The Ever After Read online

  “Ulla, Ulla!” Niko shouted, followed by demanding babble I couldn’t understand. He held his pudgy hands to me until I scooped him up.

  “Give her space,” Mia commanded, and Finn took the twins from her so she could give me a proper hello. She pulled me into a side hug, since my arms were full of Niko. “Welcome home, Ulla.”

  We all went into the house, and I let the kids interrogate me. They didn’t believe me at first when I told them I couldn’t remember what happened, but once they were convinced, they grew bored fairly quickly because all my answers were “I don’t know.”

  I sat at the kitchen table, sipping sun tea and hungrily devouring the mulberry tarts Hanna had made. Finn asked his mother to take the younger kids upstairs to play, so it was only Mia, Hanna, and myself sitting around the large farm table.

  “What’s going on?” Mia asked, eyeing her husband.

  Finn came back from helping herd the children up the stairs, and he took the Jem-Kruk book from my bag. “I don’t know, but it’s definitely odd.” He set the book on the table and slid it across, toward Hanna and Mia.

  “Why do you have Grandpa Johan’s book?” Hanna asked, wrinkling her nose.

  Mia looked just as confused, and she touched the cover tentatively. “Where did you get this?”

  “From the Mimirin,” I said. “I’m borrowing it, technically.” So far, I’d just stolen it and defaced it, but that wasn’t the kind of example I wanted to set for Hanna, so I modified the truth.

  Finn sat down beside me and asked them, “What do you know about this?”

  “Not much.” Mia flipped through the first few pages absently, her brow furrow deepening, and she shook her head. “Nikolas’s—” She stopped, her eyes flitting to me. “Hanna’s—” She stumbled again, now looking to Finn.

  “Nikolas’s father wrote children’s books,” she started again, and this time it went more smoothly. “He published a few of them, but all of that was when Nikolas was very young. By the time I was dating Nikolas, Johan hadn’t written in years and years, and he’d put that all behind him.”

  She looked at me and Finn. “Why are you asking about it?”

  “Because it’s just like I said!” Hanna announced excitedly. “This book is about Eliana!”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “But there are some things that correlate to real life in unusual ways.”

  “What do you mean?” Mia asked.

  “I think I’ve met Jem-Kruk,” I said, filling her in on all the things I’d told Finn on the car ride home. “And Senka—Jem-Kruk’s friend mentioned in the book—may be my mother.”

  “Wait.” Hanna’s big brown eyes widened. “Are you saying that your mom is related to my father? Does that make us cousins?”

  “No,” I told her definitively before she got carried away. “No, I haven’t read anything that suggests that. But it does seem like your grandfather might know something.”

  “What about Eliana? I was reading the book, because there were things that matched up. Like the grapefruit pink sky, the suns called Kyr, Nuk, and Veli, and the dragon reference,” Hanna said without taking a breath. “There’s probably even more, but she didn’t remember much—” She gasped. “Do you think that what happened to you is the same thing that happened to Eliana? Like with her amnesia?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe, but she had forgotten her entire life. I’m only missing the past month.”

  “I bet it’s the same,” Hanna said firmly.

  All the while Hanna and I had been talking, Mia had been leaning back in the chair, her arms folded over her chest, and her lips pressed into a tight line that only grew tighter.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m having a hard time understanding,” she said. “Nikolas has been gone for a long time. What could he possibly have to do with—with—” She waved a hand in frustration. “With your imprisonment, and my daughter’s elusive pixie friend?”

  Mia took a deep breath and the severity of her expression relaxed slightly. “This all seems strange and … overwhelming. For me.”

  Upstairs, Liam let out an angry yell, which was followed by Emma screaming.

  “Hanna, why don’t you go upstairs and help Grandma Annali with the kids?” Finn suggested. She rolled her eyes, but she complied.

  Once Hanna had gone, Finn looked to his wife and apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize this would be upsetting to you. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “No, it’s fine.” She shook her head. “How is this all connected?”

  “I think the place in the book is real, and that Johan has been there,” I said. “And I think it’s where my mother and Eliana are from.”

  “He never mentioned anything like that,” Mia said. “Johan and Sarina had lived in Eftershom since before Nikolas was born. They never even talked about living anywhere else.” She paused, thinking. “At an anniversary party once, Sarina did say something about them moving into their house right before the big thunder snowstorm.

  “Not much happened in Eftershom, so everyone talked about the big thunder snowstorm that happened two years before I was born,” Mia said. “So that was 1989.”

  “That was before the book was published,” Finn said. “At least, according to the publication date on the back page.”

  “He wrote that book for Nikolas, when he was still a baby,” Mia explained. “So he had to have published it from Eftershom. But by the time I started dating Nikolas, we were teenagers. We didn’t want to talk about fairy tales or his father.”

  She looked out the window, watching pensively as the branches of a weeping willow swayed in the breeze.

  “I just haven’t thought about any of this in such a long time,” she said finally, still staring off. “I can reach out to Johan. Obviously, he’ll know more about his own life than I do.”

  Finn got up and went around the table to sit beside her, and he put his hand on her arm. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded and wiped at her eyes. “I don’t know why, thinking of Nikolas just…” She managed a sad smile and pushed her chair back. “I just need a moment.”

  Mia went into another room, and Finn waited a beat before going after her. I knew that she loved Finn and their children and their life together, but she had also loved Nikolas. She didn’t talk to me about her first marriage much, but I knew they’d both been young and in love. Mia had only been nineteen when she became a widow, and Hanna was still in diapers.

  It was nearly ten years ago, when the Trylle and Vittra were at odds, gearing up for what would be known as the War for the Princess. It officially kicked off when the Vittra attacked the sleepy Trylle village of Oslinna, where Mia, Nikolas, and Hanna were living at the time. Hobgoblins with supernatural strength snuck in during the middle of the night and completely decimated the town.

  Mia said once that it looked like a tornado had gone through afterward, with houses completely flattened. Nikolas was killed trying to protect Mia and Hanna.

  While Finn was off comforting Mia, I reached across the table and pulled Johan’s book back over to me. I flipped through it, scanning the worn paper, until I spotted a passage underlined in bold ink.

  “A bird will fall in love with a magi but where will they hatch their egg?” Senka asked sadly.

  I turned through more pages, searching for other underlined passages, and I finally found another, thirty-three pages later.

  The suns set in the green sky when the good morning becomes the violent night.

  And then another twenty-one pages later, a similar message underlined:

  “Remember the words of the häxdoktor—the suns will set in the green sky when the good morning becomes the violent night,” Jo-Huk warned his brother.

  The final lines I found underlined were at the very end of the book, in the unsigned acknowledgments. There were only three sentences, brief but impactful.

  Some stories demand to be told, and this was one of them. I thank my family for allowing me the time to take my hand at telling i
t. All of this was written before, and no doubt it will be again.

  Finn’s cell phone rang from the other room, a shrill tone loud enough to easily be heard over the sound of screaming children if need be. A few minutes later, he came into the kitchen with a hopeful smile.

  “That was my friend, the one that might be able to help you recover your memory,” he said. “They can meet you at the palace right now, if you’re up for it.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I’m ready to remember everything.”

  4

  Exchanged

  Finn and I waited in the parlor, and I was happy that I’d changed out of my ill-fitting attire into a much more presentable crocheted romper. I had been to a few events at the palace—ancillary invites, thanks to Finn—but those had all been in grand ballrooms crowded with other guests. This was my first time in the smaller, more private but still luxe areas of the Queen’s residence.

  The Trylle palace was the most modern I had seen, an opulent white mansion near the top of the bluffs with plenty of windows to make the most of the lush view of thick forests and a wide river.

  The parlor was in the corner of the palace, with the two outer walls made entirely of glass. The wallpaper was cream colored with a subtle shine accentuating a pale green vine pattern. Books lined the shelves on one wall, and on the other, above a marble fireplace, was a painting of a stunning young woman, sitting in a garden.

  We waited, Finn poised and still, one leg crossed over the other as he sat on the settee. I sat across from him, literally on the edge of my seat. I had an irrational fear that the delicately carved legs and embroidered satin would collapse under me, like it was made of matchsticks.

  “Who are we meeting?” I asked as I watched the hands tick slowly on the bronze grandfather clock behind Finn. Before we’d left, all he had told me was that it was a mutual friend of the Queen’s, and she wanted to meet with us too.

  “Tove Kroner,” Finn said. “You’ve met him before.”

  I had, but only a handful of times, and he’d hardly spoken to me. The few times he came by the house, I was usually busy with the kids, and he generally seemed very soft-spoken. What I knew of him was that he was an advisor to the Queen, and he’d married the Chancellor Bain Ottesen several years ago.

  “He can help recover memories?” I asked in surprise.

  The kids talked a lot about all the cool telekinetic abilities he had, and I had personally seen him make the kids “fly” by lifting them in the air with his powers at Liam’s birthday party last year. But I’d never heard he was capable of something like this.

  Many trolls had the ability of persuasion—a telekinetic power to get someone to do something using only their thoughts. Basically, a mild form of mind control.

  Finn had attempted to use it on me earlier today, at my request, by thinking Remember the last twenty-four hours, but it had been completely ineffective. So I couldn’t imagine that he’d brought me here for Tove to try that, but I didn’t think that Tove flying me around the room would help either.

  “No, he’ll be here as support mainly,” Finn said. “His younger sister Sunniva has a unique set of abilities. Their mother is a great healer, and Sunniva’s inherited some of her skills. Both Tove and Sunniva can see auras, but she can also heal them.”

  “She can heal auras?” I shook my head in confusion.

  I didn’t understand what that meant or how it could recover my memories. Admittedly, I didn’t know much about auras, just their general definition. Auras were the luminous radiation that surrounded all living beings, emanating from within, and their coloration could give indications about someone’s health, mood, even true intentions.

  But auras weren’t visible to everyone, and since I couldn’t see them, I didn’t study them.

  “Auras appear to be light floating around you, but they’re really a part of you,” Finn explained. “But they also can work like a road map, darkening in the areas you’re hurting or need help. Sunniva’s had some success with working on those dark spots to ease psychological trauma and pain.”

  “I don’t think my memory loss is due to trauma, though. I left myself notes in preparation for it, so I knew it was coming. It had to have been a spell or some type of troll ability.”

  “I presumed as much, so I told Tove the same,” Finn said. “He still thinks he and Sunniva might be able to help you.”

  A minute later, the door to the parlor opened, and the Queen strode in. It was the first time I had seen Wendy without her entourage.

  But here she was, on her own and stripped of her usual pageantry. Her long curls hung down her back, free of her crown, and she’d left off most of her jewels. She was in her late twenties, with a stark silver lock of hair contrasting with her otherwise dark brown hair, and she had friendly eyes and a cool, anxious smile.

  I got to my feet the moment she opened the door, but Finn still beat me. Wendy went to him first, giving him a cordial hug while offering apologies. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. Tove and Sunniva are on their way.”

  “No apology necessary,” he assured her. “You’ve already done so much. I’m only sorry that I need to keep imposing on you.”

  “Finn, it’s no imposition, and you know that,” she said, then turned to me. “Ulla, it’s so good to see you after the ordeal you’ve had.” She dismissed my curtsey with a wave of her hand and motioned for me to sit down beside her on the settee.

  “I’m all right, all things considered,” I said.

  “Good.” She smiled. “We were all so worried about you here.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate all you’ve done to help.”

  “You are a citizen of the Trylle kingdom, and it’s my duty to protect you,” she said. “Your family are among my oldest friends. There was no choice between your life and a flowering plant.”

  “… what?” I asked.

  “That’s what we traded,” she elaborated. “The mourning flower.”

  “What?” I repeated. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not sure how much you remember.” She glanced to Finn, and he gave a small shrug before she looked back at me. “We negotiated through Patrik Boden in Isarna, who was talking with the leader of a radicalized tribe called the Älvolk. Most of the time, he only sent lengthy screeds about his beliefs with no real discussion at all.

  “But eventually, the only thing they demanded was the sorgblomma, more poetically known as the mourning flower,” she went on.

  “I thought that was just made up,” I admitted.

  Emma had a book called Sunny Plants for Funny Kids, and it had everything from Venus flytraps to Tolkien’s fictional Ents. I’d assumed that a globeflower with the Latin name trollius funus was a myth like some of the others.

  If the illustrations were accurate, it was an arctic bush with large peony-like flowers. The petals were mostly a bold yellow-gold but they became a vivid red near the stem. The stem itself was filled with a viscous, aloe-like substance that “bled” out if the thorns were broken off.

  The most notable thing about the flower—and where its name came from—was that it smelled like death. Sickly sweet and musty with floral undertones.

  “The mourning flower is real, but the only known plants have been solely in my family’s possession for generations,” Wendy said.

  “What does it do? Why do they want it?” I asked.

  “We’re not sure,” the Queen admitted with a surreptitious glance toward Finn. “We’re hoping that your recovered memories could shed some light.”

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to help.”

  “Don’t worry.” Finn leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees. “You’re here, and you’re safe, and your only focus is on getting better.”

  “I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that I was exchanged for … flowers,” I said. “What about the others? Were the flowers ransom enough for all of us, or were they traded for something else?”

  “It was
a package deal—all of the plants for all four of you.” Wendy hesitated slightly before continuing. “That’s part of the reason that the negotiations took as long as they did. We needed time to be sure that the sorgblomma doesn’t have any dangerous applications.”

  Finn made a sound—a subtle grunt of disagreement—and she frowned.

  “We all value your lives, but I had to be sure that I wasn’t handing a radical cult a weapon of destruction,” she said, then softer, more empathetic: “I’m sorry for any suffering you endured, but it is my duty to keep the kingdom safe.”

  “So what were the applications of the flower?” I asked.

  “The nectar in the stem can be used to flavor tea, but it leaves a bitter taste and even a spoonful can lead to stomach upset,” she said with a sigh. “We couldn’t find anything more serious than that. Markis Ansvarig Patrik asked the Älvolk what they wanted the flowers for, but the only answer he got was their insistence that the flowers always belonged to them. Indu claimed—”

  “Indu?” I asked, startled to hear her saying his name.

  “Indu Mattison, one of the leaders of the Älvolk cult,” she said. “You remember him?”

  “Sorta. Not really. He’s … he’s my father,” I said, but the words felt cold on my tongue.

  Her eyes widened. “He never mentioned that.” Then she looked to Finn. “Neither did you.”

  “I only just found out today,” he told her.

  “It’s one of the last things I remember clearly,” I said. “We met in Isarna a month ago.”

  “So he held his daughter hostage in exchange for a flower and tea flavoring.” Her brow furrowed, and her lips pressed together, and I realized this was the first time I’d seen the Queen worried.

  5

  Aural

  The wood floor felt cold and hard against my back, and a stiff satin pillow was beneath my head. Tove Kroner crouched beside me, carefully laying a damp washcloth across my forehead. His dark hair fell into his eyes, and he brushed it back while glancing up at his sister as she circled us.