“Are you guys going to leave us alone now?” demanded Roland.
“Certainly not,” said Josiah. “You’re Three; you’re stuck with us. You did make us, you know. And there’s school tomorrow. Don’t you want to watch me get beat up again? I thought you enjoyed it.”
Freddy and Mel exchanged glances. Freddy felt a knot in her stomach loosen. It was funny, after all the terror and betrayal and embarrassing moments on islands in lakes of fire, but part of her seemed to have been afraid that Josiah and Cuerva Lachance were going to go away now.
Maybe Josiah was her friend after all. It figured she would make the strangest friend she could without realising she had.
Freddy caught Josiah’s eye. She didn’t think the smile she saw lurking behind his eyes was entirely her imagination.
“The story’s over, at any rate,” said Josiah, “finally. Things should calm down for a while. There may be fewer tentacles.”
Freddy thought about how Cuerva Lachance and Josiah had been missing in the future. She wasn’t sure the story was over. Maybe it had paused. That was good enough for her.
“Let’s go home,” said Mel. Roland hesitated, then nodded. She was pretty sure there was a smile behind his eyes, too.
“You do that,” said Josiah. “I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”
“You’ll see us today,” said Freddy. The sun was coming up. As she spoke, the first beam crept through the window and, inexplicably, filled the air with rainbows.
epilogue
Mel and Roland went home. Freddy walked into the park.
There were things she would have to deal with soon. She needed to think about school and how she didn’t fit in there and how, strangely, she didn’t care that she didn’t. She and Roland needed to talk. She thought they needed to talk for quite a long time. Maybe she would try to sign a little, though she didn’t think she would be very good at it yet. She and Mel needed to talk as well. And then … Freddy saw herself and Roland on that bleak road, walking away from a funeral at which she hadn’t cried. There were things in her life on the verge of going wrong. Maybe she could deal with some of them. Maybe she and her mother needed to talk most of all. And it had been a very long time since she had seen her dad.
There were things she would have to deal with soon, but not yet. Right now, something was beginning.
The path through the woods was spongy beneath her feet. Dampness trickled in through holes in her boots. She was almost glad it did, as her left foot was throbbing from the burn. She shivered. It was a brisk fall morning, and she didn’t have a coat. Freddy moved beneath the evergreens, watching the sunlight begin to trickle between the branches. A crow called somewhere in the trees.
Cuerva Lachance, hair wild, cheek bleeding, hat and coat gone, clothes in tatters, was sitting on the bench. Freddy sat down beside her. “Have you been yet?”
“Not yet,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I was waiting for you. It’s very peaceful here. You wouldn’t think there was a city all around.”
Freddy nodded. “Why did you give me the key?”
“Well, I haven’t, but I think I will. Without it, things would have gone very differently.”
“I guess.”
“And without the time travel,” said Cuerva Lachance, gazing innocently up at the treetops, “you would have been a different sort of person yesterday. Interesting to think about, really.”
Freddy looked at her, blinking. The time travel had been an accident … hadn’t it?
Cuerva Lachance beamed out from beneath her tangled hair. “You do realise I’m the same person as Ban, don’t you? I don’t always feel the same way about what we’ve done to Three. Well … I don’t always feel the same way about very much for very long.”
“But you have less power this way,” said Freddy. “You’re more of a story.”
“Oh, power.” Cuerva Lachance fluttered her fingers in the air. “You’ve seen what happens when I’m given power. I really enjoy it, but I also really don’t. Too much power for either of us would lead to the end of everything, and life’s too interesting for that. It’s better when it’s a three-way balance. Josiah would disagree, but he does tend to see everything in black-and-white terms.”
“Of course,” she added after a pause, “I may have disagreed with all this an hour ago. You never can tell with me. Which is the point.”
They sat side by side and watched colour leach into the forest. Birds were calling in the woods, but cautiously, sparsely. Winter was on its way; the summer birds had already fled.
“Do you need the key back?” asked Freddy after a while.
“Oh, no.” Cuerva Lachance nodded towards Freddy’s right wrist, from which the handcuffs, forgotten until now, still dangled. “Keep it. Am I going to invent some psychological mumbo-jumbo to convince you to take it? I can’t think how I’m going to do that.”
“I guess you’ll make it up as you go along,” said Freddy.
“That does tend to work for me,” said Cuerva Lachance.
She was gone. Freddy shivered in the chill of the morning. Without her meaning it to, her hand had slid into her pocket and found the key. It was just a key. She knew what lock it fit now. Maybe she didn’t need it any more. Maybe there wasn’t anything all that bad about crying.
Down through time, she heard: “Have you ever had one of those days where everything goes so stupidly wrong that you find yourself saying every five minutes, ‘Now, this can’t possibly get any worse’? And then it does?”
The voice faded to nothing. The crow cawed in the woods. Freddy got up and went home through the still morning as the sun rose full above the trees.
author’s note
Time-travel stories are a chancy proposition when they go so far back in history that it is impossible to know with any accuracy what things would have been like back then. I have therefore taken certain imaginative liberties with the historical (and prehistorical) bits. Any inaccuracies are entirely my own fault. However, certain details are based on myth, legend, folklore, and known history.
Loki and Heimdallr are both Norse gods whose names can be found in many surviving poems and stories. Loki is a god of mischief, a shape-shifter who is occasionally on the side of the other gods and occasionally opposed to them. He is sometimes associated with fire. He will be one of the key players during Ragnar?k, the battle that ends the world, at which time he and Heimdallr will kill each other. Some of the insults Bragi trades with Loki / Cuerva Lachance during the flyting refer to the god Loki’s exploits.