XI) Five People, One Boat, and Very Few Fish

Baldr knew about the fishing trips before anyone invited him.

It would have been difficult not to know. Thor announced preparations as though the lake were an enemy position. Loki spent the evening before each departure refusing to explain what was in his bait box. Lexander acquired a particular expression whenever the council tried to schedule something for the same morning, and Uriah sent notes through the gate containing questions of such urgent importance as whether anyone had remembered a knife suitable for bread.

Baldr noticed all of it.

He also noticed that nobody seemed to catch much.

The first time he said so, Thor looked at him over her shoulder.

“That is not the point.”

“What is the point?”

She opened her mouth.

Closed it.

Then looked toward Lexander, who had become deeply occupied with tying a strap.

“Ask him.”

Lexander tightened the knot unnecessarily.

“Fresh air.”

Baldr looked through the open courtyard doors at an entire world containing fresh air.

“I see.”

Loki shut his bait box.

“You don’t. That’s the beauty of it.”

They left with two baskets, five rods, one spare oar, and a disagreement about which of them had been responsible for the missing cork on the previous outing.

Baldr remained in the courtyard.

He had work that morning. There was always work if a person had become good at being available. Somebody wanted his judgment on a training matter. Someone else needed an introduction. A visiting family wished to meet him because they had heard his name in an old story and wanted to discover whether the ending had been told correctly.

He was willing to do all those things.

He would also have liked to know what happened on the lake.

He disliked the smallness of the feeling and tried to put it away.

At the gate, Lexander stopped.

Uriah nearly walked into him.

“What?”

“We have five rods.”

“One is spare.”

Lexander turned back toward the courtyard.

Baldr had already begun speaking to the attendant who wanted the introduction.

For a moment, Lexander watched him: the courteous inclination of his head, the patience, the ease with which everyone assumed he would make room for their needs.

“Baldr.”

His son looked up.

“Do you want to come?”

Baldr’s expression opened before he could arrange it into anything less revealing.

Then he looked at the attendant.

“I have—”

“Can it wait?” Lexander asked.

The attendant answered before Baldr could.

“Of course, Your Majesty.”

Baldr studied his father.

“You have room?”

From beyond the gate came Thor’s voice.

“We’ll put Loki over the side.”

“A welcoming household,” Loki observed.

Baldr smiled.

“I’d like to come.”

The boat belonged to nobody in particular, which meant each of them blamed its deficiencies on the others.

It lay beside a low jetty in a sheltered part of the lake, broad enough for sensible occupants and continually disappointed by the ones it received. Its paint had once been blue. Repairs had introduced two additional shades and a patch of unpainted timber near the stern. A little water rested in the bottom, but the boatkeeper assured them that it came from last night’s rain.

“Mostly,” he added.

Uriah looked at Lexander.

Lexander looked at Loki.

Loki looked at the sky.

“A beautiful morning.”

The boatkeeper helped them test the arrangement at the jetty. Five people could sit safely if the baskets went amidships and Thor refrained from occupying the place she considered hers by divine right.

Thor inspected the narrow seat offered instead.

“That was made for a smaller person.”

“Most things are,” Baldr said.

She looked at him.

He smiled mildly.

“I may enjoy this,” Uriah murmured.

They put on the cork belts the boatkeeper supplied. Thor complained that hers interfered with dignity. The boatkeeper replied that dignity floated poorly.

Lexander paid him an extra coin for the observation.

Mjölnir remained on the shore beneath a cloth, after the boatkeeper refused to consider a legendary hammer ordinary luggage. Gungnir had not been invited. Loki surrendered a small object that looked like a silver beetle when Mara’s earlier description of an artificial lure was read aloud from a note Io had supplied.

“It is perfectly harmless,” he protested.

“Then it can wait here,” Lexander said.

Baldr carried the spare rod aboard.

He stepped lightly. The boat scarcely moved.

Everyone noticed.

“He stays,” Uriah said.

They pushed off.

For the first ten minutes, the trip consisted of establishing that Thor and Loki could not row together because each considered the other’s rhythm a moral failure.

Baldr offered to take an oar.

Thor surrendered hers with the expression of someone granting a privilege.

Loki watched Baldr’s first stroke.

Then matched it.

The boat began going in a useful direction.

Lexander sat back.

“Remarkable.”

“We were going somewhere before,” Thor said.

“Several places. Briefly.”

They reached a quiet inlet where reeds grew along the bank and a willow leaned far enough over the water to make birds feel superior. Uriah dropped the little anchor. Lexander distributed the rods. Loki opened his bait box.

Something inside glowed.

Everyone looked at him.

“Worms,” he said.

“Why do they glow?” asked Baldr.

“Optimism.”

Thor took the box away.

The rules were explained while ordinary bait was substituted.

No summoning fish. No freezing the water around a fish. No commanding a fish in the name of an ancient office. No asking a fish whether it would be willing to assist the kingdom by entering a bucket.

Baldr glanced at Lexander after that last one.

His father looked wounded.

“I asked once.”

“It sent three smaller fish,” Loki said. “Clearly an administrator.”

No lightning. That rule was Thor’s fault, though she maintained that the incident had been an atmospheric misunderstanding. No illusions designed to conceal the size of a catch. That rule had acquired several amendments. No purchasing fish from the shore and introducing them into the conversation as an accomplishment.

Uriah looked at the lengthening list.

“We’ve made this very difficult.”

“For certain people,” Baldr said.

He cast his line.

The float settled beneath the willow.

For a few minutes, nothing happened.

The silence was so unfamiliar that he almost interrupted it with an apology.

Then he noticed the others.

Thor’s shoulders had lowered. Lexander watched the little circle around his float with an attention that contained no dread. Uriah had taken off the expression he wore when someone was waiting for an answer. Even Loki seemed willing to let the morning remain unimproved.

Baldr began to understand.

His float dipped.

He lifted the rod.

A fish came out of the water, small and silver, flashing in the sunlight.

Four faces turned toward him.

He looked back uncertainly.

“Have I broken a rule?”

Loki leaned forward.

“Possibly a social one.”

The fish was measured, admired, and returned to the lake. Baldr insisted it was too small to keep. Thor insisted that the fact of its existence should nevertheless be recorded.

“Why?” he asked.

“So these people cannot deny it later.”

By luncheon, he had caught three.

The others had caught a branch, an old length of cord, and something beneath the water that refused to identify itself and eventually proved to be the anchor rope.

Uriah unhooked his line from it in silence.

“An impressive weight,” Baldr offered.

“You have adapted to the company quickly.”

They ate on the shore.

The baskets contained bread, cheese, apples, cold meat, and a pie that had been labeled For Sharing in a hand everyone recognized as Helena’s. Beneath the label was a second line: This includes Thor.

Thor read it aloud with indignation.

“She could mean I am to receive a share.”

“She knows you,” Uriah said.

Baldr sat on a fallen trunk with a plate on his knees. For the first time that morning, he remembered the people waiting for him at home.

The thought did not drive him to his feet.

Lexander sat beside him.

“We should have asked you sooner.”

Baldr looked down at the crust in his hand.

“You had your arrangement.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t want to intrude.”

His father was quiet for a moment.

“You aren’t an intrusion.”

Baldr nodded, but the words needed longer to settle than that small movement could show.

Across the grass, Loki accused Thor of taking the largest portion. Thor offered to prove otherwise by eating the evidence. Uriah lay back with his hands behind his head and declined to serve as a court.

Baldr smiled.

“Next month?” he asked.

Lexander leaned back against the trunk.

“Next month.”

The second trip began with repairs.

Garrick Valewood had inspected the boat after hearing that five members of the family intended to place themselves inside it regularly. His written opinion occupied half a page. Its spoken version was shorter and considerably less suitable for the children.

They met him at the jetty with timber, tools, and the humility of people who could have commanded storms but still required instruction about a loose seat.

“You don’t need a larger boat for this inlet,” he told them. “You need to stop treating this one as though its feelings will hold the seams together.”

Thor ran a hand along the rail.

“It has been faithful.”

“Then repay it with a nail.”

Lexander laughed.

The carpenter pointed at him.

“You can hold that.”

They worked through the morning. Baldr fitted the new support beneath the middle seat. Uriah scraped old paint from a patch that needed sealing. Thor discovered that restraint with a hammer required more concentration than force. Loki made three useful suggestions and was astonished when one was accepted.

At noon, the boat was drier, stronger, and no more elegant.

Garrick considered that a successful repair.

“Should it have a name?” Baldr asked.

“It has several,” Uriah said. “Most are spoken when it leaks.”

Thor proposed Thunder’s Rest.

Loki asked whether that meant she intended to stop talking aboard.

Lexander proposed Something Sensible, which everyone rejected because it sounded like an instruction. Uriah suggested leaving it unnamed until they knew what it preferred. This caused a discussion about whether the king of Greykeep had become the sort of man who consulted boats.

Baldr painted a small white fish on the bow while they argued.

The paint dried before they reached agreement.

The boat remained unnamed.

They fished for less than an hour that afternoon and caught nothing.

On the way home, Uriah said it had been a good day.

Nobody disagreed.

The third trip was the one with the wager.

Loki proposed it while they were halfway across the inlet, which made refusal look more defensive than anyone wished.

“Largest legal catch,” he said. “Winner chooses the next luncheon.”

“Define legal,” Lexander said immediately.

“Caught under the existing rules.”

“Including amendments?”

“You have become deeply suspicious.”

“Through sustained instruction.”

They agreed that a fish must be alive when caught, caught on a line by the person claiming it, and neither enlarged nor replaced before measurement. Jörmungandr was not to be consulted. Fenrir was not to be allowed to deliver anything conveniently dropped near a basket. No fish already belonging to a fisherman could be borrowed for the purpose.

Baldr listened with growing interest.

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Long enough,” Thor said, “to know the enemy.”

The wager improved everyone’s attention and damaged the quality of conversation.

For an hour, five people watched five floats with a concentration that would have troubled anyone expecting them to apply similar effort to government. Loki’s expression became increasingly innocent. Thor’s became increasingly suspicious of it.

Then Uriah’s rod bent.

He leaned back, surprised.

The line pulled hard toward the reed bed.

“Fish?” Lexander asked.

“I sincerely hope so.”

They shifted their weight carefully while Uriah worked the catch closer. Baldr reached for the net. Thor issued instructions whose volume was inversely related to their usefulness.

At last a broad dark shape rose beneath the surface.

Loki leaned over.

“That is a boot.”

It was a boot.

A large, ancient, water-filled boot, attached to a length of weed and bearing the expressionless dignity of an object that had hoped to be left alone forever.

Uriah stared at it in the net.

Nobody spoke.

Then Baldr said, “Alive when caught may be difficult to establish.”

Thor bent double.

Lexander lost his hat into the bottom of the boat.

Loki laughed until he could no longer form the sentence he had clearly been saving.

Uriah put the boot carefully aside.

“We could amend the rules.”

They did not.

The winning fish belonged to Thor.

It was genuinely a fish, genuinely caught, and large enough that everyone inspected it twice before conceding the result. She received this scrutiny with the patience of a victorious commander permitting conquered officers to examine the terms.

“Next luncheon,” she said, “will be pie.”

“We usually have pie,” Lexander pointed out.

“More pie.”

“There are five of us.”

“Five pies.”

Helena received the request with narrowed eyes and supplied one large pie cut into five portions, together with a note explaining arithmetic.

Thor framed the note in her room.

She said it was evidence of persecution.

The fourth trip nearly did not happen.

A council matter had become difficult. Then another matter had become urgent because the first had taken too long. Lexander sent word that he would try to come after the morning session. Uriah replied that he would wait. Thor said they should leave both kings behind and teach them consequences.

Baldr went to Lexander’s study.

His father sat beneath a small siege of papers. One hand rested against his scarred eye. He looked up at the knock with an expression that made Baldr briefly wish he had come carrying a solution.

“You’re ready?” Lexander asked.

“Yes.”

“I need another hour.”

Baldr glanced at the papers.

“Is there something only you can do?”

“Several things.”

“Today?”

Lexander regarded him.

Baldr remained beside the door.

He understood the temptation to make his own disappointment convenient for everyone else. He had practiced it enough to recognize the effort before it became virtue.

“I’d like you to come,” he said.

The plainness of it changed his father’s face.

Lexander looked down at the top report. Read the first lines again. Then moved it to another pile.

He rang for the clerk and gave three instructions. One decision could be delegated. One could wait until the following morning. The third required his signature and nothing more.

When he stood, his shoulders remained tired.

But he stood.

“Get my coat.”

They arrived late enough that Thor had begun eating luncheon in protest.

“We waited,” she said around a mouthful.

“Heroically,” Loki added.

Uriah handed Lexander a cup.

“Good morning.”

Nobody asked for the details of the council matter.

After they had been on the water for half an hour, Lexander said, “I sometimes think that if I stop looking at something, it will become the thing that harms someone.”

His float moved gently beside a reed.

The others stayed quiet.

“It’s a foolish way to live,” he added.

“It’s an exhausting way,” Uriah said. “That isn’t quite the same.”

Lexander looked toward him.

Uriah’s line lay almost motionless.

“I’ve tried knowing everything,” he said. “I was very bad at it.”

Thor made a quiet sound of agreement.

Loki examined his own hands.

“I’ve tried making it appear I knew everything. Also tiring.”

Baldr let the boat drift a little within the anchor’s reach.

“You came,” he said to his father.

Lexander looked at him, then out across the lake.

“Yes.”

They did not turn the admission into a lesson. They let it become part of the morning, beside the water and the reeds and a dragonfly that landed briefly on Thor’s rod.

She remained perfectly still until it left.

The summer trips acquired habits.

Baldr checked the boat before anyone boarded. Thor checked the provisions and denied that this gave her advance access to the pastry. Uriah untangled the lines with a patience he rarely claimed to possess. Lexander brought the cups. Loki brought something nobody had requested and which proved useful just often enough to preserve his right to continue.

Once it was a folding stool.

Once it was a tin of cinnamon biscuits.

Once it was a brass device that began predicting where the fish would be and was immediately confiscated, despite his insistence that it was a barometer with ambitions.

Jörmungandr visited during a late summer outing.

He appeared beyond the mouth of the inlet, immense and dark beneath the sunlit surface, moving slowly enough that the little boat scarcely felt his approach. Fenrir lay on the bank with his chin upon his paws, as though he had arrived independently and knew nothing about the disappearance of several fish from a basket.

Loki looked between his sons.

“This is a private gathering.”

“We aren’t gathering,” Fenrir said.

“You’re watching.”

“Yes.”

Jörmungandr’s head rose a little above the water.

“Your hooks are in an unpromising place.”

Thor looked at him.

“We did not ask.”

“I noticed.”

The great serpent settled again.

For a while, the boat’s occupants fished with determined independence.

Nothing happened.

At last Uriah cleared his throat.

“When you say unpromising—”

“No,” said Lexander, Thor, and Baldr together.

Loki smiled at his son.

Jörmungandr’s eye half closed.

“I like your rules,” he said. “They make the fish comfortable.”

Fenrir ate something from the grass.

Nobody could prove what it was.

Autumn brought rain.

The lakekeeper warned them that the wind would rise by afternoon, so they left the boat tied safely at the jetty and fished from the bank beneath an old shelter. Thor considered this a disappointment until she discovered that the shelter’s hearth could be used to warm the pie.

Baldr gathered dry wood from the store. Uriah made tea. Lexander sat on a bench with his coat around his knees and looked so comfortable that Loki accused him of having ordered the weather.

“Wrong god,” Lexander said.

Uriah raised both hands.

“No.”

Rain tapped on the roof, then deepened into a steady roar.

The rods remained outside under observation through the open front. Nobody made a serious effort to pretend they were the center of the occasion.

Loki told a story about Thor trying to teach a horse bravery.

Thor corrected him. The horse had already been brave. It had needed direction.

Baldr remembered the incident differently. The horse had possessed excellent judgment and refused to follow either of them into a bog.

Lexander laughed, then asked a question about the old place.

The conversation slowed.

There were memories none of them could enter without finding grief waiting somewhere inside. Most days they stepped around those places with practiced courtesy. Rain gave them time to sit near one without needing to make the visit useful.

Baldr spoke about a room he remembered from long ago. Not a hall of power. A small room warmed by afternoon light, where someone had left a cup on a windowsill and Thor had broken a toy while trying to improve it.

“It was already broken,” she said.

“It had one loose wheel.”

“An early stage of broken.”

He smiled.

Then the smile faded a little.

“For a long time, when people said my name, I thought they were looking past me.”

Loki’s hands became still around his cup.

Baldr watched the rain beyond the roof.

“Toward the story. The loss. Whatever they needed that story to mean.”

Nobody hurried to contradict him.

“I was grateful to be remembered,” he said. “I didn’t always know how to be here while people remembered so hard.”

Lexander moved his cup aside.

“Do we do that?”

Baldr looked at him.

There was no safe, perfect answer that would cost nobody anything.

“Sometimes.”

His father nodded slowly.

Thor stared at the fire. Loki looked down at his cup. Uriah remained quiet, giving the family room inside the shelter without leaving it.

After a while, Lexander said, “I’m glad you told us.”

Baldr let out a breath he had not realized he was holding.

Loki lifted his eyes.

“For the record, I find the living you increasingly troublesome.”

Baldr looked at him.

“You’ve caught more fish than I have,” Loki continued. “You make the boat go straight. You remember the rope. It is becoming difficult to maintain standards of irresponsibility in your presence.”

Thor laughed first.

Baldr followed.

The old grief did not vanish. It acquired, for that afternoon, the company of a warm fire and an irritating brother who was willing to meet him in the present.

When the rain eased, they found that one rod had caught a fish while nobody was watching.

It belonged to Lexander.

He accepted their accusations of unfairness with immense satisfaction.

Winter kept them ashore more often.

They met anyway.

Sometimes in a boathouse, with tools and lines to mend. Sometimes at Greykeep, where Helena insisted that a fishing trip conducted indoors remained an occasion requiring food. Once in Concordia, where the children discovered them repairing floats and transformed the afternoon into an inquiry about why a cork could remain above water while a stone sank.

Uriah began an explanation.

Loki improved it with an illusion.

Thor introduced a practical experiment.

Io entered to find four bowls on the table, water on the floor, and Baldr holding a towel beneath a leaking bucket while Lexander defended the educational purpose of the gathering.

“Did anyone catch anything?” she asked.

“A principle,” Uriah said.

“Release it before supper.”

The children laughed for the rest of the evening.

Years passed through those mornings.

There were months when one of them could not come. They stopped treating absence as an insult or presence as proof of friendship. If someone was ill, they sent food. If someone was away, they kept the next date open. If a real emergency arose, they answered it and arranged another day afterward.

But they learned to distinguish an emergency from a room full of people accustomed to having a king available.

That distinction took longer than repairing the boat.

The boat endured.

Boards were replaced. Paint was renewed badly. The white fish on the bow acquired a second coat, then a third. Someone suggested buying something finer. All five objected for reasons they refused to examine.

It was still inadequate to their dignity, which had become one of its chief advantages.

By the time Seraphina married Garrick, Lexander had learned to bait a hook while discussing arrangements without sounding as though each arrangement concealed a catastrophe.

Mostly.

On the trip before the wedding, he spent twenty minutes explaining that he was entirely pleased.

Thor listened.

Then she said, “You’ve hooked your sleeve.”

He looked down.

Baldr took the rod gently from his hand.

“We know you’re pleased.”

“I am.”

“And frightened?” Uriah asked.

Lexander looked across at him.

Uriah smiled faintly.

“My son is getting married too. We can both be pleased and useless about it.”

That helped more than reassurance would have done.

They spent the rest of the morning discussing the people their children had become. Thor was certain Garrick had good sense because he feared Seraphina’s displeasure for the correct reasons. Loki offered advice about wedding speeches and was informed that he would not be giving one without advance review.

Baldr handed Lexander back his freed sleeve.

“She knows you’ll be there,” he said.

His father grew quiet.

Later, he would remember those words beside his daughter’s own.

On the first fishing trip after little Uriah’s birth, both grandfathers arrived with stories.

Thor checked the baskets while they exchanged observations about an infant whose accomplishments included sleeping, waking, and making several expressions that had apparently never been achieved by another child.

Loki looked at Baldr.

“We have lost them.”

“Temporarily.”

“I doubt it.”

Baldr listened to the stories anyway.

There were worse things than people becoming foolish because they had lived long enough to love another generation.

That afternoon, Lexander caught a fish large enough to keep.

He held it in the net for a moment, studying the silver body and bright eye.

“We have food,” he said.

Thor looked at the baskets.

“Some of us do.”

He smiled and lowered the net back into the water.

The fish vanished with a flick of its tail.

Loki watched the widening circles.

“An extravagant approach to fishing.”

“I enjoyed catching it.”

“And now?”

Lexander settled onto the repaired seat.

“Now I can enjoy having caught it.”

Nobody argued.

The last trip of that summer began before sunrise.

Baldr had proposed the hour. Thor had complained until she learned that breakfast would be brought rather than postponed. Uriah arrived first, carrying a flask and the bread. Loki came second, unusually quiet. Lexander appeared with his coat fastened incorrectly, having dressed in the dark to avoid waking Io.

Baldr corrected the fastening without comment.

Mist lay over the inlet.

They checked the boat, settled the baskets, and pushed away from the jetty while the world still seemed to be deciding what color to become.

For once, nobody argued about rowing.

The oars entered the water softly. The white fish on the bow moved through pale reflections. Somewhere in the reeds, a bird called twice.

They reached their place beneath the willow and let the boat become still.

One by one, the floats settled.

Thor passed the bread.

Loki poured the tea.

Uriah watched the far shore as light found it.

Lexander sat beside Baldr with his hands loose around the rod.

After a while he said, “I used to think surviving would feel louder.”

Nobody answered immediately.

Then Thor looked at him.

“I can make it louder.”

He laughed.

“I know.”

Baldr leaned back against the side of the boat. It creaked beneath him with the familiar complaint of something carrying exactly the people it had learned to carry.

“This is loud enough,” he said.

Across the water, the first sunlight reached the reeds.

There would be work when they returned. There would be news, letters, people with needs that were real, and people with problems that became smaller once somebody listened. There would be children growing away from them and toward lives of their own. There would be days that were harder than this one.

For now, there were five friends on a lake.

Loki’s float disappeared.

He sat forward.

Thor turned at once.

“Don’t hurry.”

“I am not hurrying.”

“You look as though you’re about to do something.”

“That is generally necessary.”

The rod bent.

Baldr reached for the net. Uriah moved the tea. Lexander leaned aside to give them room.

They brought the catch up slowly, all five watching.

A boot emerged.

Not the old boot. Its mate.

For one perfect moment, nobody breathed.

Then the laughter traveled out across the morning water, startling birds from the reeds and carrying farther than any of them could have intended.

They stayed until lunchtime.