by Rachel Dunne
Aro stood up and grabbed the black thing from Anddyr, turning it back and forth in front of his face. She saw the moment he recognized what it was. His eyes went big as they could, face going white as the snow, and he dropped the black thing in shock.
It landed in front of Rora’s feet, a big black chunk amid all the white snow, and she had to tilt her head back and forth a few times till she could figure out what it was. A knuckle, a nail, a little piece of sawed-off bone sticking out. A toe that was bigger’n her hand. Her stomach turned.
“Evil,” the merra gasped, her face still twisted. “Abomination. Evil.”
“What the hells is it?” Aro demanded. “Where’d it come from?”
Joros scooped the toe up off the ground, put it back into the pouch, and tucked it securely away. “It’s a piece of a god, and it—and I—are the only things that can keep the Twins bound.”
CHAPTER 27
There was little difference in night and day this far north, among the constant snows. Scal had not expected that. It was a strange thing, to be moving constantly through a swirl of gray. Worst when the winds blew whistling by. Screaming their rage. He was not sure, really, where was north. South. Up or down.
There was little wind, now. Enough to tug at his clothing. To whirl the snow into his eyes. No worse than he had ever dealt with.
Strangely, he missed the cloak he had given Rora. Not for heat. For the weight of it on his shoulders. The familiarity of it. One of the few things that had made it through more than one life.
Alone atop the ridge, he watched. Counted carefully. Twenty men, perhaps, at a time. He saw how they worked in shifts. Half of the workers leaving their places to go wake men who slept on hides in a sheltered space. The woken men would go to take the places of the men who now took the hide beds they had left. For a full shift he watched. Four hours, if he counted it right. Watched until the men who had been working as long as he had been watching woke the sleepers, calling them back to work.
Scal unbound his hair and scraped it down over the right side of his face. To hide the convict’s cross that showed through his beard, that would mark him. There were beads, still, wound into his hair, and little bones. He had torn them out, long ago, after the first village where the men had pelted him with stones. The folk living in the northern reaches of Fiatera did not trust the Northmen. Scal had retrieved the beads and bones, though, where he had thrown them. It was not so easy to throw away the memories of a life. He had woven them back in, once he had grown big enough that men gave more thought to fighting him. When he could use his sword well enough to make any man who did not think carefully enough regret it. It was not so easy to be anything other than what life had made of him.
He knew he looked a Northman. It was the point, after all. Wagoneers and merchants would hire him because a Northman would strike fear in any contemplating the value of stolen wagons or goods. If he did not look the part he was meant to play, there would be no part for him.
In the blowing snow and gray light, Scal slipped away from the ridge.
He walked carefully. Circling wide. He could take his time. He had some hours. The noise came to him over the ice, soft, distant. Picks and axes chipping at ice and stone.
When he judged it was right, he turned, following the sounds of digging. Down the slanting, gentle slope that led into one side of the pit. More sound now, voices raised in tired jest. Speaking words he had not heard in years. The snow and the wind and the walls of the pit did strange things to the sounds. Bouncing and echoing and fading. Sounding one moment as if there was a man standing right next to him. The next as if that same man were shouting from miles and miles away. In that disorientation, Scal nearly tripped over a sleeping Northman.
It was the snow, the sound and the light. Impossible to get one’s bearings. Scal beat a quick retreat. Circled wider, to make sure it would not happen again. When he drew close to the camp again, it was at a safe distance. At the edge of the sleeping place, but not close enough that the workers could see him either. There was a mound of snow, blown into shape by the unpredictable winds, and Scal sat behind it to wait. He could feel the cold. The icy ground could have been against his bare skin for all the difference his breeches made, but it hardly touched him. He could see, now, that some of the Northmen slept without furs, directly on the ice. It was the way of their people. The way of the North. Scal knew who he was, knew what blood ran through his veins. It was a thing he had accepted.
He counted the time so that he would not sleep. It had been a long time since he had slept much, but this, too, was a thing he had accepted. A man, truly, did not need so much sleep. A man alone, looking for work, sleeping in forests and fields, learned to sleep lightly or not at all. There were animals roaming at night, and brigands. So Scal counted, and he was only two counts off when the workers set down their tools and began to trudge to the sleeping place. When the sleepers rose and trudged the other way, Scal rose, too. Melted through the swirling snow to join their ranks. Just another Northman. Another blond face among all the others. He picked up a hammer, and began to pound through the snow and ice.
Little was spoken. It was hard work, this, and breath could be better spent. No one spoke to Scal. No one looked at Scal. Just another face. Just another worker.
“I can feel it, brothers. We are close.”
His fingers slipped, suddenly loose around the haft of the hammer. It came free on the downswing, flying from his fingers to crash against the face of stone on which he was working. The eyes turned to him, he could feel them all on his back. He kept his face down, mumbled an apology as he retrieved the hammer. There was a snort, a suppressed laugh. No more.
And the voice from his last life went on, “Only a little longer. Then we will go home.”
Scal paused in his work, feigned wiping at sweat that was not there. Turning his face to his sleeve, he looked over his shoulder.
There stood Iveran. Dressed all in white, as ever. Nearly hidden in the blowing snow. Shorter than Scal remembered. Though Iveran had always been short for a Northman, and Scal was much taller now. There was white streaked through his hair and beard, but little else had changed. There was still a white cloak hung from his shoulders, another snowbear that had given its life for the chieftain. The snowbear’s head pulled up over Iveran’s, bloody muzzle snarling. The same fearless feral grin mirrored below, teeth bared against the world.
Scal felt a child again. Lost, with no place or name that was his own. A boy on the verge of being a man. Blood of the North, gods of the south. A voice calling him little lad, another ijka. A Northern sword in his hand, and a knife in his boot with a chieftain’s death promised to it. The bodies of a dead priest and a dead friend, the bodies of a stillborn child and the closest thing he had had to a mother. No clear answers. Only gray, swirling snow.
The hammer swung. Stone shattered.
A man must atone, Parro Kerrus had said, for all the deeds in his life.
The hammer swung. The hours passed. A hand touched his shoulder, briefly. Words of encouragement murmured against the wind. “Almost there. Dig deeper. Soon. Soon.” Men faded into the snow to sleep. Apparitions appeared to take their places. Hammers fell. Picks clanged. Shovels dug. Axes screeched. “Just a little longer. My bones feel it. Home, soon. Dig a little longer.”
“Iveran!”
The cry rang, pure and clean, echoes spiraling up and down through the rift. Heads turned, eyes seeking. Iveran hurried through the snow, legs taking him over scattered blocks of ice and stone to the man who stood leaning on his shovel, eyes bright. They spoke, and Iveran took the man’s shovel, and he hurried off. “Dig!” Iveran barked to the rest of them, and they dug.
There came, at length, a woman. Stepping gingerly upon the ice, holding tightly to one of the two men who flanked her as her feet slid. They stood out sharply, those three dressed all in black, against the whirling snow. The woman more so, for the fiery hair on her head. She went to Iveran, and they spoke, and their smiles sh
one off the ice.
“Uisbure,” Iveran called out. “Kettar. Isto. To me. The rest of you, go take your sleep. You have earned it.”
There was no cheering, as Scal might have expected. He had forgotten, in some things, the way of the North. Tools were merely laid on the ground, and the Northmen turned to the sleeping place. Save for three. Two of them Scal knew, older versions of the men who had welcomed him roughly but honestly in his last life. He watched them, for a time, until standing would draw too much notice. He followed the others to sleep, but in the drifting snow he faded away and looped back. He would have liked to say he did it for Joros. That he did it to learn what he could, to earn the cets he had been paid. But Joros was far away in his mind. He was a child again, a boy not yet a man, and there was a space in his chest that had been empty for years. A need he could not name.
He could only get so close. There were few places to hide well in the dug-out pit. He drew as close as he could, concealed behind a block of stone and snow. They dug, the four Northmen. Iveran and Kettar and Uisbure, and the fourth whom he did not know. A man hardly older than Scal, white fur draped across his shoulders. They dug as the woman watched with her black-robed attendants. There was a hungry look their faces all shared.
He could not have said how long it took. He lost track of the minutes and hours, lost his count among the memories and the aching in his chest. It felt so open that he was surprised, each time, when his hand came away clean after touching the place over his heart. Time passed, shovels and axes chipping away at the stone and ice. The snowbear claw dug into Scal’s palm, but he could not make his hand release it.
A good memory, Kerrus once had told him, is a curse as often as it’s a blessing. Pray, boy, that Metherra is kind enough to grant you short sight.
Silence. Loud and ringing to his ears, that had become so used to the constant noise. A silence, split then by laughter. Words Scal could not hear, the woman pointing. Axes and shovels dropped to the ice, rumbling that was low and angry. The Northmen, turning.
Scal dropped low to the ground, huddling behind the shield of the rock. He prayed, silently but with feeling, to the Father that the Northmen would pass on the other side. Patharro was listening, or luck was with Scal. Uisbure passed first, swearing under his breath, followed by a scowling Kettar. Iveran and the other, Isto, walked together. Iveran’s face was blank, betraying nothing. The younger man was full of fury, red points on his cheeks, fists clenched. The white on his shoulders, Scal could see now that he was closer, was a strip of snowbear fur. One enormous black-clawed paw dangling onto the man’s chest. Scal’s hand clenched. Around his snowbear claw, around his flamedisk.
They passed, and they did not see him.
The woman still stood over the place where they had been digging. Her men, now, had taken up the tools, struggling against the ice.
There was a pouch tied at Scal’s belt, full of golden coins, more money than he had known there was in the world. It told him he should go closer. See what they were digging at, kill them if need be. Bring the knowing to Joros, who had brought him here just for this, perhaps.
The coins were quiet, though, near silent against the gaping in his chest.
He gave a brief glance to the two digging men. No more. Then he rose, shielded by the snow and the strange things it did to sound, and he followed the four men back toward a life he thought he had left behind.
Things were different, in the North. In Fiatera, the leader of a group such as this would have his own tent, guards posted to keep him safe, keep any from bothering him. That was not the way of the North. Iveran had a pallet, nothing more. No better than any of his men. He sat near a fire some of the others were beginning to build, Kettar and the man Isto to his sides.
The aching in Scal’s chest drove him forward, the two pendants bouncing against the hole in him. Fire and snow, the two lives he had left behind. Belonging, truly belonging to neither, yet belonging more than he ever could in the life he lived now. So much had been taken from him. Some had been given back, and then taken again. It was a boy’s hurt. A hurt that had never left him.
Scal reached out, fingers touching the white fur cloak. The man turned, eyebrows raised. No recognition, until Scal brushed back the hair from his right cheek. The convict’s cross, the white scarred flesh standing ridged through his beard. Eyes widening, too many emotions flickering to follow or name. Mouth opening, shaping a single word. Ijka.
Softly, into the falling snows and crackling flames, Scal said, “I have vasrista to claim, Iveran.”
Things moved quickly from there. A space was stomped out in the snow, a circle wide as two men laid heels to head. “You have grown, ijka,” Iveran said with a roughness in his voice as Kettar took the sword from Scal’s back. The sword he himself had given to Scal. “You look well. Strong.” Scal could not look at the man he had loved and hated both, his eyes fixed into the snows.
“I will fight for you,” the man Isto said to Iveran, eyes glaring.
There was a laugh, a sound that did not belong. The same laugh, once, had echoed through the blood and the ruins of Aardanel. “If there is to be a fight”—there was a question in the words, one meant for Scal, one he could give no answer to—“then I will do my own fighting. Perhaps I have vasrista of my own to claim.”
There were words, words that should be said. Words that had bounced hollowly within Scal for all the years since the snows. Perhaps since the first snows, even. He had said some of those words, though, a claim for vasrista, and they had silenced all the other words within him. There was nothing more to be said, now. Words, lost among the snows and the ice.
“The weapon is yours to choose,” Kettar said to Iveran. It was his right, as the one challenged. Hands were most common, for a simple challenge of honor. The blades were saved for the deeper challenges. One weapon with which to fight the other man. When the blades came out, only one of the men would walk from the ring.
The eyes were on Iveran, all of them. One pair only, fixed on Scal. Softly the chieftain said, “It will be swords, I think.”
There was some outcry, some cheering. Little enough to matter. Mostly, there was silence. A waiting, a breath held. Kettar gave Scal his sword, for the second time.
“Must this be how we end, ijka?”
Scal had grown since Valastaastad, grown taller than Iveran. He could look clear over the other man’s head. He found words, not the ones that should have been spoken, yet ones that needed to be: “It must.”
And so it began. A circle formed by stomping feet, ringed by angry, excited men. Iveran at one side, Scal at the other, forced now to see him. To meet his eyes. To see the pain there, and the love.
Love your enemies, Parro Kerrus had told him, long years ago, in another life, for they teach you what you’ll never become.
CHAPTER 28
Time crept by, measured in the slow fall of flecks of snow, in the steam of air that leaked out from noses and mouths, in the suspicion growing in three sets of eyes. They wouldn’t stop staring at Joros, the merra with her ever-present anger but something new in her eyes as well, the boy-twin with his simple confusion and fear, and the girl with more intelligence in her eyes than he’d given her credit for. They watched him in silence, until they began to realize, one by one, how much time had gone by.
Rora, with her smart eyes and coarse voice that didn’t match, was the first one to speak the new feeling rolling through their camp, covering the suspicion like a blanket of snow: “It’s been too long.”
“It has,” the merra agreed quickly, her glare turning to Rora. “You never should have left him alone.”
They were tense, all of them, and with good reason. The North was not a hospitable place, and their only guide out was, to all appearances, missing. Returning the merra’s glare, Rora stood and brushed the snow from her breeches. “I’ll go back for him.”
Behind Joros, Anddyr made a choked little sound. Joros held up his hand to stop her. “I believe we all will go. It
may be that something more important than we realize is happening.”
Aro whined about it—it seemed as though he always found something to whine about, more useless than the boy-twin inside Raturo—but his whining stopped when his sister pointed out that if he didn’t want to come, he could stay here alone and watch the horses. After that, they all moved in silence. The horses were reluctant to move, but enough of Joros’s whip got his moving, and the others trudged on after.
Rora led them, eyes narrowed into the blowing snow. There was no knowing what sense guided her, but at some point she held up one hand to halt them, another finger held over her lips for silence. They all dismounted, staked the horses in a huddled ring. Rora led them on hands and knees up a slope, motioning them all to keep low. “This is where I left him,” she said softly, and then her eyes grew wide. Drawing up next to her on his stomach, Joros soon saw why.
He had expected to see the pit as she’d described it. Northmen crawling all over it, constantly digging. Instead, the Northmen had formed a press, the mass of them gathered around two of their number locked in combat.
“Scal!” the merra hissed, and Joros could hear the fear in her voice. It was one of the first emotions besides disdain he’d heard from her. No wonder, with the only person in the world who could tolerate her currently one too-slow movement away from losing his head.
“Idiot,” Joros spat. He had no time to waste on fools, and if the Northman had gotten himself captured, he was certainly a fool. His eyes roved around the pit, an ancient place, perhaps made by men long forgotten, or shaped by the strange-swirling winds and melting snow—or perhaps by a forceful impact centuries ago. At the far end, surrounded by three high cliffs of stone and ice, three forms still dug, stark against the snow in their black robes. There was a strange twisting in Joros’s stomach at a flash of red hair above one of those robes. “Stay here,” he said to the others. “Anddyr and I have business to attend to.” He fixed his eyes on Rora, flicked them at her brother as an afterthought. “I may have need of you two at a moment’s notice. Anddyr will fetch you here, if necessary.” He turned to his mage, then let his eyes drift back into the pit, to that damned point of red. The easiest way down would be to backtrack to the horses, circle around to where the Northmen were at the mouth of the pit, and slip around them while they were all distracted. That would take time, though, and there was a pounding in Joros’s breast that said there was little enough time to waste. “Get us down there fast, Anddyr.”
