"It is I who am sorry. My English is not very good."

"Your English is better than mine. I meant you're misinterpreting what I'm saying, and I haven't a clue about your responses. For example, I don't know where you're taking me."

"Here," he said, waving a hand at a building ahead of us. It was a small church made of grey stone that sat at the top of the street.

I relaxed a smidgen at the sight of it, feeling that Mattias was no threat despite his confusion. "Is that your church?"

"Yes. We will go in now."

I hesitated, trying to figure out how to get through to him that I wasn't the person he thought I was.

"It is all right," he said, taking my hand and tugging me up the steps to the church door. "I am the sacristan. I am the sun."

"The son of who?" I asked, eyeing the church carefully. It looked perfectly normal, not at all out of the ordinary.

"Not 'who'… the sun. You know, the sun in the sky?" he said, pointing upward.

"Oh, the sun. You… er… you think you're the sun?"

"Yes."

I switched my examination from the church to the man who was leading me into it. He still looked sane, but if he thought he was the sun, perhaps it would be wiser to let him think I was going along with his claims until I could slip away.

The church did much to reassure my nerves. It, too, looked perfectly ordinary, and was pretty much as I had expected from my visits to other ancient Icelandic churches—a small anteroom that opened out into the main part of the church, narrow aisles running down the middle and on either side of two banks of pews. At the far end stood the altar. It wasn't until I was halfway down the aisle that I realized that something was wrong. The church was decorated with the usual crosses and symbols of Christianity, but over these had been thrown small black cloths embroidered with silver crescent moons.