Sorcery Rising (51 page)

‘Katla!’

Distracted from her efforts, she looked up to find her father gazing down at her. Rather than his eyes – brilliant dark with unlikely tears – it was his stubbly beard, missing eyebrows and short, frizzled hair she noticed first.

‘What happened to you, Da – got too close to the cook-fire?’

‘You could say that.’

Aran Aranson gave his daughter a lop-sided grin. It was, she thought with curiosity, the first time she had ever really looked at his mouth. In her just-awake state everything seemed preternaturally vivid, every detail a crucial piece of the world’s design. It was a good mouth for a man, she decided: the teeth sharp and white and as gappy as a dog’s, the lips clearly delineated and well-shaped, though the line of the upper lip was marred by a pale white scar which ran up towards his nose. She had never noticed it before.

Aran watched Katla’s eyes scan his face. Unconsciously, his hand went up to the scar, his fingers tracing its unfamiliar line through the new stubble.

‘Where did you get that, Da?’

His face fell solemn and rueful. ‘I wish I could say it was an honour-wound, won against the south; but I fear it was at my first Gathering, outside of Halbo. Some of the other Rockfall lads and I overdid it on the ale, got caught stealing another jar: I tripped and fell – and was too drunk to save myself from the rocky ground! Used to trim my beard as close as Fent does, but after that—’ He leaned forward and winked at her conspiratorially. ‘Told your mother I got it in a duel.’ He put his fingers to his lips. ‘No telling, now.’

Katla felt tears come to her own eyes. ‘Did I lose my hand, Da? Tell me quickly—’

Aran knelt beside her and began to peel the bandages away with a delicacy that was surprising in so large and powerful a man. As the strips came away, Katla could see the shape of a hand underneath; and then she could feel her fingers, stiff and sore, to be sure, but fingers nevertheless. But when the last piece of linen fell to the deck, what was revealed was an abomination: a hand and wrist swollen to twice their normal size, the skin niched and shiny-pink, where it was not black and scabbed; and where before her fingers had been long and thin and brown and hard, now they were fused together into one great red rut of burned flesh. Katla gasped. She stared at the monster on the end of her arm. This thing could surely not belong to her, could it? Was this her own hand, or were her eyes playing tricks on her? She blinked and stared; blinked and stared again.

‘What happened to me?’

‘They tried to burn you, my love. Even now, I’m not sure why – whether it was for the Rock, or the other nonsense.’ The end of the Gathering had become a blur of outraged fury to Aran: all he could recall was his daughter in jeopardy; the insupportable arrogance of the Istrians; their glee at the prospect of a burning.

Katla frowned. ‘I remember climbing the Rock.’ At the very thought of it, her right hand started to itch and buzz. She pushed away the image, determined not to dwell on the horror of the injury. She had seen worse, she told herself, remembering young Bard’s dreadful scalding in the smithy the previous summer. His skin had fused too, but it had healed. Somewhat.

‘I cut your hair off for it,’ Aran said, running his palm over her scalp.

‘I climbed it again, Da: just before they caught me.’ It was coming back to her now, the sequence of events: running from the Gathering after Erno had kissed her (
no
, she corrected herself sternly,
after you kissed Erno
– charm or no charm, that was how it had been); climbing Sur’s Castle and feeling the power of the rock roaring its way up through her hands and arms; seeing the southern woman – shockingly naked – stumbling down the strand between the pavilions; and the dagger –
her
dagger, one of her best – the fine, pattern-welding of the blade as sure a trademark as if she’d etched her name on it – all stippled and smeared with blood.

She looked around – saw Halli and Fent behind their father, both smiling with relief; beyond them, Gar and Mord, Kotil Gorson, Ham the tillerman. Turning toward the bow, she could make out a knot of a dozen oarsmen playing knucklebones, and while there were several blond heads among the dozen bent over the sheep’s knuckles, none were quite as blond as Erno—

‘Where’s Erno, Da? And the girl?’

‘What girl?’ Aran asked sharply.

‘Erno was helping me run away rather than be betrothed to Finn Larson,’ she said simply, and watched as her father’s face clouded. ‘Down on the strand we came upon an Istrian woman, terrified for her life; someone had attacked her, she said, and she thought she had killed him. I made Erno rescue her, told him to get her safely away in a boat, for she feared they would burn her for it.’ Her brow knitted; then she grinned, wolfish and wild, a flash of the old Katla. ‘But instead they tried to burn me, didn’t they? I remember bits of it now; getting caught by the guards, the Istrian man appearing at the Gathering, blood all over, and such a liar; and the fire and such – but what happened to Erno, and Tor?’

‘Erno I know nothing about. Tor—’ Aran hung his head. He would have the hard task of telling Ella Stensen how her beloved, if wayward, son had perished.

Halli cut in, his jaw grim, his eyes hooded. He looked, Katla thought, as if he had aged ten years since they had left home. ‘Tor died in the battle, trying to save you from the Istrians. Took a spear in the back.’

The image of the blond man with the head of a spear bursting obscenely through his chest flickered for a moment through her head. She closed her eyes.
Tor Leeson, dying to save her from the burning. Such a brute – whoever would have thought it?
And at once felt ashamed for her dismissive judgement.
Brutes make good heroes, under the right circumstances
, she thought.
It was a brave death, and I was the cause of it. I’ll make an offering to Sur when we’re back home in Rockfall, pray that his soul is safely in the Great Howe
. But dying a land-death, would he be accepted into Sur’s ocean hall to join the heroes’ feast? Or would his soul be carried through the rock veins of the world, into the heart of the holy mountain, wherever that might be? The intricacies of these matters had not previously given her much pause for thought: death-in-battle had never touched her so closely before now. Everyone knew that when they died, they became one with the earth and sea; clay for Sur to remould into whatever form he most required; but those who died at sea or in battle he reserved for himself, surrounding himself with the soldiers and the sailors he would need for the great conflict at the end of the world, when he and his fellow deities – the Snowland Wolf and the She-Bear – would do battle with the monsters of the world – the Dragon of Wen, the Fire Cat and the Serpent – to decide the final outcome. All such had seemed merely entertaining stories, dressed with telling details and embroidered with fine jokes and aphorisms: tales for children to memorise and invent variations for; songs for travelling bards to entertain them all at High Feast. Now, she realised, they gave you a framework for your life, and your death: like the wooden frames that the women used for keeping the cloth taut when making their tapestries, keeping the picture in one place, stopping it all from sliding into a chaos of tangled wool . . .

‘I’m sorry he died,’ she said softly. ‘And I hope Erno got the poor woman away.’

Aran shook his head. ‘I hope he’s made it onto one of the other ships,’ he said grimly. ‘I don’t give much for his chances if he’s caught in a stolen boat with a naked Istrian woman.’

‘Oh, she wasn’t naked!’ Despite everything, Katla’s laugh rang out. Shaking off her father’s helping hand, she pushed herself up into a half-sitting position until her head and shoulders were wedged up against the lower plank of the gunwale. ‘I gave her my handfasting dress.’

Fent snorted. ‘Probably suits her a lot better than it did you, troll-sister.’

Katla’s good hand snaked out and caught him a sharp jab in the kidneys that doubled him up, more out of surprise than pain.

‘Ow!’

‘Never anger a sleeping troll, or one that’s just woken up.’

During the next few hours Katla discovered the full extent of her injuries. Where the shawl had not reached, her boots had protected her feet and legs from the worst of the flames, but even so, she found charred and reddened patches all over her legs where the leather had blistered away, some as small as pennywort, others the size of her palm. Beyond the club of her hand, her right arm had lost the top layer of skin from shoulder to elbow, but Katla had always healed quickly, and new skin was already beginning to grow back, tight and glistening, around the scabs. Even so, the whole limb was stiff and excruciatingly painful, as if the damage went far deeper than was apparent, so that even the touch of fresh linen upon it could make her shout – except for an area of her upper arm, where a band of skin on the outside of her biceps remained glowing and unsullied, an area which did not hurt even when prodded. Katla knew this because she had poked and pinched at it unmercifully ever since discovering this odd fact. If anything, it looked healthier and smoother than it ever had before.
One small mercy, at least
, she thought.
I’ll have skin as rough and scaly as a dragon’s all up and down my left side, except for the softest, most beautiful skin in Eyra on my upper arm
. ‘I shall start a new fashion,’ she announced to Fent, when he remarked on it. ‘By cutting a large hole in all my tunic-sleeves and showing only this patch of bare skin. Like the Istrian women and their mouths.’

‘Ah, indeed,’ Fent grinned appreciatively. ‘Incredibly seductive, being able to see nothing of them but those painted lips. Tor said—’ He stopped suddenly. ‘Damn.’

Katla looked away. ‘He asked father for my hand, you know—’

‘I was there,’ Fent reminded her flatly.

‘—to try to save me from Finn Larson.’ She paused. ‘Will Da go through with it, after all this, do you think?’

Fent looked puzzled. ‘With what?’

‘The marriage – to Finn.’

Some indecipherable expression crossed her twin’s face. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. He looked uncomfortable.

Katla, who could usually read her brother’s thoughts as if they were her own, frowned. ‘What? Why? There’s something you’re not telling me. Out with it, fox-boy.’

‘He’s . . . dead. Finn Larson.’

‘Dead?’ Her mind worked swiftly. There had been an extraordinary mêlée as the guards had dragged her to the burning, and fighting had broken out all around the edges of the pyre as they bound her there and lit it, but she could not remember seeing the portly shipbuilder amongst the combatants, try as hard as she might. Apart from which, she could not ever imagine him fighting the Istrians for her—

‘I killed him.’

Katla stared at him, dumbfounded. Her brother, her little brother, as she liked to think of him, had killed a man. And not just any man – not even an enemy – but the man with whom their father had struck a marriage-deal, Eyra’s finest shipmaker; Jenna’s father.

‘But how –
why?
Not for me, surely?’

Fent, unable to help himself, barked out a laugh. ‘The entire world does not revolve around you, you know.’ And then he told her what he had overheard of the conversation in the Istrian lord’s tent, and how he had taken the big mercenary by surprise and borrowed his sword. ‘It seemed right at the time,’ he said. ‘To take the Dragon of Wen, you know, since you made it, it seemed almost mine . . . and it fit my hand so well: it felt almost that it was singing to me as I plunged it into him: the traitor.’

Katla watched with astonishment a mad blue light enter her twin brother’s eyes.
He feels no remorse for it
, she thought.
None at all
.

‘But we aren’t at war with Istria,’ she said carefully, ‘and our King might even have taken one of theirs to wife; where’s the harm in Finn selling the southerners a few ships? I’m sure he fleeced them well—’

Two deep red spots appeared in the centre of Fent’s cheekbones. ‘Do you understand nothing of the history between our races?’ he said, and his tone was as cold and cutting as one of her blades. ‘They have stolen our land and murdered our folk for hundreds of years, driving us ever northward, until all we have left are a few poxy, inhospitable lumps of rock in the middle of a treacherous ocean and the skill to make ships and sail them. And now war looms and you would just sit back and let them take that as well? You would have done well as a traitor’s wife.’ And with that he shot to his feet and stalked the length of the ship to sit at the helm, face pressed fiercely into the wind like one of the avenging Fates.

She watched him till it was clear he would not turn and give her the satisfaction of meeting her gaze. Then, exhausted, she fell asleep again.

Early the next morning, Katla felt the old familiar draw of the blood in her veins, pulsing and buzzing beneath her skin.
Land. I can feel the land, calling me
. It was stronger this time than it had ever been before. She could even feel the reefs below the keel as they passed through the deep, dark waters of the Westman Sea; a counterpoint to the more tenacious song of the islands. On unsteady feet, she made her way forward to the helm, where Kotil Gorson stood with her father, staring away to the long grey horizon, as yet unbroken by any hint of Eyra.

Rain spattered down out of an overcast sky.
Fitting weather
, Katla thought
, for our not-so-glorious homecoming
. At that moment, the
Fulmar’s Gift
caught a big roller of a wave – another sign that land was close now – and all three of them had to grab the gunwale to save their balance.

‘Whoa!’ The roller passed. Removing her hands from the gunwale, she turned to Kotil and her father. ‘Did you feel that?’

They regarded her blankly.

‘Big wave,’ Kotil remarked in his usual taciturn fashion.

‘No,’ Katla said quickly. ‘Not that—’ She stopped, then gingerly replaced one hand on the top plank.

Beneath her palm, the oak of the ship thrummed with energy, a powerful ripple of reaction that spoke of more than the simple aftershock of the impact between sea and planks. ‘That,’ she said forcefully. She took one of Aran’s hands and pressed it down flat onto the same surface. ‘Can you feel it? It’s almost as if it’s humming, as if it has a pulse—’