Chapter 3

Gina watched me for a moment after I stopped talking.

The square had not changed because I had discovered a deadline over it. A man near the gate had started sweeping water from the shallow seam between the stones. Someone laughed too loudly in the street behind us. The castle kept the morning light on its upper walls.

“Do you have money?” Gina asked.

It was not the question I had expected after Ragnarök.

I looked at her.

She pointed at my coat rather than explaining herself. “Food. A bed. Somewhere to put your things.”

My hand went into my pocket so quickly that I nearly caught it on the lining. The wallet was there.

For a second I only held it. It was black, scuffed at one corner, and so ordinary that my throat tightened around it. It had crossed. The chair, desk, and manuscript had not.

“Maybe,” I said.

Gina considered that answer. “That is better than no.”

Inside were my cards, my identification, receipts I had been meaning to throw away, several notes, and coins. It was not much by any standard I had known yesterday. It was also all I had brought with me.

I left the cards and identification where they were. They might have been strange objects here too, but they were mine, and neither would buy bread in Asgard.

“I have cash,” I said.

“From Midgard.”

“Yes.”

“Can people spend it?”

I looked down at the pale printed paper in my hand. “Usually.”

She nodded toward the street. “First I need to deliver my message. Then we can find out.”

The square had been built to look upward. Its stone ran broad and open until we passed the last line of palace-facing buildings. Then the streets narrowed, their lower floors still stone but their upper stories timbered and crowded over the paving. The castle disappeared behind roofs after the first turn.

Water ran in a shallow channel beside the street. A woman tipped a bucket into it from a doorway and sent yesterday’s grit past my boots. Two men wrestled a cart around a corner while a third held its load of firewood in place. Shop shutters lifted one after another. Some bore painted signs; others had a boot, a comb, or a little wooden cup hanging outside instead. I knew what the boot meant. The cup took me longer, until steam and the smell of grain told me it was food rather than a cooper’s shop.

The open air of the square went with the castle. Here sound stayed between the walls: wheels, doors, a baby crying somewhere above us, a hammer beginning and stopping behind a half-open workshop. Bread came first, then wet wood smoke, then leather and an animal smell from a narrow yard I only saw through a gate. A group in cleaner cloaks moved uphill toward the palace quarter, talking too quietly to hear. Everyone else seemed to be going the other way, carrying bundles, baskets, tools, or nothing but the expression of someone late for work.

Gina stepped around a broken edge of paving without looking down. People made room without staring. One man lifted two fingers to her as he passed; she returned the gesture and kept walking.

I followed because I had no better plan.

At a stall with bread, cheese, and a steaming pot whose contents I could not identify, Gina bought two rolls before I could object and pointed across the street.

“Wait here. I will not be long.”

She crossed to a modest door set back beneath an arch, spoke to someone just inside it, and disappeared. Nothing announced what was beyond the door except a small token worked into the lintel. I ate half a roll under the stall’s awning and tried not to stare at every passerby as if one of them might explain Asgard.

The bread seller gave a customer his change, then had to repeat the count when a small boy insisted that one of the coins had been his first. A woman in a damp cloak passed with a bundle of laundry against her shoulder. Behind her, a man carried a long board badly enough that everyone coming toward him had to flatten against the walls. Nobody gave me more than the quick glance people reserved for someone standing in the way of breakfast.

Across the street, the door opened twice. A young servant came out first with a covered basket and hurried downhill. A moment later someone else accepted a rolled packet from a rider whose horse was lathered around the neck. They spoke briefly, then went separate ways. Whatever lay inside the arch had a purpose in the morning’s traffic. I was only waiting outside it with crumbs on my coat.

At home, a stranger lingering beside a food stall would have been equally easy to ignore. The fact that I had fallen out of a chair into Asgard did not alter the practical rule.

Gina returned before the bread had cooled much.

“Now,” she said, looking at my wallet, “show me this cash.”

I took out a note.

The woman accepted it between two fingers. Her thumb moved over the surface. She turned it toward the light, frowned at the little window in the paper, then looked at me.

“What is this?”

“Money,” I said.

Gina gave me a brief sideways look. It was not encouraging.

“It is money where I am from,” I amended.

The woman held it closer. The printed lines were too fine to be drawn by hand, the colours too even. A bridge stood in the middle of it, familiar and useless. There was a number in one corner and another along the edge, not quite the same. The woman rubbed a fingernail across the paper as if expecting paint to come away.

“I do not know this mark,” she said. “I cannot take it.”

I put the note away. Gina had already paid with two local coins, one dull silver-coloured and one darker.

Gina watched me finish half of it, then held out her hand toward the open wallet. I gave her one of the coins.

It was ordinary enough in my hand that I had never really looked at it. Here, against her skin, it looked absurdly exact. The rim was clean. The tiny stars were all where they were supposed to be. The two metals met in a neat circle that had not been persuaded into place by anyone’s patient fingers.

“This was made where you are from too?” she asked.

“Yes. There are lots of them.”

Her eyebrows moved. “Lots like this?”

“Not exactly. The pictures change. But they are meant to be the same.”

She turned it over once more. “Someone who deals in old metal might want this. Or someone who sells curious things.”

She gave the coin back. “Come on.”

We went downhill until the street widened around a crossing where carts had made dark grooves in the stones. The shops changed with it. Food and household goods gave way to work done behind open fronts. A leatherworker was pressing a line of small patterns into a belt with a tool no larger than his thumb. Next door, rows of buckles caught the light from a tray: plain ones, silvered ones, and a few worked with knots so fine I could not tell where the metal began to turn back on itself.

Farther on, a woman held a decorated clasp against a customer’s cloak while the customer complained that the pin caught the weave. The clasp was beautiful in a way my euro coin was not. Its tiny leaves had been cut by hand, and one of them was bent just enough to show it had been worn before. Through another doorway I saw an apprentice rubbing oil into a carved wooden handle while his master checked the fit of a scabbard beside him.

I looked at the coin in my palm again. It had no leaves, no story, no visible hand behind it. It was one of millions. That, apparently, was its strange part.

The person Gina found had a narrow shop wedged between a leatherworker and a place that sold lamp oil, with old metalwork in the window and trays of small objects arranged under the counter. The doorbell was a strip of bronze that clicked against the frame when Gina pushed it open.

He set it on a square of cloth, lifted a small glass to one eye, and made a sound somewhere between suspicion and interest. He asked where it had come from. I said Midgard. He asked which ruler had struck it. I said that was not quite how it worked. He asked who had made the ring of different metal.

“A machine,” I said, then regretted it.

He lowered the glass. “A what?”

“A very precise tool. Many tools. I do not know enough about them to explain.”

That part, at least, was true.

He did not believe I had personally made anything in my wallet. He also did not need to. The notes interested him differently. Their printed patterns repeated too well. Their serial numbers were separate without looking accidental. The transparent patches made him hold them against the window twice. He asked if I had more. I said yes before I had decided whether that was wise.

Gina stood beside the door, saying almost nothing. When the man named a sum, she looked at the notes still in my hand.

“He has more than one,” she said. “They belong together.”

The man held one note against the window again, then placed another beside it. The designs matched. The tiny printed marks did not. He asked for the rest of the notes and the remaining coins.

“We can show them elsewhere,” Gina said before I answered.

He gave her an irritated look. She did not move.

The second offer was better. It took longer than I expected after that. There were questions, weighing, and a second man called in from the back to inspect the two-metal coins. I nearly ruined the conversation by saying there were millions of similar notes. Gina stepped on my boot before I could explain what I meant.

In the end, most of the cash left my wallet in careful piles. Local coin replaced it, heavier and less familiar. I kept one small note folded behind my identification and a single coin in the shallow inner pocket of the wallet. The man asked about those too.

“Those are not for sale,” I said.

He looked at me as if he understood that sort of answer perfectly well. He did not ask again.

Outside, Gina took the local coins from my hand, counted them twice, then put them back into my purse.

“Do not buy the first room you see,” she said. “And do not let anyone tell you that paper costs more because you are from Midgard.”

I looked down at the coins. They were enough to make the next few problems possible. That was more useful than an amount I understood.

“A month is enough,” I said.

Gina’s mouth tightened for a moment. Then she turned toward the next street.

By then the market traffic had thinned behind us. We crossed beneath a covered passage, passed a courtyard where someone was rinsing wool in a trough, and climbed toward streets that held fewer open shops. The houses were narrower there. Laundry crossed the gaps between upper windows. A child leaned out to call down to someone carrying a bucket, received an answer, and vanished again. The city wall appeared at the end of one lane, pale above the roofs; at the next corner it was gone behind a tall house with fresh plaster on its lower floor.

The first room Gina showed me sat above an eating house. Its owner opened the door while arguing with someone downstairs about an unpaid tab and led us up a stair that smelled of spilled ale. The room itself was warm and cheap. It had a bed, a shuttered window, and a little table wedged against the wall.

I put my hand on the table. It rocked hard enough to slosh the cup already standing on it.

“It can be fixed,” the owner said.

I looked through the floorboards at the noise rising from below. Someone had started a song, and three other people were helping badly.

“Do you have another room?” I asked.

“Not for that price.”

Gina glanced at the table, then at me. “You will not get much work done here.”

The owner shrugged, which was fair. The room would have suited someone who wanted sleep between shifts or a place near dinner. I needed a table that did not move when I breathed near it.

We left before the singer reached a second verse. The next few streets were quieter, though carts still passed often enough to keep mud at the edges of the paving. A woman swept a front step while two older men repaired the hinge on a gate opposite her. Neither looked up as Gina led me toward another house.

The room she found was on the second floor of a house that leaned slightly toward the street. Its owner let three other rooms to travellers and workers who needed a place in the city for a while.

The room had a bed, a narrow chest, a basin on a stand, and a small hearth with old ash in the corners. A shuttered window held several small panes of glass in its upper half. Beyond it, roofs stepped away toward a line of wall and a tower whose top caught the sun. It was still better than the brick wall outside my mentor’s room.

The table stood under the window.

It was scarred, broad enough for a stack of pages, and solid when I put both hands on it. One rear leg had been repaired with a darker strip of wood. The chair beside it had a loose joint that clicked once when I sat down.

“This one,” I said.

The woman who owned the rooms looked from the table to me. “You work at it?”

“I need to. Is it steady?”

Gina folded her arms. “He writes.”

The owner accepted this with the calm of someone who had rented rooms to people with worse habits. She named a price for a month, then added that a longer stay would cost less per month if I paid ahead.

For one strange second I imagined agreeing. Three months. Half a year. A key of my own. A routine. The thought died as soon as it appeared.

“One month,” I said.

The owner shrugged. “One month, then.”

I paid. The woman gave me a key for the room, and I tried not to look too closely at the extra months she had offered.

Gina waited until the owner had gone downstairs before she said, “You need the paper before the light goes.”

“I also need ink. And thread. A knife, maybe. Something to make holes with.”

She looked at me. “A manuscript, then.”

“Yes. I made the last one myself. I want this one as close to that as I can manage.”

It was the best answer I had. I had written the first manuscript by hand and assembled its pages myself. I had changed it until the work on my desk felt finished. If any of that had mattered, I could not assume a notebook would do.

Gina nodded once. “There is a binder’s supplier nearby.”

The shop she took me to smelled of paste, leather, and old dust. It had sheets stacked in wrapped bundles, jars of ink along one wall, thread on wooden spools, and tools whose purpose I could guess only by process of elimination.

Folded gatherings waited in neat piles to be sewn. A heavy board pressed down on two fresh covers near the back wall. An older book lay open beside a knife and a small pot of paste, its broken spine held together with a strip of cloth. At the far table, a girl cut thread to measured lengths and set each piece into a tray without looking up. Someone behind a curtain complained about a manuscript with its margins ruined by damp.

I recognized enough of the work to feel briefly less lost. I had folded pages, pricked holes, and cursed thread that twisted at the wrong moment. Some of the tools here were better than mine had been; others had shapes I had never seen. The owner watched me pick up the awl, then moved it out of reach when I held it by the point.

I bought more paper than I thought I could use, then more again after remembering the pages I had rewritten on Earth. I bought dark ink, two plain pens, a small knife, thread, the awl, and thin stiff pieces suitable for covers. A ready-made blank book sat on a shelf near the counter. I touched its cover, considered how easy it would be, and left it there.

The owner noticed. “You do not want that one?”

“I need to put it together myself. Or as close as I can get.”

He seemed satisfied with that answer.

After I paid him, I counted what remained in the purse without letting Gina see me do it. The room and supplies had taken a serious bite out of it. Still, by my rough estimate, the coins left would buy plain food for two people for about a month if neither of them developed expensive habits. Since one of those people was me, that was enough.

By the time we carried everything back to the room, my arms had started to ache. I set the bundles down carefully and flexed my fingers.

Gina set the last bundle of paper on the table and looked toward the window. The strip of sun on the roofs had moved while we were gone.

“I should get back to Frigg’s rooms,” she said. “There is work waiting.”

I looked at the room around us: the paper, the coin purse, the bed I had paid for, the unfamiliar hearth. The door was shut. The castle remained somewhere above the roofs, invisible from here and no less present for it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Eat something more than bread,” she said. “And be careful with the hearth.”

“I can manage that.”

“Good.”

Then she was gone down the stairs, quick enough that the house seemed to settle afterward.

For a while I stood beside the table without doing anything.

The room was not silent. Someone coughed behind a wall. A cart rattled over the street below. The hearth clicked as the first small fire took hold in it. I had spent enough of the remaining money on dried fruit, cheese, a little honey, and a bundle of leaves the bread seller had assured Gina could be steeped in hot water.

It was hot, and for the moment that was close enough.

I opened the shutters a little wider. Cold air slipped in around the frame, and the tower beyond the roofs became sharper. From this room, Asgard was no longer a final image or a castle above a square. It was chimney smoke, wet slate, someone shouting for a child in the street, and a city wall cutting the pale sky into pieces.

A woman on the floor below opened her door, spoke to someone on the stairs, and closed it again. A delivery cart stopped outside long enough for two sacks to be dragged across the paving. Later, when the cart had gone, hammering started somewhere nearby and settled into a steady rhythm. The light on the roofs had shifted while I was out.

Then I shut the shutters again and went back to the table.

The chair clicked when I sat down. I adjusted its loose joint with a folded scrap of paper until it stopped. I set the ink where my hand would not knock it over, the pens beside it, the knife and awl farther away. I separated the clean sheets from the spare ones and put the thread and covers within reach.

I warmed water, ate a piece of cheese, and added honey to the herbal drink.

At last the room looked ready.

I had a table. I had a chair. I had paper and ink and a door I could close. I had enough food not to be forced back into the street before I understood what I was doing. There was nothing left to buy before I began.

I placed the first clean sheet in front of me.

The Asgard manuscript had begun with notes on loose pages, then scenes, then rewrites of scenes I had thought were done. Every answer had opened another question. A journey needed time. A character needed a reason to leave. A line in one chapter changed what could happen later. The months had accumulated while I was doing one ordinary piece of work after another.

I had spent the morning treating a new manuscript as a task with a shopping list. Now the paper, ink, thread, and tools were arranged in front of me, and I could see the work they implied.

I did not know how to make it fit into the time I might have.

My pen remained beside the first blank page.