The sky disappeared behind a rippling canopy of ash boughs. She was swallowed up in holy gloom. The warrior of the Hermundures was but four horse lengths behind; his heaving breath was rasping and loud in this hushed place. Why had he no fear? “Should any man enter the Ash Grove who was not called in by its Spirit,” the Holy Ones warned, “he will not walk out again in human shape.”
We will become sparrows. Or both of us will be imprisoned in a tree, living a life of tiresome sameness, our feet embedded in earth, our leafy hair touching the sky. My mother and father will never guess what became of me.
The ash trees watched her dourly, too venerable and aged to react swiftly to this intrusion. Where were the grove’s priestesses and priests? No one ever told her if they too sought cover in a raid. Hollow silence pooled in the bluish deeps between austere trunks; gauzy shafts of light occasionally illumined the forest floor. The slender pillars of this temple stood free and alone: The Ash was proud and let nothing grow beneath it—any hapless plant that tried was strangled by its roots or killed by its shade.
Brunwin staggered pitifully, and she knew he must rest or die. His coat was now wholly soaked and his wheezing hurt her to hear.
It is time. I must try to save myself, or I disgrace all my kin.
She pulled hard on the reins, but the pony would not slow. So she raised herself up and sprang from his back while keeping a good grip on the reins with one hand and holding the spear aloft in the other. She fell hard. Brunwin reared, his body twisting round as he came to the end of the rein. The warrior slowed in surprise. He danced lightly toward her, balancing the spear, deftly taking aim. She saw he was fair of face and full of brash confidence.
She moved behind an ash tree, careful not to injure it by touching the gray-green bark, dragging the pony with her. Sick terror rose in her throat. The warrior approached with caution, gracefully springing sideways round the tree. She did not understand why he was so determined to slay her rather than take her alive; it was one more element of the raid that was both horrifying and peculiar. To him, she was no more than a wild animal to be taken down; the random malice of a troll flickered in his eyes.
As she moved too, careful to keep the tree between them, she was dimly aware of a dark, low hum on a bone pipe, a persistent sound that rose and grew stronger until it poured into the air around like some warm liquid. Her eye just caught the movement of a priestly robe, spectral and white, far back in the labyrinth of trunks.
The Holy Ones were here, watching, marking all she did. Her cry for help died before it formed in her throat. They would give no aid, for she had stumbled out of daily life and into mythic life. “What passes in the Ash Grove,” they would say, “is a sign for what will pass in the world.” Her fate would be read as a portent. They would watch with detachment to see if she lived or died, then interpret the future from her final writhings. She was numbed by how suddenly all that protected her vanished: her family’s fame, her numerous kin, and her father’s many Companions—the most celebrated warriors of the tribe. She was a maid alone, stripped naked for death.
The dark-haired warrior lunged unexpectedly to the left, and the tree no longer shielded her. His spear-arm snapped out. The weapon was skillfully aimed and powerfully thrown.
Swifter than thought, she dropped into a heap on the forest floor. Had she not, the spear would have torn through her chest. She heard it sink deep into the flesh of an ash at her back. From the warrior came a low husky laugh. He is a madman, she thought. He struck an ash tree to the heart and yet he feels no terror.
Before she had time to scramble to her feet, he was sprinting toward her to take her with his hunting knife.
The sound of running feet held her transfixed. She saw a quick vision of her blood splattered on the bark. He was all the enemies she ever feared—the ogre with its swampy breath, the stooped shadow of a lurking man-thing seen at dusk beyond the last field, the Romans with their terrifying relentlessness, the guest-murderers of the winter tales.
But in the next instant she felt a powerful stillness gathering within, as if there were a holy grove in her heart. It seemed a spirit far older than her own took possession of her—it might have been an ancestor who worshipped here, or the vast soul of the Ash itself. A dark steady strength flooded into her limbs.
I can live. Arise and fight. The blood on the bark is not mine but his.
She sprang up with collected grace. Almost playfully, as though she were testing her skill rather than fighting for her life, she centered the spear’s weight in her palm and drew her arm back, eyes on his heart. She whipped forward.
It was a hard, straight throw. But he was alarmingly quick and he dodged it; she succeeded only in tearing off part of his tunic. He slowed for a moment, face contracted in pain from the flesh wound she made, looking back once to see if her spear fell close enough to be retrieved. It had not. He raised the hunting knife and lunged for her.
But she was already gone, darting like a deer to the tree in which his spear was lodged. He ran hard, meaning to fall on her before she got it free.
Working feverishly, she disengaged it. As she spun round, he sprang, knife bared like a single tearing tooth. He grinned. His hair was sweat-darkened. Distended nostrils gulped in air.
Fria, lady of Night, I am your servant, let me live…
She cast the spear with all her strength—it was the last leap of a festival dancer before she drops into exhaustion. The spear seemed to jump lightly from her hand, glad to be free.
It struck high in his chest, pitching him backward. He staggered a few steps, seizing the spear in both hands as though he could not believe it was embedded in his body.
Her joy was mingled with dread as the eyes of the warrior of the Hermundures became sky-blank, his gaped mouth stopped in place—a mouth no longer, but a frightful hole. He fell heavily to his knees, then sank quietly to his side. The blood pulsed out in a low fountain, darkening his tunic, reddening the ground. For long moments she stood very still, her breathing labored, not yet believing the struggle was done.
She edged toward him and almost humbly knelt down. The huge nostrils that moments ago grabbed at air as if with a strong fist now reached for it with a slack hand.
One fluttery breath eased out and he took no more.
I killed. Earth will collect in an empty skull where once a mind had been. A body carefully tended all the days of his life is set by me on a course of rot. A spirit is ripped from its housing and set adrift. However commonly it is done, still it is an awesome part to take.
The wind all day had been still, but now it rose purposefully, rushing through the boughs like swiftly running water. She sensed the nearness of Wodan, keeper of souls, and above him, all-enveloping Fria, setting the wind.
Was this kill your gift? she asked the grove. The wind surged harder until it was a roaring torrent and she heard a whispered yes in the wild dance of green above.
And then a passage was flung open to dreams she had had many times, of battle and the sword. In one, she stood before a grave mound by moonlight. Her head was bowed, and she touched white lips to the cold steel of a sword encrusted with mold, and she knew it was Baldemar’s. In another she stood armed as a warrior on the palisade of a fort, the enemies of all their lives arrayed before her, the remnants of her people behind her, waiting for doom. The visions unsettled her and she forced them from her mind.
At last she rose, and set about searching for small round stones to pile on the corpse. The warrior was enemy spirit now, and she must prevent his ghost from stalking the villages. After a short struggle she removed the spear from his chest. It was family treasure and must be preserved, for with it she had taken her first enemy. Then she cut a lock of his hair for use as an amulet. Finally she set about stripping the body. She found strange things.
She took first his hunting knife. But the belt in which it had been sheathed made her pause. It had odd signs carved into it, and they were not runes. From his tunic she took a moist sponge a
nd a rolled sheet of something thin as a leaf with more of these strange signs written over a curious drawing of radiating weblike lines. But she had no time to puzzle over these things. From beyond the grove she heard the distant thunder of cattle driven off and women’s screams. The Hermundures were striking on every side. Athelinda would be half mad from fear for her safety. Quickly she put all she found into her gamebag.
She heard the crackle of leaves behind her.
She turned and saw Hylda, most ancient of the Ash Priestesses, approaching in dreamy silence. Her mouth was set in a simple line, revealing as much as a toad’s. The wind kept her silver hair in ghostly motion. Her skin was the color of a hazelnut; her eyes were like a deer’s, liquid and mournful. The wind tugged at her clothes; she was like some fragile autumn leaf no longer getting nourishment from the tree, locked in a last struggle with the wind that tried to tear it from its twig. She held a torch in one hand.
“Let the fire cleanse!” Her voice was one Auriane would expect of a dwarf, sweet and high.
Auriane watched numbly, unable to speak. Hylda brushed the torch so close past Auriane’s face she nearly singed her hair. Then the old priestess walked nine times round the body, humming all the while, passing the fire close over the corpse. She stopped, studying the body, and Auriane knew she saw ruptures in the world about in the angle of an arm, the contortion of the trunk.
“He died with open eyes,” Hylda said finally, nodding knowingly. “It is great evil. It means the dead watch us.” The old woman gestured delicately. “It means an enemy rises from within.”
She looked sharply at Auriane. “When this man broke into my grove, he became all enemies, even those who rise from within. And you, Auriane, are his slayer.”
Hylda’s eyes seemed to stare inward as she solemnly touched her staff to Auriane’s left shoulder, then to her right. Auriane leaned away slightly, wondering if madness had taken the old woman.
She has spoken too long with trees. She’s grown a heart of bark.
“Your lot is to protect your people with your own body, to be a living shield as long as your spirit is clothed in flesh,” Hylda went on in her tremulous voice. “Any weapon you touch is blessed. Any weapon you wield has thrice the war-luck in your hand. The oracle commands you: Marry the god, and victory will be your fate.”
She felt a jump in her chest; it was excitement and terror. To “marry the god” meant to join the shield maidens, a small but greatly revered order of priestesses who lived and fought with the warriors and performed the rites that sent them to the Sky Hall when they were slain. Then came a sense of being both surprised and not surprised. A part of her rebelled, seized suddenly with a blind need for the comfort of farm and hearth.
No, I cannot live such a harsh, grim life. But Hylda need not know. “Who is the enemy who rises from within?” Auriane asked carefully.
“You will know him. He was always there in seed form. He falls now on fertile soil.”
Auriane looked at Hylda with a worried frown. “But this cannot be. I am to marry Witgern when I am twenty.”
“To that I have no answer. I know only what I read in the dead man’s eyes.”
A new eruption of war cries wrested Auriane’s attention away. Auriane moved off slowly, not wanting to show disrespect. “My lady…, I must go. My mother is alone.” She took up the pony’s rein and began to lead him off.
“Go then, but never forget,” Hylda admonished, following Auriane. For an instant their gazes fully met, and Auriane was aware of a dry, spidery spirit that yearned to seize her and suck in a strong young soul. Hylda wagged a withered finger. “You have more kin in this grove than in any hall…and they will claim you one day.”
Auriane hurried on, half dragging Brunwin. She would forget.
I will turn my back on this. I will deny the kill was my own.
She looked round once and saw more Holy Ones emerging from the gloom, their cloaks white as swans; as they flocked round the body, dove-soft sounds came from them, and she knew they spoke excitedly of the rare omen.
Many saw, then. They will not let me hide from this. But I will not live that life.
To the east and west she saw the angry smoke of free-running fires. The Hermundures were burning all in their path—fields, sheds, houses. She was alarmed by how close they had penetrated to her father’s hall. But once she was home she would be nestled in safety. It had always been so.
In her impatience she mounted the weary pony again and Brunwin broke into a limping trot, fighting the reins in his panic. Finally they jolted down the familiar rocky path over Axhead Hill, then the birch forest fell away and they passed a welcome sight—the neat pile of stones that marked the boundary line of her family’s lands. Here was safety, and the world’s center. She blew one more horn blast, more from joy than in warning. The pony raised his head eagerly and began to gallop; he knew this field of ripening barley. They flashed past her mother’s apple trees, then crossed the fallow field that next year would be planted with flax. Its north side was girded by a fence of human bones.
Only Baldemar had such a fence; it was constructed of the bones of Roman soldiers slain in a lifetime of battles on the border. Auriane winced as Brunwin rushed at it—he was lame and should not jump—but the sturdy pony insisted. He burst forward, cleared the low fence and landed in soft dung.
Then came long rows of cattle sheds of varying heights, and beyond, the field thralls’ huts, appearing like a cluster of modest haystacks hugging the shadows of the tall pines. The silence all about roused her apprehension and anger. There was no reason for driving the cattle off to safety and hiding in the souterrains. Who, god or man, would dare strike this farm?
And then she came to the open gate in the low palisade that ringed the precincts of the hall itself. Two tall poles flanked it; atop one was affixed the skull of a mountain cat, the totem animal of the Chattians, from which they took their name. Atop the other was the skull, spine and loose dried hide of the stallion offered last autumn in the yearly horse sacrifice. Both were possessed of such terrible holiness that she scarce dared look upon them.
When they cantered through, they left a wake of chickens fluttering up in panic. As the pony threaded his way among the dome-shaped clay kilns in the yard, Auriane saw the glowing vessels being fired within had been abandoned. Why had the kilns been deserted in such haste? Where were Mudrin and Fredemund? Athelinda’s mead shed, too, was empty of life.
Beyond lay the hall itself. Its long, low shape with its drooping cover of thatch made her think of some great brooding beast crouched at the forest’s edge. The hall was for certain a living thing, a creature of old comfortable habits and scents that loved her in return for her love.
The wide entranceway was built in the center of one long side of the hall. Athelinda was there, struggling with a goat that refused to come out. Her mother saw her and released the goat, who promptly wheeled about and returned to the hall. On her back sleeping in a sling was Arnwulf, the baby born this year at the time of the first lambs. Two other babes born since Auriane’s birth had died young of the sicknesses of children.
Brunwin lurched to a halt and Auriane dropped to the ground. She drew in a breath at the sight of her mother.
The sight of her mother’s pale lips, of that finely made face so taut and drawn, and the beaten look in her eyes made Auriane feel that the earth was giving way beneath her.
To Auriane, Athelinda had always been a supple but stable force, all-powerful but benign; when she was younger she believed her mother’s touch caused cows to bring forth milk and set the farm in motion as the mind of Fria set the stars. Her mother had no limits upon her; she spun tales from the rich stuff of her mind with the same ease that she spun wool. That strength was unexpected—she seemed, at first look, fragile as a glass vessel. But Auriane had seen her rise at midnight and battle her way through waist-deep snow to assist a frightened, sweating mare in the foaling barn, or walk with dignified calm to the center of a hostile Assembly t
o spiritedly make the case of a wronged kinsman. Fredemund said out of her hearing, “Behold the pretty bird but beware the sharp beak.” Athelinda’s hair was dark bronze like her own, but her mother’s was calmed and controlled in a neat braided knot secured with a boar’s tusk comb—that knot that Auriane once imagined somehow held the world together.
“Auriane!” A brief look of relief gave way to anger. “Where have you been? Did you not hear the horns? Perhaps you forgot where you live. Perhaps you forgot you have a family. While you were out dancing with elves the house of your father’s brother was burned. They’ll be burning here next.”
Auriane said nothing, shocked to silence by the sight of her mother’s dress torn near the knee. It was the finest she owned, dyed scarlet by her own hand with madder root—and to see it gaping open was horrifying beyond reason, as if she saw her mother’s flesh torn. Her twisted torque of silver and her serpent arm rings, which normally made her look bright and noble, today seemed to weight her down like a yoke. Her doeskin shoes inset with beads of amber, which were her pride, were caked with mud from the souterrains.
“Mother…, I am sorry—” she began haltingly and stopped, suddenly feeling too frail inside. Finally she realized what her mother had said.
“Theudobald’s hall?” she whispered, feeling as though all her blood drained from her body. “But it cannot be. How could they dare?” She felt she fought for balance on moving earth. “You’re mad to think they would come here. How can you say it?”
“Watch whom you’re calling mad, saucy child. It has happened. Now help me push the animals out—they’ll be burned alive.”
Auriane met her gaze numbly for a moment, slowly shaking her head in denial. Then she lost her strength all at once and rushed to her mother, embracing her tightly, breaking easily through Athelinda’s anger, for love as always was too close beneath the surface. “Mother, what is happening to us?” Auriane’s soft wail was muffled in her mother’s cloak.
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