“Then let me get my sack, and take me.” She said the words calmly, on her last gulp of air.
He met her eyes, and nodded. Took her bubble like a fragile glass ball in his hands, and dived.
* * *
“You followed Norga after she killed the Wind Hag?”
Sack safely on her lap, Astrid knelt on North’s palm as he blasted over the frozen plains.
“I could never trust her again. So I kept an eye on her, and the boy.”
He rose, then dipped suddenly, as if to shake loose a difficult memory. “If only the Wind Hag had never seen him.”
Astrid heard the bitterness in his voice, sensed his deep bewilderment at the Wind Hag’s fascination with Bjorn. His old mistress had loved Bjorn for his looks, as a young child. Astrid had fallen in love with the man, without ever seeing his beauty. Had fallen in love with who he was.
They came to the same man through opposite paths.
North sighed, a sound as desolate and raw as the landscape. “When I saw he was close to finding you, high in the mountains above your valley, I found the troll and told her where he was, and hoped she could persuade him to give up.”
“But he never did.”
North glanced at her. “No, he never did.”
Leaning forward, Astrid rested her cheek against his palm for a moment, rose back up. “He honors me. He believes in my strength. I will not give up what I am if we find him, I give you my word.”
North said nothing, but she thought perhaps there was a lightening of the frown on his face. That his mouth turned down less at the corners.
They reached the sea. North flew low and Astrid glimpsed ivory-tipped waves of marbled green bowing as they passed. Islands of ice floated in the distance, stark white against a slate sky.
“What is Norga’s land like?”
North huffed out a breath and churned up the sea. “A dark and terrible place. On the edge of a cliff where the sea is always cold and hungry, and the sky is always gray and listless. A place without hope.”
Astrid clutched her sack tighter, dipped her hand within and felt the golden beauty, the soothing preciousness of the treasures within.
She didn’t care if there was no hope in Norga’s palace. She was bringing hope with her.
* * *
The piercing cries of gulls ripped Astrid out of a deep, dreamless sleep, and she sat up, heart fluttering, and looked over North’s curled fingers.
Black cliffs loomed in the distance, the gulls flashes of white against the rock face as they dove from the ledges into the sea. A massive castle squatted on top, black as the rock it rose from. Astrid could not spy a single window in the wall facing the sea.
Exhaustion splintered the cold mask of North’s face, and she glimpsed the strain. They flew so low it was as if they were skimming the surface like a skipping stone.
With a final effort, North landed them on a rocky beach which lurked beneath the cliffs like a surly, dirty tramp. It was littered with debris; old wood, rotting ropes of kelp, and the sand was covered with sharp, broken shells.
North collapsed just beyond the watermark. “I had to rest here for two days last time I came.” His voice was barely audible.
Astrid leapt from his hand and as she did, he shrunk down to the size of a man. She dissolved her air bubble, and the decaying stink of the beach and the sharp slap of cold air assaulted her.
“Thank you.” Leaning forward, she smoothed his hair. For the first time, it did not move constantly in the eddies of air around him. There were none.
He found a large rock to lie on and closed his eyes, the white vapor of him stark against its blackness.
This journey had cleaned the slate between them. She was happy never to discuss his part in the old Wind Hag’s death, or her debt to him in finding this place again. All tallies were cleared from the book.
“Will you tell the Mountain Prince I tried to kill him? That I set those yggren on him?”
Ah. Not quite cleared.
“He deserves to know. The yggren are worried that some of their number have turned to Norga. They are deeply disturbed by it.”
“I only spoke to two of the oldest ones. Ones who remembered the time when it was just us and them. The wind in the trees, with no other chatter around them.”
“And both those two are dead, along with one other.”
North moved as if uncomfortable on the rock. “I am sorry for that. Sorry for all the deaths.”
She rubbed her temple. “You are my responsibility now. We will find a way to appease the yggren.”
North opened an eye. “The old Wind Hag told the air sprites to keep you hidden from my brothers and I, but I was watching that day in the forest with the troll, and I always knew where you were. I didn’t think you’d be much of a Wind Hag, watching you grow up.” He closed the eye again. “You seemed too slight. Too timid.”
“And what do you think now?” Astrid felt a tiny stream of his cold air stir through her thin dress, and shivered.
“I have changed my views.”
She smiled. “I’m going to spy out the land. Rest well.”
Then she walked, ankles turning on the loose pebbles, toward the cliffs.
Toward her final obstacle to happiness.
Chapter Thirty
The cliff face was damp and her hands, slimy from clambering over rocks to reach it, could find nothing to hold. Her nose tingled in the cold, her cheeks flushed with the effort of getting even this short distance on the boulder-strewn beach. Her gaze traveled from the sack at her feet up the rock-face, disappearing beyond her sight.
“You could fly up.” North’s whisper was in her ear, although he still lay near the shoreline.
“I don’t want Norga to learn I’m the Wind Hag,” she whispered, putting her hands on the small of her back and blowing out a breath as she tilted her head up. There was no air here, that was the problem. Just as North said, it was the outer reaches of nowhere. Even the smallest action left her breathless.
“You won’t have to convince her of anything if you’re lying dead at the foot of these cliffs.”
True enough.
She picked up the sack and thought of her air platform. Her feet did not so much as lift from the pebbles. “It isn’t working.”
“No wind sprites. No energy in the air.” North curled up on his rock. “It was worth a try.”
Astrid stepped back to see more of the cliff, looking for a way up. She noticed for the first time the gulls were like none she’d seen before. Their wings were tiny, and they did not fly down to the sea, they dived. None were circling the air above her.
There were no air currents here for them to ride. Instead, they had to climb back up the cliff.
She watched one launch itself into the air and dive into the waves, then saw another shake itself out as it hopped through the foam of a retreating wave and made its way to the cliff. It began climbing up, jumping and scrabbling with beak, feet and wings.
If a little bird could do it, so could she. She bent to her sack and took out the golden apple. Put it in the deep pocket of her skirt. She was going into the unknown. Best to be prepared. North barely stirred as she trudged back to him and hid the sack beneath his rock.
She returned to the cliff, huffing for breath, and found the first hand and footholds. Hauled herself up. This lower part was relatively easy, she realized, when you found the right path, but from the level where the gulls nested, upwards, the cliff seemed an unbroken vertical slab of rock.
After a while, she stopped looking further than the next foothold or handhold. Taking every tiny advance as a success. She was gasping for breath, and felt she would never get enough air into her lungs.
When at last it seemed there was nowhere else to go, she started looking sideways, for a way to move across to a place where she could find another way up. She leaned against the freezing rock and tried to get her breathing under control.
Something ran across her hand, and she gave a low, br
eathless scream. A spider, black as the dripping, slick cliff face, furtive and hideous, scuttled off across the rock.
Another movement caught her eye, and then another. There were hundreds of them.
She shivered in revulsion at their protruding eyes and long, spiky legs. A few moved curiously toward her fingers, and suddenly the ledge she’d been eyeing didn’t seem as impossible to reach as before. She leapt, gripping with the tips of her fingers, arching her back to push her body up against the rock.
When the pounding in her heart and head subsided, she saw there was a new way up and began moving again. As long as she was in motion, the spiders left her alone.
The castle wall was built from cliff stone. It grew seamlessly upward where the natural rock ended, and she saw as she climbed up each weathered and pitted stone slab there were no windows.
Their lack made her think of a fish she’d seen in the market once, churned up from the depths of the fjord by a storm; blind and disturbingly alien.
It gave her an uneasy sense of climbing over a living thing, sightless but sentient. Waiting for its moment to strike.
When she reached the top of the wall she clung just below the last layer of stone, her stomach clenched with nerves, her arms and legs quivering with exhaustion. She needed air. She tried to gulp it in as soundlessly as she could, afraid there would be a watcher or some guard above.
Inching up to peer over the top, she glimpsed a deep parapet, wide enough to hold twenty men abreast, and realized if she wanted to see into the castle beyond, she would need to risk crossing it. She looked carefully left and right, but there was no sign of anyone, and she struggled over the wall and forced her legs to move across the parapet as furtively as the cliff spiders below.
She knelt on the far side, legs trembling at the relief of being on a flat, solid surface, and peered over. The castle was built in a square, with the parapet running all around it. Below her was a massive courtyard and on the far side of it, opposite the wall she clutched with white-knuckled hands, were double doors leading out of the castle.
She’d expected to see trolls, but while there were a few standing or sitting around a huge wooden table in the center of the yard, there were more men and women. They did not walk about their business, they scuttled, crab-like, across the massive courtyard from one wing of the castle to the other, carrying food and linen.
They steered a wide path around the trolls and were dressed as poorly as she was herself.
Slaves?
Two of them, men in rough pants and stained tunics, were up on ladders, tying pine branches into an arch over the big doors.
A buzz started in Astrid’s ears. Those pine branches were a gate of honor. Built over a bride’s doorway in preparation for her wedding ceremony.
It seemed the world fell away for a moment before snapping her back to the present.
She had arrived just in time.
* * *
Astrid watched the men secure the final branch. Now she was here, the next step was to find Bjorn, and with the abundance of servants, slipping into the castle in her rags looked easier than she dared hope. But as she looked for a way down, a troll emerged from below and walked across the huge open space of the courtyard. Everyone she passed, the stable hands, a woman mopping the flagstones with an air of resignation, bowed low enough to touch their foreheads to their knees.
It could be Norga, but the troll looked young. Younger than the ones who’d attacked her after Bjorn had left. Young enough to be the bride-in-waiting.
Astrid watched her walk beneath the pine branch arch, nodding to the men as they scrambled down their ladders.
She was going for a walk. And she was the one person Astrid could be sure had contact with Bjorn.
She was the way in.
Crouching low, Astrid ran along the parapet, keeping close to the wall until it turned sharply inland, forming the right-hand wall of the courtyard. An open stairway angled down into the courtyard itself, but though it would be faster to take it and sneak out the front entrance, Astrid did not dare take the risk of being stopped.
Instead, she continued on until she was in line with the great entrance. She heaved herself over the wall, stopping for a moment to see which direction the troll was taking.
Norga’s daughter, if it was her, crossed the open land beyond the castle entrance and disappeared over a low rise.
Astrid climbed recklessly down the wall, scraping her hands and knees against the rough stone in her haste. After her climb up the wet stones on the seaward side, it seemed much quicker and easier.
She turned again to spy her quarry, catching her breath at the same time, but the troll was nowhere in sight.
This side of the castle was built facing down the peninsula, a gray-green moor that ended in a line of hills. A river tumbled from their slopes and then twisted sharply right, away from the castle, as if to avoid it. Near the cliffs it cut a deep gorge into the rock and fell into the sea, out of sight.
Panting, her palms stinging, her dress sticky against her skin despite the chill air, Astrid leapt the final distance to the ground. She landed hard, hobbling forward until the pain in her shins subsided. Then she set off swiftly through the low, scrubby bushes, in the same direction at the troll princess.
The troll had a ten minute start but Astrid decided that was to her advantage. She needed to be beyond suspicion. She needed the troll to come to her. So she would find a spot the troll had to pass on her way back to the castle.
She came to a small meadow of grass and bush beside the river, an open place where she was sure to be seen, and sat down to wait.
What would draw the troll to her? After a moment’s hesitation, Astrid dipped her hand into her pocket and brought out the golden apple. It almost throbbed in her hand, and for a moment, her fingers closed hard around it, and she struggled with the idea of giving it up.
But she would. That was why she had it.
She began to toss it in the air like a ball, and watched it gleam and shine in the sun, throwing wild reflections into the water slipping past.
She did not know how many minutes had gone by before she felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck lift, felt the prickle of awareness of quarry under a hunter’s gaze.
She looked up sharply, and saw the troll princess watching her from the path. As if the touch of Astrid’s gaze broke some sort of spell, the princess strode toward her, and it took all the self-control Astrid possessed not to scramble to her feet as she loomed closer.
She hadn’t expected the troll to be so big, although that seemed foolish now—she knew the size of them. The princess was more than head and shoulders above her. Her gray-green body was covered with a layered dress of the same colors, and she looked like a massive stone on the move.
There was also something in the set of her jaw, the gleam in her eye. She was intimidating. A power in her own right.
Not just a poor thing in the shadow of her mother.
“Good day,” Astrid called, and her voice cracked.
The troll princess stopped just in front of her, and Astrid could see her nose grew almost to her lips, bent a little to the left. A pungent scent of hot rock wafted from her.
“What is that you have?” The beady eyes barely looked at Astrid’s face, they were fixed on the golden apple, glowing softly in Astrid’s cupped hands.
“A golden apple.” Astrid struggled to stop the quiver of her voice.
The princess reached out a hand, her fingers bending into a claw, her fingernails black. She stopped a mere snatch away.
Astrid did not draw back, but her hands closed more tightly around the cool surface of the apple, and at last, the princess looked her in the eyes.
“I want it.”
Astrid shook her head, unable to say a word under the force of that gaze. They both knew the only thing stopping the troll from taking it by force was the magic of the apple itself. Magical things could only be given freely, otherwise Astrid would not be in a position to bar
gain at all.
“I will give anything for it.” There was a wistful, childlike quality to the troll’s voice and Astrid saw her eyes were dreamy as she gazed at the gleaming treasure.
The troll’s wistfulness gave her confidence and strength. “You cannot give me what I want for it.”
“Name it.” The troll knelt beside Astrid, still looming.
“I hear there is a prince locked in the castle over the hill.” Astrid moved the apple onto her lap, covered it completely with her hands. She gripped it tightly, to stop them trembling.
The troll went still. “So there is.”
“I hear he is handsome as a god. They say he is a god. Or the son of one.”
The troll snorted. “He’d like to think so.”
“I’m getting married soon.” Astrid managed to lower her eyes demurely. “They say if a woman spends the night with a god, they are blessed with fertility forever.”
“Do they?” The troll princess barked out a laugh.
Astrid took a deep, stuttering breath. “I will give you my precious apple for a night with the prince.”
The troll lifted a hand to her face, tapped her fingers against a cheek that looked fuzzy with mold. “For all the good it will do you, I agree to those terms.”
Relief engulfed Astrid as if she’d been dunked in a bracing sea, but she kept her head down, her eyes on the sparse dry grass of the field. “How will you arrange it?”
“Give me the apple and I will tell you.”
Astrid shook her head, and she didn’t need to pretend the stubborn line of her mouth.
The troll looked regretfully at the treasure.
“Come tonight to the castle. I will meet you at the gate after the evening meal and take you to the prince’s chamber. I’ll come for you again in the morning at first light.”
Astrid nodded. “You will get the apple when your end of this is complete.”
A snarl escaped from the troll’s mouth, and she drew herself up. “Do you know who you address, peasant?”
Astrid opened her eyes wide and shook her head.
“Princess Dekla. Show some respect.”
Mistress of the Wind Page 16
