“You said,” said Freddy. “In school. Are they going to kill us or subject us to a fate worse than death?”
He sighed. “Could be either or neither or both. It’s all a giant screwup, from what I can tell. They’re seven brothers. Ling and her uncles there have been taken because Ling’s son killed their eighth brother. It’s about honour and vengeance and other tedious things. I’ve been taken because I look like Ji, and Ji is known to be a companion of Ling, plus possibly some sort of demon. And you were with me. They didn’t expect there to be quite so many of us. It worries them.”
“It sounds like the Vikings,” said Freddy. “Are we going to walk into the middle of wars all the time?”
“I doubt it,” said Josiah. “But it’s a hazard of … the way we’re travelling. We can blame this on Three.”
“Enough with the cryptic,” said Freddy. “Tell me why we can blame it on Three.”
He twisted his head far enough around that he could look straight at her. “Now?”
One of the brothers jerked the rope again and barked something in Freddy’s face. She stuck her tongue out at him.
She hadn’t known she was going to do that. It wasn’t something she would normally have done. It was just … This doesn’t seem real, she thought. She was pretty sure the general feeling of unreality explained everything she’d done since she and Josiah had walked through the door into medieval Sweden.
The man stared at her, then appeared to decide that she wasn’t worth it. He said something to one of his brothers, who laughed a little weakly. None of them looked all that amused.
The woman in the string said something to Ji, who replied. Freddy poked Josiah, who had turned towards them to listen. “Is she Cuerva Lachance?”
“I think you’ve lost your mind. She’s Three,” said Josiah. “Ling. Qi isn’t around at the moment.”
“And Ling … Three … knows who you are?” said Freddy.
“Oh, yes,” said Josiah. “We always tell her eventually. This one’s known us since she was twelve.”
A brother jerked the rope again, this time so hard that Freddy felt the impact jar all the way up to her shoulders. One of the men waved his stone knife in her face and snarled something menacing. She considered sticking her tongue out again, but she wasn’t sure she would get away with that twice. Freddy fell silent and let herself be led on between the spindly trees.
*
It was hours before they stopped. Freddy wasn’t sure why she was still awake. She had dozed a bit in Sweden, but realistically speaking, she had been up now for more than a full day.
The sun was going down when one of the brothers called a halt. Someone tied the rope to one of the trees and pushed the first of the old men roughly to the ground. Since everyone was tied together, the rest of them had to sit, too.
Freddy and Josiah had been searched, not very carefully, when the brothers had first found them. Nothing had been found on either of them. Freddy did wonder about that. She knew Josiah had been using a knife at the Viking feast, and she hadn’t seen him drop it before they had been zapped away. However, if he still had it, the brothers hadn’t found it. She didn’t have anything in her pockets but her keys, and the brothers had missed those. She thought they may not have been familiar with the concept of pockets. They seemed to carry things on their belts or in little pouches slung over their shoulders.
Freddy and the others watched as the brothers built a fire, then sat around it and shared out food and water. They gave nothing to the prisoners, which was, Freddy decided, a bad sign. It was also problematic, as she hadn’t had anything to drink since the mead hall. Her mouth felt shrivelled and parched, and her headache was getting worse again.
“They’re definitely going to kill us,” said Freddy.
“Again with the tone of deep concern,” said Josiah. “And you’re just going to sit here and let it happen, are you?”
She shook her still-throbbing head. She did know she was acting strangely; she felt as if she had been continuously bludgeoned with the events of the last day or so. A few hours ago, she had tried to strangle Josiah against a rock. Now everything had gone slow and calm. She wasn’t sure why being in actual danger had banished her anger and panic. She began manoeuvring her tied hands into her right-hand pocket.
“You can tell me about Three now,” said Freddy.
Josiah just looked at her.
“Well, what else do we have to do?” She had managed to hook her pinky finger around the key ring. As gently as she could, she started dragging it out into the air.
“Your sense of timing is impeccable,” said Josiah.
“It freaks them out.” Freddy nodded towards the brothers. In fact, the men were looking at them askance, though they were making no move to stop them talking. Freddy didn’t blame them. They had been going about their business, kidnapping their neighbours for a bit of quiet vengeance, and these two strangely dressed people had appeared out of nowhere and started yakking at each other in a foreign language. It must have been disconcerting.
The keys were out. Careful not to let them jingle, Freddy ran her fingers through them. They were just keys, and keys had pretty blunt edges, but they did have edges. If she scraped one against the rope tied around her wrists for long enough …
Josiah could see what she was doing. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Okay, fine. We’ll be here for a while. Just … think of it like this: there are always three of us, but two of us never die. The third does, over and over. Sometimes she’s reborn as a woman; sometimes he’s reborn as a man. It’s always our job—mine and Qi’s—to find her and tell her who she is.”
Freddy was beginning to get an uneasy feeling about how all this related to her own time. “She doesn’t know until you tell her?”
“Generally not,” said Josiah, “though it’s different every time. Some of the Threes don’t have a clue, haven’t the faintest idea who we are, freak out when they see us, and throw things at us until we go away. Some dream about us. Some even remember us, though not until they see us. A few remember bits and pieces of their past lives.”
Freddy said, “Why do you have to find them?”
She could tell right away she had hit on a subject Josiah would rather have avoided. “What a beautiful campfire the brothers have made,” he said.
The campfire was a campfire. “Answer the question.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I think that’s not true,” said Freddy, “considering you’ve managed to get me tied up in a forest in prehistoric China.”
Josiah sighed. “Good point. All right, listen. You know Qi and I are … different.”
“I’d noticed something like that, yeah.”
“Well,” said Josiah, “we also have different kinds of … I guess you could call it power. Influence. Nothing you would notice unless you got too close to one of us, but we can … subtly affect the way the world is, I guess. Sometimes less subtly.”
Freddy thought of Loki manipulating the fire in the mead hall. “It didn’t seem that subtle in Sweden.”