In the Shadow of the Gods

by Rachel Dunne

  The woman wasn’t young, but she wasn’t old either. Still, she leaned on the stick as she walked forward, a little limp in her left leg. She walked straight to Rora and knelt down there, even though Rora saw it hurt her. She held her hand out, palm up, and Rora drew the knife across it, too. They clasped hands, shared their blood, and the woman’s grip was strong, her eyes still serious as she said, “Sharra Dogshead takes your bargain, girl. You go with Tare—you’re hers now. As for you, boy . . .” She let go Rora’s hand and turned to Aro, and there was a smile in her eyes when she said, “I’ve always wanted a valet.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The helm fit snugly over Scal’s head. It was too big in places, the fur lining tickling down into his eyes. In other places it was too small, so that it felt like his brains were going to be squeezed out from his ears. Iveran had told him with pride that it was made from a snowbear’s skull, but it must have been a very small snowbear.

  He had healed, finally, from the dogs. Enough that he could bend his fingers, swing his arm. Enough that there would be no more delay.

  Kettar Blademaster pressed a sword into his hand, and even though he had been expecting it, even though the edges were dull, Scal could not keep himself from being surprised. A sword, his own sword. From outside the ring, Iveran was grinning as he watched. Laughing at something Uisbure said, though his eyes never left Scal. Looking back, looking for a sign of challenge in those eyes, Scal saw none.

  Across the ring, Arje was stretching his arms. His own dull-edged sword flashed in the bright sun as he moved. Scal stood still, unmoving, the tip of his sword against the ground. It was long and heavy and ugly. Kettar gave him a hard look. Measuring.

  “The swords are dull,” the blademaster said, “but they will cut still. Lift your hand.” Scal did as told. He had learned in these weeks that defiance led only to beatings. He held his hand out, and Kettar turned it palm up. With his other hand the blademaster lifted Scal’s sword. Pressed it down against the boy’s palm. After a moment the skin broke, and blood welled up. Scal did not flinch. He was covered in such lessons after a handful of weeks in Valastaastad. Bruises and cuts and scars. His flesh a tapestry of Northern education. “You see?” Kettar said. “You let Arje get too close . . .” He pressed the blade against Scal’s arm, against the sewn leather that covered him. “Will not cut here. But here . . .” He raised the blade to press against the side of Scal’s neck. Enough pressure to spark a bit of real worry in Scal’s gut. “Here, you are dead. You should not let Arje kill you. We have spent too much time on you for you to die so stupidly.”

  Scal said nothing. He had told them, Iveran and Kettar both, again and again, that he did not want to fight. That he would not fight. “You keep saying this,” Iveran had observed the last time. “But each time you are attacked, you fight. When we found you, you fought me with your little knife. When Einas claimed vasrista, you fought him like a devil. When the dogs decided to eat you, you fought them as a dog yourself. So tell me now, why is it that you think you will not fight?”

  Scal had not had anything to say to that either. A man’s life is worth only as much as he’s willing to fight for it, Parro Kerrus had said, but Scal did not think his life was worth fighting for any longer. Not with the parro dead. Not with Brennon’s smile gone from the world. Not with his life crumbled to ashes. Not with his face cut like a prisoner’s, his skin mottled black-and-blue, his flesh scored with Iveran’s lessons. He had nothing left to fight for.

  Kettar went to stand near Iveran and Uisbure and all the others who had gathered to watch. “Begin!” the blademaster called.

  Arje charged forward with his battle cry. The boy a head taller and a stone heavier than Scal, a ram’s horns curling atop his skull helm. His sword held up high, ready to split Scal open from neck to navel. Scal watched him come, and did not move. Watched his death come rushing toward him.

  Watched as his own arm lifted his sword to block Arje’s.

  It’s a hard thing, Kerrus had said, for a man to face his own death with open arms.

  He tried to stop. Truly he tried, or he would tell himself later that he truly tried. To stop his arms and the sword and his feet that would not stay still. To stop and let Arje’s dull-but-sharp-enough sword cut through him. To let his well-earned death claim him.

  It’s a much harder thing to die than to live.

  So his feet moved him away from Arje, and his sword met Arje’s sword, and he fought again. Fought, and hated himself for proving Iveran right once more.

  Kettar called a halt to it, and the boys came to a quick stop. Arje, breathing heavily but grinning, thumped Scal on the shoulder. “You fight well!” he said joyfully. Not knowing his words cut deeper than his sword could have. Iveran vaulted over the fence and came with Kettar to give each boy praise. With his eyes on the ground, Scal kept his lips tightly closed.

  Violence is weakness, Kerrus had told them after Brennon had punched another boy. It’s the coward’s way, and I know you’re no coward. So stop fecking acting like one. The Parents gave us words for a reason. You can keep bashing your way through every situation like bloody knuckles are the only way to keep your tiny brains from leaking out your ears, or you can act like a real fecking person who doesn’t think with his cock and his fists. Which’ll it be, lads?

  “I knew we would warm your blood, ijka,” Iveran said, grinning. “You will train with Kettar every day, until you are as good a fighter as any Northman!”

  “It will not be hard,” Kettar agreed, smiling, too.

  “But it is not only fighting you must learn.” Iveran pulled the sword from Scal’s hand and tossed it to Kettar. The blademaster caught it neatly and pulled Arje away. “Come with me, ijka.” Scal started to lift the squeezing helm from his head, but Iveran stopped him. “Leave it. You make a good snowbear.” Laughing, Iveran led him into Valastaastad.

  Iveran liked to walk. More, Iveran liked to talk. Parro Kerrus had been much the same, though it hurt Scal to think of them as the same in any way. Many a night, Iveran made Scal walk with him, in a long circle around the edges of the ice shelf, and he would talk and talk and not mind that Scal did not talk back.

  “I have been thinking,” Iveran said as they walked slowly down Valastaastad’s one road. “From the first, you have reminded me of someone, but I have not been able to think who. I think I know it now. I had a friend when I was young. Not a brother, but closer than a brother. Maarin, his name was. You know the word?”

  It was one of the Oldest Words, of the runes that belonged to the North alone. A rune like the one for which Scal was named. “Ice,” the boy said.

  “Ice,” the chieftain agreed, approval warm in his voice. “Ice, as you are fire. It is no small thing, that, I am thinking. We grew together in this town, Maarin and I, closer than brothers. He was older by a hand of years, and so he taught me much of what it means to be a man. To be a good man.” He stopped outside one of the houses and pulled back the door flap, motioning Scal inside. It was warm within, an old wrinkled woman tending a roaring fire. She rose when Iveran entered, and went into a back room. Iveran crouched down by her fire, warming his hands. “It is a lonely thing, to be chieftain. Lonely, too, to be the son of the chieftain. Maarin never treated me as more than another boy. He was my truest friend, and he saved me from being lonely. I would have such a friend for my Jari.” The old woman returned, a white bundle in her arms. She gave it to Iveran, who unrolled it with an approving noise. He showed them to Scal. A cloak, a boy’s cloak, made from a snowbear’s pelt. As white as the cloak Iveran wore. And a pendant, made from a black snowbear’s claw that was longer than Scal’s hand, strung onto braided leather. “What do you think, eh? Good gifts for my son?” Scal nodded. It was the only response Iveran usually needed. “These will mark my Jari as the son of the chieftain. No one will ever know him as less. Still. I would have him have a friend. I do not know that you are Maarin’s son. I do not know that Maarin had a son, for he left Valastaastad. But you will be a go
od man, Scal. I will teach you, and you will teach my Jari to be a good man in turn.” Iveran pressed the snowbear cloak into Scal’s hands. “This will be your gift to my son. That, and the gift of your friendship. I would have you be my son’s better-than-brother. To keep him from being lonely. What do you think of that, ijka?”

  Too much.

  It was too much for Scal, who still kept the little bone knife in his boot, the knife with Iveran’s death promised to it. Who bore the cuts of a hundred sharp lessons. Whose life had been torn root and stem from the earth by this man. Yet who was fed, and fed well, by the same man. Who was clothed and housed and kept warm. Who had been given a helm made from the skull of a snowbear.

  Too much.

  Instead of an answer, Scal asked, “What does ijka mean?” It was the only Northern word his mind could not place, the only word he could not remember from his forgotten first life before the swirling snows that had brought him to Aardanel.

  Iveran’s mouth quirked up in a smile. So unlike his normal grin, with teeth bared like the snowbears he mirrored. It made him look a different man, almost. “I have said it before. You are sharp, boy. Maarin was the same. Too sharp for the rest of us. Ijka is what we call the little bears. The cubs.”

  The children of the snowbears.

  Too much.

  Scal gripped the snowbear cloak in his hands, and stayed silent. At length Iveran rose from the fire, the pendant held loosely in his hand, and thanked the old woman. Touched Scal lightly on the arm, murmured, “Hanej will be wondering where we have gone.” Together they walked from the house, the elder bearing a snowbear’s claw, the younger bearing a snowbear’s pelt, and they walked in silence.

  So Scal learned to fight. He would not say he enjoyed it, never that. But he could not deny that his blood sang as he danced the sharp dance. That there was a sweetness to the swirling of the blades. That he swelled with pride at Kettar’s praise, and at the sharp, beautiful sword the blademaster gave to him. That he found himself returning Iveran’s bear-toothed grins.

  So Scal learned what had been Maarin’s idea of what it meant to be a good man. Iveran would tell him on their night walks. Long lectures that rambled and forked and never seemed to end where Iveran meant them to. But more, Iveran showed him, or he tried to. Helping the smaller and weaker, as when they helped a group of young children fight a snow battle with a group of older children, or brought food to the elders who could not make their own. Giving praise when earned, no matter how small the deed, as when bright-eyed Talud showed Iveran the little snowbear he had roughly carved from a piece of stone. Meting out appropriate punishment when necessary, as when Iveran had Helvi’s tongue cut out for insulting Camad’s ancestor, or when he threw Ueni from the ice shelf for kicking Iveran’s favorite dog. Killing a man yourself, when his death was called for.

  So Scal learned the harsh truths of the North. Fair is a fool’s dream, Kerrus had told him, and it was more true in the North than anywhere else. They were a hard folk, these people of the ice and snow, hard as the place that shaped them. They were a folk that laughed as they watched Ueni fall screaming to the ground far below, yet prickled to rage at the slightest hint of dishonor. Honor was the most important thing, but it did not seem to mean to them what it meant to Scal. Honor was beating one who was weaker, even as it was helping one who was weaker. Honor was taking all that you could take by force, even as it was giving to those who had greatest need. Honor was in teaching, though teaching meant fists and kicks and cuts and sitting naked in the snow through a night.

  So Scal learned to hate. These people who looked so like him, who spoke the words his heart had always known, they were no blood of his. No matter what Iveran said, he would never be one of them. He learned to make a mask of his face, to keep the hatred hidden away. He would lie at night in his pile of furs in Iveran’s home and listen to the chieftain snore. The little bone knife in his hand. The lump of his hatred and his hurt held closest in his heart. He would wish for Iveran’s death, as he had never before wished for a man to die. And yet he would stay wrapped in his furs all night, and sheathe the little knife only in his boot.

  And so Scal learned a new kind of love, the love there was to be found in the North. To laugh with gentle Hanej, and take a simple joy in helping her cook and clean. To respond to the cuffs men leveled at his shoulders with cuffs of his own, and a bear-toothed smile to go with it. To play with the other boys of Valastaastad, wrestling and fighting and always parting with friendly words. To respect Iveran, for the chieftain was a good man more often than not, and kind to Scal when he had had no reason to be, and because he called Scal ijka still. To look at Hanej’s swelling stomach, and the snowbear cloak he was to give to the baby, and wonder if Jari would be anything like Brennon.

  More than anything, Scal learned that he no longer knew himself.

  He learned, too, that like the followers of the Parents, the Northmen burned their dead.

  Screaming split his dream in two. He had been talking with Parro Kerrus in his dream, as he often did, when a sharp sword sprouted from the parro’s stomach, slicing him open, and he began to scream with a pain that was raw and pure and heartbreaking.

  Scal came awake and leaped from his bed with the knife in his hand. Rushed from his room to the landing. And saw, there, Iveran laughing with joy as a group of women bustled past him into the room beneath the snowbear’s head, where the screaming still echoed. Seeing Scal, Iveran threw his arms wide. “It is time, ijka! Soon we will meet my Jari!” And he laughed as Scal had never heard him laugh, laughed like a child finding his favorite toy.

  The men all gathered out in the snow to wait and drink and celebrate together, as was tradition. Close enough to a man, Scal joined them. They drank the rough, burning ale the Northmen so loved. They drank, too, the wines and brandies they had taken from Aardanel. Scal did not drink those, for the sight of them set off an ache in his chest he had no name for. But the mood was joyful and infectious, and he drank the burning ale, and nearly threw it back up as the men laughed and cheered and made him drink more.

  They waited, all of them, to greet the chieftain’s son, the future chieftain.

  They waited for a long time, so that some of the men began to grow restless. Iveran, as attuned as ever to his clan, started to pace as he pulled at a bottle of brandy, eyes darting toward his house at the end of the lane. The joy was gone, then, replaced by a restlessness that took them all. So it was quiet among the men when the keening began.

  High and wailing as the wind that tore through the Faltiik Mountains on the coldest nights, the noise pierced through the real glass windows of Iveran’s house. And the chieftain began to run.

  Knowing, already knowing, the men followed more slowly. Scal waited outside the house with the rest of them. There was a cry, as raw and pure and heartbreaking as the one that had woken Scal, that rose over the endless keening. No one moved. No one breathed.

  After a time Iveran came stumbling out. Face twisted. Eyes red, crying. White tunic streaked with blood. He pushed past them, running, running to the far edge of the ice.

  And they knew, though they had already known. The keening of the midwives, the keening that was only for the dead. They went in to bear witness, the men of the clan. But Scal was not a man. He was a boy, a boy with too much grief in his soul, and his feet took him in the other direction. To the far edge of the ice.

  He stood a dozen paces behind Iveran, silent. Alone high above the world, surrounded by barren whiteness. No wind, no sound to hide Iveran’s racking sobs. Scal watched, and remembered. All the sobs he had held within himself. All the pain he had bitten back. His flesh remembered, would always remember, Iveran’s sharp lessons. He wanted to feel joy. Joy that, finally, Iveran felt a measure of all the pain he had caused. Joy that, in a small way, perhaps Kerrus and Brennon had finally gotten some vengeance.

  But his chest hurt, in that place that was for Kerrus and Brennon and Eddin and Lero. All those who had been kind to him, in his secon
d life after the snows. The place where he kept their memories. Where he kept them alive. Since Iveran had killed them.

  We rise above, he knew Parro Kerrus would say. It is never a fault, to offer the Father’s kindness, or the Mother’s forgiveness.

  He hurt, for all the kindness he had known. In Aardanel, and in this remote place. Iveran had given him a home. A helm made from a snowbear’s skull. The name ijka, marking him. Had wanted to give him a brother, a better-than-brother. To give him something to live for. His chest hurt, in that place he could not name, and he learned that Iveran, too, lived in that place.

  So he stepped, a dozen steps forward, to kneel next to Iveran. He put his arms around the chieftain’s shoulders, and held him as he cried his grief into the world.

  There was a time, after the tears and the shaking slowed, when Iveran grabbed Scal’s hand. Pulled it from his shoulder, held it palm up. Pressed something into it, something that was as big as Scal’s hand. For once, Iveran had no words.

  Scal tried to give it back, after the tears had stopped and they had risen to their feet. “No,” Iveran said. “It is yours now, ijka.” He put it himself around Scal’s neck, the snowbear-claw pendant that had been meant for Jari.

  They burned them that night. The men knew what to do, and had done it without being told while their chieftain grieved. The pyre stood on the barren ground below Valastaastad, wood stacked careful, precise. Waiting.

  Iveran could not do his part, when it came to it, so it was left to Scal. With Uisbure and Kettar, he entered Iveran’s house. Climbed to the second floor. Crossed into the room beneath the snowbear’s head. The women had left, their duty done for now. Left the rest for the men to see to.

  Had it not been for the blood, the blood over everything, it could have been normal. A mother, reclining on her sleeping furs, with her newborn held to her breast. But there was the blood, and they were too still, and too dead. Scal wrapped the baby, Jari, in the little snowbear cloak and carried him down. Kettar and Uisbure followed with Hanej. They laid her in a sled, to lower her down through the ice, but Scal kept Jari held close as he went one-handed down the ladder.