By the Mountain Bound (20 page)

My unforgivable sin of leaving a man alive.

Strifbjorn tries to hold me. But inside me the Suneater blinks eyes like molten rock. He grins, tongue a tide of blood lolling over ragged yellow teeth. He knows where embraces lead, and laughter and promises of comradeship.

I shove Strifbjorn aside and stand, walking away, back into the woods at the end of the clearing, following all the man-trails trodden in the snow.

The whole pack. Every one of them is dead, and skinned and lying under a gathering drift of bloody snow next to my
lover, who sits in that snow with his head in his hands and cannot weep, any more than I can.

I circle the clearing. The growl low in my throat tightens against my collar. My fur should be abristle; my eyes should glare yellow in the dark. I remember the taste of hot blood and hair and meat.
I will rend them
, but it is not a thought framed in words. Rather a knifelike jag of intention.

The wind blows snow through the bare branches, covering the scents of the men, the blood of the wolves. I turn as if I could see the cloud-wrapped peak of the mountain through the storm that enfolds it, but all there is, is gray. I breathe in the silence and the cold. It has no power to comfort me.

I come back to Strifbjorn. He has not moved from the spot where he knelt down beside me. I stand beside him, behind him. His eyes are closed. I am looking at the bodies of my friends.

“Is this all of them?” he asks finally, in a small voice.

“By count,” I say, “but I cannot tell them apart.”

“We should leave,” he says, climbing to his feet as if his joints pain him. His eyes slide from the dead wolves, where I cannot stop looking at them. The red bitch, the grizzled old male, the snow-colored cub not even old enough to choose a mate. I cannot tell them apart.

“Enough,” he says, tugging my arm. “Enough. Come with me. There’s nothing you can do for them.”

I cough up a laugh and spit it into the snow. “Leave. Aye. I’m going to leave.”

“North,” he says.

“West,” I answer, and he looks at me in surprise. The wolf
inside me bares his teeth and howls a mourning promise. The Suneater blinks once. Mad wolves are silent. They are in perfect harmony, perfect accord. “I want you to help me.”

“Anything.” Big hands gentle as if reining a nervous horse, he turns me away. Blood and ice cake our boots and our leggings.

“I’m going to kill them,” I tell him, the words on my tongue like iron splinters. “And I want you to come.”

Who invokes Hel from her ice and anguish?

Ice-burned and storm-frozen

Dew-shrouded, I am aeons dead.

        
—Baldur’s Dreams

The Warrior

N
o matter how he turned Mingan’s words in his head, Strifbjorn could not make them fit sense. “You can’t mean that.”

“Can I not?” His hand jerked spastically, at the pitiful huddle of corpses already half-drifted. “You deny me requital?”

Strifbjorn couldn’t believe it was Mingan speaking. It was as if he were inhabited by something ancient and fell. As if a cold wind from the north possessed him, one colder than the one that filled Strifbjorn’s nostrils and stung his eyes.

He glanced up, seeking counsel. But the stars were hidden behind the storm.

“No . . . I . . .”

Who could stand and regard a man surrounded by the bodies of his innocent family and deny his right to redress murder? And yet—

Strifbjorn cleared his throat and tried again. “Brother, your wrath is justified—”

Mingan cut him short with a chopping hand and spoke
softly. “It is not wrath. There is nothing righteous in it. I was more contemplating sack and slaughter.”

“Who do you mean to kill?” Vengeance was what they were for. If he claimed justice, Strifbjorn should not stop him. If Strifbjorn could limit him to just vengeance . . .

Mingan grinned at him, more wolf than Strifbjorn had ever seen him, snow riming his hair, his deep-set eyes ablaze in a face cold as stone. “I was thinking of starting with Dale.”

Strifbjorn felt his face go as cold as the Wolf’s. His musk clogged Strifbjorn’s nostrils, already thick with the nauseating scent of blood and bodies. “You can’t.”

“I understand you will not aid me.” Mingan brushed past Strifbjorn and started down the mountain. Snow crunched under his boots. The wind sang through the trees, blowing the flakes of snow horizontal.

“Mingan. It’s
wrong
.”

He neither stopped nor answered.

Strifbjorn tried again. “If you do this thing, you are no better than Sigrdrifa.”

Mingan turned on him, snarling, and took the seven steps back. His fingers knotted in the fur of Strifbjorn’s cloak. In his hand, the clasp snapped. He cast it aside. Strifbjorn caught his wrist, braced his back foot and slung him into a snowdrift. Mingan went down on one knee, rose again, turned—and Strifbjorn stepped in front of him. “No.”

His hands curled in claws, his eyes gone dark and bottomless. Strifbjorn raised his fists and Mingan sprang, not battle-mad but as if to lunge past.

Strifbjorn stepped in front of him again.

He did not stop. Strifbjorn scrabbled, grabbed hold of his
shoulder. Strifbjorn knew Mingan’s strength of old, but his heart still shuddered in his chest when the wolf clutched his collar and, one-handed, casually lifted him off his feet. Mingan brought his face close to Strifbjorn’s, and Strifbjorn thought for a moment that Mingan might break his neck.

It would do no good to strike him now. Strifbjorn hung limp in his hands as a puppy shaken by the scruff.

“Mingan. If you . . .”

He knew, already. Strifbjorn couldn’t threaten him. He had nothing to bargain, because Mingan had already decided. He was taking nothing with him where he was going. No pack. No soul. And nobody’s love to clothe him.

For a moment, though, he stared at Strifbjorn clear-eyed, and Strifbjorn hoped. And a moment later Mingan laughed and threw him across the clearing. He hit hard, bounced and rolled into the snow, sliding until he struck the bole of an oak.

“I have not so quickly forgotten my vow to harm thee not,” he said, more to the mountain than to Strifbjorn. He spun in place and trotted into the snow.

By the time Strifbjorn found his feet, Mingan was gone into the shadows, beyond any pursuit that might have reached him in time.

S
trifbjorn had no way to burn or bury the wolves. The ground was hard as steel under the drifts, and they were wolves, anyway: the best he could do was drag the freezing bodies apart, into the woods, and bury them in the drifts. They were already stiff with the cold, blood freezing in sticky crystals that melted into a clotting mess, caking his hands and arms.

Scavengers would have to see to their mortal remains.

Afterwards, Strifbjorn scrubbed snow on his clothes to try to get the blood out of the white fabric, but he was stained. He picked up his cloak and beat the ice from it as best he could.

Then he sat down on the curving root of the beech tree where Mingan had combed out his hair, and leaned his head back against the smooth, silver bark to wait for his lover’s return.

I
n the morning, or perhaps the morning of the day after that, Strifbjorn stood and shook the snow out of his hair.

He wrapped his fur cloak tight around his shoulders and started walking north. Herfjotur and her steed could find him if they needed.

And if they couldn’t, he was sure he didn’t care.

The Wolf

I
run through dead shadows, fleeing the ghosts that pursue. Four-legged ghosts lolling tongues and forgiving yellow eyes. I do not deserve their forgiveness.

I choose blood.

I wait for dawn. When the sun casts rose highlights on the snow, I stand at the slope leading from the edge of the forest into Dale. The village lies nestled like an egg in wool in the deep-drifted valley. Snow falls still, so I see the cottages in glimpses when the snow is blown aside. It’s up to my knees now, warming
the winter earth. The clouds pale to silver. The shadow of the mountain falls upon them from above.

The village slumbers still. In the snow, they will sleep late, save their fuel, until the animals rouse them.

I put my back to the mountain and the wind. My cloak billows forward, fouling my arms. I would hang it from a branch, but I won’t need my sword.

“Imogen.”

Through the snow she comes. Flakes curl from the draft of velvet-black feathertips, until she settles beside me and casts a wing across my shoulders.

“My Lord. Your pain is very great.”

“I feel no pain.”

“Lord?”

I do not look at her. My eyes are fixed on the shadowed village before us. “Nothing hurts me, Imogen. Do you hunger?”

“Aye, my Lord.”

“I am not your Lord, sister. I am your brother.” My left hand lifts. One gloved finger points to the village, its dark cottages, its single street. “There is your meal. As many as you like. But leave this house and that one alone.”

“Lo—brother?”

“Those are mine.”

She stares at me with her great gold eyes, and I signal her forward. Her wings leave feather-tracks in the snow as she leaps into the air. A moment, three wingbeats, and she is gone beyond the snow as I walk toward my first claim. Hagrim. The Baker.

I don’t expect to hear screaming. My sister is always hungry.

Two wolf-pelts are tacked to the side of the house, spread wide so they will freeze flat until summer. One is gray as soot, tipped with silver and copper highlights like sunlight on storm-clouds. The other is soft, thick, almost as white as the snowflakes adhering to the guard hairs.

I don’t bother stepping through shadows to enter the house. It’s simpler to tear the wide plank door off its leathern hinges. The baker leaps from the bed beside the well-banked fire, a wood-axe upraised in his hands. I throw the door into the snow. Dim morning lightens the room. Two children scream in the loft. There is no sign of a woman.

The baker swings at my head. I parry the haft with my forearm. It shatters against the bone, and the bone snaps, too, but I—
I feel no pain
—take him by the throat. The children’s whimpering reminds me of the whimpering of wolf-cubs. I raise their father into the air, my fingers as tight on his throat as the collar that cuts mine.

He gurgles. I smile. I could speak, but there is nothing I wish to explain to this murderer, this mortal, this candle-flicker. I drag his mouth to mine, flooded with self-contempt.
How, that this squalling thing could have been permitted to wound me?
He screams, shoving, biting, pounding my face with balled fists . . . and then, as I drag the soul from him with his protesting breath, his fingers uncurl and he begins to pull me close, whimpering like a lover, pressing his cold, meaty face to mine.

Strength pours into me like liquor, like sunlight, like honey swirled in tea. He grips my hair, my collar, his scent and his touch offensive, and from the flavor of his exhalation I know I have taken enough, and he is dying and I must stop before I take the last of his breath and with it the geas of vengeance.

I drop him to the rammed-earth floor. He falls clutching my boot, begging for the kiss. My gorge rises. I kick him away.

The children in the loft cry like puppies.

Like the puppies I left on the mountain, they do not cry for long.

T
he Imogen is finished with her morning’s work by the time I am done. The snow is sprayed with blood, scattered with sucked-clean bones. Each cottage stands silent and empty.

I walk past their gaping doors and silent windows until I come to the house of the woodcutter.

Rannveig and her father huddle in the snow beside their doorway. The Imogen stands over them, wings spread wide. She smiles as I approach, glittering a mouthful of needles. Not a spot of blood marks her; not a feather has fallen out of place.

“You have done well.” She leans into the caress as my fingers trace the seashell outline of her ear. “Pretty Imogen.”

She purrs like a cat at the praise.

The woodcutter stands. He puts his daughter behind him. “Devil!” he cries. “I told her you were a devil.”

There is no satisfaction to be had in making answer. I kill him before Rannveig’s eyes.

I expect her to bolt during that kiss, but she stands straight against the bark-shingled wall and lifts her chin to look me in the eye when I drop her father at my feet. She’s in her nightdress, barefoot in the snow. “Your wolves,” she whispers.