Chapter 1
A scream shattered the stillness of the night, echoing up the snowy slopes from the little cottage at the bottom of the valley.
Freya rolled her eyes and grinned. “How big a spider do you think Katja just found in the ice cellar?”
Erik smiled and leaned down to kiss her again.
The second scream was longer than the first, a warbling sound that shuddered with terror and pain in the darkness.
Freya sat up so quickly that she nearly smashed Erik in the nose, but her husband was already moving off her, standing up, and pulling on his trousers. As the young man dashed around the fire to fetch his spear, Freya grabbed her long leather coat and wrapped it around herself. “It’s not a spider.” She called up the hillside, “Arfast!”
Why would she scream like that? A bear? A ghost?
Erik was already running down the slope, his boots crunching on the frozen earth and frost-skinned grass, his steel spear flashing in the moonlight. His long legs flew over the dark terrain, but it was a long way back down to the little house beside the steaming lake.
A very long way.
“Arfast! Where the hell are you?” Freya yanked on her boots and grabbed her own spear just as the huge white elk appeared over the crest of the ridge and trotted down to meet her. Freya leapt onto the elk’s back and grabbed the shaggy fur of its neck. “Hya!”
The elk bolted down the slope, dashing across the loose scree. Tiny stones clattered in the shadows and plates of ice cracked and shot away down the hillside. But soon Arfast’s hooves were thumping on the frozen earth, and then he was dashing through the tall dead grass as they raced lower and lower toward the valley floor and the cottage beside the warm waters. Freya didn’t spare a glance for Erik as she passed him. All she could see was the wavering firelight in the window of their home, a single patch of warm color in the night.
The woman screamed a third time, and Freya hollered back, “Katja!”
The light in the window went out, and the night swallowed the cottage.
The white elk bounded over the low stone wall at the edge of the garden and slid to a halt just beside the house. Freya was already tumbling off his back as he trotted to a stop and she dashed to the doorway of the cottage with her spear in her hand. The leather curtain was torn away, letting a few feeble rays of starlight fall on the floor inside, but the rest of the cottage was hidden in shadow.
“Katja?” Freya hesitated. She could hear someone wheezing with wet and ragged breaths. “Katja?”
A black figure dashed out of the shadows, colliding with her shoulder and knocking her to the ground.
“Nine hells!” Freya kept her fingers wrapped tightly around her cold steel spear as she hit the earth, and she scrambled to her feet again, looking left and right for her attacker. Her heart was racing and a wave of heat washed through her arms and her face. She stared across the dark field, listening.
There.
The figure hunched low by the water some thirty paces away, obscured by the shadows of the rocks along the shore. It wasn’t moving but she could hear its labored breathing over the soft rippling of the lake beneath the cold winter wind.
It’s too lean and too quick to be a bear.
She stared at the shape, willing her eyes to grow sharper, willing the moon to grow brighter, but neither obliged her.
Could it be a wolf? There hasn’t been a wolf in western Ysland in years, has there?
Erik vaulted the garden wall and jogged to her side, where he planted his spear in the soft earth. His left hand danced in the darkness, signing, “How many?”
“One,” Freya whispered. “There.” She pointed to the black shape at the water’s edge.
“And Katja?” signed Erik.
“Inside,” Freya said. “You check on her.”
“Wait here.” Erik ducked into the house.
As soon as her husband was inside, Freya crept forward across the grass, her spear trained on the dark figure. It was still gasping and rasping, still choking on its own ragged breath, or maybe something wet in its mouth. Freya held her spear lightly in both hands, ready to thrust, ready to throw. The sharp chill in the air made her eyes stand a little wider, and made every faint sound a little clearer. A brilliant half moon cast its white light upon the lake, illuminating the pale wisps of steam rising lazily from the waters.
A low growl rose in the creature’s throat.
Definitely not a bear. So what are you?
Snarling and snorting, the beast shuffled around to face her, turning so that all she could see were two golden coins shining in a patch of darkness. The coins blinked, and then the shadow sprang at her.
Freya stepped in to meet its charge, and she thrust her spear into the heart of the dark shape flying up at her chest. She felt the sudden weight on her spear and she twisted aside to let the beast’s momentum drive the spear-tip through its ribs and carry it away from her. But the creature reached out and pulled the blade from its flesh so that it could limp away and stagger back down toward the water.
It has no tail. What sort of animal has no tail, except a bear?
She shook the blood from the tip of her spear and spun the long shaft about to point at the creature again. Freya started forward, carefully planting one foot in front of the other, closing the gap.
I need to be quick, before it rallies, before it goes mad with fear. I need to strike the heart or the throat, and hold it until it dies. The strike has to be perfect, or it will kill me in its death throes. I need to be perfect, or I’ll die. And I don’t want to die. Not yet.
Freya sighted her target and inhaled.
Now.
The beast stood up.
It rose up on its hind legs, rearing up to its full height, taller than Erik by more than a head, and it stretched out its hairy arms to both sides as though to shred the sky itself with its claws. For a moment, as it stood spread out and leaning back to crack its spine, Freya saw the moonlight flash on the blood oozing from the creature’s chest.
Then it curled forward again, hunching its shoulders and letting its arms dangle in front of its belly, its claws shining in the darkness. It stared at her with nightmare eyes, bloodshot orbs studded with brilliant golden irises. The black nostrils on the ends of its snout glistened, and its black jaws gaped to display a forest of yellow fangs.
Freya felt the sweat oozing down her palms and the small of her back. She felt her heart pounding and her belly knotting. But she managed a grin and said, “Well, you’re definitely one of the ugliest rabbits I’ve ever seen.”
The beast lunged at her again, driving its claws at her face. Freya whipped the butt of her spear in a vicious arc to smash its claws and nose away, and the creature stumbled to the side. But it lunged again and this time there was no room to swing her spear. She held the shaft of her weapon across her chest to block the beast and it grabbed the spear, wrapping its claws around the steel on either side of her hands. The yellow fangs glistened just in front of her eyes and its hot breath blasted her in the face.
She winced. “And you eat your own scat, don’t you?”
Freya planted her feet and whipped her hips from side to side, but she couldn’t wrench her spear free of the beast’s grip. With a sharp grunt, she lurched backward, yanking the creature forward onto her. As it tumbled off balance, still clutching the spear between them, Freya flattened her back on the earth and planted her feet in the beast’s belly, flipping it back over her head.
The creature yelped and squealed as it wheeled through the air and crashed down on its spine. Freya felt her spear come free of its grip, and she rolled to her feet and whirled to face the beast again.
It was gone.
She felt her heart freeze in her chest. She didn’t breathe. Left and right she swung her spear, searching for her prey in the darkness.
Nothing is that fast!
A shuffling sound drew her gaze to the west, and there she saw the hunching figure loping away across the dark meadow. Freya s
tood up, hefting her spear in her right hand and tilting it back over her shoulder. And then she let it fly.
In the instant that it left her hand, the spear was swallowed up by the hideous shadow of a cloud passing across the face of the moon.
My throw was perfect.
Freya waited.
When the cloud retreated, the moonlight spilled down over the valley, painting the world in silver and gray. The beast lay flat on the ground with her spear standing tall in the center of its back. She dashed toward the body. Her hand went to her belt in search of her bone knives, only to find her belt wasn’t there. It was still lying by the fire at the top of the hill, along with the rest of her clothes.
Freya swept her hand across the ground and caught up a jagged stone. As she circled the body, she saw her spear lean slowly to the left, and then lean back to the right. With a grimace, she lifted her stone above the beast’s head.
A claw snapped out, wrapped around her ankle, and ripped her leg out from under her. Freya crashed to the earth, the air blasted from her lungs as her chest hit the ground. The beast lurched forward, dragging its stinking body over her legs, digging its claws into her calves and thighs. She stared into its amber eyes, choking on its fetid breath. Its jaws gaped a little wider, its yellow fangs dripping with thick, syrupy mucus. The beast growled.
A spearhead erupted from its temple and impaled itself in the dirt, right next to her head. The beast sagged, its eyes suddenly unfocused and dull. One last exhalation reeking of blood and rotten meat washed over her, just as Freya managed to take a full breath again with her aching lungs.
Erik’s footfalls thumped through the dead grass and a moment later Freya felt the corpse being lifted off her body. She sat up and blinked at her husband. “Thank you.”
He lifted her to her feet and signed, “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “What about Katja? Is she all right?”
Erik shook his head, just a tiny shake of his chin. He signed, “It looks bad.”
Freya dashed across the heather along the edge of the lake, leaving Erik to gather their precious steel spears and to do whatever he might do with the body of the beast. She flew through the sultry night air, breathing in the soft steam curling off the warm waters even as the ice glistened on the slopes above her. Arfast stood by the cottage, his huge brown eyes watching her bolt up the hillside and vanish inside.
She paused just inside the doorway to let her night vision fade and refocus in the bright yellow light of the rekindled fire. Theirs was a small house, just the one common room carpeted in old leathers and young furs. A handful of little stools stood long the right wall, each one a short tripod of bone with a sturdy leather seat bound across the legs. Hemp lines and leather nets and woolen sheets hung across the ceiling holding clay pots, bone spoons, spare coats, and what few other odds and ends they owned.
The two curtains on the left hid the bedchambers, little more than closets just large enough for the thick mattresses and blankets that she shared with Erik, and the smaller one that her sister slept in alone.
Katja was lying in front of the fireplace at the far end of the common room.
Freya rushed to her sister’s side. Katja was sweating and shaking, her breath whistling through her clenched teeth. Freya searched her body and quickly found the wound on Katja’s leg that Erik had bound in cotton cloth, now stained with blood. Under the bandage, Freya found a ragged bite mark with half a dozen deep punctures from the beast’s fangs. The skin around each wound looked green, veined with black.
“Oh gods. Katja?” Freya touched her sister’s cheek. “Katja, it looks bad. It’s going to need medicine. You need to tell me what to do. Katja? Katja?”
The injured woman moaned and shivered.
“Katja? Come on now, I would take you to the vala if I could, but you’re the vala, so there’s nowhere else to go.” Freya tried to smile. “Come on now, you can do it. It’s an infected bite, from a bear, or a wolf, I think. What do I do? Bleed it? Burn it? Wash it? Tell me what to do and I’ll take care of everything. Just tell me what to do.”
She was reaching down toward the wound again when a bony hand grabbed her wrist.
Katja stared up at her, white-faced and sweating. Her lip trembled. “Don’t touch it,” she whispered. “Keep it covered. It’s poisoned.”
Freya wrapped the bloody bandage back around her sister’s leg. “Poison? What sort? What do I do?”
Katja shook her head. “It wasn’t a wolf.”
“I know, I know, it was bigger and different, somehow. Look, it doesn’t matter now.” Freya shook her head. “Just tell me what to do. You’ve fixed up worse bites than this before. Remember when old Burli got his hand bit off by his own goat? Huh? Remember that? And you fixed that no problem. Well, more or less. The point being he’s still alive. So this bite here is nothing, nothing at all. How do I fix it?”
“You can’t.” Katja shook, her limp brown hair plastered to her face with sweat. “There’s no cure for this. It’s not a wolf. Remember the stories?”
Freya frowned. “What stories?”
“The old sagas. War stories. The gods and the demons.”
“Kat, this is no time for stories. We need some herbs or a powder or something. You’ve got lots of them here. Just tell me which one you need,” Freya said, glancing up at the long line of earthen pots and jars along the wall.
Katja gasped. “Ulfsark.”
“An ulfsark?” Freya leaned over her sister, wiping her brow. “No, no, no. That’s just an old story from the wars. That was just men wearing wolf-skins into battle. Berserkers and ulfsarks were just men, not beasts. And that thing out there was definitely not human.”
The young vala shook her head, and then rolled her face to stare at the doorway. Freya turned to see Erik standing there with the beast’s head swinging from his fist. The man tugged on his left ear, and then pointed to the creature’s ear as he came forward.
Freya stared. Two silver earrings hung from the beast’s tall hairy ear. She exhaled slowly. “Oh.” She turned back to her sister. “All right, just for a moment, let’s say it is an ulfsark. A real one. A real beast-man-thing. So what do we do for your leg? There must be something we can do, and don’t you dare say I have to cut it off.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Katja shivered. “Maybe Gudrun knows what to do.”
Freya nodded. “Gudrun, right, we can ask Gudrun. She’ll know. She’s old. All right, come on, let’s get you up onto Arfast. It’s a long ride to Denveller.”
Chapter 2
When dawn broke, the sun was still hidden beyond the mountains and while the sky glowed with the pale morning light the land slumbered on in the shadows. Freya strode up the ancient road with a bone-weary ache in her back and legs, but she ignored the pain. Erik marched tirelessly at her side with his spear on his shoulder, and Arfast trotted along behind them with Katja sleeping on his shaggy back.
They’d made good time from Logarven, hiking across country through the snow around the southern edge of Gerya Ridge through the long, dark night with the stars racing overhead and the aurora waves of green light lapping at the northern sky, and the thick mists drifting across the ground. And now, as the sky grew lighter and the breeze grew warmer, Freya looked out over the hills of dead and frozen grass and she saw the waves of Denveller Lake rippling with faint glimmers of the reflected sky.
“We’re almost there.” Freya glanced at Erik, but his hands said nothing in reply. She fell back a few paces and put her hand on her sister’s cheek. Katja’s skin was hot. Very hot.
At the north end of the lake they found the decaying ruins of a tiny village of three dozen stone cottages. The roofs stood open to the sky and the doorways gaped dark and empty like toothless mouths. One of the houses close to the water had partially collapsed, tumbling and sinking into the warm mud at the lake’s edge.
But one structure still remained in good repair. A small tower stood in the center of the desolate village. It rose
three times the height of the cottages, a squared-off block of crooked black stones, its cracks and gaps filled with rotting brown grime that dripped and trickled down the dark faces of the building.
Freya pulled Arfast to a halt well back from the tower and frowned up at the ugly pile of stone.
Erik stopped next to her, his pale blue eyes sweeping the lifeless remains of the village. “Be careful,” he signed. “There are a lot of strange tracks around here.”
She glanced down at the churned up mud in the lanes. It looked as though a troop of men had run through the village.
Or a pack of beasts.
Looking up at the tower, she called out, “Gudrun of Denveller! I’m Freya Nordasdottir, and this is my husband, Erik. We’ve come from Logarven to speak with you.”
Her words echoed through the empty lanes and across the open waters. A raven screamed and hopped across the ragged grass roof of the tower and peered down at the intruders and their white elk.
“Maybe she’s gone,” Erik signed. “Or dead. I’ll go take a look around.”
“No, wait.” Freya pointed up at the tower. “Someone’s there, watching us.” She called out again, “Mistress Gudrun! We come in peace to ask your wisdom and help. My sister is ill.”
“You say you’re from Logarven?” a very young woman’s voice called down from the tower.
“We are,” Freya answered.
“There used to be a vala in Logarven. Couldn’t she help you? Or is she dead?” the voice asked.
“She’s not dead, she’s right here,” Freya said. “Our vala is my sister, Katja. She said to bring her here to see Gudrun. Are you Gudrun?”
“What’s wrong with her?”
Freya frowned. She had no time for games. There could be anyone at all hiding in that tower, and the voice was not that of a wise old woman. “She’s sick, and if you’re a healer we need your help, and if you’re not a healer then I’m going to come in there and put my spear through your belly for wasting my time!” She slammed her steel spear’s butt down on a stone and the impact echoed through the empty village. She rested her other hand on one of her bone knives strapped across her belly, and waited.
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