“I’ve been eaten!” called Tage.
“So have I!” shouted Tinder.
Only two villagers left, and now—bough and branch!—Trind and Sigrid were soaring toward Eiren’s tree. Eiren was beginning to lose hope when a bright stroke of lightning tumbled across the sky. The bright light revealed a shadow of movement in a nearby tree. Caudlyn. And he had to be the heart. The other two wouldn’t be as bold as they were if either of them was the heart.
Eiren leapt and soared toward Caudlyn’s tree.
Caudlyn saw. He dropped from his bough and twisted away, heading down toward the middle canopy. The darkening skies made it difficult to see, but he was moving so quickly it was easy to pick up his movement against the backdrop of the citadels’ trunks and the tops of the trees beneath them.
She followed, but Caudlyn kept flying. He was riding an updraft brought on by some trick of the storm; cold air above and warm air from the lower canopies sometimes created updrafts, which could be followed if you knew the signs. Caudlyn did, but so did Eiren.
She watched the canopy below, looking for the telltale flutter of leaves, the swaying of the upper branches. She also had the benefit of tailing. She could follow the path Caudlyn blazed, see how well the drafts were carrying him, and either use them herself or strike her own path. She kept hoping Caudlyn would make a mistake. That he’d stop and let her win, that he’d at least claw his way around a tree and try to escape her by climbing.
But he didn’t. He kept glancing back at her, eyes wide, and soaring onward, which he shouldn’t have. He was supposed to stay within a few trees of the rest of the wyrm.
“Stop!” Eiren called.
But Caudlyn soared on.
“Caudlyn, we’re going too far!”
Blinding lightning broke across the upper canopy. The thunder shook the very air around her, and the rain poured even harder.
That was when Eiren saw it. A length of white deeper in the holt crossing not merely a few of the great citadels, but many of them. Five or six.
Her heart pounded in her chest. “Caudlyn!” she cried as loudly as she dared. “Wyrm!” And when he glanced back again, she pointed quickly with one hand before returning to proper gliding form—arms and legs outstretched.
Caudlyn had seen. Eiren could see it in the way he was suddenly flying—tight and jittery. He swooped in toward the nearest tree, but mistimed it, coming in too fast. His claws raked the bark but didn’t catch, and he was sent spinning beyond the tree.
The wyrm slithered up between two trees. A bright green eye spied through the darkness of the trees as its head moved up and down, back and forth.
Eiren arced downward, positioning herself so that the trunk of the citadel upon which she landed was between her and the wyrm. Her breath came and went as fast as her lungs would allow. Spit formed in her mouth and it was all she could do to summon her courage and poke her head around the trunk. Holt save her, the wyrm was huge—as big around its trunk as a young citadel. It had one dead eye and a horrible scar running along the left side of its head, and several of the long white whiskers of skin were missing on that side.
Tales were told of this beast by the firesides of Hrindegaard, and the ones who told them were always deadly earnest in their tellings, for this was Golnvangr, the scourge of their village. It had been hunting warriors and children alike for generations. The wound that had taken its eye had been given it by Eiren’s own great-grandfather, who’d managed to stave off its attack and save grandper.
Golnvangr’s head moved back and forth like a pendulum, its tongue tasting the air, but when Caudlyn reached another tree and finally landed safely on it, it immediately ducked its head and began to weave between the citadels toward Caudlyn’s position.
“Find a set!” Eiren called.
Caudlyn nodded and climbed higher to the next branch, looking for a lynx set, and all the while Golnvangr wove closer. The wyrm’s spear-shaped head was only a few trees away now. The sound of the rain was loud, but it couldn’t drown out the rattle-scratch sound the hooks along its body made as they dug into the tree and released, propelling it forward.
By the nine, Caudlyn wasn’t going to make it! There was no set for him to hide in, nor was there shelter of any other kind. She wanted to yell—to distract the wyrm or call for help—but Eiren was rigid with fear. She screamed silently for Caudlyn to flee. To leap down from the branch, but it was already too late. Wyrms, as close as Golnvangr was to Caudlyn, could rear back and strike. Were Caudlyn to drop now, it would be into Golnvangr’s waiting maw.
Caudlyn knew the end was near, but gods shine on him he didn’t cower. He stood on a branch and pulled his bone-handled hunting knife from the inside of his boot. Golnvangr didn’t seem to notice. The wyrm shot forward.
Gods curse her, Eiren couldn’t watch. She owed Caudlyn that much—she owed him much more than that—and yet she found herself cowering as Caudlyn’s screams filled the holt.
Mercifully they stopped moments later, and she knew well what that meant. Caudlyn was dead, and she was next. She dropped from her perch, her speed increasing by the moment, and pulled up, flying just over the middle canopy. The sound of rain was loud. Thunder called far in the distance. But soon the rattle-scratch sounds of a wyrm slithering through the citadels resumed.
Hoping to throw Golnvangr off, she arced up and met another tree, climbed as quick as she could, and took off, down along another branch before leaping off it and soaring onward.
But Golnvangr wasn’t fooled. The wyrm bellowed like a massive trumpet as she flitted between two trees and pulled hard left. She climbed again and leapt just in time to avoid the wyrm’s head crashing into the branch behind her.
She’d never make it away now, not if she kept trying to gain the upper branches, so when the wyrm came again, she did the only thing she could—she dove down and crashed through the middle canopy.
The way ahead was terribly dark. The wyrm was coming, but her descent bore her further and further away. She turned and banked, avoiding the largest of the trees, but then leaves and branches began to slap at her as she passed.
She pulled up, hoping to stop at a tree ahead, but too late. She slammed into the tree.
What followed was bright pain. A sense of falling. Wind whipping past her.
Then darkness.
Eiren woke to the patter of rain.
Her breathing was shallow, her body leaden. It was all she could do to lift her hand to her head and probe gently. She had bumps and bruises and scrapes and cuts, plus two long gashes, one on her forehead, another on her scalp.
She rolled over, and thought at first it was night, but then realized there were patches above her, chinks in the armor of the lower canopy, where light as dim as twilight filtered down. The air was warm and humid, and it smelled of fetid waste.
She lay, she realized with growing alarm, hundreds and hundreds of feet below the upper canopy and the safety of Hrindegaard. She was on the ground, where foul creatures lived, where the evil men and women of the shadow folk roamed and hunted for food, where it was said one scrape from a thorny plant would poison you dead.
Though her fear told her to move quickly, to stand and be away from this place, she forced herself to sit up carefully. The fern upon which she’d fallen had tiny barbs along its fan-shaped leaves. The skin along her fingers already felt prickly. She was sure at any moment she’d begin to itch, that her skin would turn red and blistery.
Looking at her hands, however, made her notice something far more alarming. She was missing one of her gloves. Somehow it had come off. She still had her left one, though the stitched leather along the palm had ripped and the metal holding the claws had bent.
She stood and tiptoed to the enormous trunk of the nearest citadel. The bark here was very different than it was far above in the upper canopy. It was slick with moisture, more compact. She tried to climb it, but her right hand could find no purchase, and the spikes on her left hand and the insides of her knees and ankles
couldn’t find good purchase either, and she slipped back down to the moss-covered ground over and over again.
There were other trees here, smaller trees, trees whose crowning tops made up the lower and middle canopies. She thought of climbing them, maybe finding a way to make it to the upper parts of a citadel, but their bark was even smoother than the citadel’s, and even if she could somehow climb them she had no reason to think she would manage to reach one of the citadels, nor climb one of the great trees even if she could manage it.
Her breath was coming fast now. She could see it misting lightly in this strange darkness of day.
Where would she go?
How would she eat?
How would she find clean water without the rain tuns they used in Hrindegaard?
“Stop!” she said to herself, the strange twittering birds nearby stopping their call as she voiced that one word.
“Stop,” she said again, her voice strangely muffled. It made this place feel like another of the nine worlds, one completely foreign to her own Vrondaheim.
The twittering birds resumed their call as she scanned the area, taking stock, wondering where she might go. Her grandper and the others from Hrindegaard would surely search for her, but they’d never find her. They might find the place where Caudlyn had … where he’d made his last stand, but they wouldn’t find where she’d fallen through the canopy. They’d have no idea where to look.
Think, Eiren. Think.
The mountains, she realized. The mountains were nearby, and they were one of the few places where ground met sky. They would expect her to make for them, and so she would.
But how to reach them? She had no sense of direction. The canopy had robbed her of the sun. The light that reached this lowest level of the Bryndlholt was so dim it seemed to be coming from all directions at once. In the upper canopy she might look for moss on the north side of the trees, but here a slick, sludgy moss grew on all sides of the trees.
Then she remembered the wind. This time of year, at the failing of summer, the wind most often came from the southwest. The bulk of the mountains lay northeast, so if she could sense the breeze, she could follow where it pointed.
She stopped for a moment, releasing her fear, and closed her eyes. The breeze was barely present, but it was there. She could feel it tugging at her red-brown hair.
She set out, forging a trail around and sometimes carefully through the undergrowth, traveling for most of the day. She thought at each bend in the land, at each turn in her path, that she would see the head of Golnvangr come to find her. But she didn’t. Instead she saw strange creatures. Bright newts and salamanders and frogs of every imaginable color. She saw strange round mice that skittered along the forest floor, oblivious to her passage. Insects crawled everywhere she cared to look, or flew in clouds that parted as she passed through them. She saw tall ferns and plants with pale yellow flowers that looked dangerous to touch but smelled honey sweet. But she saw no wyrms.
The light did brighten for a time, though never more bright than the light of dusk in the upper reaches of the holt. And then it began to wane, so she knew nightfall was coming. She picked up her pace, hoping to be free of the dark forest before true night fell, but she stopped when she came to a clearing, a rare place where the forest opened up. The upper canopy formed by the citadels still towered above, but there was a space where she could see the blue sky. It gave her comfort, that sight, but it was replaced with wonder as she stepped beyond a thick wall of thorns to find a circle of standing stones.
They stood in a ragged formation like the bones of some long forgotten beast hoping to claw its way out from beneath the forest floor. Each stone was easily five times as tall as Eiren, and they had carved beneath their moss-covered surfaces runes that looked much more ancient than any of those written on the lintels of Hrindegaard or upon the blades of warriors’ swords or the heads of their axes. She stepped into the space between them.
There were nine stones, one for each of the worlds, and Eiren went to the one for Vrondaheim. That one she recognized, though the rune was different on this stone. It had more embellishments, and some key lines missing. Seeing how this one was changed, she soon recognized the others. Jalfnhaal, Eldinghilf, Svardvidr, and all the rest. She looked up to the sky and—by bough and branch—saw one of them. Through that narrow space far above she could see Skolnir, the land of the stone giants.
She moved to the stone for that world, the stoutest of them all and the only one whose top had been shorn off in some ancient tale of misfortune. She touched its surface, wondering what it would be like to visit that distant land.
No sooner had she done so than the sounds of the insects and the birds ceased. A moment later she felt something within her chest. It felt like the fluttering of her fears, but it was warm too, like how grandper made her feel when he returned on his eagle from faraway villages and handed her a sweet brought all the way from across the world.
She heard a deep rumbling, a trembling of the bones of the earth. She felt soon after the very ground rolling beneath her, threatening to land her on her backside. How long it continued she couldn’t say. She held her arms out as if to ward away some unseen foe, and she wondered if one of the stones would fall and crush her, but finally the shaking began to subside. Quakes were not unheard of in the Bryndlholt, but she’d never felt one so forceful as this.
Just as the last of it was dying away, she heard a sound she’d heard before, a cacophony of crumbling rock and sliding stone. An avalanche, albeit a small one. She’d seen one once, three years before when another earthquake had caused a whole mountainside to break free and come tumbling down the slope.
It ended nearly as soon as it had started, and finally Eiren could move from the circle of stones, something she was all too ready to do. She moved toward the sound. If there had been a rockslide of some kind, it meant the mountains were near.
She wasn’t wrong. Minutes later the forest thinned and gave way to green foothills. On either side of her was the height of Bryndlholt, but ahead were hills and beyond them the white peaks of the Whitefell Mountains. In the nearest of the hills ahead of her, part of the steep slope had given way, the rocks jumbled at the base of it, rolling all the way to the edge of the forest.
She stepped gingerly over sharp rock, but before she’d gone ten paces, she gasped and ducked low behind one of the larger rocks.
She waited, listening, her breath once coming as quickly as it had when Golnvangr had been chasing her, for in the hill ahead, exposed by the rockslide, was a form, a curled up form.
With precise care, she inched her head up.
It was still there, unmoving, skin of charcoal, body curled up tight, head hidden between its knees.
When she realized it was completely still—that perhaps it was still in its slumber or that it couldn’t move—she crept closer.
It was a giant, she realized. A giant. A creature of legend, not flesh and bone like her. No one had seen one in ages, grandper had said. Some even said they didn’t exist, but the ones who spoke like that were boys like Rikard or Henrik, who hardly believed any of the old tales.
Eiren stepped carefully over the last of the sharp rocks, catching her balance before coming to a wary half-crouch, staring up at the giant’s sleeping form. It was half-covered in earth, its legs and part of its torso still buried. Its left side, too, was still swallowed by the hill. How long had it been here? How long would it have taken for the hill to grow around it?
She stepped closer still. Its face was covered in dirt. The sun was beginning to set, and it lit the thin clouds above a brilliant salmon. Nostrils flaring, her lips set in a tight line, she reached up and brushed some of the dirt away from the giant’s face. Then more and more. She would look upon this creature before she moved on to find shelter for the night.
But as its face was revealed, she realized she couldn’t move on, for this was the face of a child. Like her. This giant was a mere child, and it had been abandoned here in the hills. T
hough she couldn’t quite define why, this saddened her deeply, so she continued until she had freed its head of much of the dirt. A boy, she saw now. It was a boy. Lost and alone and forgotten.
As the last of the light faded, she moved to the grass on the hill, just above the sleeping giant, and there she lay herself down, exhausted. She knew she was not its mother, she knew it was foolish to have such thoughts, but for now she clung to the notion as she settled like a hound to guard this sleeping giant.
As night fell and sleep began to overtake her, the thoughts she’d been avoiding all day returned and threatened to overwhelm her. Thoughts of Caudlyn, him standing and watching Golnvangr approach with but a small knife in his hand.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t brave,” she said as her tears fell softly upon the earth. She smoothed the grass where her tears had fallen, as if she were stroking Caudlyn’s heartwood-colored hair. “I’m so sorry.”
When she woke the next morning, it was to the sun breaking over the Whitefells in the east. For a long time she watched for eagles in the narrow strip of blue sky—grandper or Viveka or the others might come looking for her—but she saw no eagles and decided she’d better find food and water in case it took time for them to find her.
If they found her, she thought.
Before leaving the hill she stood on the broken black earth beneath the giant, looking up at him. The feelings she’d had last night—of protection and motherhood over this creature that might cave in her skull with his stony fists the moment he laid eyes on her—seemed foolish in the sunlight, and yet there was a small seed that remained. She felt responsible for him, and that—acting as a foster parent, or sister, or brother—wasn’t something she took lightly. No one in Hrindegaard did.
She brushed some dried dirt away from the giant’s leg. How long had he been here? Grandper had told her a story of the giants when she was young. It told of the days when man was still young and it was the giants who ruled Vrondaheim. In those days the giants had buried their children from the very moment they were born. Unprepared for the world as they were, they were left to grow within the earth, to mature, and only after many lifetimes of man were they brought forth, birthed a second time.
Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories Page 20
