Chapter 10
During the two weeks separating the first building containing ghosts from the Odense hospital, things in the Known World had moved so fast that the Silent World was being true to its name by comparison. The trial had been postponed until the expedition came back. What Reynir's father had most likely intended as a time-buying measure had backfired when the authorities finally took the possibility of the expedition crew's families being threatened in the meantime seriously. Their families were now under official protection, while Hildur and Bjarni's servants could keep an eye out for anyone who could be secretly allied with their father. Someone had also realized that that request had probably been made with the secret hope that something would happen to the crew before the end of the expedition, and that over-the-radio statements from them would be better than no statement at all if such a thing were to occur. Once these statements had been made, the lawyers defending both sides had been authorized to interrogate them. And this is where Reynir and his siblings realized just how many back-up plans their father must have had in mind.
His new plan was to make sure that if he was going to jail, he wasn't going alone. Lalli's actions on the first day made perfect sense for a scout trained to discard everything not fit for human consumption with no idea that the Icelandic justice system frowned upon the deliberate destruction of hard evidence. Reynir's father's defenders were now making him out to be so unable to understand the consequences of his actions that living in Finland was the only reason he had yet to be placed in a proper institution. They also made out Tuuri's decision to bring him on the expedition to be neglectful at best, abusive at worst. The same charges were being thrown at Onni for letting this happen. Sigrun, who had taken the initiative to start reporting to Reynir's tutors and cut all communications with Øresund base during the first few days, was going to have to answer to mutiny charges, to which she had simply replied "bring it". Taru, Trond and Torbjörn were on metaphorical thin ice as well, and Emil was going to be painted as an accomplice to the latter, despite the fact that they were probably the pair of pre-mission acquaintances that talked to each other the less. Mikkel was going to be charged with malpractice. The fact that the office chair that had wheels was now "Reynir's", the couple mornings he had simply been unable to get out of bed and the handful times he had helped Mikkel do the domestic chores because he was unable to focus long enough to do even basic skald work were now being blamed on trouble accepting his mage powers rather than the discovery that they had been hidden from him for so long. That and the whole trying to get him killed situation.
Under cover of wanting Reynir to tell his version of the facts without anyone else hovering over him, one of his father's defenders had spoken to him while he was alone in the office and suggested that the charges against the crew could all go away if he let himself "be careless at just the right moment". Since the crew's families were now safe, the crew itself was now held hostage against him. And of course, he tried to make out every single day Reynir decided to stay alive as an utterly selfish act. Reynir had found a couple of counters to it. The first was pointing that if he let himself die, he would have no way of seeing if the charges would be actually dropped. Even if he had considered deliberately getting himself in an "accident" a reasonable option in the current circumstances, there was no way he was going to accept the man's word for it. The second, Reynir refused to share with him, as he suspected it would otherwise turn into the wrong kind of leverage. The limits of what Onni had been able to teach Lalli only made the ghosts catch up with them more slowly than they would have without the spells, all the runes Hildur could think of only made that time slightly better, and researching new Finnish spells was apparently a more laborious affair than coming up with new runes. The latter still required as many minds working on it as possible. There were just enough people in the crew who were aware of that he had become essential to the crew's chances of making it out of the Silent World alive to make them a just little bit more trustworthy in his eyes than anyone working for his father.
Fortunately, Sigrun had found just the words to keep them going with the research despite this:
-If we're going to come back a bunch of misfits and criminals, let's be the misfits and criminals that come back with a new lead on a Rash cure. The people who made this stuff and got it delivered to all these places didn't give up, despite the fact that things were so bad that they never got it to the Known World. We are all going to look like wimps compared to them if we give up now.
Reynir had taken this to mean that he shouldn't give up on taking notes about the strange ghosts either. He'd noted the locations on a spare map, to keep anything Mikkel would not like off the main annotated map, which was already overcrowded with symbols. There was nothing of interest that they knew of at their next stop, and the one after that would be, finally, Odense. This time was as good as any to compare the ghost map with the main one, on the off-chance that he found something new from it. He quickly realized that there was an almost-perfect match between the ghost locations and the places that had gotten the possible cure or vaccine. When he checked his notes about the one location that had received the cure but was devoid of ghosts, he realized that the match was actually perfect. That specific location had technically gotten the cure, but none of the boxes had been opened. The patients there had all died of the Rash, and there had been a couple of trolls there as well. If that pattern held, there would be ghosts in the Odense hospital. And possibly an explanation.