Raven Speak (9781442402492)

by Wilson, Diane Lee

  But as he waited for the pair to cross the clearing, the beat slipped its rhythm and his vision swam. Snippets of stories he’d told—or heard (he was suddenly confused about that)—shot through his head. Winter winds came howling … He wandered. Alone. Until one morning … a woman rode out of the forest. And the sun blazed.

  He rubbed his eyes and blinked. This was no common rider; it was the seer! Across the clearing, riding toward him—straight toward him as if she could magically look through the overhanging boughs and see him—was the seer of his father’s stories: a beautiful woman dressed in every shade of blue.

  The hems of both garments (his lips moved with the words he’d committed to memory, though even his clever mind had never imagined anything as beautiful) sparkled with blue glass and clear crystal beads created in a far-off land.

  The thudding in his chest doubled. Seers appeared rarely and only to a chosen few. Had she come to interpret his dreams, to confirm his wishes? Would she proclaim him clan chieftain?

  Steadily she approached, steadily and slowly. Noble. Her mount could have belonged to one of the Valkyrie, for it flaunted the distinctive chopped mane, a mane that rippled like black flames with each toss of the horse’s head.

  Near to trembling with excitement—he was chosen!—he pushed the bough aside and scrambled up the stream’s opposite bank. He pulled himself tall. Walk straight, he chided. No limping. The seer’s unwavering gaze was upon him.

  But as he neared the field’s middle he realized with a shudder that it was no battle horse that approached, but only that runty little dun. He’d been deceived! And the rider? He squinted, his vision still wavering.

  Asa! Not dead then. Or maybe returned from the dead to torment him, to prevent him from being clan chieftain. He tightened the grip on his sword. Well—dead or alive—she wasn’t going to do that. She’d had her chance. And he’d labored too many seasons now molding the clan to his way of thinking.

  The jewels captured the sunlight, shattered its brilliance, and tossed it back into the air. The dazzling display triggered random words in his mind: She came to this man riding on a white horse.

  That gave him pause. He was confused again because there had been a white horse once. It was not owned by a seer, however, but by a sorcerer, a witch who had bewitched his father. That horse was no more. His father was no more. And, as far as he knew, that meddlesome woman was no more.

  “What is it you seek?” she had asked. The words played out in his mind and across his lips even as Asa rode closer and closer. He heard himself mumbling the lost man’s plea: “I seek to stop wandering. I seek to not shiver. I seek to be other than alone.”

  He remembered how the woman of the story had walked with the man so that he wouldn’t be lonely and how she helped him build a house of stone and wood and turf so that he needn’t wander. Then one stormy day this man said, “I am still cold. I am still hungry. Will it always be winter?”

  And she had done nothing.

  His teeth ground together. Just as Asa had done nothing—after all he’d offered her. He drew his sword.

  No, he thought, slowly swaying from side to side, testing the sword’s feel. She had done something: she’d thwarted him at every opportunity! She’d attacked him and humiliated him!

  One day, while the man waited beside a stream, the woman’s white horse appeared to him. “I can make you warm,” it told him. “I can feed you. And I can bring summer.”

  Was this horse speaking to him now? The blood roared through his head such that he couldn’t be certain. But he wanted summer to come. They all needed summer to come. And he’d certainly be warm in that sparkling robe. With a widening smile he pictured himself in the chieftain’s seat, the regal blue robe spilling over its sides to lap at the piles of food the others would bring him. All he had to do was slay this horse and slay its meddlesome rider, Asa. He should have stopped them long ago.

  The dun horse was tugging at its reins. It did appear rather fearsome with its ears pinned flat, its yellowed teeth champing on the bit. He remembered the creature savaging him in the byre. A purple bruise still marked his thigh. But look now—it was shaking its head, nodding its head. Telling him what to do.

  “Take my blood,” the horse said, “and scatter it on open ground. And take my bones and grind them into the dirt. And take my skin, emptied of all its worth, and mount it on a wooden frame at the edge of your new field so that all who see it will know what a gift I have given you.”

  Yes. He would have this horse’s blood. And the girl’s, too. He had been chosen.

  And this man, who was a dutiful man, did as the horse instructed. He picked up his sword and in one stroke…

  TUTTUGU OK EIN

  The broken sword snaked a menacing arc through the air. Rune jumped and grunted surprise as blood trickled down his shoulder. Too late Asa yanked the reins to spin him away. How was she going to defeat this crazed man? She had no battle training.

  Momentum had carried Jorgen off balance, and he staggered a step before raising the sword again. Both hands clutched the hilt as he lurched toward her.

  She held Rune in place until the last instant, then booted him aside, and this time the sword sliced empty air.

  The old skald stumbled sideways, panting. A thatch of hair that had fallen across one eye slicked itself to his cheek, yet he didn’t shake it aside. His mouth gaped and closed, fishlike. Was he ill or simply out of breath? No time to ponder the answer; here he came once more. Common sense urged her to flee, but she squashed it without hesitation. She wasn’t fleeing. Not from him or anyone. Not ever again.

  Doubling the reins around her fingers, she prepared to signal Rune, who was growing more and more agitated. He snorted whistling blasts and broke from his prancing to paw ragged furrows into the ground. Jorgen rushed closer, his face twisted in a clenched-jaw sneer, and just before she spun Rune away a third time, she saw that the man’s eyes shone as glassy as marbles. The pupils were blown so wide and black that he seemed to not even recognize her.

  “What are you doing, Jorgen?” She pulled Wenda’s knife from her waist and brandished it, though it was obviously more utensil than weapon. “You’re not going to hurt Rune. And you can’t hurt me.”

  Oddly, the skald retreated. As if performing some solemn ritual, he pointed the sword to the sky, then drew it close to his face, pressing its broken blade flat against his nose. With his chest heaving and the vertical sword halving his face, he focused his dark glare on her and Rune. A silence ensued in which he spoke not a word, and only Rune’s impatient snorts and swishing tail made any noise. She got the impression that some sorcerer’s spell—or many bowls of ale, perhaps—held him in thrall.

  Rune’s temper, meanwhile, was approaching a boil. Over and over he tossed his head, trying to yank the reins from her and grab the rattling bit in his teeth. Flecks of foam spattered his neck and shoulders. She’d not seen him this unruly in years, but she well remembered how explosive he could be. If he was planning one of his berserker fits, there was no way she’d be able to stay on his back. She booted his shoulder.

  In response, he bucked. Hard. Before she could grab a fistful of bristly mane he bucked again, throwing her off-balance, and in the next heartbeat he was pivoting toward Jorgen. His challenging whinny split the air.

  “No!” she cried, fighting for the reins as she was flung backward. But Rune had snatched the bit; he was in control, and his powerful haunches carried them straight toward Jorgen and the jagged-tipped sword now aimed at his belly. With the violence of a battering ram, Rune knocked the man to the ground. She heard the air forced out of the skald, a pained sound echoed sickeningly by Rune’s deep grunt. She felt her horse falter. Had the sword gotten him? His hindquarters shivered, and for several uneven beats his gait rocked like a storm-battered ship. But then the powerful rolling gallop returned and he was circling back. The gusts blasting through his nostrils crackled like wind-whipped sails.

  Jorgen was climbing to his feet, regaining
his sword, and readying himself. Rune, ears pinned flat to his head, galloped straight for him. She’d not seen such recklessness in him in all the summers and winters they’d shared. Usually—with playful exceptions—they worked as one, his back soft, his neck pliant. Now she straddled one of Thor’s lightning bolts. And that bolt—fierce, frightening, direct—had no cognizance of her. Still she tugged on the reins, hoping to guide him from harm. Otherwise he was going to get himself killed, get them both killed.

  They were upon Jorgen again. The sword came swinging and Rune neatly dodged it. She felt him lash out with a hind hoof as he passed, nearly unseating her; she couldn’t tell if the blow landed. Then, instead of continuing in another circle as he had before, Rune stopped abruptly. His front hooves slammed the ground and his hindquarters dropped like an anchor. But they couldn’t sustain the effort, and their sickening wobble—something was definitely wrong!—and near collapse sent him reeling sideways. The accompanying groan as he righted himself described so much pain her stomach sank. He was wounded; she had to get him away from this battle that wasn’t his. With both hands she pulled on one rein as hard as she could.

  She might as well have tried elbowing a lightning bolt. Stubborn to the bone, Rune shook away her attempts, gathered into a gallop, and pounded toward Jorgen. The fury that consumed him raged stronger, and she felt him rising into a full rear and coming at the man with flailing hooves. Just in time she clutched another hank of mane. To keep from slipping off his back she clamped her legs and pressed her cheek close to his neck. It was like flying; for that instant she was soaring toward the clouds, leaving the ground and all its burdens behind. Amidst the blur of a tilting sky she caught a glimpse of Jorgen beneath them, his arms flung across his face, as Rune’s hooves came pummeling.

  That moment of euphoria, of triumph over the enemy, was immediately replaced by a panicked feeling of falling, of a great weight crumbling ever so slowly, and she—helpless—with it. As if through a nightmarish fog she felt her leg jamming the ground, her ankle twisting painfully; she fought for air as a massive amount of horseflesh smothered her. She tasted mane and mud and blood. There was a great scrambling and slamming of limbs—hooves clacked one upon the other like stone on stone—and instinctively she tried to drag herself out of danger. Her nails clawed the grit, one knee shoved against the ground in frenzied spasms. Then, somehow, she found herself unfettered. Rune lunged to his feet.

  Dazed though she was, she saw that the reins tangling his legs yanked his head low. He stumbled, his eyes rolling to white. Alarmed.

  Jorgen, panting in anguished gasps, was fighting to get to his knees. He located his sword in the mud and reclaimed it, clasping it with his own two-fisted fury, and staggered toward his vulnerable attacker.

  She had the knife in her hand and was lunging for him even before she realized it. Rune’s scream pierced her fog, and a crystalline ray of fear and anger and love brought the knife slamming down on Jorgen’s back. The point tore through the wool cloak and thunked into his shoulder. A dark stain surged as Jorgen yelped.

  He struggled to turn around, to face her, but wouldn’t let go of the sword buried in Rune’s groin. Blood splattered the black-stockinged dun legs, the mud, the cloak. She yanked the knife free and sank it into him again. Over and over she stabbed, and then he was out from underneath her and, with one arm hanging limply from his shoulder, he charged. Haphazardly he slashed at her legs. Behind him, Rune staggered sideways and fell partway to the ground, splayed in an ungainly stance.

  Back and forth, back and forth, the sword swept knee-level from the ground. Jorgen lurched behind it, his haggard face twisted in a hungry, evil-eyed grin. Her blood rose up to meet his. She took a firm grip on the knife and nimbly evaded the sword’s arc while searching for an opening. Her breathing roared in her ears, burned through her nostrils. She was filled with fire. The sea wind scoured her skin; the mountain buttressed her bones. She, Asa Coppermane, was the clan’s chieftain, and she was going to rid them all of this menace.

  From the corner of her eye she saw Rune regain his feet. The rein had broken, and one short end and a long one dangled from the bit. Although he limped, another quick glance proved his unflagging defiance; she saw it in his eyes. The sword came closer. She jumped; Jorgen chuckled. Now Rune was watching them. While his muddy mane stood erect, his forelock snarled in a mass of black storm clouds. He shook his head and snorted. Though he held his blood-covered hind leg gingerly suspended, Rune eyed Jorgen and started for him. He forced his hobbling legs to his will and lunged, running Jorgen down a third time. She barely made it out of the way of the horse’s fury. He slowed to a stop, turned, and purposefully galloped over the skald, landing some near-fatal footfalls. Jorgen moaned and doubled, clutching his stomach. The sword fell free. Rune returned. She saw with horror how badly he was bleeding from his underbelly. But he tossed his head, the black forelock shooting up like flames, and managed somehow to lift himself off the ground. Not as high as before, but high enough to bring his hooves slamming down upon Jorgen’s body. He lifted again and again, as methodical as a hammer, pounding the man into the mud. Jorgen’s groans ended, and when she finally grabbed the broken rein and pulled Rune off him, the skald lay grotesquely twisted and silent.

  TUTTUGU OK TVEIR

  He was dead. Jorgen, the man she’d hated and feared, was dead. The battered face chewing mud would no longer grin at her, was in fact already hardening into some useless relic. Yet serial images of his ashen face invaded her mind: the hungry manner in which he’d always watched her, the way his eyes roved from bench to rafter and back to her when conjuring his stories, his rancid breath filming her skin, his maniacal fury as he’d slashed at Rune’s neck. For every one of her fourteen summers and winters, it seemed, he’d been a thorn to her. And while the prick under her ribs had been removed, the wound throbbed hot.

  Her chest heaved. She felt distinctly different; she was different. Blood pulsed through her veins, strong and eager. Was this how the warrior felt—keenly alive and ready for the next kill? Did one kill beget another and then another? She felt linked to the world; her heightened senses tasted the sea, inhaled the wind, fingered the mud’s grit. Everything around her roared, and she felt strangely calm, master of it all.

  Rune was still breathing hard, too, his nostrils fluttering dark and moist. He sidled impatiently, but his injuries finally held him in place. He cocked his hind leg, the one slick with blood, and gingerly touched the toe of his hoof to the ground. When he looked at her, he sighed. Newly worried, she peered under his belly. The tender hide gaped, revealing ragged pink flesh and strands of white gristle, all of it awash in blood. But no entrails dangled. If she could pack the wound with something absorbent—maybe some moss from the stream—and somehow coax his spirit back, he’d live. He had to. He was Rune.

  She laid a hand on his forehead, found it damp and matted with sweat, and momentarily doubted her bravado. “Wait for me, Rune,” she urged, and set off for the stream. Her twisted ankle buckled at once, and to her aggravation she had to make her way at an old woman’s totter to the edge of the clearing. Nor was it easy to traverse the rocky banks, and her imbalance at one point sent her leg plunging into the icy current. She yanked it out with a gasp, spied some moss upstream, and clambered with more care. As she was peeling the newest, greenest moss from the rock, a raven alit in a bare-limbed ash behind her and proceeded to report her every movement with shrieking calls.

  She wasn’t surprised, then, to see Wenda standing beside Rune, examining his injuries, as she returned. What did shock her, though, was viewing her four-legged, lifelong friend from afar. His emaciated silhouette was a jarring outline of thin neck, bony withers and jutting hip, truly no more than hide covering bone. His bristled mane looked ridiculous now. How had he managed, with the weight of all his winters, to become a warrior’s horse for her? He’d battled for her life; he’d saved her life.

  “Good girl,” Wenda said when she saw the fistfuls of dripping moss.
She squeezed the water from it and the two of them carefully packed the wound. Rune’s head lifted and his eyes glistened with pain, but other than one involuntary grunt, he didn’t protest.

  Wenda stared at Jorgen’s body, her one eye blinking in contemplation, and perhaps distrust, as if she half-expected him to rise. The wind riffled the dead skald’s hair, lifted the hem of his tunic. Abruptly Wenda booted the ground, sending a splatter of mud onto his face. It freckled his nose, where a trickle of blood wormed earthward. The two ravens descended, eager to take part in the carnage. One clawed the mangled shoulder where, in a show of triumph, he ruffled his neck feathers, snapped his beak, and voiced a series of deep kr-u-ucks. The other boldly skipped close to the smashed face to peck at a sightless eyeball. Jealous, the first bird joined him, and in moments both eyes dissolved into bloody hollows.

  “He was always blind,” Wenda muttered. “So focused on his greed that he couldn’t see.” With a jerk of her chin she sent a wad of spittle arcing through the air. It fell short, foaming in a tiny pool within reach of his fingers. As she watched her ravens, Wenda worked her jaw, pursing and unpursing her lips, gnawing at something on her mind. “That man,” she said at last, “reached beyond his grasp.”

  The accusatory words, though aimed at Jorgen, grazed Asa. Certainly she’d extended her reach too. Was she next to be punished? “What’s wrong with reaching?”

  Wenda shot her a stabbing glare. “Jorgen used lies to extend his reach. He threaded his stories with falsehood and with malice, and what he wove was intended only to serve his own vanity.” The bitterness in her voice soured the very air around them. “He reached for something he didn’t deserve. And when anyone tried to knock away his hand, he turned that hand and choked the life out of that person—or animal, as the case often was. But he had no authority to murder. He was not a god.”