“What is the matter?” Niale asked.
“Is it not obvious? The human has taken on our form, and we wish to know if it is a deception or truth.”
Niale rubbed his chin, surprised at my sight. The elder then walked up to me and brushed his hand over my face in disbelief. “The child was made terminally ill by svartmeteel,” he said to another alf, “and yet I do not see any of the ravages of it on him. Indeed, the wound that was left from it is gone even. Do you know by what power he has been healed?”
I was terminally ill? That explained why Kaihar appeared so glum when he was speaking to me. He thought I was dying, not to mention how frail I’d felt. It also must have been why Freyr mentioned curing all of my ailments. “Freyr, your king, accepted me as one of his own and gave me his blessings.” I said confidently, “Also, if I were to die soon, why were you making a ship for me?”
The elder clasped his hand over his mouth in amazement and fell to the ground trembling. I turned around and saw that the other alfar had bowed down before me, too. “Child, we were making it as a memorial for you, as is what we do for all those who have fallen to our enemies. But now, the ship shall be worked to be truly seaworthy.” He trembled and turned to the other alfar. “Go tell Kaihar of what has happened, as the teacher of magic to our youth, he shall surely be honored to train such a blessed one as this.”
Chapter 5
To the Tree’s Top
Kaihar was overjoyed to hear I was well and began my training the next day. The place he tutored me was in the shade of a rock formation near the lake. I wasn’t being taught magic at first, I was rather being taught how to use shields.
I was given two wooden bracers, both were masterfully carved to look like ivy and flowers were growing over it. Kaihar was very quick to explain that my ability to defend myself was the primary reason for teaching me shield work before anything, though I gathered that the wood from the shields could also be used as a focus for magic.
Winter began to approach as I grew steadily more competent in defensive maneuvers. Along with that, I also grew more familiar with the alfar. According to them, this entire valley was the remains of an ancient castle, one that they were and still are bound to protect.
Back before nature began reclaiming these ruins, the castle was once the home to a king three hundred years ago. Surprisingly, this was before the Agrians drove us Shaloor to the sea. Most of the alfar were not very detailed when they explained to me what happened there, but I was able to piece together what happened then. With regard to the alfar at least.
As it would be, Freyr had heard of the ranis and how difficult they were to kill. Wanting such a prize in his personal collection, he came down to Midgard to hunt one. Tragically, on the dawn of the first day and with the first shot, Freyr missed the ranis he had spotted and struck a man who had been hunting that same ranis. Worse, the man was the son of a king. To make recompense for his loss, Freyr gave him the sacred or “Nooa” tree and gave some of his subjects, the alfar, to guard it.
For reasons none of the alfar will tell me, that kingdom crumbled, but they were still bound to protect the land that was once that palace. The svartalfar took offense at the tree and wished it destroyed.
Four days before the solstice, Kaihar called me to the Nooa tree. It snowed the night before and I had to slog through a foot of the white blanket. Thanks to the ranis hide jacket the alfar made for me, I wasn’t very cold. My fingers were a little numb, but fingers are merely helpful for shield work. If there were one problem with the heavy outfit I had been given, it would have to be that it was heavy; walking uphill through the snow was already difficult enough to make me sore.
Sitting there on a rock waiting for me was Reokashothi, Niale’s brat of a daughter. I didn’t bother to ask her where Kaihar was; it didn’t seem wise even to acknowledge her. Instead of giving the quick bow that would be expected of me at seeing the highest elder’s spawn, I just walked over to the sacred tree to admire its resilience. Glazed with ice and frosted with snow and yet it still held onto its leaves and summertime complexion.
Some snow fell off and something glittered at the tree’s head, but neither movement seemed natural. I got my shields ready, both being already on me. Just then, an alf with mauve-highlighted hair leapt out of the tree; it was Kaihar, sword poised to cleave my head in two. Out of reflex, I thrust my bracers between my head and the sword.
Responding expertly to the deflection, Kaihar grabbed my right shield and used it to aid him in his recovery. By the weight that the shield was strapped to me, he had the opportunity to alter his fall as to land on his feet and even capitalized upon the moment by twisting my arm.
“Come on, shield maiden,” she shouted. “Don’t let that arm be more useless than usual. At least let it lie limply as I’ve come to expect,” Reokashothi heckled. “Shield maiden” was the name she had taken to calling me, likely as a cruel remark about my given weapon. Her remark did not annoy me this time, as it helped me remember this was not a real attack. After all, an alf as skilled in combat and cunning as Kaihar would not be so foolish as to allow a witness to a real assault.
With such confidence, I ignored the pain of my twisted arm, pulled it away, and bashed my tutor with the other shield. He staggered back and stabilized himself with his sword. No sooner than when he regained balance did he lunge back. These were easy thrusts to parry, yet another sign of being a practice run as the old master wouldn’t have been so easy to shrug off my shields.
In one last swing, he brought his sword downward toward my skull again. I quickly put my bracers over me in an ‘X’ shape and caught the would-be-fatal blow. With a quick twist of the arms, I then twisted the blade out of my teacher’s hand and used the momentum to push him to the ground. As he had taught me before, now that my opponent was on the ground, I rested my foot on his chest and pressed the serration of my shield against his throat.
“Well done,” Kaihar croaked, only being able to exhale due to the pressure on his windpipe. Teacher patted my leg and I allowed him to stand. “That was still a foolish move, maarika, to block a skyward strike instead of sidestepping.” Again, “maarika” was the name Kaihar referred to me as while training me, as I presumed at the time, it meant “student.” He slid off the wooden edge of his sword and said, “Had this not been blunted, I would have torn straight through your defense.”
I bowed immediately. “It won’t happen again.”
“I believe the Norns and Frigga would foresee differently, but suffice to say you have learned the basics of defense and are ready to learn magic.”
Reokashothi began to clap. “Good job, shield maiden, you’re finally going to be shown the rune of wisdom. Maybe you’ll be a valkyrie someday.” Kaihar paid no notice of her; he never seemed bothered by her picking.
Kaihar reached for my hand. “The first, simplest, and most important thing you must learn is…” He took his sword and cut my fingers. “How to heal yourself.”
My immediate response was to bury my fingers into my palm and bite my lips, trying to keep the blood and pain from escaping. Kaihar again grabbed my fist and tried to loosen my fingers.
“You must release your grip, or I cannot teach you to heal it.” It took a while for me to force my grip to lessen and there was blood smeared over my palm and more staining the snow. “I shall do enough to stop the blood, but you will have to do the rest.” He reached up and plucked a leaf from the sacred tree.
Now that it was so close to me, I was able to notice some subtle and magical details about it. The leaf was an emerald green and the veins had ripples of chartreuse swimming through it. Holding the leaf gently by the stem, Kaihar brushed this energy onto my cuts and they began to scab up.
With the bleeding stopped and the leaf shriveled up in patches, Kaihar stopped. “Now for you to finish.” He leapt up again and grabbed an entire cluster of leaves. I studied the leaves for a moment. There was no use in asking Kaihar how to do it because he had al
ready demonstrated that it was not his way to teach with words. I snipped a leaf from the cluster, and some of the chartreuse came misting off because of the jostling.
“Ch, ch, ch,” Reokashothi teased, now directly behind me. “That’s so wasteful of you, shield maiden, pick it off gently, okay? I know it might be hard for a Midgardian to be gentle, but do try.”
“Great, she’s starting to use baby talk,” I thought. The insults I could handle, but being spoken to as a child I couldn’t. “Kaihar, could you tell Reo to leave?” As I suspected, he shook in disagreement.
“She is fifty-two, ten by the measure of Midgardian maturity. Let her be.”
I supposed that was the end of that, so I tried to heal the wound. Fancifully, I thought of how I could “practice” on her before bringing an end to the Agrians.
I tried to copy everything Kaihar did from how he held the leaf to how thoroughly he brushed the magic onto the injuries. All of this was pointless, as when the first wave kissed my ring finger, it snapped and tore the scab off.
“Awww, did wittle shield maiden go misuse the twicky magic?”
“Quiet, you,” I snapped back, “you’re ruining my focus.” I continued to try to heal myself, but I wasn’t able to succeed completely. Success varied from each time. The next time I managed to seal the cut, but I then unsealed it and another cut after that. As the entire day passed, Reokashothi’s quips grew more and more piercing, and Kaihar even began to try to improve my form by informing me of the right way to do it. It became apparent I wasn’t ready to do this. It was tiring, but I eventually managed to seal up the cuts, albeit in a scarred fashion.
“Glad you didn’t practice on me,” Reokashothi said. Now, understand Reokashothi was smacking comments like that all day, and practicing this supposedly simple technique was surprisingly exhausting, so I wasn’t in a mood at all fitting for snide remarks like that. Because I was so grumpy, I picked up my shield and swung it toward her face. To my satisfaction, she wasn’t expecting it and it struck her square in the nose. How she clasped her hand over her face to conceal the scrape from the air and hold back her nosebleed made all of her comments worth this final pay off.
“Maarika Erland,” Kaihar yelled, grabbing my arm and pulling it to the ground. For a moment I tried to jerk it away from him, but I stopped when I remembered who I was resisting. “Reokashothi, I would like for you to leave.” She stood up, and though she winced with pain, her face sweetened into a giggle as mine soured.
“She was trying to make me angry,” I said when she was out of earshot.
“That does not matter, you should not have done that.” He stood up and anticipated my response. “You should have chosen to ignore her. She is like a weed at seed, waiting for wind or beast to brush past it. It pleads for this so that its seed may scatter and spread farther.”
“But why did you let her stay? Are you trying to draw me to striking her just to punish me?”
Kaihar remained silent and walked down the hill. “I am done teaching you for today. I suggest you get some rest now.”
Down at the site for making my ship, I took Kaihar’s advice and tried to get some rest. The hull of the ship made a good place to sleep when filled with down and covered with a fur skin. The alfar were kind enough to stop working when I was there. Try as I may, however, I couldn’t sleep. I was too fixated on Reokashothi.
It was one of those foul moods that make you need to roll all over the bed and find everything uncomfortable. To make matters worse, I was constantly looping through Kaihar’s weed parable and his silence regarding his tolerance of Reo. With either of those, I thought I needed to distract myself, so I looked at the tree line and waited for the moon to rise.
That certainly helped, as I savored the world around me. The trees, covered in sheets of ice, sparkled like the stars in the sky. The chirping of the few birds still here also graced my ears too. The moon was just coming into view when the crunch of foot on snow caught me off guard.
I jumped out of bed to see who it was and all the tension came back to me. It was Reokashothi. “What are you doing here?” I murmured from exhaustion.
“Nothing, just wanted to make sure your boo-boo is okay now.” She was back to that squeaky voice. I glared and sneered as she approached. The brat didn’t seem to mind my unwelcoming gestures, she just brushed her fingers across the ship, enjoying the textures. “Don’t do anything rash, shield maiden, you already got in trouble for attacking me today. Do you want to get into any more trouble?” There she went again, trying to draw out my enmity. She was right, however, I’d get into more trouble if I let her get the better of me again. There was no other option but to take Kaihar’s advice and not let her annoy me. To not allow the weed to scatter its seed.
“Why are you picking on me?” I yawned for emphasis. “Aren’t there other, less tired people you can bully?” I didn’t really care for an answer, an excuse to get on any different topic was all I cared about.
She shoved off the ship and shrugged. “You’re the only one I can pick on, my little shield maiden. Everybody else has tree topped me.”
“Tree topped?” I raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”
She paused mid-pace. That seemed to get her. “Like I would tell you.” She dug her finger at me in an attempt to recover. “If I told you, I…ha! Only an idiot wouldn’t know what tree top means. I don’t see why I should tell an idiot something as simple as that. No wonder Kaihar calls you a maarika.”
“What do you mean?” The tension of her jeers made me ask it with a livelier voice than before.
She grinned like a cat that had cornered her prey. “You mean, with that special gift of tongues you got from my king, you still can’t figure out what a name means?”
I forced myself to loosen my grip; fists were not the right thing for the moment.
“You really are clueless,” Reokashothi hooted. “Maarika means fool. I can now only imagine how little your family deserved a maarika like you. I’d bet my trusty hunting falcon, Baelnes, they celebrated your loss.”
“Leave me alone, Reokashothi,” I huffed. “I promise you there won’t be enough for your father to compost if you continue.” Composting, being what the alfar do when they bury the dead, was the worst threat I could come up with.
“Even better? Kaihar’s pet name for you is a girl’s name. We took it from the Agrians too. So I’m being no ruder to you when I say shield maiden than Kaihar is when he’s tutoring you.” The pale light of the moon shed over her face, giving emphasis to the way she hid her giggles sloppily with her palm.
I looked away from her and at the moon, feeling it was the best I could do to avoid her abuse. It was a crescent of the first quarter, which reminded me of Alodia and our agreement to meet around now. “I have to go now,” I said to Reokashothi after starting to run. She didn’t pursue, all she did was yell out one last remark.
“When the Agrians came after you, is this what you really did? No way can a hare like you stand to protect his family.”
All I tried to do was run away and block her out. With any hope, I could meet with Alodia and forget all about this. That little spot with the creek was thankfully not far away from Clafel once one knew their way. As it turned out, the alfar had only been taking a long route to the mountain that month ago.
Winter had also come to here. Snow clung onto slumbering branches of trees, and the creek that marched on despite the frost was the only thing that made the location familiar. All that was missing was Alodia, currently absent from the picture.
I lay down on a large slab of rock and looked up at the moon, soon to be overwhelmed by what looked like a snow-bearing cloud. “I can’t expect her to come at the same time. Might as well get some sleep while I wait.” I didn’t sleep so much as I did doze then, though. Rocks, no matter how smooth they are, always seemed to have many dips and chips in them. Then on top of that was the fact that it was winter, which made the rock unbearably cold as well. Des
pite such discomfort, I did manage to fall into that strange and magical sensation of drifting down a river. It made me feel like I was on that ship back to home. As sweet as that thought would normally be, it only felt bitter. Reokashothi’s words about my foolishness and cluelessness were slivered in my thoughts, making me feel unworthy of them.
Warmth began to waft over me and light came with it. It felt much like torchlight, so I woke up. Much to my surprise, I did not wake up to Alodia standing over me with a torch, but a mob of axe-and torch-wielding Agrians.
“Hey, kid,” asked one of the brutes in that timbre, “vhat are you doing so far from town?” He dropped his hatchet and thrust his hand at me. Just my luck! Here I was surrounded by enemies without a decent proficiency with magic, my shields present, or even a full night’s sleep. No matter, the thug had been so kind as to give me his hand. So I grabbed him by the hand and threw him face first against the stone slab. With that momentum, I got onto my own feet and tried to run away.
The others, however, ganged up on me, one for each arm and another held my shoulders still. The thug got himself back up and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Vhat is your problem?” he asked, shocked by the streak of snotty blood on his sleeve. “Are you running from your…” he trailed off as he got a look at my face.
“Go on,” I thought to myself, “say family, it would be nice and ironic.”
The one holding my shoulders pinched my cloak and felt the texture. “Is it Elderbear?” he asked.
He snorted back some of the blood as he nodded. “I think I knyow vhy Jarl Solas vanted us to come out here so late at nyight. This is the Shaloor savage,” he cried.
The Agrian savage to my right pulled his head up against my face to get a better look. He was chewing something and made obnoxious sounds with it. “Are you sure of this? He looks so much like us.” He exhaled a bitter stench as he spoke. I tried to back away from him, but the others wouldn’t even let me get that far away.
Across the Kolgan Sea Page 6
