Snow-Walker

by Catherine Fisher

  The water held him, a cold grip.

  Only Kari did not dream. Instead he slipped out of his body and stood up, looking down at the blood on his hair. Then he edged between the fallen tables and the dream-wrapped bodies of his friends to the door of the hall, flung wide. Outside the watchman lay sprawled, his sword iced over, the black wolfhound still at his side.

  Stepping over them, Kari hurried out under the dawn glimmer and looked north. Down the tracks of the sky he watched shapes move, heard voices call to him from invisible realms. He answered quickly, and the ghosts of jarls and warriors and women came and crowded about him.

  “What happened?” he asked bitterly.

  “She came. She took one of them back with her.”

  “Who came?”

  They stared at him, their faces pale as his. “We know no names. Names are for the living.”

  “You must tell me!”

  “She. The Snow-walker.”

  His mother. He wondered why he’d been so urgent; he’d known it would be her. He nodded and turned back slowly, and they made room for him, drifting apart like mist.

  Coming back into the hall, he gazed across it, at the frosted trunk of the roof tree, where it stood rising high into the rafters. Two black forms sat among its branches.

  “Go out and look,” he said. “There may be some trace of her. Look to the north.”

  “It’s unlikely,” one of them croaked.

  “Try anyway. I’ll wake these.”

  As they rose up and flapped out of the window, he moved reluctantly back into his body, feeling the heavy pain begin to throb in his head, the bitter cold in fingers and stomach.

  He rolled over, dragging himself up unsteadily onto his knees, fighting down sickness. Then he grabbed Jessa’s arm and shook it feebly. “Jessa! Wake up. Wake up!”

  It was all a dream, Jessa knew that. She stood on the hilltop next to the grazing horse and looked down at the snow-covered land. Fires burned, far to the south. A great bridge, like a pale rainbow, rose into the sky, its end lost among clouds.

  On the black waters of the fjord a ship was drifting on the ebb tide—a funeral ship. Even from here Jessa could see the bright shields hung on each side of it, and they were burning, their metal cracking and melting, dropping with a hiss into the black water. Flames devoured the mast, racing up the edges of the sails.

  And on the ship were all the friends she knew and had ever known, and they were alive. Some were calling out to her, others silent, looking back; Skapti and Signi, Wulfgar and Brochael, Marrika and Thorkil, her father, Kari. Hakon with his bright new sword and looking so desolate that her heart nearly broke.

  Gudrun was standing beside her. The witch was tall; her long silver hair hung straight down her back.

  “My ship,” she said softly. “And if you want them as they were, Jessa, you must come and get them.”

  “Come where?” Jessa asked, furious.

  “Beyond the end of the world.”

  “There’s nothing beyond the end!”

  “Ah, but there is.” Gudrun smiled her close, secret smile. “The land of the soul. The place beyond legends. The country of the wise.”

  Then she reached out and gripped Jessa’s arm painfully.

  “But now you must wake up.”

  And it wasn’t Gudrun, it was Kari, his face white, blood clotted in his hair. He leaned against her and she struggled up from the floor, holding his arm. Ice cracked and splintered and fell from her hair and clothes; she felt cold, cold to the heart.

  “What happened? You look terrible!”

  “I hit my head,” he said quietly. “I can’t see properly.”

  Making him sit down, she stared around. The hall was dim, lit only with the weak night sun and a strange frosty glimmer. A film of ice lay over everything—over the floor, the tables, the sprawled bodies of the sleepers, over plates of food and upturned benches. Wine was frozen as it spilled; the fires were out, hard and black, and on the walls the tapestries were stiff, rigid folds.

  In the open doorway she could see where the mist had poured in and turned to ice; it had frozen in rivulets and glassy, bubbled streams, hard over tables and sleeping dogs. The high windows were sheeted with icicles.

  No wonder no one had been ready. Swords were frozen into scabbards; shields to their brackets on the walls. A woman lay nearby holding a child, both of them white with frost and barely breathing.

  Jessa shivered. “We’ve got to wake them! They’ll die otherwise.”

  He nodded, stood up and walked unsteadily to the fires. As she shook Hakon fiercely she heard the crackle and stir of the rune flames igniting behind her.

  It took a long time to wake everyone. Some were deep in the death sleep, almost lost in their dreams, their souls wandering far among spells. Brochael awoke with a jerk, gripping her shoulder; Skapti more slowly, raising his head from the table and looking upward, as if the roof was falling in.

  Gradually the hall thawed and filled with noise; murmurs grew to voices, angry, questioning; small children sobbed and the warmth from the fires set everything dripping and softening.

  “Get those doors shut!” Brochael ordered. One arm around Kari, he parted the boy’s hair. “That’s deep. Get me something, Hakon, to stop the blood.”

  “Where’s Wulfgar?” Jessa ran to the high table. It was overturned on its side. A knife had been flung in the confusion and was frozen, embedded in the wood. She scrambled over, tugging benches and chairs away, crunching the frozen straw underneath. She saw his arm first, flung around Signi, and with a yell to Skapti she tried to drag the heavy table off them, until men came and pushed her aside, heaving the boards away, crowding around the Jarl.

  They helped him sit up, breathless and sore.

  “What was it?” he managed.

  Jessa crouched. “It looks like Gudrun’s work. Some sort of spell. A few people are hurt, but none are dead. Are you all right?”

  He rubbed soot and ice from his face and nodded, turning to Signi. She lay cold on the straw, Skapti bending over her. The skald looked up anxiously. “I can’t wake her.”

  Wulfgar grabbed the girl’s shoulders, his hands crushing the fine silk. “Signi!” He shook her again.

  She lay still, still as death, but they saw she was breathing. Her face was clear, and her eyes opened, but there was no movement in her, no flicker of recognition.

  “Signi?” Wulfgar said again. “Are you all right?”

  When she still did not speak he lifted her, and Jessa righted a chair and they sat her in it, but her head lolled slowly to one side, the long hair swinging over her face.

  A woman began to cry in the crowd.

  Wulfgar chafed her hands. “Get her waiting women. Get Einar—”

  “It’s no use.”

  Kari’s voice was harsh, and they turned, surprised. He stood by the table, Brochael’s great arm around him.

  “What do you mean?” Wulfgar yelled.

  “She’s gone. Gudrun has taken her.”

  “Taken her!” The Jarl leaped up. “She’s not dead!”

  “Not even that. Taken her soul, taken it far away.” He put his hand to his head as if it ached, and for a moment Jessa thought he would fall, but he looked up again and nodded at the center of the hall. “Look. She left her mark.”

  The roof tree was split, from top to bottom.

  Carved deep in the wood, a white snake twisted, poison bubbling and hissing from its jaws.

  Three

  The gods hastened to their hall of judgment,

  Sat in council to discover who

  Had tainted all the air with corruption…

  They carried Signi upstairs and laid her on the brocaded bed in her room, with a warm fur cover over her and the fire crackling over the new logs. But nothing they did could wake her, no voice, no entreaty. She breathed shallowly, so slowly that it frightened them, and both the herb woman, Gerda, and the physician, Einar Grimsson, tried every remedy they knew, filling the chamber with
exotic scents of oils and unguents and charred wood. They even tried pricking her skin with sharp needles, but she never moved, though the red blood ran freely. Finally Wulfgar stopped it all and ordered them out.

  When Jessa tapped on the door a little later, he was still sitting on the edge of the bed, his wine-stained coat held tight around him.

  “Well?” he said, without turning.

  She came into the room, Skapti behind her.

  “Kari says it was some kind of supernatural attack.” The skald leaned against the shuttered window. “I think he’s right—there are no footprints outside, no horse tracks, no evidence of any armed force.”

  “But we saw them! Some of the men are wounded.”

  “I know, but what we saw were visions, Wulfgar, mind shapes, nothing that was real. Everyone seems to have seen different things. Some of the men may have fought one another, or against wraiths and shadows—none of us knew what was real. We were all spell blinded.”

  “Can you remember,” Jessa said slowly, “what you dreamed?”

  Skapti looked at her absently. “No. Not really. Except that it was full of pain.”

  Wulfgar got up suddenly and stormed around the room. “How could she do this! And why Signi? She’s never even met Gudrun! If the witch wanted revenge on us why didn’t she kill us all there in the hall?”

  Jessa stirred, on the bench by the fire. “This is what she said she would do.”

  They both stared at her blankly, so she dragged the loose brown hair from her cheek and said, “Don’t you remember the night we all saw her, in that strange vision? The night the creature came? She was standing in a snow-field. She said she wanted Kari to come to her, and he wouldn’t. Then she turned to you.”

  “I remember.” Wulfgar stared darkly across the room. “She said, ‘What you love best, that thing I will have.’ But I never thought it would be this.”

  He looked down at the girl on the bed. Her eyes were closed now, as if she slept.

  “Sit down,” Skapti said gently. “We need to think.”

  Wulfgar came over and slumped beside Jessa on the bench. All his usual lazy elegance had left him. He put his head in his hands and stared hopelessly into the fire. “What can we do?”

  Neither of them could answer.

  In the awkward silence they heard footsteps outside. Then Brochael opened the door and ushered Kari in.

  The boy looked frail; he went and gazed down at Signi, and they saw the deep raw cut across his forehead.

  “You should be in bed,” Wulfgar muttered.

  “That’s what I said,” Brochael growled.

  Ignoring them both, Kari came and sat by the blazing logs.

  “What do we do?” Wulfgar said again.

  Kari watched him bleakly. Then he said, “It’s only too clear what we have to do. Gudrun has made sure we have no choice. We have to go to her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s where Signi is.” He glanced again at the still shape on the bed. “That isn’t her, it’s just her body, her shell. It’s empty. She’s not there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve been into her mind, Wulfgar, and it’s blank!” He ran long fingers through his hair and then said, “Gudrun has done this to make me come to her.”

  “Come where?” Jessa asked, remembering her dream.

  “I don’t know. Far away.”

  “The land of the White People.”

  He shrugged. “Wherever that is.”

  Skapti came forward, intrigued. “They say it’s beyond the end of the world. A place of trolls, a giant haunt. They say the ice goes up to touch the sky. No one could live up there.”

  “The Snow-walkers live there. My people,” said Kari grimly.

  Wulfgar looked up suddenly. “All right. If you say that’s what we have to do to get her back, we’ll do it. I’ll take as many shiploads of men as I can get; a war band—”

  “A war band is no use,” Brochael said unexpectedly. His huge shadow loomed on the wall, the firelight warm on his tawny hair and beard. “The last Jarl sent a war band up there and no one ever came back.”

  “He’s right,” Kari said. “Besides, only I need to go.”

  There was an uproar of protest, everyone speaking at once until Brochael’s strong voice silenced them. “You can’t go! Even if you got there, she’d kill you!”

  “She could have killed me here.” Calmly Kari rubbed his forehead. “She doesn’t want that. She wants me alive.”

  “You’re not going!” Brochael was angry now and obstinate; his face was set.

  “There’s no alternative.” Kari looked at him hard. “Think of it, Brochael. Signi will just lie like that for months, for years, never speaking, never knowing any of us. We could all grow old and die, and she’d just be the same. Gudrun has plenty of time. Gudrun can wait for us.”

  Silent with pain, Wulfgar clenched his fingers.

  But stubbornly the big man shook his head. “It’s folly. She may wake; we don’t know.” He came over and crouched down, his strong hands on the boy’s shoulders. “And I didn’t bring you out of her prison for this. I don’t want you to go.”

  “I have to.” Kari’s eyes were clear and cold; he looked like Gudrun, that secret, tense look.

  Brochael stood up and stalked across the room to the door. He slammed his fist against the wood.

  “We’ve never quarreled before,” Kari said bleakly.

  “And we’re not now. If you go over the world’s edge, I’m going with you, and you know that well enough. But we’re walking into her trap. How could she steal the girl’s soul?”

  Kari was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “She’s learned how. She’s been powerful for too long.”

  Brochael’s scowl deepened. He glared at the poet. “You’re very quiet. You usually have some opinion.”

  The skald shrugged his thin shoulders. “I think Kari is right, we have no choice. And for a poet, such a journey is enticing. A dream road. They say there are lands of fire and ice up there. Someone would have to make the song of it, and it might as well be me.”

  “I won’t be left behind either,” Jessa said firmly. “Don’t even think it. I’m coming.”

  Her scowl made them all smile, even now. When Jessa made up her mind, they all knew nothing would shift her.

  Wulfgar stirred. “Then it’s settled. A small group of us—we’ll travel more quickly and secretly that way, and need less....”

  They glanced at one another, wondering who would say it. Finally Skapti did. “Not you,” he said quietly.

  Wulfgar stared at him.

  “Skapti’s right.” Jessa leaned forward. “You can’t come with us, Wulfgar. You know that. Your place is here.”

  “My place,” he breathed, “is with Signi.”

  “It isn’t. It can’t be.” She stood up and faced him. “Look. I’ll tell you this straight out, as no one else will. You’re the Jarl. You rule the land, keep the peace, settle the disputes. You order the trade, keep the frontiers, hunt down outlaws. The people chose you. You can’t turn your back on them. If you came with us and we were away months, even years, what would be here when we came back?” She smiled at him sadly. “Famine, blood feuds, cattle raiding. Black, burned farms. A wasteland.”

  He looked away from her, such a hard, desolate look as she had never seen on him before. The room was silent. Only the flames crackled over the logs. Then Wulfgar looked back at her bitterly. “I think I’ll never forgive you for this, Jessa.”

  “You will.” She sat down and tried to smile at him. “And think of it this way. When she wakes, it’s you she’ll want to see.”

  Four

  When Ymir lived, long ago.

  All the next day Wulfgar avoided everybody. He spent hours sitting in Signi’s room, watching her still face, or staring silently out of the window. At mealtimes he called for his horse and galloped away from the hold, riding hard for the hills.

  Jessa watched him go, l
eaning against the corner of the hall. She could guess how he felt; Wulfgar was impulsive, always the one to act. It would be very hard for him to stay behind.

  Over her shoulder, Skapti said, “The trouble with him is that he knows you were right.”

  “I wish I hadn’t said anything. I should have let him think it out for himself.”

  The skald laughed. “Always spilling your wisdom, little valkyrie.” He turned her gently. “Now let’s go and see Kari, because I think he wants us. One of those spirit birds of his just came and croaked at me. The creature almost ordered me in.”

  She walked along beside him gravely. “Things are different in the daylight, aren’t they?”

  “Lighter, you mean?”

  She thumped his arm. “You know what I mean. Last night, in all the confusion, everything seemed so unreal. Signi, those dreams, the cold. The idea of a journey seemed … exciting.” She looked down at the longships moored at the wharf. A chill breeze moved them. “Now it’s more frightening. It will be so cold up there. And no one has ever come back, and even if we get there…”

  “There’s Gudrun.”

  “Yes.” She looked up at him. “Do you think it’s the right thing to do?”

  “I don’t,” he said abruptly. “But I think it’s the only thing we can do.”

  “Skapti, you’re mad.”

  “I’m a poet,” he said, opening the door of the hall. “Pretty much the same thing.” He grinned at her, lopsided. “You’re not usually so wary.”

  “Dreams,” she said absently. “Those dreams. They hang around.”

  Kari was out of bed and sitting at a table near the fire, carving a small piece of bone into a flat disc. He looked up at them.

  “At last!”

  “Feeling better?” Jessa tipped his head sideways and examined the cut critically. “Brochael was worried about you. He said you’d lost a pint of blood and you were a thin, bloodless wraith and couldn’t afford it.”

  Kari shrugged. “He’s given me orders not to stir out. That’s why I sent the birds.”