By the Mountain Bound (23 page)

“Aye. And how may I serve you, then?”

“Oh, you may begin by unlacing this surcote. I find I can hardly breathe in the damned thing.”

She turns her back. My fingers tremble on the laces, but I
manage the knots at last and the gown falls at her feet in a stiff rush of linen and golden thread. She stoops in her kirtle to pick it up, her shoulders and buttocks straining the fabric. I glance away as she stands and hangs the gown in the cabinet against the wall. She does not turn to me until she has stepped out of her boots and slithered the kirtle over her head.

She wears no shift, and her intent gleams in her eyes as she comes to me. “I have wanted this since first you laid hands on me, Mingan.”

I think she will kiss me, but she lifts my hair aside and talks on, her voice low and soft as she unwinds the black sash. I cannot exhale.

“Let me see you without pretenses.” The length of cloth unfastened, she draws it slowly into one hand. Her hand falls back to her side as she judges the shiver that runs through me.

So close the air moving between us strokes my skin like feathers, and yet she does not touch me, quite. She looks at me with expectation in her eyes. I brush fingers along the wires and jewels of her necklace, hunting the clasp by feel under the fall of unpinned hair. She stops me with a touch on my wrist.

“No, Wolf. So long as you wear your collar, I shall wear mine in sympathy.”

She smiles, and steps into my arms, her skin cool as linen sheets, her mouth wet and chill as it runs through the unshaven prickles along my jaw, down my throat past the collar to my chest and lower still.

I
n the morning, I plait my own hair.

The Historian

O
nce her fever broke, Rannveig recovered rapidly. Two days later, after I assured myself there were no other survivors—human or animal—in Dale, I turned my attention to the task of getting her safely to Northerholm with her dowry. She wouldn’t last a winter alone in the village, and I couldn’t take her back to the hall.

It took most of a day. I made my way to the fishing town, and paid for a sledge to be sent for her and her livestock and goods, for her lodging through the winter and feed for her beasts.

Then I returned to tell her that she wouldn’t be ruined, at least—she had property of her own, if she ever chose to return to Dale, and the beasts would dower her in Northerholm or fetch enough in the spring markets to see her south to a city. I gave her such coin as I carried, and she took as well what her father had in store.

She moved through it all with a dreamlike absence, a sorrow so deep on her that even if I touched her skin I could not touch her heart. Music could bring neither smiles nor tears to her face, and when the men with the sledge came for her and set her there beside her sheep, her goat, her dog and her bedstead and tied the cow behind, she only turned to me and raised a hand in thanks. The short day of winter was ending behind her.

It was all she could muster. It was enough.

My thoughts lay dark and still. Mingan should have killed her. It would have been a kindness.

But she had had the strength to drag herself into the cottage,
bar the door and rekindle the fire. She had the strength to drag herself from blood and death and the worst the Grey Wolf could devise, and for that she deserved a chance.

She could still become a seeress. A sorceress, a witch.

I did not think she would marry.

I leaned against the cottage wall, binding on my skis. My poles were where I left them. I started home, skiing in darkness, more than six days after I left.

The hall was alight when I skied into the bottom of the meadow, the night clear and the stars blazing overhead like jeweled earrings thrust through a cloth for display. Moonlight gleamed on untrammeled snow. Closer to the hall, black shadows fell in the ruts. I stopped for a moment to take it in, the wind bringing me the distant noise of my brethren.

Despite Heythe, despite Sigrdrifa, despite the destruction wrought on Dale—I felt in that moment a part of something bigger than myself. A brotherhood, a great and knowing thing that somehow I still believed would prevail. Love and pity and hope buoyed my mood.

I dug my poles into the snow and ice and glided down the hill toward home.

I
slipped in through the postern door, my skis and poles tucked under my arm. I meant to stow them and join the festivities once I had washed and changed, but rather stopped in the shadows just inside the door.

Heythe sat on her gilded seat before the Raven Banner, a gleaming white mantle cast over her sea-green gown.
She must have amassed quite a trousseau.

It amused me, in the moment before I registered the dark-clad shadow who lounged beside her, one arm draped over the back of her chair. She turned to him, her hand possessively on his waist above the sword-belt. He bent to her in the fire-dancing darkness and she spoke into his ear while my gorge rose up my throat. The line her fingertips traced down his hip spoke more than every book rolled up and stored in my niche.

Oh, Strifbjorn. Betrayed and betrayed. And no hope that the Lady would punish Mingan for his crimes. I closed my eyes. And—feeling another’s gaze upon me—opened them again. The Grey Wolf was staring.

Whether he noticed me returning the gaze, his eyes flickered quickly away. His attention might have been drawn by something as simple as my movement in the darkness, and he might have seen and dismissed me as the least of his brethren.

What shocked me into stillness was his expression. I had expected . . . sorrow, or grief or perhaps dark triumph. But his face was slack and still, almost in repose. A death mask, and his smile held a distant, lordly amusement: the predator’s appraisal of the prey. His eyes burned in exhaustion hollows. The light in them had not dimmed, but it was a new, harsh light, such as might sear flesh from bone.

My hands prickled numb with fear. But under it I found a slow, shadowy thing. Disdain.

For Sigrdrifa. For the Grey Wolf. And for the Lady I had once anticipated serving, a fortnight and a lifetime ago.

Heythe touched Mingan’s arm again. He swayed to her, and she spoke against his ear. He smiled, a cold smile with no juice in it. And then stepped down from the dais, obedient to whatever instruction his mistress had given.

I watched his gray-cloaked shoulders moving through the press of bodies, and then I went in search of Yrenbend.

The Wolf

T
he storm heralds a break in the weather, holding five days cold and clear, and with it the frost of winter ices me also. I stand behind Heythe’s chair in darkness like a hand on my soul, or I move through the shadows of the mead-hall like the ghost I am becoming. My brethren’s eyes skip off mine. When I pass their talk falters. They eye me with dread and disgust. The Suneater returns the stares with mockery. There is no pain in the rejection. The pain is far away. When I step into the shadows and watch them from that cold and distant road, I hear my name whispered in corners, speculation and—once little Muire returns from her errand, her errantry—some hint of truth.

So I learn that the woodcutter’s daughter lived.

Even my new allies, Heythe’s most loyal—Skeold, Sigrdrifa—show me fear after that. I overhear Herfjotur in fevered conversation with Bergdis, in sunlight under a snow-drenched spruce, and learn that Strifbjorn has vanished into exile.

Heythe brings me to her bench in the evenings or the afternoons. She teaches a commerce lingering and artful, that carries no memory of a more furtive, passionate lovemaking.

Nothing hurts me, and though her hands wander cool across my skin, nothing touches me. When she is done and while she sleeps I watch her, the Suneater plotting, or I wander the shadowed path. Nothing tires me at first, while the liquor of the souls
I have drunk is heady in me. I have not been so strong and wild since before the collar was wound about my throat, in another world, on the other side of a star-strewn void.

It is all an education, in more than the arts of making love.

Heythe thinks she owns me. And as the days pass, if I am honest with myself in the distance that has fallen over me, I feel her caresses like a brand whenever her eye passes over me.

It is an education in manipulation, in domination, in control—and I drink it up like wine, along with the secrets and the plots my brethren whisper in the shadows, forgetting I can hear. I keep their secrets.

I am here for you, O my brothers.

I am here. For you.

The Warrior

S
trifbjorn ran out of snow before he reached the mile-tall ice cliffs looming on the horizon, so he turned west and inland. He didn’t count the passing days. His awareness narrowed to the hissing under his skis. The blood on his clothing browned and flaked, stains patterning his trousers and shirtfront. Sometimes his thoughts chased each other in miserable circles. More often, as time went by, he was aware of nothing but the blind white emptiness arching up over him, and that was good.

The northern wastes spread endless and empty. Strifbjorn glimpsed caribou and a white bear, his namesake, but neither humans nor another like himself. On the third or fourth or fifth day, Strifbjorn found himself on his knees in the snow, his right ski snapped, with no recollection of how he’d gotten
there. He braced himself on his pole, levered upward . . . and fell to the side. Though he pushed and struggled, there would be no rising. He’d exhausted himself.

Rounded rocks—a layer of glacial till—prodded him through the snow. The children of the Light did not sleep, not unless they were wounded. But Strifbjorn wished then that he could, could sleep and never wake again.

He pulled his head into the shelter of his cloak, yanked his boots from the bindings and hid from the brief winter sun.

Hours later, the thunder of vast wings roused him. He blinked and rolled stumbling upright, Alvitr in his hand before he recognized the moonlit silhouette of Herfjotur’s steed. He was barely earthbound, wings still furling, when she slid down his shoulder and came running to Strifbjorn like a child.

Strifbjorn held Alvitr wide so Herfjotur would not impale herself on the blade, and the waelcyrge threw herself into his arms.

She pounded his back for a moment, weeping, and then stepped back and punched him in the nose.

Strifbjorn went down on his ass, blood gushing down his face until he focused enough to heal. He thought inanely that it wasn’t like a little more blood would damage his shirt at this point. And that she hadn’t pulled the punch.

“Light, Strifbjorn, where the Hel have you been?” She grabbed his swordless hand and hauled him up. His blood smeared her glove.

He gestured along his back trail, a single furrow reaching into darkness. You could see it for a long way, under the moon. “Skiing.”

From the look on her face Strifbjorn thought she was likely
to hit him again. Instead, she shook her head and sat down on a snow-covered rock. Her stallion tossed his heads and pawed the snow, responding to her emotion.

“Things are bad,” she said, after a little.

Strifbjorn found another boulder nearby and dusted it off before he sat. He left his cloak lying in compacted snow. The clasp was broken anyway. “How bad?”

She kicked her rock with her heel. “Really bad. Mingan . . . Strifbjorn, Muire says he . . .”

She can’t say it, so he filled her silence. It was one of his duties, to do what the others cannot.

It
was
one of his duties.

“How many did he kill?”

Her eyebrow notched higher. “All of Dale. Fifty or so. One survivor.”

“Oh.”

“He raped her.”

It was three deep breaths before Strifbjorn could speak. Even then, his voice broke. “He . . . raped . . . ?” He could not—no.
He was
mine,
and he would never
—

Herfjotur could not lie. She put her head down on her knees and knotted her hands on her braids. Strifbjorn saw her scalp pale, so hard she pulled her own hair. She moaned.

My fault. All of it my fault. I should have—

“Oh, Light,” he said, and sank his teeth in the back of his hand. “He . . . I . . .”

She shook her head without lifting it, as if it was easier to keep speaking with her face pressed to her knees. “Not like that. But he . . .”

No. That was no better.

“Forced his kiss on her? Oh. Bearer of Burdens.” Horror took Strifbjorn’s breath away. The thing he had not accepted came home all at once, brilliantly, with the painless flash of a knifeblade plunged between his eyes. Mingan was lost.

Not just to me, but for all time.

Strifbjorn stood. He crouched and picked up his bearskin, shook off the snow.

“Strifbjorn?”

He bent the clasp more or less together with his thumbs. “I’ll kill him myself.” She did not rise, and he knew the news only got worse. “Did you hear me? I said I’ll kill him myself.”

“I heard you, war-leader.”

Light, don’t call me that.
“What else is there, Herfjotur?”

She swallowed hard. His hands, his face, his arms—like so much senseless flesh hung on him. He could not feel at all, and he was grateful. “What?”

“Heythe. She’s sent the children out, about their tasks. I’ve been seeking you since I could get away. She told them to use their kiss as a punishment, Strifbjorn, and I don’t know how many will obey.”

“Right,” Strifbjorn said. “Who remains at the hall?”

“Some two dozen. And there’s more about Mingan.”

His knees failed. He sat back on the stone.
Get it over with, Herfjotur!
“Tell me.”

She weighed her words silently. It was like having the skin stripped inch by inch from his face.

“He swore fealty to Heythe. And—Strifbjorn—she’s bedding him. Quite . . . flaunting it. Just as if they were married.”

“I see.” A revelation unfolded in his mind, the shape of bloody bodies piled in the snow. The impossibility of the
villagers, alone, planning and carrying out such a hunt—the unlikelihood that they would dare anger the spirits of the mountain.