Sky in the Deep

by Adrienne Young

  A head of bright red hair stopped my gaze and I flinched, recognizing Thorpe. He sat beside a fire across the cave, pulling a wool blanket up over his chest. His face was cut and bruised, his eye swollen.

  Fiske wedged a dry log underneath the fire to build it up. His hands were still scabbed at the knuckles from where they’d inflicted Thorpe’s wounds only a few days before. When he saw me staring, he looked down at his hands and then to Thorpe.

  “Will he want revenge for what you did?” I asked quietly.

  “He won’t touch you again.”

  I looked back up to Thorpe. I’d seen him at the burning of the Riki bodies, too, and he hadn’t even looked at me.

  Fiske kicked the saddlebags closer to me and I reached inside to pull out the bread Inge had packed. I tore it in half and handed one side to Fiske, pulling my knees up into my chest. The taste of it reminded me of their home and I swallowed it down. Because thinking of Inge and Halvard made me feel strange. The gentle pull back to Fela twisted in my chest. Not like home. Something else.

  “Do you believe what Inge says? About you and Iri?” I watched his face carefully, trying to read him.

  His eyebrows raised, surprised by the question. “The sál fjotra?”

  I nodded, taking another bite.

  “I don’t know.” He leaned back into the wall, staring at the bread in his hands.

  “What do you think happened?”

  He thought for a long moment before he answered. “I think I saw myself in Iri.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve been taught our whole lives that we’re different from each other.” His eyes met mine. “But we’re the same. I think that scared me.”

  I sunk back into the shadow, away from the firelight. I didn’t want him to see anything my face betrayed. Because I knew what he was saying. It was the thing that folded around my heart when I looked at Halvard. It was the thought pushing into my mind, watching the Riki raise the walls of Kerling’s barn. The sound of their voices, singing.

  “If you believe that, then why were you fighting in Aurvanger?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “Because whether or not we are the same, we are enemies. My people die in the fighting season. At the hands of the Aska.”

  I wished I hadn’t asked. Because thinking we were the same made too many things possible. It made paths fork where they didn’t before. It was terrifying. “Are we still enemies? You and I?”

  “No,” he answered, simply.

  I looked up and Fiske was still watching me. His gaze trailed over my hair, back down to my face, making me tremble. I dropped my eyes back to the fire, my face burning.

  The Riki quieted and silence overtook the cave. Fiske laid the bearskin out on the damp ground and I curled against the wall, facing the open space. The fire was warm, but I didn’t like having my back open and exposed. I pulled a blanket up over me, tucking it under my chin as Fiske moved the logs strategically around the flames so they’d burn longer. He wasn’t complaining about the pain in his ribs, but he held his arm closer to his body than usual and tried not to carry too much weight on that side. When he finished, he settled next to me.

  I watched him draw in a deep breath and let it go, sinking into the ground as he pulled his blanket over him. I tried to picture Hylli. The dirt trails that wound around the village like river inlets. The way things looked crisp when the sun was overhead. The birds that flew over the fjord, swooping down with their wings spread and their talons outstretched to pull fish from the water.

  My breaths stuttered over each other and I stuck my hands down between my thighs to try to pull the heat to the center of my body. I shook. It wasn’t just the cold. It was the Herja. It was Hylli. It was the wondering what I’d find at the fjord.

  The dirt in front of me shifted and I opened my eyes. Fiske was looking over his shoulder, his eyes running over my blanket, and he slid himself back, into the space between us.

  I waited for his breaths to slow before I scooted closer to him, letting the line of my body fit to his and feeling the heat come off his skin. I pushed my face into the warm place where his back met the bearskin and stared at the woven leather of his armor vest, following its pattern with my eyes until they were so heavy I couldn’t hold them open. I fell asleep to the sound of his breathing, his back rising and falling against me, like the sound of seawater kissing the fjord.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The first body on the trail was lying half buried in a fresh snowfall. Her long hair was splayed out around her head with the shining furs hardened in the cold wind. She was Herja.

  Ahead, a string of frozen corpses spread through the forest and Fiske looked back to catch my eyes. We were close to Möor, the first and largest of the Riki villages.

  The top of the huge ritual house rose before the slope of the mountain as we came down. A section of the roof was caved in, blackened by smoke, but it was still standing. The homes weren’t as fortunate. Almost every one of them was a pile of charred wood. A few Riki were already starting to rebuild, planing lumber to repair the walls, and the sound of their tools scraping over the wood rose up to us on the ridge.

  They stopped as we came down the trail and a few minutes later, a group of them emerged from inside the ritual house. Large doors carved like the ones in Fela swung open and a white-haired man led them toward us. His face was stitched together down the line of a deep sword’s gash that reached up over his eye. The other men were pieced together as well, their faces and bodies showing the echoes of the raid. They hadn’t fared nearly as well as Fela.

  “Vidr,” the white-haired man called out, stopping to wait for us.

  “Latham.” Vidr dropped from his horse, taking Latham’s hand and pulling him close to clap him on the back.

  The others dismounted and I melted into the group, trying to blend in. If the Riki in Möor looked closely, they would know I wasn’t one of them. But looking around at what remained of the village, I thought for the first time that maybe it didn’t matter anymore.

  Fiske untied the saddlebag Inge packed full of medicines and bandages and we followed them up the path to the ritual house. We ducked beneath the fallen beam at the door and entered the dank, smoky room. My breath caught.

  The floor was covered wall to wall with Riki children, camped on blankets and stools, a few belongings gathered here and there. They sunk down together like little birds huddled in nests. Filthy, with wounds uncared for. Their healer was either dead or tending to more serious injuries.

  At the altar, one body lay on the platform with the light from the broken roof casting over him. It was a man, wrapped in a blue cloak with a scrolling iron clasp fastened at the neck. He’d been cleaned and his hands folded onto his chest neatly where strands of wooden beads hung. Their Tala.

  “When did they come?” Vidr looked out over the room, probably thinking the same thing I was. Fela had been lucky.

  “Five days ago. In the middle of the night.” Latham’s voice was hollow and hoarse. “They came through the trees like ghosts.”

  Silence grew thick in the smoky air. The paleness was still settled beneath their skin and the shakiness still beneath their words. It had been the same after the Herja came to Hylli when I was a child.

  Vidr stared at the man’s body on the altar.

  Latham gave a hesitant nod. “He died of infection yesterday.” He took a stool from the wall and sat, offering a seat to Vidr. I tried to move closer to listen. “We are the fifth Riki village to be raided in the last two weeks. You’re the sixth. And they’ll be back.”

  “How many did you lose?”

  “One hundred and forty-eight.”

  The silence was abrupt. Fela had only lost fifty-four. But Möor was much bigger. If the other villages had lost those kinds of numbers, the Riki didn’t have a chance against the Herja. My thoughts went back to Hylli. If they’d been able to do this on the mountain, what had they done on the fjord? The villages down there were more exposed. More ac
cessible. I swallowed hard, the trembling starting to surface again.

  Vidr sat, taking the bearskin from his shoulders and laying it across his lap. “We’ve learned they attacked the Aska before they came up the mountain.”

  “The Aska?” Latham sat up, his crooked face lifting in surprise.

  “We don’t know yet how they’ve fared. One of ours is going down to see what’s become of them.” He glanced at Fiske.

  “They are too many, Vidr. I don’t know where they all came from.”

  “Yes, you do.” He eyed the man and a chill fell over the group of them.

  There had always been whispers about the Herja. No one knew where they lived or where they retreated to. It had long been said that they weren’t entirely human. That they were more spirit than flesh, and that they brought the wrath of some angry god. If it was true, maybe there was nothing we could do to beat them.

  “The others who’ve survived are meeting us back in Fela. They should arrive in the next day or two.”

  “When they do, we’ll decide what’s to be done. Together.” Vidr leaned forward to catch Latham’s eyes.

  “We’ll have to fight.” But that ferocious look of the Riki was still missing from Latham’s face.

  I stepped around the group as they talked, finding a path in the makeshift encampment of the ritual house. The Riki children looked up at me with dirty faces, wrapped in their blankets, some clutching bowls of cold food. The fire in the middle of the room blazed, sending the heat pushing around us, and I stopped as Fiske came to stand beside me.

  The strain reaching through his whole body was carefully concealed, but I could see it in the set of his eyes. The news of losing so many Riki was a blow. And taking on the Herja would be certain death. He was thinking of Inge. And Halvard. Iri.

  “When do we leave for Hylli?” I asked.

  “Morning. I’ll treat whoever I can until then.” He looked around the room. “But I’m not my mother.”

  I walked past the fire to a kettle on the other side of the altar that was filled with water. I set it onto the coals and took the child nearest to me first. She looked at me warily as I sat her on a bench near the fire. When the water was warm, I cleaned her face, wiping the dirt and ash from her fair, freckled skin as she looked up at me with eyes the color of oiled Riki leather. Her long blond hair fell down her back in a tangled knot.

  Fiske took her leg into his hands, looking at the gouge in her calf. It looked like the work of an axe blade and it was still open, red and inflamed at the edges. I scrubbed her skin, working at the grime as Fiske closed it up. He pulled a needle through the skin slowly, holding the thread between his teeth. She refused to cry, watching him hold the flesh together with his hands. When he was done, he moved to the next child. A blond boy with his arm in a makeshift sling. I followed, cleaning each of their faces as Fiske tended whatever wounds they carried from the raid. My entire life, I’d never thought of the Riki as small children. I’d only ever known the fierce faces of their warriors in battle. But now they had pasts. Names. Souls.

  Njord.

  Idunn.

  Aila.

  Frigg.

  I looked into their eyes. They were young and afraid but strong, the way they’d been taught to be. They gritted their teeth and bore the bite of stitches and the sting of infected wounds. Behind the haze of tears and the pink on their noses, they were like fire-steel.

  I braided their hair back out of their faces, pulling it into order. Fiske smiled without looking at me, his eyes trained on the cut across a little boy’s shoulder.

  “What?”

  He glanced up, his chin tipping toward them. “They look like Aska.”

  And he was right. I almost laughed. I was never very good at it, but I knew a few Aska braids well. I’d been doing them since I was a child. They gathered around, arms crossed over their chests, watching us.

  Like little warriors. Like Iri and I had been. Like we still were.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I waited down the path on my horse while Fiske talked with Vidr and Latham. The sun was just coming up and the village was still quiet, but I had been packed and ready since before we’d slept. I could feel the pull. Hylli reached up the mountain and wrapped its fingers around me. Calling me to the fjord. It was something I’d never felt before. The Aska had died in battle and in raids, but there was never a time I’d thought the Aska may end.

  Fiske climbed onto his horse and came down the path, passing me to lead the way back to the trail, and Vidr watched us, the wind blowing his hair across his face. “Ǫnd eldr!” His voice echoed in the forest.

  The horses knew the way, though I could still make no sense of it. I was used to navigating by landmarks, but with everything covered in snow, it was impossible. Fiske’s eyes were on the treetops and the angle of the mountain, not on the ground. The sun rose up higher and the land grew steeper. The horses slid, their legs shaking, sending rocks rolling on the patches of ground that were bare. Fiske leaned back, compensating for the shift in weight, and I did the same as we made our way down the most treacherous parts of the trail. When we reached the bottom, the view widened to the valley far below where a distant stretch of green lay beyond the white expanse.

  As the day warmed and the snow began to melt, the ground grew slicker. We walked the horses when the trail turned steep again and then stopped to let them rest. I walked to the ledge of a drop-off, looking out over the trees. The canopy of the forest looked like the churned froth on top of seawater, fluffy and thick with snowfall.

  “What do you think will happen when the Riki go after the Herja?”

  Fiske tightened the saddle on the horse. “I think we will be defeated.” There was nothing in his voice to indicate fear.

  “But you’ll still fight?”

  He looked up at me with disapproval. “Of course we will.”

  I watched an eagle glide out over the trees, tipping left then right. “But if you can’t win…”

  “If we don’t fight, the Herja will kill us anyway. We die fighting or we die hiding. Which would you choose?”

  He knew my answer as well as I did. I’d never wait, hunkered down in a half-burned village, for the Herja to come back for me, even if it meant death. But I didn’t like the idea of Iri going into a hopeless fight. I couldn’t stomach the idea of Inge and Halvard cut down by the Herja. Fiske, eyes open and empty, staring into the sky as his soul left his body. A chill ran over my skin.

  “The Riki could resettle.” I pointed out over the horizon, past the fjord. “Beyond the valley.”

  “In Aska territory?” He tilted his head to one side.

  I shrugged. “The Herja change things. Either way, the Aska and the Riki won’t fight each other if they’re in the valley. They are the bigger enemy.”

  “They are the common enemy,” he corrected.

  I crossed my arms in front of me. I had been thinking the same thing, but I couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t imagine a world where the Aska and Riki were on the same side. The age-old tangle of brown and red leathers, bronze and iron on the battlefield. But fighting together.

  “And if we won? Then what?” I asked, watching as the eagle turned, tilting its wings to the side as it made its way back toward us.

  He let go of the saddle, scratching at the horse’s mane. “I don’t know.”

  We started again, taking a more level decline and slowing our progress so the horses didn’t tire. My body shook from the tension of controlling the animal, my jaw sore from biting down as I focused on preventing a slide. Once we were back on the slope, I looked behind us, up the towering face of the mountain piled with heavy snow. I could feel the power of it, hovering like it was waiting for the chance to come rolling down over us. And I imagined, for just a moment, what it would be like to be buried in it. To slowly give way to the cold and close my eyes in surrender to death. Like the night Thorpe left me in the forest. Like the days Iri spent lying in the trench, dying. But now, something about the idea was
almost comforting. It meant no more wondering. Wondering if the Aska had survived. If I’d get home or what would happen to Iri. Wondering about the thread that seemed to be tied between Fiske and me, slowly tightening.

  The sun sunk lower in the sky, making the world blue and cold again as we headed into the trees. The forest was quiet, the horses’ breaths and hooves the only sound. When we met a break in the thicket, the light was almost gone.

  Fiske moved out from under the trees ahead of me and the white moonlight spilled down on him as he slid off the horse. I tried not to stare at the way his form looked against the frigid night.

  I came through the trees and my horse stopped at the gravel edge of a large frozen lake. The surface stretched out in both directions like frosted black glass. “How do we go around it?” I dismounted, walking to the edge and tapping the heel of my boot on the thick ice.

  “We don’t.” He pulled the bag from the saddle and dropped it over his head to hang across his shoulder. “We walk across.”

  “Across?” I stared at him.

  “Across.”

  The mountain stood over us, watching. “There’s no way to go around?”

  “There is, but it will take another full day to go that way.” He worked on my saddlebag, pulling at the riggings.

  I stared at the lake. “What if we fall in?”

  “We won’t.” He smiled, and I looked away when I felt heat painting across my skin again.

  He tossed me the bag and I hung it over me as he turned the horses back toward the mountain and slapped them above their hind legs. They took off, their galloping steps like distant thunder in the dark forest.