ORIGINAL FIC: Luotes, part one
Jul. 27th, 2009 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cygna_himeSo, to better motivate me towards actually getting things done, I've decided to start posting the stories I'm working on bit-by-bit, for feedback and to ensure that there are people to nag me. Accordingly, here is the first part of the story I started two days ago.
First Luote: Disappearing
He was cold. That was all he was sure of. He was cold, his feet—did he have two or four?—were bare, the night was dark, it smelled of pine and ice that crystallized in his nose. He was cold, and he was running.
Somewhere behind him they were coming. Not as fast, maybe, but they would not stop. He could outrun them for now, maybe for a day, a week, a month, but they had his scent in their noses and more, they had the Blood Hunt on him. Sooner or later, they would catch him. Maybe not for a while, if he was careful, but when he thought they had given up, when he stopped running, they would. And he hated running.
Now he was sure of two things. He was cold, and they were coming.
He thought he might be near the border. In the dark, through fields and woods, he could not tell exactly, but he had been not too far from the border—three hours at a run, they had measured it once—and it must have been three hours by now or more. Not that the border mattered. A Blood Hunt was more important than borders.
If only there were some way he could hide from them, for just long enough that they searched through where he was and went on. It would give him time to think of a way to repair something of what had sent him careening through the midnight snow. If only there were a way to foil the Blood Hunt, a way to change his smell and taste on the air until they would not find him.
Oh.
There was a way.
It was the third thing he was sure of: he was cold, they were coming, and he knew of a way to evade the Blood Hunt. He knew that, when even his name seemed unimportant and far away. If he could get a little time and a little chance, he might escape them yet.
First he would have to foil their noses, make them rely on the Blood Hunt. He turned from the wood where the snow was less deep and fled on tiring legs to the river he could hear away to his left, running so fast and deep that it did not freeze entirely.
He was colder still when he came wet and shaking out of the water, but the cold was becoming almost comfortable. The wind bit deep. He would not last long enough like this; it would do him no good to delay them if he died before ever they found him. He was certain enough of that to make a charm fill his bones with warmth, driving back the cold. It would last long enough, he had to hope.
Down and away from the river he ran, running wherever there was no snow to make tracks, wherever his scent might be lost. He should find somewhere, somewhere to stop and do what he had to do, but in the dark he did not know where he was.
There was a light, he realized. Someone somewhere was still awake, even in this dark night. He stumbled towards it, coaxing the last strength from his muscles. That would do. That was close enough.
Strange, how he was not sure of his own name but could see the ritual he had to perform as though the vellum scroll were in front of his eyes at that moment. He knew the words, and somehow he still had the will. The ruby beneath his skin burned sun-hot as he twisted himself up and away. It hurt.
He was tired. Not far away, there was a darker shape against the darkness. He stumbled toward it, feet bare and cold-numbed. A door, shadow against shadow, was open a crack, and he fell in to living warmth and blessed sleep.
Kjell was used to being woken rudely from what little sleep he had managed to snatch, so it came as no surprise to him that the sound startling him into wakefulness was someone hammering on his door.
“What is it?” he called ahead of himself. There were no more babies due this month after the one that had kept him awake until the wee hours of the morning, but one might have come early. And it was always possible that in the however many hours (not enough, he feared) it had been since dawn someone had been injured or taken sick. He hoped, guiltily, for the former: the town had only just recovered from the regular winter outbreak of icebreak cough, which meant that he had only just recovered from the winter outbreak of pitiful, mute children unable to understand why he could not just bring their voices back. He did not have the energy for another round of illness.
Outside was Karl Berthelsen, the wheelwright and an old friend. Unlike those newer to the town, he never felt the need to tip his hat to Kjell or wait to be invited in. “You’ve got to come,” he said as soon as he could see Kjell. “Olaf, he found someone sleeping in the barn.”
“A stranger?” Kjell asked, bundling hastily into coat, boots, hood, and gloves. It was not truly a necessary question; Karl would have said if it was anyone he knew, and he knew everyone in town and had the best memory for faces of anyone Kjell had ever met.
“No one I’ve ever once seen, sure. He looks like he was out all night, too. Gudrun took him in by the fire to do what she can, but it doesn’t look good.”
Karl’s brief summary was unhappily accurate, Kjell discovered upon arriving at the Berthelsen house on the edge of town. The mysterious stranger—from across the border in Kalevas by the look of him—was breathing so shallowly that Kjell would not have wagered money on his being able to raise mist on a spoon, and he was no longer shivering. The warmth of the house might bring him around, if the shock of the change did not kill him. Kjell would have to see that it did not. He hated seeing people die of cold, though it happened every year.
“Bring blankets,” he told Gudrun. A sensible woman who had lived with the deadly cold all her life, she already had them ready. Looking around, his eye fell on young Olaf, still only a child whose work would not be missed for the day. “Olaf, help me warm him.”
Olaf obeyed Kjell’s instructions, stripping out of his shirt and crawling under the blankets with the stranger so that their skin was touching. “He’s cold,” Olaf complained, but only once.
“I know, but you’re going to warm him up,” said Kjell, doing the same. His job, however, was more complicated. He focused on the shallow movement of the stranger’s chest under his hands, shut his eyes, and went in.
Inside the cold body, blood was still moving, but it was chill and sluggish. It felt like pine sap to Kjell’s magical self. Carefully, he sank deeper, tying the stranger to his magical self and, through it, to his own body, warm and strong beneath the blankets. His heart was beating strongly; he lent some of its strength to keep the blood moving. His blood was hot; he lent some of its warmth. Then, pulling away a little before the cold sickened him too, he guided the warmer blood, coaxing it toward the chest rather than the limbs. There would be frostbite to deal with later, he could feel its presence bitter-sharp to his magical self, but saving the life had to come first. He maintained the connection and kept husbanding the heat until the weak heartbeat strengthened and he could feel the warm rush of blood doing the rest. Then he pulled out, back to his own body, and let sleep take him.
When he woke again, the high sun was in his eyes and the chest under his hands was warm. Kjell took this as a sign that it was more than time for him to check on the patient again, using his eyes this time.
He was breathing steadily now, but his heartbeat was still a touch fainter than Kjell would have liked. Somebody, probably Gudrun, had taken it on themselves to treat the frostbite in his hands and feet. They were still cold, but some of the color was coming back. Otherwise, the stranger looked well on the way to a full recovery. Sleep would do him good, hopefully enough that he would be awake and able to be moved by sundown. It was not fair to the Berthelsens to have their kitchen turned into a sickroom unexpectedly; Kjell would move the invalid as soon as possible to his own house, where there was a spare bedroom. That would have to wait until Karl came back to help, but it could not be more than a few hours.
Kjell cursed. If it was only a few hours to sundown, Yngve Ohlsen was waiting at Kjell’s office to see if his sprained wrist had healed.
Dressing hastily, he made for the door, only to be brought up short by the sight that met his eyes when he opened it.
Coming down the street were four Kalevasi, a common enough sight so close to the border, but these were no ordinary Kalevasi. They were in strange dress, almost military but with blood-red trim no military ever wore, and the smell of ritual magic hung around them. More than that, they walked down the street as if they owned it, as if nothing and no one could stop them from going wherever they wanted.
To Kjell’s surprise, they made straight for the Berthelsens’ door. He backed away without thinking. These were not people he wanted to face unless he had to.
One, a man taller than even Karl whose tawny hair had more brown in it than blond, spoke. “We seek entrance, in the name of King Viljami and by right of the Blood Hunt.”
The Blood Hunt! Kjell had heard of such a thing, but he had never known one to happen in all his days. The Blood Hunt, it was said, was a ritual only the king of Kalevas could perform, to give his chosen Hunters a sense of their prey that would never fade or be lost. They would never stop until their target was in their hands or they were every one of them dead. It was a child’s story, and now it had come to Vagnorvik.
Gudrun took his place at the door when he stepped back. She bowed and let the Blood Hunters, if that was what they truly were, in. “How can I help you, my lords?” she asked.
The same man spoke again. “We seek the erstwhile Prince of Kalevas. He has proven himself a traitor and a madman, yet a cunning one withal, for he contrived a way to evade the Blood Hunt. Yet we tracked him so far and heard it said that there was a stranger new-come to this house. Where is he, that we may see if it is he whom we seek?”
Kjell followed them into the kitchen, in case there was something he could do—and also, he had to admit, motivated by a good deal of curiosity. The stranger might be the Prince, for all Kjell could see, as he certainly looked Kalevasi, but unconscious and half-dead he hardly seemed like a “traitor and a madman”.
He was still unconscious. The Blood Hunters circled him, and the leader’s amber eyes turned red as he spoke words in Old Kalevasi that had to be a ritual of some kind. It made him look like a monster in the light, some creature out of the deep forests come to plague their quiet village, and for a moment, Kjell was afraid. Then the red faded, and he was a man once more, a tall Kalevasi and nothing else.
“This is not he,” he said.
“You did not require the ritual for that,” said one of his companions, a woman with long, fair hair. “He has not the smell of the Prince, nor even of Kalevas. He is nothing to us, naught but a lost Nordhvegrsk.”
It seemed that that was all; the four turned and left as quickly as they came, the leader tossing a coin to Gudrun “for your trouble”.
“Well,” said Gudrun, when the house was like they had never been there. “That was…strange.”
Kjell had to agree with her. Then he remembered that he was even later than before and cursed as he hurried out into the winter street. Wondering about Blood Hunts and missing princes would just have to wait.
He woke slowly from dreams that faded into a handful of faces and a vague sense of urgency. He was surprised to be warm, though he did not recall why he should be surprised. Perhaps he had been cold when he had fallen asleep? It seemed the most likely.
He tried to sit up before his eyes were properly open and gasped at sudden pain. That woke him the rest of the way all in a second: he became aware of a tingling pain in his hands and feet, and a general lethargy in all his body, but his mind was very decidedly present. Wondering what had happened, he opened his eyes.
He was in bed in a small but well-appointed room he did not recognize. Blue light was coming in through the small square windows; it was a winter morning after snow in the night, then. Looking down, he saw that his hands were wrapped in bandages: unsurprising, considering that they hurt even when he was not attempting to put weight on them. They did not feel entirely part of him, nor did his feet, except for the pain. He wondered what had happened to him. Cold, he thought, might have such an effect, but what had he been doing out in the cold so ill-prepared as to injure himself? He knew better than that, he was sure.
Someone else was in the room: a tall, thin man with red-blond hair, who was sitting at a desk beneath the windows and writing something. He wondered who the man was. He might as well ask; the man probably knew what had happened to him at the very least. “Excuse me?” Was his voice supposed to be that hoarse? He broke out in a fit of coughing, each cough making his chest ache bone-deep.
The man was by his side phenomenally quickly, one hand steady on his back, supporting him as he struggled for breath that would not come. “Easy, easy, don’t force it. You’re fine.” After a terrifying few seconds, it proved to be true: he drew one long breath, then another. “You’ve been out for a while; hold on and I’ll get you something to drink.”
He accepted the mug of water gratefully when it came. When he spoke again, his voice was still weaker than it should have been, but it did what he asked of it with no more rebellion. “Thank you. What—happened? To me?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. I’ve no doubt it’s a fascinating story, one I only come in at the end of: a friend of mine found you sleeping in his barn half-dead yesterday morning and called me in. I’m Kjell Hofstad, by the way, doctor and petty healer in this town.”
He nodded. That made sense. The cold would have affected his mind, so it was no great wonder that he could not remember how he had come to be in a stranger’s barn, of all places, on a winter night. “I’m—” he stopped abruptly. Only when he began to say his name did he realize that he had no idea what it was. Trying not to panic, he searched desperately through memory, but there was nothing there at all, only unending blankness up until the last minutes. “I—I don’t know who I am.”
Was it part of being a doctor, he wondered, to never seem surprised? Doctor Hofstad gave no exclamation, barely even moved, but after a few breaths of time he asked, “Do you have any idea what might have caused this?”
“No,” he said, uncertainly at first and then as he thought back again more definitely. “No. I remember nothing before waking up here. Not my name, not where I come from, not what happened to me.”
“Alright. For now, don’t try to force yourself to remember: it’s likely to do more harm than good. Just focus on getting better. Do you think you’re awake enough for some soup? It’ll do you good to get something warm in you.”
“Yes. I would like that.”
The soup when it came was more broth than anything, but it was still the most delicious smell in the world, though it seemed faintly dull, less vivid than it should have been, for no real reason. Considering the amount of truly disgusting phlegm currently residing in his lungs, however, he could guess at the reason. He would have happily drained the bowl in one swallow, but Doctor Hofstad insisted that he drink it slowly. That led to one more complication, because his hands were by no means capable of holding either bowl or spoon. In the end, the doctor fed him, which made him feel like a child. It was no great humiliation in itself, but to be lost in a field of forgetfulness, weak as a newborn puppy, and on top of that unable to feed himself, was the ultimate in helplessness.
After that, there were more things to drink: a bright green potion that Doctor Hofstad assured him was necessary to help his lungs recover, but which tasted almost too foul to be worth it; more water in a desperate bid to wash the taste away; and another, much sweeter potion to deaden the pain and allow him to sleep.
That last must have been effective, for he had barely swallowed it when the blankets began to seem too warm and inviting to ignore.
When he woke again, the sun was shining through windows on the other side of the room, but the doctor was still there (or more likely there again), at the same desk, writing.
“Good afternoon,” he said, feeling much more capable of conversation than he had earlier. His lungs apparently agreed with him, as he was not met by another coughing fit just yet, although he could feel one waiting in the woods for the moment he said too much or breathed in too quickly.
“Ah. You’re awake again. Feeling better?”
“Much, thank you. Though I still don’t remember anything…”
“Don’t worry about it yet; you’re still in a bad way, even if you don’t feel it. Your memory will likely repair itself when you have the energy. It’s not that you stopped breathing, anyway, which is all to the good, or you wouldn’t be able to speak, so it’s probably just a temporary thing. Think about getting well first.”
“Yes, doctor.” There was something familiar about, if not this man, then his brisk manner. He supposed he must have known someone like him before. That was something to know, in any case. He had very little, and everything was a help.
He had more soup, after that, still just as humiliating to be fed, and another dose of that horrible green concoction. It did seem to be working, at least: he felt better, his breath easier. Even his hands hurt less. However, he was still exhausted. The next day or two (he was never entirely sure, afterward, how long it had been) passed in the same way, sleeping and eating and drinking medicine and sleeping again. The doctor was always there when he awoke, though he knew a doctor must have other calls on his time. It was a comfort, in a way, to have something familiar to wake up to.
Several days later, his hands felt like his again, and Doctor Hofstad said it was time to take off the bandages.
“They’re still swollen,” he observed. “At least I don’t feel like I’m wearing gloves anymore, though.”
“You had frostbite,” explained the doctor. “You’re lucky the damage wasn’t much worse, considering how long you must have been out in the cold.”
“What could I have been doing?” he asked, not expecting an answer, least of all from himself. Even his dreams had brought him no more knowledge, not even his name. He might have been born from the snow that night, a creature without past or identity, wandering until he was found and let in out of the cold.
“I don’t know; no one’s gone missing from hereabouts, and there would be no reason to be out on such a cold night unprepared,” Doctor Hofstad said. “On that subject, what should we call you? Not forever, just until you get your memory back. You can’t go wandering about without a name.”
He thought, but all of the names he might once have known seemed to have faded from his memory, leaving only the ones he had heard since waking: Kjell, Karl, Gudrun, Tollak, Siri, Dagmar.
“Would you give me a name?”
Doctor Hofstad looked surprised, then he smiled so that the corners of his eyes crinkled. “If you like. Let me think…How does Lasse sound? A good name, whether you’re Kalevasi or Nordhvegr.”
He rolled it over in his mind, looking for a sense of fitting, of rightness. He did not find it, but he found no sense of wrongness either. It was a nice name, a normal name, for a person not a creature of the snow. “I like it. Thank you, Doctor.”
“You might as well call me Kjell; everyone does. Once I’ve seen them all naked there’s no point in staying formal.”
Lasse, new-named, threw back his head and laughed loud and long.
First Luote: Disappearing
He was cold. That was all he was sure of. He was cold, his feet—did he have two or four?—were bare, the night was dark, it smelled of pine and ice that crystallized in his nose. He was cold, and he was running.
Somewhere behind him they were coming. Not as fast, maybe, but they would not stop. He could outrun them for now, maybe for a day, a week, a month, but they had his scent in their noses and more, they had the Blood Hunt on him. Sooner or later, they would catch him. Maybe not for a while, if he was careful, but when he thought they had given up, when he stopped running, they would. And he hated running.
Now he was sure of two things. He was cold, and they were coming.
He thought he might be near the border. In the dark, through fields and woods, he could not tell exactly, but he had been not too far from the border—three hours at a run, they had measured it once—and it must have been three hours by now or more. Not that the border mattered. A Blood Hunt was more important than borders.
If only there were some way he could hide from them, for just long enough that they searched through where he was and went on. It would give him time to think of a way to repair something of what had sent him careening through the midnight snow. If only there were a way to foil the Blood Hunt, a way to change his smell and taste on the air until they would not find him.
Oh.
There was a way.
It was the third thing he was sure of: he was cold, they were coming, and he knew of a way to evade the Blood Hunt. He knew that, when even his name seemed unimportant and far away. If he could get a little time and a little chance, he might escape them yet.
First he would have to foil their noses, make them rely on the Blood Hunt. He turned from the wood where the snow was less deep and fled on tiring legs to the river he could hear away to his left, running so fast and deep that it did not freeze entirely.
He was colder still when he came wet and shaking out of the water, but the cold was becoming almost comfortable. The wind bit deep. He would not last long enough like this; it would do him no good to delay them if he died before ever they found him. He was certain enough of that to make a charm fill his bones with warmth, driving back the cold. It would last long enough, he had to hope.
Down and away from the river he ran, running wherever there was no snow to make tracks, wherever his scent might be lost. He should find somewhere, somewhere to stop and do what he had to do, but in the dark he did not know where he was.
There was a light, he realized. Someone somewhere was still awake, even in this dark night. He stumbled towards it, coaxing the last strength from his muscles. That would do. That was close enough.
Strange, how he was not sure of his own name but could see the ritual he had to perform as though the vellum scroll were in front of his eyes at that moment. He knew the words, and somehow he still had the will. The ruby beneath his skin burned sun-hot as he twisted himself up and away. It hurt.
He was tired. Not far away, there was a darker shape against the darkness. He stumbled toward it, feet bare and cold-numbed. A door, shadow against shadow, was open a crack, and he fell in to living warmth and blessed sleep.
Kjell was used to being woken rudely from what little sleep he had managed to snatch, so it came as no surprise to him that the sound startling him into wakefulness was someone hammering on his door.
“What is it?” he called ahead of himself. There were no more babies due this month after the one that had kept him awake until the wee hours of the morning, but one might have come early. And it was always possible that in the however many hours (not enough, he feared) it had been since dawn someone had been injured or taken sick. He hoped, guiltily, for the former: the town had only just recovered from the regular winter outbreak of icebreak cough, which meant that he had only just recovered from the winter outbreak of pitiful, mute children unable to understand why he could not just bring their voices back. He did not have the energy for another round of illness.
Outside was Karl Berthelsen, the wheelwright and an old friend. Unlike those newer to the town, he never felt the need to tip his hat to Kjell or wait to be invited in. “You’ve got to come,” he said as soon as he could see Kjell. “Olaf, he found someone sleeping in the barn.”
“A stranger?” Kjell asked, bundling hastily into coat, boots, hood, and gloves. It was not truly a necessary question; Karl would have said if it was anyone he knew, and he knew everyone in town and had the best memory for faces of anyone Kjell had ever met.
“No one I’ve ever once seen, sure. He looks like he was out all night, too. Gudrun took him in by the fire to do what she can, but it doesn’t look good.”
Karl’s brief summary was unhappily accurate, Kjell discovered upon arriving at the Berthelsen house on the edge of town. The mysterious stranger—from across the border in Kalevas by the look of him—was breathing so shallowly that Kjell would not have wagered money on his being able to raise mist on a spoon, and he was no longer shivering. The warmth of the house might bring him around, if the shock of the change did not kill him. Kjell would have to see that it did not. He hated seeing people die of cold, though it happened every year.
“Bring blankets,” he told Gudrun. A sensible woman who had lived with the deadly cold all her life, she already had them ready. Looking around, his eye fell on young Olaf, still only a child whose work would not be missed for the day. “Olaf, help me warm him.”
Olaf obeyed Kjell’s instructions, stripping out of his shirt and crawling under the blankets with the stranger so that their skin was touching. “He’s cold,” Olaf complained, but only once.
“I know, but you’re going to warm him up,” said Kjell, doing the same. His job, however, was more complicated. He focused on the shallow movement of the stranger’s chest under his hands, shut his eyes, and went in.
Inside the cold body, blood was still moving, but it was chill and sluggish. It felt like pine sap to Kjell’s magical self. Carefully, he sank deeper, tying the stranger to his magical self and, through it, to his own body, warm and strong beneath the blankets. His heart was beating strongly; he lent some of its strength to keep the blood moving. His blood was hot; he lent some of its warmth. Then, pulling away a little before the cold sickened him too, he guided the warmer blood, coaxing it toward the chest rather than the limbs. There would be frostbite to deal with later, he could feel its presence bitter-sharp to his magical self, but saving the life had to come first. He maintained the connection and kept husbanding the heat until the weak heartbeat strengthened and he could feel the warm rush of blood doing the rest. Then he pulled out, back to his own body, and let sleep take him.
When he woke again, the high sun was in his eyes and the chest under his hands was warm. Kjell took this as a sign that it was more than time for him to check on the patient again, using his eyes this time.
He was breathing steadily now, but his heartbeat was still a touch fainter than Kjell would have liked. Somebody, probably Gudrun, had taken it on themselves to treat the frostbite in his hands and feet. They were still cold, but some of the color was coming back. Otherwise, the stranger looked well on the way to a full recovery. Sleep would do him good, hopefully enough that he would be awake and able to be moved by sundown. It was not fair to the Berthelsens to have their kitchen turned into a sickroom unexpectedly; Kjell would move the invalid as soon as possible to his own house, where there was a spare bedroom. That would have to wait until Karl came back to help, but it could not be more than a few hours.
Kjell cursed. If it was only a few hours to sundown, Yngve Ohlsen was waiting at Kjell’s office to see if his sprained wrist had healed.
Dressing hastily, he made for the door, only to be brought up short by the sight that met his eyes when he opened it.
Coming down the street were four Kalevasi, a common enough sight so close to the border, but these were no ordinary Kalevasi. They were in strange dress, almost military but with blood-red trim no military ever wore, and the smell of ritual magic hung around them. More than that, they walked down the street as if they owned it, as if nothing and no one could stop them from going wherever they wanted.
To Kjell’s surprise, they made straight for the Berthelsens’ door. He backed away without thinking. These were not people he wanted to face unless he had to.
One, a man taller than even Karl whose tawny hair had more brown in it than blond, spoke. “We seek entrance, in the name of King Viljami and by right of the Blood Hunt.”
The Blood Hunt! Kjell had heard of such a thing, but he had never known one to happen in all his days. The Blood Hunt, it was said, was a ritual only the king of Kalevas could perform, to give his chosen Hunters a sense of their prey that would never fade or be lost. They would never stop until their target was in their hands or they were every one of them dead. It was a child’s story, and now it had come to Vagnorvik.
Gudrun took his place at the door when he stepped back. She bowed and let the Blood Hunters, if that was what they truly were, in. “How can I help you, my lords?” she asked.
The same man spoke again. “We seek the erstwhile Prince of Kalevas. He has proven himself a traitor and a madman, yet a cunning one withal, for he contrived a way to evade the Blood Hunt. Yet we tracked him so far and heard it said that there was a stranger new-come to this house. Where is he, that we may see if it is he whom we seek?”
Kjell followed them into the kitchen, in case there was something he could do—and also, he had to admit, motivated by a good deal of curiosity. The stranger might be the Prince, for all Kjell could see, as he certainly looked Kalevasi, but unconscious and half-dead he hardly seemed like a “traitor and a madman”.
He was still unconscious. The Blood Hunters circled him, and the leader’s amber eyes turned red as he spoke words in Old Kalevasi that had to be a ritual of some kind. It made him look like a monster in the light, some creature out of the deep forests come to plague their quiet village, and for a moment, Kjell was afraid. Then the red faded, and he was a man once more, a tall Kalevasi and nothing else.
“This is not he,” he said.
“You did not require the ritual for that,” said one of his companions, a woman with long, fair hair. “He has not the smell of the Prince, nor even of Kalevas. He is nothing to us, naught but a lost Nordhvegrsk.”
It seemed that that was all; the four turned and left as quickly as they came, the leader tossing a coin to Gudrun “for your trouble”.
“Well,” said Gudrun, when the house was like they had never been there. “That was…strange.”
Kjell had to agree with her. Then he remembered that he was even later than before and cursed as he hurried out into the winter street. Wondering about Blood Hunts and missing princes would just have to wait.
He woke slowly from dreams that faded into a handful of faces and a vague sense of urgency. He was surprised to be warm, though he did not recall why he should be surprised. Perhaps he had been cold when he had fallen asleep? It seemed the most likely.
He tried to sit up before his eyes were properly open and gasped at sudden pain. That woke him the rest of the way all in a second: he became aware of a tingling pain in his hands and feet, and a general lethargy in all his body, but his mind was very decidedly present. Wondering what had happened, he opened his eyes.
He was in bed in a small but well-appointed room he did not recognize. Blue light was coming in through the small square windows; it was a winter morning after snow in the night, then. Looking down, he saw that his hands were wrapped in bandages: unsurprising, considering that they hurt even when he was not attempting to put weight on them. They did not feel entirely part of him, nor did his feet, except for the pain. He wondered what had happened to him. Cold, he thought, might have such an effect, but what had he been doing out in the cold so ill-prepared as to injure himself? He knew better than that, he was sure.
Someone else was in the room: a tall, thin man with red-blond hair, who was sitting at a desk beneath the windows and writing something. He wondered who the man was. He might as well ask; the man probably knew what had happened to him at the very least. “Excuse me?” Was his voice supposed to be that hoarse? He broke out in a fit of coughing, each cough making his chest ache bone-deep.
The man was by his side phenomenally quickly, one hand steady on his back, supporting him as he struggled for breath that would not come. “Easy, easy, don’t force it. You’re fine.” After a terrifying few seconds, it proved to be true: he drew one long breath, then another. “You’ve been out for a while; hold on and I’ll get you something to drink.”
He accepted the mug of water gratefully when it came. When he spoke again, his voice was still weaker than it should have been, but it did what he asked of it with no more rebellion. “Thank you. What—happened? To me?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. I’ve no doubt it’s a fascinating story, one I only come in at the end of: a friend of mine found you sleeping in his barn half-dead yesterday morning and called me in. I’m Kjell Hofstad, by the way, doctor and petty healer in this town.”
He nodded. That made sense. The cold would have affected his mind, so it was no great wonder that he could not remember how he had come to be in a stranger’s barn, of all places, on a winter night. “I’m—” he stopped abruptly. Only when he began to say his name did he realize that he had no idea what it was. Trying not to panic, he searched desperately through memory, but there was nothing there at all, only unending blankness up until the last minutes. “I—I don’t know who I am.”
Was it part of being a doctor, he wondered, to never seem surprised? Doctor Hofstad gave no exclamation, barely even moved, but after a few breaths of time he asked, “Do you have any idea what might have caused this?”
“No,” he said, uncertainly at first and then as he thought back again more definitely. “No. I remember nothing before waking up here. Not my name, not where I come from, not what happened to me.”
“Alright. For now, don’t try to force yourself to remember: it’s likely to do more harm than good. Just focus on getting better. Do you think you’re awake enough for some soup? It’ll do you good to get something warm in you.”
“Yes. I would like that.”
The soup when it came was more broth than anything, but it was still the most delicious smell in the world, though it seemed faintly dull, less vivid than it should have been, for no real reason. Considering the amount of truly disgusting phlegm currently residing in his lungs, however, he could guess at the reason. He would have happily drained the bowl in one swallow, but Doctor Hofstad insisted that he drink it slowly. That led to one more complication, because his hands were by no means capable of holding either bowl or spoon. In the end, the doctor fed him, which made him feel like a child. It was no great humiliation in itself, but to be lost in a field of forgetfulness, weak as a newborn puppy, and on top of that unable to feed himself, was the ultimate in helplessness.
After that, there were more things to drink: a bright green potion that Doctor Hofstad assured him was necessary to help his lungs recover, but which tasted almost too foul to be worth it; more water in a desperate bid to wash the taste away; and another, much sweeter potion to deaden the pain and allow him to sleep.
That last must have been effective, for he had barely swallowed it when the blankets began to seem too warm and inviting to ignore.
When he woke again, the sun was shining through windows on the other side of the room, but the doctor was still there (or more likely there again), at the same desk, writing.
“Good afternoon,” he said, feeling much more capable of conversation than he had earlier. His lungs apparently agreed with him, as he was not met by another coughing fit just yet, although he could feel one waiting in the woods for the moment he said too much or breathed in too quickly.
“Ah. You’re awake again. Feeling better?”
“Much, thank you. Though I still don’t remember anything…”
“Don’t worry about it yet; you’re still in a bad way, even if you don’t feel it. Your memory will likely repair itself when you have the energy. It’s not that you stopped breathing, anyway, which is all to the good, or you wouldn’t be able to speak, so it’s probably just a temporary thing. Think about getting well first.”
“Yes, doctor.” There was something familiar about, if not this man, then his brisk manner. He supposed he must have known someone like him before. That was something to know, in any case. He had very little, and everything was a help.
He had more soup, after that, still just as humiliating to be fed, and another dose of that horrible green concoction. It did seem to be working, at least: he felt better, his breath easier. Even his hands hurt less. However, he was still exhausted. The next day or two (he was never entirely sure, afterward, how long it had been) passed in the same way, sleeping and eating and drinking medicine and sleeping again. The doctor was always there when he awoke, though he knew a doctor must have other calls on his time. It was a comfort, in a way, to have something familiar to wake up to.
Several days later, his hands felt like his again, and Doctor Hofstad said it was time to take off the bandages.
“They’re still swollen,” he observed. “At least I don’t feel like I’m wearing gloves anymore, though.”
“You had frostbite,” explained the doctor. “You’re lucky the damage wasn’t much worse, considering how long you must have been out in the cold.”
“What could I have been doing?” he asked, not expecting an answer, least of all from himself. Even his dreams had brought him no more knowledge, not even his name. He might have been born from the snow that night, a creature without past or identity, wandering until he was found and let in out of the cold.
“I don’t know; no one’s gone missing from hereabouts, and there would be no reason to be out on such a cold night unprepared,” Doctor Hofstad said. “On that subject, what should we call you? Not forever, just until you get your memory back. You can’t go wandering about without a name.”
He thought, but all of the names he might once have known seemed to have faded from his memory, leaving only the ones he had heard since waking: Kjell, Karl, Gudrun, Tollak, Siri, Dagmar.
“Would you give me a name?”
Doctor Hofstad looked surprised, then he smiled so that the corners of his eyes crinkled. “If you like. Let me think…How does Lasse sound? A good name, whether you’re Kalevasi or Nordhvegr.”
He rolled it over in his mind, looking for a sense of fitting, of rightness. He did not find it, but he found no sense of wrongness either. It was a nice name, a normal name, for a person not a creature of the snow. “I like it. Thank you, Doctor.”
“You might as well call me Kjell; everyone does. Once I’ve seen them all naked there’s no point in staying formal.”
Lasse, new-named, threw back his head and laughed loud and long.
