Raven Speak (9781442402492) (6 page)

“There's enough to share.” It was an eerily pleasant invitation.

“Then let's share it with everyone.”

He chuckled. “There's not that much. But I do have something for you.” As he walked toward her a rich, moldy odor preceded him. She clutched a fold of her cloak, prepared to run. The moonlight that spilled over him at the byre's entry cast his face in sharp relief. The wart on his nose bulged larger, the bristling hairs in his nostrils glistened with icicles of frozen snot. His thin lips had a peculiarly rosy color, as if he'd been sucking hard on something cold. What most grabbed her attention, though, was the crumbling chunk of pale cheese he offered on his palm. Her mouth flooded with anticipation.

“Take it,” he said. “No one needs to know.”

Her stomach joined her mouth in clamoring for a taste of the nearly-forgotten treat.
Just a bite. No one needs to know.

But Jorgen would know. And that would tie them together in a way she couldn't endure. Gazing hungrily at the chunk, she shook her head. She swallowed her saliva, ignored her panging
stomach, and demanded, “How could you hoard this food for yourself? The children are starving!”

“It's not that much,” he argued. “A bit of cheese, some hazelnuts. I had a couple of eggs at one time but something got to them and ate them before I could. And there was some cod I'd dried myself.” His own pride was hanging him.

“Then let's get it to them now. Let's wake them up.”

His fingers closed over the cheese. “No. I warned all of you this would be a bad winter, including your father. Didn't I warn you? At least
I
prepared for it.”

She remembered no such warning, though she did recall Tora counting and recounting the cheese rounds one day in the storeroom and, upon finding young Helgi and Thidrick playing a hiding game there, charging them with the loss of one whole cheese. Though they'd pleaded their innocence in tears, her father had punished the boys by making them haul enough water from the stream to fill every barrel in the longhouse.

Sensing a hesitation, Jorgen teasingly lifted the cheese toward her nose again.

“Bastard!” She pushed his hand away, accidentally revealing the knife she carried.

“Ah, so it's meat you're wanting. Well, I can serve that up for you as well.” But in the same instant that he stuffed the cheese chunk into his mouth he grabbed her wrist—hard—and wrenched the knife free. With a brutal shove that sent her tumbling, he fled the byre. She scrambled to her feet and ran after him.

He was going for the horses! She had no idea his lurching gait could carry him so fast. Already he was inside the livestock byre and the horses were thudding about and whinnying with fear. The cow bellowed in dismay. Without hesitating at the door, Asa plunged through and leaped onto Jorgen's back. Her head brushed the shaggy turf ceiling as she pounded his shoulders with her fists. The assault sent him staggering. For a few dizzying steps she thought they were both going to topple but he managed to regain his balance. Grunting like a diseased animal, he swayed left then jerked right. She felt her grip loosen. Grabbing the woven neck of his tunic, she kept up her pummeling even as she slipped. He repeated the move, jerking even harder and this time she fell, slamming into the ground with a breath-choking thud. Pain bored through her skull; her head exploded in a blinding display of flashing lights.

She couldn't breathe. She couldn't breathe at all! Her mind scrambled through its haze, trying vainly to put order to things while her chest was caving in, flatter and flatter, emptied of air. The blackness began engulfing her and she went slipping and spinning deep within herself. From that echoing distance she was somehow aware of hooves smashing the dirt just inches from her head before lifting away. And horse sweat—the thick, sour kind that comes from sudden panic—filled her nostrils. Then Rune's scream pierced the gloom. She knew it was Rune, not one of the other horses, and his distress brought her charging back to consciousness.

She sucked in a great gulp of air and dug her fingers into the dirt. She blinked, breathed, and pushed herself up in time to see a dark gash rip Rune's tawny neck. His eyes rolled to white. Trying vainly to scramble backward, he was losing his balance—and the knife came arcing down again, fast and true, like a wicked bolt of lightning.

Not even fully conscious yet, she targeted the skald. She drove off the dirt and rammed him at the knees. He buckled like a stand of barley beneath the scythe. The two of them fell together in a chaotic heap of tangled boots, elbows, and flailing fists. The horses careered around them, snorting and squealing. One of them leaped right over them as they tumbled.

Asa loosed all her fury; she scratched his greasy, pitted face and battered his chest and slammed a fist into his ragged teeth. Blood darkened his beard. He tried to block her blows, but they fell as relentlessly as hail. When he finally managed to catch her forearm and stop it midair, he gave it a vicious twist downward, roughly yanking her off him. The move tore a fire-hot pain through her shoulder and a cry from her lips. The cry hardened into a scream of determination, and the skald got only as far as his knees before she knocked him flat again. This time his chin hit the dirt at an awkward angle, and she saw the shock in his eyes as his arm flopped uselessly and the knife came free.

She buried one knee between his lumpy shoulders and braced the other against the ground. Both of them eyed the knife; its handle lay tantalizingly close. The skald wriggled beneath her.
He stretched his arm longer and longer, using his fingers to pull himself through the dirt. It took all her strength to keep him pinned while trying to reach over and past him.

She was almost there. He squirmed with surprising strength, and his middle finger scraped the handle. Alarmed, she made a desperate lunge. That teetered her off balance, and he seized the opportunity to heave himself upward and toss her off.

His fingers closed around the knife's handle. He was breathing hard, and for a moment she thought he was going to lie there, but with a rasping snarl he turned on her. His arm drew back and—as if she were watching it happen to someone else—she saw the point of the knife come stabbing through the air straight at her.

Instinct jerked her aside, and the knife seemed to bury its blade in her tangled hair, though another fire seared her neck. He lifted the knife again. She rolled to safety, calling for Rune.

She couldn't see him but she knew he'd come. And just as she pulled an arm across her face, her world became a storm of stamping hooves and sickening thuds. There was another scream—a man's scream this time—and she found her feet and stumbled away. From the other side of the byre she watched in queasy horror as the dun horse savaged the skald. He reared all the way to the ceiling and brought his sharp hooves down on the cowering man. Jorgen hugged the wall but Rune turned and delivered a barrage of kicks. The skald managed to twist out of the way and take a few running steps, but Rune chased after him, his teeth clacking like iron on iron. He trapped the skald in the corner.

Jorgen turned to face the furious animal. Panting, and cradling his ribs, he yet managed to lift the knife high and charge at Rune. The knife slashed across the horse's chest.

Every pore of Asa's skin felt Rune's pain, and she screamed with him. To her bewilderment, Rune didn't retreat. He lifted onto his hind legs again, an effort that spattered blood across the skald's face and arms. The hoof that glanced off the man's shoulder crumpled him, but as he fell Jorgen kept stabbing the knife at the horse's legs.

She had to get Rune out of here; the horse was going to kill himself trying to protect her. She ran up the earthen ramp to push the byre door all the way open. The red stallion nearly knocked her down rushing through it; the bay followed on his heels.

“Rune!” He flicked an ear but reared up again, striking relentlessly at the skald. She'd never seen him in such a rage. “Rune! Here!” He turned his head then, giving the skald a free opportunity to deliver the death blow. “Here!” she yelled at the top of her voice, and the horse lunged toward her as the knife swept the empty air. She raced ahead of him through the doorway and darted aside, crouching slightly. The moment he shot through, she leaped for his mane and pulled herself across his back. Barely holding on, she urged him toward the black shore.

The skald's anguished howl echoed in their wake.

If not for the giant silver brooch of a moon pinned against the night sky, they might have tumbled over rocks or tangled themselves in the ocean's debris. But with it they were able to mark the shoreline by its undulating ribbon of moonlit waves.

Was it just yesterday they'd galloped here? It was too much to ask of an old horse, especially after Jorgen's attack, so when they were safely around the first finger of land and alone with the sea, Asa tried to coax Rune to a walk. Clutching his thick mane, she thrust her heels forward and fought the pounding momentum. “Whoa.” That got her nothing but jounced off balance, and for a few dizzying heartbeats the ground rushed perilously close. “Whoa!” she hollered again as her knee sought a grip. She managed to right herself, but Rune kept charging along the shore, carrying her with him. The gray-whiskered prankster was taking full advantage of galloping bridle-less!

Again she tugged on his mane, nearly yanking the hairs from their roots, and this time she stretched her leg all the way to the point of his shoulder and thumped hard. “Whoa!” she demanded. Rune sank to a halt. His immediate and indignant snort, though,
which he trumpeted through the dark, denied his submission. He pranced sideways, swished his tail, and shook his head in defiance. He could go on, he seemed to claim, even with his breath coming in roaring gusts like the waves at his feet.

Feet that were limping. Now that fear no longer buoyed their flight, she detected the unevenness in his gait and hastily slid off him.

Blood splattered his shoulder and forelegs and oozed, glistening, from two gashes along his neck and a deeper one under his chest. Cupping a hand beneath his jaw, she coaxed him to take a few steps. His wincing effort showed it was the chest wound that hurt the most. But he wasn't trembling, wasn't dropping to the ground and giving up. This was Rune, after all. Between his labored breaths, he managed a soft nicker, a depositing of his trust in her.

She needed something with the healing color of black—a raven's feather or a polished stone or … even a simple black thread.
That
she had in her tunic. Admittedly it was more of a woody brown, but in the moonlight the piece of wool she was working free of its woven pattern would serve as black. She picked the thread loose, in and out, in and out, until she could snap off a length with her teeth.

“Bone to blood,” she chanted as she tied the thread around Rune's foreleg, as close to the chest wound as she could get. “Blood to sinew and flesh to hide. Odin, I call to you! Heal!” Rune worked his lips across the top of her head as she repeated
the chant a second and third time. Already the deepest wound seemed to be dripping less. Satisfied, she rose.

What were they going to do now? Where were they going to go? She looked up and down the strip of shoreline, and for the first time she became aware of the stinging pain in her neck. Running a hand behind her ear, she felt a stickiness that could only be blood—
her
blood. She'd narrowly avoided being killed herself. With a renewed sense of danger, she looked behind to make sure Jorgen wasn't following.

The frosted light of moon and stars revealed no shadows slipping along the path leading from the fjord. They were alone. Safe for now. But where were they going to pass the remainder of the night? Such exhaustion gnawed at her bones that she felt she could very nearly make a bed atop the shore's mosaic of rocks. As she stroked Rune's face a blast of sea spray reminded her they needed to find some place more sheltered. Hating to push him on, she nonetheless whistled her command, and they turned away from the familiarity of their fjord and began walking. The unnatural sequence of crunching steps punctured by a sudden grunt and thud marked Rune's hobbling progress. Each snort of pain stung her afresh.

The sheer cliffs on their right offered no shelter whatsoever. When the two followed the shoreline inland, poking along the base of the ridged fingers, the steep forests loomed so dark and forbidding that they stuck to the narrow strip between mountain and water rather than risk their lives on those precipitous black
slopes. The moon lit their way for a while, but when it finally slipped behind the mountains, taking its icy light with it, the boundary between water and land bled into shadow, and Asa, at least, walked blindly. For comfort she slipped her hand through the coarse fringe of Rune's mane, resting it lightly on the warm crest of his neck. He was moving more steadily now, and though she had to hunch her stiffening shoulders against the frigid gusts hurled from the ocean, they went on searching for shelter without mishap.

It was when they were trudging around a shadowed cove lying deep between two craggy, rock-strewn knuckles that an eerie whine sounded above them. Rune stopped, ears pricked toward the darkness. Was something stalking them? Had Jorgen somehow gotten ahead of them? She listened harder. Only the innocent splashing of water against the rocky shore broke the silence. But as she hesitated, frozen in place, she realized the damp cold was seeping through her clothing. She envisioned her mother curled beneath the sheepskins and feather quilt. If she hurried, if she turned around right now, she could be back in the longhouse lying beside her mother before she awoke.

But Jorgen would be there too.

Rune's sudden snort and shy from underneath her hand shot her through with alarm. He stood tensed, ready for flight. What? What was out there? As hard as she tried, she couldn't see anything. Yet every nerve in her own body screamed at her to go back.