The Rot

by Siri Pettersen

  Rime had only seen the chieftain afraid once before. When he had fought his son, Tein, right where they were standing now. Back then, Hirka had stopped him from dealing the death blow. But she wasn’t here now.

  “I know,” Rime replied. He could hear the ice in his own voice. The coldness keeping him alive. The Might wouldn’t release its hold on him. It filled him, defined him—made him feel as if he were born of the frost.

  “So who is he? Who wants to kill you?”

  “The Council.” Rime shook the blood from the knife.

  “They want to kill you? Here, in Ravnhov?”

  Rime smiled coldly. “Where better? That way Ravnhov gets the blame.”

  Eirik stared at him as if looking into the abyss that was Mannfalla for the very first time. He put a hand on Rime’s shoulder. It burned against his skin.

  “You said it yourself, Eirik. The enemy with the most to lose is the one to fear.”

  The chieftain’s household was well and truly awake. People thronged together in the dark. Blue figures in a blue night, with lamps and shawls. As the chieftain’s wife wrapped a blanket around Rime, he belatedly realized he was naked. And covered in blood. But it didn’t matter. It was high time Ravnhov saw Mannfalla disrobed.

  Rime raised his voice. “Eirik Viljarsón, I have an empty chair at the council table in Eisvaldr. It’s the most dangerous chair in the eleven kingdoms, and it belongs to you. It belongs to Ravnhov. Will you take it?”

  People looked at each other. Whispered among themselves. Someone shouted “yes!” Rime spotted someone he knew among them. Tein. The chieftain’s son came forward and stood next to his father. “We’ll take it,” he said.

  Eirik sighed. Ravnhov had spoken. He looked at Rime. “So what are you going to do?”

  Rime put the knife back in the dead man’s sheath, where it belonged.

  “What I do best,” he replied.

  HALF-BLINDLING

  Stars filled the night sky. Hirka almost lost her balance as she wrapped the blanket around herself. She grabbed on to the trunk to stop herself from falling. What kind of idiot climbed a tree in the middle of the night? With a blanket? In the winter?

  A half-blindling—half-human, half-deadborn.

  She tried to get comfortable in the small hollow where the trunk forked. She had her bag next to her, though she wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t planning on going anywhere. Still, it was reassuring to know she could run. If she had to.

  Sometimes being with Stefan and Naiell all got a bit much. They were both so strange, but in very different ways. They weren’t three people who would ordinarily mix. The only reason they were there at all was because of her.

  She pulled out her notebook and found her most recent entries. Where to start? There was no way she could remember all the words she’d learned. Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe it meant she could speak so well now that she didn’t need to write everything down. But there was one thing she remembered.

  Blood bag.

  She wrote it down. It looked so ugly on paper. Even the shape of the letters made it look horrible—a promise of impending pain. How was she to describe it? A container? A waterskin? An expendable life, created for the benefit of someone else?

  Those were the words they’d used. Stefan and Naiell. Easy for them to say. At least they were still able to sleep. She looked over at the hotel. It was in the center of Stockholm, so she’d had to cross the road to reach the park. Wrapped in her blanket. Cars had whistled at her, and she’d kicked at them as they roared off.

  She could see her footsteps in the snow. They were reassuring, in a way. They were proof she existed. She flipped back in her notebook. Found some old drawings of plants she’d seen back when she’d been staying in the church.

  Rosemary. Herb. No one knows what it does.

  Tomato. Used for sauces. Meant to be healthy, but no one knows what it does.

  Lilac. Decorative tree. No one knows what it does.

  Nobody she’d asked had been able to tell her anything about plants. How could it be possible to live in a world you didn’t know? Eat food without having any idea where it came from? She knew far from everything about Ym, but at least she knew how to survive. And what the plants did.

  She continued flipping through the notebook and came across a map she’d drawn. There was the church, with small crosses marking the churchyard. The route to the shop. To the greenhouse. A desperate attempt to find her footing. To make sense of the world around her. Of where she was.

  She closed the notebook. If she kept going, she’d reach her early entries. Words and experiences she’d wanted to share with Rime. But that would never happen now.

  She’d left him. Come here, to this nightmare straight out of Slokna, to make sure he’d be safe. To make sure she’d be safe. But there was no safety here or in any world. Not as long as she was a blood bag. A living breathing threat who was meant to die so that others could break their chains and bring Ym to its knees.

  She pulled the blanket tighter. How would he do it? Would she be hung upside down like a slaughtered animal, while the life drained out of her veins and into someone else? Blindcraft!

  And what would Graal do then? Was anyone back home safe? Would Mannfalla burn? Ravnhov?

  No! She had the book. It was clear that he needed it, even though it made no sense to her. Even though the three of them didn’t know what the uniform lines were meant to depict. It wasn’t any kind of language. There were no sentences. Just page after page of randomly placed circles and lines. But at least they had it. Not Graal.

  Graal? Father? No. She had only one father, and she remembered him sitting in his wheeled chair by the hearth. Back home in Elveroa. Where every day she woke up and fell asleep to the sound of the sea. Here there was only noise. Father knew what it meant to be an outsider. So much so that he’d taken his own life, for her. It hurt to think about it. It would always hurt.

  She ran her tongue along her teeth, remembering the morning after she’d found out who she was. She’d leaned over the river’s edge and looked at her own reflection. She’d thought that her canines looked a little sharp. As if she’d turned into a wild animal overnight.

  They were a little sharp, though. Was it her blindling blood? She thought about her sense of smell. About how well she could see in the dark. All the little things she’d thought she just did a bit differently than other people. Signs that she was a deadborn. Nábyrn. What else didn’t she know about herself?

  I’m not scared!

  She stared down at the compass attached to the front of her notebook. The needle pointed north. It always would. Even if she was spun around until she was dizzy. Even if the cars whizzed past and blinded her with their lights.

  The strange thing was, she preferred being a blood bag to just being a child of Odin. Of course it made her hair stand on end just thinking about it, but at least now there was a good reason for it. Being hunted simply because she didn’t belong—that was so senseless. So impossible to fight. Now she had something. Something of value, something others needed. Something they hunted and killed for. She had to remember that.

  Anyway, being half-blindling wasn’t a death sentence. At least she was someone. She was descended from the blindling who had shaped the entire history of Ym. That made her far from a nobody.

  And this from the girl who’d always envied Rime’s roots. His family tree, which could be traced back to the first An-Elderin, the warrior who had marched into Blindból. A family tree of a thousand measly years wasn’t much, was it? She had a father who was nearly three thousand years old! Sure, a monstrous one who thirsted for blood and revenge, but she wasn’t a nobody. She was Hirka. She could fix this. At least now she knew what he was after. Why he needed her.

  Naiell had said Graal’s blood was ruined. Scorched. So he could never escape this world. His prison. She’d seized on that, protesting that she would have inherited the same ruined blood.

  The moment she’d said it, she realized that sh
e’d long since disproved that claim. She was here. She’d already traveled through the gateways. And survived.

  Whatever sort of blindcraft they’d subjected him to, it hadn’t been passed down. And right now that made her as attractive to Graal as water to someone lost in the desert. That was how Stefan put it, but he could be wrong. He’d also said that people had been to the moon, so clearly his judgement wasn’t exactly reliable.

  Knowing that Graal needed her gave her power. She couldn’t control what he or the forgotten did, but she could control what she did. She had power over her own life. Would she be prepared to do what Father had done? Sacrifice her life to prevent Graal from reaching Ym? From reaching Rime?

  She felt a lump growing in her throat. Her hands were like ice.

  No! I won’t let that happen!

  It would never come to that. Graal had found a way of getting her through the gateways as an infant, a newborn. And alone. Who knew, maybe it wasn’t as hard to send a child through. In any case, there had to be a way of doing it again. She didn’t need to sit here rotting in a dying world, a world she neither understood nor liked, while the blind took over the only world she could call home. Ym needed her. She had to find a way back. And she knew someone who could help.

  Hirka jumped down from the tree. Rolled up the blanket and flung it over her shoulder along with her bag. Tomorrow she’d talk to Stefan, explain to him what they had to do. He wouldn’t like it, but that couldn’t be helped. The forgotten were the only ones who knew where Graal could be found. They knew his weaknesses. And they were no longer his friends. He’d discarded them.

  And if they refused to help, she could compel them. Now that she had something they needed. Now that she knew she had the same blood as Graal.

  THE CHALLENGE

  The front door to the Darkdaggar family home was clad with rusted steel, perforated with small crosses through which the underlying wood could be seen. Rime had been there as a boy, for a gathering he barely remembered. The Darkdaggars were experts on the law—cold, calculating bureaucrats—but then, the same could be said of everyone in Eisvaldr.

  Rime rapped the door knocker three times, all the while reminding himself to think with his head and not with his heart. Anger would have to wait. This was bigger than him.

  He adjusted his grip on the heavy stone slab tucked under his arm.

  A servant opened the door. He was young, but he recognized Rime straight away. He bowed. “Rime-fadri. Ravenbearer. Welcome.” Rime thanked him and stepped inside. The boy seemed unsure of what to do next. He started to lead the way but then clearly decided it was wrong of him to be walking ahead of the Ravenbearer. He dropped back to Rime’s side and gestured up a staircase. “Would you like to speak to Garm-fadri? Or is it …” He looked down at the stone slab Rime was carrying. “Would you … could I take that for you?”

  “No, thank you. Where can I find Garm?”

  The boy started to sweat. Rime understood his dilemma. He couldn’t ask a ravenbearer to wait, but he also couldn’t send him upstairs without notifying his master. Rime didn’t wait for a reply. He started up the stairs with the boy at his heels.

  On the second floor, a door stood ajar. Rime pushed it open and went in. Garm looked up from a sloping desk. Rime hadn’t told anyone that he was back from Ravnhov—least of all Garm Darkdaggar. He’d hoped to see him lose his composure when he came in, but if Garm was surprised, he hid it well. Presumably he’d expected to hear from the assassin a long time ago. No news was bad news. Garm had known that Rime was still alive.

  The servant came in behind him. “Garm-fadri. Rime-fadri is here. The Ravenbearer.”

  “Thank you, I can see that,” Garm replied dryly. The servant nodded and withdrew.

  The room was rectangular and well lit. The long wall behind Garm was fitted with tall windows grouped in threes. The walls were covered in maps from all of Ym—towns, regions, rivers.

  Garm got up, putting down his pen. It rolled down the sloped desk and clattered to the floor. He let it lie.

  “So how was Ravnhov?” he asked coolly.

  “Enlightening,” Rime replied. He didn’t have time for intrigues, for this game. He’d never had time for it.

  He threw down the stone slab. It thudded onto the floor. Garm stared at his own name. Darkdaggar. Golden letters engraved in stone. He closed his eyes for a moment. Rime smiled. The mask had slipped. Garm had lost, and he knew it. The lines running from either side of his nose to the corners of his mouth seemed to deepen as Rime looked on. His short, blond hair was almost indistinguishable from his scalp, and had it not been for that, Rime could have sworn it would have turned white in that moment.

  “What have you done?” Garm whispered.

  “Not me. Two stonecutters. It left an ugly scar in the Council table, but better a scar than your name.”

  “You can’t … for centuries it—”

  “I can, and I have,” Rime interrupted.

  “No one will accept this. No one will let you do this. You have no grounds, boy.”

  Rime drew his sword. Garm backed into his desk and gaped.

  “Are we really going to play this game, Garm? Are you going to deny it? To say it wasn’t you so I can say it was, over and over until someone separates us as if we were squabbling children?” Rime prodded the embroidery on the councillor’s chest with the tip of his sword.

  Garm collected himself. “What will people think? Someone tried to kill you in Ravnhov, yet you’re blaming your own? You have no proof. People will think you’ve lost your mind—and they wouldn’t be wrong.”

  “So live and let live? Carry on like nothing has happened? Sit together at the table until you find another opportunity to kill me? You know, I think we all have more to gain from me killing you first.” Rime jabbed Garm with the blade and he fell to the floor, where he started dragging himself back toward the window.

  “Get up,” Rime said. “Get up and find a sword to defend yourself.”

  “Sword?” Garm sounded confused, like he’d never owned such a thing in his life. “Think about what you’re doing, Rime! I’m not the only person you’ve threatened. You’re a threat to the entire Council. They’ll make sure you’re punished if you do this, if you kill me in cold blood. You’ll lose your chair. There will be an uproar! Even we can’t kill each other without punishment. And you’re Kolkagga! What chance do you think I stand?”

  “You should have considered that before,” Rime replied. But he knew Garm had a point. If they were going to do this, it couldn’t be done behind closed doors. The Council had done far too much behind closed doors. If they were going to do this, it had to be done where everyone could see and hear. Rime loomed over Garm.

  “I’ll give you a choice: die here and now, or find someone to die for you. I’ll fight whatever and whoever. The result will be the same regardless. When I win, you’ll admit your guilt and take your punishment like a man. All of Mannfalla will bear witness. No secrets. Everyone will see.”

  Garm clambered to his feet and brushed the dust from his robes. “So we’re regressing to the time of the berserkers? The first duel in living memory?”

  Rime smiled. “The first? I was challenged to a duel in Ravnhov less than a year ago, by Tein, the chieftain’s son. Hirka stopped me from killing him so no one would win and peace could be preserved.”

  “Clever girl. You should try listening to her.”

  Rime leaned closer to Garm, so close that he could smell the sweat on his brow.

  “But she’s not here anymore, is she?” he said through clenched teeth.

  Garm swallowed. “What’s worse? Someone wanting to kill you, or not having her here to stop you from killing?”

  Rime didn’t reply. He turned and headed for the door, stepping demonstratively over the stone slab.

  Garm shouted after him. “And what if you don’t win? What then, boy? How am I to defend myself against an enraged crowd? What if you die?”

  Rime turned toward him again.
“That won’t happen. I’m not the dying type. I’d have thought you’d noticed that by now.”

  He sheathed his sword and left the councillor with his maps of the world and a name that would nevermore hold sway over it.

  THE ALLIANCE

  Graal dropped down from the roof, landing on the balcony. He looked into the bathroom. There was marble everywhere, with gold accents. Expensive. Classic. Right down to the claw-foot tub, which was as ridiculous now as the first time he’d seen one. That had to be over two hundred years ago.

  Allegra stood over the sink, washing her hands with liquid soap. He caught the smell of lemon through the open door. Subtle, not overpowering, as soaps so often were. Not to mention sanitary wipes. Small chemical bombs for everyday use. Humans had yet to learn about correlations.

  She was a slender woman of about fifty. Dressed in gray high-waisted trousers and a white silk blouse. Another classic look. For a moment he recognized himself in this woman. He’d also learned the rules of the game once upon a time. Presentation. Power. She piqued his curiosity, and that pleased him. What would he have done if they didn’t still arouse his curiosity?

  Her hands were covered in fine lines, like they’d shrunk a little and forgotten to take the skin with them. Watching people age was fascinating. They were so impotent. So ignorant. They raged against nature’s onslaught, despite their lives being twice as long now as when he’d first arrived. And they did look better, there was no denying that.

  Allegra dried her hands and opened a small box. It was filled with crushed ice. He knew what else it contained before she picked them up. Teeth. Two of them. She held them up to the light. Then she leaned toward the mirror and studied her face.

  Graal cocked his head and smiled. He wondered what she was thinking about. Maybe her hair, which no one could call blond anymore. It was gray. She could have dyed it, but something told him she’d consider that an even greater defeat.