Then we got more deliberate. Started trying different smoke rituals—burning mugwort, vervain, wormwood, anything people told us would clear evil out of the manor. We wafted that same smoke under Dagfinn’s shirt to cleanse his body.
Set bowls of water beneath his bed. Applied different poultices and fed him tinctures. Nothing.”
Together, they entomb him in warm furs and woven blankets.
“As we became more desperate, so did our attempts.”
The pause that follows is heavy.
It takes Euphemia a moment to realize Kelda is waiting for encouragement, trying to grant Euphemia one final chance to stay in the dark before the curtains are thrown back forever.
If Kelda knows her at all, then she would know how foolish of a question it is.
“I want to know,” Euphemia says firmly. “All of it. I want to help, if I am able.”
Kelda eyes her suspiciously. But ultimately seems to shake herself of it. “I’ve tried leeches. And bloodletting.” Kelda hesitates. “The marriage to you.”
That makes Euphemia’s stomach drop.
Kelda smooths back the stray hairs at her temples and sucks in a sharp breath. “I’m not proud of the choices I’ve made. Of the things I’ve had done to him. But I’d be less proud if I just sat here and did nothing.”
Euphemia’s head bobs with understanding.
She does not voice it.
Does not dare to disturb anything in this place.
Emotion seeps into Kelda’s weary face. A shadow of grief hardens her features.
For once, the severe lines of Kelda’s face soften, and without the knife, the tattoos, or the hard set of her shoulders, Euphemia can almost see the woman she must have been before grief took hold.
Then she sniffs through one nostril and it’s gone.
Her blue eyes shine bright again as she says, “I thought I had tried just about everything, but Maryam tells me there’s a ritual in the west, a way of trapping bad dreams that she thinks could help wake him.”
Euphemia’s mind catches on the word dreams.
Not the ritual Kelda continues talking about.
The dreams.
It’s too much of a coincidence to ignore. And now that the thought has entered her head, she cannot understand how she failed to see it sooner.
Then again, she has barely been in Dagfinn’s presence at all. She has never seen his face until today. And what little time she has spent in Thorfell, she has been preoccupied with everything else happening around her.
Curiously, she looks down at Dagfinn, trying to imagine him with a skull for a face.
The man from her dreams.
The creature who follows her through Helheim.
The one who has saved her from monsters she could never have survived alone.
But also the man she currently hates.
The one who brought the nightmare into her life, watching from the shadows as it destroyed everything she ever loved.
Euphemia studies his face again.
It is impossible to reconcile this sleeping man with the beastly one who stalks her. There is no brimstone voice. No hollow eyes. No skull. Only a pale, beautiful face and a body that has now moved in months.
And yet…
The coincidence is too great to dismiss.
“—not that I’m doing any of that today, though,” Kelda continues, seemingly unaware of Euphemia’s temporary disappearance. “I don’t have the dream ward yet. Maryam is still working on getting one over here for me. Could take a few days. Could take a few months.”
Euphemia’s stomach twists.
Their eyes meet then, mutual understanding passing between them.
They do not have months.
They barely have days.
If Dagfinn is not at the town assembly by week’s end now, Percival has made it clear there may be no manor left for him to return to.
They need a way to wake Dagfinn up. And they need to do it quickly.
But Euphemia is no longer thinking only of the sleeping man in front of her.
Her thoughts return to the creature in her dreams.
Maybe it is nothing more than a coincidence.
Maybe she is grasping at anything that might make sense of the impossible.
But if the man in this bed is the man she has been meeting at night…
Then perhaps she has already been speaking to the person who knows exactly what happened to him and can tell her how to wake him.