DER VERRAT

German, "the treason; the betrayal".

For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first. -- Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

There were places in the world where the veil separating it from the Óhreinnjǫrð[1] became thin. Sometimes they were natural. Sometimes they were formed by something on the other side attacking the veil until they broke through. The second sort were the most dangerous. No one could predict where they would appear next. And no one could predict what would come through them. The monster Diarnlan killed had probably come through one such place. People kept a close eye on the sea in case any more monsters followed.

None did. After four months devoid of skrýszel sightings everyone began to relax.

Naturally that was when the next attack came. It didn't come from the sea. And it wasn't a skrýszel; it was just an ordinary jǫtunn. But even an ordinary jǫtunn was still far larger than a human and could do considerable damage to anything in its path.

This particular jǫtunn might as well have been sent directly to cause mayhem for Karandren. In the first place it arrived on the very day after he got into an argument with another student over whether it was possible or not for a human to survive a trip to the Óhreinnjǫrð. In the second place Diarnlan had taken Karandren and Erdreda to a farm for "practical magic experience" -- in other words trying to use identification spells to tell poisonous toadstools from harmless mushrooms -- when the jǫtunn tore a hole in the veil right in the middle of the farmyard.

Karandren and Erdreda were in the kitchen garden, poring over mushrooms the farmer had collected and brought back for them to study. Diarnlan told them bluntly she didn't trust them not to eat the mushrooms if they were allowed to hunt through the forest for them. Their oh-so-respected teacher kept a close eye on them in-between reading the latest instalment of some serial novel.

In spite of what Karandren had assumed at first, Diarnlan did in fact have hobbies beyond making her students' lives miserable. They included a fondness for reading some hapless author's work for the sole purpose of mocking it and poking holes in it.

If only she used up all her spite on those books and had none left for us, Karandren frequently lamented after each especially nasty insult.

If it wasn't for that book Diarnlan would have sensed the spike in dark magic long before the jǫtunn broke through. Unfortunately she was absorbed in sneering at a poor choice of words and a plethora of dangling modifiers. The two teenagers weren't experienced enough in sensing changes in ambient magic to know anything was wrong until it was too late.

Karandren was the first to sense something. "I've told you a dozen times, no edible mushroom has--"

He trailed off abruptly. An odd prickling sensation ran up and down his arms, as if insects were crawling over his skin. Growing up around ice spirits -- and being half glacier-sprite himself -- meant he was intimately familiar with ice magic. This felt like his mother's magic and yet nothing like his mother's magic. The similarities more than the differences were what unnerved him the most.

"Something's wrong," he said.

Erdreda snorted. "Of course something's wrong. You're an idiot and that mushroom is perfectly safe."

"No, I don't mean that. Don't you sense that magic?"

Erdreda's blank expression showed she hadn't a clue what he was talking about. Karandren risked a glance over at Diarnlan. She was always furious if she thought he was slacking off during his lessons. Yesterday she boxed his ears for -- in her opinion -- not working hard enough.

Luckily she was still absorbed in her book. Karandren got up and went to the garden gate. No sign of anything out of place in the farmyard. Wait a minute. There had been chickens running around when they arrived. Their clucks and crows provided constant background noise. Karandren had become so used to it he didn't notice when it stopped. Where had they all gone?

The prickling feeling intensified. With it came a strange, sharp taste in his mouth. It tasted almost like blood, but it was freezing cold. Thoroughly rattled by now, Karandren turned to call Diarnlan. Then it happened. The air rippled and distorted in the middle of the farmyard. An enormous foot stepped out of the portal and landed on the ground with a resounding thud. The rest of the creature's body followed.

Karandren had never seen a jǫtunn in real life before. All he knew about them came from the stories his mother and her family told of them. Yet there could be no doubt of what he was looking at. The giant looked as if it was carved from a block of ice. Its presence made the temperature fall dramatically. A thick layer of frost spread over the ground around its feet.

If he had ever thought about it at all, Karandren would have expected to be frightened if he came face to face with a jǫtunn. They were terrifying monsters who had come from a completely different branch of the world-tree, taken over his ancestors' territory in the Óhreinnjǫrð and forced the glacier-sprites into Miðjangarð[2], and destroyed everything in their path. Anyone in their right mind would be terrified to face one.

Instead Karandren felt perfectly calm and oddly detached. It was like he already knew how this would end and so knew there was no need to worry. Without even thinking he gathered his magic. Acting solely on instinct, he conjured up a knife made of ice magic and hurled it directly at the jǫtunn's eye.

That was perhaps the most anticlimactic jǫtunn invasion in history. The knife sank deep into its eye-socket. For a moment time seemed to freeze. Slowly the giant's body swayed. It fell backwards. It toppled to the ground with a crash that shook the buildings.

Karandren grinned triumphantly. He turned round...

And almost collided with Diarnlan. Even when insulting him and accusing him of cheating she had never looked so furious. The look on her face made Karandren take a step back in alarm.

Instinctively he tried to explain, even though he knew it would do no good. Explanations never mattered when someone had already made up their mind. "I killed that thing before it did any damage. Just like you did!"

At once he knew he'd made a mistake. Diarnlan's deadly glare intensified.

"Tell me," she said in a quiet, even tone. "How did you know exactly where this creature would appear? How did you kill it so easily when even a Great Mage would need help? And why is your aura covered in ice-magic just like a jǫtunn's?"

Strictly speaking a glacier-sprite's magic was not exactly like a jǫtunn's. But a human couldn't tell the difference between them. Karandren opened his mouth. He found he had nothing to say. Not without making his situation a thousand times worse, at any rate.

Diarnlan turned abruptly. "We're leaving. I'm going to ask my teacher to call a meeting of the Great Mages. This is out of my hands."

The situation was out of everyone's hands. Especially Karandren's. Within hours of killing the jǫtunn he found himself before a council of the Great Mages, half the teachers from the academy, and many other magicians. And, of course, Diarnlan. He listened in numb disbelief as she accused him of conspiring with the jǫtunn and helping it break through the veil.

In fairness to Diarnlan she didn't say anything that was blatantly a lie. She didn't have to. She recounted the sequence of events in the light most favourable to her, making sure to cast make Karandren's actions seem as damning as possible.

"I looked away for a minute--" No mention of being distracted by her book, Karandren noticed, "--And when I looked back this person had disappeared." It was amazing how much disgust she could put in an innocuous word like 'person'. "I was about to go looking for him when I sensed the tear in the veil. So I ran to the farmyard and saw him right in front of the jǫtunn."

"Did you see them talking?" Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair asked sharply.

"No," Diarnlan admitted. She grimaced as if she would have preferred to lie. "But he didn't act as if he was surprised to see it. He conjured a knife and killed it within seconds of its arrival."

Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair glared first at her student then at the assembled magicians. "It sounds to me as if we ought to thank Karandren for summarily dealing with a dangerous creature before it could wreak havoc. Why are all of you acting as if he's a criminal on trial?"

Diarnlan glared back at her teacher. "When he conjured the knife he used a completely different sort of magic than he ever used before. It was indistinguishable from a jǫtunn's magic. There can be no doubt he's a half-breed spy they sent to learn information about us."

"I am not half-jǫtunn," Karandren protested. "I'm-- I'm--"

No amount of bribery could keep the truth of his parentage concealed now. The headmistress of the academy stood up as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

"That's true enough," she said. "His mother's a glacier-sprite."

In the eyes of almost all the oh-so-righteous magicians, being half-anything was cause for scorn. Being half-glacier-sprite, when everyone knew the glacier-sprites originally came from the Óhreinnjǫrð, was all the proof needed in a situation like this to declare him a spy. The assembled magicians looked at him with disgust and contempt, as if he was something they'd scraped off their shoes. Karandren had thought he was used to such looks. Now he found there was a difference between getting them from teenagers at the academy and getting them from adults who were fully-fledged magicians.

Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair remained the only voice of sanity in the room. "Tell me, someone. Let's just suppose he is a spy for the jǫtnar. It's highly improbable considering they despise half-breeds as much as us and they have a well-known feud with glacier-sprites. But just suppose he's a spy. Why then would he kill a jǫtunn? Is that the sort of thing that would make them trust him?"

Diarnlan said nothing. The academy's headmistress answered instead.

"Obviously it was to make us laud him as a monster-slayer, just like your esteemed student here!"

Karandren winced. He risked a glance at Diarnlan. She didn't look at him or anyone else. She stared at the marble floor with an unhappy twist to her mouth. For one brief, hope-filled moment he thought she would listen to her teacher. It was considered downright immoral to think you knew better than your teacher. Apart from that, no matter how much she hated Karandren, she couldn't publicly disagree with someone as esteemed as a Great Mage.

"A fourteen-year-old boy cannot possibly kill a jǫtunn," another magician interrupted. "I don't care what his mother is. It can't be done. The whole thing must have been a set-up."

Diarnlan looked up sharply. "I examined the body. Do you think I don't know how to tell when a skrýszel's dead?"

The magician mumbled an apology. "It must have been an old and sick jǫtunn then."

"It wasn't," Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair said. "I checked the body myself. It was a young and healthy one."

"That just makes it all the more ridiculous to think this boy could have killed it without foul play being involved," the headmistress said. "I don't mind telling you that we've always had trouble with this boy. One of his classmates died in mysterious circumstances right after this boy picked a fight with him."

Karandren opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. What was the use in trying to explain when everyone had already decided he was guilty? It wasn't as if he had meant to kill that bully. He just lost his temper and held him underwater for a bit too long.

The headmistress continued, "And of course he's far too good at magic. No teenager is ever that good. He simply must be cheating."

Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair looked at her scornfully. "Have you any proof he's cheating?"

Reluctantly the headmistress admitted, "Well, we've never been able to catch him."

"Then that's just a baseless rumour that shouldn't be repeated as fact. I'm surprised you even mentioned it."

Abashed, the headmistress fell silent. A long and painful silence descended on the room. Karandren hardly dared to breathe. He looked from Diarnlan to Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair for help. Diarnlan had gone back to ignoring everyone. She traced patterns on the ground with the toe of her boot and never looked up. Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair met Karandren's gaze briefly. She gave him a pitying look and a minute shrug.

At last one of the other Great Mages spoke up. "We have enough evidence to cast considerable doubt on Karandren's character. For everyone's safety, I think it's best to exile him."

"You are all idiots," Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair said bluntly. She looked at Diarnlan. "You know this boy is innocent. All of you," she glared at the assembly, "have cobbled together nonsensical claims just because you don't like him. And you," she gave Diarnlan an even fiercer glare, "are going along with it because he's hurt your pride."

Diarnlan refused to look up. She continued to stare at the ground even as Karandren was dragged out of the room.

Karandren was all but literally thrown through the portal to Miavain. He landed in the middle of an empty field, with no money, no idea where he was, and no means of getting food and shelter. All he had were the clothes he was wearing, his magic, and his burning hatred of all those magicians.