His hat was still jammed over his ears, but he’d hung his leather jacket over his chair, revealing a faded Star Wars T-shirt. His mouth quirked into a smile. “You’re Haley, then?” As I wondered how he knew, Dad crossed the room to shake his hand. “You’ve grown, Ari.”
“That is the usual way of things.” His smile stiffened as he shook Dad’s hand. He quickly turned to me as I walked up beside Dad. “So you see, I have a name as well.”
My face grew hot. I realized I’d asked his dog’s name but not his.
“Mom went to get some things from the car,” Ari continued, still not looking at Dad. “She’ll be right back.”
“Wait—you’re Katrin’s son?”
“So they tell me,” he said dryly. He had more of an accent than his mother did.
Dad took the seat across from Ari. I sat down next to Dad and draped my jacket over the back of my chair. “It’s nice that you could join us,” Dad said.
“Yeah, well, I never turn down food. I invited myself, actually.” Ari stared at me through those green eyes, like he was trying to figure something out. “Flosi forgives you, by the way. The women do like to throw themselves at him. It is a problem.”
My face flushed hotter. Was he flirting with me? How did you say “no, sorry, I have a boyfriend” in Icelandic? Or in English, for that matter? It wasn’t like it had ever come up before.
Dad cleared his throat, and I realized I’d been staring back at Ari. I looked quickly down. “We met on my run,” I said.
“Would that be before you got lost or afterward?” Dad’s voice grew quiet.
“Before,” I said.
“She tried to kill my dog,” Ari agreed cheerfully.
“Well, Flosi does have a way of getting underfoot.” Dad laughed, but there was an uneasy edge to it. “So that’s how you tore your pants?”
“Yeah.”
“And is it also how your clothes got wet?”
“Well, no, but—” I fell silent as Katrin slid into the chair beside Ari and dumped a pile of geology books onto the table.
“Hello, Katrin,” Dad said.
Katrin didn’t answer him. She looked right at me. There were tired circles around her eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d take the next plane back to the States?”
Right. Katrin really did want to get rid of me, though I had no idea why. I shook my head firmly. “Not unless you plan to put my mom and dad both on that plane home.”
Dad flinched, but Ari looked up with interest. Of course—his mom probably knew what had happened, and she’d probably told him. At least he didn’t look like he felt sorry for me, the way some of my friends at school had.
“Very well. If you insist on staying, there are some things you need to know.” Katrin’s expression turned businesslike. She handed me a small yellow spiral notebook from the pile, like one of Dad’s waterproof field notebooks. “For you, Haley. Had you grown up here, you’d have had a copy years ago, but there’s no helping that now.”
I flipped through the pages. They were filled with a mix of cramped writing and strange symbols—squiggles and circles and lines. The waterproof paper felt slippery against my fingers.
“Read it through,” Katrin said. “Let me know if you have any questions. Your mother—”
I pressed the notebook shut. “What do you know about my mother?”
Katrin drew a long breath. “There is no easy way to say this. Your mother got caught by a sorcerer’s spell.”
I stared at her, not sure I’d heard right. Dad set his hands down on the table. “Not this again,” he said in his quiet angry voice.
Katrin’s fierce gray eyes reminded me of the woman on the seawall. “Yes, this again, Gabe, and perhaps now you’ll listen.”
I was listening. I shoved the notebook into my pack. Magic seemed as good an explanation for this morning as anything else. “There was this woman, I saw her on my run—” I stopped, realizing how stupid I sounded. If I mentioned my missing six hours, I’d sound stupider still.
“You didn’t mention any woman before,” Dad said.
“With long hair,” Katrin said. Her face pinched into the same worried look as yesterday. “In a red cloak.”
“How—who is she?”
“Who is who?” Dad demanded. Ari looked back and forth between us, opened his mouth as if to say something, and closed it again. A waiter walked up, left menus at the edge of the table, and quickly departed. Ari grabbed one and disappeared behind it.
Katrin laced her hands together. “Hallgerdur Hoskuldsdottir—Hallgerd, you’d say in English. Hallgerd was—some say she was a spoiled child who didn’t get her way. Others say she was just a woman seeking a way out of an unwanted marriage. A thousand years ago, Hallgerd’s father betrothed her to a man she didn’t care for. Everyone knows this story—it’s in our sagas. Only the sagas don’t tell that Hallgerd was a sorcerer, and that she cast a spell to get out of her first marriage. She meant to find someone—some descendant of hers—to change places with. In doing so she hoped to escape to another time.”
“And leave someone else stuck with the guy instead?” I asked. What does this have to do with me? Why am I seeing this woman?
“Hallgerd called on power deep within the earth for her spell,” Katrin said. “That power echoes on to the present day, in the patterns of the plates that shift beneath our feet and the fires that stir the earth.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “Or the plates could be shifting because Iceland is located both atop a hot spot and on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, making it one of the most geologically active places on the entire planet.”
“The spell failed,” Katrin said, as if she hadn’t heard, “so Hallgerd sent her—her foster father, that’s the best translation, though it’s not quite right—to kill her husband Thorvald instead, after Thorvald slapped her during a fight. Her foster father killed her second husband, too, though it’s less clear Hallgerd wanted that. As for Hallgerd’s third husband—he died when she refused him her hair to make a new string for his bow.”
Gunnar died, of course. I remembered the tour guide saying that. How much did you have to hate someone to refuse him a few strands of your hair?
“She was quite the charmer,” Ari said from behind his menu.
Katrin glanced at Ari, then back at me. “But all of that was later,” she said. “First Hallgerd cast the spell on her descendants—on her daughter and her daughter’s daughters, all the way down the line. Not many of her descendants remain, but I’m one, and your mother was another, only I didn’t know that when she came here.”
“Wait—we’re related?” And Dad just happened to wind up working with Mom’s long-lost cousin?
Ari snorted. “No more related than most Icelanders,” he said. “This is not a large island, Haley. I’m more closely related to the prime minister than to you.”
“The common ancestor was some twenty generations back,” Katrin said. “You’re probably more closely related to your president, too. And we probably have other common ancestors closer than Hallgerd—but that is not the point. The point is that Hallgerd searched for one of us to possess. For thirty generations, we all knew to turn away from her spell. Until your mother—” A pained look crossed Katrin’s face. “She probably didn’t even understand what Hallgerd offered her.”
Dad shoved his menu aside. “We don’t have to listen to this.”
I ignored him. “What happened to Mom?”
Katrin swallowed and looked down at her laced fingers. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know Amanda was one of Hallgerd’s daughters—that she was part of the line that had left for North America—until it was too late. I would have warned her, but—she ran, and so the spell consumed her.”