“Why does the so-called ‘easy way’ always involve me getting slugged?” Emil Westbrook asked with a hint of justifiable petulance. Waking up with your head still ringing from being knocked out tends to annoy even the most affable.
“Your whining attracts too much trouble,” Lalli Ghost-of-Forest opined, essaying his familiar half-smile to let Emil know he was kidding.
Emil rolled his eyes melodramatically to let Lalli know it was okay. “Just gag me next time, okay?”
“You should talk,” Reynir grumbled. “They picked me up and threw me out the window as though I were a javelin with a braid attached!”
“And a noisy one, at that,” Doc Mikkel rumbled. “We should have knocked you out too, in retrospect.” Reynir made a face at him.
“Could y’all quit jawing and get to business?” Sigrun snapped from the front of the wagon.
Emil had learned to read Sigrun’s expressions and intonations fairly well, though her reactions continued to surprise him. Even had he not, the near-fury in Sigrun’s voice would have been clear were Emil a deaf man, and while he wondered at its source, Emil was not stupid enough to bring its focus upon himself by failing to follow her command.
So their “secret rendezvous” with Trond had been a bust, but that was nothing less than they’d expected. It looked like Sigrun was taking it a mite too personally, or so Emil thought until he found out about Tuuri.
Tuuri had been hit in almost the same spot on the shoulder where the Man in the Black Hat had nailed Emil all that time ago. Emil rubbed his own shoulder in sympathy. On the other hand, this was Tuuri, so Emil ventured to reassure Sigrun, “She’ll make it. I did, and she’s tougher than me.”
Sigrun snorted. “True, but it’s not somethin’ I like puttin’ to the test.” The unwonted thickness of her drawl reaffirmed her rage, but her face had relaxed a little.
*
Tuuri recovered, of course, but not before Sigrun had plotted out the forthcoming assault on the Westbrook estate in loving detail. Emil was still arguing for his uncle’s and aunt’s innocence, but Sigrun was not nearly of a mind to pay him any heed. Nor was she too attentive to Reynir’s arguments that their foes had laid another trap at the Westbrook estate.
When Lalli brought back a weak and barely conscious Siv who bore marks of extended captivity, however, Sigrun changed her mind—reluctantly.
“Well, where are they, then; and who are they?” Sigrun demanded of Reynir.
“I—I don’t know,” Reynir stuttered. “…But Onni Talks-to-Spirits might.”
*
“They’ve got me, Trond, and Torbjörn squirreled away in a tumble-down tenement near one of the breweries; Siv and Taru are at the Westbrook estate as bait.” Onni’s voice was quite calm as he told Lalli and Reynir this. He jumped a bit when Lalli immediately vanished.
“We got Siv already; he’s just going to get Taru,” Reynir explained. “Can you tell me any more nearly where you are?”
Onni snorted. “Directions are useless in the Dreamworld; it twists everything around until left is up and right is backward, and you have to take three steps back-and-forth to go down a flight of stairs. No, you’ll just have to find me, but Lalli can, once he’s brought Taru back.”
“But who are they?” Reynir asked. Before he could hear the answer, though, he woke up.
*
It took Lalli less time to bring Taru back than it did for Sigrun to come up with a new plan, but it was neck-and-neck there.
“What we need to do,” she told the others, “is to…”
