I was a torch in the wind.
I was flickering out.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TOVA
There were no omens for this. No signs or rune stones or prayers to be uttered.
I walked through the forest, Jorrund and Gunther at my back, with the cold weight of the head in my hands. I clutched it to my chest, the blood staining the front of my dress and the face turned up at me. Mouth open. Skin yellow and gray.
He’d known me. The Kyrr’s eyes had held recognition when they met mine. I didn’t know why he was on the mainland or why he was with Halvard, but he’d known me. And if he knew me, then he knew my story.
I looked down at the open eyes cradled in my arms, glad the man wasn’t alive to see my face. I’d stood alone in the silent village as the Svell searched the forest, bringing the axe down before me and cutting the head from the corpse.
I would never forget that sound.
The camp was still awake when the fires came into view, the Svell feasting on the livestock they’d taken from Utan to fill their bellies for battle. Gunther opened the tent before me and I ducked inside. He hadn’t spoken since we left the village and I’d noticed the strain on his face growing with each day since we left Liera. He stood beside me, his hands tucked into his vest as Vigdis looked up from where he sat over a bowl of steaming, roasted meat.
His hand froze on the spoon as his black eyes landed on the head in my hands.
The table shook as he set his hands down onto it and stood. “Is that him? The one who killed my brother?”
I pulled in a steadying breath, trying to keep from trembling. “It is.”
He came around the table, taking the head from me and turning it around so that it faced him.
Really, the man looked nothing like Halvard except for maybe in the color of his hair. Even his eyes were wrong. A deep brown instead of the sparkling blue. I could still see them in my mind, filled with tears as he wrapped his hands around my throat. I reached up, gently touching the bruised skin above my collarbone. If the Kyrr man hadn’t come from the forest, I wondered if he really would have killed me.
But no one looked themselves in death, and I hoped it was enough to convince Vigdis. He lifted the head before him, as if looking the dead man in the eyes. His brow furrowed as he studied it.
“They arrived in Utan in the middle of the night. He killed two of our warriors before I took him down.” Gunther spoke beside me.
I froze, looking up at his hard face, but he stared ahead, unblinking.
I’d already cut the corpse’s head off when Gunther and Jorrund found me near the gate. I’d told him that I had seen one of the Svell kill him, and he didn’t ask questions. He only walked into the forest without waiting for Jorrund and me to follow. Now, he was lying to Vigdis, but I didn’t know why.
Vigdis let out a long breath before he set the head down onto the table beside his bowl of stew. “Make sure they’re ready.” He spoke to Siv, but his attention landed on me when he finally looked up. His eyes bored into mine, a fragile silence falling over the tent.
Jorrund took my arm gently, pulling me away, and I looked back once more to Gunther, who still stood before the table. He didn’t look at me as Jorrund pushed the canvas open, his arm wrapping around my shoulder. “Are you alright?” He ran a worried hand over my hair and I resisted the urge to push him away.
“Am I alright?” I whispered hoarsely, stopping. “I just cut off a man’s head and carried it through the forest.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.” He lifted his hands before him. “Who was it?” When I didn’t answer, his wrinkled brow arched up over his slanted eyes knowingly. “Whose head was it?” he asked again.
I twisted my hands into my skirt. “Just a dead man in the village. I had to…” I swallowed, the weakness coming back into my legs. “I had to come back with something.”
But the truth was that in that moment, beneath the gate with Halvard staring down into my face, I couldn’t do it. There was something about him that felt too familiar. A feeling that pulled like an anchor in my chest when I saw him. If he was fated to die, he should have died in the glade. And I wasn’t going to be the one to change it. Not this time. I told myself it was because I’d seen enough death, but I knew it was more than that. I didn’t want the man who’d looked me in the eye to die. I didn’t want to think that I’d never see him again.
Jorrund surveyed me, the worry creasing the skin around his mouth as his eyes dropped down to my throat, where I could still feel the ache of Halvard’s hands. “What happened?”
I reached up, pulling the collar of my tunic up. “It’s nothing,” I said beneath my breath. “I need to speak with you.”
His gaze flickered up to my face. “What is it?”
“I think…” I stopped, thinking before I said it. “I think we’ve made a mistake.”
He looked around us warily before he put his arm back around me, leading me to our tent at the end of the row. Once we were inside, he turned to face me, lifting the torch between us. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s a mistake.”
“What is?”
“All of it. Utan, Ljós. Hylli. We have to stop them. We have to go back.”
“Tova, you saw what the future holds. Vigdis made a difficult decision, but it was the right one.”
“What if I was wrong? About the runes. About everything.” I sat down on the cot, putting my face into my hands. It had been haunting me, the thought that maybe I couldn’t see into the future. That maybe I didn’t understand the language of the Spinners or the will of the gods at all.
Jorrund’s hand landed on my shoulder and squeezed. “You weren’t wrong.”
“But I saw something when I took the henbane, Jorrund. Something…”
He crouched down before me. “What?” The firelight shifted in the wind coming in from outside and I watched his face change with it. “What did you see?”
“I think it was a memory. From before.”
He stilled. “Before? You mean, before Eydis brought you to us?”
But I didn’t believe that anymore, and I didn’t know if he did either. It was just something he said to make sense of things that couldn’t be understood. “I don’t know. But I think the Spinners are trying to speak to me, Jorrund. And there’s something about Halvard…” I called him by name without even realizing it and the word stung on my lips.
“Who?”
“The Nādhir from the glade.” I looked up at him. “I think this path is tangled with mine somehow. I think the gods will be angry with us if we don’t—”
He stood. “Tova, we cannot undo what has been done. We cannot stop a war that has already spilled this much blood.”
“But the gods—”
“Silence!” he roared suddenly and I flinched, recoiling. “What do you know of the gods? You’re a child.” He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand, taking a deep breath. “Remember your place, Tova. This is not for you to decide.”
I stared into my folded hands, pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth to keep from speaking. Whatever bound me to Jorrund was like the ice clinging to the shores outside of Liera, growing thinner every moment.
“You need sleep. We’ll speak of this in the morning.” He looked at me for a long moment before he pushed outside, taking the torch with him and leaving me in the pitch dark.
I lay back on the cot, curling onto my side. But my hands were still shaking against my chest, sticky with the dead man’s blood. I could smell it. Everywhere. The stench of death and rot had clung to me in Utan and I wondered if it would ever let me go.
I pulled the vision of the water back to me. The gray deep. The stream of bubbles trailing up to the bright surface. My hands, floating out before me. And the sound. A deep hum that wrapped itself around me and pulled me down into the cold.
Until a flicker of light ignited around me. It lit the darkness like a flash of lightning and I held my breath, waiting. My hear
t pounded as a flash lit behind my eyelids again and I sat up, clamping my hands to the side of the cot as another vision surfaced in the darkness.
The wavering image of a slender woman pulling long pale fingers through fire-red hair as she sat before a fire. And there was a sound. The soft, gentle hum of a song that some part of me recognized.
More fragmented pictures spilled over one another. High, jagged cliffs. Bare feet on black stone. The sharp teeth of dripping icicles clinging to the edge of a thatched roof. They loosened the seams stitched tight around the memories bound up in the back of my mind and I breathed through the pain that throbbed in my chest.
I pushed back the furs and stepped lightly across the dirt to the fire pit. Gunther’s shadow was painted on the canvas, where he was posted outside my tent, and I held my breath, sinking to my knees. I didn’t bother to roll out a pelt. I pulled the runes from around my neck and held them before me. Jorrund would never allow me to cast the runes by myself. He said it was too dangerous. That we needed Eydis’ favor to protect me from the wicked gaze of the Spinners. But it wasn’t the Svell’s future I was looking into this time.
It was my own.
I emptied the pouch into my hand and my palms pressed together around them. I closed my eyes, sitting up straight with a deep, centering breath.
“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir sýn.
“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir sýn.
“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir sýn.”
The words rolled off my tongue, a warm tingle running over my skin.
Eye of the gods, give me sight.
For the length of a breath, I could hear another voice echoing the words. One that I knew, even if I didn’t recognize it. It widened the stream of memories flashing in my mind and my own voice bled into it.
“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir sýn.
“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir sýn.
“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir sýn.”
I chanted, my voice deepening as I held my hands out before me and I pulled every whisper of hope and desperation from where it was hidden inside me and pleaded with it. And between the uneven beats of my heart, I let the stones fall.
The breath curled in my chest as I reached out, finding the runes in the darkness and carefully tracing their symbols with the tips of my fingers. But I needed to see them. I crawled across the floor, using a flat stone that rimmed the fire pit to push a large glowing coal onto the dirt. I rolled it before me until its light illuminated the stones just enough so that I could make them out.
Eihwaz sat in the center. The yew tree. Strength and trustworthiness. I bit down hard on my lip, my heart quickening. Dagaz was beside it, their sides touching. Dawn. An awakening. And to their right sat Pethro, the die cup and the rune of secrets.
But my gaze drifted to the corner of the spread, where one more stone was pulled up and away from the others.
Othala. The land of birth. A heritage. The story of a people.
The crunch of rocks beneath boots sounded outside and I looked up to see the shadows on the canvas moving. I frantically raked the stones together and swept them under my cot, getting to my feet as the voices grew louder.
I cursed, picking up the hot coal with my fingers and tossing it back into the fire pit with a hiss between my teeth. I pulled the furs over me just as the canvas moved and my heart slammed inside my chest as a long shadow stretched over the ground before me.
I could tell by the shape of it that it was Jorrund, his robes bundled around him. He stood in the opening of the tent silently. Maybe he’d changed his mind about what I’d said. Maybe he’d come back to apologize. But just as I was going to open my mouth and speak, he disappeared.
I let out a long breath, pinching my eyes closed against the sting on my hand where the coal had seared my skin. I rolled over, reaching beneath the cot for the rune stones and returned them to the pouch, slipping it back over my head.
Dagaz. Pethro. Othala.
It wasn’t the dark fate I’d expected to see.
But it was Eihwaz in the center. The yew tree. And the shape of it pulled a thought like thread on a spinning wheel. It was the symbol that was marked into the skin at the hollow of my throat, above the symbol of the Truthtongue.
My mouth dropped open as I remembered, my eyes going to Halvard’s axe on the ground. I sat up, reaching for it, and swallowed hard before I lifted it into the sliver of moonlight cast through the opening of the tent. I rubbed at the dried blood on the iron blade with my thumb until the shape of a branch was revealed. And not just any branch.
A yew tree.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HALVARD
There were seabirds in my chest.
I could feel their wings beating behind my ribs. Their calls drifting away from shore, the sun hot on my skin even though the wind was ice.
The first time I ever saw the sea, I was eight years old. I sat on the back of my brother’s horse, my fingers hooked into his armor vest as we came up over the hill and the land disappeared beneath the water ahead. I’d seen glimpses of it from up on the mountain, on the warmest days of summer when the fog was clear enough. But to see it up close, it scared me as much as it fascinated me. It was deeper than the mountain was high and it seemed to go on forever.
After only a few weeks in Hylli, the village felt like home. But the unsettling feeling of peace was something that took longer. It felt like something that couldn’t be trusted. Something that couldn’t be real. The holding of breath between fighting seasons had been our way of life until the Herja came and changed everything. It was hard to let go of, and I didn’t know if the Nādhir ever truly had.
“Halvard.”
I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep until the sound of Asmund’s voice broke into the vision of the sea lit behind my eyes. I opened them to bits of purple sky poked like holes in the tree branches above and pulled in a deep breath, remembering where I was. I rubbed my hands over my face, breathing through my fingers. I hadn’t slept in days, and the hunger for it made my body shake as I sat up.
Asmund stood over me, the afternoon sunlight bright behind him. “Kjeld’s gone.”
I looked behind me, where Kjeld had been sitting against the trunk of the tree. His saddle was missing, only the rustle of pine needles left as evidence that he was ever there.
“He was gone when I woke,” Asmund said, picking up his saddle and setting it back onto the horse.
“He’s superstitious.” Bard leaned into the boulder beside the water, wincing against the pain in his leg. “Whoever that girl is, I think she spooked him.”
“But where would he go?”
Asmund shrugged. “Maybe he’ll wait out the war up on the mountain. Maybe he’ll go south or meet up with the others.”
I wanted to be angry, but I couldn’t be. The Nādhir weren’t Kjeld’s people. He’d come to the mainland with nothing and even if he’d found a place among Asmund and the others, he didn’t owe them anything. That’s not how life among raiders worked.
Asmund and Bard readied their horses, meeting eyes over their saddles. If Kjeld was going to run, I wondered why he didn’t do it after the glade. Why had he gone with us to Aurvanger? Maybe seeing the army in Utan was enough to scare him. Or maybe Bard was right and seeing the girl had driven him to leave. Whoever she was, he’d taken the secret with him, and that thought weighed more on my mind than it should have. Because even in the midst of war and all that was coming, I couldn’t stop thinking about her or the way she’d looked at me in Utan as I wrapped my hands around her throat. Like she knew me, somehow.
I brushed the dirt from my pants and picked up my saddle. “You should both do the same. I can make it from here.”
“We’re going with you,” Asmund said, waiting for me to look at him. “We’re staying with you.”
I buckled the straps, pulling the saddle into place. “You said you’d get me to Hylli. You nearly have.”
“I want to fight with you,” he said.
Bard watched his br
other, a gleam of pride in his eyes. Maybe it was seeing what happened in Utan or thinking he’d lost his brother to the Svell. I didn’t care why.
“If you’ll have me,” he added, waiting.
“We can be in Hylli in a few hours if we ride hard.” I grinned. “They’ll be waiting.”
Asmund led the way as we pushed across the last stretch of forest and I kept my eyes on the storm building over the fjord. In a matter of days, the rains would come and I didn’t know if they’d work in our favor in battle or in the Svell’s. There was only one way to win against an army like that, and it was to keep them from ever breaching the tree line above the village. But it seemed an impossible task with so few warriors. We would need the help of the gods, and I wasn’t sure if they’d come when I called, the way they’d come for Espen ten years ago.
Hylli lay across the valley in the distance and I was at the foot of the mountain, stuck between dying worlds. By now, Latham would have gotten word of the Svell attack on Utan. Wherever they were, my nieces would be watching their mother and father ready their weapons the way I watched my father and brothers as a boy.
At any moment, the sea would appear beneath the sky and I would be home. I could already smell the water, mixed with the far-off rain and the new grass of early spring.
The horse picked up its pace as we made our way through the familiar land, remembering the way, and though everything within me wanted to be home, some part of me also dreaded the moment I’d walk through the gate. When we came out from under the trees, warm sunlight hit my face and I breathed through the lump in my throat. The rise of land ahead pulled down, the gray water meeting the sky, and as I came over the hill, the horse halted, hooves sliding on the damp ground.
The Girl the Sea Gave Back Page 14