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later, when I got out of here.
    Memories or no memories, I’d get Ari and myself both free. I zipped and shouldered the pack, took Ari’s flashlight in my other hand, and followed the coin’s pull into the dark.

Chapter 6
    T he tunnel was colder than the room. I pulled up my hood and zipped my jacket to the chin. The flashlight’s thin beam cast eerie blue light on the tunnel walls. Water dripped somewhere up ahead, and the air felt thick and wet.
    Freki followed at my heels, to guard me or provide companionship, I didn’t know. Either way, his presence was comforting. Was that a sort of magic, too?
    The tunnel branched left. The wrapped coin pulled me forward. I followed, but as I passed the branch, a gust of icy air blew toward me. A child’s voice whispered,
“Three shells in return for my poem, poem, poem.”
The words echoed off the stone walls.
    I stopped short and peered down the side tunnel. “Hello?”
    “I’ll toss my silver at them and watch them fight, fight, fight.”
An old man’s voice, carried by the same cold wind. I turned left, though the coin urged me away. There were pictures on the tunnel walls. They skittered like nervous lizards out of my sight as the light hit them.
A boat torn apart by the sea. A coffin washing to shore
. I squinted into the distance. I saw no old man, no young boy.
    Teeth nipped at my ankle. I looked down and saw Freki’s mouth around my leg. “You hear memory, nothing more.” He drew back, the tip of his tail brushing the floor.
    “The sea has stolen my sons.”
The echoing voice
sounded
real—real and incredibly sad.
    “Muninn holds all the island’s memories here,” Freki said. “Follow them without purpose, and you’ll wander to the end of days and still not find your way back to where you began.”
    I clutched the handkerchief-wrapped coin tighter. Bad enough to lose my memories—I didn’t want to spend my life lost among other people’s memories instead. “That’s a lot of tunnels.”
    The fox’s whiskers twitched. “Only Iceland’s memories lie here. Other lands have their own guardians and their own mountains.”
    A brief image flashed through my thoughts: jagged brown mountains beneath a hot blue sky.
My
mountains, I somehow knew. I tried to remember, but the mountains sank into the muddy darkness of my missing memories,leaving behind empty shells of words—mountains, desert—with no images to go with them. My eyes stung. Muninn had no right to take who I was away from me.
    I brushed my eyes, turned my back on the voices and the images on the walls, and let the coin lead me on, back to the main tunnel. Freki walked alongside me, his gait smooth and liquid. The tunnel branched again and again. Sometimes the coin urged me left, sometimes right, sometimes straight ahead. I counted the turnings, repeating them to myself to make sure I could get back.
    “I have spun twelve ells of wool. You have killed a man. A fine morning’s work for us both.”
    “I already must grieve for my brother. Is it not enough for you that I set a bowl of porridge before his killer?”
    My hand clenched around the coin. I fought the urge to stop, to listen closer, to try to stare longer at the moving pictures on the tunnel walls. Scraps of mist drifted through the air, raising goose bumps beneath my jacket. Were all the memories in this place of sadness and loss?
    “My father gone, my brother gone, only this price upon my head remains.”
    “Yes, the girl is beautiful, and men enough will suffer for it, but I do not know how the eyes of a thief have come into our family.”
    The coin flared suddenly hot. Smoke rose from the handkerchief. A woman’s voice, not in the tunnels but inmy own head.
“How dare Hrut speak of me that way!”
Anger in those words. A moment’s silence, then,
“Haley?”
    Dizziness washed over me.
The other one
, I thought. The one whose spell had caught me. I ran from that turning, not sure what I was so scared of. My legs trembled, then