B007IIXYQY EBOK (10 page)

The wind all day had been still, but now it rose purposefully, rushing through the boughs like swiftly running water. She sensed the nearness of Wodan, keeper of souls, and above him, all-enveloping Fria, setting the wind.

Was this kill your gift?
she asked the grove. The wind surged harder until it was a roaring torrent and she heard a whispered
yes
in the wild dance of green above.

And then a passage was flung open to dreams she had had many times, of battle and the sword. In one, she stood before a grave mound by moonlight. Her head was bowed, and she touched white lips to the cold steel of a sword encrusted with mold, and she knew it was Baldemar’s. In another she stood armed as a warrior on the palisade of a fort, the enemies of all their lives arrayed before her, the remnants of her people behind her, waiting for doom. The visions unsettled her and she forced them from her mind.

At last she rose, and set about searching for small round stones to pile on the corpse. The warrior was enemy spirit now, and she must prevent his ghost from stalking the villages. After a short struggle she removed the spear from his chest. It was family treasure and must be preserved, for with it she had taken her first enemy. Then she cut a lock of his hair for use as an amulet. Finally she set about stripping the body. She found strange things.

She took first his hunting knife. But the belt in which it had been sheathed made her pause. It had odd signs carved into it, and they were not runes. From his tunic she took a moist sponge and a rolled sheet of something thin as a leaf with more of these strange signs written over a curious drawing of radiating weblike lines. But she had no time to puzzle over these things. From beyond the grove she heard the distant thunder of cattle driven off and women’s screams. The Hermundures were striking on every side. Athelinda would be half mad from fear for her safety. Quickly she put all she found into her gamebag.

She heard the crackle of leaves behind her.

She turned and saw Hylda, most ancient of the Ash Priestesses, approaching in dreamy silence. Her mouth was set in a simple line, revealing as much as a toad’s. The wind kept her silver hair in ghostly motion. Her skin was the color of a hazelnut; her eyes were like a deer’s, liquid and mournful. The wind tugged at her clothes; she was like some fragile autumn leaf no longer getting nourishment from the tree, locked in a last struggle with the wind that tried to tear it from its twig. She held a torch in one hand.

“Let the fire cleanse!” Her voice was one Auriane would expect of a dwarf, sweet and high.

Auriane watched numbly, unable to speak. Hylda brushed the torch so close past Auriane’s face she nearly singed her hair. Then the old priestess walked nine times round the body, humming all the while, passing the fire close over the corpse. She stopped, studying the body, and Auriane knew she saw ruptures in the world about in the angle of an arm, the contortion of the trunk.

“He died with open eyes,” Hylda said finally, nodding knowingly. “It is great evil. It means the dead watch us.” The old woman gestured delicately. “It means an enemy rises from within.”

She looked sharply at Auriane. “When this man broke into my grove, he became all enemies, even those who rise from within. And you, Auriane, are his slayer.”

Hylda’s eyes seemed to stare inward as she solemnly touched her staff to Auriane’s left shoulder, then to her right. Auriane leaned away slightly, wondering if madness had taken the old woman.

She has spoken too long with trees. She’s grown a heart of bark.

“Your lot is to protect your people with your own body, to be a living shield as long as your spirit is clothed in flesh,” Hylda went on in her tremulous voice. “Any weapon you touch is blessed. Any weapon you wield has thrice the war-luck in your hand. The oracle commands you: Marry the god, and victory will be your fate.”

She felt a jump in her chest; it was excitement and terror. To “marry the god” meant to join the shield maidens, a small but greatly revered order of priestesses who lived and fought with the warriors and performed the rites that sent them to the Sky Hall when they were slain. Then came a sense of being both surprised and not surprised. A part of her rebelled, seized suddenly with a blind need for the comfort of farm and hearth.

No, I cannot live such a harsh, grim life. But Hylda need not know. “Who is the enemy who rises from within?” Auriane asked carefully.

“You will know him. He was always there in seed form. He falls now on fertile soil.”

Auriane looked at Hylda with a worried frown. “But this cannot be. I am to marry Witgern when I am twenty.”

“To that
I have no answer. I know only what I read in the dead man’s eyes.”

A new eruption of war cries wrested Auriane’s attention away. Auriane moved off slowly, not wanting to show disrespect. “My lady…, I must go. My mother is alone.” She took up the pony’s rein and began to lead him off.

“Go then, but never forget,” Hylda admonished, following Auriane. For an instant their gazes fully met, and Auriane was aware of a dry, spidery spirit that yearned to seize her and suck in a strong young soul. Hylda wagged a withered finger.
“You have more kin in this grove than in any hall
…and they will claim you one day.”

Auriane hurried on, half dragging Brunwin. She
would
forget.

I will turn my back on this. I will deny the kill was my own.

She looked round once and saw more Holy Ones emerging from the gloom, their cloaks white as swans; as they flocked round the body, dove-soft sounds came from them, and she knew they spoke excitedly of the rare omen.

Many saw, then. They will not let me hide from this. But I will not live that life.

To the east and west she saw the angry smoke of free-running fires. The Hermundures were burning all in their path—fields, sheds, houses. She was alarmed by how close they had penetrated to her father’s hall. But once she was home she would be nestled in safety. It had always been so.

In her impatience she mounted the weary pony again and Brunwin broke into a limping trot, fighting the reins in his panic. Finally they jolted down the familiar rocky path over Axhead Hill, then the birch forest fell away and they passed a welcome sight—the neat pile of stones that marked the boundary line of her family’s lands. Here was safety, and the world’s center. She blew one more horn blast, more from joy than in warning. The pony raised his head eagerly and began to gallop; he knew this field of ripening barley. They flashed past her mother’s apple trees, then crossed the fallow field that next year would be planted with flax. Its north side was girded by a fence of human bones.

Only Baldemar had such a fence; it was constructed of the bones of Roman soldiers slain in a lifetime of battles on the border. Auriane winced as Brunwin rushed at it—he was lame and should not jump—but the sturdy pony insisted. He burst forward, cleared the low fence and landed in soft dung.

Then came long rows of cattle sheds of varying heights, and beyond, the field thralls’ huts, appearing like a cluster of modest haystacks hugging the shadows of the tall pines. The silence all about roused her apprehension and anger. There was no reason for driving the cattle off to safety and hiding in the souterrains. Who, god or man, would dare strike this farm?

And then she came to the open gate in the low palisade that ringed the precincts of the hall itself. Two tall poles flanked it; atop one was affixed the skull of a mountain cat, the totem animal of the Chattians, from which they took their name. Atop the other was the skull, spine and loose dried hide of the stallion offered last autumn in the yearly horse sacrifice. Both were possessed of such terrible holiness that she scarce dared look upon them.

When they cantered through, they left a wake of chickens fluttering up in panic. As the pony threaded his way among the dome-shaped clay kilns in the yard, Auriane saw the glowing vessels being fired within had been abandoned. Why had the kilns been deserted in such haste? Where were Mudrin and Fredemund? Athelinda’s mead shed, too, was empty of life.

Beyond lay the hall itself. Its long, low shape with its drooping cover of thatch made her think of some great brooding beast crouched at the forest’s edge. The hall was for certain a living thing, a creature of old comfortable habits and scents that loved her in return for her love.

The wide entranceway was built in the center of one long side of the hall. Athelinda was there, struggling with a goat that refused to come out. Her mother saw her and released the goat, who promptly wheeled about and returned to the hall. On her back sleeping in a sling was Arnwulf, the baby born this year at the time of the first lambs. Two other babes born since Auriane’s birth had died young of the sicknesses of children.

Brunwin lurched to a halt and Auriane dropped to the ground. She drew in a breath at the sight of her mother.

The sight of her mother’s pale lips, of that finely made face so taut and drawn, and the beaten look in her eyes made Auriane feel that the earth was giving way beneath her.

To Auriane, Athelinda had always been a supple but stable force, all-powerful but benign; when she was younger she believed her mother’s touch caused cows to bring forth milk and set the farm in motion as the mind of Fria set the stars. Her mother had no limits upon her; she spun tales from the rich stuff of her mind with the same ease that she spun wool. That strength was unexpected—she seemed, at first look, fragile as a glass vessel. But Auriane had seen her rise at midnight and battle her way through waist-deep snow to assist a frightened, sweating mare in the foaling barn, or walk with dignified calm to the center of a hostile Assembly to spiritedly make the case of a wronged kinsman. Fredemund said out of her hearing, “Behold the pretty bird but beware the sharp beak.” Athelinda’s hair was dark bronze like her own, but her mother’s was calmed and controlled in a neat braided knot secured with a boar’s tusk comb—that knot that Auriane once imagined somehow held the world together.

“Auriane!” A brief look of relief gave way to anger. “Where have you been? Did you not hear the horns? Perhaps you forgot where you live. Perhaps you forgot you have a family. While you were out dancing with elves the house of your father’s brother was burned. They’ll be burning here next.”

Auriane said nothing, shocked to silence by the sight of her mother’s dress torn near the knee. It was the finest she owned, dyed scarlet by her own hand with madder root—and to see it gaping open was horrifying beyond reason, as if she saw her mother’s flesh torn. Her twisted torque of silver and her serpent arm rings, which normally made her look bright and noble, today seemed to weight her down like a yoke. Her doeskin shoes inset with beads of amber, which were her pride, were caked with mud from the souterrains.

“Mother…, I am sorry—” she began haltingly and stopped, suddenly feeling too frail inside. Finally she realized what her mother had said.

“Theudobald’s
hall?” she whispered, feeling as though all her blood drained from her body. “But it cannot be. How could they dare?” She felt she fought for balance on moving earth. “You’re mad to think they would come here. How can you say it?”

“Watch whom you’re calling mad, saucy child. It has happened. Now help me push the animals out—they’ll be burned alive.”

Auriane met her gaze numbly for a moment, slowly shaking her head in denial. Then she lost her strength all at once and rushed to her mother, embracing her tightly, breaking easily through Athelinda’s anger, for love as always was too close beneath the surface. “Mother, what is happening to us?” Auriane’s soft wail was muffled in her mother’s cloak.

“The gods know,” Athelinda said with bitter calm, patiently stroking Auriane’s hair. “The earth delivers up monsters, the enemy knows no law and the Wheel of Yule spins backward.” She put an arm about Auriane and they walked toward the open door. “Perhaps it’s world’s end. He lives longest who knows when to hide.”

They entered the cozy gloom of the hall. It smelled as always of tanned hides, fresh-mown hay and day-old leek-and-venison stew, mingled today with the smell of wet ash from the freshly doused hearth fire. Auriane began with a calf, pushing on the creature’s haunches to coax it outside to safety. Athelinda herded chickens with a broom, striking at them with motions that were frantic and sad, her eyes bright and intent.

Auriane looked at her. “Mother, there is something else. What is it?”

Athelinda hesitated and then said, “A message came this morning from your father. He’s gotten an order—an
order,
if you can believe it—from the Roman Governor. As if we were his subjects. Marcus Julianus, high chief over the whole world—” Athelinda was abruptly silent, as if she decided at the last moment to spare her daughter the truth.

“Mother, tell me. I am not a child.”

“Very well then. He wants you married to one of the sons of Wido.”

Auriane made the peculiar discovery that the heart could feel nausea. She gave the calf an overly rough shove that speedily propelled it into the yard.

“How dare he?”
she whispered. No enemy the forest might spew forth seemed so vile as the Romans with their dark purposes and invisible snares.

“They dare anything that suits their purpose.”

“Mother, I am far too young.”