The last rays of sunlight mingled with flickering candlelight across the rich red tablecloth as Oliver and Remiel sat, looking out over the darkening waters of Lake Vänern, at a window seat in the bistro that occupied the ground floor of their hotel. Remiel picked at the remnants of her slice of lingonberry cheesecake while Oliver nursed a tall glass of a pale beer, brewed only thirty kilometers to the south, which had come at the recommendation of their waiter. Across the water, barely visible through the thickening nighttime fog, the silhouette of an island loomed dark against the rapidly sinking sun.

“Why are we waiting here?” Remiel asked.

Oliver took a long sip from his glass and didn’t say anything.

“Oliver, we’ve been here for two days. I’m about finished with touring churches and sampling Scandinavian cuisine. And you have spent the whole while pecking away at your phone looking up god knows what.”

“Haven’t you ever taken a vacation?”

“No, Oliver, I haven’t.”

“Sounds mighty stressful, living for thousands of years without ever taking a few days off to relax,” Oliver said. He punctuated his opinion with another long drink and licked foam from his top lip. 

“I was being sarcastic,” Remiel snapped.

“Really? It’s so hard to tell with you. Makes me glad that I managed to stop looking you in the eye back in London. I’d hate to fall for someone who doesn’t know how to relax for a few days.”

Remiel gritted her teeth to keep back another remark, then shook her head and ate the last bite of her cheesecake. The last three days, since they had departed from Gower’s apartment in the early morning, had been maddening. Oliver continually pored over the notes stored in his phone, ignoring her as he cast himself into a tangled web of information ranging from Gower’s translation of the folio, to summaries of the operas of Wagner, to scanned books that detailed the complexities of translating Norse runes. When she asked him questions he responded mostly with inarticulate grunts. It was clear to her that he resented her presence. More importantly, however, she was beginning to worry where his line of inquiry might end. Though the Watchers had lost track of several of the shards over the last few thousand years, Remiel was reasonably certain that there were none in Scandinavia, with the possible exception of one that she didn’t especially want to think about.

“Oliver, please, at least tell me whether you actually have a lead on the shard, because if we’re just hiding from Zedekiah or another of your enemies I can suggest a few places that are a bit warmer this time of year.”

He shook his head and said, “Don’t worry. The shard will be here soon, and I am almost certain that I know how to get it.”

“Be here?” she said. 

“That’s right. I’m waiting for the shard to come to me, then I’m going to pluck it right out and bring it home to join the others.”

“Don’t be so hasty to pluck things, boy,” a voice growled from behind them, speaking in an English heavily accented with German.

Remiel turned her head towards the voice and felt the blood drain from her face.

“About time you got here,” Oliver quipped, raising his beer in salute to Odin. 

Odin swept his long gray coat off and dropped it onto a spare chair, then settled himself into the seat with an explosion of breath. Seeing him now, dressed in a gray tweed suit with a chocolate brown shirt open at the collar to reveal a scar that encircled his throat, Oliver was surprised at the muscular bulk of the old man. Thick cords of muscle ran down his neck, bulged beneath the fine wool of his dinner jacket, and braided across the backs of his hands. The black patch over his missing eye was supported by a narrow band of black elastic. His beard was trimmed close to the jaw and seemed to have streaks of yellow running through it. Only his gut, thickened by untold gallons of mead, remained the same. Overall, the impression was of a man who was younger than when Oliver had last seen him.

“You sounded confident enough on the phone, so I assumed that you had successfully evaded Loki since departing Germany and managed to learn what you needed of the folio, so I took the liberty of pausing in Amsterdam on my way here. One should never give up the opportunity to bed a good woman, Oliver, never forget that. Speaking of which, you haven’t introduced me to your companion.”

Oliver glanced at Remiel and saw a sour expression twisting the stately lines of her face. Not surprising, he thought. “This is Remiel. She helped me out of a tight spot in Britain, then insisted on accompanying me to make sure that I don’t get in over my head again.”

Remiel flinched, so slightly that Oliver might have missed it if he had not been surreptitiously inspecting her expressions for the last two days while she thought he was ignoring her. That had been the only way he could look at her without becoming lost in those eyes, a failing that he still could not put down to his inexplicable infatuation or some supernatural power.

Odin’s brow wrinkled and he seemed to be trying to recall something, then he raised his eyebrows, shook his head, and leaned forward to proffer his hand. “Good evening to you, lady, I’m Odin. I suppose I ought to apologize if I have offended you with my womanizing, but when you get to my age you don’t give a thought to voicing exactly what is on your mind.”

Remiel nodded and her face shifted from sour to vaguely surprised, then rapidly dropped to a neutral expression as she regained control of her features. She did not take his hand.

“Silent type you have here, boy,” Odin said, dropping his large hand to the tabletop with a bang that shook the cutlery. “Her voice as comely as her face, or has she never said a word to you?”

“Never mind her,” Oliver replied, keeping his eyes fixed on Odin to avoid shooting a puzzled expression to Remiel, “I think I know how to do what you’ve asked of me.”

“So you translated the folio?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not just following in another’s steps, are you? That is the whole reason I need someone like you, to find your own path through the fire, seeing as it’s been so long since anyone worshiped the true gods like we did back then.”

Remiel slammed her fist on the table and, turning to her, Oliver saw that her face had flushed a deep red.

“Something wrong, Remiel?”

She set her jaw, seemingly biting her tongue as she shook her head and turned her back on Odin to stare out the window.

“Sure about that? Because you’ve looked like you want to punch Odin since he sat down.”

“It is a common enough reaction,” Odin said, a smile cracking the corner of his mouth. “Women either love me or hate me, for the most part.”

Oliver set his nearly empty glass on the table and pulled his phone from his pocket. He lay it on the table and pulled up a document that he had been working on since leaving Britain. He pushed the phone towards Odin and said, “This is what I’ve managed to work out from the folio. Tell me how it matches with your recollection.”

Odin lifted the phone and began scrolling through the document as Oliver summarized it for the benefit of Remiel, who was still pointedly ignoring Odin. “I have to take your word for only a mortal being permitted to pass through the, I suppose we’ll call it a barrier, or membrane, that separates the actual tree that exists in this world and the roots of Yggdrasil, wherever they might be. The folio mentions nothing about that, but I’ve worked out that the sequence of events that Wagner drew upon as the basis for the plot of Siegfried, the third opera in his Ring Cycle, are actually a sort of code. Each event in the original poem, many of which were adapted for the opera, can be mapped to the meaning of a Norse rune. If I have the location right, and understand the meaning of certain runes correctly, we should be able to perform the ritual tomorrow.”

“And what exactly is this ritual you keep mentioning,” Remiel said, turning to glare at Oliver. “Exactly how do you intend to defile your soul for the sake of a dangerous relic that I have repeatedly warned you about?”

Oliver looked back to her, trying to understand the cause of her sudden hostility. She was, of course, hostile to him tracking down the shards, but he thought that they had agreed to see this quest out to the end together. Now she was openly attacking him. He pulled the folio, still wrapped in a plastic bag, from an inner pocket of his jacket and laid it on the tabletop, then waved for Remiel to examine it. She hesitated, then turned away from the window and pulled her chair closer to the table to get a better look at the folio.

“Do you see these runes here, and here?” he said, pointing to several sharply angled lines placed between what appeared to be stanzas of a poem. 

Remiel nodded, the mask of her rage slipping slightly. Odin set down Oliver’s phone and leaned forward to examine the runes as well.

“I recognize those as well,” Odin said. “It’s been, damn, three hundred years or more since I tried to read these.”

“Which is part of why you need me, and why I needed to go to Britain. It’s only been a few years since I studied runes like this, and I was a bit rusty on their meanings. Anyway, the poem indicates that you, Odin, were a mere man when you stepped through.”

“That’s true enough, as well as I can remember.”

“And the ritual?” Remiel said.

“I’m getting to that. First I have to reach the island where the tree is located, which shouldn’t be terribly difficult as, if Sam’s interpretation of the poem and my geographic extrapolations are correct, it is about twenty miles across that lake,” Oliver said, pointing out the window to the dark waters, just visible in the glow of street lamps and dockside security lights. “There is a large ash tree in a valley at the center of Djurö National Park, and when I say large I mean it is one of the largest in Europe. Carved into the trunk of that tree are the runes of the Norse writing system. Some historians believe that the tree was used for ritual sacrifice during the pagan era, but the location is so remote, and nobody has ever found evidence of a major settlement in the area, so nobody has made a serious effort at exploring it in over fifty years. The only people who visit the location are tourists and a small group of neopagans who come to the island twice a year.”

“I think I do remember a long boat ride.” Odin interjected. “Do you know what you are supposed to do when we get there?”

“Yes, Oliver, what are you going to do?” Remiel snapped. “You can’t seriously believe that some lines carved into an old tree will let you step into a different world.”

Oliver gave them both a puzzled look. He had a growing sense that his suspicions of Remiel knowing more than she admitted to were well grounded. All three of them were bent over the table now, examining the folio like pirates gathered around a blood stained treasure map, a vision that Oliver couldn’t help admitting to himself might be fully appropriate. He shrugged, then smiled and tapped a finger on one of the runes, near the middle of the poem. “I won’t tell you everything now, but I can say that it all begins with this, the rune for inheritance and knowledge.”

He sat up and grinned at both of his glowering companions. “Just think, by this time tomorrow Odin will be human again, I will have another shard, and you, Remiel, will have tagged along on a grand adventure. Who knows, maybe you’ll even tell me the truth about what you want once I have that next shard.”

Remiel glowered at Oliver and said nothing. She risked a glance at Odin, but the old fool was already busy proposing a toast, then downing half his glass of beer in a single quaff. It looked like Oliver had indeed worked out the location, and possibly the ritual, to access the roots of Yggdrasil.

“Remiel, are you alright?” Oliver asked.

She shook her head, but managed to flash him a weak smile. “I am just concerned.”

Oliver smiled. He didn’t know what game Remiel was playing, and he still did not trust her, but something in him still wanted to draw her out of her funk. “Don’t be worried for my sake. This is a great day, Remiel. Tomorrow I’ll descend to the well of Mímir and capture my sixth shard, and then I will be that much closer to knowing what sort of device they all came from.”

Remiel looked away from him. That’s exactly what I am afraid of, she thought. 

Next Chapter: Norse Pantheon