By the Mountain Bound (7 page)

“Yield?” she offers.

“Not, I think, so soon.”

She grins at my defiance, comes after me again. I sidestep and thrust out my boot. She trips. I dive after, knee at the small of her back, left hand on her neck and right hand twisting her wrist behind her. My brethren’s excited shouts. Branches crackle under my weight and hers.

Her left hand is pinned across her chest.

“Your question back to you, Heythe.” She goes slack, but
I am not duped. Her body twists, cool and slick and strong as a sea creature. No surrender in her. I tighten my hands.

Her left arm jerks straight. She thrusts herself over, landing on me, shoulder into my chest. A snapping sound is not the branches breaking; her right arm fractures in my grip. She rips it free with a shout. I drag at her hair with the hand that slips off her neck, sharp sticks tearing my shoulder. She kicks back and down, catching the side of my knee. Shattering heat takes my breath away.

It hurts to take it back. I shout a word—“
Isa
”—and draw the straight line on her shoulder blade with my thumb. Her skin glows blue, the tang of winter. She laughs, drives her left elbow into my midsection and flexes, rolling to her feet in an evolving motion.

“Better than your brothers, little Wolf.” The arm I broke straightens. She curls her fingers, testing, balls a fist.

I push myself to a crouch on the good leg. The other one complains until I heal it, begrudging the tiredness. Spring forward without warning, uncoiling, striking her midriff with the crown of my head. She falls. Voices, shouts, wagers.

She’s stronger, faster. I must hurt her badly, and fast.

I land on top. She grunts. I strike her across the face with my closed fist, an unpulled blow.

I’ve never hit one of my brothers so hard. She takes it, reaches up, clutches of my braid, swallowing the blood on her lips. “Lovely!”

She hauls herself up my queue, hand over hand up a rope. I hit elbow to forehead, and she rocks back, keeps her grip and kisses me hard on the mouth.

I’ve never been kissed by a
woman
before.

Shock, recoil. I try to yank my head away. She’s strong, though, and with one hand clenched in my hair and the other gouging into my neck I cannot break her hold. I strike again, elbow into her sternum, and she gets a foot on the ground and rolls me, knee into my belly and then, again, into my groin.

Nauseating, hot pain. Mint on her mouth. I hold my breath, even when her blows make me gag. She shoves me down on my back, one knee on my chest, blood smeared on her torn white shirt. She gives me an inch, hand tight on my throat—“Yield!”—as both my own clench over her necklace and squeeze. Cut stones rip my hands, pain I am willing to endure—must endure—to choke her into unconsciousness.

“Hah!” she gasps, and shoves her fingers hard between my neck and my collar, twisting.

She slips from my hands. I scrabble at her face, her fingers. Need to get her hands off that bit of cord. Shove, twist, shouting, and she tightens her grip, thumb pressed hard under my ear, and the light from the collar flares
bright
. The hall in stark flare and shadow until the brilliance splinters, shatters, and I fall through it, tumbling into darkness.

The Warrior

M
outh full of the metallic taste of fury, Strifbjorn came into the circle of his brothers and held out one hand. He could not look at Mingan on the floor among the pine boughs. Heythe stood slowly, wiped her hands on her shirtfront—smearing it with his blood—and glanced up.

Strifbjorn bent over the hand she offered.

“Is that all it takes to prove myself to you?” She smiled, and then she squatted and slid her arms around Mingan’s shoulders and under his knees. He was breathing, Strifbjorn saw with relief. She stood easily, as if his weight were nothing.

“Perhaps not
all
,” Strifbjorn answered.

“Which is his bench?” she asked as if she had not heard.

He shook his head. “He does not stay here.”

“Then which is yours?” She glanced up at him impatiently. He pointed to a niche near the head of the hall, and she bore Mingan into it.

He turned away and walked toward the door, and Yrenbend. “Bring the others back,” Strifbjorn told him quietly.

He nodded. “I’ll start with the Historian, and I’ll ask Brynhilde to see to the Wolf,” he said, his chin indicating Heythe, visible bending over Strifbjorn’s bench through the disarrayed arras. She pulled furs and the eiderdown over the Wolf’s still form. “Shall all the halls be notified?”

“Aye,” Strifbjorn told him, and clapped his shoulder before he turned to go, too wary to let him see welling gratitude.

Menglad would not be getting much of a honeymoon.

The Historian

N
ot sleeping presents its own unique difficulties: keeping occupied, for one thing. Which is why, in the darkness of a late autumn morning a week or so after Menglad’s wedding, I came to be pacing a muddy street in the coastal town of Sanura.

There seems to be some rule that the worst and best areas in
any city will run alongside the waterside, almost as if wealth and poverty are both cast up by the sea. At that, I suppose they are.

The scent of blood caught my attention as I rounded a corner into a narrow side street—the scent of blood, and the
swanning
, the received knowledge, of a death hanging on the air, about to descend. They led me to a doorway.

In the doorway was a girl.

A girl who had been slit open ear to ear, and slumped against the stones, blood still seeping between the fingers clenched tight around her throat and bubbling from her lips with every faint, weakening breath.

“Fear not,” I whispered, crouching beside her on the blood-sticky ground. “I will comfort your passing, and you shall not cross the river alone.”

Her eyes were wide, and her lips moved to shape a word. I shook my head. “Yes, I am waelcyrge. And I will claim your vengeance for what has been done to you. Are you ready?”

She blinked once, and I bent to touch her blood-slick lips with my own, holding her torn throat together. The breath had almost left her, but there was enough, just enough—one gasp.

The other purpose of our kiss, besides the bonding: the taking of vengeance, and the choosing of the slain.

Her life flowed into me, brutal and brutally cut short. Fifteen, orphaned and alone: Ute found whoring paid better than washing, and serving ale was just whoring with sore feet thrown in. I saw her life and her loves and her ragged little dreams—
ah, candle-flicker, what a sad brave little light you were
—and last and most important, I saw the faces of the two men who had cut her throat for the pennies in her purse.

Some would say,
At least they didn’t rape her
. As if it were
worse to be raped and alive than unmolested and dead. The girl in my belly wouldn’t have thought so, and as she breathed her last into my mouth and fell slack against the wall, her soul squirmed inside of me and called out,
Vengeance!
Strength—the strength of the slain girl—ran through me, heady as wine.

I wiped her blood from my mouth. Then I stood, and faced the hunt.

Their trail was fresh through the muddy streets, a footstep here, a hand on a stone wall there. The cutthroat lads had gone in search of other prey, drunken sailors or desperate girls out too late on a night that promised rain. I found them lounging in an alley not far from where Ute the whore had died. The mud of the streets had worn the blood off my boots by then.
Vengeance
, Ute’s voice demanded.

One of them straightened as I came forward. “Far from home, mistress,” he said to me in a voice like silk.

I smiled at the implicit threat and slid Nathr into my hand. “Farther than you know,” I said, and killed them both where they stood, starlight flashing blue-hot along the crystal length of my blade.

Candle-flickers. A brief tide of sorrow washed me as the girl’s shade fled into her rest. I flicked blood off my blade. Freezing rain began to fall.

Choosing comfort over usefulness, I slipped into a tavern a few blocks from the southernmost of the town’s two greens. It wasn’t likely that press-gangs, drunks or further cutthroats would brave the rain, anyway.

Eyes came up when I walked into the tavern. Two guardsmen, off duty but not out of uniform, diced at the blackened table in the corner, and a tired woman wiped a spill off the bar
with a brown-stained rag. Several other patrons seemed deep in their cups, and the scent of stew from the kitchen was cold.

The barmaid straightened at the sight of my white blouse, worked in silver thread around the collar, and the indigo swordsman’s cape that left my right arm free for fighting. Her hazel eyes rested longest on Nathr’s hilt over my shoulder.

“Bright one,” she said, hurriedly tidying hair streaked with swirls of gray, as if she had brushed a paint-stained wrist across it. “We are honored by your presence.”

A tinge of concern colored her voice, showed in her hurry to do me honor. Some of the humans do fear us. Some of my brethren stand on ceremony far more than do I.

Some of them, also, are more than merely bemused by the mortals, creatures so like and unlike us. If we were more different, perhaps we could understand each other better. But I suppose we are like siblings, the children and the men—jealousies are inevitable. Though the Bearer of Burdens dwells within us all.

“Honored enough to let me buy a mulled wine and sit out of the rain?” She didn’t expect the informality; I saw it in the quirk of her eyebrow.

“Of course,” she said. “Sit where you will be most comfortable. I will bring your drink. Red wine?”

“With honey if you have it.” I found a table against the wall and seated myself, resting my pack beside me and unlimbering Nathr so I could lean comfortably into the paneling and rest my eyes on the inside of the shutters. There was a draft, which was why the table was unoccupied, but the cold didn’t trouble me.

The barmaid heated my wine with a poker drawn from the fire and brought it. She tried to wave away the bit of silver I passed her, and I thrust my braid behind my shoulder. “You need the money more than I do.”

I tossed the coin. She caught it reflexively and grinned. “As you wish it, Bright one. I can warm you some supper.”

“Just the wine please, and a quiet place to sit.”

She nodded, withdrew, and I thought I saw a spring in her step. I had overpaid.

The wine was good: hot and sweet, and she’d served it in a wooden goblet so it didn’t taste of metal. I sipped slowly and called for more. The warmth relaxed my shoulders and neck.

I leaned my head against the window ledge and let the air flow over my tongue as I breathed in and out. The looks Mingan had given me before the wedding hadn’t seemed the sort a man gave a woman when he was matchmaking for a friend. But then, they were more than friends, weren’t they?

Lanternlight cast a soft sheen over the oiled wood of my goblet as I twirled it. The warmth of the wine soaked through slowly. After a little, the noises of the tavern resumed: the rattle of dice, the murmur of quiet conversation.

No one had left or entered. Through the shutters, I glimpsed grayness. The sound of the rain had ceased. I left a coin on the table to pay for the second wine and slung Nathr back over my shoulder as I stood.

“Thank you for your kindness,” I said to the barmaid as I passed. She nodded and wrung her towel between her hands.

I stepped out into the gray light of morning, boots slipping
in the ice-crusted mud of the street. “Shadows,” I swore halfheartedly. The ruts were not so deep at the edge of the road. I walked toward the docks.

Silence, except for an early ale-wagon lumbering past. Closer to the sea, I heard the shouts of men unloading fish. No one else seemed awake yet, and the whores and drunks had gone to bed.

So a white-garbed figure strolling toward me along the same street was remarkable. I raised my hand in salute, and Yrenbend returned the gesture. When he was a little closer, I called out. “Looking for me?”

He glanced around, as if seeking someone else, and closed the rest of the distance while I laughed. I tilted my head at him. “What brings you to lovely Sanura-on-the-Elder-Sea?”

“You do.” He turned to fall into step. He dropped his hood down his back, revealing sunrise-colored hair. The town awakened around us, groaning and cursing as it stretched into the day. Yrenbend reached down and slid his flute out of its oiled leather case and raised it to his lips to play a trill. “Where’s your violin?”

“Fiddle. I’ve rented a room. We are summoned home already?” Apprehension rose up my throat, and I swallowed it. “Is everyone well?”

“The Wolf was injured in a challenge”—I blinked at that news—“but he will recover. No, more important”—fingers rippled along the length of his flute, chasing gold and copper vines I wrought there—“the Lady has returned, and the Banner shows a Raven.”

I stopped and turned to him. “You’re not joking.”

Light flickered, swirled from the holes in his flute like mist
around a hurrying messenger. He dropped it from his lips. “I am not.”

“To my room. Then we will speed our footsteps home.”

W
e returned to the seedy rooming house where I had stowed my belongings and retrieved my fiddle and a long white cloak lined in fox fur.

“How bad is it?” I asked as we walked to the edge of the ice-rimed green and found a place screened from view. My fiddle was out of tune: even the lower four resonating strings had slipped in the cold. I tightened them while he took a breath.

“It’s . . . confused. Mingan was hurt, she won, and then she left—on whatever errands concern a goddess, I suppose. I’ve been organizing a council, and Brynhilde was caring for the Wolf. Strifbjorn expects to lose his place at the head of the table. I suspect he’s not unhappy.”

“And the Lady? Where did she come from?” I rosined my bow and set my fiddle under my chin.

“That’s the odd part.” He blew across the flute, and a liquid silver note floated forth. “It was that girl that Strifbjorn found nearly drowned and brought back to the hall. None could stand before her.”