Liv backed away.
“Why not?”
“Because my mom might come home.”
“She really doesn’t let you have friends over?”
Stephen stood at the curtains, peeking between them for another moment.
“No, she doesn’t.”
“You’re eighteen. You’re a man-” Liv started, but Stephen cut her off.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” he muttered. “Okay?”
“Sure, fine.”
“Let’s go back into the woods.”
“Okay.”
Liv followed him down the two sets of stairs, still marveling at the opulence surrounding them. Liv had never been in a rich person’s house before. Everything seemed heavy and expensive-looking. Even the doorknobs appeared precious and untouchable, though Stephen yanked on them as if he hoped to rip them from the heavy wood doors they protruded from.
In the forest, Liv breathed easier, and she noticed Stephen too seemed to calm.
“You don’t like your house?” she asked after they’d walked for several minutes.
“I can’t wait to get out of there,” he muttered.
Liv puzzled at his answer. She couldn’t imagine wanting to escape the beautiful house.
“I’m leaving town tomorrow for a few days,” Liv told him. She didn’t know why she told him. It wasn’t as if he’d asked.
“You are? Where are you going?”
“To stay with my Uncle George.”
Stephen nodded but looked away from her.
When he looked back, his eyes were troubled.
“Guess I’ll have to swim on my own,” he told her.
Chapter 7
Liv
“George, how did you meet my mother?” Liv asked. She lay stretched out on the rug near the hearth in George’s cabin, inhaling the sweet scent of pears roasting over the fire. She’d heard the story a hundred times, maybe more, but she never tired of the tale.
“Fate brought your mother and I together, Volva. The manipulations of man are helpless against it.”
“But why does she say you seduced her?” Liv’s mother rarely spoke of the one night she’d spent with George, but the handful of times Liv had begged her to share, she implied that the devil’s song lured her to the Stoneroot Forest.
“Because your mother was raised in the fires of the church and among the furies of western men. How do we question our creator? It is difficult, and your mother is a good and pious woman. She believes she committed a mortal sin. Not you. You are pure in the eyes of her God, but she… she is not.”
“But that’s not true.”
George held up a hand.
“I know that, and you know that. But only your mother can unburden herself of such ideas. The morning I met her; I woke to a pale blue flower drifting down to my bed. The flower landed on my chest. I picked it up, strapped on my boots and walked into the forest. I knew the place where the blue flowers grew. I found your mother there, wailing into the blossoms as if her dead beloved might be hidden amongst them. We talked for many hours. When I left, she followed me back here to this cabin, where we ate roasted hare by firelight. I’m sure it is the only night in your mother’s life where she experienced magic. Not me,” George laughed. “But in the world. She gazed into the fire and saw a girl running through the woods with long, billowing hair and fierce brown eyes. She saw you, Volva. We created you that night and, in the morning, I returned her to the blue flowers. You were her pathway out of the darkness, child. You do not realize it now, but as you grew, as she returned to her mother-self, she shirked off the burden of her grief and lived once more.”
“She cried for years,” Liv murmured.
“She still cries,” George agreed. “We all cry. There is much pain in these lives. But you are wrong in why she cried. She cried because she longed for the freedom she saw in her only daughter. Even before you arrived, she knew you would not suffer her fate. You would be born free.”
Liv woke on the little straw bed in the corner of George’s cabin.
Someone pounded on the door.
“Volva, open up,” George called.
Bleary-eyed, Liv stood and fumbled the door open.
George stood outside with a boy, no more than eleven or twelve, hoisted in his arms. The boy’s eyes were closed and his lips purple. His wet, reddish hair hung across his ashen forehead.
“He was fishing. He must have fallen in the lake…” the woman babbled, following George into the cabin.
George laid the boy on the rug in front of the hearth.
The boy’s mother followed; her eyes bloodshot from crying. Liv saw a darkening purple bruise on the woman’s cheek.
Liv said nothing, but watched as George moved his hands over the boy’s head, and then to his neck, and finally to his belly. As he pressed into the soft places on the boy’s abdomen, George frowned. He opened his mouth and peered inside.
“Volva,” he said to Liv. “Gather some dandelion root.”
George turned to the boy’s mother.
“He did not drown. He consumed nightshade.”
Liv stepped from bed and slipped on her shoes, hurrying out the door.
In early summer, the dandelions were plentiful. She dug with her bare hands, since she had prepared no tools, and George insisted an unfortified tool could do more harm than good.
When she returned to the cabin, the boy’s mother sat on a wooden chair, moaning and rocking back and forth. George did not shush her. He took the root from Liv’s hand and added it to a jar of other herbs.
“Volva, put your hand here.” He took Liv’s hand and pressed it to the boy’s soft belly.
George stood and went into the kitchen. He scooped water from a large drum into the jar.
As Liv sat, she felt a pulsing beneath her fingers, as if something wanted to escape from the boy’s body.
“Will he die?” the mother asked, balling her hands into her skirt and squeezing.
George shook the jar and gazed at her.
“We will know soon, my dear.”
Tears gushed down the woman’s face, and she recommenced her rocking.
George returned to the boy, the jar in his hand, a hunk of smoky quartz in the other.
Liv pulled her hand away as George rested the quartz on the boy’s throat.
“Get the drums, Volva.”
Liv hurried to the cupboard by the bed and retrieved two oval-shaped drums. They were old drums that had traveled with George across seas. Reindeer hide worn smooth and stretched over a piece of wood, bent into a circular shape. Symbols decorated the hides. The twin ravens of Odin had always been her favorite of the images. She gazed at the two black birds locked together, more like one bird with two heads.
George tilted the jar over the boy’s face, releasing several drops into his open mouth.
Satisfied, he sat back and took a drum. Liv held the other in her lap and, following George’s hands, she began to pound the drum. The rhythm was slow at first, and then quickened. George murmured in the language of his ancestors. Liv barely heard him beneath the beating of the drums.
As they pounded, Liv slipped into a trance. She drifted from room and into sky. She soared over green-topped mountains and deep valleys filled with flowers.
The drum pounded in unison with her heartbeat. The rhythm of her blood matched the thrumming.
Voices called out from the blurry edges of her vision.
Another, clearer voice broke through her reverie.
“Come back, Volva,” George whispered.
She blinked, her head lolling to the side, and the cabin slid into focus.
The boy no longer lay on the rug. His mother held him, though he was big and awkward in her arms. She crooned into the boy’s ear.