Page 22 of Between Broomsticks and Beating Wings
“Most.What about the ones youdidsee die? Why didn’t you help them?” she asked.
A sigh slipped through my lips, and I began wishing she’d go back to her injury-induced rest. How easy she’d been under the throws of sleep. “Because I have oaths to uphold,” I said.
“Yet you didn’t uphold them with me, did you?”
I pushed myself out of my seat, running a hand through the loose ends of my hair. “Are you angry I saved your life?”
“Of course not. I simply want to know why I’m here. This is my life! Or, it’s meant to be. I, I don’t even know what my lifemeansanymore, or if I still have one,” she admitted with a wince. “I had visions of you taking me. As distorted as they were, I now know what I saw, though I still don’t understand why. But you have the answers I need.”
Visions of me?
I’d watched the seeress for years, scribbling on birch bark, stoking fires, drinking tea, speaking to spirits. What she did eachtime she closed her eyes evaded me, but knowing she dreamt of me sent a tickle up my spine.
“You have a life,” I resigned. “I brought you here to ensure that. I took you on a drunken impulse. Is that what you want to hear?”
“A drunken impulse?” she scoffed. “If you’d let me die, I would’ve been with my family in a realm of death. Because you took me, I’m here without my family, and now, I must run and hide. You caused nothing but complications for me.”
Her words sat with me as I reclaimed my seat, and in my heart of hearts, her speech held a truth I couldn’t fight. Her complaints were valid, and were why we had rules and oaths in the first place. Rayna’s complaints about me stealing the seeress’ death played through my mind, but how could I regret bringing her here? She was made for so much more than death.
“I complicated things, yes, but when has ‘easy’ ever meant right?” I asked, and that sentiment finally ended her string of demanding questions. Her shoulders fell, and she leaned back into the bench. Even Áma grew quiet, but my intention was never to shut her up. I just needed her to see she was worth more than what she thought she was. It wasn’t her time to be with her family yet, and I was intent on proving that to her.
Night after night, I watched her. Night after night, she’d proven how much she deserved not just her world, but my world too.
The silence ate at me, and I found a question rising to my lips just so I could hear her speak once more. “What’s wrong with your face?”
When Kari’s hand flew to her cheek in horror, I pushed out further explanation with haste, realizing what I said came out as an insult. “You screamed, looking into my mirror.”
“Oh,” Kari said, glancing over to Áma, as if the two of them now harbored some secret. Áma gave her a nod of approval,which rubbed me in all the wrong ways. Why did the old crone have any say in what the seeress told me?
“I’m cursed. Well, I was. Somehow, it’s been lifted,” Kari said, twisting her hands in her lap.
“You’re…what?” I stuttered. My eyes scanned over her, wondering how I could have missed such a thing. You’d think after watching her all this time, I would have realized something was amiss. But what was it?
I thought of each time she stumbled around my bed and bathing chambers, how she grew uneasy the moment she stepped in front of a reflective surface. I thought of the cloth coverings that hung on her longhouse walls, though I’d always assumed paintings of her family hid beneath the dusty fabric. Maybe they weren’t paintings at all, but mirrors.
“Why can’t you look at yourself in a mirror?” I asked slowly, not completely certain I’d figured it out just yet but willing to take the risk.
“My eyes.” Kari paused to take a deep, shaky breath. “They always appeared rotten. I couldn’t stand the sight of them. The puss that oozed out of the rotting flesh was too much to bear, even if it was all a cruel illusion.”
“Was that the first time you looked into a reflective surface since arriving in Valhalla?”
Kari nodded her head. “It was. My curse could’ve lifted the moment you brought me here for all I know.”
“It mostly likely did,” Áma said. “In the morning, I can speak to the residual traces of it in your body and use its unique signature to determine who placed it and what limits the curse has.”
“I know who placed it,” Kari mumbled, grabbing her tea sitting upon the table situated between us.
“Who?” Áma and I asked in unison.
Kari shifted uncomfortably before her pink lips parted, and she uttered, “Hel.”
I stared at her as I took in her perplexing admission. “Hel? Why? What did you do that caused the goddess of death to curse you?” I asked.
“Not me directly. It’s an ancestral curse,” Kari explained. “And I wish I could tell you why. That information died with my relatives long ago. All I know is that it impacts the first-born daughters of every generation. My mother and I were cursed, but my younger sisters were not.”
I nodded but remained silent, letting her words sink in, hoping Áma would have some useful information. I could pluck souls from bodies, see people’s final moments, and lift things far heavier than what my body should’ve allowed, but I knew very little of curses, especially ones bestowed by Hel.
“Ancestral curse, huh?” Áma asked with a slight shake of her head. She pushed herself from the padded bench with a groan. “You two girls can stay up and talk about this until you're blue in the face, but his old body needs its beauty sleep, and no solution will be found until I do. We can talk more in the morning. We’ll have work to do, that’s for sure.”
