Part 4, Chap. 3: Baby, the Snow Must Fall
Chapter 3: Forecast
A few hours after midnight, the snow started coming hard and fast again.
I knew this because I was sitting cross-legged in my nest of blankets, gazing out the window - the same one Stephen had hit with his gravel, hours ago now. I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes I put my head down and drifted, but it never lasted for more than a few minutes. Then my thoughts came back, and like the snow under the floodlight, they whirled and whirled in my brain.
I was so turned around, sleep-wise, that I started doing things that felt like parts of a dream. I reset my alarm clock for seven a.m. I stood up and unfolded the door of my closet and looked in. I whispered, Loki, Loki, Loki, as if doing it three times would make him appear.
And then I sneaked out again and climbed the mountain.
It was between three and four, and I was at that stage where you’re so angry about still being awake that you can’t stop gritting your teeth, let alone sleep. I’d had enough resting. I wanted to do things. Stephen’s words kept running in my head, in garbled bits: The moon wasn’t big enough. An army of Jotuns in the valley. The runes still driving him.
I had no runes, but I was driven. Why else would I grab my sword and my flashlight and tiptoe downstairs (not even thinking about the creaky step) and pull on my jacket and semi-dry sneakers and slip out the door? I didn’t think about Pike, who might be extra alert tonight, or about any other possible complications. I had no plan. I just dodged the junk on the porch, swung the door and marched straight up the hill.
Cold wind blew in my face, bringing hundreds of tiny flakes. The mountains and the path had disappeared under a white shroud. I oriented myself by the slope of the land and the black fence posts on either side. When I turned, I could see the sky glowing that sickly stewed-tomato color over the valley. I didn’t use my flashlight, because with its beam reflecting off the flakes I could see for only a few yards ahead.
Everything was different up here, and strangely beautiful. Snow lay wedged between the boughs of the cedars in the little crescent of trees, making them seem like shelter. Snow blanketed the boulders and made angles into curves. Somehow, regardless of where the moon was in its cycle, I couldn’t imagine Jotuns walking out tonight.
But why not? They were ice ghosts, after all.
The rock was a dark wall in front of me, the place where the flakes stopped. In the spectral light from the sky, I could see the cliff’s nooks and crannies, crazy white zigzags.
I didn’t feel frightened at all as I stepped into the rock maze. I felt as if I were dreaming, still tucked up warm and safe in my bed.
I moved quickly, efficiently, my sneakers slipping a little, the sword close to my side. I stopped only when I smelled smoke.
They were just out of sight around the next bend, at the cave entrance. They hadn’t heard me. With my back pressed to the cliff wall, I listened to the two voices, boy and girl, as they passed the cigarette back and forth. I knew them both.
“Feeling a little warmer?” That was Stephen.
“Yeah.”
“Here. Take another drag.”
“I’m not even going to try to inhale.” That was Kristen Hawke.
Though I knew I couldn’t see them, I pressed my eyes tight shut. Something danced round and round in my head like a strobe light. I wondered how I would explain this scene to Imogen without laughing like a crazy person. “He went to join the Touched crowd,” I would say. “The cool cold kids. He’s finally realized he doesn’t have to be weird with us.”
“You think he’s asleep?” Stephen asked. He didn’t sound happy - more tired and annoyed.
“He was kinda snoring when I got up.”
“We can ask him to go get stuff tomorrow.” He began muttering a long list of things they needed. “Sleeping bags, blankets, camping lanterns,” I heard. “Warm drinks in thermoses.”
“And booze!” said Kristen. She giggled. “Lots of it.”
“If you don’t want it to be just you and me here, yeah.”
For a while, silence, and I began to think they might hear me breathing. That scared me more than anything on this trip had.
Then Kristen asked, “You’re not going to tell the others, are you? What’s gonna happen?”
“Why not?”
“I guess it wouldn’t matter. It’s not like they’d believe it.”
“Who cares either way?” said Stephen.
I heard scraping and scrambling in there. Before I’d had time to think, I was squeezing and sliding my way back through the rocks as fast as I could without kicking gravel or smacking a wall face first. It was only when I was all the way out, shivering among the black-and-white cedars, that I realized they weren’t following. What I’d heard was them going back inside the cave.
Sleeping bags? Snoring? They hadn’t just come to meet Jotuns. They were staying in there.
Down the mountain I plodded, with my flashlight off and the air stinging me with tiny hurtling shapes like mosquitos. What had happened to the crickets we heard on this slope just last month? I tried to remember how the grass and dirt smelled when Stephen and Imogen and I first came up here, still so close to summer.
By the time I climbed the porch steps, my sneakers were water-logged. I fitted the key in the lock, my bare hand shaking, but I didn’t feel cold or uncomfortable or happy to be home. I was still expecting to wake up from this long, pointless dream.
And in the end, I did.
I woke when the alarm drilled its way through my fuzzy unconsciousness, at seven. When I lifted my head, it felt heavy, and my toes under the blankets were clammy and stiff. Then I knew that, though my midnight hike felt like a dream, it hadn’t been one.
I sat up in bed and looked out the window at the blue dawn world and the snow still blowing. I lay back and pulled the blankets over my eyes. When my mother knocked on the door, I said, “What?”
The door creaked, and she said in her usual brisk, morning-person way, “Seven-thirty, Aslaug. Want oatmeal with an apple?”
“I’m sick.”
Long ago, after Rowanne’s mom burned up, I didn’t want to go to school. For a couple of weeks my mom told the principal I was having allergy attacks. Then she realized that if I had my way, I would stay home till I was sixty. And for the next six years, she made up for her mistake by sending me to school with colds and sniffles and headaches and basically anything short of the killer flu. “How sick?” she asked.
Right then, something occurred to me. I was adult sized. If I did not want to walk downstairs and go to school, no one could make me. I felt almost sorry for my mother, because she sounded so confident of making me do anything she wanted. “Very,” I said.
“Too sick for school, Aslaug?”
“I’m going back to sleep,” I said.
And I did. From my den under the covers, I heard my mom coming into the room, undeterred, and then Pike calling to her and the two of them talking outside in low voices. Without distinguishing all the words, I knew he was concocting an excuse for me, something about seeing me get up for Advil in the night and how wretched I looked and sounded. Good old Pike.
By the time they clomped back down the stairs, I was dozing. Despite my buzzing head, I didn’t feel sick at all; I felt just right.
You know how it is when you start staying up late and sleeping at the wrong times? You stop knowing when you are. When I opened my eyes, it was still blue outside and still snowing. My digital clock said four-forty-two.
Dawn: that was my first thought. Somehow I’d slept straight through another day and night, and the dawn was just now breaking. Maybe I really was sick.
I padded into the bathroom and brushed my teeth and exfoliated. Three whiteheads had sprouted on my chin, two little and one big. Funny, I thought, how you can be the daughter of a dead hero and have killing eyes and still suffer from greasy pizza skin. Where’s the logic there?
I was so sure it was early morning that I was surprised to come downstairs in my bathrobe and find Pike getting back from milking, rather than going out. He was propping himself with one hand on the doorframe and grunting as he tugged his boots off. My brother sat at the kitchen table, tapping on Mom’s laptop and eating a microwaved pizza roll.
They didn’t seem to notice my funny look. “The sleeper awakens!” said Pike. “We worried you were maybe dead in there.”
“C’mere,” said Till, beckoning me to look at something on the computer. “Have you seen this yet, Az? It’s messed up.”
I pulled up a chair and watched the video he wanted me to watch. It was a segment from our KYAX news, with Sam Gann doing the weather. Sam Gann looked like himself - like a tall, refreshing glass of milk with a smile tacked on - and I almost forgot I’d so recently seen him sitting in the grass and humming like a crazy person. “Why did someone post this?” I asked. I saw the clip was titled WEATHERMAN SNAPS.
“Sam Gann’s gone off the deep end,” said Pike.
On the tiny view-screen, Sam Gann was pointing to a radar map with white pinwheels swirling over the mountains. The map scrolled left, to show it was also snowing in the city.
The image cut to a woman in a red blouse and gray jacket, not Monique Ambler. She had fancy caramel-highlighted hair with glossy bangs. “Good gracious, Sam, when do we get some relief?” she asked.
“Relief? Absolutely,” said Sam, grinning.
“No, but I mean, when? When does the snow stop?”
“Not gonna,” said Sam.
The woman giggled. “Seriously.”
“It won’t stop,” said Sam Gann. He was still grinning, but he had his more sober, Happy to Help look, the one he used to explain things we might not know about cold fronts and air rising. “The snow continues into the foreseeable future,” he said. “This is it, folks. Winter is upon us, and it ain’t ending.”
Again the woman giggled, her pitch a bit higher. “Doesn’t it always feel like that. Will we get some clear skies over the weekend, Sam?”
“You misheard me, Bebe,” said Sam, his grin widening. “It snows and it snows and it snows. Got it? When it’s covered up everything, maybe it’ll stop.”
“So the snow isn’t stopping this weekend?” said Bebe, her face wary now, as if she were trying to trick Sam Gann into saying the right thing.
“Solid snow, I believe I said,” said Sam Gann. “Now, as to whether it’s just our area - well, that’s more than I’d venture to forecast. But the fact is, I wouldn’t be amazed to see solid snow around the world for the next month or so.”
“Snow in Florida?”
“Probably.”
“So a kind of worldwide blizzard,” said Bebe, who was starting to look distraught.
“Yup.”
Bebe tried again to make it into a joke, this time by reminding Sam Gann about global warming. But I didn’t need to see the rest. I went to get myself some cold cereal and warmed-over coffee. I don’t usually drink coffee, but I had a feeling I’d need it.
“Frickin’ lost it. Poor bastard!” said Pike. For a long-time fan of Sam Gann, he seemed to find the whole thing awfully funny.
So did Till. “Is he gonna get canned?” he asked.
“Naw. They’ll probably send Sam off for a Caribbean vacation, all expenses paid. It’s forecasting 14-inchers in these dang mountains every single dang winter for twenty years that’s got him confused. Thinking negative. I don’t blame him.”
“No, I think he’s seriously demented,” Till said. “Did you see how he was, like, smiling, Aslaug? The whole time?”
I gulped down the bitter coffee. “People sometimes smile when they’re sad. You don’t have to laugh at them.”
“But he’s mental. Did you hear what he said?”
“He thinks it’s true.”
Then I knew why I was so irritated with both of them. They just assumed Sam Gann was wrong about the permanent snow, which made his craziness harmless and silly. I did not assume.
A noise came from outside, loud and brisk as a volley of summer thunder. It jolted me, and I straightened so quickly that Till snickered and pointed out, “It’s just somebody using the knocker.”
No one ever uses our brass door knocker except the UPS man, who comes once in a blue moon. Our friends know to run around the side of the house and tap on the kitchen window. I pulled my robe tighter around me and sat down. “Did you order something?”
“Maybe it’s the pair of Mormons I’ve seen around Skorriesville,” said Pike. “They look like nice upstanding young gents. Kinda well dressed for around here.”
As he spoke, he opened the mudroom door. Neither Till nor I wanted to watch Pike argue about Scripture with a pair of eloquent young men in suits. But I was still more surprised than relieved when he came back with Imogen.
Her black coat was covered with snow, and she wore a round fur hat like something in a Russian movie. (Fake fur, I hoped.) Looking at her, with her scarf and gloves and fur-lined boots, I knew the snow hadn’t stopped all day. Yesterday it had been a freak fall storm. Today it was winter.
“Is school over already?” I asked, since I knew now it was afternoon.
Till snorted. “Why do you think I’m home?”
“It is over,” said Imogen softly. “But a lot of people weren’t there. Juniors especially. My classes were two thirds empty.”
“What happened?” I could tell from her distant tone that something had. Imogen looked and sounded different to me somehow - as if she’d grown up overnight, or as if I had. I couldn’t imagine standing in the snow and having yesterday’s argument now.
“Mmm, not a lot,” said Imogen, and I heard, We need to talk privately. She went on, “Are you sick, Aslaug? You never miss school.”
None of us answered at first. Then Till said, “She don’t seem sick to me. She’s just training for a sleeping marathon.”
I tried to swat his head with the front section of the newspaper, but he dodged. “I was sick. I feel better now.”
“It’s just that . . .” said Imogen. I could see her scanning Pike’s face, trying to cook up an excuse. “It’s just that I was taking a little walk, and I was hoping you could help me with a EurHist problem. Something about Austrian exchange rates.”
I nodded as if “Austrian exchange rates” were my middle name. Then I glanced Pike’s way, too. I could see he knew we were going to talk about Stephen, one way or the other, and he wasn’t happy about it.
“I think I can help,” I said. “I’ve been sleeping since yesterday afternoon. I’m dying for some exercise.”
My eyes were still on Pike. For a long moment, he looked as grim as an undertaker. Then his face relaxed into the usual grin, and he said, “OK. I won’t tell your mom you left this house, if you’re back in forty-five minutes, and if you introduce us both to your friend.”
“We know her already,” said Till, eyeing Imogen quizzically. I think he still believed the stories about witches in the Cray house.
“That’s no excuse for not shaking hands,” said Pike. He stuck his hand out, and Imogen shook it. “Nice to finally meet you, girl from the castle down the hill. I know your aunt Val. She talks a blue streak. Knows how to work a room.”
Imogen flinched. “She’s a lawyer.”
“Force of nature is what she is. Az, I’m guessing you need to go put some clothes on. Forty-five minutes and you’re back inside, kids. Y’hear?”
A few hours after midnight, the snow started coming hard and fast again.
I knew this because I was sitting cross-legged in my nest of blankets, gazing out the window - the same one Stephen had hit with his gravel, hours ago now. I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes I put my head down and drifted, but it never lasted for more than a few minutes. Then my thoughts came back, and like the snow under the floodlight, they whirled and whirled in my brain.
I was so turned around, sleep-wise, that I started doing things that felt like parts of a dream. I reset my alarm clock for seven a.m. I stood up and unfolded the door of my closet and looked in. I whispered, Loki, Loki, Loki, as if doing it three times would make him appear.
And then I sneaked out again and climbed the mountain.
It was between three and four, and I was at that stage where you’re so angry about still being awake that you can’t stop gritting your teeth, let alone sleep. I’d had enough resting. I wanted to do things. Stephen’s words kept running in my head, in garbled bits: The moon wasn’t big enough. An army of Jotuns in the valley. The runes still driving him.
I had no runes, but I was driven. Why else would I grab my sword and my flashlight and tiptoe downstairs (not even thinking about the creaky step) and pull on my jacket and semi-dry sneakers and slip out the door? I didn’t think about Pike, who might be extra alert tonight, or about any other possible complications. I had no plan. I just dodged the junk on the porch, swung the door and marched straight up the hill.
Cold wind blew in my face, bringing hundreds of tiny flakes. The mountains and the path had disappeared under a white shroud. I oriented myself by the slope of the land and the black fence posts on either side. When I turned, I could see the sky glowing that sickly stewed-tomato color over the valley. I didn’t use my flashlight, because with its beam reflecting off the flakes I could see for only a few yards ahead.
Everything was different up here, and strangely beautiful. Snow lay wedged between the boughs of the cedars in the little crescent of trees, making them seem like shelter. Snow blanketed the boulders and made angles into curves. Somehow, regardless of where the moon was in its cycle, I couldn’t imagine Jotuns walking out tonight.
But why not? They were ice ghosts, after all.
The rock was a dark wall in front of me, the place where the flakes stopped. In the spectral light from the sky, I could see the cliff’s nooks and crannies, crazy white zigzags.
I didn’t feel frightened at all as I stepped into the rock maze. I felt as if I were dreaming, still tucked up warm and safe in my bed.
I moved quickly, efficiently, my sneakers slipping a little, the sword close to my side. I stopped only when I smelled smoke.
They were just out of sight around the next bend, at the cave entrance. They hadn’t heard me. With my back pressed to the cliff wall, I listened to the two voices, boy and girl, as they passed the cigarette back and forth. I knew them both.
“Feeling a little warmer?” That was Stephen.
“Yeah.”
“Here. Take another drag.”
“I’m not even going to try to inhale.” That was Kristen Hawke.
Though I knew I couldn’t see them, I pressed my eyes tight shut. Something danced round and round in my head like a strobe light. I wondered how I would explain this scene to Imogen without laughing like a crazy person. “He went to join the Touched crowd,” I would say. “The cool cold kids. He’s finally realized he doesn’t have to be weird with us.”
“You think he’s asleep?” Stephen asked. He didn’t sound happy - more tired and annoyed.
“He was kinda snoring when I got up.”
“We can ask him to go get stuff tomorrow.” He began muttering a long list of things they needed. “Sleeping bags, blankets, camping lanterns,” I heard. “Warm drinks in thermoses.”
“And booze!” said Kristen. She giggled. “Lots of it.”
“If you don’t want it to be just you and me here, yeah.”
For a while, silence, and I began to think they might hear me breathing. That scared me more than anything on this trip had.
Then Kristen asked, “You’re not going to tell the others, are you? What’s gonna happen?”
“Why not?”
“I guess it wouldn’t matter. It’s not like they’d believe it.”
“Who cares either way?” said Stephen.
I heard scraping and scrambling in there. Before I’d had time to think, I was squeezing and sliding my way back through the rocks as fast as I could without kicking gravel or smacking a wall face first. It was only when I was all the way out, shivering among the black-and-white cedars, that I realized they weren’t following. What I’d heard was them going back inside the cave.
Sleeping bags? Snoring? They hadn’t just come to meet Jotuns. They were staying in there.
Down the mountain I plodded, with my flashlight off and the air stinging me with tiny hurtling shapes like mosquitos. What had happened to the crickets we heard on this slope just last month? I tried to remember how the grass and dirt smelled when Stephen and Imogen and I first came up here, still so close to summer.
By the time I climbed the porch steps, my sneakers were water-logged. I fitted the key in the lock, my bare hand shaking, but I didn’t feel cold or uncomfortable or happy to be home. I was still expecting to wake up from this long, pointless dream.
And in the end, I did.
I woke when the alarm drilled its way through my fuzzy unconsciousness, at seven. When I lifted my head, it felt heavy, and my toes under the blankets were clammy and stiff. Then I knew that, though my midnight hike felt like a dream, it hadn’t been one.
I sat up in bed and looked out the window at the blue dawn world and the snow still blowing. I lay back and pulled the blankets over my eyes. When my mother knocked on the door, I said, “What?”
The door creaked, and she said in her usual brisk, morning-person way, “Seven-thirty, Aslaug. Want oatmeal with an apple?”
“I’m sick.”
Long ago, after Rowanne’s mom burned up, I didn’t want to go to school. For a couple of weeks my mom told the principal I was having allergy attacks. Then she realized that if I had my way, I would stay home till I was sixty. And for the next six years, she made up for her mistake by sending me to school with colds and sniffles and headaches and basically anything short of the killer flu. “How sick?” she asked.
Right then, something occurred to me. I was adult sized. If I did not want to walk downstairs and go to school, no one could make me. I felt almost sorry for my mother, because she sounded so confident of making me do anything she wanted. “Very,” I said.
“Too sick for school, Aslaug?”
“I’m going back to sleep,” I said.
And I did. From my den under the covers, I heard my mom coming into the room, undeterred, and then Pike calling to her and the two of them talking outside in low voices. Without distinguishing all the words, I knew he was concocting an excuse for me, something about seeing me get up for Advil in the night and how wretched I looked and sounded. Good old Pike.
By the time they clomped back down the stairs, I was dozing. Despite my buzzing head, I didn’t feel sick at all; I felt just right.
You know how it is when you start staying up late and sleeping at the wrong times? You stop knowing when you are. When I opened my eyes, it was still blue outside and still snowing. My digital clock said four-forty-two.
Dawn: that was my first thought. Somehow I’d slept straight through another day and night, and the dawn was just now breaking. Maybe I really was sick.
I padded into the bathroom and brushed my teeth and exfoliated. Three whiteheads had sprouted on my chin, two little and one big. Funny, I thought, how you can be the daughter of a dead hero and have killing eyes and still suffer from greasy pizza skin. Where’s the logic there?
I was so sure it was early morning that I was surprised to come downstairs in my bathrobe and find Pike getting back from milking, rather than going out. He was propping himself with one hand on the doorframe and grunting as he tugged his boots off. My brother sat at the kitchen table, tapping on Mom’s laptop and eating a microwaved pizza roll.
They didn’t seem to notice my funny look. “The sleeper awakens!” said Pike. “We worried you were maybe dead in there.”
“C’mere,” said Till, beckoning me to look at something on the computer. “Have you seen this yet, Az? It’s messed up.”
I pulled up a chair and watched the video he wanted me to watch. It was a segment from our KYAX news, with Sam Gann doing the weather. Sam Gann looked like himself - like a tall, refreshing glass of milk with a smile tacked on - and I almost forgot I’d so recently seen him sitting in the grass and humming like a crazy person. “Why did someone post this?” I asked. I saw the clip was titled WEATHERMAN SNAPS.
“Sam Gann’s gone off the deep end,” said Pike.
On the tiny view-screen, Sam Gann was pointing to a radar map with white pinwheels swirling over the mountains. The map scrolled left, to show it was also snowing in the city.
The image cut to a woman in a red blouse and gray jacket, not Monique Ambler. She had fancy caramel-highlighted hair with glossy bangs. “Good gracious, Sam, when do we get some relief?” she asked.
“Relief? Absolutely,” said Sam, grinning.
“No, but I mean, when? When does the snow stop?”
“Not gonna,” said Sam.
The woman giggled. “Seriously.”
“It won’t stop,” said Sam Gann. He was still grinning, but he had his more sober, Happy to Help look, the one he used to explain things we might not know about cold fronts and air rising. “The snow continues into the foreseeable future,” he said. “This is it, folks. Winter is upon us, and it ain’t ending.”
Again the woman giggled, her pitch a bit higher. “Doesn’t it always feel like that. Will we get some clear skies over the weekend, Sam?”
“You misheard me, Bebe,” said Sam, his grin widening. “It snows and it snows and it snows. Got it? When it’s covered up everything, maybe it’ll stop.”
“So the snow isn’t stopping this weekend?” said Bebe, her face wary now, as if she were trying to trick Sam Gann into saying the right thing.
“Solid snow, I believe I said,” said Sam Gann. “Now, as to whether it’s just our area - well, that’s more than I’d venture to forecast. But the fact is, I wouldn’t be amazed to see solid snow around the world for the next month or so.”
“Snow in Florida?”
“Probably.”
“So a kind of worldwide blizzard,” said Bebe, who was starting to look distraught.
“Yup.”
Bebe tried again to make it into a joke, this time by reminding Sam Gann about global warming. But I didn’t need to see the rest. I went to get myself some cold cereal and warmed-over coffee. I don’t usually drink coffee, but I had a feeling I’d need it.
“Frickin’ lost it. Poor bastard!” said Pike. For a long-time fan of Sam Gann, he seemed to find the whole thing awfully funny.
So did Till. “Is he gonna get canned?” he asked.
“Naw. They’ll probably send Sam off for a Caribbean vacation, all expenses paid. It’s forecasting 14-inchers in these dang mountains every single dang winter for twenty years that’s got him confused. Thinking negative. I don’t blame him.”
“No, I think he’s seriously demented,” Till said. “Did you see how he was, like, smiling, Aslaug? The whole time?”
I gulped down the bitter coffee. “People sometimes smile when they’re sad. You don’t have to laugh at them.”
“But he’s mental. Did you hear what he said?”
“He thinks it’s true.”
Then I knew why I was so irritated with both of them. They just assumed Sam Gann was wrong about the permanent snow, which made his craziness harmless and silly. I did not assume.
A noise came from outside, loud and brisk as a volley of summer thunder. It jolted me, and I straightened so quickly that Till snickered and pointed out, “It’s just somebody using the knocker.”
No one ever uses our brass door knocker except the UPS man, who comes once in a blue moon. Our friends know to run around the side of the house and tap on the kitchen window. I pulled my robe tighter around me and sat down. “Did you order something?”
“Maybe it’s the pair of Mormons I’ve seen around Skorriesville,” said Pike. “They look like nice upstanding young gents. Kinda well dressed for around here.”
As he spoke, he opened the mudroom door. Neither Till nor I wanted to watch Pike argue about Scripture with a pair of eloquent young men in suits. But I was still more surprised than relieved when he came back with Imogen.
Her black coat was covered with snow, and she wore a round fur hat like something in a Russian movie. (Fake fur, I hoped.) Looking at her, with her scarf and gloves and fur-lined boots, I knew the snow hadn’t stopped all day. Yesterday it had been a freak fall storm. Today it was winter.
“Is school over already?” I asked, since I knew now it was afternoon.
Till snorted. “Why do you think I’m home?”
“It is over,” said Imogen softly. “But a lot of people weren’t there. Juniors especially. My classes were two thirds empty.”
“What happened?” I could tell from her distant tone that something had. Imogen looked and sounded different to me somehow - as if she’d grown up overnight, or as if I had. I couldn’t imagine standing in the snow and having yesterday’s argument now.
“Mmm, not a lot,” said Imogen, and I heard, We need to talk privately. She went on, “Are you sick, Aslaug? You never miss school.”
None of us answered at first. Then Till said, “She don’t seem sick to me. She’s just training for a sleeping marathon.”
I tried to swat his head with the front section of the newspaper, but he dodged. “I was sick. I feel better now.”
“It’s just that . . .” said Imogen. I could see her scanning Pike’s face, trying to cook up an excuse. “It’s just that I was taking a little walk, and I was hoping you could help me with a EurHist problem. Something about Austrian exchange rates.”
I nodded as if “Austrian exchange rates” were my middle name. Then I glanced Pike’s way, too. I could see he knew we were going to talk about Stephen, one way or the other, and he wasn’t happy about it.
“I think I can help,” I said. “I’ve been sleeping since yesterday afternoon. I’m dying for some exercise.”
My eyes were still on Pike. For a long moment, he looked as grim as an undertaker. Then his face relaxed into the usual grin, and he said, “OK. I won’t tell your mom you left this house, if you’re back in forty-five minutes, and if you introduce us both to your friend.”
“We know her already,” said Till, eyeing Imogen quizzically. I think he still believed the stories about witches in the Cray house.
“That’s no excuse for not shaking hands,” said Pike. He stuck his hand out, and Imogen shook it. “Nice to finally meet you, girl from the castle down the hill. I know your aunt Val. She talks a blue streak. Knows how to work a room.”
Imogen flinched. “She’s a lawyer.”
“Force of nature is what she is. Az, I’m guessing you need to go put some clothes on. Forty-five minutes and you’re back inside, kids. Y’hear?”