By the Mountain Bound (19 page)

Now am I also complicit in his slavery.

“Swear it.” My tone, startling me, is soft and precise. “Swear that you were ignorant.”

“I swear,” she says, her eyes steady on mine. “I care not whom you love, Mingan, or who loves you. If you choose to return and live under my rule, both Strifbjorn and yourself are welcome.”

“And if we do not?”

Her eyes seem to rime with ice about the edges. “Then do not oppose me. I’d rather see you live.” Her fingers fumble at her collar, and she slips the cloak from her shoulders. Its heavy folds drape her fist. “Here,” she says. “I kept this for you. Thank you.”

I take it. Her fingertips brush my glove. I know she sees me shiver, but she turns and mounts her horse. One hand raised in farewell, she reins the mare around and rides away.

In me, two wolves howl. One is sane and sorrowing, and the other is as mad and old and merciless as the sea.

The Historian

S
igrdrifa was still picking herself up from among the pine needles when I kicked her in the face. She sprawled backwards,
both hands raised in defense; I reached over my shoulder and slid Nathr into my hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Yrenbend come up behind me, his hand also on the hilt of his sword. I glanced over at Heythe, and the Lady took a step back and turned away, pointedly looking at the door she edged toward.

Sigrdrifa was on her own. As she tried to get up, Yrenbend put his boot on her chest and pushed down hard. Menglad and Herfjotur came up on either side of me.

Around us, those of our brethren who were somehow still seated rose. Bergdis stepped forward as if to intervene, and Yrenbend just raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m probably not going to kill her,” he said mildly. “As long as she’s helpful.”

Fury rose cold up my throat. My fist clenched on Nathr’s hilt.
I
might kill her anyway.

Bergdis dropped her gaze and stepped back. “Watch your step, Yrenbend,” she said as she turned away.

He glanced down at his boot on Sigrdrifa’s chest and smiled. “I’m watching it now,” he muttered. Herfjotur, turning to survey the room, barked a laugh.

Sigrdrifa didn’t struggle, but her eyes turned to the side, to Skeold and the rest of her faction. Skeold and three einherjar began to walk forward.

Herfjotur raised her hand, and an unexpected gust of wind disordered my hair. Her steed towered above and behind us, his shoulder higher than my head. He spread wings that brushed the ceiling of the mead-hall and tossed his alabaster manes. I cringed away, accidentally crowding Yrenbend, but my weight was not enough to shift him when he was braced.

Menglad grabbed my belt and steadied me, staying clear of
my sword arm. I could not have been more grateful for that quick solid touch.

Herfjotur’s face was stern, her one raised hand seeming to be the only thing that held back her steed, or—conversely—the brethren gathered behind Skeold.

The Light was dead and dull and silent in the back of my head, and I could not hear the music at all.

I remember thinking, calm and quiet,
Oh. So this is how it ends.

“So,” Yrenbend said, slowly, “where exactly did you get that piece of information, Sigrdrifa?”

She spat at him, her eyes blazing like lanterns. They were cold infernos, brighter and harsher than they should have been, a savage light that cast stark shadows across Yrenbend’s features and picked out the red in the gold of his queue.

He leaned forward, putting weight on his foot. She gasped. “I said I wouldn’t
kill
you,” he pointed out, politely.

“Probably,” I added. “So tell us, please?”

Her eyes swept aside, in the direction that Heythe had gone, but the Lady had already effected her departure.

Sigrdrifa paled. She looked back to Yrenbend. “I followed them,” she said, her voice breaking around it, the Light in her eyes flickering to darkness. “I spied on them.”

She was lying. I could not take a breath around the implication of that, and so I denied it: She was a child of the Light. She could not be lying.

“Why?”

“The Wolf . . . threatened my life.”

Most of our brethren seemed to be leaving the hall, or going about their business. Ten or fifteen still stood in a loose
semicircle, observing, not interfering—whether in caution of the steed bowering us with his massive wings or out of approval for our actions I did not know.

I kicked her in the side, below her ribs. Yrenbend glanced at me, pursing his lips, but said nothing. “And Strifbjorn refused you.”

“Like he refused you, runt?”

I almost kicked her again, but it would have given her too much satisfaction. “Exactly like that.” I smirked. “Except I didn’t stick a knife in his back.”

She made a rude gesture, as well as she could with her elbows braced on the floor. Yrenbend shot a glance at Menglad. “Are we done?”

“I think so,” she replied, and Yrenbend took his boot off Sigrdrifa’s chest. He’d left a muddy footprint on the immaculate white of her surcote.

I smiled.

Herfjotur put a hand on her steed’s right-side neck, holding his mane, and led him from the hall. The rest of us followed her, Yrenbend directing a glare at Sigrdrifa that kept her on her elbows until we were outside.

“I’m going to look for Strifbjorn and the Wolf,” Herfjotur said, and started across the meadow toward the trailhead. Her steed whinnied after her. Whatever she answered was unspoken. He watched her go for a moment, both heads raised and turned, and then seemed to shrug and shake himself. Hoof-beats drummed hollowly, echoing against the mountain, as he trotted to the sea-cliff and fell into flight, untroubled by the wind and the blowing snow.

More snow was falling, so Menglad, Yrenbend and I
walked around behind the mead-hall and stood in the lee, among the huts and lean-tos where the thralls kept house.

When the howl of the wind grew quieter I leaned on the mud-chinked wall and kicked a heel against it. Yrenbend leaned beside me, his arm pressing my shoulder comfortingly, and Menglad stood across from us. Eddies furled her cloak around her like the wings of some strange raven.

We stood and stared, one to the other, for a few minutes before she sighed and folded her arms across her bosom. “What now?” she said, eventually.

I shook my head. “You don’t think she’ll . . . force us to . . . rape souls, do you?”

Yrenbend said, “Did you want an honest answer to that?”

“Yes.” Menglad drew her knife and began cleaning her fingernails, plainly for something to do with her hands.

The set of Yrenbend’s shoulders was as defeated as the tuck of his chin. “I don’t see how she can
force
us. But there are only two choices now. And I don’t believe what Sigrdrifa had to say for herself.”

“I don’t see how that follows,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’m sure she did eavesdrop. I’m equally sure that Heythe put her up to it.”

“So how did Heythe know? I—” Too much, and I bit it off midsentence.

Yrenbend was too clever to let it pass. “You?”

“I knew. They were . . . very discreet, Yrenbend.”

“But you found out?”

“I was . . . looking for privacy. And stumbled over something I shouldn’t have. But most of us don’t walk up the mountain unless we’re looking for the Grey Wolf.”

“Ah.” He seemed to think about that for a long moment.

Menglad finished with her fingernails and wiped her knife on her trousers before slipping it back into the sheath.

“So how would Heythe have known. For certain?” Yrenbend came up hard as if someone had snapped his reins. “Sigrdrifa lied.”

My lips shaped words twice before I managed to give them voice. “Lied? How do you know?”
I thought so, too. How could she have lied?

“She’s no huntress. A warrior, yes—but Mingan would have smelled her coming.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Mingan didn’t smell me.”

“Muire—you may not appreciate it, but your woodcraft is probably surpassed only by his. What you just said—most of us don’t walk up the mountain, but you do, and Mingan does, and Strifbjorn does. Sigrdrifa . . . doesn’t step out of the mead-hall if she can help it.” He chuckled. “Some of us notice your skills.”

“Oh.” I dropped my foot and scuffed the boot through crisp snow, which was accumulating faster now. “So how did Heythe find out to tell her?”

Yrenbend was thinking hard. I recognized the expression, the tension in the line of his jaw, the half-folded hand upraised for temporary silence.

“Strifbjorn,” he murmured.

Menglad’s brow furrowed even as mine smoothed. “He breathed for her,” I said.

Yrenbend nodded. “Yes.” And turning with a sudden, liquid motion drove his fist wrist-deep into the bark-shingled log wall of the mead-hall.

The Wolf

S
trifbjorn is in brighter spirits when I find him. He has dusted the snow from a boulder and sits there, his bearskin spread across the rock as a pad. Footprints neither mine nor his mark rutted snow. A trace of scent still lingers. “Herfjotur.”

“Pledges her support, and as many of the others as she can bring.” He stands and comes to me, rests a hand on my shoulder. “You got your cloak back.”

“I spoke with Heythe.” The wolf in me leans into the touch of his hand—pack-touch, leader-touch. The reawakened Suneater growls low in my throat, untrusting of the kindness that leads to chains. I close my eyes and take the scent of my lover deep, step into his clasp. The barbs in what Heythe said about serving my master only prickle the Suneater, and the insolent pride of a man.

The wolf is more sensible. First and always, the pack.

Strifbjorn smooths an escaped strand behind my ear. “What ultimatums did she have to offer?”

I shrug, my cloak swinging from the movement, brushing my calves. I step away so I may look him in the eye. His hand stays on my shoulder. “She offers a place by her side to both of us. She claims she knew nothing; she wants us to return. . . .”

“And follow her leadership? You told her nay.”

I place my right hand over his own, let him see me smile. It’s cold and dark inside me, despite the furnace of a swallowed sun. “Are we going to war?”

He swallows, and then he nods. “We’ll die doing it, Mingan. There aren’t enough who will rebel.”

He will not like what I have to offer; I offer anyway. “We have the Imogen.”

That freezes him as the snow never could. “Against our brethren?”

“Against Heythe.”

“Oh, no.”

“Think on it. It may be the only chance.” My poor sister. Hunger her plate, and famine her knife and a cold grave to sleep in. But a goddess to dine upon. That might fill even the Imogen’s belly.

The justice of it would suit me.

He looks away. His hand slides down my arm. I let him go. “We could leave,” he says. “We could go south.”

“And what? A cottage by the sea, fish and forage and braid hemp rope?”

“Why not?” He snaps. I stare. He says it again, softer. Coaxing. “Why not?”

He knows why not. And when I meet his eyes, he gnaws his own mouth and looks down.

“Come,” I say, and start up the trail toward the denning-tree.

The wolves should have gone down the mountain when the snow came. They cannot run over it like the great cats do, or men on snowshoes, and the game flee to the valleys in winter, too. I expect the denning-tree to be lonely and chill; I think we will make a nest among the roots and wait out the night.

If I were still a wolf, I would know sooner. If I were still a wolf in truth . . .

My father had five sons and a daughter. Four of us were bastards and monsters, the Grey Wolf and the Wyrm and the
centipede stallion, and the half-dead girl whose hunger could never be fed. But two were well-made, born in wedlock, pleasing the eye.

Our father adored them.

And of those two, the all-Father transfigured one into a wolf, and fed him on the flesh of the other and then bound my sire beneath a mountain with the guts of his own dead son.

So there is justice in that, glutted on the body and bones of the all-Father—who was no father to me or mine—I should awaken reborn as a man.

. . . yes. We
can
bite down on a grudge and grin around it until the end of time.

I remember the taste of that grudge, the crunch of those bones, the shock of my transformation as we crest the trail. The cold scent of blood raises the fine hairs that would be hackles, had I not been forged into this man-shape.

Other scents layer under the blood, man and wolf and piss and spilled bowels, and risen hackles become a snarl and the wild unchanneled flare of starlight. The Suneater snarls in me, feral but cunning. I sprint through snowdrifts, off the trail, into the cedars and then still, still as a feather hung on an up-draft. Strifbjorn, startled, must follow—I hear him wallowing through the snow, tangled on a dog rose that is naught but a briar in wintertime.

No wolf, Strifbjorn.

Nothing but an angel, he.

I pause in the shadows and the falling snow, and all I can smell is blood.

The Suneater moves through the falling snow like a part of the storm. He seeks his enemy on hushed steps, a wraith with a
silver stare. But the enemy is gone, and I step from among the cedars and through the thin stand of white birch and into a clearing awash with blood, blood and trampled snow, the clean new fall drifting across like a sheet dragged over the dead.

I cannot tell them apart.

Boar-spears and arrows, and some of the blood is men’s blood, but not enough, not enough at all.

It will never be enough blood to sate me.

Strifbjorn finds me. It must only be moments later. He finds me kneeling by the bodies, piled like so much meat under the naked boughs of the copper beech, and I cannot tell them apart.

He comes and pushes my face into the fur covering his shoulder, turns me away from the bodies of my not-brothers, the bodies of my friends, stripped of their deep plush coats, their scents and their individuality. Stripped of their lives and their laughter.

Punished, I know—because I know the men whose scents pollute the clearing—punished for my sin.