The Fire Stallion. Stacy Gregg

the wrong idea. “I mean, yes, I’m coming, but I’m not working as part of the crew or anything. I’m here with Mum.”

      Gudrun narrowed her eyes at me. “Do not underestimate yourself, Hilly. You have a role of your own to play. And a very important one it will be too.”

      She leaned close to me and whispered conspiratorially: “I threw the runes this morning and the gods told me everything. The future holds great adventure for us, Hilly. Ready yourself …”

      “Excuse me—”

      It was the waiter.

      “What would you like to order, madam?”

      Gudrun didn’t open her menu, she just smiled up at him. “Do you have any puffin?”

      The waiter looked horrified. “No, madam!”

      Gudrun sighed with genuine disappointment. She turned to me. “It’s so difficult to find puffin on the menu outside of Iceland. They’re delicious roasted. The Icelanders catch them in butterfly nets.”

      Instead, Gudrun ordered the Atlantic salmon. I had the teriyaki chicken. As we ate, she asked me all about my life in Wellington and seemed genuinely excited when I told her that I rode.

      “It must have been hard to leave your horse at home, to be away for so long?” Gudrun said.

      I said nothing. I didn’t want to talk about Piper.

      “You’ll find the Icelandic horses very different to the ones back home,” Gudrun continued. “They’re bred to be highly spirited and hot under saddle and they have five gaits.”

      I didn’t understand. “Five gaits?”

      “Most horses have just four gaits – they can walk, trot, canter and gallop,” Gudrun replied. “An Icelandic horse has no gallop – instead they pace, and they have a fifth gait, the tölt, which is super fast – it’s like a trot except it’s so smooth you do not need to rise out of the saddle. When you ride a tölting horse, it feels like you’re flying. You can sit on their backs quite comfortably like this for great distances.”

      “Have you ridden at a tölt?” I asked.

      Gudrun smiled. “Of course. As a girl I grew up riding every day. Everyone rides in Iceland. There are only three hundred thousand people, and there are a hundred thousand horses. The Icelandic has the purest blood of any horse in the world. Their breeding hasn’t changed for a thousand years. They are the horses of the Vikings.”

      “So do you live in Reykjavik?” I asked.

      Gudrun shook her head. “I grew up there, but New York’s my home now. When Katherine asked me to work on this project, I knew I had to come back, though. Brunhilda is very important to me.”

      I had taken a look at the Brunhilda script when Mum was reading it on the plane. “So it’s about the princess from Sleeping Beauty, right?”

      Gudrun’s face darkened. “Sleeping Beauty is a nonsense story! Brunhilda is not some fairy-tale princess. She was a real girl. This is precisely why I am here – so that this movie won’t become some ridiculous recounting of her history, a helpless fawn waiting for a prince’s kiss to awaken her. The true Brunhilda was the fiercest, the noblest of warriors, willing to fight to the ends of the earth for what she believed in. I have worked all my life to serve her truth.”

      Gudrun looked at me hard, her green eyes searching mine. “But why are you here, Hilly?”

      I gulped down my sushi roll and thought about telling her everything about me and Piper and the worst time of my life, but in the end all I said was the truth.

      “I didn’t want to be home.”

      The flight to Iceland took us into Keflavik airport, an hour from the capital Reykjavik. We were picked up by three minivans and got on board with our bags before driving off in convoy. The landscape out of the window was like looking at Mars – plateaus of bare, rugged black rock patchworked with lichen, moss and snowdrifts with strange curls of smoke coming out of the ground.

      “Steam not smoke,” Mum corrected me when I pointed it out to her. “There are a hundred and thirty volcanoes here. Thirty of them are still active and even in summer there’s snow. They call it the land of fire and ice.”

      We turned off the motorway not far from Keflavik because Lizzie thought it would be fun to stop for lunch at Blue Lagoon, a vast natural hot water lake.

      “It’s just so touristy,” Gudrun said as we got out of the vans. “There’s hot water everywhere in Iceland but this place is a little too crowded for me.”

      It smelled like the hot pools back home in Rotorua with a rotten tang of sulphur in the air. The hot water lake was huge and the water was an ice-cloudy blue.

      Mum and I changed into our swimming costumes along with the crew and got in, sitting up to our armpits. Gudrun was off having an intense conversation with Katherine and didn’t join us.

      “Slip this on,” Lizzie said, giving me a wristband.

      “What’s it for?” I asked.

      “Anything you want!” She winked at me.

      It was the coolest thing ever. All I had to do was wave my digital wristband at the kiosks and I was given whatever I wanted. Soft drinks, chips and hotdogs – well, Icelandic hotdogs, which were kind of like American ones but with this weird creamy mustard sauce. I asked for tomato sauce instead but even that was a little strange and tasted like sweet cheese.

      We soaked in the pools until my skin wrinkled. It felt chalky and dried-out when we got back out and dressed in the cold air. Then we piled back into the vans, all toasty from the hot water.

      Most tourists go to Reykjavik and stay there but we drove straight through. It wasn’t a big city so it didn’t take long and pretty soon it was like we were driving across a moonscape, all spooky and barren with scattered patches of snow despite the summer. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the snow vanished and we were driving through tussocky plains, bare and desolate. It looked prehistoric here, almost as though humans had never existed.

      We passed a roadside diner that looked closed except for the flashing lights that insisted it was open. By now it must have been late, but it was still eerily light. I looked at the time on the clock on the dashboard of the van: 11 p.m.

      “There’s the hotel.” Mum nudged me and pointed off the main road to the right. In the far-off distance, I could see a long, low wooden lodge that looked like something the Vikings would have lived in except it was much bigger. It stood alone, in front of a massive forest of grey-green fir trees.

      “So, that’s our base for the next two months,” Mum said.

      The sign outside the hotel said ISBJÖRN. It translated as “ice bear” – polar bear, I guess it meant, since there was a giant stuffed polar bear standing on its hind legs in the foyer. Isbjörn had twelve rooms inside the lodge and another twenty-three cabins. The whole place had been rented out so that we were the only ones here. Katherine and the actors were going to be in the main lodge. The rest of us were allocated cabins around the grounds. Lizzie was methodically doing the rounds of the vans with a clipboard as everyone clamoured around her to find out where they were sleeping.

      “Jillian, I’ve put you in the woods – total Hansel and Gretel job, little footpath into nowhere, but, trust me, it’s very pretty …” Lizzie handed Mum our key on a wooden tag and a map of the hotel grounds.

      “Which way?” Mum asked.

      “Go through the hotel foyer,” Lizzie called back without looking round. “Out the other side you’ll see the path into the forest. Follow the middle track. On the map I gave you your cabin is marked with a red cross.”

      “You navigate,