“Yes. He’s the first skald,” said Josiah. “A kind of court poet. This is where it begins.”
She felt her eyes narrow. Down below, the flyting was continuing. No one had tried to stop it. The fire was still coiling around Loki, but Bragi was standing his ground. The exchange of insults was rhythmic, like a song or a poem. “It’s not a coincidence that we’re here,” said Freddy.
Josiah hesitated, then said slowly, “It’s a coincidence that we’re here at this moment. It’s not a coincidence that we’re here.”
Bragi spoke again. Freddy saw he was smiling. Then she bumped down, hard, into the sunlit grass. Josiah, crouching beside her, added, “Here either,” and dragged her behind a rock. There were voices nearby, speaking a language that Freddy didn’t know at all but that sounded vaguely Asian to her. Two tiny birds darted across the sky. Freddy tried to convince herself she had felt a brief winter chill for just a moment after the change, but she knew she really hadn’t.
9
The paralysis that had been keeping Freddy calm for the better part of a day broke.
She hitched herself up onto her knees, turned to Josiah, wrapped her hands around his neck, and slammed him against the rock as hard as she could. It was more than a little satisfying to see the shock on his face.
Freddy said, “What have you done to me?”
He reached up and pried away her hands. “Shut … up. They’ll notice us—”
“Oh,” said Freddy, “will they? Who are they?” Her head was thumping again, not as badly as before.
The voices had stopped. There had been three or four of them, Freddy thought, over past the rock. She moved her hands to Josiah’s shoulders and slammed him against the rock again.
“Cut it out,” he said, trying to squirm away from her. Normally, he would have been able to. Normally, she wouldn’t have been quite this transcendently furious.
“No,” said Freddy. “You explain what’s going on right now. This is not supposed to be happening—”
“Nothing is supposed to be happening,” said Josiah.
She dug her fingernails into his shoulders. “Stop trying to weasel out of it. You’ve lived forever, and I’m travelling through time with you, and I have no idea why.”
“Why do you have to choose this particular moment to grow a backbone?” Josiah hissed.
Freddy said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think it should be obvious.” He was trying to escape again. She pressed him back against the rock. “Ow! You’re not the world’s most assertive person, are you? You just let everything happen to you.”
“That’s not true,” said Freddy. “Today in school, I even got in trouble—”
“It wasn’t today. It was five thousand years in the future,” said Josiah. “What … you mean you being sent to the office? That was just you being influenced by me.”
She opened her mouth to disagree. She shut her mouth again. She couldn’t think of any examples to back up her point.
“You see?” said Josiah. “Even your fight with Roland was wimpy. You were going on about being allowed to make friends with whomever you liked, but you never really made friends with me, did you? You just let me insinuate myself into your life. Every once in a while, you did the duckling act, but that was as aggressive as it ever got.”
“I’m being aggressive now,” said Freddy, crushing his shoulders with her palms.
“Ow. I noticed. You’ve lost your mind. This is not the moment,” said Josiah.
Something he’d said a minute or so ago was only just registering. “Five thousand years?”
“Give or take a few centuries,” said Josiah. “I recognise this place. I also know what’s about to happen, so will you please let go of me now?”
“What if I don’t?” snarled Freddy.
“Well,” said Josiah, “these gentlemen are just bemused by us at the moment, but I expect they’ll start poking holes in us any second now.”
Belatedly, Freddy turned and looked up into the eyes of the first of four roughly dressed men who were standing around them in a half circle. They had quite a few weapons with them, too.
*
“I said I was sorry,” said Freddy.
Josiah glared at her. Both of them had been tied up and added to the string of captives the men were leading through the woods. The others in the string were two old men, a middle-aged woman, and another version of Josiah. Josiah had told her his name was Ji. Ji and Josiah had already exchanged resigned looks and had an incomprehensible conversation that involved a lot of eye rolling and jerking of chins in Freddy’s direction. The men had tried to shut them up, unsuccessfully.
“How lovely for you,” said Josiah coldly. “I really hate being tied up.”
One of their captors—there were seven in all—jerked on the rope that bound them together. Freddy couldn’t quite figure these men out. She thought they might be bandits of some sort. All of them carried spears with stone tips, and a few also seemed to have little stone knives bound to their belts. Two had pieces of what she thought had to be bone, but they were the wrong shape for weapons. They may have been spades. There was no metal. If it was really five thousand years before her time, that wasn’t surprising.
Ji said something to one of the men. Knowing Josiah, it was a prehistoric Chinese insult.
She thought they were in China. It was surprisingly hard to tell. The people had an Asian look to them, and Ji’s name sounded kind of Chinese to her, but considering when it was, she had no cultural references by which to measure these people. The men were dressed in rough tunics and leggings made of undyed skin and cloth. They wore their hair at least as long as the Vikings had, but they had tied theirs back in ponytails. Four of the young men had thin beards. The other three were still in their mid-teens. The old men had white beards reaching halfway down their chests. The one woman was dressed almost like the men, except that her tunic was longer, and she wore it over a woven skirt. There were no colours or decorations.
The woman and the old men glanced back curiously at them every once in a while. They seemed more resigned to whatever was happening to them than afraid of their captors. Josiah and Ji had been talking to them a bit, despite the threatening motions the seven men kept making.
“Are they going to kill us?” asked Freddy eventually, since no one had said.
“How worried you sound,” snapped Josiah, who clearly hadn’t forgiven her for getting them captured yet.
“There’s no use in me being worried unless I know for sure they’re going to kill us,” she pointed out.
He was just ahead of her in the string of captives. He cast her what she could only really describe as a look over his shoulder. “There are fates worse than death,” he said. “I once spent a year trapped in a cave.”