Iceland was cold in a way that felt intentional.
Not the damp biting cold of winter back home that crept under your collar and argued with your jacket. This was a wide open cold, clean and absolute, the kind that came off the water and moved across the flat gray landscape without anything to slow it down. The sky was the color of pale steel and the light had a particular quality to it, thin and honest, that made everything look exactly as it was with nowhere to hide.
Katherine stepped off the transport and pulled her coat tighter and looked out at the stretch of southern coastline ahead of them and thought that she understood a little better why a person who loved nature and kept to herself might choose to live here.
There was nothing pretending to be anything else.
"It's beautiful," Courtney said quietly beside her, her breath making small clouds in the cold air.
"It's freezing," Niall said behind her.
"Those things can both be true," Courtney said.
"They are both very true," Niall confirmed.
Thomas had arranged a vehicle and it was waiting for them at the edge of the road, a wide dark car that fit all of them with the bags in the back and Niall's knees somewhat uncomfortably against the seat in front of him which he noted once and then did not mention again because Katherine gave him a look.
KaSandra had given them a region and a name. Engel Viento. The town was small enough that the name was not hard to find once they were in it, the kind of small where people knew their neighbors and noted strangers with the quiet attentiveness of communities that didn't get many.
They took it slowly.
Thomas and Dean went first, asking careful questions at the kind of places where careful questions could be asked without drawing too much attention, a small shop near the water, a fuel station at the edge of town, a woman walking a dog on the coastal path who looked at them with open curiosity before answering in accented English that yes, she knew the Vientos, the father and the daughter, they lived up the road past the old stone wall, the house with the green roof.
The house with the green roof sat back from the road on a slight rise, surrounded on three sides by open land that ran down toward the water. It was a solid practical house built for weather, with small windows and thick walls and a garden that was mostly wild, the kind of garden that had been allowed to go its own way and was better for it. Wind moved through the grass around it in long steady waves.
Dean stopped the car a reasonable distance from the house.
"How do we do this?" Carlyle asked.
"Carefully," Tierney said.
"Tierney and Katherine go first," Thomas said from the front seat. "The rest of you stay with the car for now. If Engel is who KaSandra says he is he will read the situation fast. Too many people approaching his home unannounced will put him on guard."
"And two people won't?" Kristen asked.
"Two is a conversation," Dean said. "Eight is an event."
Nobody argued with that.
Tierney and Katherine walked up the road toward the house. The wind came off the water steady and cold and Katherine felt her own power stir in response to it, the wind element in her waking up the way it always did when the air moved with purpose.
And then she felt something else.
The signal.
Not faint and distant the way it had been when she reached for it from the living room floor back home. Here it was close and clear and present, the airy circling current she had learned the shape of over days of practice, and it was coming from the house ahead of them and it was coming from somewhere outside the house too, off to the left, down toward the water.
She touched Tierney's arm and tilted her head in that direction.
They found her at the edge of the land where the grass gave way to rock and the rock dropped down to the water below. She was sitting on the highest rock with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped loosely around them, looking out at the flat gray sea, her brown hair moving in the wind. She wore a heavy coat and worn boots and she was so still that she might have been part of the landscape, another feature of it, something that belonged.
She heard them coming.
Of course she heard them. She probably felt the shift in the wind when they left the road.
She turned and looked at them and her blue eyes were calm and careful and not entirely surprised, the eyes of someone who has been expecting something for a long time without knowing exactly what shape it would arrive in.
She looked at Tierney. Then she looked at Katherine.
And then she looked at Katherine for slightly longer, the way people sometimes did, reading the particular quality of her that was harder to explain than to feel.
"You're not from here," Samantha said. Her voice was quiet and even, neither warm nor cold, simply honest.
"No," Tierney said. "We're not."
"You came looking for us." Also not a question.
"Yes," Katherine said.
Samantha looked back out at the water for a moment. The wind moved through her hair and she didn't push it back, just let it move.
"My father said someone would come eventually," she said. "He didn't say when." A pause. "I used to ask him when I was small and he always said the same thing."
"What did he say?" Katherine asked.
Samantha looked at her again.
"He said when the wind decides it's time," she said. "And then he'd smile like that was a perfectly normal answer."
Katherine felt something shift in her chest, quiet and certain.
"Is it?" she asked. "A normal answer."
The corner of Samantha's mouth moved. Not quite a smile but the shape of one.
"I'm starting to think it might be," she said.
She unfolded herself from the rock and stood, and the wind moved around her differently than it moved around everything else, not against her but with her, easy and familiar, the way it moves around something that belongs to it.
"My father is at the house," she said. "He'll want to meet you."
She started walking back up toward the green roofed house without waiting to see if they followed, because she already knew they would.
Katherine fell into step and glanced sideways at her, at this quiet girl who had grown up on a rock above the sea with the wind answering her moods, and felt the signal she had chased for days walking right beside her, steady and clear and real.
"Samantha," she said.
Samantha looked at her.
"I'm Katherine," she said. "And I think you've been waiting a long time for this."
Samantha held her gaze for a moment, the wind moving between them.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "I think I have."
They walked up to the house together.
Above the green roof the pale Icelandic sky stretched wide and cold and endless, and somewhere inside the house a door opened before they reached it, and a man with brown hair and hazel eyes and almond skin stood in the doorway looking at them with an expression that was recognition and relief and something older than both.
Engel Remial looked at Tierney first.
Then he looked at Katherine.
And then he looked past them at the car on the road and the shapes of the others waiting beside it, and something in his face settled the way things settle when a long wait finally ends.
"Come in," he said. "All of you."
He stepped back from the door.
"I have been expecting you for a very long time."