“Before we came here.” More than anything, I wanted to draw him closer again.
“Yes, of course. That would be—perhaps a day.”
“One day?”
“To give me some credit, I did not start that kiss.”
My cheeks burned hot. “You could have stopped it!”
A sheepish smile crossed his face. “Yes, but I am not stupid.”
“And you think I am?” I scrambled to my feet. Freki looked up and cocked one ear quizzically.
“No, of course I don’t think that. …”
My lips still tingled. I feared if I spoke at all, I’d begin kissing him again, and that wouldn’t be fair to either of us. Or maybe it would be fair. Maybe I’d broken up with the desert boy months ago.
I had to get my memories back. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life like this.
“I did not stop because I did not want to stop,” Ari said slowly, “but also because I thought you did not want to stop. I am sorry.”
Great. He had to go ahead and be nice about it. I grabbed his handkerchief from the floor, wiped my stinging eyes, and handed it to him. He shoved it into his pocket. I stuck the spellbook in my backpack and pulled the pack over my shoulders. “You said you know a way out of here?” Once we were out maybe I could find a raven’s feather—a normal non-talking raven’s feather—and try the memory spell. Or maybe my memories would return on their own once we were away from Muninn.
“There are some problems. But yes.” Ari got to his feet, gave a small gasp, and fell again.
I helped him back up. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, I—”
“It’s not your fault,” I snapped, doing my best to ignore the warmth of his arm as he leaned on me.
Around us, the memories of other bears, of other times, growled softly. “I think I am not quite used to being human again.” Ari’s white hair—and eyebrows and eyelashes—made his face seem very pale. He shuddered. “I did not know it was possible to forget such a thing.”
Apparently it was possible to forget all sorts of things. I steadied him as we hobbled down the hallway. At least he was okay. We’d deal with everything else later.
“If you can get us back to the place where you slept,” Ari said, “I can find the way from there.”
I shone the flashlight back the way we’d come and played all the turnings in my mind. “This way.” I hoped Muninn wouldn’t be waiting for us when we got there.
Ari kept leaning on me as we walked. Freki followed at our heels. Ari gave the little fox a suspicious look, then shrugged and walked on. Memories whispered around us, none of them mine.
An old woman’s voice: “I must to bed, but ale for all, and enjoy yourselves as you will.”
A young woman’s voice: “Take me abroad with you, for it is not Iceland that I love.”
A small smile crossed Ari’s face. “I know that story.”
“Did he take her?” It was clear enough the young woman spoke to a lover.
Ari stopped and turned to me, his expression strange. “I did not think you knew Icelandic. Have you been—how do they say?—holding out on me?”
“It’s not in Icelandic.” But I listened harder. The words were different from the words Ari and I spoke with each other, even though they made just as much sense.
Ari scrunched his pale brows together. “Can you hear me now?” he asked, all trace of accent gone from his voice.
“Sure.” Only after I spoke did I realize we’d both used that other, not-English language.
“Did I speak both languages before?” I asked in slow, careful English.
“Not that you told me,” Ari answered, still in the other language. “You tried to speak Icelandic once, but your accent was terrible. Now it’s just—a little odd. Old-fashioned, maybe?”
Freki nudged the back of my knee with his nose. “It is my master’s mead.” The little fox spoke Icelandic, too, though something about his intonation was different from Ari’s. I realized I’d been speaking Icelandic with Freki, as well, and with Muninn—automatically answering in whatever language I was spoken to in.
“Your master—” Ari stopped short to stare at the little fox.
“My master no longer walks in this world,” Freki said.
“Well, that’s something, at least.” Ari looked like he was trying to figure something out. “Aren’t you and your brother supposed to be wolves?”
Freki’s whiskers twitched. “There are no wolves in Iceland,” he said matter-of-factly.
Ari grinned at that. “Yeah, well, remind me to tell my teachers. I’m sure they’ll be very interested. So Haley drank—the mead of poetry?” He sounded like he was trying to get his brain around a difficult idea. That made two of us. How could some drugged alcohol teach me a whole new language—not to mention mend broken bones?
“Even my master’s mead can only do so much. Given the gibberish Haley spoke when she arrived here, it’s a wonder we got her speaking intelligible words at all.” Freki flicked an ear toward me. “You’ll have to handle the poetry on your own.”
“I’ll cope.” I kept using Icelandic so Freki would understand. “Do you have the mead of memory lying around someplace, too?”
Freki’s whiskers twitched again—because he thought that was funny or because there really was such a thing, I couldn’t tell. “You’re no help,” I told him.
The little fox stretched his legs out in front of him, unconcerned.
“And they say Icelandic is hard to learn,” Ari said wryly. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stick to my own language from now on. English is not so easy for me, you see.”
His English sounded awfully good to me, but what did I know? Not much, at the moment.
“If Haley doesn’t want that mead next time, you can give it to me,” Ari told the fox. “I’ll give you poetry complete with a solid bass line.”
Freki didn’t answer that, just headed down the hall ahead of us. I thought of the mead in my pack. Ari probably wouldn’t be half as interested in it if he knew it would put him to sleep.
He gave a rueful laugh. “And to think I once told my mother all her sorcery talk was nonsense. If we make it out of here, I owe her an apology.”
I heard a whisper of memory—in my head, not in the air around me. “But you said it wasn’t sorcery you were sorry for.”
A pained look crossed Ari’s face. “You remember that?”
I tried to remember more. My thoughts slid away; my head began to hurt. A drop of water dripped from the ceiling and trickled down my jacket. “What were you sorry for?”
Ari drew a sharp breath. “See, answering that question is one of the things that got us into this mess.” He pulled away from me. “Thanks, Haley. I think I can walk on my own now.”
I missed the weight of his arm on my shoulders, but I didn’t say so. I gripped the flashlight tightly as the tunnels whispered on. “Take me abroad with you, for it is not Iceland that I love, love, love.”
“Of course he didn’t take her with him.” Ari scowled. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry with me or himself. “He went abroad and flirted with the pretty Norwegian girls, and so she married his best friend instead. And then both men died. A tragedy, just like in Shakespeare.”
I’d gone abroad, too. Had I left someone behind? More water dripped in the distance. “What happened to the woman? Did she die, too?”
Ari shook his head, white hair falling into his eyes. “Nah, she remarried and lived to a ripe old age.”
What kind of romance was that? A bit of mist floated past the beam of my light. “Didn’t take her long to get over him, did it?”