C. Dale Brittain (6 page)

And his own father was also acting strangely.
 
Valmar was still not sure what Roric’s remarks had meant when he came home the morning before, or why his father had listened to them without saying anything at all.

“Tell me,” said Valmar suddenly, “why you and Father quarreled.”

Roric gave a start, then smiled what appeared to be his normal smile.
 
“I gather we were heard all over the castle.
 
But men sometimes say things when they have sat too long drinking that they later regret.”

“Is that why you slipped away last night rather than drinking with us?”
 
But as he spoke he remembered:
 
that shouting match in the hall with the door closed, the voices loud though the words were indistinct, had taken place in the middle of the morning.

“I just had somewhere to go,” said Roric offhandedly, though Valmar, watching his face, thought there was more here than he wanted to say.

“Even though you quarreled with Father,” Valmar asked, “will you stay at the castle?
 
Will you continue to serve him—and,” he added almost shyly, “once I am king, will you serve me?”

This time Roric looked disconcerted, as though he had not thought this through.
 
“I do not know,” he said, not quite meeting the other’s eyes.
 
“There are reasons—the lords of voima know what powerful reasons—for me to stay, but something has happened that may mean I shall go away for a while …
 
How about you, Valmar?” he added suddenly and with a grin.
 
“Are you going to travel far and boldly, to win a fortune and a place in all the songs?”

It was Valmar’s turn to be disconcerted.
 
“But I could not leave,” he said slowly.
 
He had grown up knowing he would someday inherit this kingdom and had never seriously considered going elsewhere—even if the day he would inherit always seemed impossibly far in the future.
 
“Without someone directing the castle, nettles would invade the fields, deer roll in the meadows, geese nest in the forest clearings—”

“Here comes Nole,” said Roric.
 
“He has her this time.”

As the spotted mare galloped down the hill, a band of shouting men on her tail, Valmar glanced up to see a single rider in the distance, silhouetted against the sky.
 
Father was coming after all, he thought.
 
He would try to talk to Roric privately some other time.

The three brothers, Roric, and the housecarls leaned on the fence to look at the foals.
 
Valmar was glad now that his father had not accompanied them.
 
When Hadros reached here in another minute, he would find everything as it should be.
 
Valmar had showed he could be trusted with the horses, and the housecarls had all obeyed him today without any of the humoring he sometimes sensed, the faintest suggestion that he was still a child.

“The mares should have all been bred to Midnight this year,”
 
he said.
 
“Father said that black colts have been doing especially well at market recently.
 
So tell us, Roric,” with a elbow for his ribs, “where did those two sorrel foals come from?”

“Don’t ask me!” he protested.
 
“I do not set my stallion at stud without charging for it!”
 
In the middle of a laugh, his face changed abruptly.

Valmar whirled to look where he was looking.
 
His father had ridden to within a dozen yards of the pen.

Except that it was not his father.

The housecarls and Valmar’s two younger brothers fled, kicking their horses wildly.
 
But the mares in the pen went dead still, and the birds above them fell silent.
 
Roric turned slowly to greet the rider.
 
Valmar, behind him, was too frozen to move.
 
This was a creature out of the recurring nightmare he had had as a boy, the nightmare he hoped he had finally outgrown, coming to meet him in broad day.

The rider had no back.
 
He had a face, a front, but it was only a hollow shell.

But Roric did not seem to notice.
 
“Have you decided then that you need me?” he asked the rider evenly.

“We want you, Roric No-man’s son,” said the rider, in a voice so deep it seemed to come from the earth.
 
Valmar could see blue sky through the holes of his eye sockets.

“I shall be with you in half an hour,” said Roric.
 
He suddenly tossed back his hair and grinned.
 
“There is one other person who wants me.”

“Not half an hour,” replied the rider in the same deep, vibrating voice.
 
As he spoke storm clouds moved across the sky, and the air temperature began to drop precipitously.
 
“You will come now.”

“Roric!” hissed Valmar.
 
“You can’t—
 
Don’t you see—
 
He has no back!”

“Don’t bother me with children’s tales,” Roric hissed in reply.
 
“Two minutes!” he shouted to the rider.

Then he whirled on Valmar and seized him by the shoulders.
 
“Listen very carefully,” he said in a low voice.
 
“Take this message to Karin for me.
 
Tell her I have found at last a place for a man without a family—or that such a place has found me.
 
Tell her I have gone with the Wanderers, but that I shall always love her.”

“That’s not a Wanderer!” protested Valmar.
 
As Roric shook his head, Valmar took in what else he had said.
 
“You mean—
 
You mean you love my big sister?”

The corner of Roric’s mouth curved up slightly.
 
“Yes.
 
Tell her that.
 
And take care of her if I do not come back—especially if you marry her yourself.”

“I couldn’t marry her!” Valmar started to object, but Roric had already turned away and was mounting his stallion.

Valmar looked after them in amazement as Roric and the being who could not be a Wanderer rode quickly away.
 
Could this be not a nightmare but a dream, the dream he had sometimes had of all-powerful beings realizing they were not all-powerful but that they needed something, someone, him?
 
But that he might marry Karin!
 
One of his most vivid early memories was of her, only a few weeks after she had first arrived at the castle, coming to him and saying, “You’re my little brother now.
 
And I’m going to teach you the games you have to play with me.”

He glanced back over his shoulder.
 
His father, really his father this time, was galloping toward him, a crowd of warriors and dogs and housecarls with him.

Valmar suddenly jumped on his own horse.
 
“Roric!” he screamed, his voice thin and high.
 
The two figures were about to disappear into the forest.
 
“Roric!
 
Wait!
 
I’m coming with you!”

His gelding ran all out, but he was too late.
 
When he reached the forest edge, they were already gone.

# * # * # * # *

Long, long ago, in your grandmother’s day or your great-grandmother’s day, lived a man and woman who loved each other with all their hearts.
 
He fished in winter in the briny sea, and grew barley in summer in his fields on the hills, while she kept the cow and brewed the beer and made the cheese and bread.
 
Their only sorrow was that they had no children.

Their only sorrow, that is, until one stormy winter’s night his ship did not return from the briny sea.

And in her despair she came home from drinking his funeral ale to a silent hall, and she called on the lords of voima to hear her.
 
Her man was dead such a short time, she argued, he could not yet be in Hel, in the realm of the lords of death.
 
Voima must still reach him.
 
She demanded the lords of earth and sky to listen, demanded incessantly for three days.
 
And on the third day, when she had almost lost hope and had returned to her duties on the farm and was once again brewing the beer, a Wanderer came to her.

“So you want your man again,” he said, standing in the door of the brewing house and looking at her from under his broad-brimmed hat.
 
“All it will take in return is that which is between you and the vat.”

“Between me and the vat?”
 
She looked down and saw the silver funeral buckle at her waist.
 
“Of course,” she said.
 
“I shall gladly meet your terms.”
 
But even while she was loosening the buckle the Wanderer disappeared.

She looked wildly for where he had gone, then forgot him, for she heard a voice in the yard and a step she had thought never to hear again.
 
But as she turned to rush from the brewing house she suddenly gave a great cry and collapsed in agony.

For the lord of voima had not meant her buckle.
 
And she had not known until that moment that she had been with child.

CHAPTER TWO

1

Across the meadow, into the forest, through the tangle of the alder thickets, Roric followed the rider.
 
The other’s horse went effortlessly through the densest underbrush, and Goldmane followed.

It disturbed him that he could not see the rider clearly.
 
Maybe it was the sun’s glare, or the speed they were going, or the thin blue mist that rose from the boggy soil under their horses’ hooves, but when Roric looked at him directly all he could see was a shadowy outline.

And yet he had seen his face, thin and yellow, dark eyes within enormous bony eye sockets burning like the last coals on the hearth on a winter’s dawn.
 
If it was a Wanderer who had sat and talked with him outside the manor’s guesthouse, this could not be the same one.

They came up from the boggy lowlands at last, their horses scrambling on the thin soil that overlay a steep rocky hill.
 
Roric looked around, thinking they could not have come so far so fast.
 
This hill marked the western boundary of King Hadros’s kingdom, and even by road and sea it should have taken a full day to reach here, yet it appeared that only an hour had passed since the rider appeared at the mares’ pen.

“Where are we?” he called to his companion.
 
“Where are we going?”

The other did not answer or even acknowledge that he had heard.
 
Roric looked ahead, toward the top of the hill, and saw two lichen-spotted standing stones that he could never before recall seeing, leaning together as though to form a gate.

The rider went straight through.
 
Goldmane made to follow, but Roric held him back for a moment, looking off toward the distant sandstone escarpment that rose over Hadros’s castle.
 
Whoever this person was, he seemed able to move space and time.

But then the stallion jerked his head against the bit and followed through the gateway of the standing stones.

And emerged into a world Roric had never seen.

2

The sea wind blew in Karin’s face, stinging her eyes and whipping her hair.
 
She took a deep breath of clean salty air and abruptly felt awake for the first time in ten days.

It had been like a dream during a bad fever, events rushing at her too fast, incomprehensible.
 
She must have slept during that time, but she could only picture herself working, or else lying fully awake in bed, longing achingly for Roric.
 
She had prepared for the trip to the All-Gemot with no conscious memory of having done so, packing her clothes, making sure that Hadros and Valmar had their own finery, choosing what herbs to include in her medicine chest, preparing food to take, instructing the maids on what would need to be done in her absence.