By the Mountain Bound (5 page)

The rest—the kiss—was anathema.

They were expected to marry, Mingan and Strifbjorn. Expected to bond a wife with whom they might get a child and replenish the children of the Light. Even long marriages proved fertile only rarely, and the ones that did were notable in the strength of the bond between the pair.

The bond of their kiss.

Strifbjorn owed his brethren children, if he could get them. As did Mingan.
Damn us all.

Strifbjorn slid down the path as much as walked. Rocks and scree skittered from his boots. It was all broken shale, and tricky, edging on a sheer drop, strewn with boulders and bits of rock. The moon was falling and the strand glimmered pale, littered with seaweed and shells that crushed under his steps. He skipped a stone, counted bounds. Seven. With the sea so smooth, he should be able to do better.

As he stooped for a flat rock, a glitter of crimson and violet caught his eye—foreign colors in the moonlight monochrome.

Her skin was white as the strand, the long wet gown that draped her more beige or golden, her hair pale and matted with salt and sand. She lay still as a ridge on the beach: Strifbjorn never would have seen her if not for the moonlight caught on the collar of jewels and golden wires that cinched her throat.

He stared at the shadows and outline for seconds before he realized what they meant.

A woman. On the beach like so much flotsam, dead or unconscious, her pale hair twisted with seaweed.

Hand on Alvitr’s hilt, Strifbjorn sprinted across the wet sand to where she lay, her fine pleated gown waterlogged and drifting about her ankles as the tide rolled down her body.

She could not possibly be alive.

He dropped beside her, knees digging furrows. As gently, as swiftly as he could, he turned her. His hand under her nape, he straightened her neck and arched it. She was not breathing. Something littered the sand beneath and around her—a tangle of sodden falcon’s feathers, stripped and broken by the tide.

Strifbjorn pressed his fingertips under the line of her jaw and held his breath. Her skin was clammy and gray, but a moment’s patience rewarded Strifbjorn with the slow, staggering thread of a heartbeat.

Oh, Light.

He did not know her: a mortal woman, not one of the waelcyrge. He could breathe for her without fear.

He drew her mouth open and bent over her, probing down her throat with his fingers, straightening her tongue, remembering Mingan’s rough fingers prizing his own jaw open. But his mouth was hot; hers tasted briny and cold when Strifbjorn pressed his lips down, pinching her nose shut. Salt in the tooth-marks reminded Strifbjorn to will them healed, so only the first breath stung.

The force to fill her lungs surprised him. There was muscle under that silken gown. Lapping waves wet his calves and knees, round stones buried in the sand bruising as he breathed for her, out and gasp and out again. He had no hope of saving her, this mortal woman with her body battered by the sea, but the thread of her pulse grew stronger under his hand cupping her jaw, and at last she gagged around his breath.

He turned her on her side and let the water trickle from her mouth as she convulsed. She retched and purged, and when she
was done she lay quiet, breathing on her own, moonlight threading the jewels of her necklace.

He had torn the skin of his right hand on the wires. He healed it with a thought, all the remaining bruises and scrapes and the hard marks of Mingan’s loving hands. And he scooped her into his arms.

Leftover blood smeared the sand-colored cloth of her ruined gown. Her eyelids didn’t even flutter as he carried her back up the treacherous cliffside path to the hall.

The Wolf

I
hurry from the mead-hall in the meadow, the mortal town below it. From whence I found the waelcyrge weeping. Away from my sisters, my brothers, and into the dark. I run into the night’s embrace. Already I draw my gloves off, loping up the mountain amid the leaf-lorn oaks and beeches. They give way to conifers, and above that meadow and above that finally bare gray rock and ice. I will not run so far. The wind floats a wolf-howl to my ear. That ear feels as if could almost perk and swivel.

It is not yet time to return to the pack. While the hurt is fresh and sweet, while my body still aches with unwise passion and wiser pain, I climb to a high knoll screened by pine and spruce. There, the wind is colder. It carries a scent of woodsmoke and the sea, the scent as well of wolves, of the distant human town, of bucks in their autumn rut. I turn to the ridge of Ulfenfell, flickering in the moonlight with a cool blue gleam. There is a sharp wind from its peak, and another scent on that.

“Imogen,” I whisper into the wind, “come to me.”

She is swift and all but invisible. Even to me. Her wings are feathered soft as an owl’s. Her eyes are paper lanterns. She settles before me, furling her pinions close as a cloak about her naked form.

“My Lord,” she whispers.

His mistress, Darkness. Oh, I hear what they say.

But she is my sister. Half sister. As old as I am, in a world too young. She is my sister, and she obeys me.

Hunger would not kill her. Nothing can kill her. Starvation is her plate, and famine her knife.

But how can I leave her to suffer?

She steps closer, velvet black fur slicked with gleams. The moon is setting: some of that light shines from me. She comes like a gnat into a candleflame, her red mouth an open gash in her face, showing teeth pointed as thorns. She mews, hungry. Always hungry.

I open the collar of my shirt, the heat in my center cresting, flaring, burning under my heart. My fingers brush the too-tight silken ribbon clinching my throat. Droplets of pale light leak. I touch the knot that cannot be loosened, brush tender bruises where I strained against the fetter when I lay down for Strifbjorn.

I bare my breast to the demoness.

“Feed, then. I shall be a feast for thee tonight.”

Her nostrils flare as she leans forward, ducking her head to taste my skin. Her tongue rasps a little, softer and wetter than the tongue of a cat. Her wings fold around us, a shelter or a cage: I pinion her wrists gently, protecting my shirt and my flesh from her small, sharp claws.

She finds a place over my heart and leans into me, breath
and feathers tickling as she nurses like a babe, straining for a moment against my grip, claws flexing.

Relief. All the grief, the sorrow of the night and all the nights before, flows into her, drawn from my body like a stain. I straighten, will and strength returning, release her right hand from my left and stroke her head. Copper sweetness—my own blood—fills my mouth; the scabs have broken. I raise my eyes to the sky, bask in the light of the stars. False dawn glows on the horizon. Her claws scratch as she lays the hand against my chest, but—settled now and feeding—she restrains herself, dainty as a sparrow, and does no harm.

When I can bear the grief again, and I am staggering with tiredness, I whisper, “Enough.” The Imogen raises her head with a faint high whine.

Still hungry.

Always hungry, but if I permit it she will eat me to a husk, and then fill me up with sorrow again. She is a weapon—born and bred for nothing else.

She is my sister, after all.

A
fter the Imogen leaves me on the mountainside, I find my way back to the wolf-lair at the copper beech. They have not returned from their run. But though the carcass of the foolish young buck is much gnawed, there will be enough for tomorrow. They are not hunting, merely running for the sheer joy of it. I am about to climb into my favored perch when I notice something odd at the margin of the clearing: straggly wildflowers, tied with a red ribbon, set beside a checked cloth bundle.

I crouch and touch the bundle haltingly with a fingertip. A scent of spices arises. I unwrap it.

Gingerbread, with cloves and cinnamon laced through it, redolent of molasses and brown wheat flour. A rich gift.

There is a trace on the red ribbon other than the flowers—the girl in the russet cloak.

An offering? Or simply thanks? And who tracked the wolves to our lair? The girl? Perhaps.

Unlikely.

The pack returns, surrounding me, snarling at the reek of woodsmoke and ambergris clinging to my cloak. The red bitch rubs against me, at last, coating me with her scent; her mate, dark as old bronze and dusted with silver across the hackles, soon follows. I laugh as they take my forearms in wolf-gentle mouths, press me down, wrestling and yipping and marking me their subject, their pack, theirs.

Later, I try to share the spice cake with them, but only the red bitch and a ghost-pale two-year-old will touch it.

The Historian

T
he mead-hall blazed with torches when I returned from weeping in the wood, picking my way barefoot across the turf. Herfjotur’s steed raised one of his heads to watch me. He half-unfurled snow-white wings in greeting, and then lowered the antlered head again to crop the summer’s last long grass.

The great doors stood open, and I stepped inside, dirt and leaves staining the hems of my trousers, pine needles tangled in
my hair. I braced for attention and whispers: I had expected to return to a quiet hall.

No one noticed me.

My brothers and sisters were clustered in the southeast corner. Worried murmurs reached me as I walked beside the rekindled fire trench. I drew even with them, crossed before the Lady’s empty chair and came up beside Yrenbend.

“What has transpired?” I stood on tiptoe to reach his ear until he hunched to accommodate me.

“Strifbjorn has rescued a drowned mortal girl on the beach,” he said. “We’re annoying him.” He raised a wry eyebrow and smiled at me from the corners of silver eyes laced with a cast of green. His queue was a dark golden-red. I wanted to reach out and yank it.

“Will she live?”

He turned away from the crowd and laid a companionable hand on my shoulder. “She is breathing on her own. Come. There’s still mead to be had.” He led me back down the hall and served us both from the cask near the Cynge’s chair—in round-bottomed bowls that could be sipped and set aside, not the horns that must be drained at a draft. “She has not awakened.”

We sat together at the end of the trestle table, and he watched me drink. I pulled a knife from the sheath on my thigh to cut some scraps of the cold roast that still lingered on the table, and gave him my best attempt at a smile.

He reached out and touched a lock of my unbound hair, pulling a swag of pine needles from it. He smelled of leather oil and salt sea-spray. A silver flute hung in a case at his belt: a flute I had made for him. “You look unwell, sister.”

I sighed and glanced around the hall, leaning across the table closer to Yrenbend once I saw that no one was near us. There was no privacy, in a mead-hall. “I’m troubled, Yrenbend.” I poked at the venison again, cutting a hatchwork of lines in the side of the roast with the point of my knife.

“Strifbjorn?”

Something as dark and ravenous as the Suneater raved in my breast.
Hope.
And a terrible thing hope can be. “What else? I had myself all but convinced that there was no chance. I’m not the bravest or the best of us, by any means . . . and plain as a sparrow, I know that, too. But I went walking tonight, after Sigrdrifa teased me. . . .” Yrenbend would know the details. Word passed quickly from the women’s end of the hall to the men’s. Yrenbend’s wife would have told him what Sigrdrifa said, regarding Strifbjorn and whatever feelings I might have for him. And the likelihood of those feelings being returned.

I realized that my voice had trailed off only when Yrenbend prodded me. “And . . . ?” He sipped his mead, both eyebrows rising in an expression that never managed to make him look surprised.

I stuck my knife into the mutilated roast, tip grating on the bone. “I heard something I shouldn’t have. The Wolf and Strifbjorn, speaking in the shadow of a tree.”

He retrieved my knife and carved a bit of meat, which he pleated meticulously before tucking it into his mouth. He watched my face while he chewed.

“Mingan—the Wolf—was counseling Strifbjorn to marry. And quickly.” I took the knife away from Yrenbend, attacking the roast so that I would not have to meet his eyes. “And me.”

Not the whole truth. But not a lie, either. And whatever else I’d overheard . . . was not mine for the sharing.

“Really.” Yrenbend did not sound astonished, but then he never did. “Naught else?”

I risked a glance. He seemed thoughtful. “I walked away. It seemed indecent to eavesdrop.”
Not a lie, not a lie, not a lie.
But as close as I had ever come.

“Your honor does you credit.” He finished his mead. “Let me see what I can learn.” Standing, he dropped his hand on my shoulder again and turned away, back toward the dispersing knot of our brethren at the far end of the hall.

T
he next morning, I left walking southward, to make myself useful in the world.

The Warrior

T
he waelcyrge and thralls laid the woman on the bench in Strifbjorn’s cubby and tucked blankets about her, trickled brandy under her tongue, brought braziers of coals to warm the space.

She shivered in her sleep, and when she woke, a long time later, she woke up screaming.

Skeold, who sat by her, shouted. Ulfgar and Strifbjorn were closest. They came at a run before the crash, snapping wood and the thump of falling bodies. An instant later, two people plunged through the arras, and the blacksmith and the war-leader checked hard.

The blond stranger knelt over Skeold, one fist in the waelcyrge’s
hair, the other pinning her wrists. She was nude, the bedclothes discarded. Her chest heaved, her eyes and mouth wide open. Skeold strained against the grip, and could not shift it.

No mortal girl, this, then.

Strifbjorn had no blade in his hand. He spread his arms wide, showing open palms. Ulfgar, with a sideways glance, did the same. “Peace,” Strifbjorn said.

“You’re not giants,” the woman said. “You’re not Aesir.”

“There are no Aesir anymore. No giants. You’re safe. All dead, and on another world.” She still stared, disbelieving. His hands fell to his sides. “You’ve come across the water to the next world. I’m Strifbjorn. Release my warrior, please.”