Viking Queen_A Reverse Harem Romance Read online

  by

  Savannah Rose

  Copyright © 2018 by Savannah Rose

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  I always tell my customers to believe in their dreams.

  That is part of my routine, in the same way that I tell them to cross my palm with silver. In the same way that, before they leave, I hold their faces for a moment or two between my hands and promise them that all will be well in the end.

  It is part of the illusion, part of what breaks through the coating of daily life to feel real - or better than reality, even. It is this breaking through, this sense of being touched, that makes my customers come back. Mostly, I tell them the things they want, but sometimes I can’t resist adding a dash of whatever it is they need.

  Leave your wife.

  Forgive your father.

  Stop working so hard.

  Call your sister, tell her you love her.

  And I tell them to listen to their dreams. I tell them that their dreams are the stories that tell them what they need to know. Their eyes fill with tears, they nod, they leave.

  I have helped, I think.

  But, as is so often the case for professionals, I do not take my own advice. Like a lazy doctor or a drunk-driving cop, I wake up and immediately push my dreams away from myself. Not because they disturb me - not exactly. The only disturbance I feel is from the fact that these dreams do not reach into my past, to my happy, uncomplicated childhood in the countryside. They seem to tell me nothing about my origin story, about how I came to be here, about who I am, or where I am going.

  In my dreams I recall a childhood that was not my own.

  I always see the walls first. Stone walls, stone floors, stone ceilings. Shavings of watery light fall through narrow windows. We run around these patches of light, but never through them. It is an undeclared rule of the game that the light from outside is something to fear, although the reasons for this are never said aloud, and therefore fade into irrelevance.

  I am a child again in these dreams, but my exact age changes - sometimes we are scarcely toddling, other times we are old enough to be half-ashamed of our play, but we keep playing anyway. The word bounces off the walls and we throw it from one to the other, like a ball.

  In these dreams I am always part of a ‘we’. I do not exist except when I am reflected in the eyes of the girl next to me. We are dressed the same. Barefoot. In dresses of rough cloth the color of a cold dawn. She is small, smaller than me. Golden-haired. Her eyes are blue-cold, and if I saw them in another child I would be frightened, but in the dreams I always accept this icy look as being a part of myself.

  I understand, the way that we can only understand things in dreams, that this girl is my sister, though the way she looks into me is less like a sister and more a darker self. I do not even know what it should feel like to have a sister - I am an only child, after all.

  In my dreams, I am the elder. I know this too, without needing to be told. Sometimes she trips and falls over, and it is down to me to pick her up, dust her off, tell her not to cry, even though she never cries. I know that our father has told me that I must always protect her, and know just as clearly that I am the one who needs protection.

  You see, I am the older, but I am not the stronger.

  It is not precisely clear what she will do to me if I do not play the game by her rules, if I let the sunlight touch my skin even for a second. It never needs to be said - the dream-self is used to deferring, the dream-sister never needs to exert her power.

  Sometimes I feel her anger prickle me like shards of ice. I do not know why she is angry with me, but feel in some sense that the anger is richly deserved. My dream-sister, my other self, can detect some fraudulence in me.

  She pinches me, hisses my name, yanks my hair, tears at my dress, and I know that she wants to rip me into pieces with the rage that only one sister can feel towards another. When this happens, my ability to run evaporates, and I can only remain rooted to the spot while my mind does its best to flee. I scream soundlessly.

  But sometimes, in these dreams, we love each other. Quite effortlessly, her coldness and my warmth are happy beside one another, mingling with the harmonic force of opposing currents in a stormy sea.

  We skim over the surface of those stony floors and walls like two dragonflies, and our laughter scatters the air like blossom falling from trees. We fly around the patches of light and make friends with the shadows. She says the word. I say it back. We laugh and understand each other, and my hand reaches out for hers and she grasps me tightly, needing me as much as I need her, and all is well.

  I wake, and I miss her. The word still echoes.

  And then I stretch, I pick up my phone and check for texts and emails, and the pain of missing her diminishes until it blends in with the usual sensations of my body.

  I dress. I put on my filmy veils, my thick black kohl, my blood-red lipstick, my tinkling silver jewelry. I arrange my hair so that it partly hides my face - it is not so difficult to make myself appear mysterious. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, when I prepare my medium self for the world, my green eyes flash a chilly blue, just for a second.

  It is easy enough to pretend that it didn’t really happen.

  I go about my day, and my sister fades away, except when I walk through a patch of sunlight on the pavement, or hear a golden-haired child laugh.

  You would think being a medium wouldn’t get boring, but the truth is that the days all start to blend into one, the way they do with any other job.

  I get up. I put on my ‘medium’ face. Lots of makeup, a squirt of heady Oriental perfume. I walk to Starbucks and order a latte, just like everybody else. And then it’s off to the office, the quarters that hold within it all the mystique that surrounds Madame Riana, the Fortune Teller. Not my real name, but my own name, Rhea, doesn’t work for a fortune teller. Too powerful-sounding, too Norse. Nobody wants their fortune read by a goddess. It’s intimidating.

  Taxes, bills, emails, and the good ol’ newspaper take up the better portion of my morning. Just like the regular folk. Just like everyone else.

  Then it’s time to start.

  Lights.

  Camera.

  Action. Lies.

  I wrap myself up in as many veils and shawls as I can be bothered with and drape another big shawl over my closed laptop. I make sure that the Starbucks’ cup is well-hidden in the rubbish bin - no one wants to see that their medium goes to the same coffee outlets as them. We’re supposed to be this mysterious entity and so I play the role I’m meant to play. I light incense to hide the coffee smell, switch on Middle Eastern music to mask the noise of the construction outside. I check my makeup - make sure there’s no lipstick on my teeth - and then I buzz in the first customer of the day.

  The buzzer’s important. My customers want tea leaves and crystal balls, astrological signs and tarot cards. What they don’t want is a psychic huffing and puffing up and down the stairs.

  Well, they also want the truth.

  But truth, ladies and gentlemen, is subjective and it is exactly this subjectivity that makes my job easier than most would expect it to be.

  It’s not hard to figure out what people’s problems are. When someone’s looking tired and drawn I say that they’re preoccupied and tell them that it will all become clear soon. Which is true. No matter how dark the night, mornin
g will bring with it light. The same is true with plight. As the days pass, even the grimmest of pasts fade into the background.

  When they’ve clearly let themselves go and put on a bit of weight I observe that they aren’t single. Women of a certain age want to know if it’s a good time for them to have a baby. Mothers worry about their teenage kids. I tell them they’re going through a phase and they’ll grow out of it, and mostly they do.

  Sometimes groups of giggling teenage girls show up under the pretense that it’s just a laugh, but secretly they’re desperately curious about what the future will hold. I always promise them wonderful, exciting, exceptional lives. It doesn’t matter if the predictions don’t come true - they were never going to be repeat customers.

  There’s a lot of people who want to communicate with a dead loved one. I’d say that’s about sixty percent of my customers. You can tell from the embarrassment on their faces, the look that says, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I also can’t let go.’ So we sit together for half an hour and we try to make our peace with the dead.

  Do I believe in any of this stuff? No.

  I’ve seen behind the curtain, it’s all nonsense and a wastepaper bin full of empty Starbucks cups. You can’t communicate with the dead, but you can talk to the living, and tell them the things they need to hear.

  Some people think that makes me a liar. I don’t think I’m any more of a liar than most people. We’re all just spinning a line, throwing stuff at the wall to see what might stick. I’m all smoke and mirrors, same as everyone else.

  That doesn’t mean I don’t take my work seriously. I keep detailed notes on all my readings to see what worked and what didn’t, so I can learn from it for next time. I’m constantly working on my look - making my daily smoky eye more mysterious, experimenting with different ways to make my shawl throw a shadow across my face.

  And I keep up with the rest of the industry, of course.

  I go incognito, after hours. Never locally - I don’t want to be recognized. I scrub off my makeup and pull on my jeans. I spin stories, often borrowing from my own clients, and beg for advice.

  I’ve seen psychics who were better at the stagecraft than me, and others who were much worse. Good mediums are great storytellers, bad mediums are great frauds. I’d say I was a pretty medium-level medium - ha ha.

  They’re often not what you’d call normal people. That sounds ridiculous coming from a professional fortune-teller, but when you’ve gazed into the eyes of as many people as I have, you know what normal is, and you also know what crazy looks like and how to get it out of your office as quickly as possible.

  Some of the mediums I go to see are a lot like me - they’re the ones who’re playing the game. But some of them definitely buy into what they’re saying. I’ve had old ladies grab my palm and inform me that I will come into a great fortune, or that I will have four handsome husbands, or that I’ll be a general in a war. They tell me all this crap with tears in their eyes. They believe it.

  But this one is different.

  It has been a normal day. Boringly normal. Wake up, coffee, VAT return, customers. Four women trying to communicate with dead loved ones, one man wanting to know if his wife’s opening her cookie box to another monster, and one teenager who wanted me to predict his A level results. I told them that the loved ones understood and forgave them, gave the wife the benefit of the doubt and told the husband that they should try to reconnect, and awarded the boy two Bs and a C.

  A good day’s work.

  I’ve heard through the grapevine that there was new competition in town, so I’ve made an appointment to scope it out. I’m not exactly worried. People come, set up shop for a while and then leave again - all the time. Since most of my customers are regulars, I’m not too worried about losing business to the new act in town, who is supposedly called Ysulte.

  That’s pronounced izz-old-uh, by the way. Awful psychic name, in my opinion. You need to go with something that people can say easily.

  I get the bus to the place where she’s set up. Nowhere near the high street or shops, but instead an actual caravan in a forest on the outskirts of town. At the very least, that gets her points for authenticity.

  The light is already fading as I make my way to her little campsite. There’s a steady drizzle pattering on the bed of dried leaves, creating a background fuzz of noise in the damp, leafy forest. I’m not scared of being alone in the forest with a medium - I’ve seen gimmicks like this before, after all - but I’m definitely on my guard. As I already said, some of these people can be a little bit… unusual.

  When I get there, Ysulte is hunched on a tiny stool, staring into her smoky little campfire. Long, matted grey hair covers her weather-burned face, and two gnarled old hands protrude from the sleeves of her rough grey dress. She’s wearing a cloak and seems to be going for some kind of ancient world vibe, rather than the mystic belly dancer image that’s currently popular in the medium scene.

  There isn’t a trace of another customer in sight - clearly her business hasn’t taken off yet.

  “Madame Ysulte?” I call out as I approach the clearing where she’s set up her caravan. She jerks, as if in surprise.

  A rookie mistake. One of the first tricks of being a medium is to always act as though you’ve been expecting the customer all your life.

  “Ysulte. Just Ysulte. No Madame,” the old woman mumbles.

  Ysulte stands up to her full height, no more than five feet. It might just be because of her hunched posture, but she seems to be working very hard to stare at my feet and not look me in the eye.

  “I’m Ellie,” I say. I always give a fake name when I go to see other mediums - don’t want them tracking me down. Everyone’s a medium with Google, after all.

  The old woman tears her eyes from my feet and looks straight at me. Her eyes are pure, piercing blue, like a sunny Northern sky on a cold day.

  “No, you’re not,” she says. “You’re Rhea.”

  I admit that I jump a little at this. I try to figure out where I slipped up. I’d tried to make an appointment with Madame Ysulte, but I couldn’t find any trace of her online so I’d just shown up. It couldn’t be that. Was there a letter from the tax office sticking out of my handbag? Did she make a lucky guess from the ‘R’ charm on my bracelet?

  I decide to figure it out later. After all, I’m pretending to be somebody who believes in mediums, so I shouldn’t appear to question it too much.

  “That’s right. I’m here to see you.”

  “Of course you are,” she says back, a little drily. Is the old lady sassing me?

  I reach out to shake her hand, and she ignores it, motioning to the door of her caravan. ‘Come inside,’ she croaks, mounting the steps on unstable feet.

  From the outside, the structure is dark and wooden, not much to please the eye. Which is good…for me. This old lady is no threat to my customer base - she doesn’t seem to have a clue about how to draw in customers. But she knew my name, and I’ve got to admit that that impresses me. I follow her, crouching a little as I make my way inside.

  The caravan is tiny and poky, lit only by dozens of candles which all seem about to keel over into puddles of melted wax. There’s a strong smell - but not bad, exactly. It’s very organic, very herbal, very green. It smells familiar and mixed with the smell of wood-smoke it mingles into something that touches my innermost senses and seems to tug at some long-forgotten memory. Despite myself, I breathe in deeply. The old woman smiles.

  “You remember,” she says simply. I nod, even though I don’t know exactly what she’s talking about. Because it’s true - I remember something of that smell, even though I have no idea what that something really.

  Ysulte gestures to a roughly-carved wooden stool, and I sit down.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” she says. I start to notice a trace of an accent in her voice - a real accent, not the vaguely Russian/Arabic accent that some of the psychics put on. She sounds as if she might be German, or may
be Danish. Something Northern European, anyway.

  I don’t know what to say, so I just nod and smile. Usually this would be her cue to ask me something about myself, or otherwise to roll her eyes dramatically and say that she sees something. But instead she just sits, and looks, with those blue, blue eyes.

  I’m so caught up in staring back at her that at first that I don’t see them.

  It’s dark in that pokey little caravan. So dark that the only things I can make out are the stools and bundles of rags illuminated by the light of all those candles. But after we’ve looked at one another for a long time, Ysulte gives a little nod as if she’s saying see? and looks around her armchair. My eyes follow hers, my breaths hiccupping in my chest in equal parts of disbelief and fear.

  Four huge men, all standing as perfectly still as statues, span the width of the area behind Ysulte.

  My first impulse is to scream. Is this her real game - to lure me into this tiny little caravan so these men can do… what, exactly? But right now they’re not doing anything, just standing around her winged armchair, staring at me.

  They’re dressed strangely, too, in odd brown leather outfits highlighted in burnished bronze. The way they’re dressed reminds me of something I’ve seen before, though I can’t think of exactly what. They’re all blond, blue-eyed, intense-looking, muscle-bound. Any one of them could grab me and I’d be able to do nothing about it.

  I start up from my stool, but the old woman reaches out her wrinkled hand and places it on my arm. All at once a feeling of calm washes over me, and understanding dawns on me that whatever this strange situation is, nobody will hurt me.

  “Look closer,” Ysulte says softly. I do, and all the fear that once gripped my nonexistent balls fades and laughter now wraps me in its protective arms.

  The men aren’t there. Well, not really, anyway. The bronze of their clothes and the planes of their faces don’t exist the way that I exist. Not flesh or blood, not reality, but faintly there- translucent. I can just about see through them to the wooden paneling of the caravan wall.