Sorcery Rising

by Jude Fisher

  And Fabel had thrown back his head and laughed.

  ‘You’re a hero, lad!’ he’d cried. ‘All Istria will hear how you waded fearlessly into Falla’s fires to make sure with good Forent steel that the Eyran witch’s soul reached the Goddess’s judgement before her sorcery could save her.’

  ‘I killed her?’ Saro was aghast. His heart had thudded painfully against his ribs. His mind raced. He could never raise a weapon against Katla Aransen, surely there was some appalling error, a joke made in the worst of taste? ‘I took my sword to the Eyran girl?’

  ‘We all saw you, my lad,’ Fabel had said proudly. ‘It was a noble attempt, a hero’s act. They’re already making songs of it, I swear, even though it was in vain.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Sara’s heart had stopped its beating; he had felt it flickering in place like a hummingbird poised in the most delicate of motions. ‘In vain?’

  ‘The witch used her sorcery to escape the fires, or so they say.’

  ‘But how?’

  Fabel shrugged. ‘Who knows the ways of witches, Saro? Disappeared into the air, she did, leaving nothing behind but that outlandish shawl she had wrapped about her head.’

  The shawl. Somewhere in Saro’s smoke-hazed mind he recalled the shawl, a thing of many colours, glowing with a light of its own amidst the flames.

  ‘And how – how did I get here?’

  Fabel smiled fondly and his chest swelled with pride. ‘Ah, well, that was me, you see, lad. The smoke and fumes had done for you, it seemed: you’d fallen down on the edge of the pyre, would have been burned yourself had Haro Fortran and I not seen you there. We came in after you, dragged you out and I carried you back here. Amazing the strength you find in yourself under dire circumstances,’ he pronounced smugly. ‘Haro already has half a song written for you. “In battle’s heat, midst flame and fight / He drew his sword in blackest night / To give the witch to Falla’s might / Such was the act of a true knight.” Rather good, I thought. He’ll be delighted to hear you’ve come round, I know he’ll want to perform the rest of it for you.’

  ‘But I’m not a knight,’ was all Saro could say.

  It was inexplicable, bizarre; profoundly disturbing. He had turned his face to the pillow and wept, though for what, exactly, he could not have said. Fabel, embarrassed by such an unmanly display, had left silently.

  And that was all that Saro had managed to discover, from Fabel, or anyone else, to this day. He had been visited by fragments of nightmare, a dull, vague sense of failure and misery; and worst of all, he had been haunted again and again by the vision of Katla’s eyes, the searing hatred she had turned on him as he came toward her through the flames. For all the evidence, though, he would never accept that he had meant to kill her, or the men whose faces the nomad woman had shown him, for surely it was not in his nature. But no matter how strongly he urged himself to believe this, still more strongly the suspicion grew that although he had not intended their deaths, he was still, in some terrible, incomprehensible way, fully responsible for them.

  Twenty

  Homecoming

  But Katla Aransen had not died, though she lay as one dead.

  She had done so for day upon day as the Fulmar’s Gift cut its way home to Rockfall through the churning waters of the Northern Ocean and was aware of no more of the voyage than the fiery sting of salt on her face and the dreamlike sensation of falling endlessly through the peaks and troughs of that hostile sea. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she heard the voices of the crew as from a great distance, and to her they sounded like the cries of carrion birds over a battlefield, a battlefield from which she fled over and over in her dreams: on foot, on her hands and knees; lashed to a dark horse that galloped tirelessly through the night.

  No one, it seemed, could do anything to ease her from her fugue. They had put to sea in such haste that Aran had had no time to locate a healer, deciding rightly that to escape the killing grounds of the Moonfell Plain must be their foremost concern. Once out of sight of the fires, and beyond pursuit of the inferior Istrian vessels, he had bathed her burns himself – treating them with seawater and covering them gently with strips of his best linen tunic, which he had torn to pieces with shaking, furious hands, cursing his own failings all the while – but for the hurts he could not see, which were the deepest of all, he could do nothing.

  In the two weeks it took for the passage – weeks in which the winds blew steadily and the currents ran true – Katla’s hair began to grow back, a fiery red that graded through to the coarse and patchy black; an uncompromising colour that looked violent and ugly against the dark burns and scabs left by the fire. But the fact that it had appeared again even on the side where the fire had caught her – as if Erno’s shawl had truly acted as a magical shield between her body and the pyre’s worst destruction – offered hope. Every day Aran Aranson came and touched this new growth, the feel of it as soft as down against the callused pads of his fingers, as if it gave some sign if the inward health of his daughter, and prayed (for the first time in his life to the women’s deity, Feya) for a miracle.

  The miracle came on the day before they made landfall.

  Fent was sitting beside his twin, as he did between watches and chores, knotting twine and making nonsense verses and riddles. Today, he had made a new one for her:

  ‘I own no great hall

  But I do have a bed;

  I travel to and fro

  But I never leave home.

  I whisper and roar

  Yet I have no mouth

  My bounty is endless

  And so is my wrath.

  Silver streams through me

  And azure above

  I let you rest on my skin

  But death lies within.

  Who am I?’

  There was the smallest of movements from the huddled figure beside him and then, with the utmost clarity, a voice said: ‘The sea.’

  Surprised, Fent stared around. Halli was the closest to him of the crew, but his back was turned and he was in conversation with Kotil Gorson, the navigator, and there was no one else in hearing range. Frowning, he went back to his knots.

  A moment later the voice came again. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I said, “the sea”. Too easy – far too easy: the seabed and tides, the silver fish and the sky and all. Pity your rhyme scheme is so lacking. Old Ma Hallasen’s goat makes a better poet!’

  Looking down in astonishment, Fent found his sister’s eyes – as deep and indigo as the ocean itself – were wide open and fixed upon his face, glinting with amusement.

  He grinned from ear to ear, then let out an ear-splitting whoop: ‘Da! Da! She’s awake! Katla’s awake!’

  Such a fuss, Katla thought, over one who’d just been asleep. She tried to lever herself up into a sitting position and was utterly defeated by the effort it entailed. Sur’s nuts, such pain! And how odd, for Fent not to react to her gibe . . .

  Suddenly afraid, she reached up and tried to catch Fent by the sleeve, but her hand felt heavy and weak: she couldn’t feel her fingers. ‘How long have I slept?’

  Exhausted by even this slight exertion, she sank back down, her eyes closing involuntarily. Confused images of a frantic pursuit overtook her at once: a chase between tents, along a dark, moonlit strand in the shadow of a great rock; in and out of a crowd of people from which familiar faces loomed and then vanished in turn: Jenna; her father, Finn Larson, his red lips all wet with greed; Halli with the wood-adze raised above his head; Erno entwined with a strange dark woman; a blond-bearded Eyran man, his mouth open on a scream, the head of a spear protruding from the centre of his chest; and an Istrian coming at her, his sword raised, a strange, pale, silvery light burning in his eyes . . .

  With a sudden convulsion, she brought her right hand up in front of her face and stared at it. It was a bundle of cloth: a great, swaddled club of a thing.

  ‘What happened to me?’

  The thought came, swift and sure, that the man with the sword had cu
t off her hand, that this clumsy, bandaged stump was all that was left. She would never climb again; never beat the iron, never wrestle, never even feed or clothe herself easily . . . Made desperate by this certainty she started to tear at the cloth with her teeth.

  ‘Katla!’

  Distracted from her efforts, she looked up to find her father gazing down at her. Rather than his eyes – brilliant dark with unlikely tears – it was his stubbly beard, missing eyebrows and short, frizzled hair she noticed first.

  ‘What happened to you, Da – got too close to the cook-fire?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  Aran Aranson gave his daughter a lop-sided grin. It was, she thought with curiosity, the first time she had ever really looked at his mouth. In her just-awake state everything seemed preternaturally vivid, every detail a crucial piece of the world’s design. It was a good mouth for a man, she decided: the teeth sharp and white and as gappy as a dog’s, the lips clearly delineated and well-shaped, though the line of the upper lip was marred by a pale white scar which ran up towards his nose. She had never noticed it before.

  Aran watched Katla’s eyes scan his face. Unconsciously, his hand went up to the scar, his fingers tracing its unfamiliar line through the new stubble.

  ‘Where did you get that, Da?’

  His face fell solemn and rueful. ‘I wish I could say it was an honour-wound, won against the south; but I fear it was at my first Gathering, outside of Halbo. Some of the other Rockfall lads and I overdid it on the ale, got caught stealing another jar: I tripped and fell – and was too drunk to save myself from the rocky ground! Used to trim my beard as close as Fent does, but after that—’ He leaned forward and winked at her conspiratorially. ‘Told your mother I got it in a duel.’ He put his fingers to his lips. ‘No telling, now.’

  Katla felt tears come to her own eyes. ‘Did I lose my hand, Da? Tell me quickly—’

  Aran knelt beside her and began to peel the bandages away with a delicacy that was surprising in so large and powerful a man. As the strips came away, Katla could see the shape of a hand underneath; and then she could feel her fingers, stiff and sore, to be sure, but fingers nevertheless. But when the last piece of linen fell to the deck, what was revealed was an abomination: a hand and wrist swollen to twice their normal size, the skin niched and shiny-pink, where it was not black and scabbed; and where before her fingers had been long and thin and brown and hard, now they were fused together into one great red rut of burned flesh. Katla gasped. She stared at the monster on the end of her arm. This thing could surely not belong to her, could it? Was this her own hand, or were her eyes playing tricks on her? She blinked and stared; blinked and stared again.

  ‘What happened to me?’

  ‘They tried to burn you, my love. Even now, I’m not sure why – whether it was for the Rock, or the other nonsense.’ The end of the Gathering had become a blur of outraged fury to Aran: all he could recall was his daughter in jeopardy; the insupportable arrogance of the Istrians; their glee at the prospect of a burning.

  Katla frowned. ‘I remember climbing the Rock.’ At the very thought of it, her right hand started to itch and buzz. She pushed away the image, determined not to dwell on the horror of the injury. She had seen worse, she told herself, remembering young Bard’s dreadful scalding in the smithy the previous summer. His skin had fused too, but it had healed. Somewhat.

  ‘I cut your hair off for it,’ Aran said, running his palm over her scalp.

  ‘I climbed it again, Da: just before they caught me.’ It was coming back to her now, the sequence of events: running from the Gathering after Erno had kissed her (no, she corrected herself sternly, after you kissed Erno – charm or no charm, that was how it had been); climbing Sur’s Castle and feeling the power of the rock roaring its way up through her hands and arms; seeing the southern woman – shockingly naked – stumbling down the strand between the pavilions; and the dagger – her dagger, one of her best – the fine, pattern-welding of the blade as sure a trademark as if she’d etched her name on it – all stippled and smeared with blood.

  She looked around – saw Halli and Fent behind their father, both smiling with relief; beyond them, Gar and Mord, Kotil Gorson, Ham the tillerman. Turning toward the bow, she could make out a knot of a dozen oarsmen playing knucklebones, and while there were several blond heads among the dozen bent over the sheep’s knuckles, none were quite as blond as Erno—

  ‘Where’s Erno, Da? And the girl?’

  ‘What girl?’ Aran asked sharply.

  ‘Erno was helping me run away rather than be betrothed to Finn Larson,’ she said simply, and watched as her father’s face clouded. ‘Down on the strand we came upon an Istrian woman, terrified for her life; someone had attacked her, she said, and she thought she had killed him. I made Erno rescue her, told him to get her safely away in a boat, for she feared they would burn her for it.’ Her brow knitted; then she grinned, wolfish and wild, a flash of the old Katla. ‘But instead they tried to burn me, didn’t they? I remember bits of it now; getting caught by the guards, the Istrian man appearing at the Gathering, blood all over, and such a liar; and the fire and such – but what happened to Erno, and Tor?’

  ‘Erno I know nothing about. Tor—’ Aran hung his head. He would have the hard task of telling Ella Stensen how her beloved, if wayward, son had perished.

  Halli cut in, his jaw grim, his eyes hooded. He looked, Katla thought, as if he had aged ten years since they had left home. ‘Tor died in the battle, trying to save you from the Istrians. Took a spear in the back.’

  The image of the blond man with the head of a spear bursting obscenely through his chest flickered for a moment through her head. She closed her eyes. Tor Leeson, dying to save her from the burning. Such a brute – whoever would have thought it? And at once felt ashamed for her dismissive judgement. Brutes make good heroes, under the right circumstances, she thought. It was a brave death, and I was the cause of it. I’ll make an offering to Sur when we’re back home in Rockfall, pray that his soul is safely in the Great Howe. But dying a land-death, would he be accepted into Sur’s ocean hall to join the heroes’ feast? Or would his soul be carried through the rock veins of the world, into the heart of the holy mountain, wherever that might be? The intricacies of these matters had not previously given her much pause for thought: death-in-battle had never touched her so closely before now. Everyone knew that when they died, they became one with the earth and sea; clay for Sur to remould into whatever form he most required; but those who died at sea or in battle he reserved for himself, surrounding himself with the soldiers and the sailors he would need for the great conflict at the end of the world, when he and his fellow deities – the Snowland Wolf and the She-Bear – would do battle with the monsters of the world – the Dragon of Wen, the Fire Cat and the Serpent – to decide the final outcome. All such had seemed merely entertaining stories, dressed with telling details and embroidered with fine jokes and aphorisms: tales for children to memorise and invent variations for; songs for travelling bards to entertain them all at High Feast. Now, she realised, they gave you a framework for your life, and your death: like the wooden frames that the women used for keeping the cloth taut when making their tapestries, keeping the picture in one place, stopping it all from sliding into a chaos of tangled wool . . .

  ‘I’m sorry he died,’ she said softly. ‘And I hope Erno got the poor woman away.’

  Aran shook his head. ‘I hope he’s made it onto one of the other ships,’ he said grimly. ‘I don’t give much for his chances if he’s caught in a stolen boat with a naked Istrian woman.’

  ‘Oh, she wasn’t naked!’ Despite everything, Katla’s laugh rang out. Shaking off her father’s helping hand, she pushed herself up into a half-sitting position until her head and shoulders were wedged up against the lower plank of the gunwale. ‘I gave her my handfasting dress.’

  Fent snorted. ‘Probably suits her a lot better than it did you, troll-sister.’

  Katla’s good hand
snaked out and caught him a sharp jab in the kidneys that doubled him up, more out of surprise than pain.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Never anger a sleeping troll, or one that’s just woken up.’

  During the next few hours Katla discovered the full extent of her injuries. Where the shawl had not reached, her boots had protected her feet and legs from the worst of the flames, but even so, she found charred and reddened patches all over her legs where the leather had blistered away, some as small as pennywort, others the size of her palm. Beyond the club of her hand, her right arm had lost the top layer of skin from shoulder to elbow, but Katla had always healed quickly, and new skin was already beginning to grow back, tight and glistening, around the scabs. Even so, the whole limb was stiff and excruciatingly painful, as if the damage went far deeper than was apparent, so that even the touch of fresh linen upon it could make her shout – except for an area of her upper arm, where a band of skin on the outside of her biceps remained glowing and unsullied, an area which did not hurt even when prodded. Katla knew this because she had poked and pinched at it unmercifully ever since discovering this odd fact. If anything, it looked healthier and smoother than it ever had before. One small mercy, at least, she thought. I’ll have skin as rough and scaly as a dragon’s all up and down my left side, except for the softest, most beautiful skin in Eyra on my upper arm. ‘I shall start a new fashion,’ she announced to Fent, when he remarked on it. ‘By cutting a large hole in all my tunic-sleeves and showing only this patch of bare skin. Like the Istrian women and their mouths.’

  ‘Ah, indeed,’ Fent grinned appreciatively. ‘Incredibly seductive, being able to see nothing of them but those painted lips. Tor said—’ He stopped suddenly. ‘Damn.’