Chapter 20

An anniversary expedition, organized by someone who had somehow convinced the Nordic Council that the first expedition's tank was much better off in a museum than rusting out in the Silent World. It happening at all depended on the funding it could get from their family business. ?lafur was asking Reynir's opinion as to whether it was a good idea or not. A year ago, Reynir would have suggested not doing it. But now, in all honesty, he was almost considering going back there himself and even wondering if the expedition asking for money had any people in mind for its crew yet. While he was still in the middle of untangling his discovery of the Silent World from his father's attempts to get him killed and later get his guards locked up, enough untangling had happened that he could now see a little of what Tuuri had seen in it. Helping Mikkel and others make sure her work didn't go to waste had contributed a lot to this, as well. He now wondered what would happen if he went back there without the looming cloud of having recently discovered that his father had never cared for him. He also now knew that there were plenty of other Tuuris out there, including in Iceland itself, who would not listen to any injunctions to avoid the Silent World, even from those who had actually been there. The next best thing to do was to let at least some of them go there, in as much relative safety as one could manage. And the fact that there had been an expedition there the previous year meant that people now knew more about what to do and not to do on an outing to the Silent World than before. On the subject of Tuuri, he wouldn't mind giving her gravesite a proper visit, considering the new expedition was meant to go there anyway.

One of the enhancements of the new expedition was an increased number of mages. The organizer had in mind to bring two Finns and two Icelanders to cover as many bases as possible. With Reynir already set to come, Hildur, Onni and Lalli had fitted perfectly in the other spots. Bjarni's mechanics hobby turned out to be relevant to the organizer's initially crazy idea of giving the abandoned tank a new engine and driving it to a harbor rather than trying to transport it with something else. They soon found out that Emil had volunteered for one of the cleanser slots, and that Sigrun and Mikkel had joined as well.

Mikkel had been among the workers renovating the ?resund bridge for a couple of months before his own personality had caught up with him and gotten him fired.
-It's already looking much better. It turned out that they have been trying to get a real renovation going for a few years, but it wasn't happening because it wasn't being used that much anymore. The fact that we broke it made some higher-ups realize how badly the repairs were needed.
Reynir remembered when the bridge had broken. It had been a matter of luck that they hadn't all ended up at the bottom of the sea. Come to think of it, it had also taken escaping an outright assassination attempt for Reynir to realize how little his father had cared about him. But also how much other people in his life, as well as a handful of quasi-strangers, did. As much as he had tried to focus on the latter over the past year, the former still stung a lot. Enough that he had been wary of his own classmates for his first few weeks of mage training, and it had taken most of the year to be comfortable around them, then other people who regularly came into the school. He was currently just getting around trusting the townspeople living near the school to not be secretly out to kill him enough to be able to do some quick errands outside of the school's grounds. Class, however, was the only context in which he was currently able to let his guard down on a regular basis. The rest still needed work. But Reynir was certain that this bridge would eventually be repaired in time, as well.