By the Mountain Bound (29 page)

Hard-hurt the heart hewn past healing:

Despairing die even the bold!

—The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald

The Wolf

S
igrdrifa lets the curtain fall shut behind her and comes forward. Her blade rises, leveled at my throat. As if he does not exist, she never glances at Strifbjorn, who stands an arm’s breadth away, though she stares about this way and that, as if seeking who I speak to.

I gulp air I never thought to taste, the scrapes Strifbjorn left on my chest stinging, a throb in my roughly pierced ear. That breath is sweeter than it has any right.

Snake-swift, hawk-cunning, my sister. Svanvitr hangs beneath my cloak, unreachable. One death is as good as another. I am grateful that Strifbjorn will not have to strike the blow.

I smile at Sigrdrifa. Her eyebrow rises, but she does not hesitate. Her sword darts forward like the beak of a heron. I don’t expect to feel a thing.

I’m shocked when pain like molten wax spills down my chest. Her sword plunges through skin and flesh, grates on bone, pokes from my back below the right shoulder blade. A
cry wants to fill my mouth, but what comes instead is blood and froth.

I fall to my knees, topple backwards.

The sword stays lodged in my breast, knocked from Sigrdrifa’s hand by Strifbjorn’s lunge. She crashes down, and he falls with her. Then I cannot see them; I am on my back, my legs folded under me, the swordpoint lodged in the rammed-earth floor. Two feet of her hilt and the forte of the blade stand out of my chest.

Strifbjorn hit her, and Sigrdrifa missed my heart.

Wood and cloth rend as the combatants strike the partition, pulling it down around them. My own blood fills my mouth, hot to steaming. Strifbjorn grunts, a sound of pain coupled with the sound of metal meeting flesh. I moan and tug the blade—

Cloth tears once more. They roll on the floor, Sigrdrifa’s pained shout following the sound of fist or elbow thumping against her head.

Strifbjorn.
I reach up with both hands, the right one a twist of agony, and splay my palms on the flat of the sword. Outcries and running footsteps in the mead-hall, the hanging pulled back as more wood cracks and Strifbjorn cries out.

I press my palms together, straighten my elbows and slide the blade from my breast.

Crystal grates on bone, the edges of the blade slashing my palms. I risk a breath: it comes with more frothed scalding blood on my tongue, a sensation like ground glass filling up my lung.

Enough.
I make myself whole and healed.

Relief of pain comes with a hundred-mile-runner tiredness.
I put my elbows down, shove. The world tunnels dark, as if Heythe strangled me.

I am the Suneater.

I will stand. Now.

I
will
stand.

Sigrdrifa’s blade is in my hand, dark as midnight water. I reverse it, catching the hilt in my left hand. My right darts to Svanvitr’s hilt, draws her across my body.

A circle of observers has halted outside the doorway of the alcove. I suppose they can see Strifbjorn now. I hear their noises as he hauls himself up beside me, his knife left wedged in Sigrdrifa’s eye.

She will not be standing again.

“Walk away,” Strifbjorn mutters.

Swaying in exhaustion, I shake my head. “I swore to serve her, brother. Wouldst have me oath-broken, too? Kill me now, as thou camest to.”

He takes a breath and turns away.

The children of the Light fall back as Strifbjorn advances, stiff-legged as an old wolf walking out to a fight he thinks he can’t win.

Bergdis comes forward, frowning, reaching out as if to lay her hand on his sleeve. He doesn’t glance at her, but her motion is arrested and her hand drifts back to her side. I know the look on her face, on all of their faces. It is the recognition of dominance.

I almost think they will let him leave the hall. Until Heythe steps in front, a pair of sdadown snarling and hackling at her heels.

“Stand and speak with me,” she says, in a clear voice that carries. I sway, two swords in my hands. My healing came dear.

But I will stand.

He gives her nothing but a scornful glance, until she bars his path with an outreached arm. “Why are you here?”

He glances down and brushes Sigrdrifa’s blood. “I came to talk to my friend. I am done now.”

Dizzy exhaustion blurs my vision and weakens my knees. I set Sigrdrifa’s sword against the floor and lean on it.

“You have entered my hall uninvited. Will you swear fealty to me, then?”

“I will not,” he answers.

“Then I will challenge you.”

“Not so quickly, my Lady.” The voice rises from the crowd, and Yrenbend thrusts through the crowd. “I demand an explanation.”

She inclines her head, gracious and imperious.

He pushes Strifbjorn aside as he advances. Small hands reach out and draw my love into the crowd. I see his platinum head among the golden momentarily, but I cannot follow. The most I can do for him is to pretend that I saw nothing.

“Aye, Lady,” Yrenbend says. “Your plans are senseless, and there is still no sign of the war you prophesied. Make me understand.”

She gestures dramatically to the Banner behind her chair. “There is my proof.”

But the Raven on the Banner is draggle-tailed, stoop-headed in defeat. Faintly, over it, lies the flicker of an illusion.
That
Raven, the false one, is spread wide-winged in victory.

A glance shows me no one else has noticed the change. A heavy weight swings in my ear—no more pain; it healed with my lung—and I realize there has been no change. Now, I but see a hidden truth.

Another lie. Another lie, in the belly of all this horror. Heythe—

But that is unfair. I have visited horror upon myself.

Yrenbend has let a long, jag-edged silence hang. Now he tosses his plait over his shoulder and lays one hand on his blade. “I’ll not fight for you, Lady. You claim you wish to strengthen the children, but your practice sets us at one another’s throats, crushing our strength.”

He draws a breath and his sword. Starlight flares in his eyes, licks the length of the blade. He turns and gestures with that sword at where I lean against Sigrdrifa’s dark blade.

Against the weariness and the numb tingling in my limbs, I straighten my spine and return the salute with two swords. My blade and Sigrdrifa’s flare not.

I lower hers to the floor, arm trembling, and stumble toward Yrenbend as Heythe advances from the other side. The blade carves furrows behind me. My eyes are drawn to the Lady’s face, bright and lovely in the light slanting through the high window.

“I will not have my orders questioned,” she says, in a voice soft as death. My brethren withdraw, a circle forming around Yrenbend, Heythe and myself. Sdadown growl behind her, a sound more like a hissing of adders than the voices of wolves.

“What I do I do for the future of the world, and old jealousies will not be permitted to destroy it.”

“Whatever you want,” Yrenbend says, “it is not our future.”

Her eyes skip past him, meeting mine. “Master Wolf, hold your hand.” I stagger to a halt, although I did not intend to strike down Yrenbend. I am not sure, in fact, what I had intended, but when her eyes meet mine my collar tightens as if she twisted it. She is lying.

Lying.

The Suneater knows. He is the end of the world, that beast—Ragnarok, Apocalypse, born for devouring. He is pure and ruinous as the wildfire, as the ice storm; he has no pack, and all sanity has been choked and chained and tortured from him, and the man who held him in check has been shattered and warped just like the chain that held him before.

There also used to be another wolf inside me, besides the Suneater, a clean devoted wild thing. That wolf is dead with his pack, resurrected as a gaunt abhorrent yellow-eyed monster. The sdadown are more than a weapon. They are a lesson. She has bound my skinned body in her shadows, too, and like them I must love her for it.

The world is ruined. Let the sun go dark.

It has the feeling of an old thought, long hoarded and long recalled. Feral strength wracks me, the exhaustion falling aside as I walk past Yrenbend, leaving Sigrdrifa’s dark sword lying among the dry-needled boughs littering the floor. Among the faces in the crowd, I see Rannveig’s and I see Muire’s, but Strifbjorn is gone.
Gone, or cloaked under his pass-unseen again?
It does not matter. The bonds are shattered, though the collar still twists at my throat. I know my master. I have sworn my service. I know my task.

In bondage now bides the Wolf, ’til world’s end.
Old words. Old worlds. Still true.

I take my place at my Lady’s side with my brothers, all in shadow wrapped.

A sane wolf growls before it kills. Hackles rise, and teeth are bared. I make no display. With my left hand, I open the clasp of my cloak. It slides from my shoulders, puddling at my feet like a shed skin. Yrenbend meets my eyes and nods, his sword in his hand like a stinger, dripping Light.

“I say you are corrupt, Lady.” His voice is clear and level. It carries, and the children mutter.

I step forward. Behind me, the sdadown tense. They smell of old meat frozen in a cache.

“I said stay your hand, Master Wolf,” Heythe murmurs. “Give me your blade.”

Svanvitr stays dark. I reverse her, and give her hilt-first to Heythe, never taking my eyes from Yrenbend’s face as it registers his shock. I am permitting another to wield my sword—the symbol of my covenant.

Strifbjorn never should have given me this blade. I am more tarnished than any, and never was anything but a shadow set up to reflect their Light. Under my skin of darkness, a dead wolf squirms in pain that will not end. But the Suneater smiles.

Heythe takes the blade. At her touch, it flares instantly, hurtingly into light. “Corrupted?”

But I can see through the light, see a grayness in the shadows it casts. Rannveig’s earring swings warm in my ear. Another illusion. Destruction follows this one, and I follow destruction.

“Will you recant?” Heythe again. “I need you, bold Yrenbend. I need you all. All my children.” The nonexistent light casts flickering shadows across her face, making her seem taller.

“Am I meant to be impressed?”

Heythe shakes her head sadly and steps forward, with one last warning glance to me.
Do not intervene.

I have no such intention. The Suneater does not care if she dies or if Yrenbend does, so long as there is blood. A white star hangs in my breast. I wonder if Heythe knows what she has unleashed. I am certain Rannveig does not.

I am the Grey Wolf. My bindings are not lightly parted.

Crystal blades flash and sing and clash upon each other. I hear myself laughing like a stranger in a darkened room. And then little Muire steps into the fight, singing a war-chant, her sword blazing blue and white in her right hand. The woodcutter’s daughter is a few steps behind her, stooping to pick up Sigrdrifa’s fallen blade. She swings it like a wood-axe, clumsily, charging Heythe from the flank.

Faced by an einherjar and a waelcyrge, Heythe does not even bother to toy with the girl. Her sword—my sword—flickers sideways and severs Rannveig’s hand at the elbow. The girl goes to her knees as Muire shouts and lunges.

Heythe sidesteps Muire’s blow, parries Yrenbend’s thrust and minces sideways to flank him, prowling like a cat. He pivots, keeping her before him, as Muire spares a glance for the bleeding girl but comes up beside him. I step away from the silently watching sdadown and kneel beside the girl.

They have practiced together, Muire and Yrenbend, and they press Heythe as a pair. She gives no ground, my sword dancing in her hand with a skill I have never seen equaled—not by Skeold, Strifbjorn, even Menglad. I dismiss Muire and Yrenbend from my thoughts and turn to the girl. Already, I can see that they will die.

The woodcutter’s daughter is also dying. So much crimson
hides deeper wounds than the cut to her arm. The blade continued down. Blood pulses from a razor-edged wound on her thigh, flooding from the stump of her arm. It covers my hands and body as I gather her. “Foolish candle-flicker.”

“Master Wolf.” Her lips shape a whisper. “There is no pain.”

“Only what I gave thee.”

Her lips shape a curious smile. “Take it back.” Her left hand comes up as if to rest in my hair, falling away before it more than half-lifts. My hands brush her flesh.
Kiss me again.

The Suneater laughs at the thought, revealing his red, mocking maw.
We create suffering. We are not for the easing of it.

The silence between the pain and me is all I have. I am sure that to shatter it would mean my destruction.