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Sigríður’s son returns on a crisp, spring morning, standing amongst a motley crew of adventurers.
The first thing she does is hug him. The second thing she does is hit his arm—the same way her siblings used to do to her when they were all young and unruly—and call him stupid and a fool .
Reynir complains over her protests, and when Sigríður’s terrible, worried anger fades, he does his best to reassure her. Yes, Mamma, I’ll stay home, and I’ll be safe, I promise. The pounding of her heart ceases, and she feels like she can breathe again.
Her son was always so earnest and so kind. For a brief moment, the warm feeling in her chest feels like pride.
It all goes wonderfully for two months, Two beautiful, quiet months, Sigríður’s house warmed with laughter and company. Reynir insists on going to the Academy on the fringes of Reykjavík; Sigríður lets him go without putting up too much of a fight. What is Reykjavík compared to the Silent World, anyway?
Reynir takes the weekly carriage out to Reykjavík. With her youngest child gone, Sigríður’s mornings and afternoons are filled with chores and entertaining her other children. Guðrún tells her all about her beloved with a rare, starstruck look. Bjarni comes and pesters her when she’s snuggled in her bed at night, lying across her legs, self-proclaiming himself a nuisance.
Reynir’s friends, with a lack of anything to do, explore the town. Sigríður offered to take them around, once, but all Emil Västerström did was mumble something in Swedish before running off. Lalli Hotakainen had stared at her for a long, unnerving moment, before turning around and stalking after Emil. Sigríður heard the front door slam open and then shut before she could even think to say anything else.
It’s not until later that Sigríður figures it out. Lalli speaks only Finnish; Emil, Swedish; her son, Icelandic. How they even became friends is beyond her, but it’s clear they are friends.
(She makes cookies, a week into their stay, leaving the batch on a rack to cool while she goes to the front window to enjoy the rare breeze when she hears Reynir cry out. Startled, she turns, only to see Reynir shoo Lalli away from the cookies not unlike chasing away a stray cat. Lalli glares at him. Reynir stands resolute, the two at a standoff, only for Emil to sneak in from the side and yank a cookie from under their noses. Reynir makes an admonishing noise. Lalli’s glare intensifies. Quicker than lightning, Reynir snatches the cookie from Emil’s grasp.
Lalli’s head swivels around. He stares.
He pounces.
Cookie crumbs fall all over the kitchen floor as the boys chase each other around the dining table. Sigríður sighs. She was about to intervene when Mikkel stepped into the doorway, blocking her view of the kitchen. Wordlessly, he holds out a broom to the three boys.
Thank the gods above for Mikkel Madsen.)
A month passes by quickly. Reynir returns home on the last day of his course, sullen and forlorn, staring out the window. Regardless of his mood, he gets to work, and Sigríður’s happiness at having him back on the farm outrules any concern she’s had for his bad mood, as selfish as that thought is. New runes are carved on the barn doors and windows and fence posts, and the sheep are safer than ever.
Sigríður never really managed to ask after Reynir’s almost-pretulent moroseness. But she knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew the Seiðkona who taught the summer classes, and the truth chills her to the bone.
Reynir was asking about entry to the Norwegian military.
Her heart pounds in her chest. Her idiot child—four months in the Silent World, and he still wants to go right back to the frontlines of the Norwegian military? The frontlines were already dangerous enough for people with immunity. What about those without?
Her son will be dead within a week. She can’t let that happen.
Mind made up, Sigríður resolves to give him a stern talking to once he returns from Reykjavík. There were plenty of things to do for a non-immune mage, even this deep in Iceland. The farm always needs work. People need blessings. Perhaps he could even teach at the Academy. Maybe he can finally put that old coot Árna out of business, what with her overcharging half the town; by Odin’s name, it was definitely about time.
Guðrún had said he was running off to Reykjavík to collect his summer course certificate. Patiently, Sigríður waits for him to return.
The sun never fully sets. Not this far into summer, at least. She doesn’t sleep as she sits through the night, hand-in-hand with her husband, waiting for her child to come home.
He never did.
Nine months pass until Sigríður sees him again.
The day after Reynir disappears, Guðrún hands her an unopened letter.
Sorry, Mamma! Reynir dares to say. She skims through the message. Not going to Reykjavík—Lalli needs help—back to the Silent World—Finland—will be safe. Choking out a bitter laugh, the paper crinkles in her hand. I’m sorry, don’t worry about me too much, I’ll be back before you know it!
It strikes her, then, that Sigrun, Mikkel, Emil, and Lalli had all left the day prior, too, without even a goodbye.
How could she have been so blind?
Sigríður cleans the house from top to bottom thrice over while her husband handles the sheep. Throughout it all, Guðrún looks at her with a slightly worried look on her face. It hits her like a battering ram – she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know her baby brother was back in the Silent World.
Reynir lied to her, too.
Winter breaks, fading into a gentle spring when Sigríður finally receives a letter from the middle of nowhere, Finland.
She takes a deep breath. It feels like her first one in months.
April turns to May when she sees him again, strolling down the docks of Reykjavík. As a mother does, Sigríður rushes forth and catches her son by the arm, peering into his eyes for any kind of distress.
“Why did you—?” Sigríður rushes out. She inhales. Tries again. “You are in a lot of trouble, you stupid—”
Someone steps up behind Sigríður’s son.
“Reynir,” interrupts Mikkel, laying a hand on Reynir’s shoulder, sending him a pointed look. Some sort of unfinished conversation, Sigríður guesses.
Reynir, uncharacteristically, scowls. “Ja, ja, jeg… skal? Fortelle henne det. ”
Mikkel raises a thick eyebrow. “Godt. ”
Sigríður glares, shaking him by the shoulder. “When did you learn Swedish?” She demands. Then, hurt strikes her, sharp as a knife. Mikkel knows Icelandic—why would Reynir respond, purposefully, in a different language?
…Unless he wanted to exclude her from the conversation.
“It’s Norwegian! Sigrun’s from Norway!” Reynir yelps, dancing around Sigríður’s swipes at his shoulder. “She taught me some of it— ow, Mamma— ”
“You,” she hisses, jabbing him in the chest, craning her head up to glare at him. “Will be coming home right now. ”
“Okay, okay, okay—wait, huh?”
“What were you thinking, heading out into the Silent World not once, but twice?” Emil and Sigrun are staring. Lalli glances to the side, hands over his ears. “I was worried sick about you! Do you not care for me at all?”
Sigrun leans over, whispering comically loud in Emil’s ear, “Hva sier hun? ”
“Hur skulle jag kunna veta? ” Emil hisses back. “Ser jag ut som jag pratar isländska? ”
“Hun tilbyder gratis overnatning,” Mikkel says.
Sigrun turns so quickly that her neck cracks. Emil visibly bites down a wince. “Er du seriøs? ”
The corners of Mikkel’s lips twitch upwards. “Selvfølgelig ikke. ”
“You’re coming home!” Sigríður snaps at him, uncaring of the peanut gallery arguing behind her. “Leaving us for almost a year, and it wasn’t even like last time! No radio, no letters, nothing! The four of them can’t always protect you! They already have enough on their plate without having to look after you, too—”
“Mamma.” Sigríður hears Reynir’s sharp inhale over her raised voice. He bites the inside of his cheek, and blinks—once, twice, before he opens his mouth again. “I can’t go home just yet.”
A sudden sharp anger surges through her. “Why not? ”
“I can’t!” Reynir protests. “Some…guy? From Sweden? Is coming over to Reykjavik in a few days, and Sigrun and Mikkel want to meet him. Actually, I don’t know if it’s just one guy or a group of them, but – Mamma, I can’t just go back home so soon –”
“Why do you have to go?” Sigríður knows she sounds petulant, but she feels like it’s her due, living with her worry for almost a year until it calcified her mind. She had almost forgotten what it was like to not worry. She had grown around her heartache; she had ended up defined by fear. “The farm needs you!”
“Sigrun wanted me to come,” Reynir says. He brightens. “She wanted the whole crew there. It’s kind of a funny story, actually, how I found out. Sigrun wanted to teach me a bit of Norwegian—”
That sentence strikes an unpleasant chord in Sigríður’s chest. It rattles her teeth. “Why are you following what Sigrun says?”
Reynir looks at her like she’s grown a second head. “Because Sigrun’s my captain?”
Sigríður stares. Something wholly unameable bubbles up in her chest. She thinks it's horror, or fear, or simple disbelief—but none of those words fit quite right. When was Sigrun Eide your captain? She wants to say. You weren’t even part of the original crew. Something changed, between the gaps of the pages of the end of the first adventure and the end of the second. Reynir holds himself up with more assurance, now, and the way he acts and speaks—he sounds less and less like a civilian who had to be babysat, and more like the sixth crew member they've been looking for all along.
Sigríður doesn’t know what to make of that thought. She thinks she might hate it.
Autumn invariably turns to Winter; Reynir leaves a day later with barely a word. Hildur returns home, hand-in-hand with a shy, bright-eyed girl.
Sigríður continues to exist.
It’s not the same for the rest of her children, she thinks. Ólafur belongs to a large, twenty-person crew, and he fishes relatively close to the Icelandic mainland. Hildur is a nurse. Bjarni is the only one who regularly crosses the silent sea, but he is a mechanic, kept safe in the very bowels of the ship he was maintaining.
In the world’s biggest bout of irony, the only one of her children who developed an addiction to adventure was the only one not immune.
And still, time and time again, he keeps on running, running, running, like he’s running out of time. Sigríður doesn’t see what he’s chasing; she doesn’t understand what he’s looking for. Sigríður can’t comprehend what makes him leave, every damned time.
Guðrún marries the man of her dreams in the springtime breeze. The affair is quiet, respectable, and reserved for close friends and family.
Sigríður tried to get her to wait. What about Reynir? She reminds her, and all she responds with is a roll of her eyes.
It’s just a wedding, she huffs. The wedding isn’t so important. It’s about what comes after. Then, quieter, she admits, he might not even be alive, anyway. And if he is, he wouldn’t want me to wait.
That thought haunts Sigríður until her family receives a letter in April from Mora, Sweden. Reynir is back in the next month, the rest of the crew in tow, everyone grinning and alive. The first thing Reynir does is hand her an envelope with enough money inside to last the farm a year. Something in her heart crumples at that—at the thought that this time, it was a paid job. That Reynir signed up for a dangerous mission, with intention, and never thought to back out.
Sigríður doesn't offer to host the rest of the crew. No one seems to ask.
She does, however, end up having a meal with Sigrun and Mikkel. Sigrun ends up telling her a story of how Reynir took down a troll with nothing but a vial of his own blood. All of a sudden, Sigríður’s appetite is lost.
“And none of you protected him?” Sigríður knows she sounds childish. Plaintive. She can’t help it. This is her child, and she is only a mother.
“If he was going to wet his pants after a troll came after him, I wouldn’t have let him on the team, mage or not,” Sigrun says, confusedly. “He would just be some useless civilian, otherwise.”
Mikkel sighs. He continues eating, undisturbed by the morbid tale Sigrun told of Sigríður’s son, trapped in a wet, rotting house, with nothing but an empty gun and his runes against the army of trolls knocking at the door.
“What she means,” he says, after an extended period of silence, as if Sigríður had trouble interpreting Sigrun’s shoddy Icelandic. “With regards to Reynir’s lack of immunity, there are measures in place to prevent infection. However, as much as I loathe to admit it, Sigrun’s right – Reynir wouldn’t be on the crew if he couldn’t hold his own.”
Sigríður struggles to fit down the rest of her meal.
“You are not going back into the silent world,” Sigríður tells Reynir, as harsh as she could be, when she’s back home. “I won’t allow it.”
Reynir stares. There’s ink on his hands, a bowl of ground sheep bone next to him, and a small plate of half-dried blood. He’s stripped his room of the runes he had pasted on the walls; the papers lay in a half-circle around his knees. Sigríður doesn’t think she’s seen those runes before.
“But I’m not going back?” Reynir says, but it sounds like a question.
“You aren’t?” Sigríður asks, and then she remembers her son’s propensity for lying. “Like Hel you aren’t!”
“I swear, I won’t! Mamma, wait—”
She smacks him on the arm. “Sigrun told me what happened. You’re not going back!”
Reynir pales. “She told you what happened?”
“Yes, about the house and the troll—”
“She didn’t tell you about…all of it, did she?”
Sigríður pauses, voice coming out harsher than she can help it. “What else was there?”
“I didn’t—” Reynir flushes under her gaze. “Okay, so. It’s a—actually, it’s not very funny now that I think about it, but after Sigrun and Emil got me out, I puked so hard I cried, and then I didn’t stop shaking until a few hours later.”
Reynir sorts out the runes at his feet, placing them in an order that makes sense only to him. “But Lalli gave me a cookie and Sigrun said while Emil handled his first troll way better than I did, he wasn’t the one stuck in an infested house overnight. So I think I won!”
“There’s nothing to win!” Sigríður exclaims, exasperated.
Reynir shrugs, glancing off to the side. “Winning means being alive?”
That sentence only serves to heighten her worry. “You are not going back.”
“I didn’t even—” Reynir catches a glimpse of her glare and pales. “Okay.”
“I’m serious,” Sigríður says. Reynir doesn’t meet her eye. “It’s dangerous. What if one day you don’t come back?
“I’ll stay home, it’s okay!”
Sigríður’s voice is rising. So is Reynir’s. “You won’t,” she snaps. “You can’t go back there. It’s dangerous.”
“I can hold my own,” Reynir says, an odd tone to his voice. “I may be non-immune, but I’m a mage! The trolls—”
“—will scratch you, and you die!” Sigríður cries. Her fury is building, building, building. “You’re not immune! Mage or not, you can still die! Do you know how painful it is to die by the rash?”
“I do!”
“Do you?” She challenges. Reynir stares up at her, frozen. Horrified. Paper crinkles as his hands clench, smearing wet ink over his runes.
All of a sudden, Sigríður remembers the crew member who died. She was non-immune. Twenty-one. Born and raised in Finland.
Sigríður never knew her name.
Reynir never said. He never talked about it.
Abruptly, Reynir stands and runs out the door. That is the last thing Sigríður ever sees of him for the next two years; his back as he leaves.
Sigríður can’t keep him safe.
The thought haunts her.
You can’t keep him safe. One day, he will die.
Oh, everyone dies. This she knows. But with the way he’s living, Reynir will die long before she goes, and this is something she can’t accept. In every scenario since her children were born she’d always known she’d go first. This is a law that the world revolves around. Parents should never outlast their children—in all the times they do so, it is a tragedy.
She wishes her last conversation with him wasn’t an argument.
Winter passes into Spring, which turns into Summer, and then into Autumn, ending in another long, long winter. The lambing season comes and goes. Her husband marks the ears of the new lambs.
Reynir sends Sigríður letters. Once, from Dalsnes, Norway, followed by a season of silence, and then another letter, from Aurland, reassuring her that yes, he’s still alive, and heading out again—to where, he’s not sure, but Onni says there was a job for them nearby, in Finland.
The silence that follows haunts her.
You can’t keep him safe.
Summer hits the town like a brick. Lambs go missing from their barns, then sheep. Sigríður hears the gossip. Old Salbjörg insists she knows her sheep—they don’t wander, she says. Now they’re missing from the hills where she’s set them free. Sigríður’s neighbour Ómar swears upon Odin himself that he saw spirits walking down the streets at night. Even Árna seems to think the hills around the town are haunted. It’s only when the town gets hit with a week-long rainstorm, flooding the streets and bringing down dirt from the hills that the mayor caves and calls for a mage trained in the dealings of spirits to be sent down from Reykjavík.
A week turns into two. The farmers start to panic. The rain was starting to flood their fields, they cried to the mayor, who sent out another call for a mage.
Perhaps the gods heard the town’s cries. One day, a commotion arises from the woods near the town. Sigríður and a few other townspeople volunteer to investigate amidst the pounding rain. When they finally arrive, though, the hard-fought battle was almost won.
Fog crawls down the hills and weaves through the grass. The spirits in Iceland have never revealed themselves to Sigríður, but this time she sees them, drooping down from the branches like rotting meat from bone and rushing forth through the grass in shapeless, amorphous forms.
The fog and rain hides her view of the mage in the middle of the dip in the grove, but she sees one of the ghosts lash out. The crowd gasps. Her ears ring, but there's no sound as the ghost hits something that sends it flying. Enraged, the ghosts of the hill surge downwards, hitting the invisible barrier that the mage conjured, again and again as the mage chants their spell.
Lightning flashes across the sky. The barrier shatters, and her vision blurs and unblurs. A collective cry rises up from the crowd as blood—stark red against misty fog—flies through the air and colours the tips of the grass. With the breaking of the barrier, air rushes out of the grove in a great whoosh, almost like an exhale. The air clears enough for Sigríður to see a flash of red hair and a pair of brilliant green eyes.
You can’t keep him safe.
With a word that rings with a conclusiveness, of completion, the ghosts vanish as the mage completes his chant. The crowd cheers. Reynir turns around, shocked gaze landing on Sigríður as the sky opens, the light falling onto the town for the first time in weeks.
You can’t keep him safe.
You can’t— he was always clutching at the hem of her skirts. Mamma, Reynir would cry, hair tucked into a little ponytail, chubby-faced and wailing. Mamma, it hurts. In a well-worn routine, Sigríður would fold him into her arms, kiss his tiny cut better, and bandage it as well as she could; it had been something parents have done for their children for millennia, and yet, every time, it still feels like a revelation.
Mamma. A tug on her skirt. A reddened flush speckled across Reynir’s cheeks as he blinked back tears. Mamma, Bjarni’s being mean.
A hand grips her sleeve. Mamma, can you help me? I had a nightmare, says Reynir, still young, still thirteen. Mamma. The sheep are in trouble—Reynir, growing up—Sanna shoved me down again today—fifteen and growing older, older—can you teach me how to cook?—I want to be useful.
Mamma. Mamma. Mamma.
Mamma, Reynir asks, at twenty, the youngest he’s ever been. Tomorrow, the coach to Reykjavík arrives, taking Reynir with it. Mamma, he asks—it sounds like finality. Can you help me braid my hair?
“Mamma,” Reynir says, for the lack of anything better to say. Sigríður stumbles down the hill, heedless of the whispering crowd behind her. “I was going to write, I swear, but I just—”
He looks different. His hair is cut short, now, to his chin, his face sharper, eyes older. A series of charms dangle by his waist. Somehow, they make no noise as Reynir takes a tentative step forth, then back, as if he’s not sure where to run.
Sigríður blinks down the burning in her eyes.
“You are my child,” she forces out behind the throbbing in her throat. “You will never stop being my child.”
Reynir’s face crumples.
“And because of that,” she continues, brushing back his wet hair. “I worry.”
Reynir chews the inside of his cheek. “You don’t worry that much for Bjarni. Or Hildur. Or—”
“It’s different for them.”
“Because they’re immune?” Reynir mutters. The bitter tone of his words takes Sigríður by surprise. There’s a story there—one that she’s not sure she would like.
“Because they’re not like you,” Sigríður sighs. “You’re the only one who runs willingly into the silent world. And they’re all settling down, now. Finding people. Searching for safer jobs. Even Bjarni is looking for something that will let him stay home, with that nice man he’s been chasing.”
Reynir doesn’t meet her eyes. “I’ve never been interested in those kinds of things, Mamma. You know that.”
“That’s not the—” Sigríður resists the urge to yell. “I don’t know why you keep on going out. I don’t know how you can stand risking your life, making your pabbi and I worry—”
Reynir winces.
“Just…come home?”
“I can’t—Mikkel’s waiting for me at the port,” Reynir tries to insist. “We’re meeting Sigrun soon, then Emil and Lalli in Keuruu—”
“Just for one night?” Sigríður asks. “Bjarni and Ólafur are home. They can tell you their stories again.”
At the mention of his siblings and the stories they bring, Reynir brightens, and for a split second, Sigríður recognises the child she raised. The child who fell in love with stories first before he fell in love with the silent world.
“Okay,” Reynir says, and follows her home. The crowd parts before them with little fanfare. Sigríður’s eyes still sting—she can’t keep him safe. He will go running, again and again, chasing whatever he looks for, and one day his luck will run out. One day, he’ll disappear and never return.
Sigríður can’t keep him safe.
Reynir Árnasson was born in Iceland. He will die in the silent world.
Sigríður stands at the door to her house, hands on her hips; she would say that she’d gotten over the sting of him leaving, but that would be a lie. He would always leave, no matter how she asks or begs or pleads for him to stay.
She would never understand. Maybe that’s why it hurts the most —he’s not immune, and yet, at every turn, he insists on returning. He’s outgrowing Sigríður and the house he grew up in and the town that raised him. She tried to keep him safe. She failed. She’s accepted that. She just wants to see him happy, and he’s the happiest with his crew.
The night he spends at home is the liveliest the house has been in years. Bjarni cries; Reynir teases him about it, and Bjarni wrestles him to the ground. Reynir squawks with dismay at having been brought down so easily while Guðrún cackles, loud and long.
Adventurer or not, he’ll always be the youngest in the family.
“Where are you going?” Sigríður asks, a pointless question for an answer she already knows. Her stupid and idiotic and brave and terrifying and capable son is heading back into the silent world, and she can do nothing to make him stay.
Reynir spins around. His pack is back on his shoulders, and he’s taken out his mask, too, where it dangles from around his neck. It’s midnight. The sun is still setting, the sky a sea of red and orange, and the glow from the sunset dances across Reynir’s cheeks, setting his hair and eyes aflame.
“I, uh—” he stammers. He at least has the decency to look guilty for leaving in the middle of the night. “You said it was just for one night?”
Sigríður cuts him off by pinching his cheek.
“Don’t you dare make me miss you!” Sigríður hisses over his protests.
“Okay, okay! Ow, Mamma—”
“—send lots of letters, too! As soon as you can! To your siblings as well, I know they don’t show it but they worry, too—”
“Okay!” Reynir swats her away, rubbing at his cheek. “I’ll send one when I get to Denmark—”
Sigríður freezes. “Denmark?”
Reynir’s face lights up; it always does when he talks about adventure, or anything close to it. “We’re heading into Germany,” he says, and Sigríður can see him trying to dim the excitement in his face, distinctly aware that this is a goodbye.
“Germa— ”
“It’s not so bad!” Reynir rushes to say. Germany. Sigríður’s head spins. She can count on one hand the number of times she’s heard it mentioned, and all her knowledge of it boils down to it being south of Denmark, past swaths of untouched, corrupted, dangerous land.
“You—” Sigríður scolds. Then, she takes a deep breath in. Out. She jabs him in the chest. “Letters. One every week, until you head out into the silent world. Got it?”
Reynir nods.
“Now go, before I drag you back in.”
Reynir stares at her for a long, disbelieving second, before he steps back. One step, two steps. He glances down at the long, winding road that will take him out of Brúadalur, and then back at her.
Sigríður sees him come to a decision. Running back, he presses a rune into Sigríður’s palm. It is carved from stone. Meant to last.
“We usually use these on the trolls,” Reynir explains to her. “But it should keep the farm safe.” He winces. “Maybe? It scares away the trolls, and trolls are almost the same as ghosts—I think? But, even so—”
Sigríður closes her shaking fingers around the rune. Reynir was always so earnest; so kind, and the silent world didn’t change that.
“Make sure you come home,” Sigríður hisses through her teeth. Reynir laughs, bright as the midnight sun, and heads down the road with a wave goodbye.
Sigríður watches him go. She watches him run down the winding road, chasing the horizon, chasing the sunset. The sun has finally dipped below the horizon as Reynir disappears over the far hill, chasing an adventure that could very well be his last.
Sigríður breathes in a lungful of muggy summer air. Her heart trembles between her ribs.
If she finally weeps on the doorstep of her home, there’s no one but the gods to see.
Seven months later, Sigríður’s son walks down, safe and sound, from the gangplank of an Icelandic vessel.
Sigríður sees Sigrun sling her arms around Reynir and Emil. Reynir, taken by surprise, leans way too far forward, his height dragging down the other two—their panicked squabbling can be heard over the din of the port. Instead of crashing back into the cold Icelandic sea, Mikkel grabs Reynir by the back of his coat, Lalli grabs Emil by his arm, and Sigrun manages to right herself, shooting a daring grin at Mikkel.
Then, Reynir spots Sigríður. He smiles, brighter than the spun gold of the sun, and for the barest flicker of a second she sees all of him—the starry-eyed child she raised, the teenager she nurtured, the adult who stumbled into the silent world, and then the assured mage with a fire in his eyes.
“Mamma!” Reynir cried, still flickering between the then and now, past and present. SIll flickering, still all of him. Sigríður blinks, eternity condenses, and then she sees the eager, short-haired adventurer that is her son, waving across the dock.
Sigríður smiles, and goes to welcome him home.