“What makes you think she got over him?” Ari plucked a strand of hair from beneath his cap, squinted at it, and frowned. “It’s not that simple.”
But it was simple: Either you loved someone or you didn’t. Yet as if to mock me, the air around us whispered, in the same woman’s voice, “Though I loved him best, I treated him worst.” Ari laughed, a pained sound.
In the distance, I heard the faint beating of wings. I froze and switched off the light. Ari’s shallow breathing seemed loud beside me.
Freki twined around my legs. “There are no secrets here,” the fox said. “Muninn knows where you are, just as I do, and he comes or not as he chooses.”
The wingbeats grew closer, then faded. I waited until they were completely gone before I turned the light back on and continued walking, Ari close by my side. I wanted to reach for him; I clenched my free hand into a fist instead. Nails dug into my palm. I forced my hand open before they could break skin. Why did I keep doing that? You’d think I wanted to hurt myself. I glanced at the scars there and wondered if I did.
We reached the final turning. I shone the light down one last tunnel and saw a round room with a stone bed at its center. The room was empty, no raven waiting for us there.
“Right. I can take it from here.” Ari took the light. He glanced suspiciously at Freki, then back at me.
I shrugged. “He says he won’t try to stop us.”
“Is that true?” Ari asked him.
The little fox silently stared up at us with his small brown eyes.
“Yeah, you expect us to trust you just because you’re cute, don’t you?”
Freki didn’t answer. Ari laughed to himself and started walking. He led us past several familiar turnings, then turned sharply right. I followed him, Freki a silent white shadow at my side. We began a steep climb. Ari panted with effort, but my legs made their way uphill easily enough, as if used to working hard.
Images flickered around us. The voices whispered on. “You shall not hew!” one of them said.
“Like in the Lord of the Rings,” Ari muttered.
I remembered that movie, and the book, too. Only there the line had been, “You shall not pass!” which wasn’t the same at all. Great—I could remember lines out of old movies but not whether I had a boyfriend.
“Hey, weren’t Arwen and Aragorn twentieth cousins, too?” Ari laughed softly. He glanced at me, but I had no idea what he was talking about. He quickly returned his gaze to the sloping tunnel.
Whispers of vengeance and battle gave way to whispers of bad weather and lost grazing, of failing crops and starving livestock.
“I have committed no crime. A charm to keep foxes from lambs, nothing more!”
Freki sniffed disdainfully. “There is no charm that can keep a fox from a lamb.”
“Hear my innocence. By God and Christ I swear I used sorcery against no man.”
On the walls I saw images of flames lapping at wood and skin. I saw a woman bound and thrown into deep waters.
A memory flickered through my thoughts: A pool of water, turned bloodred by the sun. The memory slid away as I tried to focus on it. I bit my lip to keep from crying out with frustration. Maybe it’d be easier to remember if I began with the small things, the ones that didn’t matter so much. TV shows. Old movies. Like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. “Hey!”
Ari looked back at me.
“You are so not Luke Skywalker!”
Ari’s mouth quirked. “You prefer Han Solo, then?”
“I …” I didn’t know. I remembered Star Wars, sure, but I didn’t remember whether I liked it, or the actors in it. I remembered only the parts that had nothing to do with me. When I tried to get at what I’d actually thought about anything, I hit more darkness. I wanted to scream. Instead I gave a shaky laugh. “You’re not Han Solo, either.”
“Ah.” Ari nodded knowingly. “That leaves only Darth Vader, then.”
Chill mist drifted through the air around us, thicker than before. “Darth Vader was kind of cute when he was younger,” I said. At least, I thought so now—who knew what I’d thought before?
“Darth Vader was a jerk when he was younger,” Ari said without heat.
“As opposed to his old age, when he had a productive career blowing up planets?”
Ari laughed, and the sound echoed off the walls around us, making the corridor feel just a little less cold than before.
We reached a dead end. Ari shone his light on the wall, and I saw depressions in the gray stone, evenly spaced, like a ladder. Ari put the flashlight between his teeth and began to climb. The light faded above me. I found the first foothold as much by feel as by sight.
I felt claws through my jeans. Freki scrambled up my legs, over my backpack, and onto my shoulders. He was heavier than he looked, but I didn’t kick him off, whether because he really was cute or because I’d grown used to his company, I didn’t know. His fur was soft against my neck.
My arms were nowhere near as strong as my legs. They strained as I climbed. The voices and images faded away. The wall disappeared into the mist below. Dizziness washed over me, and I turned quickly back to the cold stone I was climbing. Apparently I was someone who was scared—terrified—of heights. I remembered falling through empty space, water roaring in my ears. My head swam. My grip loosened on the stone.
Claws dug into my shoulders. “Ouch!” The memory fled and I quickly tightened my hold.
“Thank you, Freki.” I was breathing hard. The fox nudged my neck with his damp nose.
I didn’t look down again, just focused on finding handholds and footholds, on climbing higher and higher, following the blue beam of Ari’s flashlight above me.
The light vanished. My breath caught, but then the light returned—Ari knelt on a ledge, pointing it down at me. I kept climbing. Freki leaped from my shoulders onto the ledge. I followed, shaking out sore arms.
Ari led the way up a low staircase and into another stone room, like the room where I’d slept, only larger. He swept his light around the space, which held no mist at all. There was a small stone bed, covered with furs, and a huge wooden door—a door!—carved with a pattern of arcs and lines. No handle, no doorknob—but a door was a start, right? We just might make it out of here.
Ari’s light moved on, to a stone desk covered with scraps of parchment and more animal skins, a wooden staff—carved with symbols—leaning against it. An old man sat in a wooden chair there, head on his arms, asleep. Ari’s eyes grew large. He quickly shut off the light. I guessed the man hadn’t been here when Ari found this place—or maybe that was one of the “problems” he’d mentioned. Pretty big problem, having a guard at the door. In the dark Ari grabbed my hand and pulled me back toward the stairs.
I heard a sound like wood scraping stone. It echoed and re-echoed through the chamber. “Who disturbs my sleep?” a voice boomed.
Heavy footsteps strode across the floor, right toward us.
Chapter 7 
Light bloomed from niches in the walls. Ari and I whirled around, racing for the stairs, but then we heard wingbeats down below.
Right. No going back that way. We turned to face the man. His brown beard was streaked with gray. His wool cloak hung open over a belted shirt and baggy pants wrapped with strips of leather. His eyes swept quickly over Ari and took on a calculating look as they focused on me.