Á Íslandi 22

No, I'm not getting old or confused or forgetting anything, and you have not overlooked a post either. This is not the next logical piece of the story. An instalment is missing. We should now hear what Sandra told of the missing Aamu. But this morning I had an idea for this here chapter.
Á Íslandi 21 is to follow later.

I used ONE words of the given prompts: Flee.

Here's the list of prompts from February 23rd.
Enchanted
Lavish
Scurrying
Bouquet
Smash
Anyway
      And/or
Champagne
Caviar
Candlelight
Heartshaped
Flee
Excitement

 Finnbogi, Lis and Tage returned just before dinner was ready. They called Susan, Knud, Martine and Rósa to them.
"Yes," Finnbogi said, "as far as I am concerned, it is David. A reduced, bitter David, older than his years, but still him. By the way, I un-trapped the portals again. We might need them."
"Do we have a way of keeping him secure here?" Susan asked. "I just hate the thought of anyone - even him - spending more time than necessary in those cells."
"We could secure the smallest outhouse," Knud said. "The walls are thick, the door and lock are sturdy, and a one way-dome would make it magically impenetrable. He would not be able to flee from there."
"I think this needs a vote." Rósa said. "After all we're potentially endangering everyone here at Birch Manor."
Knud nodded and said: "I'll gather the old apprentices. Let's meet at the stairs leading to Sandra's room. She'll have to cast her vote as well."

Soon all 13 old apprentices were gathered outside. Fiona opened the door to Sandra's room so that she could hear.
Susan described her stay in the cell: "It is almost total sensory deprivation. You can't hear a thing, almost not see, and you do not know where you are or what will happen. I think I was in there for ten minutes, but it felt like days. It is inhuman."
 "But he's evil," Rósa said. He killed my family.
"No, Martine said, "It was not him. He condoned the killings, but he did not do it. Tristan did, as far as I understood it."
Sandra said, "Yes, Martine, "and maybe Torben. Remember, David was just a boy."
 "Just a boy, maybe," Finnbogi said. "but he caused strife and discord wherever he came."
"I'll go and get Ella," Susan said. "She knows him better than any of us."
"Then why did she not warn you?" Knud asked.
"She was maybe spelled," Susan said slowly. "Sometimes she began saying something, then she stopped as if she forgot, I just thought she was getting old."
"Get her!" Sandra said in as strong a voice as any of them had heard from her since she fell ill.
"A premonition?" Fiona asked.
"Yes," Sandra answered, sounding tired.
"Everybody off!" Fiona said. "It's time to eat, and time to give Sandra a draught, your hare-brained schemes are tiring her out."
"Tiring in a good cause," Sandra's voice was heard. "But no need to come back for my vote. I say bring him here!"

Susan hugged Knud, grasped a couple of buns and some slices of meat from the laden table and went off direction portal room. Soon she stood in the clearing in the darkening German wood. The dizziness was definitively getting lesser, Susan thought smiling, and walked towards Ella's cottage. Light was streaming from the windows. Susan knocked, and Ella hastily opened the door.
"Oh, hello Susan, I thought it was Walther, He has not returned from work yet."
"No," Susan said, "And he won't return. He is in Iceland right now. He used the portal and was trapped there. We need you to come to Denmark and  tell us a bit more about him."
Ella looked at Susan: "Did you kidnap my husband? Why? What has he done?"
"As far as we know, nothing yet," Susan said, placing her hand on Ella's arm. "And we did not kidnap him. He used the portal himself. Please trust me. But if he is what we think, then you, I and everybody is having a problem. I would like to say no more rigth now, and only explain this once, to everybody. Please come."
"I'm afraid to," Ella whispered.
"Be brave!" Susan answered. "Remember the baker from town, remember Granny, Remember Corinna, my gargoyle. Be brave for them"
"Is my Walther a skinturner?" Ella said terrified.
"Come with me," Susan said, "I have a story to tell, but it's not my story, and I really, really want to tell it only one time."
Ella took Susan's hand. "I'll come. But I can't go through the portals alone, you need to take me."
"I will, and I won't let you go!" Susan said squeezing Ella's hand.
While Ella dressed, Susan munched the buns and meat. She was thirsty, but something warned her against drinking the water. Instead she took a sample in a small vial.
"Do you have your own well here?" she asked.
"Yes we do, and when I was small it was the very best water, I knew. When I returned to live here with Walther it did not taste as good. But memory is a bad master, as Walther always said, when I complained."
Together they walked through the dark woods and Susan used her wand to light their way. Ella grasped Susan's hand as they went through the portal to Iceland.
"What a ghastly place," Ella said. "I feel as if I'm buried alive here."
"It's not a nice place to be, no," Susan said, shaking her head to clear it. "When we were young, it was more welcoming, with carpets, paintings and such. Now only the bare bedrock remains. Let's get on, this is like a central station, where the lines cross."
She pulled Ella into the corridor, down it and into the next portal room. Then they went through the portal to Birch Manor.
"Here we are," Susan said.
The others had eaten and the children had packed off to the only room where digital connections were possible at Birch Manor. Susan and Knud had decided that Smart-devices were counterproductive to the teaching of witchcraft and scrambled the waves apart from in what they called the office. Now all the children had gone there to be on SoMe and play intricate games against one another.
All the old apprentices and Martine were waiting for them, even both Fiona and Marit were present. "Sandra's fast asleep," Marit said. "And sleep is still the best medicine."
"This is Ella!" Susan said, and Ella made a sketchy bow. "Please all sit down while I talk.Yes you too, Ella. I am going to tell a long and tangled tale, and if anyone can semja or copy it for the archives, and for My, Helge and whomever else to read I'll be happy."
Rósa said: "Can do." I used to be the one taking notes, I think I still remember the spell. She rose and got pencil and paper from the storeroom. She placed a wad of papers in front of her, took the pencil and her wand: "Sem þú, Susann!" she said swishing her wand. "Say something, please Susan."
Susan said "Hello, my name is Susan." which was nicely written on the top of the first paper. "Fine, It works," Rósa said, "Just go on."
"I have to go far back in time," Susan said with a glance at the pen and paper which did their job, as far as she could see. "When we began studying at the Unicorn Farm,  all was not idyll and flowers. Some of the apprentices, led by one boy, had the idea that only children from magical parents could be expected to do magic, or at least being good at it. It irked him that Fiona was as good a flyer as she was, that I could call animals, any animal, better than him, and that My could whip up a potion and do it right each time. This idea is, I suppose, as old as Adam and Eve. If it had stayed with rivalry, competition and such, we of non-magic parents could have fended for ourselves and kept our own. But it turned into harassment, peaking for the first time at the broom racing in our first summer, where that boy and a bunch of followers hexed and sabotaged the brooms, leading to near fatal accidents. The teachers took it seriously, and did a lot to set him straight. We thought he was brought to better ways of thinking, but in our third and last summer a foreigner arrived from Belgium. He and some of the professors and apprentices, led by the boy, now young man, began a reign of terror at the school, planning to overtake first Denmark, then all of the Nordic countries by means fair or foul. We, that is some of the teachers, including Martine, and a handful of us apprentices, stopped them at the cost of our own magic. Unfortunately, as we only recently realized, the sister of the foreigner was the mastermind behind it all, not the foreigner himself ..."
She looked at Martine who sat waving her hand to get her attention: "Please," Martine said. "Name them. Secrecy breeds fear, and we are done with fear."
"Martine is right. Secrecy does indeed breed fear. The apprentice, who led the others on, was called David Hansen. The two teachers were Torben Søeborg and Birgitta Svensson. The foreigner was called Tristan and his sister Eileen Teresa.
Teresa, as we knew her, died in Paris around 20 years ago. And as Teresa was not there when we killed the magic, her magic was still intact, albeit untrained. She had a daughter, and she taught her daughter, not well, but revenge is a strong motivator. This daughter, Liisa, married Hilde's son, Rasmus. Liisa sought revenge, but in her efforts to do so, she teleported from Copenhagen to Tromsø. She overstretched her magic doing so, and is now in a coma in the hospital in Tromsø.
We know for certain that Torben and Tristan died soon after the magic were taken from them, and we read in the papers that David died during a riot in Copenhagen eight years later. This we now doubt, as we suspect that Walther, Ella's husband is actually David in disguise. Walther, let's keep that name for now, tried to come here, or somewhere else via the portals under the mountain - that is where the portal from Ella's town leads. We had set the portals up as traps, and he is now in a stony prison under the mountain."
Susan stopped and had a drink of water. Then she turned to Rósa: "You can stop the semja now." When the pencil lay besides the paper Susan continued: "Now our quandary is: Do we leave Walther in the cell under the mountain, or do we bring him here? We have an outhouse with sturdy walls and a spell to keep him in. We should be in no danger. And of course we're going to search him and take his wand."
She turned to Ella.
"Ella, do you have anything to add?" Susan asked. "You ought to know him a great deal better."Ella shook her head in confusion. "I do not know," she said. "We moved to Granny's house mainly to get away from my siblings, as they did not like Walther. I loved him, and I trusted him. He always told me that he felt he was simply not good enough for the smallest and prettiest of the bunch. His magic was not much, I always found this an asset, as I have none of my own as the only one in the family. He was always a bit circumspect, feeling inferior to and I suspect jealous of my siblings. As I said, in the end, when granny died, we moved to her cottage. I still spoke to my sisters often, but we did not visit."
"What did Granny think of Walther?" Susan asked.
"She was old, senile, but she did not like him very much,"
"And you did not trust her either?" Susan asked. Then she turned to Fiona. "Is there anything left of that antidote, that Sandra does not need? Then I think Ella could do with a sip. Finnbogi, please smell this water." She handed him the vial, she had filled in Ella's house.
"It stinks!" Finnbogi said simply.
"Ella," Susan said, " I don't know how to put this. but I think you have been used, gaslighted and generally abused."
"But why?" Ella said vehemently, "I do not have any magic, I can't do anything for crying out loud!"
"No, exactly. You are thus unable to find him out. And if Walther is really David, he knows that I would try to find you, if I ever had my memory and my magic back!" Susan said.
Fiona returned with the antidote. "I wonder if this is an antidote to any and all potions?" she said, and poured a small glass for Ella.
Ella looked at it, sniffed it and looked up at Fiona again. "This smells and looks just like one of Granny's potions," she said. "Somehow it reminds me of Susan as well. As she was when first we met. Well in for a lamb, in for a sheep. Cheers!"  And then she drank it up. All looked at her in silence, Rasmus very intensely.
"Wow," she said. "My head feels clearer now, It feels a bit like I have been sleepwalking for a long, long time and now, finally is really, truly awake."
"Do you know what's in it?" Susan asked. Ella shook her head, and Susan said: "Cerinna's tears. I kept them hidden all those years, now I'm so happy to use them."
"Well, yes, urm ..." Ella said. "Now I have to say something that's not easy for me." She looked around. "I know all you old ones. It's strange to see you old and grey like me, when in my memory you're still the children you were when we met. But I trust you on the evidence of those memories alone. Because now they are growing in my mind. And I remember David and Torben, and Tristan ... and I remember Teresa, too. I have met her many times since. She often came visiting. Walther ... he is David, I think so too ... told me she was a remote cousin of his. And that she did not like magicians. Now that was a lie, as I often saw them cast spells together. But he, no they, made me -- forget? not notice? not care?" she ended on a confused note. "Walther has indeed been lying to me, gaslighting is a suitable expression."
Monica rose and smelled, then carefully dipped a finger and tasted it.
"Aided by this potion in the water," she said in disgust, "you could not help it."
"I feel dirty, soiled, abused. Sad and angry at once. I'd say let him rot in that cell under the mountain to the end of his days," Ella exclaimed. "On the other hand, we need him here, to get the truth, all the truth out of him. Wring him dry and ..." she began crying and Rasmus went over and held her close.

After a short while, Rósa got up: "I suggest a vote, a simple count of  hands will do."
Knud rose as well: "All in favour of bringing Walther here. Raise your hands."
Almost everybody did.
"And those against," Knud said. Only Rósa, Finnbogi, and Rasmus raised their hands.
"Anyone abstaining?" Knud asked. No hands rose. "Then it is decided. We bring Walther here."

... to be continued