By the Mountain Bound (12 page)

The collar chokes me still. My voice rasps. “You . . . would vow to make the attempt?”

“I never . . . the Aesir bound us all, one way or another. Whatever you did, in the end—it was not unprovoked.” She touches my sleeve. I tremble. “You deserved better, and your sister and your brother, too, than to be cursed for a prophecy and an unfortunate paternity.”

“I do not recall, Lady,” I say—although her words stir answers in me, to questions long-fallow and sharp as shards of ice. “What is it that you would have me explain to him?”

She sighs, as she is sighing much. “I don’t propose to treat humans as cattle. But we take thralls in tribute; we kill in battle; we kill in defense of the innocent and our own lives. How is it different to take our enemies’ mortal strength before they die?”

“It is wickedness.”

“Why is it so?”

“Because . . .”
we know it to be. Because we know what the kiss is for, and that, it is not.

But. Kissing Strifbjorn was wickedness, too.

Heythe watches me before she smiles. “It seems poetic that the strength of our enemies should be made to serve us.”

She reaches again, strokes a finger down my cheek. I know her disquiet, pride, resolve . . . and another thing. A thing I’ve only felt under Strifbjorn’s hands.

Desire.

I know her surprise only when I feel it in her, for her face gives no sign. She adapts quickly, her voice under my skin.
Is that so surprising, that you should be desirable?

Yes. My hand, innocent of its glove, catches hers. I move her fingertip from my face, but still we are skin to skin.

Still, she speaks aloud now.

“I think”—softly—“that I would like to kiss you again, Master Wolf. When you are not trying to batter me into unconsciousness.”

She shakes free as I stand, silent, watching her sky-blue eyes. She smiles and drops her gaze, as if suddenly shy. “But,
I think, after you have made your decision. One way or the other. If you want.”

Not choking, this time, but my tongue won’t shape words. She steps back, tosses her braid from side to side like a very young girl. After a stretched moment, she says, “Consider my offer.”

And with that she brushes past me and continues down the trail back toward the hall.

I watch her retreat, turning my neck but not my shoulders, and when she has vanished behind trees I climb on. The distant scent of angry men colors a bitter wind, but they are not near and there is no blood-scent. I could attend them, but instead seek my pack.

Their scent leads me off the trail. I pick across a grove of young ash trees that have claimed a decade-old burn scar on the eastern side of the mountain, making my way toward the sea.

I do not smell him. But among the ashes, I see him.

Pale as a streak of winter sun slanting between branches, he stands fetlock-deep in winter-crisped ferns. His head is turned, to track my approach, the dully gleaming fluted spiral of his horn like carved and polished seashell. I freeze and he snorts, steam jetting from dark red nostrils in a muzzle white as the sand on the shore.

We stare. His eyes are enormous and dark, glitters of light in them like sparkles on a nighttime sea. Hardly daring breathe, I crouch among fallen leaves. Making myself small.

He is there like the sea is there.

Startle not. Startle not, my beauty.

He steps forward, tossing his forelock about the root of his horn, and his beauty does not strangle me. Muscle catches light
along the curve of his neck, under the shining scarred hide of his shoulder. Oh, his scars. His many scars.

Healed pale marks among the ivory coat hearten me. They recall bites and kicks from equine teeth, cloven hooves. An old, canny stallion, and in his life there have been enough of his kind in the world to give him a fight for the mares.

I thought they were a myth from across the sea, but here he lingers in the failing sunlight, shaggy with winter’s approach, mincing through sere undergrowth to examine me more closely. Not so cautious as a horse or a deer, and far more silent; before long the steaming breath fogs my face.

He breathes across me, and it smells of hay and moss and the lichens he’s been gnawing from the tree bark. And then there is his scent. I know not how I missed it, for he stinks, rank musk like a civet. A warning; this is no meek grazer, but a beast wily and wicked-horned. Thistles and a brown maple leaf are matted into his beard. He bows over me as I crouch lower. Small. Small. Light glints on the impossibly fine point of his horn. He sights along it like an archer along an arrow, trains it on my eye.

“Silken-swift.” The stink of him is like both goat and lion. “You grace me.”

He shakes his head. The horn swerves from its killing angle, returns.

I might fence with him: Svanvitr’s edge might be one of the few things in the world that could withstand the unworn spiral blade. It is sharp as if stropped, and there is no sign it has ever been damaged, though the scars are so thick along the crest of his neck—where another stallion might clench his teeth—that they show the pink of skin.

“I stalk thee not.” Those old wounds try my heart, and before I think of the risk of doing offense I address him as a brother. “Neither will I hunt thee. Walk from here safe, under my ward though I be unworthy.”

Mist wreathes his muzzle again. He steps forward, and now the horn is so near I cannot see the tip. There will be pain, a moment of pain. And then nothing, when the horn passes through my eye and enters my brain.

But he tilts his face aside so the horn only draws a line of blood like razor-kiss along my temple. His face presses mine, brow to brow, white-gold tangles falling into my eyes.

Blood trickles down, staining his creamy muzzle.

Unworthy? I think not, Wolfling. Pure as the will of the pack, thou art.

Thou dost speak?

Ah yes. He lets me appreciate the stupidity of my question for a moment. I wince, but have to argue.

Neither in body nor in soul am I pure.

And I feel him laugh.
Pure in love, pure in intention, pure of heart. The other is no matter. Like thee and me, ’tis but a metaphor given flesh. Guard thyself. Thou shalt be tempted, and thou wilt be made to choose. Thy path is not clear before thee.

His muzzle is soft, the hide and hair on his temple coarser, oily. Greatly daring, I place my palm against his cheek.
Choose?
I ask.
We’re not for choosing, einherjar. We’re for doing the will of the Light.

Aye.
He blows out another sweet breath.
All things change, and always. Wolfling, speak to thy brother. Wolfling, look to thy pack.

He dances back a step, shakes out his tangled mane, wild as a bull elk again.
Forever, and forever, and forever
, he says,
though now I touch him not. Whirling on his hind legs, he is gone among the ashes as if he never was.

The Warrior

T
he long trestles could be taken up in sections when not in use, and stacked against the side walls of the mead-hall near the bottom end, where the niches stopped. The benches the brethren left intact, though the thralls moved them back from the center of the mead-hall, against the row of rough-hewn, smoke-darkened interior pillars that helped support the span of our post-and-beam roof.

Now Strifbjorn stood beside the eastern one, leaning back, shaking his head. Yrenbend sat before him, elbows on his knees. Herfjotur lounged next. She had kicked one foot up on the bench and was cleaning her fingernails with a knife, flicking each nail paring into the rushes.

“My steed has no counsel yet,” she admitted. “But you may rely on our support.”

Strifbjorn liked Herfjotur. She was solid, sensible and ferocious. And he liked her valraven as well: a steady sort, and more interested in einherjar doings beyond his relationship with his rider than other steeds. Strifbjorn should not need the reassurance of their approval. But it did him no harm.

“Thank you, Bright one,” he said, without irony.

Yrenbend sat staring, lost in thought. Strifbjorn could not tell if he heard. But Herfjotur looked up from her toilet, giving Strifbjorn a pale, thoughtful stare.

“We know you, war-leader.” A dismissive flick of her knife.
“The Lady . . . There is service and there is service, and though the Light is silent, you have served the Bearer of Burdens as long as we have known you.”

Not in all things as he should, but Strifbjorn could not say so. He shrugged, accepting the compliment with the best grace he could manage.

Yrenbend turned and stared at her, frowning. Perhaps he was listening after all. “And there’s an interesting question.” A narrow line between his eyes deepened as he spoke. “Why is there no guidance? Why should the Light be silent on such matters?”

There was an air of the rhetorical in his question, as there often was. Yrenbend was quick of wit: Strifbjorn sometimes thought everyone bored him, except for Muire and Brynhilde. But Strifbjorn waited him out, and at last he relented, smiling tensely.

“Intervention,” he offered, a word dropped like a weight.

Herfjotur set down the foot she had kicked up, scuffing the rushes about restlessly. She slipped her knife into its sheath and sat straight and silent for some time before she answered. “You mean to say the Dweller Within cannot speak to us because it is . . . opposed by something?”

The Wyrm acted through the brethren. They were its extended hand, fisted or open. But there were rules to bind it as well, and one was that it could not intervene directly unless it were paid for with a willing life, or it relinquished its immunity, sacrificed its immortality and took itself from the realm of myth. By placing itself on a mortal level, it would become subject to mortal laws.

It could then be made to bleed, or die.

Yrenbend was going where Strifbjorn had suspected. “If
the Bearer of Burdens intervenes, it could meet retaliation. From Heythe’s giants . . .”

He need not finish. They’d seen not a sign of giants. But the Raven Banner did not lie.

“Unsettling.” Strifbjorn chewed the edge of his thumbnail. The unfinished pillar caught at the fur of his cloak, tugging at his throat as he stepped away. Of course he thought of Mingan.

He’d walked three steps before he caught himself and turned back. Herfjotur still watched. Yrenbend glanced at the door, but no one entered. He looked back at Strifbjorn and made an encouraging gesture.

“Because it hints that what we’ll fight—Heythe, her ominous giants or another problem—is enough of a threat that the Bearer fears to expose itself.”

“What does that mean?” Herfjotur asked.

Yrenbend answered before Strifbjorn could. “It means we’re expendable.”

Herfjotur laughed. She stood and patted Yrenbend on the shoulder. Strifbjorn watched the muscles flex in her forearm. “We always were,” she said. She pointed at the wall. “Besides, the Raven portends victory.”

M
ingan returned after full dark, wolf fur streaking his sleeves and cloak. He strolled casually across the hall and ended, seemingly at random, beside Strifbjorn. Strifbjorn stood near the unkindled fire trench, staring up at the torn and blood-spotted banners nailed to the beams overhead.

“Catinhame Ford,” he said, following the war-leader’s gaze to a green flag blazed with some foreign heraldic beast in white. “I remember.”

They’d met a human host at Catinhame—dark islanders with names such as Tadg and Connla, a beautiful folk with purple-black skin, wielding greatswords and fierce in their kilted plaids. The broad, rocky ford had run red with blood; they fought well. The children had returned four swords to the sea at the end of it, one of which was the blade of Herfjotur’s husband. But after three days of battle the invaders had been turned back. Brynhilde and Sigrdrifa guarded the surrendered survivors home, and sang a blight out of the corn.

It was easier than it could have been; they had been driven by hunger to conquer. The children had fought other battles less tidy.

As if distressed by Strifbjorn’s silence, Mingan said, “That
will
be remembered.”

“Not if we fail,” Strifbjorn said. Strifbjorn caught Mingan’s considering glance on the edge of his vision. Mingan knew what Strifbjorn was thinking.

“Love,” he said, so softly his lips barely moved, “Heythe came to me in the wood today.”

The piece of him Strifbjorn wore inside became a needle, stitched through his soul and tugged a thread hurtfully tight. Strifbjorn knew—how couldn’t he?—that he would never be enough for him. All Mingan’s longings and his sorrows were there under Strifbjorn’s heart, only waiting to be taken out and examined in the light.

“And?”

He thought his voice stayed level, but Mingan’s nostrils flared. He scented Strifbjorn’s distress. His head swayed from side to side—not quite a negation, more a gesture of thought.

“She requested a mediation between you and her.” With a gloved thumb, he worried absently at the side of his neck above the shirt collar.

“And what sort of bribe did she offer you?”

He turned to face Strifbjorn. Strifbjorn didn’t look at him directly, but he saw the hurt expression in his Light-filled eyes. “I am not to plead her case with you, Strifbjorn. She requests only that I . . . help seek an understanding.”

“I see.” Strifbjorn did understand, when he could sense past the uncomfortable tightness of jealousy in his throat. “Giants. Do you believe her?”

Whatever Mingan had been about to say, the question arrested him. There was no fire laid in the trench; the hall was cool. The low sounds of conversation, a hammering from the smithy, the thralls singing in the kitchen as they prepared a meal filled his silence. His voice held wonder and worry when he spoke at last. “You propose that she is capable of
lying
?”

Strifbjorn hadn’t thought of it that way. But it was, wasn’t it? What he was suggesting. Einherjar, waelcyrge, did not lie. Could not lie, not and remain in the Light.

“Well,” he answered, “I’m not assuming a damned thing yet, and that’s—so far—my only decision.”