A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  “All right,” said Ylf, and built a fire.

  “Pot!” said the witch, pointing to one of the smaller antechambers. Ylf fetched the pot, a huge cauldron, nearly as big as he was. “Snow,” said the witch, and then “Melt” and “Knife.” Ylf ran about the barrow-house, fetching things as the witch called for them, and finally she looked him up and down. Tapping the knife against her palm, she said, “Leg.”

  “I’m sorry, what do you mean?” said Ylf.

  “Leg! Give leg!” shrieked the witch, waving the knife at him. “Meaty, juicy leg!”

  Now, Ylf was not as clever as Tofa, but he had a little cunning of his own, not to mention a profound emotional attachment to his leg. He wrapped his long fur cloak around himself and drew away. “I think no,” he said.

  “Leg!” screamed the witch, scrambling towards him.

  “All right, all right,” said Ylf. “You can have my leg.” But from beneath the cloak, he offered forward not his leg, but the long haft of his axe. The witch fell upon it with a cry and hacked it right off, shearing off the haft right below the head of the axe with one stroke and taking a good deal of the fur cloak along with it. She threw the whole mess into the boiling cauldron, laughing with delight, and as soon as she turned away, Ylf fell upon her and killed her with the axe head he still held in his hands.

  He dragged her body out of the barrow-house and piled it high with the driftwood wings and all the other scraps of wood that he could find littered about her house, and he set it ablaze so Tofa could find him, if she was looking. The mist had cleared when the witch died, but Ylf couldn’t see the boat anywhere, not even all the way out by the horizon. He sighed. “Well,” he said, “I might as well make use of my time.” So he turned away from the cliff and went in search of a white bear.

  Ylf was an excellent tracker, but white bears are sneaky and cunning, and they only walk on snow packed tight, so they leave no footprints. After a few hours of looking for white bears against the white landscape, Ylf’s eyes were sore and half-blinded, so he kicked some snow into a pile to shelter himself from the wind, and he sat down to close his eyes and rest for a time.

  When he opened his eyes, Tofa stood right over him with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. “Here you are!” she cried. “Napping in the snow, right where I expected to find you.”

  “However did you get here so fast?” he cried, leaping to his feet. “I looked across the whole horizon, and I didn’t see the ship anywhere.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “The boat got much faster once the witch whisked you and your curse off, and when you looked for us, we were already at the foot of the cliff. We called and called for you, me and the sea-women, but you didn’t look down.”

  “Well,” Ylf said reasonably. “I’ve never been known as a very clever man.”

  “No,” Tofa agreed. “So it’s lucky that you have such a clever wife.”

  “Perhaps my clever wife can outwit these stealthy bears.”

  So Tofa, with her fresh eyes, looked about, and eventually she found a little patch of disturbed snow where a white bear had buried its droppings. She found the trail then, and led Ylf along it, pointing out scratches here or there, and finally they found a valley in the endless ice fields. At the bottom of the valley was a giant sleeping bear, bigger than any that Ylf or Tofa had ever heard of. It would have been as tall as a pine tree if it were standing on its hind legs, and each of its paws was as wide as Tofa was tall.

  “Perhaps this was a bad idea,” Tofa said.

  “Perhaps,” Ylf said. “But I have to kill that bear.”

  “That bear?” said Tofa. “Why not find a different bear?”

  “We haven’t found any different bears,” Ylf said, quite logically. “Now, you’ll have to tell me how to kill it, or else I will skip my way down the hill and throw myself on its snout with my axe.”

  Tofa sat down on the snow and put her chin in her hands to think, and at length she said, “All right.”

  There was a rune on Ylf’s axe-head that she had engraved for him years before. She spat on the rune, that being the only way of linking it to Hrefnesholt that she had, and from that flicker of power (and it was just a flicker, a bare whisper), she managed to grow the broken haft into its full length again before the magic faded. “That’s all I can do in that regard,” she said. “But I have another thought.” Now, what Tofa knew was that the bear in the valley was too big to be your usual kind of bear. “We’ll go down together,” she said. “Just like always.”

  They descended into the valley together and hid behind a snowbank. Tofa peered over the top and looked the bear over. “This land must have magic in it,” she said to Ylf. “Between the bear and that witch, there’s something in the earth and water here.”

  Ylf nodded. “I think you’re right,” he said. Tofa thought for a little while longer, and then she told Ylf her plan.

  Together they walked out from behind the snowbank, clutching each other in awe and amazement, and came right up to the edge of the bear’s paw.

  “Oh goodness me, darling, look at the size of it!”

  “My dear, all the stories couldn’t do justice to such a magnificent creature!”

  “Certainly not! I shall have to carve the portrait of this mighty beast into the shoulder-bone of an elk.”

  The bear snuffled and whuffed in its sleep and slowly opened one eye.

  Tofa and Ylf gasped in wonder and applauded. “How wonderful! What a beautiful and terrifying creature!”

  “Truly he must be the jarl of the ice fields.”

  The bear lifted its enormous head slowly. “Who are you?” it rumbled.

  “So eloquent!” Tofa gasped.

  “We’re no one special,” Ylf assured him. “Just travelers.”

  “Just travelers!” Tofa sang. “We heard tell of your greatness, and we could not rest until we came to see for ourselves. Are you the jarl here?”

  “What’s a jarl?” said the bear. Its voice was as deep as an avalanche, and it made the ground beneath their feet tremble.

  “A jarl is the greatest and most skilled person in all the land. Often the fiercest and the bravest, too. Is that you?”

  (Here I had to stop to explain something to Orfeo, because I realized that to a non-Hrefni ear, it might sound like Ylf and Tofa were trying to flatter the bear, perhaps to trick it into showing its weakness—that’s how it would go in any other story. But the Hrefni find such cascades of unfounded praise embarrassing and unsettling. They are very realistic about their skills and abilities. Having someone assume that you’re the jarl when you’re not would be uncomfortable or even shameful because it means that perhaps you were misrepresenting your skills—bragging, in other words. The Hrefni don’t bother with that. It is not something that makes sense to them.)

  “Well, I don’t know about all that,” whuffed the bear, a little offended. “I’m no different than anyone else.”

  “Surely you must have the biggest paws of any bear on the ice fields?” pressed Tofa.

  “That could be,” said the bear, suspicious. “I am large. It is possible.”

  “How amazing it is to meet the biggest bear in the land!” Ylf crowed. The bear whuffed again, annoyed, and pushed up with its forepaws so it was sitting rather than lying down.

  “But we should introduce ourselves,” said Tofa.

  “Yes! This is my wife, Tofa, the best wife I have ever had, and very possibly one of the best wives in all the land. She can match anyone riddle for riddle, song for song, and rune for rune.”

  “And this is my husband, Ylf, the best husband I’ve ever had, and . . . well, he’s all right, as husbands go.”

  “I’m in the middle as husbands go,” Ylf agreed cheerfully. “I’m still practicing.”

  “He has proven himself to be among the bravest and fiercest and most skilled in all the land. He was great jarl of our villages twice.”

  “What do you want of me?” said the bear. “Why have you disturbed my nap?�
�

  “Well,” said Ylf, “we were planning on killing you, if we’re being honest.”

  “That’s right,” said Tofa. “But then we saw how grand you are, and we knew that was a very bad idea.”

  “It is a bad idea,” the bear said. “Begone with you, or I will crush you beneath my paw.”

  “Now, now, hear us out,” said Tofa. She had been studying the bear this whole time, and she had not yet spotted any runes that might transform the bear into this enormous monster. “We were going to offer you a deal,” she said. “We were going to ask you to become our business partner.” (I had to translate the word for Orfeo. They don’t say “business partner” in the original Hrefni, of course, because that’s a very southerner sort of idea—they would have said gyldbróðir instead. The two concepts share a lot of the same trappings, but a different impetus and direction.)

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Well,” said Tofa, clasping her hands behind her back and pacing before the bear. “You never know when your luck can change, do you? It helps to be careful. Suppose the seas grow warm and the ice all melts. Where will you go? What will you eat? If you have prepared in advance, then you need never worry about such matters. They take care of themselves.” As she walked back and forth, she still looked the bear over. She caught sight of a flash of green behind the bear’s ear, and upon closer inspection she saw it was a strange jewel, wedged into a snarl in the bear’s fur.

  The bear scoffed. “These ice fields have been here since the world was born, and they will be here until the world dies.”

  “Mm,” Tofa said. “Well, if you want to take that chance. Such a magnificent creature like you must live for a very, very long time. . . .”

  “And there was that thing we saw back at the cliff,” Ylf said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, greatly concerned. “That was a frightening sight indeed. The witch, dead. The cliff, crumbling into the sea. But it seems like this fine snow-white gentleman has his affairs well in hand, dear husband, so let’s leave him to his sleep.”

  “What was that you said about the witch?” the bear asked. “Dead?”

  “Dead as death!” said Ylf. “A real shame.”

  “Murdered, I suspect,” Tofa said. “The ice fields really aren’t what they used to be, are they, darling?”

  “You’re lying,” the bear said suspiciously.

  “I beg your pardon, we most certainly aren’t,” said Tofa. She held her arms out to either side. “You’re welcome to sniff out the lie on me. The witch was murdered!”

  The bear narrowed his eyes, but he did indeed lean down to sniff her, whereupon she lunged at the jewel behind his ear and wrenched it free. As soon as the jewel came loose, the bear roared out in fury and shrank, and shrank, and shrank, until he was only the size of a normal bear.

  A normal-sized bear was no challenge for a great hero like Ylf, of course, and by the time Tofa had scuttled away behind a snowdrift with the jewel (because her strength was with cunning rather than brawn), Ylf had already killed it.

  “Oh, well done!” said Tofa. “Let’s take what we need and go home. I’m getting cold.”

  “You’re not thinking of bringing that jewel with us, are you?” Ylf asked, squinting suspiciously at it. “Only I’d rather not have a wife the height of a tree, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “It’s not coming with us, no,” she said, and buried it deep in the snow.

  While she did that, Ylf skinned the bear and took its teeth and claws and liver and heart and as much of the meat as they could carry, and then they went back to the boat. Tofa showed him a steep, hidden path down the face of the cliff, and when they made it back to the water, the sea-women all bobbed up above the surface and helpfully pointed out that Tofa and Ylf were rather covered in blood, did they know?

  Ylf took the bear’s teeth from his pockets and showed them to the sea-women, and they all crowded around and cooed. “Take us the rest of the way home, and I’ll give them to you then,” he said.

  “Half now, half later,” said the sea-women, and Ylf found that acceptable. He climbed into the boat, which immediately sprang four leaks, and sighed.

  A sea-woman said, “I think your boat is leaking again.”

  When they made it back to their own familiar fjord, Ylf paid the sea-women the rest of the teeth and they vanished beneath the water without another word. Ylf walked up to the witch’s cottage, halfway up the mountains, and gave her the pelt, the heart, and the liver, as promised, and she worked a long and complex spell, involving many runes, which she laid into the raw side of the pelt. When she was finished, she wrapped up the fur again and bid Ylf take it to the best tanner in the village to have it cured, and then to make it into a cloak or mantle, which he could pin about his shoulders for warmth.

  “I think I’ve solved your boat problem with this,” she said. “I’m not the best witch there is, you know.”

  “I know,” he said. “But you’re the only one we’ve got.”

  “That is true,” she said.

  Ylf had the fur tanned, as he was instructed, and when he wrapped it around his shoulders and pinned the paws together over his chest, he felt quite certain that the witch had cured him. He immediately went down to the water and leapt into a boat, paddling it out a few yards.

  Well, within half an hour, the boat had taken on enough water that it was getting very low, nearly sunk, but to Ylf’s surprise, he found himself resting on top of the water as if it were the ground. He got up and danced around, but his feet only splashed like he was a child jumping in a puddle.

  That is the tale of how Ylf the Bear-Slayer failed to undo his spell-twisted luck, but gained a magic mantle instead.238

  * * *

  236. Not again! No! Another one?

  237. Shit. Your namesake, I suppose? A story from your own childhood, one you knew before you ever heard a rumor of a Chant in the village. I . . . begrudgingly relent, then. If any story is yours to do with as you will, I suppose it would be this one. You own this one in a way that’s more real than the others. If you want to write it down, if you think it’s not as hideous as shoving pins into dead butterflies, then fine. Write it down. It’s yours.

  238. Gruffly and grudgingly, I am forced to admit . . . It is a rather good story. And it clearly is precious to you. I will remember it well, and I will pass it along to another, in good time. And I’m sorry for snarling earlier.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  There,” I said. “How was that?”

  “Wonderful,” he said. “Really. It made me think of the stories my grandmother used to tell me when I was very small.” I smiled and ran my fingers through his hair, imagined how his eyes must be shining, judging by the sound of his voice. “But how do you feel?”

  “All right,” I said. I took a breath. “Fine, actually. Good. Warm.” I pressed my hand flat to my chest, between my heart and stomach, right over the seat of the soul, feeling a little candle-flame of . . . I’m not sure what to call it. Contentment, perhaps, though satisfaction might be more accurate.

  “That was a story you knew before you met your master-Chant, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe that’s why I feel good.”

  “Are you named after Ylf?”

  “Yes. Ylfing is a diminutive—little Ylf, or Ylf’s-child, but the word ylf means ‘wolf,’ so my name is also ‘wolf-cub.’ They don’t have gods in Hrefnesholt, just heroes. There’s a lot of stories about them, and people make up new ones all the time. Lots of people get named after them, too. There was a boy when I was young called Finne—that’s a hero too, just like Ylf.”

  Orfeo kissed me again. “It was a wonderful story. Ylfing. I’ve liked all your stories so far. Do you think the others might feel better again, someday?”239

  “Maybe,” I said, tilting my head a little in thought, but Orfeo saw it as an invitation and pressed his lips to the pulse in my throat, which distracted me for several lovely moments. “If I stop feeling so tired,” I said eventu
ally, when I had regathered my wits. “It’s like washing clothes these days. Tedious and grimy and exhausting, scrubbing away while the lye chaps your hands. Not the stories themselves, but having to share them with people who don’t understand them.”

  “It wasn’t always like that, though, surely.”

  “No,” I said softly. “Not always. But I saw once what people will do for a story, the ways it can go wrong, and after that I stopped wanting to give them anything that might hurt them, or that they might use to hurt other people. And the longer I went like this, the more I thought about it, the worse it got. I probably shouldn’t have let it fester like that.” I swallowed, pressed my face against his hair. “But it used to be like doing magic. Rare and wonderful.”

  “Oh,” he said, with a kind of warm familiarity that made me lift my head again.

  “Do you have some? I heard the Pezians do, sometimes.”

  “Just a little.” He raised his hands and a faint shimmer ran across them, like pale golden starlight. It lit us briefly, sparkled in his eyes like soft firelight before it faded.

  I caught his hands in mine and kissed his palms. “Show me again.”

  He rubbed his hands together briskly, as if he were warming his fingers in winter, and flexed his hands, and then another shimmer ran across them. Beautiful, beautiful. “That’s about all I have. A little witchlight and some nudging.”

  “Nudging?”

  “When something already wants to do something and you just help it along.240 I bet you can start a fire with two sticks, right?”

  “Takes a while, but yes. If I have to. It’s easier to carry a tinderbox and flint or alchemical matches.”

  “I don’t need matches. Two sticks and a nudge is almost as quick. Or you can nudge a pot into boiling over, or imbalance clay on a potter’s wheel. It’s easier if it’s already doing the thing you’re nudging for, because then you’re just giving it a little more momentum. But it’s just little stuff, just mischief—I had a friend who could nudge a nervous horse into bolting, but she lost the knack as she got older.”