By the Mountain Bound (21 page)

Still I answer not, but my footsteps halt at the sound of her voice. She studies my face, trembling like a catkin when you
blow across it. The vast indifference of the storm rises over us. Gusts plaster her shift to her shape.

I lift my foot with an effort. The Imogen watches avidly, longing, no doubt, to claim this one last life.

“You poor thing,” Rannveig says, and minces toward me like a determined doe, snow packing under her cold blue toes. Her father had a pelt tacked to his door, too, oak-leaf brown with a golden undercoat. Blood has frozen around the edges, and if I look away from Rannveig, I must notice.

“Your eyes look strange.” Her voice has fallen to a whisper. “So dark, Master Wolf.”

She steps over her father’s body, stifling a sob, but grimly reaches up to touch my face. I shy, flinching from the caress.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “My village. If you . . . if I do whatever you want . . .” But the Imogen’s wings come down, and when Rannveig looks past me, she sees what she could not see before. “Oh.”

“There will be no bargaining.”

Strange, how soft and plain her voice is. As soft and plain as my own. “They’re dead?”

“All of them.”

“It doesn’t look like enough blood. For so many people. How will they know who they are, to bury them?”

“No one will bury them.”

“But I . . . oh.” She takes a breath, as if only now recalling that she must. “I never should have brought you the cake. It was my fault, wasn’t it? That’s why you . . . you saved me for last.”

“Yes.”

She swallows hard. Then she closes her eyes tight and tilts her head back, lips parting and closing slightly, like a resting
butterfly’s wings. I bend over her, my braid falling over my shoulder. She smells of wood-ash, goat’s milk and unwashed girl. I taste her breath and feel the hunger, the Suneater’s rage, flare up in me. Her blond head is framed by the door-hung pelt. I have never been so
hungry
.

The Imogen shifts and croons. Snow creaks under her weight. Wind soughs through the empty cottages, rattling doors and thumping shutters. The morning grows brighter, and Rannveig trembles, cold to the bone.

Her breath tastes of strength and summer and innocence and roses, of the sea, of hope, of the fresh-turned loam. It tickles my lips, strong as brandywine, sharp as the bitter, blood-scented air. It’s not enough blood. And the baker’s breath, and the woodcutter’s, has awakened something in me, something as ravenous as the Suneater I always was and always was meant to be. The wolf, the man. These were only ever guises.

And the girl . . . she’s a yearling doe, a succulent coney hare. Lovely and insignificant. I exhale slowly and bend over her. Shaking so I have to hold her on her feet, she crushes her eyes shut in whatever emotion grips her.

Her lips are chapped and peeling, human and flawed. She sighs as mine come down, but then stiffens in panic. Her eyes fly wide, her hands splayed flat against my chest. She shoves at me, panting.

I think of the cub, of the red bitch who would sit with her back to mine in the dappled shade of a summer evening. If she had lived out her life to its fullest, she might have hoped for as many years as this human child has already squandered.

I hold her fast with one hand, and with the other I reach up and tilt her face roughly.
Hush, candle-flicker. I will make this more pleasant for thee than thou dost deserve.
My gloved thumb slides down the yielding resilience of her cheek. The softness pleases me, and so does the way she tries to writhe away from the touch of my mouth. The capability I have to hurt her—or choose to do no harm—that pleases me as well, with a kind of acrid satisfaction. It’s filling, and fulfilling, and while it is bitter it is also
sweet
, surcease for that emptiness I always took for loneliness.

But oh, I know the truth of it now.

She opens her mouth and screams with all the fury in her. Her breath rushes down my throat like a draft of wine, heady and strengthening. I breathe her deep, and—

With a reversal so sudden I am made light-headed, she leans into me, the arm I have not pinioned sliding up and around my neck. Her mouth falls open, seeking, and she relaxes into my touch like a lover might. As Strifbjorn would, when he gave himself to me—

I won’t permit that thought to linger. I have chosen other things.

The breath comes from her on a long, surrendering sigh. Strength flows through me like warmth from liquor. Her own is failing: her knees buckle; her eyes close. I lift my lips from hers before she passes, and she whimpers, ever so slightly, curling her dying face against my throat like a wolf-cub.

Don’t stop
, she begs.
Never stop. . . .
Her curled fingers slide down my shoulder, her arm hanging limp as her head lolls back on her neck. Almost gone.

The strength I have robbed from her, from her father, from the baker and his cubs—that strength possesses me, power like a stag in rut. Power like the star that burns behind my breastbone.
And then through it, swelling, consuming . . . the darkness, the cold icy nothing that is the voice of my pack, which I will never hear again. Tarnished-silver, both molten and cold as the wild blue ice to the north. It will consume me. The wolf in me knows, pure and holy in its intention, untainted by the bitterness of the man, of the Suneater.
I am three souls, one heart. What justice is there?

The wolf in me is the angel, and the wolf knows pity.
Let the girl die.

But no.
She shall live with this as well.

I lift her gently now, cradling her in mine arms like the child she is . . . and I give her something none of my brethren have given a human before.

I give her my kiss, and my sorrow, and the grief that eats me like a worm gnaws the root of a tree. I give her the Suneater’s fury, and the anguish of the wolf and the suffering of the man. I give her my breath, and my kiss and my pain.

And then I drop her in the snow beside her father’s corpse, and I turn, and I walk away.

Silent as a hunting owl, the Imogen has vanished in the snowfall. Perhaps Rannveig will freeze.

It would be a kindness.

I
walk in spirals through the forest, the new strength on me as if I were ridden by something old and wild. Snow falls and falls: I leap up and run across its surface on light feet like a snow-hare’s.

The pack
, I remember—
Strifbjorn will have left by now
—and go to see to the bodies.

But he curls under the span of the copper beech, wrapped
tight in his cloak, heedless of the snow drifting. Waiting for me. I halt in the shadow of the cedars. The bodies . . . the bodies are gone.

Strifbjorn has cared for them for me.

I whimper, a wolf-cry for succor, for the attention and guidance of the pack leader. I step forward . . . I mean to step forward, and something binds my boot to the snow. I look down. I am ice-caked and blood-spattered, and I try again to lift my foot and step into the clearing.

Strifbjorn does not shift. He sits staring, snow falling over him as if frosting a statue, and I cannot go to him. I cannot. He is the pack, and the pack is dead, and I have forsaken what remains of it. Faithless.

My crimes are beyond forgiving, and still there is not enough blood.

Where I cannot go forward, I can leave.

I know not how long I walk, nor how far. A silence takes me—wolf-mind, a space without thought or remembrance, all endless motion. One foot, and then another foot and then another. Hiss of storm through tree boughs, crunch of snow under my boots. Small animals flee. They know a predator. The mountain is a memory behind me and I have walked the storm out when next something snags and focuses my mind.

Something that does not flee.

His cloven hooves break the crust of the snow, but he does not flounder as a deer would. He prances, the ivory of his coat like a stain on the snow. Tossing his matted mane, flared nostrils wet and red as blood, and the white sclera of his eyes shows me his fury.

Once more. Again.

I drop to my knees in the snow. Gloved fingers fumble the laces at my collar. I bare my throat to him, turning my head aside. He snorts and levels his horn. I close my eyes.

His annoyance and amusement press like a knife into my breast. The tip of the old stallion’s horn bears down on into the thin pearly ribbon of my collar, dimples the skin behind it—but even a unicorn’s horn cannot part that thread.

Do you not know a messenger yet, Wolfling? Did not your brother the Wyrm send me to your side? And did you not then go to it for counsel?

I have failed it
, I say.
I cannot escape this story.

But you eluded fate before.
He paws the snow, and the pressure of the horn drives my collar into my skin. Red blood trickles over the ridges and hollows of my ribs, and still the horn cannot part the silken ribbon.
Am I not proof enough that nothing must be as it was foretold? Are you not proof enough of the delusiveness of prophecy?

My fault. He says it is my fault.

He is right, and it is my fault, and I could have stopped this before it began.

“Put an end to it,” I whisper.

I told thee to look to thy pack
, he answers.
Live then, and be in the future less innocent.

I hear nothing else. But when I open my eyes he has gone.

The Historian

T
wo days after the flyting, the storm broke into a bright, clear morning and I fled the crowded confines of the mead-hall like
a partridge flushed from a coppice. The snow lay too deep for walking, but I needed silence and the deep woods over me.

And if I were Strifbjorn, I would have weathered the blizzard in Dale.

The valley road was drifted deep, but the high trail over the mountain—though shorter—would be harder work on skis, and the drifts and billows were too deep to wade through. Travel was faster in wintertime.

I dug my poles in and made good speed cross-country.

Snow hung heavy on the fir trees. The black edge of another stormfront rose up dripping from the east, but I judged I had until midafternoon. The clouds looked to be well out to sea, and sunlight fell so brilliant on the snow that the shadows under the firs gleamed blue. Only the hiss of powder under my skis broke the hush.

Skiing from the ferny embrace of the conifers into the sheltered valley, I was struck by the silence hanging over Dale. Snow had not been cleared from the doors of the houses—any of the houses.

I drove my poles deep and halted, breath curling from my lips in silvery filaments and fantastical whorls. The scene lay perfect before me, snow bowing branches to the ground, graceful as the line of a lady’s skirts. No smell of smoke tainted the air, no
swanning
of an imminent death.

Just breathless stillness and a buried village.

And then I spotted a single lonely smoke-curl rising from a house at the far end of town.

I skied down the high street, remembering the hustling marketplace of only a few days before. The cottages were cold,
doors ripped wide. Snow drifted over roofs on the windward side, but windows stood staring open.

I wondered what the snow hid, and I was glad not to know.

When I closed on that still-warm cottage, the poignancy of woodsmoke pierced me with all the things it should mean: home, and warmth and safety. Snow lay halfway up the wooden door—but there was a door, and that was something.

I thrust my poles into a drift and squatted to undo my bindings. I leaned the skis against the cottage and climbed the snowbank, taking care, for it was slippery. I tapped upon the door.

I didn’t expect an answer: the latchstring had been drawn inside and I guessed the door was barred. In a moment, however, footsteps rustled through hay or pine boughs. I put my hand on Nathr and shuffled backwards through the snow.

The door swung in, and a young girl—fair-haired as one of my sisters, if not quite so lovely or tall—stood framed in the dimness, only the red light of coals in the fireplace behind her. Her eyes were glazed with fever. Her silence lay like a mantle across my shoulders. A goat bleated in the byre behind her.

She stepped back, barely, clutching the door for support so it creaked on the leather hinges. I half-hopped and half-slid down the high-piled snow into the cottage, and brought half of it with me.

She did not speak; I was not even certain she breathed. Her cheeks flushed bright against a livid pallor. Blankets from the bedstead trailed behind her, caught to her breast with a trembling hand. A shaggy dog big as a sheep pressed herself
to her leg, brown eyes worried in her rough gray head. She whined, the tip of her tail quivering just a little as she assessed me.

“Child, where is everyone?”

She opened her mouth, closed it and fell into my arms.

T
he illness was on her like a passion. I know not where she found the strength to stand and open the door, the courage to walk so far on feet that had been gnawed by the frost. She’d lost toes, and the bedclothes stank of gangrene.

I commandeered the cottage for a chirurgery—boiling water in an iron kettle over the fire and dosing her with herbs, trickling goat’s milk into her mouth from a rag, bathing her to break the fever that had her shivering like a captured hare.

She mumbled and cried in her delirium, quieting only when I lay down beside her and gathered her into my arms. “Mam,” she whispered, and cuddled close. “Mam, I don’t feel good.”

It was an odd sensation, a child calling me mother, and not one I ever expected to know. That was one of the reasons marriage was so central a part of our rituals: those rare children came only to pairs who shared their spirits deeply and often. There were never so many of us, children of the Light, and not even enough babies born to replace the ones who perished. Fortunately, we were not easy to kill.

At midafternoon on the first day, the storm I had glimpsed on the horizon broke over us with a hiss like serpents. I risked a peek out the door and found frozen rain sheeting down like a wall of glass, freezing to everything it brushed. Hastily, I dragged
my skis inside, before they could glaze to the snow, and leaned them against the wall beside the door.