I felt a thrill at his words, at the thought of someone using the sky to paint a portrait of the past. How much time did it take? How much power? One day, I swore, I would find a way to paint the sky.
A neighbour in the sky to the Goddess, the Giant loomed against the velvety black backdrop. It was one of the largest shapes, made up of many, many stars. Our ancestors spoke of the jōt, as did many of the cave wall runes. They’re tall, we were told. The size of at least three grown men, though usually more. Stronger than a bear, they almost never use weapons. Some joked darkly that, if they flicked a finger against us, our bodies would shatter as they fell.
In many ways, I supposed, they were like the Ør. Only they didn’t invade our lands. And while they would fight and kill when necessary, they didn’t seek out war. While that sort of size and power would have at one time been difficult for me to picture, having met the Ør in person helped to bridge the gap between my frail imaginings of the jōt and their reality.
A frigid breeze swept in from the sea. Sitting up, I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared out to the water. It was from there, from where my eyes were affixed to, that the end of Skane would come. From these waters, countless foreign sails would amass, and from the boats would come the Ør. There would be many of them, so, so many of them, and from the moment the first foot touched our land, we could only hope our deaths would be quick. How long we’d sat here, quiet, safe, fighting against a frozen land for a chance at a life that was never to be. How many lives we’d sacrificed, trying to lay down roots somewhere far from the horrors of what happened in Löska. In many ways, Skane was like a sapling, the start of a new life, which the Ør would simply pluck up and crush.
I wasn’t brave, or even terribly useful. I couldn’t read runes like Ivar or sail a ship like my father, but I would rather be damned to die at the hands of the mountains than sit by and watch my world, my people, be ripped limb from limb and left to drown in their own blood. If we had to die, let us die in a fight. Not on our knees begging for our lives. Let them come looking for their scouts. I’d send their heads out to meet them in boats.
Let no more children grow up without knowing their parents.
I closed my eyes and saw my mother’s face – how I imagined it. Hair as light as mine, but perhaps less curly. Green eyes like Anneka’s, but more vibrant and beautiful. Happy eyes. A mouth that always smiled. Neither my sister nor my father had ever told me what she’d looked like, refused to on every occasion I’d asked. I didn’t deserve to know, Anneka said. There was no point in looking back, Father told me.
I left the coast and made the short trek to the village, my steps filled with purpose. Away from the waves, the silence was deafening. The only noises came from my boots in the snow and even that was muted. The trees seemed to stand taller around me, as if showing their support of my new plan. Behind them hung the ever-watchful stars.
There was a bonfire in the centre of the village, and a crowd – just about everyone who lived here – was gathered around it. My father stood in the middle, beside the fire, along with Sigvard and a handful of others who were generally looked up to as the village leaders. There wasn’t much order to how they became leaders; the title tended to fall upon those who were successful in their trade, like my father, or whose skill garnered respect from the villagers, like Sigvard. One day, if he chose to follow in his father’s footsteps, Ivar would be a leader too. Rune singers were always respected. I’d heard stories that things were different in Löska, that there was usually one man in charge, and everyone wanted his power. Power invites disaster, Sigvard had once said. Things were different in Skane. Women could offer as much as the men – Ivar’s grandmother had been a widely-respected rune singer – and the power of leadership was divided amongst more than one person.
Even from a distance, I could tell those gathered were debating. Some voices were raised in an earnest appeal, and others were more calm and rational.
“We can train,” my father said, “but the sooner we all accept our fate, the better. Don’t fill your heads with foolishness.”
“We can offer every last bit of strength we have,” Sigvard countered. “We can’t lie in our beds and wait to be slaughtered.”
“The only reason we are here, Sigvard,” my father replied, “is because our ancestors’ world was destroyed. The Ør took Löska as easily as a toy from a child. With so few of us, even if we rally every village we know of, we’d make nothing more than a few hours’ work for them.”
“The only reason we are here,” Sigvard shot back, “is because our ancestors fought against all odds and escaped to build a life.”
A few voices erupted in agreement.
“With talk like yours, Eldór, we’ll never stand a chance!” someone shouted.
“Aye, we’d rather hear Sigvard speak,” another added. “We want to hear of hope.”
“I am more comfortable with speaking of what is real and of what is to come, than filling your heads with fairy tales,” my father replied, so calm it was almost alarming. “Have you all forgotten about the plague in your blind fear of the Ør? How many of us do you think will live to see the fight? I lost more than some of you last time. You can hope for the best, but I’m prepared for the worst.”
I stopped moving. Father never mentioned Mother. Ever. His face was blank, but pain pressed behind his eyes, a sort of headache he’d been suffering for seventeen years.
I pushed through the throng.
“I’m going to the mountains.”
Eyes dug into me, especially my father’s. His forehead wrinkled, a mixture of both confusion and anger. “What nonsense are you on about now, Ósa? We are discussing serious matters.” He waved me off like a fly.
“There were runes,” I continued, speaking loud enough to be heard. “Runes in the cave by the lake. They said if I make it to the mountains, I can hear the Goddess speak. It’s our only hope. We must beg Her to call off the plague, and to help us battle the Ør. We cannot survive both. We could hardly survive one.”
My words were met with silence. My father continued to stare at me, perhaps questioning whether I’d taken leave of my senses.
“I can ask Her, I think. Ask Her what can be done.”
My father shook his head. “Nothing can be done, Ósa.”
From somewhere in the crowd, Ivar stepped up. “You don’t know that,” he said. “You can risk your daughter’s life at sea in a storm, but you draw the line at standing up to the Ør?”
The look that my father gave to Ivar could have turned the world to stone, if Ivar’s anger hadn’t given him such a resilience. I opened my mouth to say something, to ease the tension, but closed it again.
“At a moment like this,” Ivar continued, not the least bit subdued, “we should allow for more than one possibility. Someone carved that rune. Someone who knew something.”
I understood how we must sound, but no one else had seen the things we’d seen, learned the things we’d learned. In my heart, I knew that going to the Kalls might be nothing more than a death sentence. But I also knew that, no matter how small, it also offered us some a chance at survival.
“It’s foolish,” I conceded, more to my father than to anyone else. “It may end in my death, and yes, perhaps we will all die anyway. But if there’s anything She can offer, we’ll never receive it if I don’t try. She cared enough to put the red lights in the sky to warn us. Perhaps She’ll care enough to help us through it. Perhaps She can be persuaded to stop the plague, to stop the advance of the Ør.”
The fire crackled, warming the right side of my face. I kept my eyes on my father, unflinching. Intimidation was his strong point, and he well knew it. But not this time. This time, I wouldn’t back down.
“Where was She seventeen years ago?” he said, barely above a whisper. “Where was She when babies were burning from within, the elderly dying a slow, dragging death? Where was She when your own mother was taken, delirious to the end? She didn’t know me, didn’t know Annek
a. She died a stranger, Ósa. My wife died a stranger to me.”
I blinked away the burn of tears behind my eyes. I’d never heard him speak this way. Never heard him utter words that were born from raw emotion and pain.
“The Goddess left us to rot back then. She’ll do the same now.”
A fist tightened around my heart, and in the edges of my vision, I saw Ivar glance at me. My father’s face was calm, stony. He watched me, waiting for me to give in.
“I can fix it,” I whispered. My father’s eyes cut into me. “I can help this time, try to stop it. I owe you that. I owe Anneka that.”
“You can never undo it.”
A lump in my throat tried to choke me, but I swallowed it.
“I say she goes,” someone said from the crowd.
“As do I,” another added.
Before long, everyone was agreeing, nodding and speaking to each other with a sense of affirmation. I met one pair of eyes after another, finding them filled with hope. After so much fright, so much heartbreak and worry, the sight melted my heart.
It was another few minutes before my father replied. “Go if you want,” he said, his voice resigned. “But go alone. We can’t spare another body that could be here aiding in the preparations. Everyone should be trained with knives and bows and arrows. Everyone will learn to defend themselves. Ivar will see to that.”
He paused, and the look in his eyes dismissed me. When he returned to discussing the preparations, a tremor of terror ran through me. While I’d wanted his blessing – though perhaps not his permission – not one part of me thought he’d condemn me to the mountains alone.
Chapter 9
I packed that evening. Anneka sat malevolently in the corner of the room, her words dripping with poison.
“You know the mountains are haunted,” she’d told me, instilling her voice with an eerie chill that made me shiver. Then, in a low tone that sounded almost like a chant, she recited a familiar poem we’d all learned as children.
“In mountains tall
Where snow falls deep
The shadows crawl
The demons sleep.
The giants stalk
The misty ways,
Where darkness walks
Through night and day.
Beware the hills,
Beware the peaks,
Where night-time kills,
And mountains speak.
“I know you’ve heard the stories.”
I’d nodded, stoking the fire and willing away the chill of her words. “We all have.”
“Then what sort of foolhardy hero’s mission is this? Why would you, of all people, choose to go?”
I couldn’t tell if her words stemmed from genuine concern or a desire to make me miserable. It could have been either, and I was too exhausted to convince myself that she was capable of sympathy. Anneka didn’t do things for me, and certainly not out of kindness. It had always been that way. As I sat, staring into the fire, I remembered a time many years ago, when I’d learned just how deep her hatred of me went.
I couldn’t have been much older than eleven. Father was out at sea with some others, and the clear skies spoke of good weather, so we knew he wouldn’t be back until late. While Father was gone, the leadership of the house fell to Anneka, as the elder sister. Those were the worst days. Often I could get away, spend my days with Ivar or traipsing through the woods, sitting in the pen with the sheep or climbing up to the rooftop to stare at the sky.
No matter where I went or how long I was out, I always had to return home. Eventually, hunger and sleep would pull at me and I’d be drawn back to the house, my feet hesitating and complaining all the way. It was a clear but frigid night. I’d been lying in a pen with some new lambs, watching and laughing as they unsteadily learned to walk, and now and then looking at a scroll I’d stolen from Ivar, pretending I knew how to read it. Sometimes I thought that if I stared at the markings for long enough, my mind would begin to make sense of them. It never worked, but my unwavering insistence on trying remained strong throughout the years to follow.
I made my way through the streets, stopping to kick stones or glance up at the blossoming stars, or just to stand and hold myself and take in the night. Night held a charm, a power that I often fell victim to, feeling its draw and pull and bidding me stay out for far longer than I should. On this particular night, I longed to stay in the cold embrace of the outdoors until the sun rose once again, but the bite in the air whispered that it would be foolish. On nights like tonight, even my soul could freeze.
The door to my home was locked. I tried again, just to be sure it wasn’t the cold making me weak, but it wouldn’t budge. I knocked a few times and called out Anneka’s name. When there was no reply, I knocked again. A moment later, the door cracked open.
“Yes?” she asked, barely opening the door wide enough for me to see her face.
I blinked a few times. “Let me in.”
She made a show of thinking for a moment and then shook her head. “No. I don’t exist to play host to you at your beck and call, Ósa,” she said. “I made dinner earlier and you weren’t here. I’m settling in for the night and waiting for Father. When he returns, then you may come in. But, not before.” And she pushed the door shut.
I stood staring at it for a long moment, keenly aware of the deepening cold. She’d never done this before. She’d never been motherly, but this was something else entirely. For a few seconds, I hoped that maybe it was some wildly unfunny joke, that in a moment, she would open the door with a wicked gleam in her eye and warn me not to be so late again. But the door remained closed.
Slowly, I turned away and looked around the village. I could go to Ivar’s, certainly, but then I’d have to explain what had happened, why I couldn’t go home, and shame was already settling into my being. I didn’t want to tell anyone. Didn’t want to share the news that my own sister had locked me out of the house on a night as cold as this one.
So I walked and I walked and I walked until I found a cave out of the breeze. I piled some sticks atop one another and lit them using a flint I kept in my cloak at all times – just in case. I’d rarely ever had need for it, but in that moment, I thanked the Goddess it was with me. When the sticks were crackling nicely, I sat cross-legged before them and held my hands over the growing warmth. Father would be back soon, surely. I could wait an hour or two and then return and tell him what had happened. Although I doubted he would reprimand my sister. He would either tell us to sort out our differences amongst ourselves, or take her side and say that I should have been home earlier.
At some point, my father probably went home and slept in a warm bed by a large fire that had roared for most of the day. But I didn’t. I piled more and more sticks on to my little fire, and spent a cold, disturbed night in the cave. He didn’t come searching for me and the pain of his indifference stung me sharply.
The intensity of the memory had me on my feet and out of the door. I couldn’t bear to be around Anneka’s sneering and contempt for a second more.
Very little light penetrated the towering fir trees, yet somehow the snow seemed to glow, illuminating the woods around me in ethereal light. My footprints trailed away, disappearing somewhere far ahead, ghosts of my presence that would vanish with the lightly falling snow.
The village seemed an eternity away from where I stood in the frozen woods, as night crept towards dawn. Out here, there were just trees and snow and quiet, and the white breaths I released into the air. All was still and peaceful, a world of its own on an island consumed by fear. Out here, my sister couldn’t talk to me and I didn’t have to avoid my father’s gaze. There was a solace in a snow-laden forest wrapped in night found nowhere else, a loneliness that made me better acquainted with myself. After all, when it was just me and a hundred thousand trees that could neither speak nor think, I was the only company I had.
“Uxi,” I said softly, though it rang loud in the quiet. A pause, then again, “Uxi.”
F
aint movement fluttered to my right. A white owl landed silently on a low branch. From a pocket in my cloak, I withdrew some paper, inside of which I’d wrapped a small bit of meat, not enough to be missed by a soul. Winter was harsh and hunting could be scarce, even for the animals.
I needed this little one to make it through. I’d found in him a friend the likes of which I’d never find in the human world. He couldn’t talk, and there was something about that fact that made him dearer to me than almost anyone else – almost. Our friendship hadn’t been built on conversation, on exchanging our ideas and views. It had been built on the utterly basic grounds of me having saved his life as a tiny owlet. It was months ago now that I’d found him lying in the snow, expelled from the nest at too young an age to survive, but with some gentle care and attention, he’d recuperated beautifully. In a very different yet hauntingly similar way, I could relate to him. I, too, had been raised without a mother.
Uxi’s round, yellowish eyes watched me like circles of candlelight set against his snow white feathers.
“The sky has turned red again,” I said as the meat disappeared down his gullet. “I wonder if you noticed it. I wonder if you know what it means.” I crossed my arms against the cold and leaned against the trunk of a fir tree.
He shook out his feathers, round eyes fixed on me.
“Perhaps you do know,” I went on. “Perhaps you can sense the danger.” Maybe those red lights meant something to the animals, too. Did it set them on edge, make them wary, even if they didn’t know why?
His eyes moved away from me, staring off into the forest with that sharp intensity. I turned too, imagining I could see through the endless fir trunks and all the way to the Kall Mountains, away in the far northwest. Even from here I could feel them, feel their frozen forms looming over us, harbouring countless dangers that never crept beyond the ice and stone of the peaks, that let us exist in safety far below. A handful of my people had ventured in their direction over the years, but most got as far as the snowbound foothills before turning back, the menace of the mountains outweighing any curiosity or bravery they’d felt. But some had powered on, and that was the last we saw of them.
A Shiver of Snow and Sky Page 6
