Page 43 of The Fanged One

"So you mentioned in your text when you woke me up. It better be worth it, Von," Linnea said and poked him in the chest.

Fenris's hand twitched, wanting to rub her scent off the shaman. He still hadn't had a proper chance to talk to Linnea yet and didn't want to start acting overprotective and make whatever he had done worse. The run with Tor had helped with some of his restlessness, and now it all came rushing back.

"I'm sure it will be, but it's kind of complicated to explain," Von replied, catching her hand and tugging Linnea inside.

"I love complicated at 2 a.m," Tor said, hanging up his coat.

Arne patted him on the back. "Pretty sure that's all this family knows how to do."

Fenris followed Linnea and Von down the hall, not bothering to remove his jacket. He didn't like letting her out of his sight, and he had already been away from her for hours.

Mate is here now, his wolf said. That is enough.

Linnea was unwinding her scarf in front of him, the back of her braid loose and still sleep-mussed. She had taken his paw before they were interupted by Von's message, and he counted that as a good thing. He would be patient for the moment, but as soon as he got her alone again, he would demand to know what he had done wrong.

Von was already halfway down the hall. "Lounge room, please! I need to lie down on something comfortable."

"How much coffee have you had?" Tor asked him.

"Enough to have my best idea ever," Von replied.

Ciara let out a soft snort. "Surprised he isn't climbing the walls."

The lounge was warmed by a small fire going in the grate. Two deep oxblood couches faced each other across a long oak table that hadn't been there earlier in the day. Von must have dragged it through from the library. A chaise was pushed against the wall under the window, a blanket bunched on it, a book open, face down, on the floor beside it.

Von set a small book with a cracked leather cover down on the long table under a lamp, before leaning his hips on the table edge and pointing at all of them.

"Okay, sit your asses down, please. It's story time."

Linnea took the couch closest to the table, and Fenris took the seat beside her without asking, but was careful not to touch her. He wasn't sure if he was allowed to anymore, and it was driving him crazy.

"I've spent the entire night going through everything I've ever written down or filed on Loki. There's nothing more I can do there. We have plowed that field to death, so I decided to go widen my gaze and focus on his kids."

He looked at Fenris when he said it, with a small apologetic incline of the head. "Sorry, love. Everything I have about you is bad."

"You don't need to apologize for searching my family," Fenris said with a shrug. "What did you learn?"

"I went to Jörmungandr first. As far as I can tell, no one writes useful things about him because everyone is too busy being terrified of him. Bless." Von folded his arms. "I went through Sleipnir next, which gave me a great deal of horse-stuff, charming but also useless. I saved Hel for last because her lore is the most obscure. I went through a lot of the same monastery panic documents that I collected years ago, and then I remembered I had bought this."

Von picked up the little book again. The leather was old, dark, and soft from handling. There were no decorations on the leather, and it had a plain, unadorned clasp.

"This frustrating little book is an account I bought ten years ago off a man in Reykjavik who didn't know what he had. The text claims to be written by Brother Eyvindr, a monk from a monastery in Iceland. The first page is in late medieval Latin, the kind you can pick up in a year if you have the discipline for it. I've translated that first page myself, but after the manuscript stops being in Latin my real frustrations began."

Von passed the book to Fenris. "This is what the rest of the manuscript looks like. I've shown it to four Old Norse specialists at three universities, and to the best linguist at the Reykjavik Library. They all looked at it and said they had no idea how to read it. They agreed it is in a dialect of Old Norse, but it's so archaic that none of them can translate it. There's no extant text in this form, no reference grammar, or parallel corpus. I've tried to crack it with every method I know. I have tried for years. I gave up on it three winters ago, and I told it to leave me alone."

Von paced the room, pushing his hands through his hair.

"Tonight, I was like, what the hell, I'll have another look and found my notes on the Latin. The story begins with a wandering old man who turned up at the monastery one winter night and told the monk a tale of meeting the goddess Hel and a great treasure hidden in her realm. That's all I know, and yes, before you bitch me out about waking you up, I remembered we have a really old god at our disposal now, and maybe he can make sense of it."

Von gestured at Fenris to open the book and flopped down on the chaise lounge beside him. "Please try and read it. I need to know my decade of headaches has not been for nothing."

"Let me see. It's been a long time since I read anything, shaman," Fenris replied and opened the book. "I never learned Latin, but this here…" He leaned closer to look at the black markings and reached back into his memories. After a few moments, the meanings started to come to him.

The strokes of the letters were for Norse sounds, set down by a man who hadn't been trained to write the tongue, only to hear it. He had spelled it phonetically, the way a song is taken down by ear.

The language itself began to make sense as Fenris realized what the monk had tried to do. He had spoken this tongue every day with the humans he had lived with.

Fenris lifted his eyes to Von. "It is messy where the monk tried to spell out the sounds, but I can read it."