By the Mountain Bound (22 page)

I sat that night beside the girl’s bed, tending her livestock and feeding the dog, which paced worriedly about the cottage between naps on her bed of straw just outside the byre. Every so often she crossed to the girl and nosed her hand out from under the covers. Once or twice she stirred, and once she cried out words that I could not understand.

The night stretched long. “So what’s your name, then?” I asked the dog, and she looked at me and thumped her tail before coming over to rest her head on my knee. Near midnight, trees in the wood began exploding under the weight of the ice. In the spring, there would be clearings where seedlings could push up to greet the uncertain young sun.

In the morning, I had to break the door open. I caught my breath at the vision that met me: a world of crystal, glittering like a lens held up before a candleflame—too bright even for my eyes. The air I gasped was frigid. I closed the door in a hurry, not for my sake but for the girl’s.

The second day passed much as the first, except I got some broth into her to go with the milk and there was no storm. The third day was no different, and I daydreamed through most of it with her head pillowed on my scant bosom.

On the fourth day she awakened, and her eyes were clear. Her lips parted; she licked them, grimacing at the pain of a dry tongue meeting fever cracks. She tried to speak and croaked.

“Lass, wait.” I brought her warm water from the pot pulled up beside the fire, with honey and herbs stirred into it. Her hair was like straw when I brushed it from her face.

I cradled her head in my other hand while she drank from
the cup I held, until she raised her hand to signal enough. I lowered her onto sweat-damp ticking and sat on the stool beside her bed.

“Now tell me what transpired.”

She took a breath, but her face contorted and she started to sob. I held her through that as well, the brave candle-flicker, until she could speak through the tears. “We angered a spirit,” she said. “And he killed everyone.”

“Except you.”

She nodded and then choked, her hand rising to her mouth.

“What’s your name, lass?”

“Rannveig the woodcutter’s . . . Rannveig.”

“Tell me about your spirit. How did you anger it?”

“He rescued me from my father’s . . .
friend
. In the forest. And then when I went to thank him, they must have followed me. And they killed . . .” Her voice trailed off, her fingers plucking at the eiderdown.

Patience. She was doing her best. I thought her brave. “What did they kill?”

“A pack of wolves.” Her eyes closed tight, and I did not know if she meant to remember, or hide from memory’s sight. “And he came back with a demon, and . . .”

“Oh, no.” I laid my forehead in the palm of my hand and moaned. “No. Oh, no. So he took his vengeance on the village.”
The greengrocer, the babies in carriers. The woman in the blue skirts who crossed the street out of fear of me.

“Yes.”

“And he spared you?”

Both her hands clenched in front of her mouth, the right
one dragging the eiderdown with it. “Not spared,” she whispered. “Just didn’t kill.”

I forced my voice to gentleness and called the Light up in my eyes. Just now, it might resemble the tossing light of a storm more than the glow of a summer night. “Please explain.”

She breathed deep once, twice. “I wanted him to kiss me, before.” Another breath, taken and held, and the expression on her face shaded from terror into longing. Her voice grew ragged and caught. “And he did.”

“And then?” The dog shoved her tousled head into my lap. She did not growl me away from the girl, but I thought it was an effort for her.

Her jaw tensed. I thought she chewed her cheek, and slow tears rolled through her lashes almost gently. “And then he gave me his pain, and left me lying in the snow beside my father. I would still be there if Bo hadn’t come looking for me and made me come into the house.”

“Bo?”

She ruffled the ears of the worried dog. “Bo.”

My heart ached—not for the Wolf, for what he had done here was beyond my capacity to meet with pity. But oh. Oh, Strifbjorn.

“Where is your father, Rannveig?”

She looked at me as if I had grown wings. “Under the snow by the door, Bright one. The Wolf killed him.” Her frostbitten hands knotted before her chest, and she shuddered. Blackened flesh cracked, showing pink beneath. She seemed not to notice. “I wouldn’t have minded, if he had killed me like that. But to leave me alive, with this . . . this in me. Oh. How he must hate.”

The Warrior

B
y the time Strifbjorn started moving, the snow was too deep for walking. He floundered through drifts until he found a spruce, its branches bowed under its salt-white crown. He slipped in under its bower, where there was a depression in the snow, and placed his hand against the bark.

He sang to the tree. He hadn’t the power with music that Yrenbend or Muire did—his voice was more suited to supporting than leading a wreaking itself—but his skills were adequate to small tasks. The tree shivered, awakening under his touch. He cautioned it back to near-slumber—sap flowing at the start of winter would be disastrous—and in chanted words explained what he needed.

Light traced spirals up the spruce from Strifbjorn’s fingertips, swirling like coils of smoke. The bark writhed, peeled back from pale wood beneath. In moments, long pale slats grew like ribs from the trunk. Strifbjorn leaned into the song and a perfect pair of skis dropped to the snow. A rustle above and two strong, straight limbs marked with swellings three inches from pointed ends daggered into the drifts. Poles.

He sang the wound in the bark closed and thanked the tree. Then he sat in the snow under its branches to see what he could improvise for bindings.

H
e skied north, mostly, along the seacoast and away from the Ulfenfell. He would have vowed not to return, but he knew it for a lie in advance of the telling.

He had a great deal of time to think. Didn’t it seem odd that the villagers trapped the wolves so easily? The whole pack, all at once and together? That none escaped? How many men or what magic would that require?

Strifbjorn skied from bare-branched foothills into the cold desert places farther north. Hillocked ground gave way to tundra, less thickly blanketed by snow. Any snow at all was unusual this far north: the thirsty ice usually drank all water from the air.

The deaths of the wolves seemed odd indeed. He meant to understand it. The relentless rhythm, the hiss of his skis, parted the numb silence that had wrapped him since Mingan left. Pieces and shards began to fall into place. With them came a cold, old, patient determination. For the sake of his love, and his brethren, and the poor mortal candle-flickers Heythe so easily discarded. For the wolves, and for the world. She would not be rid of Strfbjorn this easily.

That passion came with a flaring of the Light through his veins, burning a dire conviction.

It was wrath, and it was holy.

With the darkness of the evening, a freezing rain began.

Whence cometh the sun

The smooth skies bestriding

Once Fenrir hath her consumed?

—Vafþrúðnismál

The Wolf

T
he ice storm does not catch me until I emerge from the birches. Bitter rain soaks my cloak, slicks my clothes to my skin as I cross the meadow. My boots break a crust on the snow. It matters not: I am numb at the heart already.

The rain steams on my skin.

I come the long way around. I wish to look upon the hall of my brothers as I approach it.

Look to thy pack.
I failed one family.

I will not fail another.

When I enter, the mead-hall is crowded, benches arrayed along both sides of the long trestles. My brothers and sisters sit or stand gossiping and dicing. Many from other halls came for the flyting, and more have flooded in, drawn by the word that a Lady has returned to us.

The talk gutters as I enter, my cloak black with rain. Every gaze that seeks my face slides away again as if from ice. Tendrils of vapor rise from my clothes and hair. A ripple of silence
paces me the length of the hall as I stride, head high, to stand before Heythe’s chair.

Yrenbend does not hide his face as I pass, but nods once as if in recognition of an equal. I do not choose to see him. I am the Grey Wolf, the Suneater, and I have no equals. I have masters, and I have prey.

Heythe rises as I ascend to her chair. Skeold stands beside her, her hand on her black crystal sword. But I let my hand fall far from Svanvitr’s hilt, my fingers relaxed.

“Master Wolf,” Heythe greets me, resplendent in blue robes traced with gold embroidery, her surcote and kirtle cut low across her bosom to display the glitter of her necklace against skin white as silk. Her hair drips crystal. In the torchlight, she shimmers.

“Lady,” I answer, and hear the collective intake of breath behind me as I drop to one knee. “Permit this one to serve.”

She never hesitates, nor do her eyes so much as widen. Her hand falls on my bowed head, blessing and sanction. Fingertips strong and light outline the curve of my ear, slide under the five-strand plait to ruffle the hair on my nape. The low whimper in the back of my throat is a cry of submission that might have shamed me once. But no longer.

Done with that caress, absently completed as fondling the ears of a favorite dog, she tilts my face to look me in the eye. I can feel the brethren watching as she bends, the floor-brushing sleeves of her surcote falling about me like the curtains of a tapestried bed.

“Master Wolf,” she says, her voice soft luxury, “you are wet to the skin, and filthy with blood. I bid you use my chamber.
Go and undress; make yourself warm and clean”—as if steam were not rising from my plastered shirt—“wait for me there. I will speak with you when you are comfortable.”

Her pointing finger directs me to a curtained niche. A shiver that derives not from ice-rimed hair or clothing rattles my teeth. Strifbjorn’s bench. Which the Lady has claimed for her own. I nod, swallow and go where I am bid. It is a long walk—the length of the hall a second time. As I step into the alcove, I hear the pitch of conversation swell.

I
have been in this niche only once before, when Heythe choked me insensible. There is just enough room beyond the tapestry for a bench and a wardrobe. I strip off my shirt, boots and cloak and hang Svanvitr on the wall, but I leave the leathern trousers on despite clotted blood. A thrall arrives with warm water and bathes me. He unbraids my hair, combs and washes it and combs it again. There’s no reason to stop him. None that makes any sense.

But once I’ve let him pull my plait apart, nothing else he asks of me can matter. I let him take the clothes for laundering, and the filthy trousers, too.

My skin prickles, and I might slide under the furs and the eiderdown, curled up small around the ache in my belly—but the bench smells of Heythe, layered over the scent of Strifbjorn, and that is more than I can bear. Worst is the way the raindrop light from my collar fills up the niche once my shirt is unlaced and set aside.

I find a dark scarf laid on the dressing-bench and wind it
about my throat to contain the glow. Then I lean back on the bench and close my eyes, numb as a drunken tongue, and try not to listen to what I can hear of the conversation beyond.

Heythe leaves me until sunrise, when the storm has ended and the shutters are thrown back from the high windows above, letting wintry sunlight spill into the hall. I know she’s coming. I hear the faint scrape of her chair under the talk, and the way the voices of my brothers swell for a moment, then fall silent.

She brushes the tapestry aside and steps past, allowing it to swing shut behind her. The illusion of privacy. But nothing can be said here that will not be heard by anyone passing close.

She is radiant in the dawnlight, her hair as golden as the wires of her necklace, her eyes as bright as the sky glimpsed through the windows above. Her gaze travels over me, lingering. A slow flush caresses my chest and my face.

“Master Wolf,” she says through the curve of her lips. She shrugs her mantle off and lets it puddle on the cold earthen floor. She unpins, too, the net of crystals from her high-piled hair. Strands wander downward as she moves.

“Lady. I thank you your hospitality.” I have never been ashamed of nakedness, but the way she examines me leaves me sweating.

“You’ve sworn to my service,” she replies. “It is but your due, my duty.”