C. Dale Brittain (52 page)

The woman smiled vacantly and turned back into the house.

“Is she deaf?” muttered Roric.

Two housecarls lounged in the yard.
 
Karin tried them next; they listened as attentively as dogs might listen, then wandered away without answering.

“Roric, what is this?” she cried in frustration.
 
“Do they not see me?
 
Am I not real here?”

The woman reemerged, carrying a tray with milk and bread.
 
She stood stiffly while they thanked her and took some.

“I should have thought of this,” said Roric.
 
“
You
are real, Karin.
 
But these people may not be.
 
I met some of them when I was here before but just thought them vague.
 
The lords of voima built a whole world here and had to populate it all, but I don’t think there are very many of them, and probably not many of the ‘second force’ either.
 
And you heard the witch—the Wanderers cannot create new immortal beings without the women.
 
So instead they made manors, complete with animals and people, but people who can no more use reason than can the animals.
 
They’re not much more than illusion—no more real than the bear I killed.”

Roric had killed a bear two winters back, but Karin was fairly sure this was not what he meant.
 
She would ask him about it later.
 
“How about that ‘third force’ you were with before?” she asked.

They finished the milk and replaced the mugs on the tray.
 
The woman bore them away with the same vacant smile.
 
“
They
were real and could talk and think,” said Roric, “even imagine they could overcome the Wanderers.
 
This time I’d like to find the real lords of voima.”

In the distance they could hear loud voices, shouted commands, and heated quarreling.
 
“It sounds as though Eirik has arrived,” commented Roric with a grin.
 
“If he is expecting to find piles of jewels, he would have done better in the dragon’s lair.
 
We’ll let them sort it all out on their own.
 
And while everyone here is distracted by a few dozen murderous mortals, you and I can find Valmar.”

As they slipped back out of the manor and through the woods beyond, Karin realized that they had never asked the Witch of the Western Cliffs how, once they reached the Wanderers’ realm, they could get back again.

3

The trip through the Wanderers’ realm was much slower without Goldmane.
 
And Roric was not sure where they were going.
 
The hills and valleys all looked vaguely familiar, but he saw no landmarks he recognized for certain from his first visit here.

“Well,” he said to Karin, “let the immortals find
us.
 
They seemed so interested in you and me before, and they must certainly know we’ve entered their realm.”

But whether the immortals were no longer interested, or whether they had been so thoroughly distracted by King Eirik and his men that they had no time for anyone else, Roric and Karin spent two days—or a period that seemed to them some two days long—walking through a lush landscape without meeting anyone but more beings without will or thought.
 
The sun, which had been sitting on the horizon when they dove into this land, was now partially gone.

“This would be an easy enough land for a fatherless man to conquer,” said Roric as they sat under a tree.
 
He batted at a swarm of flies; there were many more flies here than he remembered.
 
“No one in any of the manors we’ve passed seems truly alive.
 
They’ll do what we tell them, bring us food, and would probably find a bed for us if we asked, though I must say sleeping with them all around would give me duck’s flesh!
 
So what do you say, Karin?
 
Shall we make our kingdom here?”

She looked at him thoughtfully.
 
“You would not be satisfied.
 
There is no honor in conquering a people without self-knowledge or will, and there would be nothing but frustration in trying to rule them.”

“Oh, I think I could rule them fairly easily once I trained them,” he said, keeping his voice cheerful.

“There will soon be nothing here to rule, Roric,” she said gravely.
 
“Look at the sun—before long it will be night here, and who knows how many days or years the night will last?
 
In the meantime the cows here all look ill, the fruit is rotting on the trees, and the bread they gave us at the last manor was moldy.”

“But a fatherless man can’t be picky,” he said lightly, “especially one fleeing his own blood-guilt.”

She was still looking at him.
 
He found it hard to hide anything from those level gray eyes.
 
“Just because you know now you’ll never learn your father’s name,” she said, “is no reason to settle for what would never satisfy you.”

“By the Wanderers, Karin,” he said gruffly, looking away, “I am only trying to find a future that holds
any
hope for me, a future that might give me enough that I could ask you without shame to stay beside me.”

She entwined his fingers with hers and put her head on his shoulder.
 
“I loved you and pledged myself to you when you were Roric No-man’s son, one of the warriors of the king who held me hostage, and I am still pledged to you.
 
What matters a man’s father if the man himself is true and strong and honorable?”

“And has blood-guilt on him he can’t repay,” he muttered.

“I am heiress to my own kingdom,” she continued, playing with his fingers.
 
“I can pay Hadros whatever compensation he asks for Gizor and the other men.
 
I would love you the same even if I knew for certain you were the son of a drab and a housecarl.”

She slid her arms around his neck and began to kiss him.
 
No man could ask for more than this.
 
He tried his best to embrace her with his old enthusiasm.

But she realized something was wrong.
 
She drew back, eyes glinting in the horizontal sunlight.
 
“There is something else that’s happened,” she said, “something you have not told me.”

“No,” he said seriously, “I have told you all that happened.”

“You feel even worse about killing Gizor than you have said?”

He tried not to meet her eyes.
 
“No.
 
I told you all about that.”

She put her hands on the sides of his face so he had to look at her.
 
“Is it this land, then?
 
You do not feel right lying in my arms in the Wanderers’ realm?”

He pulled away and stretched out on the grass.
 
“Nothing like that!” he said, trying to laugh.
 
“If that was a problem, would I be asking you to stay here with me?
 
Maybe I am just a little tired after the last few days.”

“And maybe,” she said quietly, with an undertone to her voice that he could not tell was teasing or dead seriousness, “there is a woman in this land, a member of the Hearthkeepers, whom you are waiting to see again and love more than me.”

“Karin!” he cried in protest, sitting up and clasping her to him.
 
She kept her head turned away so he could not find her lips.

“Tell me truthfully and tell me now,” she said in a low voice, angry but with a note that sounded as though she might burst into tears.

He held her against his chest; she leaned limply, waiting.
 
“Karin, I wanted to keep this from you.”

“I thought so,” she muttered.

“Yesterday or whatever you would call it, I began thinking again about what the witch had said—and what the Weaver told me this spring.
 
Karin, I think I may be your brother.”

She went absolutely rigid.
 
After a moment he could feel the front of his tunic growing wet and realized she was crying.
 
He rocked her gently back and forth, his own eyes stinging.

“Why else would the Weaver have told me knowledge of my father would destroy me?” he said after a moment.
 
“I know, I know what the witch said,” he went on when she tried incoherently to protest.
 
“The witch tried to explain the Weaver’s words by saying that sure knowledge would leave me with no goal to strive for, not even an imagined father to try to emulate.
 
But I think the meaning is far more direct.
 
The Weaver knew what it would do to me if I could never be your lover.”

“The Weaver could have meant all sorts of things,” she mumbled.

“Such as that I was a warrior’s or housecarl’s son?
 
That is what I always assumed when growing up.
 
I wanted to know
which
warrior or housecarl, but the knowledge could not have hurt me.
 
For a while I thought I might be King Hadros’s son, but Queen Arane told me she was quite certain I was not.
 
That leaves your father.”

“It
can’t
be true,” she said, lifting her head sharply and rubbing her wet cheeks with her fists.
 
“You could have been fathered by a hundred different men.
 
Hadros and my father were always enemies!
 
My father would never have sent him a child of his own, even a child born to a serving-maid.”

“Your father sent him you,” he said, stroking her hair.
 
He had already thought of these objections and had, he feared, also thought of all the answers.
 
“And they cannot always have been enemies.
 
We do not know what relations were like between them before we were born.
 
They have both long been numbered among the Fifty Kings.
 
They had plans and wars—and alliances—for many years before we appeared and started thinking of them only as they affected
us.
 
Might I not have been a hostage left over from an earlier conflict?
 
Or might not the war we remember have begun because your father—or, I should say,
our
father—objected to some aspect of how I was being raised?”

“My father would have told me,” she said against his shoulder.

“He may have intended to tell you, but remember, you were only home a short time, and he did not know I was your lover.
 
Might this not be why Hadros refused to let us wed?”

“The witch would have told us!” Karin gasped.

“The witch wants to unite everyone, mortals and immortals alike.
 
That
is why I can never know my father.”

She was sobbing in good earnest now.
 
She threw herself on him, giving him tear-soaked kisses.
 
“I don’t care!
 
I don’t care if you are my brother!
 
I love you and don’t want anyone else!
 
It’s too late anyway.
 
We’ll stay here, Roric, and no one will ever know!”

He held her gently until her wild sobs subsided.
 
“This goes beyond blood-guilt,” he said quietly then.
 
“We are both cursed already, and the curse would be made far, far worse if we committed incest in full knowledge.”

“Then we might as well die,” she said, a little more calmly but in tones of black despair.
 
“In the old stories, the brother and sister who did not recognize each other and became lovers threw themselves over a cliff.
 
We’ll find Valmar and send him home, then you and I can go down to Hel together.”

“No, remember?
 
The witch did not think that would work.”

“I wasn’t thinking of seeking death for the Wanderers,” she said in a voice lacking all expression.
 
“I would seek it for us.”

4

The iron gates of the fortress resounded with the blows of the battering ram, but no one looked out from the narrow windows above or shouted defiance at them.

“Are you all dead in there?” King Kardan yelled up at the empty windows.

“Just cautious,” said Hadros, sharpening his knife.
 
“They know we want Roric and the princess back again and are hoping we will pay well for them, so they hope to frighten us with this silence.”

The night before, after the terrible day in which they had not found Karin, lost Roric, lost one man to the dragon, and for a while thought they had lost a great many more of their warriors until the final one staggered into camp by moonlight, they had at last buried the dead.
 
They had raised a great mound of earth, sand, and stones above the tide line and sung the funeral songs; the best songs were for Gizor One-hand.

“I should never have told Gizor I wished I was rid of Roric,” Hadros had said regretfully as the two kings rolled up in their blankets on the pebbled beach by the salt river.
 
“I am getting too old to do things like that without thinking through the consequences.”