Daughters Of The Storm (38 page)

Hakon had said Bluebell threw an axe from a mile's distance and that is how his face had become so disfigured. Wylm turned
this thought over. It couldn't be true. Could it? The burly raiders on the beach were throwing only a dozen yards. He supposed Hakon might promote the story of Bluebell's supernatural prowess to hide an embarrassing truth: that he had simply been bested by a woman of flesh and blood and bone.

Flesh. Blood. Bone. And Wylm would be the one to kill her. The randrman had been certain of it: he was the
kyndrepa
, a word he had come to understand meant ‘kinslayer'. He shivered, told himself it was the cold sea wind and went back inside to the warm smoky hut.

Deep, deep in the night, Wylm woke to a thudding noise. A moment passed, another, as he tried to remember where he was. The roar of the cold sea told him.

The thudding again. It was at his door.

He stood, lifted the latch, and a big hairy man thrust Eni at him. ‘He won't stop crying. Hakon says he must sleep with you.'

Wylm caught Eni before the boy fell to the reed floor and the raider was gone before he could reply.

Eni's two cold hands clung to Wylm's wrist. ‘Rabbit?' he said.

‘I don't know where your rabbit is.'

Eni lifted his hand and felt his way up to Wylm's chest. Pressed firmly. ‘Rabbit,' he said.

And Wylm understood: the child was calling him Rabbit. He had only told Eni his name once, and clearly it had been forgotten. Instead, he had become the man who forced roast rabbit on him, who carved a stick like a rabbit. He had become Rabbit to the boy.

‘Yes, it's me. It's Rabbit,' Wylm said. ‘Will you sleep in my bed?'

Eni hooked his arm through Wylm's and allowed himself to be led to the straw bed. Wylm lay next to him, trying to keep a few
inches of space between them, but the boy wriggled across the gap and was soon sleeping peacefully with his bony knees curled into Wylm's ribs.

Wylm lay awake much longer. Rabbit. What a grim joke it was. He should be Wolf to the child, or Bear, or Fox. But Rabbit he was, and would remain until ...

Well, Wylm could not conceive the boy's ultimate fate. It lay behind a veil of darkness, beyond his destiny as
kyndrepa.

His destiny. Yes, he liked the sound of that. The randrman had seen it in a dream: only kin could slay Bluebell, and who else could that be but him? Her sisters were in her thrall, her own father loved her better than he loved Gudrun. He rolled the thought over in his mind and it grew dull and round and pulled him down to sweet darkness.

Just as he was succumbing to sleep, he thought he heard a strange voice on the wind outside. Neither human nor animal. Alert now, he listened into the dark.

It was singing. A strange, howling song.

He rose, careful not to wake Eni, and peered out the doorway. Up on the ridge danced Eirik, the randrman. The moon had risen: just a sliver off full. The sky was clear and the sea boomed. The randrman was no longer a stooped, fragile figure. He was lithe and mobile, his joints as fluid as a child's. His movements were so at odds with his tufted hair and wrinkled skin that it gave Wylm an unnatural chill. The song continued, the hooting and dancing, his voice carrying away far, far out to sea as the moon shone down on Hrafnsey.

For four days and nights the same pattern unfolded. They took Eni in the morning to spend the day with Hakon and his men. Wylm caught a glimpse of them occasionally as he spent his day
darting away from the icy curiosity of the raiders. Hakon firmly but gently led the child from forge to stable to bakehouse, as though assessing his fitness for any of these tasks, then muttered and clicked in exasperation. Wylm knew Hakon's patience would eventually run out. Not this month, nor the next, but by the time winter came and Eni stood exposed as a mouth to feed in lean times, Hakon would tire of the game and a pair of rough hands would hold him under the sea until it was over.

Wylm spent each day out of the hut so that Eirik the randrman could sleep among his smoking prophetic herbs and dream about the mystical trollblade that he said Wylm would wield against his stepsister. The sword was even now being forged and shaped with an ominous clanking rhythm that echoed through the settlement.

They brought Eni crying to Wylm at night, every night, with thinning patience and hardening carelessness. After, Wylm lay listening to the strange howling song of the randrman, high and cold on the hill, drifting in and out of sleep. He knew that he couldn't leave Eni here with Hakon. Not because he had grown soft and worried about the boy: travelling would be far easier on his own. But because, whatever sword they gave him to defeat Bluebell, he would still need a shield.

Eni was that shield.

Late, late at night, the door swung open and Wylm barely woke, so used was he to Eni's nocturnal appearance. But the door remained open, and a cold prickle made him open his eyes and sit up.

The randrman stood there, wearing a strange crown of black feathers that hung down around his ears and over his brow.

‘What is it?' Wylm said, his voice catching on sleep.

‘It's time to come to the forge,
kyndrepa.
The blade needs tempering.'

‘I don't know anything about making a sword.'

‘You don't need to know anything. Just follow me.'

Wylm pushed back the woven blanket. The sea-cold air licked over him and he shivered. The randrman had already gone ahead and Wylm had to hurry after him, barefoot, over the gritty earth and down into the hollow of the village, behind Hakon's hall to the smithy. Firelight glowed under the shutters.

The randrman pushed the door open and the hot smell of iron rushed out. Hakon stood by the forge, along with a young, tall blacksmith whose hands were wrapped up with coarse cloth. Wylm, just a few moments out of sleep, felt as though he were dreaming the dark and the smells and the orange glow of the forge.

‘Here he is,' Hakon said, as though it was perfectly natural that they were meeting in the forge at midnight.

The smith held out the sword, but it wasn't a sword. It was a dark unfinished blade, with no pommel or crossguard, just an exposed tang. Wylm's stomach dropped. He thought of Bluebell's sword, the Widowsmith. A fine, gleaming blade forged by famous swordmakers in Blicstowe, home of exceptional steel.

The randrman, as if sensing his concern, leaned into him. Hot breath flowed over his ear.
‘Griðbani
is not finished. The magic has yet to be poured in.'

Wylm took heart in the randrman's words, in the prophecy.

‘Hold out your hand,' Hakon said to Wylm.

Wylm extended his sword hand to take the blade.

‘No, your off-hand,' Hakon barked, jerking Wylm's left hand towards him and turning it palm up.

‘No, I'm —'

In a blur that lasted half a moment, the smith brought the edge of the rough blade down on Wylm's palm. The blow was a hot sting. Blood flowed.

‘First bite,' the randrman said, still close to Wylm's ear. ‘Now see.'

The smith shoved the blade back into the forge. Wylm's blood dripped steadily onto the dirt floor. He stared at the wound in alarm.

‘Go with Eirik,' Hakon said, as the smith pulled the blade out and quenched it in a barrel beside the forge. ‘He will tend to your wound.'

Out again into the night. ‘It is yours now,' the randrman said. ‘Your blood is in the steel. Only you can kill her now. Only you or one of your blood.'

‘I'm left-handed. You just cut the hand that needs to hold the sword.'

The randrman didn't miss a beat. ‘That is how it will fall, then. Blood from your sword-bearing hand will only make the magic stronger. Destiny will rush upon us; you cannot escape what has gone before and what is to come.'

A thin drizzling rain fell. But Wylm's blood was too hot and thudding with pain to feel the cold.

The wound was deep and long, and although Eirik had wrapped it, it seeped blood all that night and all the next day. The randrman told him that the healing would take as long as it needed to take. They were in no rush to kill Bluebell, but Wylm was. Every day that crept by was a day his mother might be in danger. He could hear the clanking and clattering of the smithy and knew that the time for him to take up the sword was drawing closer. He began to think about how he could slip away and take Eni with him. Hakon had made a claim on the boy, keeping him beside him most of the day and at every meal in the long hall. When Wylm had raised the possibility of taking Eni with him, Hakon had been surprisingly aggressive.

‘He's mine,' Hakon had shouted, firelight making horrid shadows of his face. ‘I will find a use for him yet.'

But Wylm needed Eni. He needed the boy to make Bluebell weak, because as much as he believed the randrman's
kyndrepa
prophecy, it was unclear whether killing Bluebell would result in his own death too. And while it might suit Hakon to have Bluebell dead at the expense of Wylm's life, it certainly didn't suit Wylm.

Two times in the past week, Wylm had seen a small group of raiders go out to sea in a round fishing boat made of wood and leather. It was a big enough boat for four men to sit comfortably, with a covered end. As they rowed away from shore, one of them would erect a sturdy mast in the middle, and the sail helped them negotiate the tricky departure and return under strong prevailing winds. Often his mind returned to this boat, to the distance back to the mainland with the winds in his favour, of his capacity to sail the boat and navigate it to the place closest to where Bluebell's lover had said she'd taken Æthlric. He had sailed many times on the river near his childhood home, and knew how to handle a boat and a sail.

All he needed now was the sword.