A Solstice Journey Read Free Page B

amazement. We seemed to have been dropped into the middle of an ideal medieval village, with people moving about their business. Houses dotted the landscape, small one- or two-story whitewashed buildings, with what I guessed were thatched roofs. Most of them had a small stone wall around the yard, and I could see that was for keeping the chickens out of everyone’s way. Right next to us rose a large building built out of stone that could have been called a castle, it was so big.
    People came to lead the horses away to be taken care of, I guessed. The silent horseman was staring at me—staring right through me would be a better description, and it was eerie.
    “Stand down, Bleddyn,” Celyn said with a grin. “I’m pretty sure that the Álfr is harmless.”
    I bit my lip at that, but these people seemed to be some sort of medieval warriors, so next to them, I probably did seem harmless, even if I could make two of them in size. I didn’t know how to use the muscles I had. I wasn’t out of shape, since a lot of dating in the gay scene depended on how good you looked. I had learned fast when I started dating in college that the pretty men were always picked up first and very few people were comfortable around a guy who looked like he bench-pressed small cars as a hobby. I didn’t look like that, not really, even if I did lift at the gym so that I avoided getting a gut while sitting behind a desk all day.
    My heart skipped a beat when I got a closer look at my rescuer as he took off his helmet and shook his braid loose. He stretched a little and then tucked his helmet under his arm. It must have been a long ride for him too. He was a lot prettier with the helmet off, and I noticed his ears had a rare delicate curve and were almost lobeless. But what I really noticed was that he had a sword strapped to his hip, and he moved like he knew how to use it. He was pretty, dangerous, and very out of my league. I didn’t even know why I was thinking of that. This had to be some sort of weird hallucination.
    Bleddyn nodded and fell behind Celyn, at his right shoulder. He looked like he was some sort of guard dog for a second, protecting Celyn from me.
    “Is that what Álfr wear?” Celyn asked me with a laugh after looking me over.
    “This is what I wear most of the time,” I said dryly. “I don’t know what elves wear because I’m not one.”
    “You have the look of them,” he replied, his voice light. “Not their tongue, though. You speak the language of the menskr. ”
    Humans, I spoke the language of the humans, or man, if I understood him correctly. “Thank you,” I told him, in Italian, just to see how they responded.
    They looked confused. I repeated the phrase slowly in a couple of other languages. Besides Icelandic and English, I knew enough in several different languages to make myself understood before one of us got frustrated and switched to English. It was usually someone I was talking to and not the other way around. I finally said thank you in Icelandic, and they seemed to understand it.
    “What were all the words that you were speaking?” Celyn asked.
    “‘Thank you’ in a bunch of different human languages,” I said. “The tongues of man, I guess you would call them.”
    They appeared confused and a little worried, I thought.
    “They are many now?” Celyn asked. “So many that they don’t all speak the same tongue? We had not known that the nation of Man had grown so many over time. We ride less and less into it, content in our own lands.”
    “Yes,” I said shortly, wanting to avoid explaining that there were six billion people on Earth. I thought that wouldn’t be something they could understand. Something told me they thought a gathering of fifty or so people to be large. “Iceland, the nation that I come from, is considered to be very small. Boston is a city in what is called the United States, which is one of the larger nations on Earth.”
    Celyn and Bleddyn looked at each other,