Page 86 of North Is the Night
Blinking back my tears, I shrug. “Don’t ask me to explain it any better. I just know I have to get her back. I can’t live like this.” I pluck the other rieska loaves from the hearthstone before they burn. “I feel like I’m dying. Without her, I feel dead. That’s our story.” I glance across the fire at him. “Does it compel you to help me?”
Without answering me, Väinämöinen tastes the soup. He takes a few slurping bites, groaning with delight. “I never figured you for the cooking type.”
“My mummi taught me well. Even if I prefer to hunt and fish like my brothers.”
He nods, dipping his rieska loaf into the soup and tearing into it with his teeth. Soup dribbles down his bearded chin. “You’ve told me of your Aina’s beauty and her cleverness, her unfailing kindness. But answer me this: What is she worth to you?”
I gaze across the fire at him, studying the lines of his ancient face. “Is that not yet obvious? More than my own life.”
His bright blue eyes twinkle in the firelight. “And what are you willing to risk to get her back?”
I square my shoulders, my meal forgotten. “My very life.”
He nods again, his focus back on his soup. “Good. It will likely cost you that and more by the end.”
“Does that meanyou will help me?”
He eyes me warily. “And how do I know you won’t use this knowledge for ill? Many before you have sought me out, desperate to learn the secrets of the shamans, only to use my gifts for wicked and destructive ends.”
“Nothing I can do or say will convince you of the honesty of my intentions,” I reply. “You must accept that there may still be some good in the world.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees. “Now, tell me about the shamans.”
“I am the first shaman,” he replies. “From me was born the magic of combining wisdom and song. With my kantele and my drum, I sang pieces of myself across the realms, across time itself. I learned the secrets of nature and the gods. I traveled the world and heard all the stories, learned all the songs... and made up a few of my own along the way,” he adds with a smirk. “All the magic of the shamans was born out of me.”
I search his weathered face. “How old are you?”
He shrugs, draining his drinking horn of milk. He wipes the back of his hand across his mustache, smacking his lips. “I don’t know anymore... maybe I never knew.”
“But you’re immortal?”
He considers my question for a moment. “I think once I was immortal. Now, I’m not so sure. My immortality has changed. There are... conditions.”
“What kind of conditions?”
He glares at me. “You’ve been here for all of two days, and you want me to trust you with my most intimate secrets? Trust is earned, Siiri.”
I cross my arms, glaring right back.
“You’re a brave girl, I’ll give you that. And not unclever. The gods have surely blessed you, but some of your survival must be down to your own skill. And your intentions towards your friend seem true enough.”
I brighten a little. “So, you’ll help me? You’ll teach me the ways of the shamans?”
He frowns, his blue eyes piercing as they study me. “Don’t get too excited. I’ve told you, girl, I’m not the shaman I once was. We may both find I’m not enough.”
“You’ll have to be enough,” I declare. “Väinämöinen, you’re all I have.”
An hour later, we sit side by side at a fishing hole at the edge of the frozen lake behind his hut. No foxfires light the sky tonight. Heavy clouds hang low; a winter storm is coming. The only light comes from a lantern Väinämöinen hung on a pole he wedged into the ice. We each have a fishing line in the water, fluttering our fingers so the bait appears to move.
“What do you know of shamans?” he asks, his voice muffled by the cowl wrapped around his face.
“My mummi says shamans hold the secrets of medicine and healing,” I reply, through my own cowl. “They also divine the weather and make the crops grow.”
He snorts. “We do nothing of the kind. To claim we hold knowledge in secret is an affront to a shaman. This will be your first lesson: knowledge is power. That power is always meant to be shared.”
Before I can respond, there’s a tug on my line. I gasp, gripping it tighter.
“Hook it, girl,” the shaman grunts.
I jerk the line sharply, twice, and it gives a mighty tug back. “Got him.” I wrestle it for a minute, reeling and tugging, before I pull a slippery trout from the black water. Väinämöinen lifts the lid from the basket between us, and I place the fish inside. “You were saying? Knowledge is power, and power should be shared...”
