Odin's Child

by Siri Pettersen

  Rime stared at the blind one. Fear awoke in him. Poisoned him. He slowed his breathing to maintain control. The fear wasn’t dangerous. He recognized it. He’d known it as a child. A child who had almost met his maker. The weight of the snow. The feeling of being suffocated.

  Nothing can harm someone who is already dead.

  Nothing he knew of. But he didn’t know about them. Who were they? How could they be stopped?

  Eirik’s voice reminded him that he wasn’t alone. “You thought it was a strategic rumor. You thought it was a lie from the north. An excuse to prepare for war. To accuse Mannfalla of not being able to protect anyone.”

  Rime could feel his anger rising, hot amid all the ice. “The twelve believed it. Mannfalla believed it. Personally, I never saw what you stood to gain from it. The blind would make the whole world flock to the Rite, the same Rite you want to distance yourselves from. Starting such a rumor would make no sense whatsoever.”

  Eirik studied him, his head bowed in contemplation. His beard lifted up on one side, as though he was smiling. But he didn’t comment on Rime’s assumptions. He nodded at the blind one. “There were two. Maybe more. Nobody can be sure, I guess. We were hunting them when we found you. They’d found you too. I assume they smelled the Might when you killed your own.”

  That hit Rime right where it hurt. His own. Brothers in arms who had fought and sacrificed their lives for a lie. Maybe he could have saved them. If he had just found the right words, before the first blow. Rime swallowed.

  “I would have seen them. There was nobody there. Nobody but us.”

  “Nobody sees them, boy. The name is apt. They make others equally blind. But they kept their distance, and you can thank the ravens for that.”

  Rime suddenly remembered seeing the sky through the fog of pain. Ravens. Lots of them. Black blotches shrieking amid white snow. Hirka dragging him.

  “That’s why they haven’t attacked Ravnhov?”

  Eirik nodded. “They’ve done plenty of damage in the surrounding area. Trust me, you don’t want to see a man sucked dry of the Might. He looks like them. Hardly distinguishable. Pale. Bloodless. With eyes rolled back in his head. They draw the life force out of you. Old women say they feed on your soul. And they do it regardless of whether you’re a man, woman, child, or bear. They go after life, regardless of its form. If you’re going to kill them, you have to be prepared to sacrifice men. They die like ordinary people, but …”

  Rime continued for him. “But it comes at a cost?”

  Eirik ran a big hand over his face. “You think you have them, then they disappear. Melt into the mountain.”

  Rime felt a shudder tear through his body. The only way he knew how to stop them was to send Hirka … where? Home? Where was home for a child of Odin? Certainly not here. She didn’t belong here.

  “The doors … They come from the stone circles.”

  “Yes, we know,” Eirik said. “We have the same stories here. We wanted to tear down the circle at Bromfjell, right near here, but then that daft old stone carver showed up.”

  What was he talking about?

  “Who?”

  “A couple of days before we found you two, a crazy stone carver arrived here from Elveroa.”

  “Hlosnian!”

  Eirik raised a bushy eyebrow. “You know him?”

  Rime shook his head. Not in response to Eirik’s question. He simply couldn’t believe it. Hirka had been right. If anyone knew how the old circles worked, it was Hlosnian.

  “He carved the Seer icon in Elveroa. What did he say?”

  “I’m afraid he’s not the man you remember. Unless he’s always talked nonsense. He said the tree was gone. The old codger babbled like a three-year-old when we wanted to tear down the circle at Bromfjell. He said if we did that, we’d never be able to keep them out. A broken door can’t be locked. Those were his words. We had a vote and the majority chose to listen to him.”

  “Vote? What do you mean?”

  “All of Ravnhov. A show of hands. After all, lives might have to be sacrificed today to save lives tomorrow.”

  Rime couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They’d done what? Assembled every single soul in the town and just asked?

  Eirik didn’t seem to notice his amazement. He just continued. “The stone carver believes there’s only one way to put a stop to them. The girl has to return home. To where she came from.”

  “No!” Rime didn’t want to hear it. It was the wrong solution. It was the weak solution. The solution that punished an innocent. “There’s another way, Eirik. Urd Vanfarinn’s death. This is his blindcraft. He’s the one who brought them here. Without him, they won’t find the way.”

  “Are you certain?”

  Rime closed his eyes. “No. No, I’m not certain. But we have to act as though I am. We can’t ask Hirka to leave Ym. Even if Hlosnian knew how, it’s not an option. Nobody knows where she comes from, or what she’d be going to. It’s beyond reason. You might as well burn her alive.”

  Eirik rubbed his shoulder again. “It’s not our decision to make. It’s hers.”

  Rime looked at the blind one again. A freak of nature. Not because it was so unlike him, but because it was so frighteningly similar. Nobody knew where they came from, or how many of them there were.

  “How do they kill?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “How often?”

  “We don’t know that either. We think they come in groups and disappear again after a couple of hours. In two places we’ve found nothing but ashes remaining, but that’s because people have burned the houses and the bodies when they’ve found the dead. Nobody who has seen the dead can blame them. We’ve heard the same stories from other places. So we think these two were left by … the pack.”

  “Rejected?”

  “Either that or someone got too eager. Ran too far to catch their ride home.” Eirik laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. An unpleasant sound from such a big man.

  “Come, Rime. You haven’t had breakfast yet, and you’ve been surviving on nothing but drops of the girl’s blind brew for days.”

  Rime could hear the warmth in his voice, even though he was insulting the brew that had kept him alive when he didn’t have the sense to watch his back. And for the first time, the gnawing feeling in his stomach was definitely hunger and nothing to do with sleep or illness.

  They left the crack in the ice and headed back down toward the chieftain’s household. It felt wrong to leave the body unattended. Sick. And not without danger. “Are you just going to leave him here?” Rime asked.

  “What else should we do? Burn the blindling?”

  The word sent a chill down Rime’s spine. The blindling. It was as if he were talking about an everyday pest. Rats. Or insects. Rime stopped.

  “They could spread disease. Or even worse, what if someone from the town wanders up here and chances upon him? Panic would break out!”

  “You’ve spent too much time in Mannfalla, shadow. Hide him from the people, is that what you mean?”

  “I’d have thought …”

  Eirik turned to Rime. “You’d be hard-pressed to find an ymling in Ravnhov who hasn’t been here yet. They’ve seen him, all of them.”

  TWO LEADERS IN RAVNHOV

  Hirka opened the door a crack and snuck into the great hall. She looked around. It was smaller than she remembered, probably because Mannfalla and everything she’d seen there had skewed her perspective. But it was still impressive. The two rows of logs holding up the roof, each of them wide enough to hide behind. The fireplaces in the end walls she could stand upright in. The gallery above, running all the way around the hall like an indoor balcony.

  But there was something new in the room. White stone sculptures filled the entire corner under the stairs and had started spreading out into the room. Someone had taken pity on the smallest among them and stood them on the long tables, where they looked very out of place. Hirka smiled at the thought of Unngonna, who, despite all
the keys attached to her waistband, couldn’t find room for Hlosnian’s ceaseless output.

  Where was he?

  The sudden sound of a chisel revealed the stone carver behind a pale stone block: an unborn sculpture. It was so tall that he was standing halfway up the stairs, chipping away at the top of it. He had his back to her. His red tunic had faded even more. Hirka guessed it had been wrestled away from him to be washed after he came here. She moved closer to see what he was doing. He had cut grooves into the stone all the way up, as if it were a huge measuring stick. She smiled.

  “Have you given up on trees, Hlosnian?”

  Hlosnian chuckled, but he didn’t turn around. She moved closer. Then he turned and laid a wrinkled hand on her shoulder, but he didn’t reply. Didn’t do anything. His hand sat there for a moment before he collected himself and asked her to sit. Hirka cleared away a wooden bowl, a cup, and an empty wine bottle from the steps and sat down just above him. He pointed at one of the stone trees on the long tables.

  “That is now the most beautiful tree in the world,” he said, completely without pride. He was just stating a fact.

  “So you knew when the tree in Eisvaldr shattered?”

  “Knew? No, I’m an old man. All I know is that I know less and less. But it wasn’t difficult to tell. I woke up one night and suddenly this tree was the most beautiful tree in the world.”

  Hirka shook her head. He seemed more lucid than before. His eyes were focused and he was speaking clearly. But it was still difficult to make sense of what he was saying. “So why did you come here?” she asked.

  “Because you shouldn’t—”

  “I know. I shouldn’t be here. What can we do about it?”

  “As long as the stones are standing, anything is possible. Did you know that the wild men here wanted to pull them down?!”

  “You can’t blame them, Hlosnian. People are scared of the blind. They’ve killed one here and promised we’ll go up to see it when—”

  “I don’t see why it’s so difficult for people to understand. A door can only be locked as long as it exists. I’ve been telling them since I arrived, but they just stare at me like sheep. It’s like we don’t speak the same language.” Hlosnian continued to chip away at one of the grooves. “Few know where the doors are, and even fewer can use them. And what’s the solution? Tear them down! Where would we be if we let ourselves be ruled by fear alone? Hmm? In the past, people were killed and wars fought for those stones alone.”

  “I think wars are still being fought for them.”

  Hlosnian stopped what he was doing and looked at her with one eye half-closed. “Wised up now, have we?”

  “It comes with being an outlaw,” Hirka said, smiling.

  Hlosnian snorted. “An outlaw. There’s no such thing. Being an outlaw implies lawlessness, lawlessness implies a law, and the law comes from men and women like you and me. Do you feel lawless, Hirka? Do you have no laws to live by?”

  “I have plenty, but they’re mine alone.”

  “Well, then. There you go.”

  Hirka was becoming increasingly fond of the old stone carver. It was like he built his sentences differently than other people. A separate language you had to learn, but as soon as you mastered it, everything made sense. There was no point exchanging only a few words with him. That just led to confusion. But after a while, the words flowed like milk. Good and satisfying.

  Hlosnian told her it wasn’t as simple as she’d thought. It wasn’t that the blind were there as long as she was, it was that they could be brought to Ym as long as she was there. He scared her, saying that no one knew what other creatures might come through as well. People knew of the blind and Odin’s kin from the myths, but who was to say that’s where it ended? What about the stories from the north about the kingdom of ice? The songs about pixies and dragons? For all they knew, the stones could be used to visit Slokna.

  Longing for Father gripped her for a moment. Visit Slokna. If only it were possible … but she didn’t have to think about it long to realize that there were some places people weren’t supposed to be able to visit.

  The old man expertly dodged all her questions that he couldn’t answer as if she’d never even asked. For example, who built the first circles and how old they were. Or about what the place she came from looked like. Or whether it was true that she could spread the rot.

  “How fares the heir to the chair?” he suddenly asked.

  She blushed. That description had never been more wrong. “He turned his back on the Council a long time ago, Hlosnian. He became Kolkagga. And now that he’s an outlaw, they’ll never give him the chair, not even if he decides he wants it. He’s going to lose everything. He doesn’t think his uncle is strong enough to hold onto the house and their wealth. The rest of the Council will seize the lot.”

  Hlosnian didn’t seem to care about any of that. “So he’s up and about?”

  “Yes. He’s up and he’s seen the blind one, and now he’s sitting with Eirik and—”

  The doors to the hall crashed open. Eirik stormed in. Others would have found it difficult to make the doors budge at all. The sun streamed in behind him, casting his shadow across the floor. A small army of warriors followed him. The doors stayed open.

  “Where?” he boomed.

  A young man took off his helmet and dragged a hand through his muddy brown hair. Hirka recognized him. He had collected her from Maja’s inn when she first came to Ravnhov, the night Villir had been stabbed in the thigh. That felt like a hundred years ago. He wasn’t nearly as scary as she remembered him.

  “Near Dvergli. Only half a day from the lake where Aljar found all those fish that had gone belly up the other day.”

  The others shifted restlessly. Eirik rubbed his shoulder. “Foggtarn?! Aren’t they pretty well defended? We’ve sent ravens and messengers to every house in Foggard! What are they doing out on their own?”

  “They’ve got kids and carts with them. Fully loaded. They’re heading our way, chief.”

  “I know what they’re doing, Ynge! Don’t they realize we’re on the brink of war?! And that the blind have been sighted in the forests? Those kids are as good as bait!” Eirik flung his hands out in exasperation and stared at his men, who looked sheepish. He sighed. “How many?”

  “About fifty.”

  “Choose eight men, Ynge. We leave at once. And make sure they’re men who won’t wet themselves every time a twig snaps.”

  A familiar silhouette appeared in the doorway and Hirka’s blood ran cold. She got up. She knew straightaway what was coming.

  Rime took a step into the room. Chainmail clinked as the men backed away from him. “Do you need men, Eirik?”

  After a few seconds, Eirik nodded. Rime cast his eyes over all the men in the room. “Where are my swords?”

  “I’d rather arm one of the blind!” It was Tein. Hirka hadn’t noticed him among the others. He looked to the men for support, and they didn’t disappoint. They pointed at Rime and grumbled. Arming an enemy was insane. A onetime heir to the Council. Kolkagga. One of them asked Eirik whether his wound had healed so quickly that he’d forgotten. Eirik cut them all off. “Enough! Give him his swords.”

  Everyone was silent. Eirik stared at Rime as the men left the room, one by one. His gaze was a wordless curse. A promise of a one-way trip to Slokna if Rime betrayed his trust.

  “Then I’m coming too. Someone needs to watch your back,” Tein hissed at his father.

  “Someone needs to look after Ravnhov if we’re going up against the blind, lad.”

  “I need one more thing that can help us,” Rime said, looking up at Hirka. She closed her eyes and swallowed.

  “I’ll come,” she answered.

  “Ah, it’s like that, is it?” she heard from Hlosnian, who had started carving again.

  Everyone was quiet as they rode through the forest. All they could hear was the muted sound of hooves on the ground. The men sat upright on their horses’ backs, trying to move as li
ttle as possible. They’d swapped their clinking chainmail for leather. Hirka wasn’t used to riding, so she ran alongside them, making sure not to run ahead or fall behind. Eirik thought that would make her too easy a target.

  Hirka felt naked next to the armored men sitting high up on their horses, swords at the ready. They left dark tracks in the thin layer of snow on the path. The rest of the forest was still colored by the autumn, protected by tall trees. The occasional stray snowflake danced between them. More would come before the moon was full again. She stole glances at Rime. Had she really pushed him away when he had kissed her? She couldn’t believe she’d been able to resist.

  Hirka tugged at her jacket. She had borrowed it from Ramoja the night they broke into Eisvaldr. She might never have the chance to return it. Unngonna had scrubbed the wool until it was almost falling apart, but the sleeves were still stained a rusty red from Rime’s blood. She’d said it needed throwing out. A bloodstained jacket was unlucky. But to Hirka it was a reminder that she was still alive, against all odds.

  Kuro stayed closer than usual, curious about the ravens in cages hanging above the horses’ backs. They hadn’t been able to bring that many of them. There was a fine line between having ravens for protection and having so many that they attracted attention. The same applied to men. They’d have preferred to bring more men, but too many would attract danger rather than keep it away. No one was sure of anything, though. It was like planning a battle against ghosts. So, they were eleven men. And Hirka.

  She said a silent prayer to no one in particular. A prayer that they would make it home safe. Particularly Eirik. If anything happened to him, it was over for Ravnhov. For them all. Tein was in no way ready to take over—whether he wanted to or not.

  The sun was low in the sky by the time they found anyone. Sounds from the north made the men straighten up and hold their breath. The ravens cawed in agitation. They could hear people. Ordinary people. Eirik closed his eyes, but it was hard to tell whether it was because he was relieved or because the villagers were being so reckless. Hirka could hear them more clearly now. A baby crying. A mother calling out to playing children. And pigs?