“Ansgar! Stop!”

Forseti’s heels clicked as he hurriedly descended the stairs, his back straight, his chin high, the very image of masculine grace despite the speed with which he moved. He swept his coat from its hook in the entrance hall, sliding it onto his shoulders as a cowl before he placed his hat upon his head. He pulled on his gloves as he stepped out of doors, and it was only when Forseti crossed over the threshold that he heard Tor thunder down the stairs behind him.

With such speed could his brother move, and with such heft behind his feet! Forseti’s brother might as well be an elephant.

“Ansgar,” Tor said again, coming to fall into step beside him still in his shirt sleeves, not even wearing his coat, and Forseti wondered briefly what the neighbours must think, to see his brother in such a state of undress, yelling at him in the street.

“Good afternoon, brother,” Forseti bade him farewell, making to turn away, but Tor’s hand gripped tightly at Forseti’s wrist, so tightly that the skin smarted, and Forseti hissed out a sound of pain.

Torkild’s rage had affected colour to rise in his cheeks, and his long hair had come out of its careful ties, meaning that it was hanging around his face in weathered strands.

“You would to Norway?” Tor asked, his lips parted, his eyes searching – and oh, how the weight of his gaze settled on Forseti’s face, making him draw back. What was it that made him so sensitive to this man’s emotions above all, prompted such weakness in him?

“Or America,” Forseti muttered, not able to hold his brother’s gaze. “I know not yet.”

“Forseti,” Torkild said achingly, his tone so wounded as to pluck at Forseti’s heart strings even though he couldn’t bear to look at him. The use of this private nickname did not do nearly as much as the weight of Torkild’s own voice. “You would leave us? Leave Mother and I? And Father?”

This latter was a painful afterthought, Tor’s voice quavering just slightly as he made the addition.

“You would have me as I am now?” Forseti replied, his tone arch. He twisted his wrist out of the other man’s grasp, now staring him in the eyes and resisting the urge to curl his lip. “What would you have me do, Torkild? Remain within the house as my forever-gaol, perform no labour of my own? I have not the soul to live a life of leisure, never earning my keep.”

“Then just take work, Ansgar,” Torkild pleaded, and Forseti stared at him.

“What work, pray?” he demanded, not quite forgetting himself as to raise his voice, although the two of them stepped aside in the street. “What work is left to me now? What would might you suggest, Torkild, that our father might permit? I am not to be a journalist, nor a poet; I am to be neither an artist nor a musician; teaching is beneath me, tutoring undignified; engineering too low for me, and management too high!” His voice was not rising in volume, but it did rise in tone, becoming slightly shrill, and he made himself check his tongue, bidding it be silent in his mouth.

Torkild was looking at him beseechingly, his face expressing purest grief and powerlessness.

“Tor, I merely seek some form of peace,” Forseti murmured. “Life without our father’s single eye keeping watch over me, examining me. I feel ever as an insect beneath a microscope, pinned prone under a sheet of glass! What am I to do under such exacting scrutiny? Every breath I take is tight in my chest, lest he find some fault with the set of my lungs, the dilation of my nostrils, the shape of my mouth – every step I take, I must be graceful, yet manly, light-footed and yet strong! You know full well he doesn’t track you as he does me, doesn’t police you as he does me. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“He only wishes for you to be content, Forseti,” Tor said, but his voice was hoarse, and now it was him who couldn’t meet Forseti’s gaze, his hand creeping under his loose locks of hair to rub the back of his neck.

“And do you see me content, brother?” Forseti asked.

“No,” Tor admitted. “But what he wants—”

“What he wants is irrelevant,” Forseti said helplessly, his hands folding in front of his belly, his elbows under his coat. “Tor, he won’t listen to me, he won’t— Whatever it is he extends to you, that grace, he will never extend it to me – all I do is disappoint him, and as long as I live under his roof, that disappointment will keep me in its shadow. I cannot stay here, Tor, I can’t.”

“But to Norway?” Tor asked. “To America? To be far from Father, yes, but… from me? From Mother? You know it will pain her – and if you do not know it now, let me tell you, for you to be so far from me will rend my heart in two.”

“Good afternoon, Tor,” Forseti said, only just able to keep the crack out of his voice, and he turned elegantly once more upon his heel, walking more leisurely now away from his brother. The autumn air was cool against his skin, and he took fast on the path, making his way quickly from the edge of town and onto the country lanes, making his way toward the wood.

“Mr Borson, sir, good afternoon,” said a kindly voice, and Forseti turned, offering a polite smile and a tip of his hat to Vest a Jameson, the cook for the Wright family some doors away.

“Good afternoon, Vesta,” Forseti said, giving her a nod of his head. “Picking apples for Murmel?”

“Young Mr Wright does love his apples, sir,” Vesta said, and she reached into her basket and held one out to him, its skin shining red in the light.

“Oh, Vesta, I couldn’t possibly—”

“Go on, sir. An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” she said, and Forseti couldn’t help the warmth in his own smile, soothing his anxiety away. He had been a sickly child, often confined to bedrest, and when he and Tor had begun to spend more time with the Wrights – Murmel and Hilde both – Vesta had often pushed a diet of more fruits upon Forseti.

“My thanks,” he murmured, taking the kindness as offered, and he touched the brim of his hat once more as the two of them passed each other by. Forseti held the apple over his heat, polishing it against the dark blue of his suit jacket, and he welcomed the boughs of the forest trees over his head. His feet crunched softly on the carpet of yellow and red stretching out beneath his feet, and as he walked, he slipped the apple into his pocket, sighing softly.

The sound itself was taken up by the western wind, and it seemed to echo his own exhalations, rustling through the leaves above his head and making them dance over the path.

It was the second time in as many weeks that Forseti had left the dining table early, his and his father’s tempers catching like two matchsticks against one another, and Forseti felt the heavy ache of guilt in his chest. His mother’s face had been as much pained as it had been shocked at this latest outburst, and Forseti sighed, momentarily removing his hat to run his hand through his hair.

He kept his shorter than Tor did his own, more in the fashion of the Englishmen about them, more in the fashion of the Englishmen they were meant to be themselves.

“What have you been doing today, my son?” his mother had asked, her voice quiet across the table, and Forseti had glanced cautiously up from his stew. She’d lowered her voice for a reason, and seeing Tor and Father so engaged in conversation, he had seen fit to respond in an undertone.

“I sent an inquiry to Mr Dalish at the docks on the Thames,” he’d said quietly. “I thought perhaps, come November, I might take travel to Oslo.”

“Oslo?” had come his Father’s demand from the head of the table – the dining room was small, and sound carried too well in it at times.

Once more he and Forseti had come to verbal blows – what was it to be said for one’s life, when it felt one’s greatest enemy in it was one’s own father?

The wind softly brushed through Forseti’s hair, and he felt its cool touch upon his skin, felt the kiss of the western wind upon his brow.

“What is to be done?” he asked the forest at large, looking out into its depths, into the expanding green. Oh, to be a tree! Standing ever still and unmoving and yet satisfied with one’s lot, changing colours with the seasons, an object acted upon, fed and watered and struggling not with the agony of sloth.

He inhaled, letting the scents of autumn fill his nostrils – mushrooms were growing thick on the forest’s floor, and hazelnuts were beginning to grow in, blackberries growing fat and black in the hedgerows. Taking one up from a thick set of brambles, glad for the leather of his gloves, Forseti slipped it into his mouth and tasted the bloody burst of sweetness on his tongue, then stepped from the path.

Forseti had always been comfortable in these woods, had always taken to them quite instinctively, quite naturally. He had been but a babe in arms when the family had travelled by sea to England from Norway that his father might take up his factory – Tor had been a few years older, four and then five.

He had been very frightened of the forest, he’d told Forseti, before Forseti was old enough to lead his elder brother by the hand down the wooded paths, let alone off them into the grass and undergrowth. He had always had an instinctive understanding of the way the paths meandered and connected with one another, carried a sense of direction even with no sign of the horizon or glimpse of the sun over their heads that Tor lacked.

Even now, Tor never went into the woods alone – he walked at Forseti’s side or with Brunhilde on his arm, stepped under the canopy of the trees only with an escort.

“The dark doesn’t frighten you at home,” Forseti had told him once, the two of them late into their teens and drinking in secret together, Forseti cross-legged upon an old stump and Tor sat across from him on a blanket, reclining back against a willow tree. “Why is it so different here, tinged green from the leaves instead of red from the wallpaper?”

“I don’t know,” Tor had said, and to his credit, Forseti had believed him. He’d stared into the middle distance, his head tilting slightly to one side, his eyes narrowing. “It’s… It’s quiet here, Forseti, that’s all. You hear things here I do not – you see animals and creatures all about us, insects and beetles and spiders, squirrels and birds, cats, deer; you hear their calls and noises, hear branches snapping, hear the wind, even. I have always felt deaf and blind in this place – that you do not lose these senses as I do here, it makes me feel more secure alongside you or Brunhilde or Murmel, even, but still, without you, I simply feel… Vulnerable.”

Torkild Borson was not a man accustomed to feeling vulnerable. Forseti might have resented it, were it not that he so ached to see his brother quaver in this way.

As older children, playing the games they did amongst themselves, the Borsons and the Wrights together, Forseti would often voice the wood as a character of sorts – he would hide behind trees or secrete himself into holes and crevices, call out in booming or whispering voices asides or commentary on their plays.

Many times, once Murmel had begun to embrace his calling as a solicitor, they would play at trials and lawyering, and this was where Forseti’s childhood nickname had come to him and stuck: he would play the judge, mark the line of justice versus injustice, track that which was and would be fair.

He thought about it now, Murmel’s hand brushing against his as they played together, handing over some document or other – and it was always Murmel, too, that could find Forseti during games of hide and seek, where neither Hilde nor Tor could manage it.

Even today, Forseti could hide in these woods as no other man could, could find shadows and holes or climb up into branches that might hide him near entirely. Hilde did not seem to feel blindfolded or deafened as Tor did, but she lacked Forseti’s natural instincts for the wood, his breaths often synchronised to the very breeze over their heads; Murmel was a passionate fisherman and an even more passionate birdwatcher, and he could spy the tiniest movements of Forseti’s body, his limbs, his hair.

How many times had Murmel managed to creep up on him and suddenly lay his hand on Forseti’s shoulders, on the back of his neck, on his waist, in his hair? How many times had Murmel’s breathless laugh sounded in Forseti’s ears, warming his cheeks, the back of his neck?

Forseti quietly exhaled, soothed at more pleasant thoughts than his father’s control and command, and he moved forward, hearing twigs and small branches crunched under his feet, a contrast to the softer cushioning of leaves beneath his boot soles. Wild garlic leaves kissed the hems of his trousers as he eased himself through the gap between two heavy hawthorn bushes and into an old clearing.

There had been some manner of stone circle here once upon a time, he thought, perhaps a very long time ago – the ground was very well-trodden, made up of short grass and moss doing its best to grow over outcrops of broad, flat stone, and to one edge was the heavy log of a fallen oak tree. On one edge of it grew several shelves of yellow mushrooms, sprouting out from the wood in half-umbrellas over one another, but it was to the other edge of the log that Forseti went to, flicking his knife out of his pocket and sliding it into the barely visible crack in the wood trunk’s flesh.

He opened it as easily he might a cabinet, catching the slab of wood he’d carved years on years ago to hide all manner of contraband – books his parents wouldn’t allow him to read (certain novels outlawed by his father, certain books of philosophy; outlawed by his mother the occasional prurient pamphlets or erotic etchings that Murmel or Tor had brought home from sojourns abroad); two bottles of a strong, sweet mead; a carefully-folded waistcoat that was wrapped in wax paper to keep it dry that his father had damn-near hit the roof upon seeing Forseti wear, demanding if it was his intention to be dispatched to a working camp on the heels of that unnatural Irishman Wilde, and declaring he would whip him if he ever saw him wearing it in the company of others again.

It was for none of these sacred objects he reached for: he reached instead for the distinctly unsanctified, tugging out the heavy leather volume from its own envelope of waxed paper, he sat down on the mercifully dry seat of the old log, tugging off his gloves with his teeth and laying them aside.

This was a rather recent discovery – his father had recently been abroad for some weeks, and with the freedom this allotted him, his gaoler temporarily departed, Forseti had been able to go into London with Murmel, Tor, and Hilde.

They had attended the pursuits of any unwise young people, naturally, drinking and dancing and laughing, playing silly parlour games with friends of Torkild’s, and Forseti and Murmel had even taken advantage of their respective siblings’ desire to be alone together and gone off themselves, creeping into an alleyway and then through a secreted passageway.

Murmel had been there before, had even greeted some of the other gentlemen present by name, and the two of them had sat aside in a booth. It had been on their last day in London before getting the train back, and Forseti had been exhausted, had not the energy to join in with the dancing or the games played in that establishment, and twice, he had assured Murmel he hardly minded if he wished to enjoy himself.

“Oh, but I am enjoying myself, Forseti,” Murmel had said quietly, smiling richly and warmly at him over their matched cocktails, their knees brushing under the table.

“I’m meant to be catching my breath,” Forseti had told him dryly, his tone too amused to sound truly scolding. “Is it your desire that you should make me breathless, Mr Wright, and render me very ill indeed in this den of sin?”

“You’re quite right, of course,” Murmel had said with a wink. “I should whisk you away from here and into some sinful bedroom instead, that I might make you breathless there instead.”

Forseti had laughed, and he smiled now, brushing his fingertips back and forth over the aged leather that bound the book in his lap, its weight almost as heavy as Murmel’s ankles rested on his knees, dozing across from him in the train carriage. On their way out of the gentlemen’s club (although Forseti was quite certain no man there had been a gentleman, for he’d worn his favourite waistcoat, and seen another young man wearing rather a similar one with nothing underneath), they’d dipped into some shop of curiosities and antiques, and when Murmel had seen him examining it, he had hurried to pay for the book as a gift without even looking over his shoulder to examine it himself.

“Aren’t you going to ask what you’ve just purchased me?” Forseti had asked when they were settled on the train together, and Murmel had raised his hat from over his twinkling eyes, looking across the carriage at him.

“Is it something very old and rather arcane for my sensibilities, but nonetheless rather naughty?” He’d leaned in to ask the question, and he hadn’t followed Forseti’s automatic gaze to the window in the train carriage door, seeing of Tor and Hilde were looking across at them, but of course, they were embroiled in their own conversations.

Forseti had said, very softly – all the better to encourage Murmel to lean in just a little bit further, so that Forseti could smell the sweet, woody musk of his Belgian cologne, “A not inaccurate summary.”

“Then I need not ask, and merely satisfy myself that I’ve satisfied my obligations well in advance for your birthday,” Murmel had said, and cocked his hat forward again as he’d leaned away.

As Murmel had stretched out and slept as comfortably in the train carriage as an indolent cat, quietly snoring and occasionally mumbling something incoherent but nonetheless flirtatious in its tone in his sleep, Forseti had paged through the book and thrilled at its contents.

Thrilled at the book itself, quite the forbidden piece and exquisitely old, and at the same time thrilled that it had been a gift from Murmel, easy and thoughtless and full to the brim with affection for him.

Murmel and Tor had that in common, an easy capacity for showing affection.

A breeze brushed through his hair, cool and biting on the back of his neck where his hair was pinned up beneath his head, and Forseti inhaled, drumming his fingers against the old, weathered leather of the book in his knees.

“I know, I know,” he murmured to the wind, half-imagining that it was scolding him for being so distracted, thinking of Murmel instead of the distraction at hand – he would be leaving Murmel behind too, after all, if he fled to Norway or to America. Better to busy his anxious mind with other things.

Brushing his fingers over the book’s face, he traced the textured weight of it, touching the small fragments of shiny gilt that remained stuck fast to it, the only memory of the book’s full title, now lost to the passage of time. It was a very heavy tome, and it smelled of the best of the libraries he’d ever stepped into, smelt of paper and ink and dust warmed by scant sunlight.

He was very careful as he cracked open the cover, momentarily holding back the piece of protective wax paper that covered the book’s title page. Each of them was made of a very thick, yellowed parchment paper, the texture wholly different to any paper a book was printed on today. The full cover page had been torn away at some point, but there lingered one half of the title page, where in decadent and swirling black ink were written the words ſpell work.

Every page of the text contained the ingredients or the recipe for some manner of bewitchment or enchantment – Forseti had thought at first that the book was a piece of parody, a well-made curiosity for the theatre or even some avid occultist, but as he’d first begun to page through it on the train, he’d discovered it was far more earnest than that, and in the two or three occasions since he’d managed to make time to peruse it, he’d been more convinced.

This was no parodic facsimile or a silly practical joke – this book purported itself to be and intended itself as a genuine guide for a student of witchcraft.

To think that such ridiculous fantasies might be entertained today, in 1896, with the turn of a new century so close.

Forseti had, of course, been raised on all manner of tales and stories – his own mother had taught them the stories of their homeland, had spun tales as to the coming of Ragnarok, as to the adventures of the Aesir and Vanir, of the Thor from whose name Torkild’s came and Thursday too, of Odin and Freyja, of the great snake Jormungandr, who encircled the world; Vesta, when looking after Tor, Forseti, Hilde, and Murmel, would tell them English tales instead, would tell them of the Black Dog who prowled graveyards and cemeteries, the mere sight of which would frighten you to death, would tell them of fae lands and children who were spirited away by fairies and replaced with uncanny copies, would tell them of white-dressed ladies who haunted great manor houses, waking their inhabitants with shrill, ear-piercing screams.

Vesta and his mother both had talked of witchcraft in the days of old – in Vesta’s tales, such solitary women with their black cats and broomsticks were hunted down by lumberjacks keen to cut them down or priests wanting to burn them at the stake for their sins; in his mother’s, they were somewhat different, were women of wisdom and repute, who delivered babes and tended to sickness, foretold the future in bowls of water or in the bowels of sacrificed animals, or divined further prophecy in the movement of the stars.

For all her stories were more sympathetic and more respectful as to the idea of the völva in contrast to the common English witch, Mother had always come over very stern when they made childhood play at casting spells or making light of such things – she often turned her nose up at the English fairy tales Vesta entertained them with, and Forseti remembered more than once that she’d made scornful comments as to the waking of the Sleeping Beauty or Snow White from their magical comas.

“Curses like that are not so easily reversed,” she’d said scathingly once when she had clapped her hands loudly together and declared that Torkild should not use such words as “curse” so lightly, and Tor had listed off the ways they might be reversed in the stories he’d heard. “Take care what you say, Torkild, and do not let your tongue bind you with a knot you can’t untie.”

Almost everything in this trunk was hidden here because of his father’s disdain and his strictness – this book and its contents was the only thing he would worry at having to explain or justify to Mother.

Forseti had read through a little under half of the volume so far, and it was slow-going – in parts because of the faded ink, or because a paragraph was water stained or on slightly torn parchment, in most places simply because the hand-written text in its swirling script was just very unusual and unfamiliar, and needed a great deal of careful deciphering – but he had been very entertained by what he had read thus far.

Some of them were potions and poultices and embrocations – gels or creams to make and rub into a man’s bald head or to help lance a boil, to ease a child’s teething pains or dry up milk; potions to settle a stomach or to encourage one to vomit, love potions or a poison that promised to make its victim’s teeth fall out; poultices to put on an ailing joint, or a pouch of magic herbs that promised awful nightmares to whomever carried it, unbeknownst, in their pocket or tucked into their bedclothes.

These were the more realistic of the entries – Forseti was no expert in herbalism or natural medicine, and many of the words used for different flowers or herbs were either archaic or simply unfamiliar, but from what mushrooms and plants he did recognise, they seemed suitable for the purposes described in their recipes.

Father said, from time to time, that the witchcraft of the past was the science of today, and had dryly pointed out when overhearing some of Vesta’s tales that the same acts performed by witches, for which they were drowned or stoned or hanged or burned, would have been paid for and celebrated when performed by physicians or Christian priests.

No, magic was one of the few things his father ever seemed to find amusement or entertainment in – perhaps were Forseti to go home and declare his intention to become a witch or warlock, he might finally be satisfied.

“You would favour Tor over me in every venture a man could imagine, and you know it!” he’d snapped that evening. “Any machine in any of our factory buildings, Father, name it, lay it in front of me, I might take it apart and piece it together again; I know every worker by name, I know his address, his children, his age; every one of our account books I might recite from memory, and still, still, you would favour him over me! Just admit it!”

“I will admit to nothing except my own foolishness,” Father had retorted, on his feet, his eyes blazing, the windows near to rattling at the sheer volume of his voice. “Thinking you might amount to anything – is that what you think this work amounts to, boy? Recitations and memorising names and figures!?”

“Well, you won’t let me manage the place, so why—”

“Manage it!” his father had repeated incredulously, the chandelier swinging over their head. “For God’s sake, will you not just stay home!?”

Turning over to the next page he had not yet read through, Forseti stroked over the etching on it, a sketch of a swaddled babe on the side of some sort of hill, or in the midst of a forest glade, perhaps. “Spell to reveal a changeling,” he read aloud, and the wind rose suddenly, coming in such a burst from behind him that it knocked Forseti’s hat from his head, and he let out a short, surprised sound.

Rubbing the back of his neck, soothing the chilly bite of the wind away, he set the book to the side and leaned to reach for it—

And froze.

In stark white, contrasting to the carpet of browns, reds, and oranges beneath his feet, made up of autumn leaves trodden into the mud, was a line of mushrooms curving about one side of the trunk in a neat arc. The toes of his boots were just inside it, and leaning back, he looked on the other side of the log, finding that the arc was mirrored on that side too.

A circle of mushrooms surrounded his log in a clean, well-established ring, surrounded the seat he so often thought his sanctum, and he hadn’t even noticed them, had stepped directly over the line of them with no care, no realisation, no notice at all.

Forseti felt his blood run cold in his veins, chilling him from within, and he pressed his lips tightly together as he snatched up his hat and held it on his knees, cradling it in his lap. It was a silly superstition, as silly as any other, but this was an area where Mother’s tales and Vesta’s crossed over: a ring of mushrooms or a pale ring on grass signified that some strange border had been made, and he was not to cross over them, lest he be whisked away by fairies or vaettir or some other unholy spirit.

Exhaling as he sets his hat aside, he shakes his head and rubs tiredly between his brows. Has he not always thought these superstitions silly? Had he not been thinking, mere moments before, how odd it might be for someone to believe in witchcraft in so modern age as this?

For God’s sake, why should he have let himself be so startled, anxious at being spirited away by some magical creature that didn’t even exist?

Shaking his head at his own stupidity, Forseti drew his book back into his lap, tracing the lines of small, scrawling text with his finger, puzzling it out letter by letter and thanking every spirit of mercy imaginable that in the intervening time between this book’s publication and his own attendance at school, someone had thought to standardise English spelling.

“An offering to a Faerie,” he read aloud, his voice low, “ought be made with the greatest diffidence. The Faeries are fickle beings, notoriously Hot of Blood, and they might take Offence at Any Slight.”

Forseti half-expected the laughter of the trees once again, but it didn’t come. Looking about the clearing, he saw it was as unchanging as ever, saw the branches over his head rustling in the wind. Something was wrong here, something slightly off, and he couldn’t place his finger on it – the trees about him were the same as ever, a willow and some oaks and birches and a dying yew; the leaves beneath his feet were the same, the mud well-trodden; the flowers and undergrowth, the bushes. A bird was sitting on a branch – he didn’t know their names like Murmel did, and certainly couldn’t identify them with just a passing glance before they fluttered away. He was lucky to identify this one as an evening bird but not an owl, and it was possible he was wrong.

He realised what exactly was so strange about the clearing around him as the bird fluttered away – he couldn’t hear it.

He heard no sound at all.

Forseti could not hear the rustle of the leaves, nor the evening song or flutter of the birds. He couldn’t even hear his own breaths, hear his own heartbeat – he had never experienced such eerie silence as this, such uncanny and unnatural quiet.

“Hello?” he called, but although he felt the weight of the word on his tongue, although he felt its vibration in his mouth, he heard nothing, nothing, nothing! Breathing somewhat faster, Forseti took up his book and clasped it tighter to his chest. Whatever force was compelling him within the mushroom circle he’d crossed into, be it fate, divinity, or even fae magic, he felt his gaze drawn downward, and he looked to the mushrooms over which he had (unthinkingly! Unknowingly!) crossed to reach his usual seat, and there, there, shooting up from the road like so many infernal geysers were bursts of blood.

The brown mud beneath his feet stained with it, spattering in thick red upon his dark shoes, upon the hems of his trousers, and Forseti felt real terror strike his heart now.

Clutching his book tight to himself as if it might shield his breast, his hat and gloves forgotten, he crossed the line of red mushrooms, no longer white, and began to run, his feet pounding on the ground.

He was not so far into the woods, and he might have made his retreat blindfolded (had done so before) – he ran until the path toward the orchard was within sight, and yet he felt, felt without looking, without hearing it, that something was in his pursuit. The very hairs on the back of his neck, thin and light and very fine, were standing on their end, and he couldn’t bear even to imagine what he might see if he turned his head to look behind him.

What slavering beast was giving chase, its breath hot on the nape of his neck and those sensitive little hairs that covered it, its snapping jaws so very close? What dragon or ogre, jotun or faerie, was going to grab him about the middle, by the scruff of the neck – or hook him about the ankle?

His foot caught in an unexpected root, and he cried out in fear and shock alike as he lost his balance and landed hard onto the ground, his book beneath him. Closing his eyes tightly and feeling himself tremble as he braced himself for whatever death was about to alight on him, he pressed his forehead into the clay-rich dirt, its scent filling his nose, and yet—

There was no snapping jaw upon him, wrenching his head from his neck. There was no monster’s claw upon him, ripping him from belly to chest, no beast, no nothing.

There was nothing.

Forseti sat up on his knees, looking with staring eyes about himself, and yet he spied nothing out of the ordinary. The trees at the edge of the forest behind him were rustling gently in the breeze, birds singing, and close by he could hear the soft babble of the stream that ran between the forest and the orchard, a natural border.

Sighing hard, Forseti put his dirty face in his hands, feeling the sweat on his skin, and then he picked up his book and clutched it in his arms, holding it to his breast. If he was frightening himself like a child in the woods, it was a sign he ought soon home and to bed…

And then what? To argue with Father? Console Mother? Make plans to flee to Oslo, or else New York?

“If only magic were real,” Forseti muttered himself, wiping dust and dirt away from the cover of the book and taking its protective envelope out from where it was folded against the back cover, wrapping it up again. “Father could hardly fault me then, could he, book? Just snap my fingers, and there—” Forseti snapped his fingers, and his eyes were stunned by a sudden flash. Blinking a few times, he stared down at his own empty hand, tightening his grip on the book against his other hip. “—be fire,” he finished in a whisper.

It was the worst of habits to talk to oneself, he knew, but this…

Forseti snapped his fingers again. Nothing happened.

On the grass ahead of him were his top hat and gloves, dropped ahead of him as he’d fallen – but hadn’t he left them behind? He didn’t know any longer. He felt dizzy and a little confused, too hot under his suit and coat even though it wasn’t at all a warm day.

Forseti put the back of his hand to his forehead, feeling for a temperature – undoubtedly, he was a little more warm than he ought be, and yet this strange turn, moments of deafness, frighting at faeries and imaginary blood, now seeing sparks where there were none?

He’d had migraines before, and he hoped this was not a new precursor.

Sighing, he picked up his gloves and slightly muddied hat, and began the walk home.

* * *

Forseti slept ill that night. He tossed and turned in his bed, his skin hot to the touch and his flesh feverish, and drink as he might from the jug of water beside his bed, twice he had to call for the boy to refill it. By morning, he was laid out in his bed, his skin chalky in colour, and Mother sat beside him, soothing his hot brow with cool cloths.

“You oughtn’t have walked in the woods in such inclement weather,” she said quietly.

“It was a fine day,” Forseti told her, his voice hoarse.

In the open door of his bedroom, he saw the shadow of his father hovering in the doorway. Would he enter, Forseti wondered? Would he face his son even as he lay abed, sick as a dog? Sick as he so often was?

The shadow passed away.

“I thought so,” he muttered.

“What’s that, Ansgar?”

“Nothing.”

“Sleep, my dear,” Mother murmured, and Forseti let his eyes shut closed, doing his best to sleep once more.

Once upon a time...