By the Mountain Bound (25 page)

She gnawed her lip and then shook her head. “Herewys, then. Menglad, Arngeir. Brynhilde. Can you do more than that?”

I thought, chin tucked. “No.” My right hand curled into a fist, wishing for the power to strike Heythe’s sorcery down.

“It will be enough. Brynhilde and I on our steeds can reach many of our brethren, as they go out in the world. It’s just a matter of getting to them before they do anything . . .”
irredeemable
.

Her silence hung. Then: “Will you remain here, Yrenbend?”

“It will be dangerous. Especially once Heythe knows of the revolt. But aye, I shall remain.”

“I was . . .” I let my voice trail off.
It’s such a small and futile hope, a tiny thing.
I was certain it would come to naught, but there was the hope that shard of decency might lie, still, in the heart of the Wolf. If it came to war, the children could possibly stand against Heythe, and against whoever she might succeed in tarnishing.

But not against Mingan, and not against the Imogen.

Yrenbend gestured me to continue.

“I was going to fetch the girl, Rannveig, from Northerholm. Set her before Mingan’s eye. To stir his pity, has he any.”

“My steed and I will fetch her when we return,” Herfjotur said. “And you may treat with her here. Tonight, weave your wardings, and in the morning I will need a pass-unseen for Strifbjorn. Can you manage it?”

“Aye. I can manage it.”

She fingered Solbiort’s hilt with something like satisfaction, and gave me a curt, conspiratorial nod. “Tomorrow, then. And if not, the day after.”

Yrenbend laid a hand on her shoulder. “And until then?”

Herfjotur shrugged. “Then I think you’re in charge, Yrenbend.”

She cocked her head skyward, a distant expression crossing her face. A moment later and the rush of wind from the wings of her pale steed swirled stinging crystals of snow all around us. The stallion appeared caparisoned in saddle and bells. He dropped to one knee so Herfjotur could mount more conveniently.

She swung up and waved, clutching the pommel one-handed as her mount bore her skyward. Yrenbend winked at me, silencing whatever useless thing I had been about to say. Together, we returned to the mead-hall, where I withdrew to my niche to sketch spells until I understood how they must work.

Before morning, I was bent over the bellows in the smithy.

For three hours I stood among the bar and scrap and the racks of tools, melting gold and stamping it into bands, working by the light of the forge and thick candles set well back from the heat. In the open smithy, the wind iced my back and the heat of the forge seared my face. I wondered how a mortal would endure. When the rings had cooled enough to hold the imprint, I tooled runes on the insides.
Menglad, Arngeir, Brynhilde, Herewys. Muire, Yrenbend, Herfjotur.

I set the butter-bright, butter-soft gold on a scorched oak table in the corner and turned back to the forge, blowing the coals up hot once more. Thick silver softened in the glow, and with hammer-blows and main strength I stretched and bent it into a diadem, set with smoky quartz and rock crystal.

The rhythm of the work caught me up and I poured my
frustration into it, the swing of the hammer and the hiss of the bellows. When Ulfgar crept up behind me, the smith startled me so badly that I almost caught him in the face with the hammer when I spun. I gasped and he chuckled at me, turning away to examine the little pile of gleaming rings.

He picked one up with his fingertips, holding it close to his face. His time at the forge had given him admirable shoulders, and he braided his queue in five strands to keep it short and out of the fire: it hung in a round column only to the middle of his back. “Pretty,” he said. “Nice work.”

I nodded. “A gift for a friend.” It was Brynhilde’s, and I watched as he turned it over in his hand.

“A warding?”

Was he Heythe’s? The worry curdled like soured milk in my mouth. Ulfgar was a friend, someone who worked the bellows while I pounded steel. A valraven, a hippogriff, partnered him. He had never married.

There is no reason why a brother cannot also be an enemy. I thought of Mingan.
A brother. Or a lover.
“Yes,” I said. “We are going to war, after all.”

He nodded and rolled the band between his fingers. As casually as I could, I picked up the others and dropped them into the pocket of my scarred leathern apron while Ulfgar raised my ring to his eye and peered at me through it, winking broadly. The motion folded the fine lines at the corner of his eye. I looked away, and held my hand out for Brynhilde’s ring.

“May I borrow this a moment?” He tilted it so I could see the design of oak leaves I had stamped around the surface. Yrenbend’s bore a pattern of feathers, and the others were marked with flowers or different sorts of leaves. “I’d like to . . .” His
voice drifted off. He cleared his throat. “Show it to a lady I mean to ask a question of soon.”

“Bergdis?”

He smiled. “If we all live that long.”

It would seem suspicious to say he cannot take it.
I nodded and waved him inside with it. “If we all live that long, Ulfgar, I’ll
make
you the rings.”

He returned just as I was setting the last stone in the diadem, the crystals evenly spaced to catch the music I planned to weave into it soon. “She thought the ring lovely,” he said with a smile. “The Lady commented on it as well. She said to show her the next.”

Ulfgar dropped the ring into my gapping pocket and leaned over my shoulder to examine the work on the silver. “Not for you,” he commented. “That would suit a man’s head.”

“It’s a gift as well.”

“Ah.” He laid a hand on my shoulder, squeezing gently. “Muire, it’s good to see you . . . moving on. You deserve a good husband.”

His words went into me like a scalpel working the edge of a wound. I tilted my head and looked him in the eye. “Ulfgar, you never asked,” I said, and he grinned at me out of a face tanned to leather by the forge.

“I already knew the answer,” he replied, and clapped me on the shoulder, turning as if to go.

I watched him leave. Setting my tongs down, I dug in my pocket until I came up with Brynhilde’s ring. It seemed untouched, and I frowned over it. At last, I pursed my lips and whistled up the dweomer of magic around it, studying the calm blue-silver glow.

All appeared as it should.

I resolved to re-enchant it anyway.

The Wolf

H
eythe tugs her boots over the cuffs of her trousers and straightens, stamping her feet into place. A cold draft disorders the fine curled hair at the nape of her neck. Amused, I watch her.

I prefer her this way, rough-clad, hair bound in a simple braid bouncing down her back. She still wears the necklace, invisible behind the laced collar of her shirt, and over the shirt she layers a sweater and a reindeer-skin coat. I toss my cloak over my shoulder and refrain from comment, although she raises an eyebrow.

The night before, she had turned to me in the darkness and whispered, “Take me to where it happened.”

“What is that, my Lady?”

“Where your pack was killed.”

Though my heart was a plucked string in my chest, I nodded in the dark. I don’t wonder that she knows. Everyone knows.

There are no secrets in a mead-hall.

“Are you ready?” She gives me a smile I think is meant to be comforting. I appease her with a nod. “Come with me, then,” she says, and leads me into the snow.

I could take her through the shadowed road, but balk. What right has she to my secrets? And, I tell myself, the cold might damage her. An odd sort of goddess, this: stronger than
any mortal, any einherjar—and yet so vulnerable to physical needs and fragilities. It troubles me.

“It is far to walk in the snow,” I say.

She laughs at me. “Trust in my strength, Wolf.”

She pulls my face to hers and kisses me there, just outside the door of the mead-hall, her tongue cool and slick between my lips. The sun still lies low, slanting rays casting our shadows long upon the trampled snow. Someone else kisses her. Someone else lets his fingers rest lightly on the back of her neck.

She leans back, sunlight splintering through the blue crystal of her eyes. The smell of her imprints my skin, and there is a yellow-eyed wolfshadow deep in me that wants to roll in the snow and scrub myself clean of the scent. Something else revels in the touch, but it is not a clean delight. There’s a perversity in it.

It’s wrong, I ken, and ken as well that I deserve no better. I am tainted. There’s no perversity in a wolf—only need and joy and the struggle to fulfill both. A human thing, sin and the taste for sin. A thing not for wolves, but for men and for monsters.

Heythe strokes my cheek, her touch like a razor. So sharp I feel nothing.
There is no pain
, I think, and know it for the lie it is.

The truth is that there is nothing, nothing within me but hunger and a void . . . so when the pain comes, it comes as a relief, a song in silence. It is the only thing left that binds me to earth, and the more it hurts, the better. I do not deserve the pleasure of that pain.

I could summon the Imogen. But I need my emptiness. I need my grief.

I lean into Heythe’s caress.

“Watch,” she says, and raises the hand that does not rest against my face to touch her collar. The jewels of her necklace suddenly sparkle through layers of cloth, glittering in dozens of shades.

She glances at the shadowless sky. And a rainbow falls at our feet, broad as a horse-path, casting stained-glass shadows on the billows of snow leading up to the tree line. It looks like a ribbon of spun candy, firm enough to step onto.

Which is exactly what Heythe does. Her hand on my shoulder, she urges me to follow. I step up onto the span, expecting my boot to find no more support than a mud puddle. But my bootnails click. Firm as stone.

“Come, Wolf.” She draws me after her. “Surely you recall this.”

And I do, although I have not walked this path in many years. Last time, the bridge was cool under pads as I was led to my prison.

The Suneater wants to snarl and jump back, lick his paws, but he follows his mistress into the sky. I look back only once, and see the children who remain at the mead-hall clustered below the bridge, hair gleaming like coins in the rising sun.

The rainbow fades below, lifting back into the sky as if the touch of the earth repels it. The Ulfenfell spreads out as I have never seen, an unlooked-for tapestry of granite and silver. The slate sea tosses. Velvet-green spruce and fir peek through gleaming snow and ice. The wind whips my cloak. I breathe in glory with the morning.

This must be the world the Imogen sees.

Heythe, scampering like a squirrel up the railless pathway,
turns back with shining eyes. “You like it?” Her voice is breathless and happy. She meant this for a gift.

The sight pierces me sharp as if I cast myself on Svanvitr. “Thank you, my Lady.”

I mean it.

Too soon, we reach the flank of the mountain and come to earth under the span of the copper beech. The clearing is peaceful and silent, contours softened by a pall of snow. Heythe slips her hand into mine as we step off her rainbow. She might mean the squeeze for comfort.

“The bodies are scattered.” I cannot bear to say Strifbjorn’s name to her.

“Bring me to one.” She released me.

“They are under snow and ice, Lady.”
Let them lie in peace.

“Sing one up, then.”

I make no answer, but I go and crouch on crusted snow under a cedar where my lover laid one of the dead. I smell frozen blood and meat.

I lay my hand on Svanvitr’s hilt. I close my eyes and begin to sing.

I haven’t the voice of my siblings: Muire’s pure soprano, Strifbjorn’s steady baritone. My voice whispers and growls and howls around the notes, constricted by the collar. But it can brush the snow aside.

Moments later, I bear the frozen carcass of a friend into the clearing and lay her at my mistress’ feet. I kneel and cannot raise my eyes.

Heythe strokes my hair with one hand.

“Poor little thing,” she says, in a voice dripping sorrow, and
peels her glove from her hand in a motion that looks like skinning. I taste blood.

“I wish I could bring you back to what you were,” she whispers, and then she leans over the corpse and strokes her forefingers over its frozen eyes, tracing a rune across each of them and another between.
Sowilo, Hagalaz, Nauthiz.

Life, wrath, need.

Bending, she spits into the mouth of the wolf. I whimper. She silences me with a glare.

And then another whimper—not mine—and the frozen eyelids of the skinned animal twitch.

“No. Please.”

Heythe ignores me, gentling the creature’s frozen forehead with a caress not unlike the one she just granted me. She stands and moves away. In the shadow of the beech she kneels, rooting beneath it as if digging for a lost ring.

My hand hovers an inch from the crying, motionless wolf, the dead wolf, the body of my friend that somehow, unbearably, begs for an end to a pain it should be beyond.

“Heythe.” My voice breaks.

“Hush.” When she comes back, her fingers drip darkness. She bends beside my wolf, one hand gloved and one bare, and rubs the shadowstuff into her flesh. Hot tears shiver down the creases in my cheeks, a trickle of light. Some of the tears drip onto the body of the wolf. Their ripple of light fades into the darkness Heythe spreads.

A darkness which soaks in, tightening over bone, consuming the flesh between. What stands, at last, and wags its tail, and licks my face with a tongue like raw meat, is a gaunt yellow-eyed
horror like a hide hung over an animated skeleton, a monster with massive, splayed paws and jaws that drip slaver. It circles wide, and sits at heel behind my mistress.

I kneel in the snow and cannot raise my head. “What is that thing?”

“Sdada,” she says. The name, I know, must come from
sceadhu
—“shadow.” She smiles. “I give you your vengeance, my love, on the humans who hurt you so badly.”

Her hand falls gentle on the beast’s dark head, and it closes mad yellow eyes in enjoyment. I know the caress, and I know the surrender to it.