By the Mountain Bound (26 page)

I shudder.

“Fetch me another,” Heythe says.

The Historian

L
ater that night, I gave the rings to Yrenbend, all but Herfjotur’s and mine, so that he could see them distributed.

Herfjotur did not return in the morning, however, and the next day at dawnlight Heythe took Mingan away riding on rainbows, something I had never heard of outside of alf-tales. But the next afternoon, while I fretted in the mead-hall over scraps of cloth and a saga that would not come right, a shadow fell over me. A girl’s soft voice spoke in my ear. “Bright one?”

It was Rannveig, bindings from skis she must have left by the door dangling from her hand, her face bright with cold. “Herfjotur says to meet her in the wood. I am to show you.” Her eyes seemed bruised, dark in their sockets. She was thinner than even at the end of her fever.

Silently, I stood and led her to my niche. She limped still, her stride awkward and unbalanced. I folded my things away and fetched my skis, my fiddle and the finished diadem, and when we were ready she led me across the meadow and up the hill. Skiing beside her, I asked without taking my eyes from the trail, “Did Herfjotur tell you what I will ask of you?”

“Yes,” she said tightly. Her eyes were trained straight ahead, skis working steadily. Her tone was unwelcoming. “You want to make me a thrall at the mead-hall, so that the Wolf will see me and think on his crimes.” She was silent a moment. “I am willing, though it cost me my life.”

“No,” I answer. “I want to make you my student.”

She tumbled and fell over her skis, catching herself with her poles before I could assist. “Your student?” She turned to me, so I stopped as well.

“Do you want to be a farmwife? A merchant?”

She shook her head. “I will not marry.”

“How about a sorceress?” I patted the fiddle in its case, slung over my shoulder beside Nathr.

“Will you teach me seithr?” She offered no hint if she found the idea alluring.

“I am no prophetess,” I said. “No, nor a witch, either. But I can teach you music and runes and poetry.”

She did not smile, but the crease between her eyebrows eased. Whether it was the promise of power or the taste of vengeance I did not know, but she thought about it carefully. “I should like that, Bright one. Thank you.”

“You’ll be risking your life, you do realize?”

“I care not,” she answered.

“All right, then,” I said. And we traveled on in silence.

Herfjotur and Strifbjorn waited in the shadow of a vertical cliff face, a high sweep of granite frosted with snow as if sugar had been thrown against it. A frozen waterfall tumbled down its height, formed in magic twists like candle-wax.

They greeted us with tight nods, and I gave Herfjotur her ring. She took it without comment, though Rannveig raised a questioning brow. “You will need one as well,” I told her. “But you’ll have to make your own. My strength is at its limits. It will be your first lesson; I’ll show you how when we return.”

“What does it do?”

“Protection from spells that bend the wits,” I said.

Her eyes widened a bit. “Oh. You’ll teach me that?”

“You’re useless to me else.”

I turned to Strifbjorn, browned bloodstains covering his arms and chest. He did not offer, and I did not ask.

“This is for you, war-leader.” I held the circlet out, unable to meet his gaze, flinching as he took it from my hand although his fingers did not brush mine.

“Set this on my head?”

I nodded. And began unpacking my fiddle, for all it complained in the cold and I had to mark it with
Fehu
to protect the wood and loosen all eight strings. By the time I had it retuned, Strifbjorn had jammed the narrow hammered circlet over his hair, looking as if he felt faintly foolish.

He looked like a martial prince, our war-leader who had never needed a symbol of authority. We had always known, since the beginning, who we followed.

I looked him in the eye, drew a breath, set the fiddle under my chin.

Light soared from my fingertips with the music, silverbright
and crystalline, and Herfjotur threw her head back and joined in the song. Gossamer filaments of brilliance swirled around us like dye in water, drawn to the polished crystals bright in their six-sided settings. I stood before Strifbjorn, one foot shuffling time in the snow, and fixed him with a mocking, aching gaze.

I would never tell him that I loved him but this once, and not in words even now. But if we died together, outnumbered under the swords of our brethren or the teeth of a de mon ess, he would know.

And he would know that it was not the reason I stood beside him.

I leaned the whole weight of my power into the song, a wreaking as fine as ever I had made. Despite Herfjotur’s voice bending into the song, low and sweet, I let him have no doubt of what the music was saying as it twined his limbs, coiled his throat, crowned him in blazing white light.

Guard him; ward him; hide him from sight. Watch him; keep him; bring him back to me whole—until the end of time.
His eyes never left mine, and once—just once—he nodded and I saw the acknowledgment on his face. Acceptance. But nothing returned.

I was going to die for this man who could not love me. And for once, the only pity I felt was for him.

When the last tendril and flicker of Light sank into his crown, he flickered and grew indistinct. My eye slid off him like a foot off wet rock, and if I did not know to look for him I never would have seen him standing before me, six and a half feet tall and not six feet away.

I set my fiddle back in the case while Rannveig looked
from Herfjotur to myself, her mouth wide in amazement. “You can teach me that?”

“I’ve already started,” I said. “Come; let us hurry. The spell will not last forever.”

The Wolf

M
y wolves aren’t the only wolves dead under the snowdrifts, and Heythe needs only the bones. In a hand of days we claim dozens, traveling Heythe’s rainbows—even in the darkness—and singing out the dead. Not just wolf, but snow leopard, and arctic tiger and white and brown bears. The first sdadown have an amazing facility for unearthing dead things, and we scour the continent bare of corpses as far south and west as Eiledon, where the river Naglfar runs into a sea that the sun sets behind rather than rising before.

Heythe makes her fell beasts and releases them to await her call. I follow like a shadow cast. The emaciated ghosts of my pack run alongside us, yellow eyes glaring.

The Lady needs beds and food and warmth, and that means inns, and that means men and the cities of men. Twice I intervene in minor crimes and each time, hunger on my back with spurs, I slay a candle-flicker with my kiss. When Heythe sleeps in way stations, wearied by our labors, I stand guard. The sdadown take their ease in the darkness below our windows, lean specters slipping across moon-white snow.

I do not know if the men see them. If they do, they are wise enough to stay by their fires of a winter night.

The sdadown are a yoke hung on my shoulders, but I do
not protest. The time for protests is past—passed long before that final night of our travels when Heythe forbids me my place by the window and draws me into her hired bed. Under eiderdowns, between clean linens on a mattress that still smells of summer hay, she smooths her hands over my thighs, the bones of my hips. Her fingernails tick across my ribs. She cups a cold hand between my legs, presses like a cat against my heat.

I shrink from her touch. I cannot make love to her.

I curl away. She hisses annoyance and with one hand on my shoulder shoves me onto my back. The room is full of scattered light, from my collar and her necklace.

I am numb. Tingling, nerve-dead as a manacled hand. Plush thighs bestride my chest. She smiles down. “Mingan,” she says. “This won’t do.”

Two fingers burrowed under my collar twist my dull body to life. My vision tunnels as the ribbon slices, tight enough to prick blood to my skin. My eyes burn, vessels popping. My lungs burn, starved of air. My hands claw her wrists, nails driven deep. I wish she would yank harder, drive deeper, choke me into a darkness I need never come up from again.

My prick and the Suneater . . . have their own ideas.

She hurts me. I thrash. I kick like a hare in a wire. I growl in hate and need and the sheer demeaning pleasure of being punished.

Being owned.

I clutch her and she lets me, lets me thrust her back against the bed and mount her, though my sight is fading. I bite her, paw her, pin her shoulders while she twists the collar and I move in her as if it were my last act on earth. I wish—

—it were.

She makes me powerless.

And like a mortal man, I permit it.

She is slender and delicate, and should be fragile enough to break with my hands, but when she submits to my rage I know it is acquiescence, and when I fuck her with all the hate and poison in me, so the bed shatters plaster from the wall, she laughs at my strength and chokes me until my skin breaks on the cord, until I cannot see or hear but only feel her stretching against me, thighs a vise.

I would tear her throat open in the darkness, soak the bed with her blood. But my teeth scratch at her necklace, chip on fragile wires and jewels. Her hands clench as her body convulses.

The darkness crushes me. Release scours me dry.

I
wake in her arms.

She sleeps against my shoulder, frail and delicate and strong enough to kill me with her bare hands. With the one fine-boned hand that lies still entwined with my collar.

There are no linear thoughts in sleep, just the jumble and slide of emotion. I taste them as I taste her sweat. There is no way to avoid them, dark and bright and coiling—triumph, pleasure and a kind of gloating pity.

And the fine, piquant ferment of a long-anticipated, delicately-savored revenge.

Kin will kin-slaughter

And brothers’ blades bloody

Woe, woe, all the wicked wide world.

An axe-age, a sword-age, an age of shields shattered

A wind-age, a wolf-age, the old world unwinding

No mercy to muster, no heart left unhewed.

                              
—Völuspá

The Wolf

W
e return to the mead-hall in the morning. Those first dozen sdadown attend. Only Skeold comes to greet us, presenting the welcoming-cup, her expression questioning. She flinches from the undead wolves, and will not look me in the eye. The Lady, however, she ducks a little curtsey as she holds out the drinking horns.

“Welcome home, my Lady,” she says, and adds, “my brother” on the end.

I drink because the Lady drinks. As we lower our empty cups, Skeold takes them from us and steps aside. Her eyes flick again to the dark beasts pacing behind Heythe, but she says nothing more.

The mead-hall is largely empty, though Yrenbend works at carvery in the corner, his tools and wood spread on a bench.
I see only a few others. Most of my brethren must be about the errands Heythe set them.

Heythe releases her sdadown from heel. They loll about the hall like so many hunting hounds before the fire. Golden eyes blink from dead faces. Heythe lays her hand on Skeold’s shoulder, smiling fondly, and draws her aside.

“Come sit with me, Skeold, and tell me what has transpired in my absence. Mingan”—she smiles at the coldness I turn on her—“find Sigrdrifa, my love?”

Skeold’s eyes open at the fond words, but I turn away without answering. Sigrdrifa is easy enough to locate, hacking at a pell in the trampled practice yard. My face must serve as a warning, because she only nods to me and sheathes her sword. I watch her go, the cold wind ruffling my cloak.

The cliff is only a few dozen yards further on.

I climb the rim, balancing on ice-rimed rocks, and watch the sea toss. Cold calm mutes the memory of the night before. It’s not serenity so much as ice and mist over the molten stone of loss and hate. I might tumble into that seethe . . . but unless I should, it’s as if I stand at a distance and watch another grieve and rage.