Mýra and my father watched me, shock written across their faces in deep, hard lines. And then my father’s face fell, looking beyond me into the house, where Iri stood in the shadows against the back wall. His shoulders were hunched, his frame bent low to see through the doorway.
My father didn’t think. In the next breath, he was moving, one pounding footstep over the other through the snow, and Inge stepped aside, moving out of his way. I followed, trying to keep up, but he was past the gate before I could catch him. And then he was through the door, moving past Inge. I came into the house and stopped short, my heart jumping into my throat.
My father had his arms wound around Iri like ropes, hunched over and weeping into his shoulder, his body wracked with sobs. The sound of it filled the house and spilled out into the village. And Iri was the same, his face broken into pieces as my father held onto him. I closed the door as soon as Fiske and Mýra came through, leaving the rest of the Riki outside. Runa stood beside the fire, watching them with her hands tucked into her elbows. Inge, too, stood at the wall, staring.
I gulped down the cry forcing its way up from my chest. My father was a proud man and I’d wondered which would have a stronger hold on him—his Aska blood or his love for Iri. Relief flooded through me, unwinding every tense muscle and calming my heart. I already knew that Iri’s betrayal was nothing compared to the truth that he was ours, but seeing my father know it, too, made it more real.
He was saying something into Iri’s ear, but the sound of it muffled against his hair. Iri nodded, wiping at his face and trying to catch his breath. He had outgrown my father only in width, their tall statures matching. Behind me, Mýra watched with the eyes of a warrior, her weapons still clasped in each hand.
“Eelyn.” Inge’s soft voice lifted beside me and she touched my back, smiling. “I’m glad you’re back,” she whispered.
I breathed in the smell I’d come to associate with this place. Toasted grains and drying herbs. “This is my father, Aghi,” I said. “And this is Mýra. My friend.”
Inge nodded to both of them in greeting and Halvard came around me to look up at Mýra inquisitively. My father wiped his face on his sleeve, coming back into himself, and I instantly felt safer. Seeing him lose control was something that scared me. He looked across the small house, taking it in, until his eyes landed on Inge. They looked at each other in silence.
A knock pounded on the door and Inge stepped forward, lifting the latch. Vidr stood on the other side of the threshold with the Tala behind him, her eyes landing on me first. They stepped into the house and we fanned out against the back wall as more Riki I didn’t recognize filed in. My father looked to me and I watched his hand tighten on his axe. Mýra watched them from the top of her gaze in the corner. Their faces, too, were shrouded in suspicion.
Vidr stood at the front, sizing up my father from head to toe. “We’re glad you’ve come.”
My father looked them over carefully, left to right. He stood beside me, his sword still hanging at his side. The glisten of tears still shone on his cheeks, but my father was a dangerous man. Anyone could see that.
Beside me, Halvard was still inspecting Mýra. He reached up to touch her hair and she recoiled, moving closer to the wall to get away from him.
“Welcome to Fela.” The Tala stepped forward, breaking the silence. Her fingers tangled into her necklaces. “We understand the Aska have been raided by the Herja. As you can see, we’ve suffered great losses as well.”
My father didn’t answer.
Vidr watched him with flinty eyes. “These are our other village leaders—Freydis, Latham, Torin, and Hildi.” He motioned to each of the faces in the crowded room.
“There are seven Riki villages,” my father corrected.
“The other village leaders are dead,” Freydis answered. Her cloak was pulled over one shoulder, an injured arm hanging out.
“What is it you want from us?” My father took command of the conversation the way I’d seen him do many times before. He was always in control.
“We have a common enemy. One that will likely be the end to both our clans.” Vidr took a step forward. “We want the Aska to join with us against the Herja.”
“And after?” My father unveiled his real concern. They would find out soon enough that the Aska were weaker than they were. “What’s to keep the Riki from turning on the Aska after we’ve defeated the Herja?”
The other village leaders looked to Vidr, as if they wanted the answer as much as we did. “A truce. Neither of us will be able to fight after we take on the Herja. And even if we are, we won’t fight each other.”
“And generations of war will end just like that?” I asked, my eyes narrowed on the Tala.
She let the silence widen before she answered. “Perhaps the gods have a new path for us.”
“A new path?” The skepticism in my father’s voice mirrored the look on Mýra’s face. She was stone beside me.
“We don’t always understand the gods’ ways, do we? What we do know is that the Herja have emerged again from whatever hell they come from. I don’t know how the Aska have fared, but they have wiped out more than half our clan in a matter of weeks. Another month and we may all be gone. They’ll go back down the mountain and do the same to the Aska.” She looked to each of us. “Or we could join together.”
My father wasn’t convinced. I could see doubt in every shift of his eyes. He didn’t trust them to keep the truce. Niether did I. Not really.
“The Aska live and die by their word,” he said.
Vidr’s voice rose in defense. “So do the Riki.”
“The Riki who killed my sister are probably out there, right now,” Mýra muttered.
“Two sons,” Freydis snarled. “Two sons I’ve lost in Aurvanger in the last ten years. I don’t want to stand around the same fire as the Aska. I don’t want to trust one at my back in a fight. But I have two more sons.” She raised a hand, pointing to the door. “Out there.”
Inge pulled Halvard to her. “You can abandon your blood feud, Freydis?”
“To save them? Yes.”
“But can the others?” I looked to the Tala before my eyes drifted back to Mýra. “Can we?”
The Tala reached to Vidr’s belt and pulled his knife free. In one quick motion, she slid the blade across her palm. Her hand filled with blood.
“Tala?” Vidr reached for her.
She stepped forward, looking to my father before she held her hand out to me.
I pressed myself to the wall. “What are you doing?”
“I’m offering a blood oath.” Her hand hung in the space between us, blood dripping to the floor.
They all stared at her, but her eyes were on me. It was the most precious thing she could offer and she knew it. She couldn’t break a blood oath without sacrificing the afterlife. And if anyone wanted to go against the Tala, they’d have to kill her. Slaying a Tala would bring the same bleak fate.
I pulled out my knife before anyone could object, cutting into my flesh and taking her hand. She smiled, pressing her palm to mine.
Vidr watched us, clearly worried. She’d put herself in a vulnerable position, binding herself to me. If he’d harbored any secret plans against the Aska, they were undone.
The Tala turned to my father. “Do this and we will owe each other a debt—a debt that can never be repaid.”
Fiske was quiet, standing with Iri and Runa behind the table piled high with fresh bundles of sage. He looked at me.
I didn’t want to think about what it all meant. What a future like that could mean. The same weight that had been with me since the day I looked into the bear’s eyes at the river pressed me further into the ground. I pulled my sore shoulder back to stretch it. To feel something else, even if it was pain.
The room suddenly felt small. The air was too hot. I couldn’t breathe.
I stepped to the side, finding a path to the door, and quietly slipped out into the air, gulping it in as I paced toward the garden, w
here Inge had plowed rows for planting. I pulled my axe free from its sheath and opened the neck of my tunic trying to cool my skin. The tree at the edge of the forest was marked up with the slashes of axe throws. I threw my arm back over my head and swung it down hard, flinging my axe forward and sending it through the air. It landed with a loud crack in the trunk of the tree.
The door latch rattled and I didn’t turn around to look at him. Feeling him was enough. It was something I recognized now. I stared at my axe, lodged in the wood.
“They’re leaving at first light to go back to Virki.” Fiske spoke behind me.
I walked toward the tree and pried the blade free, pressing against its edge with my thumb. “And then what?”
“And then they return with the Aska. We’ll meet them in Aurvanger in two days.”
I pressed my thumb harder to the metal. “And then we all die?”
“Maybe.” He kept his distance from me. “Will you go with them? Back to Virki?”
I looked at the house, where my father was still talking with the Riki. How did we get here? How could we ever go back? I wanted to push my face into the snow. I wanted to scream.
He stepped toward me, taking my cut hand into his. He turned it over before wrapping a strip of cloth around it, knotting it on my palm. I breathed through the feeling flowing through me, like candle wax melting. “Don’t.” The word hit me in the chest as he said it.
I bit down on my lip until my eyes watered. To keep myself from speaking. I was afraid of what I would say if I did.
“Stay with me and come with us to the valley. We’ll meet the Aska there.”
I closed my eyes as a tear rolled down my flushed face. Trying to escape. Trying to leave this moment and pretend like I hadn’t chosen a path to get here. It wasn’t a command. It was a request. One that I didn’t think I could deny. He’d left his family and come with me down the mountain as his people reeled in the aftermath of a raid. He’d taken me home. Helped me find my father. Now it was my turn to make a choice.
To choose him the way he’d chosen me.
I turned back toward the tree as he left, boots crunching all the way to the door, and the latch clicked again. I crouched down and put my face into my hands, feeling the village spinning around me. I tried to remember who I was.
Strong. Brave. Fierce. Sure.
I tried to summon her to me—that Eelyn who would choose her people over anything else. I searched for her within myself, but she was different now. I was different. And it was something that was already done. Something I couldn’t change.
FORTY-THREE
They were talking about numbers.
The number of Aska.
The number of Riki.
The number of Herja.
After hours of discussion, the Riki village leaders left the house quiet. The fire crackled in the pit between Iri’s old family and his new one. I swallowed hard, wondering which one I was part of now.
My father asked questions, but not too many. He didn’t want too many answers. He just wanted to be happy that Iri’s heart was still beating. But Iri would have to answer for what he’d done eventually, and we all knew it.
Inge came down the ladder with two mats for my father and Mýra. “Your cot is still in the loft.”
I knew it wouldn’t take long for them to put it together. The understanding sunk into Mýra’s face, followed by my father’s. And the confusion written there quickly turned to disgust. “You were their dýr?” Mýra spat, standing.
I sighed, running a hand through my hair. I was exhausted. I didn’t have the will to explain. And there was no explanation that could satisfy them. Not ever. If I were Mýra, I’d feel the same way.
My father looked down at Inge with a hard, cold stare before he wrenched the mats from her arms and went outside. Mýra followed him, slamming the door behind her, and Inge flinched.
“I’m sorry.” Her face fell.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t say it was alright, because it wasn’t. Instead, I took the newly bound bundles of sage from the table and pulled a torch from the wall. I leaned over the fire, lighting it, and then headed for the door. I needed the sky stretching out over me and drowning out the swirl of everyone and everything in this village.
I walked out into the dark and could sense the bodies behind the closed doors and in the trees. Fela had become a sanctuary, seething with the anger of the Riki. The houses glowed with night fires burning to keep mourning families warm.
I swallowed it down.
The dead Aska. The dead Riki. All of it.
The path curved toward the incline until I reached the cellar. I kicked the snow from before the door so I could open it and put the torch into the mount on the wall. The scent of the sweet sage made my head swim with the memory of the first time I’d walked into Fiske’s home. And I couldn’t understand the feeling that followed it. I wanted it all to fit into a place inside me that made sense. I wanted to hate them all for everything that had happened.
But when I followed the trail back, it had started with me.
I was the one who watched Iri get cut down in battle. I left him. And I was the one who followed him into the forest the night they captured me.
It began with me. I’d made a choice.
Like Fiske had made a choice when he saved Iri’s life.
The hinges on the door creaked and I went for my knife.
Fiske stood at its opening. He pushed the door closed behind him and the moonlight was cut out, leaving only the light of the torch on the wall. My hands clenched tighter around the sage, the scent still fragrant in my lungs. He looked at me and the hardness that always hid his face fell away. I could see him again. The way I had at the river. The way I had in Hylli. The open, tender part of him that was reaching out. It moved across the floor of the cellar and touched me. It lit the inside of me on fire.
Tears stung behind my eyes and I tried to blink them back, but I wanted to see him. I wanted to feel him. And as if he could hear me think it, he crossed the space between us slowly. The toes of his boots almost touched mine as he took the bundles of sage from my arms and he reached up, leaning over me to hang them from the line.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
But he didn’t answer. He looked down at me before his hands lifted, finding my face, and he stepped closer. His fingers wound into my hair until I tipped my head back and I sucked in a breath.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was deep.
I searched his face. “For what?”
He dropped his head down, his lips hovering over mine. “For everything.”
His fingers curled tighter into my braids and he kissed me. He dove down deep inside of me, filling me up with the warmth the winter had stolen away. Melting the frosted, frozen pieces.
His hands were hot on my skin, trailing down my neck, over my collarbones to slide around my waist and pull me up, into him. I lifted up onto my toes, trying to get closer. Trying to wade through the thick, murky stream of thoughts in my head. To flush them out. He pushed the top of my tunic open and when his lips moved to the top of my shoulder, I groaned. Because it hurt. More than the arrow wound. More than the day I lost Iri. This was a different kind of pain.
His hands slid from around me, hovering over the scar encircling my neck that was still healing from the collar. He leaned away from me and the hardness carved its way back onto his face.
I took hold of his armor vest, pulling him back to me. But the guard was going back up over him, one thought at a time. “I don’t belong to you.” I repeated the words I said to him the night he pulled the stitches from my arm. This time, to lift the weight that pressed down onto him and silence whatever words were whispering in his mind.
And because a small part of me still wanted them to be true.
“Yes, you do.” He pulled the hair back out of my face so he could look at me. “Like I belong to you.”
I couldn’t feel the tears falling anymore. I couldn’t feel anything except
for the parts of me that were touching him. I reached up to the clasps of his armor vest, keeping my eyes on his. I pulled them free, working it loose until I could fit my hands up under his tunic and press my palms against his skin. I slid my fingers over his ribs and he shook against me, his breaths coming harder.
I pushed the uncertainty and doubt down to the very deepest part of me. I buried them there, along with the beliefs and traditions that had made up who I was. I pulled the tunic up over Fiske’s head and dropped it on the ground with the armor vest and touched the scars perforating his skin in raised, chaotic lines. The deep blue stains of the bruises on his side. The shape of him. He wiped the tears from my face, spreading his thumbs over my cheeks, and I smiled.
He unbuckled my vest and I lifted my arms so that he could pull it off with my tunic. And when he kissed me again, the seconds slowed. They stretched out and made more time. I felt his body against mine, unraveling everything else that was between us, and my soul unwound, threading itself to his.
And I let it. I gave myself to him. Because I was already his.
FORTY-FOUR
Iri held Inge in his arms, looking over her shoulder at me. He didn’t need to ask because I knew what he was thinking. We’d see Runa safely to Aurvanger while he went with my father to the Aska.
He let her go, and he didn’t reach for me. He didn’t have to say it. That he was sorry. And I was too. I let my father hold me, saying good-bye as Mýra stood back against the house, talking to Fiske. He towered over her, but she stood squarely, meeting his gaze with a fierce look in her eye that I recognized. That was Mýra. Small but ferocious. I’d seen her take down men twice his size. She could have killed him that night on the way to Fela just as he could have killed her.
She walked to me with her eyes down, her thumbs hooked into her belt. I reached up to grasp her right shoulder and she did the same.
“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching up to touch the bruise on my face where she’d hit me.
I didn’t forgive her because I didn’t need to. I understood Mýra. I knew that fear of everything being ripped away and the last of what you love being threatened. We were warriors. And she was willing to fight for me the way I was willing to fight for her. Nothing would ever change that.
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