A Solstice Journey Read online

  That earned me a bark of laughter from the two of them.

  “We know not this Boston that you speak of,” the other horseman announced. “You are in the lands of Sút.”

  I blinked in shock. Winter, I was in the lands of Winter, if I was understanding him correctly. For a moment I wondered if I had actually passed out because of the wine at the party and was slowly freezing to death in the Public Garden. It wasn’t like anyone was going to miss me. The office was closed until after Christmas. My mother would miss me on Christmas when I didn’t call her, but that was about it. And that was three days from now.

  It was all so unreal.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I told them, my teeth beginning to chatter. I didn’t know if it was because of the cold or the shock. I was shivering now, and I knew I needed to either get moving again or get on one of their horses, because I was exhausted and needed to get out of the cold. “I was walking to get the train home and then there was all this snow.”

  The two horsemen looked at each other and then at me. “Then we should take you to shelter,” I was told, grudgingly. “Do you know how to ride?”

  “I don’t,” I answered.

  More laughter from the two of them. I wanted to ask if they knew how to use a computer, because that was a lot more useful to me than dealing with an animal to go from one place to another, even if it did smell better than public transportation in Boston. But I wasn’t going to argue with them, because this was the only rescue I could expect. As insane as it sounded, I almost believed them when they told me I wasn’t in Boston anymore. It was true, this didn’t feel like Boston. The air smelled different and the snow felt different too. It seemed fake, like it was whatever was used in the movies for snow, but it was cold enough to kill me if I stayed out too much longer.

  “You will ride pillion behind me,” one told me, as if he expected me to argue with him. I was grateful for the ride out of there. It wasn’t like I knew how to ride, so having someone else controlling the animal wasn’t an insult.

  He looked me over critically and then got off his horse gracefully, like he was a gymnast dismounting from a balance beam. “You are going to need help up,” he said, sounding annoyed.

  Had I been warm enough, I would have blushed. I felt really stupid, but he helped me onto the horse, and I managed not to fall off on the other side after I was up there. I sat on my coat, and it was a little bound and bunched up underneath me, but I was warm. My savior managed to remount while in armor and with me sitting there like a bump on a log, with the same grace he had shown climbing down. He settled into the saddle, and I sort of guessed what to do, because I had ridden on the back of an old boyfriend’s motorcycle while in high school. I shifted a little and leaned forward so I could grab him if I needed to. I was strongly of the opinion I was going to fall off as soon as the horse started moving.

  “My name is Celyn,” he called back over his shoulder. “And yours, Álfr?”

  I wasn’t going to get upset about him calling me elf until we got to someplace warm. Principles were nice, but living was a lot better. If I got him mad at me, he might dump me back into the snow. “Gunnar,” I said, wondering if I was bold enough to grab onto him if I started to slide off the horse. “Gunnar Dagviðurson.”

  I got a grunt at that, and then the horse began to move. I couldn’t call it a trot or a gallop, the thing just moved. It was a smooth ride, though, so I didn’t do much more than hide my head against Celyn’s back. The ride reminded me even more of a motorcycle because it seemed so fast and smooth.

  I couldn’t see where we were going, because every time I looked up, the scenery around us seemed blurred. I had no idea where we were, but I was finally convinced I wasn’t in Boston, no matter how crazy it was. I felt a little panicky, but I wasn’t freezing to death anymore. I was tired, though, and was fighting the urge to nod off now that I was warm, because I didn’t know what would happen if I fell off the horse. Would it be like a fall off a motorcycle, which could be deadly? Or actually be like slipping off a horse’s back, painful and embarrassing, but not deadly. I didn’t want to find out and just hung on.

  We eventually arrived… someplace, because the horses stopped. Celyn dismounted easily, and then he turned to look at me, a slight smile on his lips. I slid off the horse more than climbed, but I landed on my feet without hurting myself. I thought he was impressed. As I straightened out my coat, I became aware of how warm it was, so I unbuttoned it. My suit was probably a mess, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to make a good impression on these people in a plain blue suit, not when they ran around in silver armor.

  We stood in the middle of what could have been a village green. I didn’t understand, one minute we were riding and the next we were stopped. The place was pretty. The ground seemed to be covered by a mixture of clover and grasses, soft underneath my feet. I looked around in amazement. We seemed to have been dropped into the middle of an ideal medieval village, with people moving about their business. Houses dotted the landscape, small one- or two-story whitewashed buildings, with what I guessed were thatched roofs. Most of them had a small stone wall around the yard, and I could see that was for keeping the chickens out of everyone’s way. Right next to us rose a large building built out of stone that could have been called a castle, it was so big.

  People came to lead the horses away to be taken care of, I guessed. The silent horseman was staring at me—staring right through me would be a better description, and it was eerie.

  “Stand down, Bleddyn,” Celyn said with a grin. “I’m pretty sure that the Álfr is harmless.”

  I bit my lip at that, but these people seemed to be some sort of medieval warriors, so next to them, I probably did seem harmless, even if I could make two of them in size. I didn’t know how to use the muscles I had. I wasn’t out of shape, since a lot of dating in the gay scene depended on how good you looked. I had learned fast when I started dating in college that the pretty men were always picked up first and very few people were comfortable around a guy who looked like he bench-pressed small cars as a hobby. I didn’t look like that, not really, even if I did lift at the gym so that I avoided getting a gut while sitting behind a desk all day.

  My heart skipped a beat when I got a closer look at my rescuer as he took off his helmet and shook his braid loose. He stretched a little and then tucked his helmet under his arm. It must have been a long ride for him too. He was a lot prettier with the helmet off, and I noticed his ears had a rare delicate curve and were almost lobeless. But what I really noticed was that he had a sword strapped to his hip, and he moved like he knew how to use it. He was pretty, dangerous, and very out of my league. I didn’t even know why I was thinking of that. This had to be some sort of weird hallucination.

  Bleddyn nodded and fell behind Celyn, at his right shoulder. He looked like he was some sort of guard dog for a second, protecting Celyn from me.

  “Is that what Álfr wear?” Celyn asked me with a laugh after looking me over.

  “This is what I wear most of the time,” I said dryly. “I don’t know what elves wear because I’m not one.”

  “You have the look of them,” he replied, his voice light. “Not their tongue, though. You speak the language of the menskr.”

  Humans, I spoke the language of the humans, or man, if I understood him correctly. “Thank you,” I told him, in Italian, just to see how they responded.

  They looked confused. I repeated the phrase slowly in a couple of other languages. Besides Icelandic and English, I knew enough in several different languages to make myself understood before one of us got frustrated and switched to English. It was usually someone I was talking to and not the other way around. I finally said thank you in Icelandic, and they seemed to understand it.

  “What were all the words that you were speaking?” Celyn asked.

  “‘Thank you’ in a bunch of different human languages,” I said. “The tongues of man, I guess you would call them.”

&nb
sp; They appeared confused and a little worried, I thought.

  “They are many now?” Celyn asked. “So many that they don’t all speak the same tongue? We had not known that the nation of Man had grown so many over time. We ride less and less into it, content in our own lands.”

  “Yes,” I said shortly, wanting to avoid explaining that there were six billion people on Earth. I thought that wouldn’t be something they could understand. Something told me they thought a gathering of fifty or so people to be large. “Iceland, the nation that I come from, is considered to be very small. Boston is a city in what is called the United States, which is one of the larger nations on Earth.”

  Celyn and Bleddyn looked at each other, wordlessly communicating, it appeared, before Bleddyn bowed and marched off. It couldn’t have been called walking, because he moved and people got out of his way.

  “If I may ask, where are we now?” I said, once I realized Celyn wasn’t going to tell me, not that he had to. I was a guest, and there was such a thing as privacy.

  Celyn smiled. “It is called Ísshamr.”

  Ice home, I translated. But it wasn’t cold. It was almost too hot here, and I did want to strip down to my shirtsleeves. I felt sweat starting to trickle down my back.

  He looked over what I was wearing and shook his head. “I think that you would be more comfortable in something else,” he said with a nod.

  Celyn didn’t say anything else as he led me into the castle, nodding at all the people we passed. Most of them stared at me, and I didn’t know if it was because of how I was dressed or because of the way I looked. Everyone seemed pretty happy to see him. Once or twice we were stopped by someone who would talk to Celyn in quiet tones, but Celyn appeared embarrassed when this happened, so I just looked around, fascinated by my surroundings. I didn’t mind the stops, didn’t think he was rude, because he obviously had business to take care of that wasn’t me.

  The castle looked like it was almost picture perfect, as if this whole place was some sort of fantasy village. The building was made out of smooth stone, the corridors looking like they had been grown out of one piece of stone, since I couldn’t see any sign of mortar. They were wide enough for at least four men to walk side by side. The place almost sparkled. I didn’t know if it was because it was so clean or that there were crystals in the rock. It was impressive as any cathedral or castle that I had seen in my vagabond childhood.

  But the place wasn’t cold; there were small touches here and there that showed me that this place was someone’s home. A brightly woven rug in front of a door, small tables in the hallway with small knickknacks on them, things that showed me that people lived here. It took a couple of minutes for me to realize that I was in what could be considered the “private” part of the castle. It dawned on me when we stopped in front of a heavily carved door with a small bench beside it, and the fact that I hadn’t seen anyone trying to talk to Celyn for a couple of minutes.

  “We need to take off our boots now,” he instructed.

  I sat down and unlaced mine, a pair I had bought when I had been home last, because I knew they would be warm. I took them off and wiggled my toes a little. They were warm, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t been wandering in the snow long enough to worry about frostbite.

  Celyn slipped out of his boots just as easily, then handed me a pair of slippers from underneath the bench.

  “And what do I do with my boots?” I asked. I was nervous about someone taking them, but I also knew wandering around in the snow to find my way home wasn’t going to happen either.

  “One of the pages will clean them and return them,” he said. “Come inside now and let me give you something to wear.”

  “You have anything that is going to fit me?” I asked.

  Behind the door was his room and it was the size of a studio apartment, with the bed hidden in an alcove, wardrobes instead of closets, and in the corner a battered wooden desk piled with parchment and… sticks, for some reason. Complete with a stand in the corner that I assumed was for the armor he was wearing.

  I hesitated and then asked him what had been bothering me. “If you think that I’m an elf, and you called Boston the nation of Man, what are you?”

  “We are called Dökkálfar,” Celyn replied absentmindedly, seemingly focused on going through his wardrobe and seeing what he had that would fit me.

  I almost laughed. In the sagas and epic poems, that word meant “Dark Elves,” which a lot of people then translated into “dwarf,” for some reason. But these people weren’t dwarves. They did look a lot like elves, tall and willowy—but muscled too, since they wore metal armor that had to weigh a lot. And from what I’d seen so far, they were all blond, from the pale white of Celyn’s braid to a dirty blond that was almost brown. Their eyes were all blue and their skin was all pale. I stood out like a sore thumb, but I was used to it. With the noise and their language, if I closed my eyes, it could be like I was home. I felt a pang; my mother was going to be frantic if I didn’t get back to Boston before Christmas.

  “You know the word,” Celyn said.

  “I know the word,” I agreed and then added, “even though I look more like what people think a dwarf looks like than you do. But a lot of people think that elves are all supposed to be tall and blond, because of one fantasy author. But I grew up with tales of the Hidden Folk, which is what most sagas call elves and dwarves.”

  Celyn didn’t say anything as he handed me the clothing he had gathered. “You will be more comfortable in these.”

  I looked around for someplace to change and was shocked when I realized Celyn expected me to do so in front of him. I flushed, and he raised an eyebrow, amused by my embarrassment. “I am being forward with someone I have just met,” he acknowledged ruefully.

  Well, it wasn’t like I hadn’t stripped down in public before, because I did go to the gym fairly often. I just hadn’t expected to do it here.

  “I do usually dress alone,” I said.

  “No lover?” he asked with a slow smile.

  “Not at the moment,” I told him. “I’d transferred and broke it off with Ted when I left.”

  I didn’t know why I’d just told Celyn that.

  “A pity,” he commented, sounding sincere. He really appeared sorry that I didn’t have someone in my life. He also didn’t seem to care that I had just indirectly told him I was interested in guys. Or maybe he didn’t know Ted was a guy’s name.

  I walked over and laid the clothing on the seat of a wooden chair in front of the desk. I slipped out of my overcoat and then my suit jacket, hanging them on the back of the chair. I was unfastening my shirt when Celyn came over and examined the plastic buttons on my shirt. They would be a novelty here, I was sure.

  “So tiny and strange,” he said, studying them closely. Either that or he was checking out my chest, which just seemed weird.

  I shrugged out of my shirt and pulled off my undershirt before I grabbed the top I had been handed. The long tunic was a pretty off-white linen—I guessed, from the weight—and tightly woven. It was heavily embroidered with abstract patterns in faded reds, blues, and greens in cross-stitch with some other stitches I didn’t recognize. I slipped it on over my pants and it fell to my knees. I unzipped and unbuttoned my pants, glad my underwear was covered as I dropped my pants and toed off my slippers to get them off more easily. The floor wasn’t as cold as I would have thought a stone floor would be. I pulled on the loose pants he had given me. They were about the same color as the tunic, but a heavier fabric and drawstring-type and big enough for me, which surprised me, since I was a lot bulkier than Celyn. An oak tree to his willow, in a manner of speaking.

  I folded my shirt and pants and placed them on the chair, not knowing what else to do with them.

  “Do you need help getting out of that?” I asked Celyn, gesturing at the armor he still wore.

  “I don’t think that you have the skills for it,” he replied, eyes dancing merrily. “But I am glad that you are interested in get
ting me out of my clothing.”

  I flushed again. “That wasn’t what I meant!” I protested. I just didn’t think he would be interested in running around in a metal shirt if he didn’t have to.

  “A pity, then,” he said with a quick smile. “I had my hopes for a moment.”

  I didn’t know what to reply but was saved by a knock on the door. Before Celyn could say anything, it swung open and a woman strode into the room.

  She had the same pale hair as Celyn, piled on top of her head in a loose knot, a casually messy one, held together and up with a couple of large silver pins. She was wearing a long tunic of pale red that was pleated in some complicated manner and tied closed with several ribbons. She wore a pair of soft-looking black shoes. She could have been his wife or his sister, since she entered his room after barely pausing.

  “Your timing could be better, Llinos,” Celyn said as he smirked. “The Álfr was trying to seduce me.”

  Llinos looked at me, and I smiled weakly. She turned and rolled her eyes as she said to him fondly, “You’re a terrible tease, Celyn! The poor thing doesn’t need you teasing him on top of being lost.”

  “He wasn’t lost. Were you, Gunnar?” Celyn asked.

  “Well….” I started. “I didn’t think that I was lost, really, until you showed up.”

  “The Solstice thins the walls between the worlds,” Celyn said thoughtfully. “That is the only explanation. Even if you were raised with the menskr and know their ways, when the Solstice happened, you came here.”

  “I was usually at home—”

  “With the Álfr?” Llinos asked curiously.

  “With my family,” I snapped. “I’m not an elf, no matter what the two of you want to believe. I always had Christmas with my family, no matter what. It was just this year I couldn’t.”

  She frowned, and I felt like an ass for talking to her like that, but I was tired and beginning to panic about what I had gotten myself into. A little late now, but I was blaming that on the cold more than anything.

  “He is of the world of Man,” Celyn told her. “And I have been rude. Gunnar Dagviðurson, this is my cousin Llinos, a woman who is wise enough not to have wed me.”