Chapter 1: The End of Innocence

Love infused my childhood: ah the innocent days, before we learn of danger, of betrayal, of fear. I was lucky, really, to be sheltered so long, and to live - however naively - in such a safe and nurturing space.

My sister Brenna found our home to be more constricting than I did, and she chafed under the isolation it enforced upon us. Whenever she could, she would sneak away to peer through the Market Gate, where people from Other Places came to trade with the men of the village. But I was not so made, and felt comfortable inside the walls of the village where we lived. Neither doubt nor question ever troubled me.

And as a child, what was there to question, really? My papa doted on Brenna and me; no matter how long and exhausting his day, he made time for us every night. I can still remember the sound of his great heartbeat under my ear as I lay my head against his chest, and the vibration of his voice as he sang to me and Brenna, one of us on each knee.

He had crazy in him, too: “Bloooooo-Ho-Haaahhh!” he’d bellow as he came for us with impossibly long arms tipped with the threat of tickles. Oh, how papa could make us laugh!

Mama would see us turning red and telling Papa, “Stop, stop!!!” and she’d firmly let him know that enough was enough. She hated tickling herself, and would never inflict such a thing on us. But oh, could she tell a story! How many nights the three of us on her four-poster bed, snuggled into covers and one of us in each crook of her arm while she lulled us to sleep with stories of Freya, of gods of Aasgard and heroes of Midgard.

She also delighted in making surprises for us. One of my favorites were her treasure hunts. We would come home and she would hand us each a small slip of paper with an unfinished couplet: Your treasure hunt is now begun, and this is your first clue:

To find the next now stop and think: where do I keep the ____?

And off I’d be to the craft box where she kept the glue!

As we grew into young ladies, Papa seemed to calcify into stricter ways, but Mama could still disarm us with silliness any time. One of her best weapons against our teenage years was her four-year-old alter ego Toastie Zwieback, a mischievous but well-intentioned kindergartner who discovered endless ways to get in trouble by trying to “help”.

We were lucky to live in innocence for so long, but of course it couldn’t last.

The village of Skogtårn-i-Sør was better suited to preserving innocence than most. For the first 18 years of my life, the only contact I ever had with someone from outside of the village would be when someone new came to live there. Merchants were allowed in the area outside of the Market Gate, but never inside of the wall; and casual passersby were not even allowed so close. Having no basis for comparison, this all seemed quite normal to me. Brenna, on the other hand, seemed instinctively to knw that it was not.

The only other gate in the village wall was the Labyrinth Gate, and just beyond it, the Labyrinth Forest where the Will-o-Wisps were said lay in wait to lure unwary children to their doom. Many important rituals of the village centered around this gate, but the only time it was ever opened was - so we were told - to banish someone from the village. As the daughter of a Village Elder, I knew that death itself was preferable to banishment, and in any event, we never had a banishment during my childhood, so the idea of the gate opening at all was more myth than real to me.

Once a year on Freya’s Day, which fell on Midsummer’s Eve, everyone in the village would gather at the Labyrinth Gate. The main event was a solemn and scripted Freya’s Day Pageant, which did not vary at all from year to year. The year that I was seven years old, I was selected to play the roll of Bygul, one of the magnificent blue skogkatts that pull Freya’s chariot when she comes to open the Labyrinth Gate and lead the people of Skogtårn-i-Sør to the fields of Folkvangr.