The Morning Flower Read online

We sat at the table while Eyrun poured us a glass of homemade strawberry-rhubarb juice. I took in our surroundings, and Pan made small talk about her son’s art, slowly putting her at ease.

  I’d begun to realize that Pan had this way about him. With his soothing baritone, somehow strong and light all at once, he was a calming presence. It was hard not to feel like everything was going to be okay when you were around him … even if it wasn’t.

  “So, what is it you think I can help you with?” Eyrun asked as she sat down across from me. “I can tell you right off the bat that I never gave a child up for adoption, and you look like you’re eighteen? Seventeen? I would’ve been eight or nine when you were born.”

  “I’m nineteen,” I told her. “I didn’t suspect that you were my mother, but I thought you might know someone who may be connected to my parents.”

  “And who might that be?” she asked with pointed skepticism.

  “Indu Mattison,” I said.

  Eyrun looked away and let out a “Huh.” She didn’t say anything more, just stared off in thought.

  “We saw the name listed on the birth certificate of your child,” Pan said, calmly trying to salvage the conversation, which seemed poised to go off the rails before it even really started.

  She closed her eyes, almost wincing. “I suppose that is an unfortunate matter of public record.” Slowly she exhaled and opened her eyes again. “I didn’t want his name listed. But they take birth record and population info very seriously around here. They won’t let anyone slip by.”

  “We’re sorry to upset you,” Pan said quickly. “We never meant to bring up unpleasant memories.”

  Eyrun ignored him, resting her brown eyes on me. “You believe Indu to be your father?”

  I didn’t answer right away, because I didn’t know what the answer was. I hadn’t let myself consider that Indu Mattison might be my father. The idea of this Älvolk fanatic, impregnating Omte women for some reason … that wasn’t exactly the ideal father I’d conjured when I was growing up.

  But I also couldn’t deny the possibility—he’d had babies between 1994 and 2006, putting my birth in 1999 almost right smack in the middle. The woman I suspected to be my mother had last been seen in the First City—where Indu was alleged to be from.

  If he was not my father—as I hoped was the case—then it was still likely that he had crossed paths with my mother.

  If he never met her, he still knew where Áibmoráigi was.

  If he didn’t, he could still tell me something more about the Älvolk and maybe put me on the right track to finding the First City and the Lost Bridge of Dimma.

  No matter what, Indu was my biggest lead, and I needed to find him.

  “I think he knew my mother,” I clarified finally.

  Her lips pressed into a tight, painful smile. “He knows many women. I’m sure he knew her too.”

  “Is there anything you feel comfortable telling us about him?” Pan asked. “Or is there a way we can contact him?”

  “Your mother.” She twisted her wedding band, anxiously spinning the punch-pink gemstone around her finger. “What was her name?”

  “Orra Fågel.”

  “Orra Fågel,” she repeated as she considered it. “Wasn’t the Queen called Fågel before she married the King?”

  “They’re cousins,” I said.

  “I don’t think I knew an Orra, or any of the Fågels,” she decided at last. “That doesn’t mean much. Fulaträsk is bigger than it looks.”

  “We didn’t expect you to know much about Orra,” I admitted.

  “Right. You want to talk about Indu.” She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms, and looked out the window. “I don’t know how much I can tell you. I haven’t seen him in years, since before our daughter drowned.” She paused. “He didn’t even come for the funeral.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

  “Don’t be. Just don’t expect him to come to yours either,” she said flatly. “It sounds mean, but it’s not meant to be. It’s only facts. For as many kids as Indu had, he knows fuck-all about being a father.”

  “Why’d he do it?” Pan asked, and we both looked over at him. “Do you have any idea why he kept having children if didn’t want anything to do with them?”

  “Because he believed it was his duty as an Älvolk,” she explained bitterly. “His children are supposed to add to the numbers of his ‘thrimavolk,’ and he never did explain to me what exactly what that meant, just vaguely referenced needing to guard the Lost Bridge or protect the realm or whatever ogreshit it was he claimed to believe.

  “Honestly, I’m not even sure that he knows what for,” she said with a rough sigh. “He took an oath to spread his seed far and wide, and he was promised divinity and his heart’s every desire.”

  “And what were you promised?” I asked gently.

  Tears instantly formed in her eyes, but she smiled. “A daughter. A strong, healthy baby when so many struggled to conceive. He said his blood and mine would make a child of unrefuted strength, verging on an immortal.”

  She shook her head, but neither Pan nor I said anything, instead waiting for her to speak when she was ready. “I can’t tell you how much of what he said was a truth or a lie or merely a delusion. All I can say is that…” Her breath caught in her throat, but she pushed on. “All I can say is that Tindra did not live forever.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Pan said, and she held her hand up to silence him.

  “Do you know how to contact him?” I asked, hoping to change the subject. “I know you haven’t seen him in some time, but do you have a number or something else?”

  “Not anymore.” Eyrun shook her head. “I had a number once, but it went to some antiquated phone service where I left my number, and he’d call back when he had a chance. Or whenever he felt like it.

  “The last time we spoke, it was a bad connection on the phone,” she went on. “It was so staticky, and I’d told him that Tindra had passed, and all he cared about was getting her body to be buried in Áibmoráigi.”

  “That’s rather morbid,” Pan said.

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” she agreed. “Morbid and clinical and uncaring. I tried to discuss anything else with him, any other part of Tindra’s life, but he was fixated on getting her where he wanted, focused entirely on the logistics of how to transport from an off-the-grid swamp community to a hidden village in the Arctic.”

  “Do you remember where?” I asked. “Anything at all about the name or the location?”

  “I don’t remember exactly what he said.” She frowned. “But he mentioned the Kiruna Airport. He was ranting about it when I hung up on him.”

  We talked for a little while after that, but the conversation wound to a close relatively fast. She didn’t really want to talk about any of this at all, especially not with strangers.

  Just before we left, she said, “I’d wish you luck on your journey, but for your sake, I hope you don’t find Indu. Your life is better without him.”

  17

  Navigations

  I sat on the couch, legs folded underneath me, with my notebook open. Pan had gone with Rikky into the narrow attic space above her bedroom to dig through her storage.

  After a bit of shrieking and several loud thuds, Pan rushed down the ladder. By then I was on my feet, standing in the doorway to Rikky’s bedroom.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Pan as he wiped the cobwebs and dust bunnies from his face.

  “Yeah, Rikky’s got raccoons living up there, and she says it’s fine.” He rolled his eyes at that. “But I noped right out of there.”

  A little bit of something—a tiny downy feather—clung to his long, dark eyelashes. He stood before me, a little out of breath, his hair mussed from the encounter. His hands were on his hips, and the sleeves of his white T-shirt were rolled up, taut around his biceps.

  I stepped closer to him, tentatively, and I reached out and plucked the feather from his eyelashes. He didn’t mo
ve or flinch—he kept his gaze on me, then slowly closed his eyes and opened them again when I pulled my hand away.

  He laughed quietly. “For a second I thought…”

  “Found it!” Rikky yelled through the ceiling, followed by a scurry of little feet.

  Pan stepped back from me, shouting back over his shoulder, “That’s great, Rikky! I knew you’d get it.”

  I went back to the living room, waiting on the couch for Rikky to close up the folding attic ladder and hatch. She came in, laughing about the raccoons, and nudged aside Pan’s laptop, was still open with his recent searches for Kiruna, and then she sat beside me and plopped a big old atlas onto my lap.

  “Here it is,” she said as she brushed the dust off the cover. “Snorrik’s Troll Guide to the World. It has all the various maps from our history, but I can’t be sure they’re all that accurate. I looked through these before, and if I recall, there’s one where they put Greece and the Dead Sea in Canada, so there are definitely some errors.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said and leafed through the book, carefully so as not to damage the brittle pages.

  Pan leaned on the back of the couch and reached over—his arm brushing mine—to click his keyboard and wake the laptop back up. “So, this says Kiruna is about a hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.”

  “I’m not seeing a lot of longitude or latitude lines on these maps,” I muttered as I looked through them.

  “Trolls, unlike Vikings, are not so great with cartography,” Rikky agreed. “I always assumed it was because they mostly made maps to trick the humans about our locations, but then they never made accurate ones for themselves.”

  There weren’t a lot of landmarks for me to go on in general, and when there were, they tended to be misconstrued—like one where Scandinavia took up the entire page and the rest of Europe (labeled the Sutherlands) was the size of my thumb in the bottom right corner.

  I stared down at the disproportionate map, and the splattering of trees for forests and triangles for mountains and blue puddles for lakes, with labels like Lake Mälaren and Giebmegáisi and Krystallsløret and an island in a giant blue puddle marked Isarna. There were a dozen marked “cities,” if they could be called that. One was simply titled Sigrad Haus. But there were others, like Birka and Oslo, that were real human cities that still existed.

  “So, I’m guessing that Kiruna would be somewhere up in this … north region.” I used my finger to draw a circle on the uppermost part of the malformed Scandinavian peninsula. “Indu mentioned the Kiruna Airport, so he probably thought that was the nearest one. So, there can’t be that large of an area that it services.”

  “Let’s see.” Pan moved the laptop so it perched on the arm of the couch, allowing him to type more easily. But still his arm pressed against me.

  I wasn’t sure if I should move, and anyway, there wasn’t anywhere else to go with Rikky sandwiched up on the other side of me. Besides, I didn’t really want to move—it wasn’t an exciting or particularly meaningful touch, but I liked it all the same. And I liked how he smelled—a wonderfully clean boy smell, that soap and rain and crispy musk that seemed to be the undertone of all soaps for men.

  “So, you’ll be surprised to learn that the Arctic regions of Sweden are very sparsely populated,” Pan said when he’d finished reading the entry on Kiruna. “Which means it can’t support a lot of airports, so the Kiruna Airport is the only one in a fairly large radius.”

  “Dammit.” I sighed. “It’s summer. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I kinda hiked around the countryside.”

  “It says here that area around there is incredibly mountainous,” Pan continued reading. “Kebnekaise is the tallest mountain in Sweden.” He glanced down at the atlas. “I think that’s the same as the Giebmegáisi.”

  “I didn’t say it would be an easy hike,” I argued weakly.

  “I don’t know, Ulla. I think we’re gonna have to come up with a better plan than us wandering around the wilds of Sweden,” Pan said gently.

  His phone rang in his back pocket, and he straightened up to grab it. “It’s Sylvi. I’m gonna take this outside,” he said, and he took long strides toward the door as he answered the call.

  “I hope everything’s okay,” Rikky said, her eyes following him.

  “I’m sure she’s just checking in.”

  “What exactly are you looking for on the maps?” Rikky turned her attention back to me. “You know the Lost Bridge won’t be listed, hence the name.”

  “Yeah, but I was hoping there’d be some kind of landmark on there that correlates to the location near Kiruna, and then … I don’t know. It would magically all make sense to me.”

  She laughed—the kind where she threw her head back and let out a loud staccato sound. “Nothing in life ever works that way. Trust me.”

  “The woman who raised me, she always said, ‘Put hopes in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first,’” I said.

  “That was one that my mama was fond of saying too!”

  Rikky and I looked through the maps for a few more minutes, until Pan came back into the house. His brow was knotted, but his expression was more blank than grim.

  “What’d she say?” Rikky asked, and I added, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. But I have to go back to Merellä,” he said.

  18

  Claims

  Rikky was already on her feet, while I was still registering what Pan had said.

  “Why? What’s wrong?” She rushed to his side, but he stepped away from her.

  “Nothing’s wrong.” That was what Pan said, but he had a dazed look on his face and he toyed with his phone. “It might be…” The furrow on his brow deepened, but a faint smile played on the corners of his lips. “I think it might be good news.”

  “What do you mean?” Rikky asked.

  “The Kanin monarchy is reopening my case.” His jaw tensed, and his eyes were moist. “You know how my mother told me that my father was the former Kanin King Elliot. He died when I was still a baby, but the kingdom has always refused to acknowledge my existence.”

  He paused, swallowing hard. “But now they’re reopening my paternity case. I’m going to get confirmation one way or another.” He looked down at his feet, but he couldn’t hide the relieved smile. “I’ll know who my dad is, and so will everyone else.”

  Rikky squealed and clapped her hands together, shattering the gravity of the moment, and Pan only grinned at her excitement.

  “We must celebrate!” she insisted.

  “Nothing’s set in stone yet,” he said, but his words fell on deaf ears.

  Rikky was a woman on a mission. She was already pulling on a pair of muck boots and talking about how she had to go out to her “aboveground cellar” to get her really good strawberry wine.

  Pan managed to stop her before she made it out the front door, but he had to actually step in front of her to do it. “I do have to leave in the morning. I have to get back to make my case. And with two long days of driving ahead of me, I don’t want to start it with a hangover.”

  She waited a beat before asking. “So tonight is your last night here?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Okay, well, your farewell celebration definitely calls for the good wine.” Rikky went on undeterred. “You can drink as much as you feel comfortable with, and not a drop more.”

  “That’s a fair deal,” he relented with a laugh.

  “I’m a fair woman,” she said as she slipped around him, and then she was out the door, presumably venturing into some sort of aboveground cellar.

  Once she was gone, taking her high-strung energy with her, Pan looked at me with an embarrassed smile. “Sorry about all this.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sure that Rikky will let you stay with her longer and help you figure out things here.”

  “I’m sure she would,” I agreed as I walked over to him. “But I don’t want to take advantage of her kindness. She�
�s already extended herself so much. And, if I’m being honest, I don’t know how much more there is for me to find here.”

  He frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “Probably they know more than they’re telling, but the Queen isn’t talking, and I don’t want to hang around here imposing on Rikky for some undetermined amount of time,” I said.

  And that was true. We’d already been at Rikky’s place for four days, and that seemed like long enough to be taking up her space and time. Pan and I had pooled together before we got here—both of us had dug into our savings for this trip—but we both agreed that Rikky’s hospitality deserved compensation.

  He’d given her the money when he arrived, without either of us setting up an exact time frame, but it felt like enough to cover maybe a week. We were close enough to that expiration date.

  “Besides,” I said, smiling up at him, “we started this journey together; we finish it together.”

  “Good.” His voice was low.

  And then gently, deliberately—his eyes on mine—he took my hand and pulled me toward him. He wrapped his arms around me and held me to him. As I closed my eyes, I realized that nobody had ever hugged me like this before. I don’t know that I’d ever felt quite so … held before. The hug completely enveloped me somehow, so all I could feel was the warm strength of him, his heart beating quick and loud in my ear.

  “We’ll find your family,” he promised, and in his arms, with my head to his chest, I felt his voice rumbling through me, and I felt an intense heat in my lower belly.

  “I know.” I stepped away from him—acutely aware that Rikky would burst through the door at any moment—and walked away, pretending to focus on the caged squirrel while I slowed the racing of my heart and hoped the fan would cool the flush on my cheeks.

  As if she had been summoned by my thoughts, Rikky returned a moment later carrying a cask of wine. She was in surprisingly good spirits about the whole thing—or at least it came as a surprise to me. I assumed she’d be upset about Pan’s departure, but maybe I had misread things and she was just happy to have her space back.