“It’s good you’re out!” Inge smiled, standing to the side so that Iri and Kerling could get inside.
Kerling kept his eyes to the floor, his face twisted up in pain and sweat beading at his hairline. One pant leg was tied up to the knee, where the lower half of his leg was missing. I’d seen it before. Probably an axe or a fall that crushed the bones. It could have even been an infection.
The woman came through the door and stood behind Kerling. When her hands fell on his shoulders, he shrugged her off, scooting to the edge of the bench and lifting his amputated leg up to rest on the seat. Inge sat beside him, slowly untying the pant leg, and she pushed it back to reveal red, swollen skin, puckered together in zigzagging rows of stitching.
“Compress, Iri.” She leaned in closer to inspect the wound as Iri got to work, pulling the kettle from the fire and opening a large wooden box of herbs on the shelf.
“How are you feeling?” She looked up into Kerling’s face.
He met her eyes, gripping the sides of his leg with his fists. “Like half a man.”
Inge looked up to Gyda, whose face was cast to the floor. “I don’t know how you survived that wound. Thora has favored you.”
Kerling stared into the fire. “Or cursed me.”
Iri pulled the cloth from the bowl of steaming water, looking at Kerling. Beside him, Gyda looked at me. Her furious eyes were filled with tears, her teeth set on edge. I took the unfolded cloths from the other end of the table and sat beside the fire, folding them one at a time and setting them into my lap with Gyda’s stare still burning into me.
Iri dressed Kerling’s leg in a fresh bandage and helped him outside. When they were through the door, Inge put her hands on Gyda’s belly, pressing gently. “It will be soon.”
Gyda didn’t answer, but her face fell, the corners of her mouth turning down.
“I’ll be with you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Inge smiled.
But that wasn’t true and if I knew it, then Gyda knew it too. A woman was as likely to die in childbirth as she was to die in battle. And Gyda looked as if she’d seen a fight before.
“He doesn’t want the baby anymore,” she whispered.
Inge sighed. “Why do you think that?”
Gyda’s hands went to the curve beneath her belly. “He doesn’t want anything anymore.”
Inge looked outside, to where Kerling and Iri were making their way back to the house across the path. Before she could speak, Gyda turned and left, following after them.
Inge stood at the door, watching her. The strain in her eyes reached down to the straight line of her mouth. Her fingers were coiled around each other. I’d seen it happen before in Hylli, the wounded losing their will to live. She probably had too.
Inge cleared her throat. “Have you crushed garlic before?” She rolled up the sleeves of her dress and closed the door.
“A little,” I answered. “For cooking.” I watched her pull an entire crate full of the little white bulbs from the shelf on the wall.
She set a large stone pestle and mortar on the table in front of me. “We’ll peel and crush them. Then we’ll bottle it all.” When she placed an iron knife on the table, my hand twitched at my side. “I’ll peel it, you crush it.” She smirked. She knew better than to give me a knife. “How many years are you, Eelyn?”
I tried to read her, but her eyes were on her work. It was the first time she’d said my name. I didn’t like it. “Seventeen.”
“Do you have family in Hylli? That’s where you’re from, right? Hylli?”
I nodded, studying her. How did she know where I was from? I know Iri didn’t tell her. “Only my father.”
She was quiet for a few minutes and when the sharp, acrid smell of the garlic began to fill the house, she stood and went to the door, propping it back open to let the air in.
“Did you know that Iri is Aska?” she asked, sitting back down.
I picked up a handful of the garlic cloves and set it into the pestle, trying to hear what she wasn’t saying. What was carefully buried beneath the words.
“He and Fiske nearly killed each other five years ago.”
My eyes snapped up from the table.
“It was the last fighting season. They were fighting and fell over the edge of a deep trench.”
I swallowed, blinking.
“Fiske broke a leg and an arm and Iri’s side was cut open from the blade of Fiske’s sword. My husband searched for Fiske for two days before he finally found him. He thought he was dead.” She sucked in a breath. “But he wanted to burn his body. So, he scaled down the wall of the trench and, when he reached him, he saw that Fiske was alive.” Her eyes lifted to mine. “So was the boy he’d been fighting. Just barely. And Fiske wouldn’t leave Iri behind. He begged his father to save his life.” She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “Iri was so badly wounded that no one thought he would live.”
I tried to clear my eyes of the burn that was gathering there. “How did you save him?”
She set the knife down onto the table and looked at me. “They brought him in, and the cut was so deep that his organs were coming through the opening of the wound. I was sure he would die. But then he didn’t. Somehow, the skin and the muscle were cut but his organs and arteries remained intact. I stitched him up and it took a long time, but he healed. And as he healed, Fiske healed.”
“So, why isn’t he a dýr?” I asked. The sharp words crossed the table between us.
She paused again. “He was going to be. But he was so injured that we had to keep him here, in our home, and care for him day and night. And I’m not sure how it happened, but he became a part of our family. Fiske’s love for Iri became ours.” Her eyes shined again.
“So Iri is Riki now?”
She nodded. “He is. Iri left his past behind. It took time, but the Riki accepted him. The gods are funny that way.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, sometimes they make families in peculiar ways.” She stood, pulling more garlic from the crate. “Fjotra,” she said, under her breath.
“Fjotra is the blood bond. They aren’t brothers,” I corrected her.
“That’s munstrǫnd fjotra. Sál fjotra is a bond between souls.”
I stared at her.
“This kind of bond is formed when a soul is broken. It’s formed through pain, loss, and heartbreak. They’re bound by something deeper than we can see. And that made Iri family.”
I stopped trying to hold back the tears that were waiting to fall. Because I knew exactly what she was talking about. It was what I had with Mýra. A tether born of tears.
Iri and Inge didn’t share blood, but Iri looked at Inge as if she were his mother. She felt like he was her son. And I didn’t need to ask her how she’d been able to love him. Iri was pure of heart in a way that I had never been. And he was brave. Not afraid to love or give of himself. People had always been drawn to him and I had been proud to be his sister. For the same reasons that Inge loved him.
A shadow came through the door and I looked up to see Runa coming in with a cloak pulled up over her head. She looked at me a little warily as she set a small bundle of wood onto the table. I recognized it immediately—sacred wood. My hands stilled on the mortar before I dropped my eyes back down to the garlic, remembering the way she touched Iri at Adalgildi. The way she looked up into his face, her cheeks pink and her eyes warm.
She took a basket of sage from the table and washed the branches in a bowl of water. When she was through, she dried them with a cloth carefully and tied bunches of them together, hanging them on the wall beside the fire.
“What’s all of this for?” I asked.
“Healing,” Runa answered. “The garlic is for illness, wounds—that sort of thing. The sage is used for skin, teeth, stomach…”
“And those?” I nodded to the bundle of raspberry vines. All the berries were gone.
“They’re for Gyda. We’ll use it when the baby comes.
” She tightened the twine on another bundle of sage and hung it. “Do you have a healer in Hylli?”
I nodded, not meeting her eyes.
“I’ve been apprenticing with Inge for almost four years.”
“She’s ready to be on her own.” Inge smiled proudly.
Runa blushed. When she turned toward the fire, I reached up slowly to take a piece of the sacred wood from the table.
“We need more jars.” Inge sighed.
I dropped my hand back into my lap.
“I’ll be right back.”
I went back to grinding the garlic, still keeping my arm pulled into my side so I didn’t have to use the joint.
“So, you and Iri are…” I wasn’t sure what word to use.
“Yes.” But the sweetness was missing from her voice. She was ready to defend herself.
“And that’s why he…”
“Maybe it was part of it. I don’t know.”
I leaned onto the table, looking at her. “Then why aren’t you married?”
“We will be. My father wanted to wait until he was back from Aurvanger.” Her voice changed, the words finding a softer tone. “He was going to tell you.”
I went back to work. I didn’t want to know what Iri planned to do. He’d left. He’d taken a new family, and he didn’t owe me anything anymore.
EIGHTEEN
A piece of sacred wood and a small, dull carving tool sat together beside my bed the next morning. Inge must have seen me try to take it and put them there. It wasn’t the first time I realized that she saw more than she seemed to.
I sat beside the garden with my legs crossed, watching thin curling strips of wood peel up off the crude block as I dragged the carving tool over it. The shavings fell down onto the ground in front of me, scattered on top of the snow. Fiske stood with Halvard on the side of the house, watching him practice his axe throw. He’d kept to himself since Adalgildi, tending to his duties in a manner that I was beginning to recognize as his. He hung in the shadows, like he wasn’t really there, save for the presence that followed him. It was thick and heavy, silent but alive. And it seemed to be everywhere. All the time.
Fiske stood back, watching Halvard closely as he stepped forward, letting the axe in his hand sink down behind his head and then snapping his arm forward and letting it fly.
It hit the trunk of a pine tree with a loud pop. The sound was so familiar that it tugged at the tangled knot of memories inside of me. I bit down on my lip, watching him as he repeated the throw over and over, Fiske quietly instructing him until he moved to the other hand. I could tell by the way he gripped it that it wasn’t as strong.
Halvard sighed, hanging his head back as the axe’s handle hit the tree with a ping, falling to the ground.
“Again,” Fiske ordered, walking out to the tree and retrieving it.
Again.
Iri’s voice echoed in my mind.
Again, Eelyn.
Halvard shook out his arms before he lifted it again, but he didn’t argue. His elbow sunk forward, sending the axe out. It missed, this time the blade hitting at an angle and sliding to the left.
Fiske walked back to him with the axe in his hand, his eyes looking over my head to something behind me. I turned to see Gyda standing across the path. Her long black hair was braided over each shoulder, the ends trailing down to where her hands wrapped around her swollen belly. She stared at me, her eyes narrowing with the same hatred they’d held the day before.
I brushed the wood shavings from my lap, taking the hooked metal over the top of the wood to round it out. The idol my father had of my mother was so worn that the wood had turned a dark, slick gray. He held it in his calloused hands every night, whispering prayers for my mother’s soul, and I’d do the same for Iri. Then we’d switch, kneeling in the fire-lit dark of our home on the fjord. I lifted the wood to my nose and breathed in the crisp, raw scent of it. I’d always believed my mother’s soul made it to Sólbjǫrg. That she and Iri were together there.
Fiske made Halvard throw the axe until he hit his mark three times in a row and when he finally dismissed him, Halvard ran to me, sliding on the snow and landing on the ground beside me. His knees touched mine as he leaned forward, inspecting the idol.
“Is it your brother? The one who died?” His thick eyelashes flickered as he looked up at me. His eyes were as blue as Fiske’s, but different. Dark. Like a storm.
“My mother.” I handed it to him and watched him turn it over in his hands gently.
He smiled.
“What?”
He shrugged, handing it back to me. “I like it.”
“Don’t you have one for your father?”
He shook his head, pulling his mouth to the side of his face.
“Why not?”
“It’s not our way,” Fiske interrupted, coming to stand over us.
My eyes dropped back down to the half-finished idol. I had the head and shoulders done but the rest was still just a block of wood. Halvard reached into his vest and pulled something into his hand. When he opened it, a round, flat stone sat in the center of his palm. It was etched with words I couldn’t read, the same as the one I’d seen Iri tuck into his vest before Adalgildi.
“What does it say?”
“Ala sál. Soul bearer,” he said, proudly. “It’s my taufr.”
I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. “What is it?”
“It protects me.”
“How?”
“You give it to someone you want to protect. It tells the gods that you bear another’s soul. My mother made it for me.”
Fiske’s shadow slipped over me as he headed toward the house. He took the net from where it hung on an iron hook. He was going to the river.
“I—” It slipped out just as he stepped onto the path and I clamped my mouth closed, clenching my fist around the idol in my hand.
But he was already looking at me, turned with the net swinging beside his leg. “What is it?” The words were missing the anger they usually held.
I bit my lip again. “I can help you with the fish.”
He looked surprised and for a moment, I thought maybe he could see through me. That maybe he knew what I was up to. His weight shifted back and he looked at the ground before his gaze rose to the trees. His hands twisted in the net. “Alright.”
Halvard groaned, falling back from where he sat and landing backward in the snow with his arms out wide around him.
“Come with us.” I stood up off the ground and tucked the idol into my vest.
“I have to stay for Gyda. In case she has the baby.” His eyes moved to her house, but she was gone.
I gave his leg a soft kick with my boot and when he looked at me, I grinned. I pulled the hood up on my cloak and followed after Fiske, trying to catch up to him.
He didn’t slow for me. I shortened my strides as I reached him, staying on his heels as the path pulled up out of the village and the trees multiplied. The pines were so tall that I couldn’t see the tops. They moved in the wind, the branches of each tree bleeding into one another as the trunks creaked. I kept my eyes up instead of down, tracing the shape of the trees and marking a path in my mind that I would recognize even in deep snow.
The path snaked through the forest until I could hear the river. We came up over the ridge to see it carved into the ground like a vein under the skin. It rushed past, the spray of it rising up into the air around us, and I let my hood fall back, studying it. It wound down the slope, crossing in front of us and disappearing. The water had to make it to the sea eventually. If I followed it, it would take me down the mountain and into the valley.
“It’s not the way down,” Fiske said beside me and my eyes snapped up. “Try if you want to, but you won’t make it.”
I looked back to the water. He had to be lying. The river had to lead down the mountain.
He walked down the bank until he reached two large flat stones in the water and he made his way across. I picked up my cloak and steppe
d carefully as the water roared past. When I made it to the second stone, he reached for me and I took his hand as I jumped, landing in the deeper snow on the other side.
We walked farther down to where a large wooden post was buried in the ground with a length of rope tied around it and disappearing into the frozen surface of the water. He pulled his axe free and broke up the ice, then crouched down and untied it, his fingers prying the wet rope from the knot.
We used nets in the fjord all the time, but never like this. It was standing up on its side, tied across the width of the river like a hide stretched in the sun. “It’s a net?”
“Yes.” He grunted, freeing the rope and winding it tightly around his hand as he lifted it slowly against the weight of the current. His face tensed, the muscles in his neck pulling and his shoulders tightening as he hoisted it up, but it was caught. The bottom of the rope was snagged on the branches of a fallen tree.
“It’s stuck.”
He looked down, still holding the net against the rush of the water. “Can you reach it?”
I unclasped my cloak, tossing it onto the snow, and came around his legs to squat down between him and the trunk of the tree disappearing under the surface.
I took a deep breath and plunged my arm in, following the rope down so far that the water came up to my shoulder. I found the end and yanked at it, gritting my teeth.
The rope went slack and Fiske shifted his weight until the net full of silver fish rose up out of the water. I took the other end of the net and we pulled it onto the bank, setting the fish into the snow.
They laid on their sides, wide eyes looking up at me and mouths gulping air as Fiske got down onto his knees to replace the net with the one we’d brought with us.
“It means fish.”
He looked up at me, his brow furrowing as he stood.
“Your name. It means fish, doesn’t it?”
A sharp snap sounded behind us and I turned, my heart coming up into my throat as I stepped back, toward the water. In the trees ahead, an enormous brown bear stood on his hind legs, looking at us. My hand found Fiske’s arm and clamped down hard onto it, my fingernails digging into his tunic. He looked over his shoulder and dropped the ends of the net, sending the fish sliding over the snow.
Sky in the Deep Page 9