by K. C. Julius
The boys spun around to see Old Snorri leaning on his stave.
The old man pulled a small knife from the folds of his dusty cloak, harvested the bloodteeth, and carefully wrapped them in a cloth, which he returned to his pocket, along with the knife. “They’re quite rare, actually. I imagine your mother might find a use for them, Fynn, but I’ll dry them for her first.”
Fynn’s mother was known for her healing tonics and remedies. A goodly number of Restarians came furtively to the manor of “the yarl’s woman”—as she was called—when they were in need of a cure. And Old Snorri stopped by frequently to share the whereabouts of wild herbs, or to drop off a handful of restorative berries. He was one of the few in town who treated Mamma with unfailing respect.
“That’s very kind of you,” Fynn said politely, although he wondered what ailment the gruesome mushrooms might treat.
Old Snorri peered at the boys as if seeing them for the first time. “What are you two doing here?”
Einar looked as if he might bolt, and Fynn would be on his heels if he did. Although the Grove wasn’t strictly forbidden, it was a sacred place. Loitering here without purpose would be frowned upon.
Fortunately, Old Snorri seemed not to require an answer to his question. He shuffled to one of the bordering stone benches and lowered himself onto it. “I used to come here often as a boy myself. The Grove brought me great comfort after my father died on a raid.”
Fynn tried to imagine the white-haired old man as a boy. That must have been long, long ago.
“In those days,” said Old Snorri, “we lived up on the hill.”
Fynn felt Einar’s shoulder bump companionably against his own as the two boys settled at the old man’s feet.
The thread of a story had been drawn.
Chapter 3
“Our longhouse was west of where you live now, Fynn Aetheorsen,” Old Snorri began, and then gave a hearty laugh. “But we didn’t dwell in a fine manor like you and your mother, you can be sure of that. Ours was a ramshackle affair, jutting out of the earth and tunneling into it, so that most rooms received no sunlight. Still, it was warm in winter and cool in the long days of summer.
“I was the youngest in my family and the only boy. You can imagine what that was like.”
Beside Fynn, Einar nodded sympathetically. He too was a lone son, and the last of his parents’ children. “How many sisters did you have?”
“Too many!” Old Snorri chortled. “My mother gave birth to fifteen daughters before I finally saw the light of day.”
Einar whistled, and Fynn knew his friend was feeling lucky that he had only three older sisters to needle him.
“My father held a huge banquet in honor of my birth,” recalled the old man. “From my first memories, I was ever by his side. When I showed a talent for poetry and tales, he convinced the yarl to take me to sea as the ship’s skald. I think it made my sisters quite jealous.”
“What happened to your house?” Fynn asked, for theirs was the only one now on the hillside.
Old Snorri’s shaggy brows drew together. “It slipped down the hill in heavy run-off during a spring melt. Luckily, we’d had warning—the porch shifted for days before the landslide—and had abandoned it. But if it had happened suddenly in the night…” He shuddered. “Still, it was a harbinger of tragedy.
“As I said, the old yarl had agreed to make me his skald, but I fell ill before my maiden voyage in that honorable role. The fleet sailed without me, and when it returned from raiding, our father did not come back with it.” A shadow crossed the tale-weaver’s face. “According to my uncle, he disappeared while they were ranging over newly seized territory in Gral. They were far inland, which is never a hospitable place for seafarers, when they were attacked by a battalion of local knights. Our men were vastly outnumbered but still managed to fight their way through and retreat toward the coast. In the confusion of battle, my father went missing. He was assumed dead.”
Einar and Fynn exchanged a stricken look. Every Helgrin had relatives—fathers and sons, husbands and brothers—who’d been killed in the pursuit of war. Einar’s uncle had died in a shipwreck just two years ago, and Fynn’s own father had lost a brother long before Fynn was born. But for a Helgrin warrior to ascend to Cloud Mountain, his body must either be cast into the sea, burned on a pyre, or—in the case of a yarl—sent off in a boat set alight. To be left on a battlefield in a foreign land… That condemned a man’s soul to wander there for all eternity.
“Of course,” Old Snorri continued, “this terrible news compounded our grief, as it meant we were denied even the small comfort of knowing we would be reunited with our father in the afterlife. My mother and sisters wailed and tore their clothes and dusted their unbound hair with ash for forty days.
“But after that, they went about their lives as if nothing had changed.”
The old man looked past them to where Wurl rose majestically to the heavens. “There are no such grief rituals for a young boy. I was expected to bear it like a Helgrin warrior. But this I was not; I was only fourteen years old.”
“I should be very sad if ever I lost my father,” said Fynn, his heart aching at the thought.
“Yes,” agreed the tale-weaver, “you would be. Especially if you knew his spirit would never be at rest. I spent my nights crying into my pillow while my sisters and mother slept. And my days were often passed here, beneath Wurl’s branches. It was the great tree that inspired me to try to find a way to lay my father’s spirit to rest.
“Thus I decided,” Old Snorri said matter-of-factly, “that I would climb to the Sky Hall and ask Tuon, Lord of Souls, to help my father join his ancestors there.”
“What?” Einar clapped his hand belatedly over his mouth.
Fynn followed Old Snorri’s gaze to the huge oak. “But weren’t you afraid you’d fall?” he said. “Or that you wouldn’t be able to come back? That you would…”
“Die?” The old man chuckled softly. “I suppose I was, on some level, but once I had the idea in my mind, I worried it like a hound with a bone. Would you boys not dare the same for your own fathers’ eternal peace?”
Fynn and Einar nodded in unison.
“So you’ve been to the Sky Hall, Old Snorri?” Einar asked, his eyes fired with awe.
“In a manner of speaking, I have, but I didn’t arrive there by climbing Wurl.”
“Then… then how?” Fynn asked.
“At first, I did try to climb Wurl. Many times I tried. But each attempt ended with bleeding palms, broken nails, and skinned knees, not to mention the bruises I suffered when I fell. The truth is, I never even made it past the first branch, and it wasn’t so far from the ground in those days. So.” Old Snorri shifted his gaze between the two boys. “How did I get to Cloud Mountain?”
Fynn couldn’t imagine, and Einar remained silent as well.
Old Snorri reached into his pocket and pulled out the cloth in which he’d wrapped the seeping fungi. “I ate one of these.”
Einar gasped. “And it poisoned you?”
Old Snorri poked at the boy with his stave. “I’m no ghost, Einar Mortensen! I’m as alive as either of you young cubs! Or nearly, I’d say.” His expression sobered. “The bloodteeth are indeed poisonous, if too many are consumed, and there’s no accurate way to determine what will be a killing dose. But I knew from my sister Freya, who was skilled in herb lore, that bloodteeth are said to cast dreams. If a small quantity is eaten, one might travel in his sleep. And I so wanted to bring my father’s spirit to rest, I decided, despite the risk, to dream for him.”
The tale-weaver shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his own audacity.
“This was a treacherous path to tread. According to Freya, for every survivor who ate a bloodtooth, two perished. I dared not ask her more about them, for fear of rousing her suspicions. But as the youngest, I was often in her care while she dried her herbs and
ground her pastes, and it proved easy enough to slip a few of the dried morsels into my pocket while she worked.”
“How many did you eat?” asked Einar.
The old man leaned toward them with an air of conspiracy. “I decided to nibble half of a cap. Once I had, I fell into a deep sleep, right here beneath Wurl. Leh herself came to me. She flew me up to Cloud Mountain on her back, and took me straight into the great Sky Hall. And what a marvel it was to behold!”
The old man’s eyes were lit with remembered pleasure. “Open to the stars, the vast chamber was filled with treasure of gold and silver. The mighty axes, hammers, and swords of the gods and goddesses decorated its walls, and longboats drifted in the air, their sails billowing without wind. And seated at great oaken tables were the fabled heroes of old, feasting and drinking and singing the stirring ballads of war. Gauter Ironbreast, Crainbein Helthersen, and all the fiercest warriors of yore! I even glimpsed Olka the Maiden, as beautiful as she was bold, her golden hair as bright as the sword she brandished, her eyes luminous as grey pearls.”
Fynn’s heart leapt as he envisioned the great spirit owl swooping through the hall of the gods.
“But I sought another, and I did not pause until I found him. The Lord Tuon himself.”
It was hard to believe Old Snorri had been in the presence of the Lord of Souls and lived to tell of it. Fynn inched closer to Einar.
“I trembled before him,” confessed the tale-weaver, “for he was terrible to behold. His eyes were like ice in winter and his lashes were frosted with rime. Gerithan, his legendary sword, hung at his side, and he grasped his hammer, Vron, in his mighty fist. Upon his head sat his silver helm, from which an enormous rack of antlers spanned. As he towered over me, I felt as insignificant as a mote of dust. Yet somehow, I found my voice.
“‘Great Tuon,’ I said, bowing low. ‘I’ve come for the love of my father, who fell in heathen lands. I ask that you bring him to rest here on Cloud Mountain, so that he may dwell in the Sky Hall with his ancestors, where my mother, sisters, and I might meet him again one day.’
“‘Foolish boy!’ the great lord replied, in a voice like thunder. I feared he would strike me dead then and there. ‘Foolish,’ he repeated, ‘but brave as well—a mere mortal child venturing into the Sky Hall. You do your father great honor in risking your life for the peace of his soul. Nevertheless, it is not within my power to grant your request.’
“His words smote my heart, but Tuon had not finished. ‘It is not in my power,’ he repeated, ‘but it is within yours.’
“I fell to my knees upon hearing this. ‘Tell me, Lord Tuon, what must I do?’
“‘You must go alone to the land where your father fell, and where his spirit still roams. There build a great fire. When it blazes high, call your father’s name three times and bid his soul to enter the flames. Only in this way can he ascend to Cloud Mountain.’
“And with that, the Lord of Souls turned away from me.
“Now remember, I was just a lad—not much older than yourselves. I knew there was no way I could travel alone to Gral and find the place my father had died. But before I could call after Tuon to tell him this, the dream began to unravel.”
Old Snorri paused then, and stared off into the distance. “When I awoke, I was filled with despair. I had made it up to Cloud Mountain, but I’d failed my father all the same. It wasn’t until a few sorrow-filled days later that I suddenly realized how to achieve what Tuon had demanded of me. I had simply to use the bloodteeth once more to travel to where my father had been slain.”
Even though it was evident that Old Snorri had survived, Fynn felt his blood run cold.
The tale-teller seemed to have read his thoughts. “To eat the fungus once is perilous. But twice?” He shook his head. “This was terribly reckless, for the poison accumulates in the blood and is not dispelled over time.
“I sat under Wurl for long hours, cradling a single mushroom in my hand, torn between serving my father and sparing my own young life. In the end, duty and my desire to see him again won out.
“I ate another half of a cap.
“This time, Leh did not come for me. Instead I drifted alone over a ravaged plain and knew I was no longer in Helgrinia. These fields had been put to the torch, and the acrid odor of smoke mingled with the sweet stench of decay. The rotting corpses of our people were strewn upon the blackened soil—for the Gralians had taken their own dead away—and great black birds with ragged crests tore at the carrion. Their raucous calls and flapping wings were all that broke the eerie silence.
“Gagging from the smell, I dragged wooden shields and staves out from under the fallen to build a pyre, all the while fearing that at any moment my dream would unravel and I would leave with my task undone. But once again my luck held, and when the flames were leaping high above my head, I called my father’s name three times.”
The old man’s expression grew grim and his gnarled fingers whitened on his staff. When he spoke again, it was in a voice choked with pain. “Across the plain, I saw a ghastly figure slowly rise, his face obscured by crusted blood and flies. He lurched forward on one leg, dragging the other, shattered and twisted, behind him. Pillagers had stripped him of any ornament that might have identified him, but I recognized him by his war vest. The axe that had cleaved his shoulder down to his chest was still lodged there, making his hewn leather armor unworthy of plunder.
“This was indeed the corpse of my father.
“Torn between fleeing this specter and running to him, in the end I did neither. Instead I bowed low as the gruesome figure approached, and pointing with a trembling hand, I bade him enter the fire and rise to Cloud Mountain.”
The old man slumped forward and bent his head. “Just as my father stepped into the flames, my dream began to unravel.”
“You did it!” cried Fynn, jumping up and laying his hand on Old Snorri’s stooped shoulder. “You rescued your father’s soul! Why have I never heard this tale of valor before? Surely it should be sung in all the Helgrin lands!”
Old Snorri shook his head. “You have not heard this tale before because until this moment, I have told it to no one.”
“But why?” Einar asked.
The tale-weaver sighed. “Because I don’t know for certain my father ascended to the Sky Hall. My dream ended too soon. And I won’t know until I ascend Cloud Mountain myself.” A small smile curled his thin lips. “At least it won’t be too much longer now.”
How awful to bear such grief and uncertainty for so long, Fynn thought. It made him wonder if others he knew had woes they hid from the world as well. It was a sobering thought.
“You’ve kept it a secret all these years,” he said softly. “What made you decide to tell us?”
The old man lifted his thin shoulders. “I don’t rightly know. Perhaps the bloodteeth prompted me… and your choosing this day to visit the Grove.”
“What’s special about today?” said Einar. “The Midsommer fest doesn’t start until tomorrow.”
Old Snorri leaned back, his staff planted before him. “It was on this day, all those years ago, that I last laid eyes on my father. Ever since, each year at this time, I have come here to pray for his soul.”
He cleared his throat noisily, then rubbed his sleeve across his eyes. “I would ask that this story remain between us.”
Fynn pulled Einar up and gave him a meaningful look, then turned back to the old man. “Of course,” Fynn promised. “We’re honored that you shared it with us. We’ll leave you now to your prayers.”
* * *
Back in town, Fynn wandered aimlessly through the tables that had been set up for the women and their thralls to string the Midsommer garlands, which would festoon every window and door in Restaria before nightfall. His mind was still occupied with Snorri’s tale as he marveled at the revelation that it was possible to travel through dreams, and he wondere
d if he would have had the same measure of courage as the old man.
So caught up was he in his thoughts that he failed to notice the woman standing in his path. Her angry cry as he collided with her snapped him out of his reverie, and he reeled back just in time to avoid her punishing blow.
It was Wylda, his father’s wife.
“How dare you!” hissed the yarla. Her low voice held even more venom than if she’d shrieked at him.
“I… I beg your pardon,” said Fynn. “I… I didn’t see you there.”
Quick as a whip’s lash, Wylda snatched up his wrist and yanked him forward so that her pendulous breasts heaved mere inches from his nose. “You think because the yarl has returned, you can insult me? That while he’s with your whore of a mother, you’re free to show me this disrespect?”
Anger and fear warred within him. “I meant you no disrespect, Yarla,” he said, loudly enough so the onlookers could hear. “I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. I’m… I’m sorry.”
Her cruel grip did not ease. He knew his wrist would soon be blue with bruising, but he was determined not to give the evil woman the pleasure of hearing him plead for her to let go.
As if reading his thoughts, Wylda tightened her hold. “You’ll pay attention before long,” she threatened, “when the Drinnglennin slut wears the iron collar she deserves! I’d put one on you as well, bastard, if the blood of my husband didn’t run through your cursed veins.” She leaned closer, and he smelled a faint decay on her breath. “Mark my words,” she hissed, shaking him. “You’ll both rue the day that noita bewitched Aetheor.”
Then she dropped his arm and spun on her thralls. “Get back to your work!” she snarled.
As Fynn hurried past the yarla, he made himself meet the stares of the other women. While a few looked sympathetic, most of their faces reflected a degree of satisfaction, as though he had only gotten his due.
Better me than my mother, he thought, to console himself. But the crazed look in Wylda’s eyes when she’d called Mamma a noita—a sorceress of dark magic—was a new worry.