By the Mountain Bound (18 page)

“You talk of abomination?” She strikes the table, overturns a bowl of ale. “What do you call what you’ve been doing with
him
?” Her finger wavers in my direction, but she will not meet my eyes.

Strifbjorn spears meat on the point of his knife. “I believe I’ve answered that question to everyone’s satisfaction.”

His voice is quiet. In such silence, it carries.

Sigrdrifa spits into the pine boughs. “I heard nothing of the kiss.”

My wooden bowl shatters in my hand, and this time Strifbjorn does not stop me as I rise. For a moment we stand shoulder to shoulder, confronting the Lady and her cur.

“I am not,” Strifbjorn says, each word a drip of acid, “going to dignify that.”

Sigrdrifa laughs, delighted, while Heythe steps away, wearing a stricken grimace. I could pity her. For an instant.

And the hall falls into silence so complete I hear pine sap popping in the fire. Yrenbend, on my left, slides away.

“Oh, really?” Sigrdrifa claps her hands together, suddenly bright and assured again. “What does it cost you, Strifbjorn, to say no?”

Into that hanging silence, a voice rings across the hall. “Unless you cannot.” Bergdis stands from the cross-bench, picking more carefully across the ruins of the meal than did Sigrdrifa. I barely see her, for on the bench behind her is Muire, face buried in her hands, gone from triumph to grief in an instant.

Bergdis comes to stand before us, sorrowful and angry.

“Indeed,” Heythe echoes, voice shaking. “Just say her nay, Strifbjorn.”

Her gesture takes in Sigrdrifa, the mead-hall and the sea. “We will believe you.”

And Strifbjorn draws a breath. I see the word’s shape on his lips. A lie, bitter and brutal—an abrogation of our contract with the Light. The silence deepens, as if even the fire and the wind outside held their breaths.

“I cannot,” he says at last, and—catching me to him while
I stand in stunned slackness—he kisses me hard, futilely, on the mouth, before all the hall. And then turns and strides around the edge of the table. Shoving Sigrdrifa aside, he stalks toward the door.

It is a long stunned moment before I gather myself enough to follow, a moment in which I cannot even hear my brothers and my sisters breathe. Heythe meets my gaze, and something shatters inside of me under the pressure of her regard. Whatever the vision is that she would give me, I shove away—hard—and swallow down like bile.

I feel the weight of all their stares. I stiffen my spine and follow Strifbjorn into his exile.

The Warrior

M
ingan caught Strifbjorn ten feet up the trail. Once they were out of sight of the mead-hall, dignity permitted him to run the few steps between. He grabbed Strifbjorn’s arm in fingers like an iron cuff and turned him. Strifbjorn stumbled into a drift. With another band of weather, it was snowing again.

He seemed about to speak, but could not for a moment, and in that moment, Strifbjorn’s checked tears overflowed. His cheeks stretched when he threw back his head, but no sound passed his lips but a thin, exhausted whine. He fell to his knees. Snow soaked the shins of his trousers.

“It’s over,” Mingan said, kneeling beside him, catching his wrists in his hands when Strifbjorn might have struck at Mingan or at himself. “It’s over.”

“We lost.”

“Not yet.”

Strifbjorn tried to shove him away, but though he outweighed Mingan, Mingan held on and pushed back. Snow melted around the Wolf, soaking his clothing, and he seemed not to care in the slightest. He still hadn’t reclaimed his cloak.

Strifbjorn wondered what Heythe had done with it. Mingan’s touch calmed him, and once he could breathe without pain he stood and moved away.

Mingan remained kneeling in the meltwater, looking up at Strifbjorn. “I’m free,” Strifbjorn said, as if it were a discovery. “We can—”

“We can die,” he said. “Unless you mean to let her twist them into devils.”

Hard and stern. And what Strifbjorn needed. He was wrong. Still he argued. “I have no power over them.”

“Strifbjorn.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, hoping Mingan could understand how many ways he meant the sorrow. Strifbjorn could have argued more—they made their decision; they did not want his help—but as it was not Strifbjorn’s choice to lead them, so it was not Strifbjorn’s choice to leave them. He looked away from Mingan, out into the forest. Mingan must have understood, because he stood and walked through the rumpled snow to stand beside Strifbjorn.

“Sorry?”

Strifbjorn glanced at him sidelong. He was looking away, dreamy, as if the rustle of the falling snow were a whisper in his ear. “Mingan. Sorry to have made you an outcast as well.”

He looked at Strifbjorn then, eyes gleaming, lips halfopen
to show the points of his teeth. In his eyes was the killing laughter of wolves. “Outcast?” He moved a step closer, his heat and scent hanging on the breathless air. “Only with thee, Strifbjorn, and with the pack—only then am I other than outcast. You have robbed me of nothing. Nothing at all.”

Strifbjorn was caught on his eyes like an insect snagged on firelight. He leaned closer even before Mingan reached up, buried his glove-clad hands in Strifbjorn’s hair and pulled him into a ferocious embrace.

Too close to the hall
, Strifbjorn thought, and then he thought,
Oh, who gives a fuck?

Mingan tumbled Strifbjorn into a snowdrift beside the ground-sweeping boughs of a spruce, amid a scatter of hastily discarded clothing. The snow crystals, at first melting on his skin, at last cooled it to the point where he felt chill when Strifbjorn laid the palm of his hand against Mingan’s back. Mingan was no more gentle with Strifbjorn than Strifbjorn was with Mingan, until the end, when Mingan knelt over the war-leader-no-longer and pressed lips to lips soft as the snow that was still falling over them, and Strifbjorn filled him and they filled the air with light.

There was a taste of sorrow on Mingan’s breath that was not familiar, and a resolution—cold, also, as that falling snow—that Strifbjorn was too tired to question.

He said nothing after, except “Wait for me here.” And then he dressed himself and left.

H
erfjotur came to Strifbjorn as he waited, perched on a granite boulder alongside the trail. The way was too overhung
for her steed to bear her, so she slogged afoot. She stopped when she saw him. “Brother,” she offered in a neutral tone.

“Sister.”

She came closer, close enough to touch. Strifbjorn stood, out of respect. Flakes of snow tangled in her braid. “I’m sorry to have failed you, sister.”

She laughed, not meeting his eyes, and punched him lightly on the shoulder.

“Idiot,” she said. “You realize, of course, that”—words failed her, and her gesture took in the mountain and the mead-hall and the whole dark cloud-wrapped sky—“some of us are willing to follow you no matter what.”

“The Lady won the flyting,” Strifbjorn reminded.

She shrugged. “I’m not above treason in a good cause, Strifbjorn. And Heythe . . . is a good cause. If I won’t bloody my hands for her purposes, it seems I’ll bloody my hands opposing them.”

“You talk about slaying our brethren. And most likely dying in the attempt.”

She patted the hilt of her blade. “I remember Yrenbend’s demonstration,” she said coolly, although Strifbjorn heard the pain beneath it. “I also know they are as free to choose as I.”

“Ah,” Strifbjorn said, thinking of Yrenbend.

“Yrenbend agrees with me. Menglad, too. I know not how many others.”

“We’ll lose,” Strifbjorn said. “We’ll die. It’s only about a clean death now.”

“I know,” she answered. “Send word when you are ready for us. I’ll see how many I can bring.”

The Wolf

I
hunt.

Something mad sits in me—a thing I recognize from long ago, although I do not remember with a sapient mind ever feeling it before. I step into the cold, charred shadows, and recall—with the brutal force of a blow to the body—that I have been here before, in this darkness, many times. There was a dog that howled. There was a woman whose face was divided, purple from white.

I know this place.
Knew
the name of this place, in another time, with the mind of . . .

The mind of a beast. Dim and sorrowful. Trapped and panicking. I claw at the collar, sag to my knees. Gasp glacial air, flakes of soot rising around me, disturbed by my fall.

Burned, all burned and cold and empty. This was my sister’s realm, a place for dead souls deemed unworthy. I remember the smell of it under the char. And I remember a chain, and a rock, and a blade driven between my teeth for a gag, and the taste of my own blood running down my throat for a thousand years.

I sprawl prone, hiding my face in my hands, and choke on vomit and blood and the taste of scorched hair.

I know what Heythe broke, in my mind. A wall, a mirror, a mystery. Shattered now.

Everything.

She has given me back everything, and I do not want any of it. I recall a ship clinker-built of the torn nails of dead men, and the hot taste of god-flesh and the bitterness of injustice. My father’s rough hand, and my sister’s pity. My brothers, monsters
also: the eight-legged stallion, the legless world-girdling Wyrm. Treacheries and tricks—all recalled by scent and sensation more than thought, recalled with the dim wit of an animal and the hopeful heart of a child.

I choke on soot and strangle on the collar, tasting the heat of a star between my teeth, hearing in my ear the words that Heythe herself spoke. A prophecy she gave before the old world died that doomed us all: me to my rock and my sister to her rimed wormy hall and my brother to depths of the sea. And our half brother bitted and blinkered, saddled and spurred, made to bear the all-Father on his back as a final insult to our sire. And that all-Father himself, the lost Cynge . . . Well. I remember why he won’t be coming for us, now.

He won’t be coming because I ate him.

As Heythe prophesied I would.

W
hen I rise up from the ice and cinders, my breath, at last, is quiet. Tears have streaked the soot down my face. I feel their salt-stiff crackle on my cheeks.

I taste my own smile, and it is terrible. This cannot be what Heythe intended when she gave me back my memories, for I have recollected myself—and what I am is so awful that my old name is still a word of nightmare, centuries later and a world away.
Suneater.

Oh, I remember now.

Words have come back to me, words that are not new at all, but were cast in prophecy long ago.

I clutch them close to my burning heart, where they cannot spill out again, and go hunting Heythe, the witch.

S
he stands beside a red mare in a field not far from Northerholm. The horse is sweated, steaming in the cold air. She tosses up her head and fights the bridle when I step out of the shadows and the wind brings her my scent. Her Lady turns to soothe her, a hand on her muzzle, giving me her shoulder as if she trusts me. She still wears my cloak.

“Heythe,” I say. “Gullveig. Mardoll.
Lady.
” The wolf in me keeps me a wary arm’s length from her. I remember the last time, and her hands under my collar. “You have so many names.”

I want to tear her throat out with my teeth, crunch the glittering strands of that necklace between my jaws. There are two wolves in me: the monster, and the simple beast. The Suneater’s lust is upon me, raw and hot. Under it, drowned in it, I know the purer intention of the wolf that is only a wolf. I want to taste her blood, and . . . despite Strifbjorn’s touch still lingering on my skin, I want other things, too. With an urgency that dismays.

“As many names as I had deaths, Wolf,” she answers. “I see you have your memories.”

“Yes.” My voice a snarl through bared teeth. “Thank you.” The only gratitude in it is mocking.

She does not turn away from her mare. “The Aesir used us all poorly, Wolf. But I am not of the Aesir, and never have been. They raped me, too. Snatched me from my home, held me hostage. Stole from me my husband. I was but a prize of war.” Her forehead rests on the red mare’s mane. She takes a breath. “The ones who chained and taunted you, the ones who earned your wrath, are dead.”

I open my mouth again, and poetry spills out of it.

“Fetters burst; the wolf will rage:

Much do I know; and more can see

Of the fate of the gods; the mighty in fight.

The sun burns black; earth shatters in the sea,

And hot bright stars; from heaven are hurled.

Now do I see; the earth in foam

Rises green and renewed; from the waves again—”

My voice chokes off with a growl. “Your words. Your curse. Your prophecy. I know what you are, tricksteress.”

She turns back to me, the mare quieting, and smiles. “Only because I showed you. Hush, Wolf. Peace. I was prophesied to be here, and you yourself prepared my place for me. Surely, things . . . can be arranged to suit us both?”

“Prophecies do not always come true,” I remind her. “As I stand here before you, when you spoke my death, aye and the deaths of my brother and sister, too.”

“Ah, yes,” she says. “There is that. But here you are. Perhaps I am not so skilled at prophecy.” And then she grins. “I
did
put the all-Father’s throat in your teeth.”

“What makes you think we can still converse—after tonight?”

“The flyting?”

“Sigrdrifa’s display. Or will you maintain that was her own idea?”

Heythe shakes her head. “Sigrdrifa . . . you and Strifbjorn are each worth ten such as she. Do you understand?”

“You deny that was your doing?”

“How could it be my doing? I didn’t even know, Mingan. How could I have known?”

I taste the wind—so much warmer than the wind off the shadowed road, the wind between the stars. The Suneater struggles in my breast—but his rage will not serve now. You can drive any animal mad, if you fetter and torment it. The Suneater has been chained all his life, so chained in me that I had forgotten him. The very flesh of my body is his chain.