By the Mountain Bound (32 page)

Heythe? She has deceived us all.

She has no intention of winning this war. Only of destroying us all. Destroying you as well, Wolf.

I am already destroyed.

Nay.

I am destruction itself. Deny it not.

I deny
—his breath flowing back into me, bearing the trace of his life, his love, his soul—
that you are only what Heythe shapes you to be. My love, you have been controlled. Deceived.

Strifbjorn, I know.

You know nothing.
And he shows me the village, the wolfhunt. He shows me the lovely woman with the glittering necklace, leading the hunt. He shows me the death of my pack, as he has imagined it.

My eyes burn.

Do not blame poor humans for a goddess’ work, Mingan.

You saw this?

I deduce it. So who is deserving of your destruction?
The taste of his breath entangling mine, the sorrow and the wrath and fear that snarl us both. I do not know my soul from his own, or the darkness from the day. He abandons himself to me: total trust, revocation of self, of dignity; a total gift of his soul—no remorse, no thing held back. He is einherjar: he cannot lie.

I can only lie to myself.

I thrust him back. He seethes in me, the kiss like a flame held to my skin.

“I will destroy what I can,” I answer.

I am turning away as I hear him whisper. “Recollect yourself, my love.”

I answer with silence, that silence chill under my skin. I will not see Strifbjorn again.

I do not return to Heythe’s side.

The Historian

S
wordplay might not be my strength, but history was, and the history of the world is the history of war. We had a host of problems—not the least of which being that the towering ice protecting our left flank could become as easily a boulder for the enemy to dash us against. By sunrise, snow was falling. A minor gift: low-lying clouds concealed the heights of the glacial escarpment, gentled a dawn sky which otherwise would have had us fighting into the glare of sunlight on snow. The blizzard had come across the ocean, and I wondered if there was a guiding hand behind it. But the storm was a hindrance as well as a help, limiting the effectiveness of the valraven for aerial support, and I thought it would make it easier for the sdadown to slip around our flanks.

At least the enemy would suffer from the footing as much as we.

We took up spears and shields and formed the wall. The valraven and their riders—and Brynhilde’s steed flying alone, for he had not yet chosen another—covered the right flank. At the center rear of the line paced Herfjotur’s steed, his rider bracing our silver-embroidered indigo banner at her boot, snow caught in the carved detail of her helm.

The first line was the shield wall, and they were armed with their crystal blades. As Strifbjorn had promised, I was in the second line, behind and to the left of him. Nathr stayed sheathed across my back, a plumed spear ready in my hands.

Across the snow-blanketed moraine, through the blizzard, I glimpsed our enemy drawing their lines. My stomach shuddered in anticipation. Heythe was unhelmed, but clad in a chain hauberk worked in some metal that seemed almost as white as the ice above us. Her green fur-trimmed cloak was unmistakable as she walked the line, even through the feather-thick snow, but I strained my eyes in vain for a lean gray shadow following her like a cur at heel.

I leaned forward and murmured in Strifbjorn’s ear, apprehension a bright line down my back. “Mingan’s not with them.”

His voice was dry, assured, but I caught the gleam of unspoken misery in his eye when he half-turned to speak over his shoulder. “I’m sure he’ll be along presently.”

Then he drew his sword and raised her overhead, commanding silence and attention. The length of the line in both directions, other swords went up—Arngeir and Menglad side by side to Strifbjorn’s right, Herewys and Njal to the left, the line stretching in both directions like reflections in facing mirrors, disappearing into the storm.

Strifbjorn began to beat the flat of his blade against the rim of his shield, a chiming rhythm soon taken up by the rest of the line. It echoed across what was soon to be a battlefield, but the blue-white light that flashed about the blades and piled into the storming sky flared on our side only. Menglad raised her voice in song and I joined her, other voices following.

“Forward!” Strifbjorn’s voice rang above the song and the
rhythm of swords on shields. Singing, wreathed in Light, we advanced across the slick rocks in the shadow of the glacier.

The snow fell.

And the enemy came on. Five hundred yards, three hundred. I could see their faces under their helms, the Raven Banner wind-rippled behind, the sdadown like a poisoned black tide before. I breathed deeply, quietly, peering around Strifbjorn’s broad back and the edge of his shield.

I heard him murmur, “Mingan, where are you?” The spear-wielding einherjar on my right glanced upward nervously. I didn’t bother. If the Imogen came on us, a third of us would be dead before we knew.

We’d never see her, under cover of the storm.

Two hundred and fifty yards, and then the sound of thunder.

I felt the magic writhing under my skin even as it took effect. The Grey Wolf’s hand lay on the weft of the world, on the reins of the ice, and I knew the runes he must have drawn there, although I never could have touched such power.
Hagalaz, Isa, Dagaz.
Storm, ice, rousing.

He could only have done it from the face of the glacier itself, in the seconds before it tumbled away beneath his feet.

A shattering rumble danced the stones under my boots. I fell. Majestic, languorous, moving with deceptive speed, jumbled blocks of ice and rock somersaulted out of the obscuring storm, wreathed in coils of mist like rising steam. I screamed, and Strifbjorn called a retreat that would have done us no good at all—if the falling ice had been aimed for our line, instead of before it. I dragged myself to my feet and ran.

We fled the tumbling ice, falling back, hearing eerie animal cries cut off as the avalanche plowed through the line of sdadown. I staggered again, and Arngeir caught my shoulder, pulled me up. “Strifbjorn says south and across the tundra. We flank them while they are in disarray and head for the sea. He says we will have help if we make it so far as that.”

“Aye,” I answered.

“Get everyone moving!”

He turned back and was swallowed up in the crowd and the storm.

The Wolf

I
’ve bought you the ocean, brother.

The cliff face tumbles beneath me, and for a moment I fall, wrapped in the wings of the storm. It might be a peaceful ending, but darker wings take me and bear me into the mist and clouds, and then through them to the sunlight above. The Imogen cradles me in her arms and bears me away.

And now I am oath-broken, too.

The air is thin, torn from my lungs by a rush of wind. And yet I laugh. The remnants of Strifbjorn’s kiss warm my belly like the memory of a night of love, and old pain awakens anew at the touch of it. I laugh because the Suneater is in me, too, and he hates that kiss, and he hates my heart, and he hates the fire that burns under my skin. He tastes blood—his own, and the blood of others—and he craves the hot lick of it down his throat.
More. More.
Like a starving man’s hunger, that taste of
death. He revels in the tumble and rush of the ice beneath his feet . . . and I laugh because of his strength, and because he is no stronger than I am and because what Strifbjorn gave me back on his kiss was myself as much as it was of him. The Suneater is not other. He is a part of what I am and what I have become.

New worlds rise out of the foam. Saplings from the wrack of ruined trees. Ashes from the scars of fire.

Someone has to break things.

And somebody has to dine on gods.

The Imogen sets her bloodred lips against my ear. “Whither, my Lord?”

I take a breath. “To the meadow by the waterfall,” I answer, and she bears me onward, above the storm.

I am a weapon, and she is moreso. And it is time for laying weapons down.

S
he lands me lightly at the base of the high cliff, turns as if to vanish into the blowing snow. “Imogen, with me.”

I lead her to where the waterfall whispers still, delicately under its pall. I lay my hand against the ice. It melts under the flat of my palm, and with the trickle of water come the trickling memories.

I had brought him here on a midsummer’s day. He followed me through the forest, nearly keeping up, strange and golden in the light through the leaves, and laughed in delight when we broke out of the birches and into the clear. His voice echoed the sound of water chattering on the rocks, and the air was sweet with meadowflowers. We were a pair of wild things then, a cub
and a colt, perhaps—painfully young, and falling into the spiral of a friendship that seemed almost . . . foreordained.

I didn’t know about the cave. I’d never ventured under the waterfall. Strifbjorn found it by plunging his head under the water to soak his hair.

When the rest of him followed, I went to see what he had found. He stood just inside the fall, wringing out his shirt, standing on a sandy floor. “It goes back,” he said. He laughed and stepped away when I shook the water off.

Wet leather clung to my legs. I wrinkled my nose at it. “Explore?”

He nodded and hung the damp shirt on a jag of rock. The watery light made his hair seem white. “At least until the light runs out.”

“We can use starlight, after.”

It did indeed go back a long way, forking and twisting, formed of huge slabs of rock leaned up against one another. Somewhere in the darkness, brightened by the light of our eyes, I reached to help him up a slope. My ungloved hand clasped the bare skin of his arm and I hauled . . . and then we stopped.

Unmoving, as if frozen face-to-face in the darkness. His skin was cool and moist, the muscles cabled hard in his forearm—a swordsman’s arm. His eyes flared brighter silver, and I tasted the shift in his scent when I did not release him. “What?”

I let my hand slip off his wrist as if scalded. “You were . . . just thinking.”

He might have taken a step away if the incline had not been just behind him. “You . . . know what I was thinking?” I could almost smell the blush creeping up his face.

I nodded, knowing it was visible in the Light spilling from his eyes. “When I touch. Sometimes I can tell.”

“Oh.” He looked down, avoiding my gaze. “Mingan, you’re my friend, and I hope how I have been feeling won’t . . . ruin that. I never would have said anything.”

There had been no way to answer in words. I had smelled him breathing in the silence that stretched between us, and then I had taken the half step forward and kissed him hard on the lips, using his braid to drag his mouth down to mine.

I blink in the memory, ice water coursing over my hand. Something else he’d given me in the darkness of the night before. Our first kiss. And our last one.

“Kenaz. Kenaz. Kenaz.”
I call on fire, the torch, the rune of passion. My wet fingers sketch a chevron on the ice-locked waterfall. A moment and the ice cracks, falling away, revealing a thin trickle of frigid water drizzling across the mouth of the cave.
A time for laying weapons down.

Snow flecks scatter the Imogen’s wings and face like stars in a midnight sky. I lead her down into darkness and the belly of the earth.

“Brother?”

“Hush, love.”

The deepest cave is a small chamber, the floor deep with earth that has filtered through the cracks in the living granite. “Stand against the wall, please, Imogen.” She does as she is commanded.

I draw Svanvitr into my hand and I begin to sing.

Power stirs under the mountain, the deep throbbing heart of the earth pulsing around me. Starlight flares in my eyes,
tainted pewter and stained like ink, but no Light comes to my blade.

No Light at all. I said it myself.
I am beyond forgiving.
The darkness still sears me . . . sears the self-that-was, the self that Strifbjorn has given back to me.

The Suneater chuckles.
I told you so.

It doesn’t matter. We were used before, my sister and myself. I will see neither of us used again.

What grows from the floor is a stone box the size of a bedstead, the dark surface etched with deep lines of runes. The top lies open. I sweep my cloak from my shoulders, and fold it into the bottom of the box.

“Come, Imogen. I have made a bed for you.”

“Brother?” But she comes to me, as bound as any of us, and she lies down quietly while I sing her tomb closed over her head.

She does not struggle. She cannot struggle.

She is made only to obey, docile as a sword in the hand that kills, and as blameless.

The stone is thick.

I almost cannot hear her screaming, cannot hear the rasp of her talons on the inside of the lid when I sheathe my mud-black sword, turn and walk away.

The Warrior

S
trifbjorn and the children fled under cover of the storm and the enemy’s confusion, and turned at bay on the narrowest
part of a long spit of land. Some miles north of the Ulfenfell, it reached between a pair of inlets where the north sea tossed against the rocks far below. The spur widened again behind them, but the place Strifbjorn chose to make their stand in was narrow.

Ranks stretched across it in a thick double line, they waited.

The terrain was worse here, and Heythe would have to come to the children. Strifbjorn was content with the small advantage, and happy to have the sea at their backs. The storm was less of a blessing now, but it had served its purpose. He was grateful.

Muire, at his back again, took up a sorrowful song, and other voices joined her, Light flickering about them, drawing their enemies down like a moth into flame. Like the ache of a missing limb, Strifbjorn wished Mingan were beside him.