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The museum is built where the wall of Trolberg meets the bay, under what was a proper look-out tower back in Edmund Ahlberg’s day. It’s made up of a series of square rooms going up from the reception and occasional patisserie on the ground floor, through three rooms of exhibitions, and a top floor just for the museum director, uncatalogued materials, and one part-time staff member in the form of Frida. Before her there weren’t any other staff except Ms Hagen, only lots of volunteers, all of whom cheerily greet Frida when they see her and ask her if she isn’t bored of this place yet.
Frida isn’t bored. Frida has a spreadsheet and a box of materials which she found upstairs without their correct labels, and she will fix this. Frida’s mother, who also wonders out loud occasionally if Frida might be bored, does at least understand this part. According to her parents, Frida had been bringing proper order to misorganised things since she was two-years-old and rearranging her blocks. In the museum she sometimes has to design a new organising system before she can start categorising, but that’s not a problem either. Her problems mostly come along when the existing categories don’t make any sense, which is often.
It is a very cold Tuesday afternoon, with almost no visitors at all. The door opens and Frida looks up from her cataloguing slowly, eyes taking in bright red boots all the way up to wild blue hair. “Hilda!”
Hilda smiles at her. “Your mum told me you’d be here.”
It has been nearly two years since Frida saw Hilda. She does have a towering stack of postcards back in her bedroom, with photographs of forests and lakes on one side and Hilda’s messy handwriting and careful sketches on the other. But Frida was hardly ever able to write back. Hilda hadn’t stayed in one place long enough.
*
Frida decides to take her break, calling one of the volunteers over to the desk to keep an eye on things.
Jeremy smiles brightly at her when he agrees. “You have a good chat with your friend, dear, don’t worry about me. Haven’t burned the place down yet now, have we?”
That’s…worryingly specific and now Frida is somewhat concerned that Jeremy does plan to start a fire. But she smiles back at him and goes to ask Hilda if she wants a peppermint tea.
“Yes please.”
“And it’s Tuesday, so there are pastries if you’d like one.” Hilda tilts her head and Frida explains, “We don’t have an actual café, really, just Mrs Eriksen and Ms Dahl bringing things in to sell on Tuesday and Saturday. It’s not…not really a proper museum honestly but there’s some interesting things here! And it’s fun, or at least I think so.” She tails off. “Did you want a pastry?”
“Oh, yes please! And I think it’s a lovely museum.” Hilda looks around, wide-eyed.
“The things are mostly upstairs, this is really just the welcome bit. I can take you for a tour, if you like? If you have time?”
“Lots of time.”
Frida makes a pot of peppermint tea and brings it over with some pastries. “Here you go. So you’re here for a while?”
“I think so.”
“Your Mum must be happy about that. She was here last week actually, I’m trying to help Ms Hagen do some more advertising for the museum and your Mum was giving me some advice. I’m not much of an artist unfortunately but we’ve been getting some ideas together.”
Frida hadn’t been sure it was fair, asking Johanna for help for something that people should be paying her for. But Johanna had said that Frida spent the better part of seven years bringing Hilda home safely to the little flat she still shares with Tontu, so if she wanted to donate some of her time to consulting with the Museum that was really her business. Frida – knowing how many times she nearly hadn’t brought Hilda home safely – wasn’t quite convinced, but much like with Hilda there isn’t always a lot of point arguing with Johanna about these things.
“That sounds fun.” Hilda’s hands are wrapped tightly around the mug. “You know, I thought you might be working at the Library, before I heard you were here.”
“Kaisa’s still at the library, they don’t really need two witches there.”
“Do they need a witch here? Is someone else a witch too?” Hilda looks around again, staring at Jeremy as though he might be hiding magical secrets.
Frida takes the opportunity to look at her properly: the big grey sweater and what might be the same yellow scarf she always had. Frida remembers the argument between Hilda and Johanna when the favoured red sweater had finally been too ratty to wear – in the end it took Tontu stealing it and taking it to wherever he likes to hide things. There’s a braid in her hair that might have been added days ago, given the flyaway segments, but Frida wants to know what made her add it in at all. Hilda hadn’t sent sketches of herself, obviously, so Frida had kept picturing her as she was the day she left, heading out on a wander without a destination.
Frida knows it isn’t the same, but she had felt a little like that herself back then. “No other witches here,” she tells Hilda. “Only me. Come along then, let me show you around.”
*
Frida leads tours around the collection sometimes. She can’t imagine Hilda wants the standard one, so the first thing she does is head for the rock room. She gestures grandly around the space.
Hilda grins. “Cool rocks.”
“David and I checked them out, just to be sure there were no baby trolls this time. Definitely all rocks.”
“Good to know.”
Frida lets Hilda look around at the rock displays for a little while – longer than Frida usually needs to look at them – and then guides her upstairs. “Before we go in, I know this room’s a bit weird, okay?”
“Okay?” Hilda follows after her and looks up at the ‘History of Trolberg’ sign. “Ah. Why do I get the feeling that some of this might not be entirely accurate?”
“Seven years of living in Trolberg?”
“Well, yes. I know it’s a little better with Gerda in charge of the Safety Patrol, but there are still a lot of people with completely ridiculous ideas about the city. When I came back through the gates they were still asking me if I’d seen anything suspicious on the mountainside, as if they couldn’t just ask one of the trolls themselves if they care so much what’s happening out there.”
“I suppose it was different out on your travelling.”
Hilda makes a contemplative face. “Hmm. Some of the creatures could be a bit odd too I suppose. I met this one Swamp Man who was convinced I was a friend he’d known centuries ago, and he wouldn’t believe I was a nineteen-year old human for days.”
“Did he think you were a Swamp Man?”
“I was a bit messy at the time. I’d been trying to find evidence of an old Salt Lion colony and it made everything a little…plant-covered.”
“How did you convince him in the end?”
“It was a bit sad, really. Turns out his friend was a human, and he didn’t realise that we don’t have quite the same lifespans as Swamp People.”
“Oh no.”
“I suppose it’s better that he knows now that she couldn’t come back and visit him. It sounds like she was quite old the last time he saw her – he said her hair was whiter than mine and her face had gone crinkled.”
“Why do you think she didn’t tell him, though? She must have known she might not be back to see him.”
“I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t realise he didn’t know? We don’t always understand the things other creatures know about humans. Or it might just have been something she didn’t want to talk about.”
“I’d want to know,” Frida says. “If my friend might not come back, I’d want to know.”
Hilda gives her a long look. “I know you would.” She turns around the room. “This says it’s a spear from a Wood Folk invasion force. I’ve met a few Wood Folk and they mostly want to be left in peace to read their books and play music – if they wanted something they didn’t have then they’d bargain or gamble for it, not launch an invasion of Trolberg.”
“I tried to relabel it,” Frida says. “I’ve looked up the provenance records and there’s nothing substantial, even if there was any real historical evidence of an invasion attempt. But apparently it was donated by the family of one of the board members and changing the label… did not go well.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“Ms Hagen didn’t mind, really, she just told me to put the label back. It’s just frustrating you know? I don’t appreciate being told to leave things to be wrong.”
Hilda laughs softly. “I remember.” She walks over to look at another label and groans. “This one says it’s a charm to keep water spirits away.”
“Well, I don’t think it works, but I do think that’s what it was designed for, so at least it’s more accurate.”
Hilda turns around, still glaring. “Why would anyone want to keep a water spirit away, even if they could? Water spirits are helpful. Mostly, anyway – usually more helpful than humans.”
“I know.”
“Can’t you do something?”
“Like what? Hilda, I already said I tried to fix the label and I’ve been looking for more exhibits upstairs but the things people kept were mostly-”
“What?”
“Mostly like this. Weapons or things they think are magic, or things belonging to Ahlberg and the first safety patrol. Even things from the early town before they built the Wall. But water spirits don’t really leave behind the kind of things you can put in an exhibition.”
“That’s not their fault.”
“I know it’s not their fault, Hilda, I’ve been trying my best to-”
Hilda sighs, giving up easier than she ever did when they were younger. “I’m sorry. I’m not back in Trolberg mind yet I suppose. Come on, show me the rest of the museum. And tell me how your magic is going - is Tildy still keeping the rest of them in line?”
Frida takes her up one more level to the temporary exhibition space, currently empty, relaying the latest futile attempts by The Committee of Three to justify threatening to feed David to the void, and Tildy’s many ways of laughing in their face.
*
Frida’s familiar is a girl the same age as her, who goes walking around into the wilderness on her own adventures. It had seemed a lot more manageable when they were eleven and Hilda passed her a piece of half-rotted shipwreck to use as a wand. Frida doesn’t know if she would be a different kind of witch if instead of Hilda she had a cat or a lizard or even a deerfox. If she had a familiar close by her side and of her temperament, instead of wandering the world without her and bringing back her own hopes and plans and memories.
Frida clutches the old wand tightly in her pocket, worn to perfect smoothness after nine years. She walks all the way to the top floor of the museum to find Ms Hagen. Morning sunshine comes through the window brightly, and Frida takes a breath. “Good morning.”
“Good morning, Frida, what can I do for you?” Ms Hagen asks.
“It’s about the history of Trolberg exhibition.”
“Frida my dear, you know I sympathise, but we simply can’t change the entire exhibition without-”
“What if we didn’t change it? What if we just added some things?” Frida spreads the contents of her other hand out over the desk. She has two years’ worth of postcards from Hilda, covered in sketches and observations, and she knows Hilda will have more in her notebooks.
“What are these?”
“My friend Hilda has been exploring the wilderness beyond the wall. She writes down and draws what she sees, what’s really out there. Why can’t we have some of that as well as-”
“This is a museum, Frida, we don’t really have room for ephemera.”
“We’re not showing the whole picture! We have a charm against water spirits but nothing from the water spirit’s perspective. A whole cabinet that says it’s troll armour from the first battles of Trolberg but nothing about how the trolls might have lived before we came to the valley. It isn’t fair.”
Ms Hagen looks up at her from the desk for a very long moment. “No, it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean we can just add in whatever we like, unfortunately. Is there other evidence associated with these drawings? Did your friend record the dates and places she sketched them, or are there any photographs from other explorers that might go alongside to show that she documented accurately?”
“No, but- why do they need to have more corroboration than the Wood Folk spear, when everyone knows-” Frida had checked the provenance herself. She has a number of spells in her arsenal to show her the truth of things, and she is always collecting more. The spear was for fishing, it had never even been touched by a Wood Folk. She’s not sure what kind of creature had been touching it – they had been green-haired and dark skinned and beautiful, riding a pony alongside the river. The rest had come in flashes, the spear lost one day in a hurried flight, being picked up a human girl and – again – used for fishing, better and sharper than anything the girl’s brothers had, until it was lost again at the foot of the mountains one sad day. Frida can’t write any of that on a new label beside the cabinet.
Ms Hagen sighs. “Let me think about it. Or at least, we have a board meeting this evening so let’s not do anything before that, so Edwin Edman won’t have an excuse to ask me any difficult questions before we’re prepared for it, all right?”
“All right.”
Ms Hagen gathers the postcards all back up and gives them back to Frida. “The sketches are very beautiful. Your friend is a real artist.”
Frida nods and heads back down the four staircases all the way back to the bottom, where Hilda is apparently waiting for her. “Hilda.”
“Hullo. I brought you brunch, since it’s not Tuesday. Is that okay?”
Frida lifts up the hinged part of the counter to let Hilda walk in beside her at the desk. “That’s okay. I was just talking to Ms Hagen. About what you said yesterday, actually.”
“Oh, don’t worry about what I said, I was only- it’s an adjustment, being back here.” Hilda laughs. “Hopefully not quite so much as it was the first time!”
“No, but-” Frida spreads the postcards out again, watching as Hilda’s eyes go huge. “You were still right.” She tells Hilda all about the conversation, about the way Hilda’s own witness reports and sketches, Frida’s carefully worked magic, is nothing against a donation made to the museum three hundred years ago that matches what it says in a very poorly researched history book.
Hilda smiles. “What we need are Alfur’s records, really, if we could convince the elves to give all of Trolberg a contract to be able to see them. He would know the exact date and map reference for most of these actually, though he did head off to visit one of the elf mountain villages for a little bit once I was staying with the forest giant. Apparently that week wasn’t looking to be exciting enough for his readership so he went to have a stay with his many-time removed cousins instead. But he’d know about the rest.”
“I’m not sure the museum board would have the patience for the magnifying glasses required, even if they did decide elves count as a proper corroborating source.”
Looking down at her hands, Hilda says, “I do have something else. Not just a picture. I brought it back for you, but if you’d like it for the museum instead…”
“For me?”
Hilda leans down to her satchel and pulls out something covered in a red cloth. When she uncovers it, she reveals a shining red gem. “It sings,” she says.
Frida reaches out and touches the stone gently, and when she does she can hear it. Caught in the reflected surfaces she can see a face. “Oh!”
“They’re not stuck,” Hilda says. “Don’t worry. I suppose it is a picture, in a way. It’s the song of an earth spirit. The forest giants say that the music got caught there centuries ago, when the ground was hotter than it is now.”
Frida leans in close to hear it, a low and compelling song which makes her want to dance. “You brought this for me?”
“They said witches used to want them for magic, and I know I’m not a very good familiar but I thought maybe you might want it, or want to study it, I’ve never seen one in the library or in your books though maybe you have now? But if you’d want it for – it’s a real thing, not just a picture, if you’d like it better for the museum.”
“No.” Frida brings it close to her chest. “No, I want this one for me, please.”
Hilda smiles. “All right. I can bring you back something else for the museum later if you like.”
“You said you were staying for a while.”
“Yes,” Hilda agrees, “for a while.”
*
On Thursday Frida doesn’t see Hilda all day, but when she gets to the Sparrow Scouts meeting David grins at her. “Hilda said she’s coming around this evening.”
“Here? To the meeting?”
“She said she has an idea.”
“O-kay.”
“Probably something terrifying,” he tells her.
“Probably.”
“Did you miss her?” he asks.
“Yes. Did you?”
“Yes. Even the terror, probably. Come on then, let’s get this going, Raven Leader.”
“Temporary Raven Leader,” Frida reminds him.
He laughs at her, which is exactly what he did when she told him that she had agreed to stand in as Raven Leader for a few months, six months ago, when the actual Raven Leader had to go and help set up the new troop.
Frida glares at him. “Go and teach them your new song and stop doing whatever it is you think you’re doing.”
David salutes her cheerfully and guides the children towards the piano. “Circle up, Sparrows.”
By the time Hilda arrives, the Sparrows have moved on to practicing their knots mostly peacefully, and David is teasing her again. “Do you have any idea what this plan of Hilda’s is? She knows that she can’t try for any more badges now, doesn’t she?”
“We got her a few eventually,” Frida points out.
“A few what?” Hilda asks, dropping into one of the small chairs.
“Badges,” David says. “First aid and bug identification, wasn’t it? I’m taking credit for both of those.”
“David,” they protest in more or less unison, and he grins again.
Frida turns to Hilda. “Not that it isn’t nice to see you, but why here?”
“Badges,” Hilda answers. (Frida ignores David’s elbow in her side.) “A bit, anyway. And the museum.”
“What about it?”
“Don’t you have that big empty room in the middle?” Hilda asks.
“Yes. It’s a temporary exhibition space, though sometimes it gets hired out for meetings and things. I’m trying to get Ms Hagen to let me advertise it more, there are lots of community groups who might like it, and it’s good to have people actually in the museum using the place if we’re there anyway.”
“Like the Sparrow Scouts,” Hilda says.
“We have a hall,” David points out. “We don’t really need another room.”
“I know,” Hilda says, “I was thinking more of- I don’t know all the badges. Isn’t there something for learning about other cultures?”
“There is,” Frida agrees, “but I thought we’d decided that the museum wasn’t really the best place for…”
“Ms Hagen said you couldn’t change the things in the big exhibition even if they are wrong. And she said there wasn’t anything to put into it new, because you don’t have any proper museum pieces that belong there.”
“I know.”
“So let’s not try to change the exhibition, let’s do something else. The museum is right on the Wall, there’s probably even Vittra tunnels right underneath it.”
“Probably,” Frida agrees. “I’m still not sure…”
“What if we made a kind of- living exhibition? If we brought trolls or vittra or creatures in instead, sometimes, and everyone talked to each other instead of just looking at the exhibitions or my drawings. We could still have those too, if you like, but the main thing is really-”
“People learning the truth about each other,” Frida says.
“Yes.” Hilda nods.
David looks between them. “Okay. So you’ve been back home three days and you’re going to create an intercultural learning group in Frida’s museum.”
Hilda looks solemnly back at him.
“I’m not complaining!” he says, “I’m just making sure I understand. Why do you need the-” he cuts himself off in realisation. “Because Sparrow Scouts are-”
“-a friend to all people, animals and spirits.” All three of them finish the oath.
“All right,” David agrees, “although this sounds like the kind of badge activity we’re going to have to give out golden wings for. And Frida’s going to want a project plan.”
Hilda looks nervous. “Frida? What do you think?”
Frida leans from her seat to bump Hilda’s shoulder. “I think it’s brilliant.”
*
Frida looks around the formerly empty exhibition space with satisfaction. She has temporarily borrowed some of the materials from the other floors, including the water spirit protection charm and the alleged Wood Folk spear. Because Hilda and David were both involved, there are also a number of interesting rocks.
Frida has brought along her earth spirit gem, with label carefully drawn up. Alongside it is a series of very tiny pages under a movable magnifying lens, donated by Alfur as soon as Hilda had asked. While he hadn’t been there for the whole visit with the forest giants, he had taken extensive notes during the trip to the caves where Hilda had been gifted the gem, and his friend Adeline had made copies of other records the elves had of the phenomena. It’s honestly fascinating and Frida is looking forward to studying them properly when she isn’t in the middle of all of this too.
Hilda looks at the label beneath the gem, which says it was gifted to Hilda by the forest giants and is currently on loan from Frida for this exhibition. Hilda smiles. “You definitely don’t want to give it to the museum then?”
“No. Definitely not. But it’s good for other people to be able to hear the music too.”
“Do you think anyone will come today?” Hilda asks. They had advertised around the city, with flyers for their launch weekend and a lovely graphic designed by Johanna. Ms Hagen had given Frida more or less free rein, which was both terrifying and exhilarating.
“Well, lots of Sparrow Scouts,” Frida says. “But… I have organised events here before and sometimes… sometimes things can be quiet. Even for good things, sometimes no one comes. If that happens, it’s nothing to do with you or the idea, Hilda, you know that.”
“I know. Still. I hope people come. Not just humans, I hope some-”
If a troll turns up then - Gerda and The Night of the Trolls or not – Ms Hagen probably will end up with Board Member Edman asking some difficult questions tomorrow. Frida is sure that she’ll manage.
“If nothing else,” Frida says, “Twig can always represent the spirits?”
Twig yips happily and preens at them.
Excluding the Sparrow Scouts, it is quiet through the morning. Mrs Eriksen and Ms Dahl made special pastries just for the occasion, which they bring up to third floor themselves along with pots of tea. David has the Sparrow Scouts listening to the song of the gem before trying to write something of their own.
Just before lunch a woman walks in with two small children. “Is this the new exhibition?”
Two of Frida’s Sparrow Scouts greet her. “Welcome to our living museum!”
The woman looks startled but smiles at them. “Hello. Are you some of the exhibits?”
“We’re learning about earth spirit music, would you like to hear more about it? Or we have some coloured pencils here if you’d like to add to our wall?”
On the big empty wall Hilda and Frida had painted a map of the city and its surroundings, and all around Hilda has pinned sketches of things she found there. The Sparrow Scouts have added a few of their own drawings of Vittra riding cows, and one of the Woff migrating.
“We’re mostly just keeping out of the rain,” the woman tells them, but she nods down at her own children. “Go on then, go and look at the drawings. That’s a baby Salt-Lion, isn’t it? They’re Ada’s favourites but we’ve never seen a little one.”
“It’s tricky to see the babies.” Lina is one of their most regular volunteers for team leader in the Sparrow Scouts. She had absorbed all of the information Hilda had told her earlier about travelling as though she would be tested on it later. She tells the smaller children, “Their mothers are fiercely protective, so if you get close they’ll try to scare you off, but there’s no evidence at all of them actually hurting anyone over it. They can be dangerous if you’re not careful, but that’s true of almost every species who looks after their babies, from trolls to humans, and even deerfox.” Lina strokes Twig’s head, bringing him to the attention of the younger children, and then it’s nothing but awed giggling for a little while.
“Frida?”
Frida looks over to see Hilda standing at the window towards the bay. “Something wrong?”
“Look.”
When Frida goes to join her, she finds Hilda in a staring contest with a water spirit mere metres away, stretching out of the harbour.
“Hello,” Hilda says, “are you here for our museum day?” She turns to Frida. “If Wood Man was here we could try talking to her.”
“Give me a minute.” Frida takes Hilda’s right hand in her own left, and extends her free hand out. “Hello.”
As always, the spell gives more impressions than language.
Eventually, Frida manages, “She heard about the charm.”
Hilda asks, her own voice real and anchoring through the rush of the spell, “The warding charm, the one that doesn’t work?”
“Yes,” Frida says. “It was created for keeping water spirits away, ages ago. They thought the water spirits brought the storms and the father wanted to keep his daughter safe on the boats. It didn’t work, poor thing. The spirit says- she says she wanted to make sure we knew that the storm wasn’t on purpose. And that the charm doesn’t keep the storms away.”
“Nothing keeps the storms away,” Hilda says. “That’s not how storms work. She remembered after all these years?”
Frida thinks about the Swamp Man who Hilda had met, waiting for his friend after centuries. Time has different meaning for different folk. “Yes,” Frida says, “she remembered.”
When Frida lets the spell go, nodding gratefully at the Water Spirit, she steps backwards to discover the Sparrow Scouts and the rest of the exhibition visitors all gathered at the window. There are a few more of them than there were before.
“Oh.” Hilda turns around too. “Did you all see the Water Spirit?”
The Sparrow Scouts chorus ‘yes’ and the visitors look a little more suspicious, but Hilda tells them all the story anyway and Frida slides away to the opposite corner.
Ms Hagen smiles at her. “Well done.”
“You don’t think the board might be angry about moving things around?”
“We can put them back later, bring out some different things next time. It rather depends what stories you would like to be telling.” She winks. “I’ll worry about the board, my dear. You think about what you might like to do next.”
What Frida wants to do next, as it happens, is grab Hilda from her place in the middle of the crowd. She tells David, “we’ll be right back,” and he waves knowingly at her. “Come upstairs,” Frida tells Hilda.
Frida takes her up to the very top of the building, past even the offices and the attic, ducking around the old bell to get to the tower.
“Oh…” Hilda leans out and takes in a breath. “I had missed these views.”
“I missed you, you know.”
Hilda blinks. “Really?”
“Yes, really! You’ve been away nearly two years, Hilda.”
“Oh. I missed you too. I just didn’t realise… I’m always missing something. I’m not very good at staying in one place.”
“I know that.”
“I did send you the postcards.”
“I know. But I still missed you, Hilda.”
Hilda slips her hand into Frida’s. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. But I am here now? And when I have to go again…”
“You’ll come back.”
“I promise. I’m your familiar, after all. Would you like me to bring you back something in particular, next time? Is there anything you need for spells, or from your books, or-”
“More stories,” Frida tells her. “Just you, and more stories. And maybe some time when it’s not a years-long trip with no fixed return date-”
“Yes?”
“I’d come with you. We could find some stories together, and then bring them back to share.”
“That sounds… that sounds lovely.”
In a few minutes, they will need to go back downstairs and relieve David, and thank Ms Hagen again, and bring up a fresh pot of peppermint tea to try and entice some more visitors to the new exhibition. For the moment though, Frida holds Hilda’s right hand in her left, and watches the light on the water, and thinks about the adventures they can’t even imagine yet.