The waters of Baltia were glimmering with amber lights as Beryl Skadi tightened her grip on the tiger pine. Her daemon Ivor soared just ahead, his eagle eyes tracing the dark landmasses and calling out their names to her:
"We've passed Lapland - there's Doctor Lanselius's beacon. Remember the roasted marshmallows we had at his house last summer, during the congress? Svalbard's just ahead."
"I don't want to go there, let's go faster." Beryl commanded impatiently. Dusk was falling rapidly. The wind tossed her thick, black curls and turned her cheeks a stinging red. She loved nothing better than this great abandon of flying, at exhilarating speeds, to find unknown lands.
"I can just make out the land of the Thorfins. " Ivor called back an hour later.
"You mean Orcadia?"
"Yeah, can't we stop and rest up there? Mother fought a battle against the Church in Kirkjuvagr... you know you'd like to see it. "
"I don't want to think about mother." Beryl snapped angrily.
They were running away, Beryl and Ivor. That in itself was unremarkable: young witches ran away all the time. They were expected to explore the universe unsupervised from the day they learned to fly, days after they had been weaned. Beryl could not recall a fathom of the Baltic coast around Latvia that she did not know intimately, and before she turned five she had travelled to Lapland, Byelorussia, and Baffinland. But Beryl was flying farther from the clan of the tiger hides than she had ever been, and she had no intention of going back. She was angry at her mother.
When she wasn't busy flying away and exploring on her own, Beryl liked to play with the village children. Her best friend was Luigi, an agile, tow-headed boy. He was the champion of every snowball fight, so nimble at ducking, with such skillful aim that no one but Beryl could elude him, and that was only because she held the unfair advantage of a witch.
The village children didn't know she was a witch. She took care not to fly before their eyes, except in confused situations like the midst of a snowball fight. Her daemon changed just as often as theirs, and because she was not grown-up yet, Ivor could not go very far away from her. The other witches in the clan sometimes dropped hints about how it was "time," but Beryl rarely paid attention to their advice or reproaches. She had no idea why witches' daemons travelled much further than human ones. She vaguely assumed it had something to do with becoming an adult, in the same way one's daemon would mysteriously stop changing.
It was Ruta Skadi who descended upon her last night, when they were playing hide and seek in the Bosco. Ruta, Queen of the Latvian witches, had barely been home all summer. All Beryl's life she had had more important things to take care of, leaving Beryl to the care of her sister witches. Beryl liked it that way; no one dared cross a princess, so she had more freedom than many other young witches. When the war ended, Ruta spent years in the assistance of an angel; finally the world fell into place and the witches returned to their old ways of survival, understanding nature, negotiation and trade amongst tribes. Ruta had just returned from meetings in Sylvania.
"You. Leave these humans alone." Ruta marched her out from the small circle, while the other children stared at Ruta's imposing fur-skinned apparition. To them, Ruta was dazzlingly beautiful, young, and infinitely wise: nothing like a mother in appearance, yet an indistinct aura hung about her that was all-knowing and motherly.
"Why?" Beryl asked indignantly when they were some distance from the gaping group.
"Because they're humans." Ruta did not explain.
"So? How're we that different? They have daemons, just like us. They just can't fly, but I've been meaning to teach Luigi. I think if they tried hard enough they can learn to..." her voice trailed off under her mother's blazing gaze.
"Witches do not mix in human affairs."
"But I don't see how we're --"
"Believe me, it will cause you great grief. Promise me you'll never speak to that boy again."
"Mother, you don't understand.. he's my best friend..."
"I saw the way he looked at you. You're too young." Ruta Skadi's voice had suddenly melted, and she was no longer passionate and ruthless. "You're beautiful." She told her daughter and kissed her forehead. But how could the child of such parents be anything but beautiful?
---
It was not the only kiss Beryl had that night. Despite her mother's decree, Beryl tiptoed out into the Bosco at midnight. She found the tiny house of Luigi's parents, and dashed a handful of pebbles against Luigi's window. He pushed the sash open and climbed out onto the snow in his nightshirt, with bare feet.
"Mom says we can't play together anymore... I don't really know why."
"That's too bad."
"I know... there's so much I wanted to tell you about, show you... it's just not fair." Beryl seethed.
"D'you know what'll make it better?" Luigi asked abruptly.
"What?"
Suddenly Luigi's lips met her lips. Beryl found that it tasted very sweet, like drinking chocolatl on a cold, harsh day.
"It's a friendship kiss." he told her.
"I'm going to run away... til I find somewhere where we can kiss all the time." Beryl promised Luigi.
A new feeling bubbled over Beryl as she crossed the Baltic waters. She had never felt so light and attached at the same time. The women taking care of her used to tell stories of how Ruta's great beauty attracted the best men in the world. But there were never any men amongst the Latvian witches. She wondered how her mother had met these men, who they were, where they lived.
---
"I don't want to think about mother." she reiterated.
Nevertheless her curiosity stirred as they loomed over the dots that were Orcadia, sprinkled in the waves. Beryl tilted her tiger pine and circled gently to a landing on the sandy beach of the Scapa Flow. The waters were gray, endless, and turbulent here. The shore itself was gray and deserted. In the background, the black masses of a charred city waited forebodingly. Ivor flitted back and turned into a shivering baby chick at Beryl's very feet.
"Don't be a chicken." Beryl was scornful trying to keep the fear out of her voice. "I wonder what happened here." She continued to muse.
"Don't go there... there's something... evil..." Ivor could barely squeak.
"Is that Kirkjuvagr?" Beryl's fascinated gaze kept returning to the charred landscape, as if a great magnet was attracting her irrevocably towards her it.
They hiked slowly along the coast, finding debris among the shrapnel. Beryl picked up something white and gleaming.
"This looks like one of mother's tiger fangs." she told Ivor excitedly.
"Thought you didn't want to speak about her."
"I don't. But now we know she fought here, here, on this very spot, killed something... look, it's stained with blood."
They stopped quietly in front of a great carcass, fur mixed with shards of metal, once formidable, now reeking with rotting flesh. Beryl turned quickly from the revolting smell, but Ivor became a lizard and crawled testily onto the beast.
"A Panserbjorn!" Ivor exclaimed.
"I've never seen one before." Beryl whispered.
Trepidly she moved towards the bear's great head. Ivor crawled under his neck, and nudged his collarbone. One of the cuffs of his armour came loose. Ivor dropped it at Beryl's feet.
There were engravings on it. Beryl bent down, and tried to decipher them. Some of the letters were unfamiliar to her, but Beryl had listened to enough tongues in her infancy that she could guess at foreign languages with relative ease. "Jormakka Byrnison, ...that's his name, and I think the small words below say 'in the service of King Iorek' " she pronounced after some time.
"There's something on the back." Ivor pointed out.
They both gasped at the message, scratched in a hurry:
SVALBARD IN DANGER. HELP IS IN OXFORD.
A/N: Beryl Skadi is a character of my own invention. Beryl derives from "brille", the german word for glass, originating in the medieval word for "crystal." Ivor means "yew" in Latvian.