by Kim Wilkins
Realisation dawned slowly on Skalmir. ‘It’s a true tree,’ he said. ‘The Ærfolc legends say that the oldest ash in the forest makes people tell the truth.’ He gazed down at the dog. ‘The black hound is another Ærfolc legend.’
‘And the washerwoman?’ Rose asked.
‘Perhaps. I don’t know them all.’ Rathcruick’s words came back to him: You see only a sliver of the wood. My people have been here since the time of the giants. Skalmir and Rose were wandering somewhere ancient and enchanted, a place made of trees and old legends, where the Ærfolc reigned. He was more certain than ever that Rowan was in here somewhere.
‘So we are constrained to tell truth while we are here?’ Rose asked.
‘I believe so.’
‘Then perhaps it is best if we don’t talk.’
Skalmir looked at her, saw the corners of her lips turn up, and chuckled. ‘Perhaps, if we want to stay friends, we should talk. Is it true, then, that you don’t trust me?’
She shook her head while saying, ‘Yes. I am trying to trust you, but I don’t know you and you are a man and stronger and taller than me by miles, so I have wariness in my heart.’
He took her hand. ‘Remember, I have kept Rowan safe these four years.’
‘You lost her. You lost her to the Ærfolc. I would not have lost her.’
‘You already did.’ Again, the strange sensation of words jumping on to his lips without his permission.
Rose’s brows drew together sharply. ‘Stop talking,’ she said. ‘We must stop talking.’
So they did. They sat in silence a long time while the dog snored beneath them, but now Skalmir’s curiosity was roused and so he asked Rose, ‘Why did Wengest hide Rowan from you?’
The look that crossed her face hurt him, so he held up his finger to her lips and said, ‘Forget I asked.’
But she spoke anyway, her breath warm against his fingertip. ‘I loved another. Wengest found out. I was simply lucky that he never suspected Rowan wasn’t his.’
‘Is she his?’
Rose shook her head. ‘Her father is Wengest’s nephew, Heath.’ Her eyes were sad. ‘I expect you’ll tell him.’
‘I won’t,’ Skalmir said. ‘Nothing could persuade me to.’
She looked at him, and a smile came to her eyes. ‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘Because in the true tree, you couldn’t lie to me.’
He smiled back. ‘See? It’s not so bad up here. I can say to you that I will protect you because of the love I hold for your daughter and your sister.’ The last words came out completely unbidden, and he drew a sharp breath.
‘My sister?’ Rose said, eyes narrowed. ‘Which sister?’
‘Bluebell.’
‘How well do you know Bluebell?’
‘I …’ Everyone knows Bluebell. Say it. Say everyone knows her and she’s not special to you and she never visited Rowan. ‘I am in love with her.’
‘She is your high-born lover?’
Skalmir nodded and waited for Rose’s mind to tick over, to realise –
‘She’s seen Rowan, hasn’t she? She’s been to visit you and Rowan? She’s known all along where my daughter was and she told me nothing!’ Her voice grew wilder, infused with repressed sobs. ‘Four years! Four years I have been apart from my own child and she swore she knew nothing!’
‘She thought it for the best.’
‘She always thinks she knows best. She doesn’t.’ Rose looked down at the dog. ‘Leave us be, you foul creature. We need to get out of this tree before the whole world shatters with the horrors of the truth.’
Skalmir put a hand on her sleeve, aware of how soft she felt beneath it. ‘Don’t, Rose. Bluebell knew how much it would hurt you if you knew. She only wanted to be part of Rowan’s life.’
‘So did I,’ Rose said, then fell to silence.
Skalmir turned away from his guilt, and applied his mind to the problem at hand. The woods were silent and still. The dog had fallen asleep; they couldn’t stay up this tree forever.
‘I’m going back to the camp to get my bow and arrow,’ he said.
‘You won’t get past the dog.’
‘I have a plan. Of sorts.’
‘Tell me what I can do.’
‘You need to do nothing but wait up in this tree for me to kill the dog,’ he said. ‘You don’t seem much use.’ Again, he wished for the words to return. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, because that was also true.
Rose gave him a hard look. ‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to die in the forest alone.’
‘We understand each other,’ was all he could say, as he eased off his remaining shoe and threw it with all his might deeper into the forest.
The dog woke, lifted its head and sniffed, then got to its feet and padded off towards where the shoe had landed. Skalmir jumped from the tree, jarring his joints and sending pain shooting up through his injured foot. At once, he heard the dog’s footfalls stop, turn …
Skalmir ran. He was quick, but he was shoeless, and he was not entirely sure which direction to take to return to the camp. The dog gained on him, hot breath on his heels. Leaves ploughed up on either side as they ran. Skalmir heard the stream, reoriented himself and redoubled his speed, broke through the trees and skidded to the ground, reaching for his bow and loading it just as the dog landed with a crushing thump on his chest, knocking all the breath out of him.
Then crack.
The dog yelped and turned, snarling. There was Rose, launching another rock at the dog’s head, clipping it over the ear.
Skalmir nocked an arrow, shot it.
It slid through the air and into the base of the dog’s skull, right into its brain.
It froze, shuddered, fell over on its side.
Skalmir stood and filled the damned thing with arrows: heart, liver, lungs. Making sure it never got back up.
Then he stood back, catching his breath. He glanced up at Rose. ‘I’m sorry I said you were no use.’
She smiled at him. ‘It wasn’t true.’
Twenty-one
The sky was pale and Willow felt the cold all the way to her bones. As always, she embraced discomfort, proof that she was doing Maava’s good work. Long yellow grass, sea air bristling and alive with salt, and grey clouds on the horizon. The sounds of strange sea birds that she had never heard before. Willow had grown up by the sea, but in the south-east, a delicate pretty part of Thyrsland where apples and berries grew wild and the summer air shimmered with the constant movement of butterflies. Not this barren, yellow-and-grey peninsula off the eastern coast of the Ice-Heart, where Hakon had left her with supplies and an oilskin tent, and vague directions to a crater lake with sticky clay sides.
‘I will return as soon as I can,’ he had said, and she had been afraid, frantic angel wings beating in her heart. Afraid to be alone in this strange place, where she knew none of the language, nor any of the routes and landmarks to get herself back home.
Wherever home was now.
But as he had sailed off, the unease in her body began to harden into strength and intensity, just the way that her muscles grew harder the more she made them ache during training. So what if he was abandoning her, never to come back? She would survive. She would build a chapel right here in the remote east of Is-hjarta and she would send for her son and they would do Maava’s good work and all good would grow from there. Because only good grew from her faith, she felt that as surely and strongly as rocks felt sure and strong in their seats in the earth.
It had been two days. She hadn’t seen another soul. But she could see the smoke of a village across the shallow grey water, and she had watched the tide seep away from the causeway each day, leaving a gleaming muddy path exposed for several hours before closing over it again.
So this morning, she waited for the water to move out of her way, so that she could walk to the village. Willow had money, of course. Before she’d fled with Hakon, she had gathered her savings and a few trinkets to sell if she needed to. She never wore jewelle
ry – her grey clothes were always fastened with plain iron pins, her long mousy hair always in an unadorned plait tied with yarn under a rough scarf – but she had a good collection of it packed. Some were pieces given to her by her uncle, her father, her sisters, back in the times when she knew her family. She had no need for them any more, not with Maava’s angels as her new kin.
Willow waited an hour after the tide had cleared the causeway so the grey, rippled mud wouldn’t be too sloppy to walk on. Still, it sucked at her feet as she crossed. Broken shells and fish skeletons crunched under her shoes from time to time, but she kept her eyes up, fixed on the smoke of the village so she didn’t wander her way into more remote places. She was exposed on the causeway, and the wind whipped at her cheeks.
Back on dry land, the same spiky yellow grasses pulling at her skirts, Willow made her way along a rutted track, her fingers chilly. Another mile and she could smell the smoke and the sweet steam that told her somebody was brewing mead. After so many days at sea and then alone on the peninsula, with only sour rainwater and dried beef for sustenance, Willow’s mouth watered. She hurried her steps, ascended a steep, slippery slope where stones loosed themselves under her feet, then down again towards the village. The long lines of fish drying under a thatched roof told her what the primary work of the villagers was. She made directly for the alehouse, only remembering as she opened the door that she didn’t speak the language here. Her focus had been on teaching Hakon her own language, and she’d picked up nothing from him but the occasional frustrated curse.
She let the door close behind her. The inn was tiny, smoky. The smell of fish was strong. A fire burned and Willow approached it and stretched out her hands to it, feeling the ice leave her fingers. Two old men sat at a table in the middle of the room, playing a game with counters on a wooden board. The alehouse wife called out to Willow in the strange Is-hjarta language. Willow assumed it was a greeting and waved in return.
She picked her way around a great sleeping hound and stood in front of the alehouse wife. ‘I don’t speak your language,’ she said.
The woman shrugged.
Willow mimed drinking and eating and this time the woman nodded and held out her hand, pointing to her palm to ask for money. Willow felt under her cloak for her purse and withdrew a handful of coins. Again the woman nodded and Willow said, ‘Thank you,’ before finding a place to sit down.
‘Southlander,’ a sly voice said.
Willow looked up. At a table in a dim corner sat a cloaked man. She hadn’t seen him when she’d come in because his clothes blended with the dark. Now he’d pushed back his hood and she could see a pale face with a broad, smooth brow and hooked eyebrows. He might be thirty or he might be forty. She glanced at his hands; the knuckles were knotty. Forty then.
‘Good morning to you,’ she said to him.
‘Why are you in Dewthorp?’ he asked, with the same musical accent as Hakon.
‘That is my own business,’ she replied.
‘I have many fine charms for sale.’
Now his stained cloak and sly manner made sense. He was a travelling pedlar, and he was selling charms. In her own lands, he would be known as an undermagician. Here in Is-hjarta, they were called randrmen. She knew this because Hakon told her a randrman had forged the sword she could feel reassuringly pressed against her hip. And she knew what an undermagician was because her aunt was one, and possibly her sister Ash. Whatever they all called themselves, they were full of evil and an enemy of the one true god. And the ones who were so pathetic that they sold tricks to strangers were the worst.
Frustration boiled over. She was surrounded by devils. ‘I have no use for heathen magic,’ she said imperiously. ‘Leave me be.’
He shrugged and turned his gaze back to his mug of ale.
Willow’s meal arrived and she ate it in silence, the proximity of the randrman eroding the edges of her satisfaction. How could she happily enjoy her food and drink when Maava’s enemies were so close: breathing, hearts beating, unbelieving?
She pushed her plate away and left without a backwards glance. She was better off across the water, on the deserted peninsula where there was nothing between her and her god.
Willow returned to the causeway. Long-legged birds were picking over the mud now, catching tiny crustaceans and fat worms that had gone to ground too shallow. Mud splattered her hem, and she felt her profound and unshakeable abjectness in the eyes of Maava. She was just a worm in the mud, in a land determined to shun the trimartyr faith. She cried as she walked, huge heaving sobs, and shouted at the sky, ‘I’m sorry! I am sorry, Maava, that I am so low! How dare I even take your name on my tongue? Maava, Lord of all kingdoms, on earth and in the Sunlands, I am sorry that I am so low!’ She stopped, wiped her nose on her sleeve, then lay down on her back in the mud and looked at the sky.
I will show you, I will show you, she said in her head. I shall raise your name high above these heathen dogs. I pray to you, Maava, and all your angels, that you return Hakon to me only if he is able to be converted to our faith. I would rather be here alone, among the mud and the mute animals, than surround myself yet longer with heathens. Send him back to me only if it means we can take the Ice-Heart and dedicate it to magnifying the name of Maava.
And angels began to sing to her in clanging, overlapping voices that buzzed against the inside of her skull. The sound obliterated everything but her prayer, as she repeated it: I will show you, I will show you.
She must have entered some kind of trance, because when she became aware of her surroundings again, sea water was lapping around her face and lifting her hair. She stood, saw that the tide was returning, and waded across, ankle deep, to her little tent.
Willow’s body was wracked by shivers, from the cold and from the trance. She made a fire and stripped off her muddy clothes, then sat naked close to the flames.. Her skin turned pink. The triangle on the chain around her neck grew hot. She unclasped it and dug it hard into her inner thigh, harder until she felt the skin give, puncture. A bubble of blood squeezed out. She smeared it with her thumb, drew a triangle and stared at it a long time.
When she finally looked up, the shadows had grown long and her fingers and toes were icy. She dressed in her spare clothes and combed the mud out of her hair, then washed her muddy clothes and strung up a line of rope to hang them on. Just as she was tying the rope, she glanced out and saw ships in the distance. She counted them with her eyes. Seven ships. And among them she recognised the small vessel that she and Hakon had taken from Sæcaster, from her chapel-burning sister.
Willow could tell from the sails and the prows carved like dragons that these were raider ships, and she had grown up with a healthy fear of raiders. Hakon’s presence among them didn’t reassure her, so she went inside the tent and tied the entrance together. She held her triangle between her fingers to wait. But he had returned, and that meant that she and the angels – no, she and Maava Himself – had an agreement. She would now do everything in her power to convert Hakon. Though she hadn’t reckoned on him being surrounded by hundreds of raiders …
She heard them. She heard the ships sliding onto the gravel and mud, she heard them calling to each other in their strange language, she heard Hakon’s voice above them all.
Finally, he came, calling her. ‘Willow! Willow!’
Hands shaking, she unpicked the knots on the tent. He put his hand out to help her to her feet, and she emerged into late afternoon sunshine and wild sea wind to see three hundred and fifty ragged, hairy men setting up an encampment.
‘I told you I’d return,’ Hakon said, a merry glint in his eye. ‘And look: I brought us some company.’
Willow’s tent became her refuge from the noise and commotion of the raider encampment. These men had been followers of Hakon for many years, travelling from place to place – islands and remote peninsulas like this – always believing that he should be the true king of the Ice-Heart. The current king, Gisli, was Hakon’s twin, and Hakon’s army despised
him for what they saw as his betrayals and for his caution about raiding in the south. If Hakon was to be believed, there were plenty back home in Marvik who would follow him if he had the chance to take the throne again.
Willow listened to their musical chatter as she travelled to the lake to fetch water for her porridge, and wondered what they were saying. Perhaps they were talking about how all the riches of the south could be theirs. The ports and the mines and the farming soil that wasn’t mixed with ice. Willow had never thought about her homeland as a lucky place, but to these folk from the meagre, permafrozen north, it had been a place to envy for generations.
That afternoon, Hakon took her out past the encampment, which was growing by the hour, to train on the causeway mud.
‘You won’t always have trimmed grass beneath your feet,’ he said, crunching his linden shield against a blow from her sword. ‘You might be slipping on the guts of your fallen companions.’
She shut out all but the force of Maava in her body and soul, and let Him guide her movements, swift and strong. She battled with Hakon until her shoulders burned and then went at him harder through the burn. Too hard. Lost her footing. Fell to her knees in the mud, bringing her shield up too late.
Hakon’s blade fell to the curve between her shoulder and neck and then stopped.
Willow panted, gazing up at him.
He smiled. ‘You are almost ready.’
‘How can you say that? I just died.’
‘I am one of the mightiest swordsmen in all of Thyrsland.’ He lifted his sword, twirled it in a flourish and sheathed it. ‘And I said “almost”.’
Willow climbed to her feet. Her heart still thudded. She sheathed Griðbani and pressed the shield against her stomach, arms folded over it. ‘Why did you bring your army to me?’
‘Because I am thinking of doing something …’ He ran out of words, said a word in his own language, then tried again. ‘Wild? Unexpected?’
‘And what is it?’
‘Invading Sæcaster.’ He looked at her closely, the wind whipping his long hair across the ragged wound in his cheek.