Meeting

Bjarni could see the bustling market on the island his and Emil's boat was approaching. This was the market from which the grandchildren of the woman who had abducted his foster parents were getting their supplies. His foster parents had gone on the trip not realizing his mother was pregnant; she had been, after all, old enough that some of the usual tell-tale signs of a pregnancy could happen for another reason entirely. The pregnancy had been eventually discovered due to one of its own complications, that made it dangerous for his mother to try travelling back to Iceland before having the baby. The last letter Bjarni and his siblings had gotten from their parents mentioned that they had heard of a gifted magical healer living not very far away from the place in which they had settled to see the pregnancy to term, and that they were going to try seeing her. Bjarni now knew that the woman had isolated herself and her family on a small island a few months before his foster parents had come to look for her, and had been in need of people on whom to experiment. For reasons nobody had been able to pinpoint, the woman had spared the baby, to the point of making him a last-resort experimentation subject alongside her own non-immune family members. He'd never gotten a proper name, but that had one positive aspect: it had left that particular spot open for the name their parents would have most likely given him. Hildur had already told him what it was during her mage-plane visit to him, but Bjarni would be the would the one to test whether it had actually caught on.

Within a minute of the two of them setting foot on the island, a small crowd surrounded Emil, asking him various questions. Emil either answered or dodged them best that he could and gave Bjarni an idea of what he was to expect after coming back alive and well from the Hotakainen island himself. This only made him even more baffled as to the reason Emil had decided to move into their home as an extra pair of hands. On the subject of hands, Bjarni noticed a thin one emerging from the crowd and touching the exact spot of the knit-wool hat that Emil was wearing that Bjarni knew to be covering still re-growing hair. The people in the crowd who noticed the hand almost instinctively stepped away from its owner, who hardly seemed to acknowledge it. Emil's initial reaction was surprise, but it his face turned into a big smile the second he laid eyes on the hand's owner:
-Hi Lalli. Don't worry about it, it's healing fine. I think it's okay for you to take your hand away now.
Lalli took his hand away from Emil's head, then started looking around him:
-I thought you were supposed to come with… someone else.
Emil pointed to Bjarni:
-He's here.
Lalli looked at Bjarni and raised his eyebrows:
-You don't look like… what I expected.
Bjarni could see the young man's point, considering his own black hair in addition to probably having a face that was nothing like his brother's. Lalli turned his back to Bjarni and Emil, and started walking:
-My boat is this way. It's big enough for the three of us and all your things.

On the way to the island, Bjarni started to get a glimpse of Emil's motivations. Despite the awkwardness of the conversation on both sides and his rather dodgy Finnish, Bjarni was able to pick up that Emil and Lalli had taken an interest in each other at the time they had met, but circumstances had kept them from actually spending any kind of time with each other. Just how little they had been able to speak became obvious to Bjarni as he was watching them finding out new things about each other about every one or two lines. As they got closer to the smaller island, Bjarni noticed a short figure sharing Lalli's hair color emerging from a woody patch and coming to wait for them on the harbor. As they disembarked, the young woman introduced herself as Reynir's wife Tuuri in Icelandic that was about as good as Bjarni's Finnish. He was about to ask how she had learned Icelandic, when he remembered Emil mentioning that Lalli had been buying a Finnish-Icelandic dictionary when he first met him. Tuuri grabbed Bjarni's arm:
-Come see Reynir at the farm.
Bjarni didn't have time to point out that they would be leaving Emil and Lalli alone with the bags before getting literally dragged into the woods by Tuuri. Soon enough, she had taken him to a sheep pen with a small sheepfold not far from it. In the pen, a red-haired figure sporting a long braid bearing a more than passing resemblance to Bjarni's foster father was examining the sheep. Hildur had already told Bjarni about the fact that he was tending to the sheep on the island, but actually seeing this brought back memories of the farm that had needed to be handed over to a neighbor a few years after their parents had gone missing in addition to the feelings brought in by actually meeting his younger brother. Reynir finished his work and came to greet Bjarni in broken Icelandic similar to Tuuri's, then gave Bjarni a hug. Bjarni hugged him back, letting tears out of his eyes.

xxxx

Once the initial onslaught of emotion had passed, Bjarni's top priority had been to do something about Reynir and Tuuri's awful pronunciation in Icelandic, and they apparently had the same idea about Bjarni's Finnish. That resulted in the three of them pronouncing random words for each other while Onni was already putting Emil to work by having him make dinner and Lalli was having cat nap. If it weren't for the bandages covering Onni's face and Tuuri regularly failing resist scratching her left shoulder, Bjarni could have forgotten the reason the place was probably the only one in which Reynir could have somewhat of a happy life. The world outside the island couldn't even start to understand the implications of an incubation phase lasting for years, and Bjarni wasn't completely sure he understood himself. Reynir looked perfectly fine, at worst starting to come down with a cold without noticing. Bjarni didn't even want to start imagining what could happen if some random villager saw him from afar, noticed that obvious tell-tale sign that he was out of place and got the idea of rescuing him. This, ironically, effectively caused Reynir's status to be closer to that of a prisoner of the family than what Onni and the others wished it to be.

xxxx

Bjarni wasn't going to lie to himself. The fact that the little brother he had never known was "technically married" with the only woman among the surviving grandchildren of the woman who had abducted his foster parents had worried him a little. The bed that had been given to him was in the same room as the one Reynir and Tuuri were using. Bjarni had fallen asleep much earlier than he intended to, tired out by the trip, only to wake up to the two of them snuggling, still sound asleep. As for the interactions between them he had seen the previous evening, he'd seen far, far worse between people who were in arranged marriages, some of which were due to having a number of options not that much bigger than what those two had had. Bjarni realized he probably wasn't going to go back to sleep, and decided to get up and go to the house's main room.

-… gives you any trouble about this, tell me about it and I'll have a word with them, okay?
A little peek inside the room told Bjarni that Emil was already awake and that Lalli was back from his nocturnal scouting round. Both had turned their attention to him as soon as they had noticed him starting to open the door.
-Uh… sorry. I can come back later if you want to talk to each other some more.
Lalli answered:
-You can come in, I already know everything I need to.
Emil looked a little disappointed for a few moments, then decided that he might as well start breakfast now that three of them were already up. The bustling soon woke the rest of the household up. Onni came into the main room quickly enough, but Reynir and Tuuri took their time. During the meal Bjarni couldn't help noticing that Onni kept glancing in Lalli's general direction. Once breakfast was done and Onni's bandages were changed, Bjarni went to tend the sheep with Reynir and help him with various chores.

xxxx

Bjarni had been back to work for a couple months, and almost forgotten about the early morning conversation between Emil and Lalli he had interrupted while visiting Reynir, when got the news via a letter from Hildur. Reynir and Tuuri were now apparently fighting over the few private spots on the island with Emil and Lalli.

Sigrun wished that just once, she could tell people of that small island in outer Saimaa, and stop having to pretend that the misdirected letters had been their most surprising case so far. Mikkel kept telling her they would probably eventually run into something even more interesting they could tell people about. Unfortunately, between the rumor that she and Mikkel had been able to escape the Hotakainen island only by abandoning Emil there and the real reason Emil was now living there, it was going be very hard to find a better story.