Chapter 19
His stomach had never hurt so much in his entire life. During one of the few moments during which he had been able to focus on anything else, Mikkel told him that he had probably accidentally eaten spoiled fish and had come down with food poisoning. He hadn't dared ask Mikkel about his chances to make it through. He really didn't want to know the answer. At least, when Hildur had noticed something was off, he had been able to sincerely tell her that it had all happened due to lack of attentiveness on his part. In the times during which he was unconscious, but alone, it didn't take long to realize that he had gotten exactly what he wanted. No lives would be risked trying to save him. If this killed him, it could pass as both accidental and deliberate. If he survived, the period of illness was still going to rob him of the opportunity to do something that would have had a better chance to work.
He wasn't sure of the time it had taken, but he eventually got better. He was vaguely aware of the boat having arrived while he was still ill, and to have been moved to a different bed. The first thing he became aware of was that he had been put in a corner cell and that his sole neighbor was a quite grumpy-looking Sigrun. This made her the first to notice him fully waking up. After yelling for a doctor, she asked him how he was feeling. Reynir answered that he felt better than what turned out to have been a whole week of being ill. Someone came to examine him soon after, and was happy to see that his illness "apparently actually was a worse case of food poisoning than usual". Reynir quickly found out that his condition had sufficiently worried some authority figure that not only their on-board quarantine would last a month, but they were all going to stay an extra month in a quarantine facility in the middle of the ocean as an extra precaution. Damn. He hadn't considered that the threat to get everyone else locked up could be enacted before any of them even set foot in Iceland. While feeling better than during the last few days, Reynir was too tired to keep himself from apologizing to Sigrun for what had happened, and in the process all but straight up tell both her and the doctor examining him about the "deal".
-Wow. That worked way too well.
The comment had come from Sigrun. She quickly explained that Mikkel had been suspecting Reynir to be hiding something, and that finding out its nature would probably require catching him in a moment of weakness. The doctor, meanwhile, explained that his father most certainly had nothing to do with the crew's stay on the off-shore facility. That was actually one of the many wrenches Trond and Taru were trying to throw into Reynir's father's plans until they broke down completely. It could be easily justified as an extra security measure, that also happened to please some highly placed people, some of which were part of Trond's "favor network".
-And that Trond guy seems to find the idea of keeping your guards out of jail by locking them up elsewhere hilarious.
Sigrun chimed in:
-Yep, sounds like the old man.
Sigrun, quite ironically, ended up being the first to complain about not being able to leave her quarantine cell. That extra time was also time keeping Lalli and Onni separated from each other at a time at which they needed each other the most. Hildur however ensured to Reynir that she and Bjarni were doing their best to help Onni, while Emil seemed to be doing the same for Lalli. Sometimes, when Sigrun and Mikkel weren't talking to each other or playing games, Reynir thought he could hear Emil speaking Finnish. Or at least trying to do so. This extra quarantine time, fortunately, turned out to be a big factor into tipping the scales. While the police had done their best to freeze as many accounts as possible, money could still be drawn out of one of them as long as it officially went to paying a lawyer. Because it actually wasn't going only to a lawyer, it ran out much faster than it should have, and the hired and bribed portion of the help had bailed out by the time Reynir and his guards were actually allowed to set foot in Iceland again. By that time, nobody's relatives had needed guards and those who had been moved out of their usual homes had gone back to them. Torbjörn, Trond, Taru, Onni and Reynir's family minus his father had still been able to welcome the group back.
Now that Reynir was back, one last thing needed to be settled. While Ólafur, Guðrún, Bjarni and Hildur had all be groomed to either take over a key position in the family business or be a good candidate for an external position from which they could help it in some way, no such thing had ever been prepared for Reynir. Ólafur taking over was good opportunity to change this, if Reynir wanted so. Reynir had never considered this before, and it came as yet an extra decision he needed to make in addition of those involving everything he had found out about himself and his family during the expedition. Ólafur understood, but spelled out that he intended to ask him at least a few more times before giving up, the next one slated to be after Reynir graduated from his mage training.