By the Mountain Bound (30 page)

Then let me be destroyed.
Blade clashes on crystal blade. I do not raise my head. I bend and press my lips over the girl’s.

Too late.

Hers lie slack and still beneath my mouth, and no breath trickles from them. She is gone. All my grief and love goes down into darkness with her, leaving the shadowy memory of emotion.

Muire cries out, and the noise drags my head up. She sags to her knees, the sword tumbling from her fingers. Heythe has half-severed her right arm. She clutches the wound, blood dripping between the fingers of her left hand.

Yrenbend steps between the two women before Heythe can finish the waelcyrge, deflecting her blade with a grunt. He cannot give ground, not and protect the waelcyrge struggling to rise behind him. Muire staggers to her feet, that song bubbling from her lips again, her sword dragging from her left hand.
Somehow she lifts it, stepping up beside Yrenbend. He sidesteps to give her room, and she lunges toward Heythe, who parries the blow contemptuously.

It is the best the wounded waelcyrge can do. She slides to one knee again, her right foot going out from under her, and drops her sword, dragging the edges of her wound together with her left hand. Yrenbend stands over her, taking up the song, Light sparkling and arcing between his blade and Heythe’s when they ring on one another. The tones are fragile and clean, like flicked crystal, but these blades do not break.

Heythe gives a step, suddenly, something she has not done before, and I see the realization of his mistake on Yrenbend’s face the instant he moves to take advantage of it. Heythe’s feint is toward the woman on the ground, her eyes hooded in concentration as she seals the rent in her upper arm. Yrenbend moves to parry, his chest unguarded for a moment as Heythe reverses her cut, smooth as a twisting cat, and thrusts Svanvitr through his heart.

He falls across Muire, dying without a whimper.

Her eyes flick open and she shouts. Yrenbend’s body lies in her lap, his eyes open and dark. She bends over him, her own blood spilling across his face as she tries futilely to wipe it away. A moment and she snarls and shoves him aside, face tight in concentration, the wound in her arm sealing over.

She fumbles her sword up and begins to lever herself to her feet. Something about her expression, the weary determination in her eyes, brings me to my feet as well. Rannveig tumbles from my lap.

Heythe steps forward, my blade still shining falsely in her
hand. She raises Svanvitr to guard while little Muire brings her blade up with blood-slick fingers, her arm shivering with exhaustion. Heythe smiles and draws her hand back for a blow that will brush Muire’s wavering guard aside like an axe through a willow wand.

Unthinking, I step over Rannveig’s body and catch Heythe’s wrist in my hand. “Enough.”

She turns to me mildly as Muire falls back on one knee, still struggling to stand. “We’ll only have to kill her later, if I do not now.”

A historian and a poet, not a swordswoman. Born for something different than the rest of us. I tell myself it is her blind courage that stirs my heart, drives the Suneater to silence for a moment. “Strifbjorn has already made his escape.” I know it’s true, and that Yrenbend and Muire chose to give their lives so that the rebel prince might flee. “There is no glory in killing an enemy too wounded to stand.”

Knowing Strifbjorn, he believed them when they promised a diversion, and that they would meet him on the mountain after. He would never have left them to this.

Heythe examines my face, turns and regards the dead. Last of all her eyes fasten on the poet, who has gained her feet and leans heavily on her sword. Heythe smiles then, nods and stands on her toes to kiss my forehead. Her fingers brush mine as she gives me back my sword. “So glad I am to have you by my side again, my love, I can deny you nothing.”

She glides away, her sdadown following at her heels.

I nudge Yrenbend’s sword with my boot. “Take it for his wife.”

Muire spits at my feet. “Don’t think this will buy you forgiveness.”

My own laughter, cold as the pealing of a bell. The Suneater howls with it. “I think I’m beyond that, sister.” I step away, bend to collect my cloak from the floor and follow behind my Lady.

The Historian

S
trifbjorn’s face paled as I toiled uphill to him, blessing the crust over the snow. My skis and my fiddle were left behind in the mead-hall, and I had no intention of going back. “Yrenbend?” he asked, when I came close to speak without shouting. “Rannveig?”

My tunic was rent. Blood soaked my tunic and trousers. I reached over my shoulder and drew Yrenbend’s sword from where I had thrust her under my cloak. Silently, I handed her to Strifbjorn, and kept walking past him, over the shoulder of the mountain, away from where Herfjotur waited.

“Muire?”

“You go on ahead,” I called over my shoulder, not turning. The hollow place between my breastbone and my spine hurt too much, and if I looked at him once, I would sink down in the snow and I would never stop crying. “I’ll walk.”

I
t was five days by foot from our hall to Arngeir’s in good weather, with a clear road. I estimated I could make it in nine,
over snow, walking without rest—or in four on skis, once I talked a tree into sharing some with me. I wanted the cold and the silence. I wanted the bitter wind in my hair, and I wanted to be alone. I thought of turning south and skiing until I ran out of snow, away from the winter and the war.

It was only half a temptation, though. I was not all that eager to live to see the coming world, and I didn’t want to be alone that much, or for that long.

On the second day, I knew that I was followed.

I glimpsed my stalker from the corner of my eye, pacing me through the dark boles of the trees on the north side of the road. Whatever it was, its footfalls bore it lightly, barely disturbing the snow. Through the night and into morning it drifted alongside, just out of easy line of sight.

As the third night approached, I realized that it was waiting for me to sleep, so I made myself comfortable in the lee of a white oak, back to the broad trunk, and obliged it. It wouldn’t do to leave things like that out to trouble travelers less resourceful than I. Besides, if it was one of Heythe’s creatures, I wanted the chance to test it.

The snow reflected what little moonlight there was, and the light of the bright close winter stars as well. I leaned back in a drift and laid my sword across my knees, waiting. Half an hour later, more or less, I saw it picking its way through a pale patch of light between the barren trees.

The fell thing looked to have been a lynx or a young lion once, all angular shoulders and lashing tail. Its eyes shimmered green in the darkness, a slack mouth shining wet as it prowled across the drifts in a dreamlike silence. When it was only a few
feet away it sniffed the air deeply, one foot raised like the hunting cat it must once have been.

I rolled to my feet and dove forward, Nathr extended before me, even as it sprang. Starlight flickered the length of her blade, lighting the snow-swept scene in shadow and brilliance. The foul thing wrenched aside, snowshoe feet scattering powdery crystals left and right. It whirled, and I turned, keeping my back to the tree on the chance that these creatures hunted like wolves, one the distraction and the others creeping around to flank the prey. It crouched, tail lashing, just out of sword reach. I jeered at it, shuffling through the drift, unwilling to give up the shelter of the oak.

The thing lowered its head and
hissed
at me. I shouted and it sprang, a foolish frontal attack. I plunged Nathr through its throat, expecting to have to scurry back a step through the snow to dodge the dying beast’s claws.

But its lunge didn’t end with feeble twitching and the spurt of blood from a severed artery. Instead it pressed itself the length of the blade, and would have fastened its teeth in my shoulder if I hadn’t thrown myself down in the snow and rolled clear, levering it over my head with the fulcrum of the sword and a kick in its underbelly, which was not soft but hard as oak.

It smacked into the trunk of the tree, tumbling snow onto our heads from the branches. I rolled to my feet while the thing shook its head, and brought Nathr down between its ears.

The skull split top to bottom, shedding tatters of darkness, and still the thing came on, reaching for me with flopping jaws. Swallowing bile, I scrambled to the side, bringing my blade
around for another cut, meaty resistance and then the scrape of crystal on bone as I lopped the thing’s mutilated head off.

Horribly, it scrabbled randomly through the snow even when I had dismembered the body.

I was glad indeed that I rejoined my brethren at Arngeir’s hall without meeting another one.

The Wolf

H
eythe waits three days past Yrenbend’s death while her partisans return to the hall. There are fewer than she had planned to see, and I expect anger, but she seems curiously satisfied with the tally, and curiously pleased with my behavior. She keeps me as close by her side as if tethered, feeds me tidbits I neither need nor desire from her fingers. The nights are spent by her side as well, staring into the high darkness of the banner-hung rafters while she breathes peacefully, head cradled on my shoulder like a child’s on the flank of a trusted hound.

As if she could trust me. As if she ever would.

Even when I bathe, her scent never leaves my skin. It is just another chain, and I am grown accustomed. And the Suneater will get what he wants soon enough.

Blood, and plenty of it.

Before sunrise on that third night, I slip out of bed when she turns in her sleep, sighing. I rise and dress in the dim red light that angles under the hanging. The sdadown beside the bench watch with unblinking yellow eyes as I stuff feet into boots and make my way into the hall.

The children . . . the
tarnished
—Muire’s name, a truer
name, good Historian—are scattered about the hall. I move among them silently, and they fall away like surf running back from a rock. Yrenbend is dead, and none of the others will meet my eyes.

The chiming of blades comes faintly from outside, and I follow it. Two einherjar fence in the starlight before the doors, moving through the trampled snow. A ring of our brethren surround them. Several of them turn at the spill of faded firelight when I open the door, and turn away as quickly. I watch for a moment and then walk past.

The stairs down the cliff to the ice-clotted beach are slick and jumbled with trodden snow. The ocean is a dark tumble far below, moving like coils of hair tossed on a pillow. It is not a pleasant place, in night, in winter.

I make my way down to the sea.

The moon was a barest sliver, and already it has set. I cannot summon the world-Serpent, the Bearer of Burdens, the Dweller Within—and I would not want to. Still I walk down to where the combers touch my boots, and after a long silence I find my voice, somehow. I draw a salt-prickling breath and speak to the sea.

“I understand now what you could not tell me, Brother. Yrenbend understood it, too, I think, by the end.” The numbness in my chest makes it difficult to continue. I close my eyes and let my neck go slack, the collar tightening when I permit my head to roll forward, chin to my chest, my cloak furling back from my shoulders in the wind off the water.

“I wish I could tell you I was sorry, Bearer. But this is . . . what I want. What I have always wanted, for the second chance you gave me was nothing but another sort of bondage. And I
am weary of my chains, Brother.” I stand for a moment, watching the sea come and go. Ceaseless, immortal, life-giving.

There is no heart in me but for the hating. Hunger gnaws my breast, a hunger that will not be assuaged until all the world is consumed in flame and ice. “I am weary of love, and expectation and family. The Lady has not come to conquer. She has come seeking vengeance. She thinks she’s bound me to
her
sort of destruction, but she doesn’t understand the leash she slipped. And she doesn’t know the Suneater. But you, Brother . . . blood of my blood, and flesh of my flesh. You knew what I was. And still you gave me a place. For that—I am sorry for what happens next, and if I were other than I am, I might even sacrifice myself to buy your intervention.”

The indifferent sea licks at my feet. I draw Svanvitr into my hands and hold her out before me. The light of the so-distant stars shines along the ink-dark crystal of her blade, but no answering light flares within. Even when I try to call it into her, the sword is a darkness I could lose myself in. “You see how close to my true self I have drifted, Brother.”

I speak into silence, and silence answers.

“She means to kill you. It’s plain before me—she’ll wield the children one on another like stone on stone until all are shattered, and then she will turn her attention to you. So I give you the warning.

“But I warn you also—when that battle comes, I will stand by her side. And should she defeat you . . . Well.” A low, soft chuckle rises up my throat like a growl. “Destruction is what I am for, and we have proven, I think, that the only protection from something like me is to keep it eternally chained. I will
still be at her back when she is weakened by battle. And what good are gods to me, save the dining on?”

Half-hopeful, half-hateful, I wait for an answer I do not expect to hear.

I wait, and then I say, “When I have devoured her, Brother. You must be ready, after.”

Nothing comes, and at dawnlight I summon the Imogen, and feed her the unsatisfying leavings of my grief and my sorrow. She whines for more, and I have nothing more to give her—but a cold immortal hate and a hunger almost the equal of hers.

And those things are
mine
.

The Warrior

H
erfjotur asked only two questions when Strifbjorn rejoined her beside the frozen waterfall, her eye skipping off the gaudy spots of blood to fasten on the sword in his hand. It wasn’t Strifbjorn’s, or Mingan’s, and she paled.

The first thing she said was, “Mingan?”