C. Dale Brittain

by Voima

  “That’s right, Wigla,” said Karin, thinking rapidly. “It is Wigla, isn’t it? Isn’t that what he called you? Your sight is keen to know we have further reason to be here. But I too have keen sight. And I know that last year you and one of Eirik’s men planned to leave here and go south, to start over again far from this death-filled realm.”

  Karin could hear the woman’s breath hiss between her teeth, but she did not stop. “When Eirik told you he had abruptly left to go raiding, you persuaded yourself at first that he was seeking booty to make himself worthy of you, but you should always have known better. Your lover’s brothers found his body—hidden, his spirit never celebrated in song and none of the sacrifices made for him, either to death or to voima.”

  She was rapidly reaching the end of what she could guess easily and was wondering desperately what she could say had happened next; maybe the castle by the salt river had been burned by enemies, requiring the move to this mountain hideout. But the woman’s hands closed around her neck, ending either the need or the ability for further speech. “How did you know this? Did he tell you?” she said hoarsely, as though the words were dragged from her.

  Karin put a hand up as though casually and worked a thumb between her own neck and the woman’s palm. “Don’t be surprised,” she said when she could breathe again. “I told you I had keen sight. I tell you this only to demonstrate my abilities to you so you will understand what I shall next tell you. I also know, with my same sight, that there is near here a doorway into the Wanderers’ realm.”

  Wigla had lowered her hands, and Karin heard her shuffling her feet, though whether in embarrassment or suppressed anger she could not tell. “The Wanderers do not come here,” she said in a surly mutter. “There’s nothing but death—and the dragon.”

  Karin did not like this repeated mention of a dragon. “Then I see more than you do,” she said with an attempt at confidence. “But this I can tell you, and I think you will agree. If I leave here, to find my lover—whom Eirik’s men left behind when they captured me—and then to find the door into the realm of voima, then I shall not be here. And he makes your life an agony as it is—I do not need very keen sight to see that! How much more agony would it be to see him constantly comparing you to a younger princess—especially since that princess spurns him?”

  “We had already been on the edge of being outlawed for years,” Wigla said, still in that mutter. “A life of raiding grows thin, as you’ll see if you stay here. What are you suggesting instead?”

  Karin found herself glancing over her shoulder, wondering if Eirik too might be up early and coming to see his woman—or women. “Let me out of the castle,” she said. “Then I’ll be gone. Tell Eirik I escaped in the night, tell him it’s his own fault for not posting better guards.”

  The woman scowled, then abruptly made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “I think I can find things myself to tell him.”

  “Then you’ll let me go?” asked Karin, trying not to sound as eager as she felt.

  “Maybe,” said Wigla, almost reluctantly. Dawn was advancing rapidly, and Karin could now see the green eyes glinting fiercely. “Tell me first how you expect to find this doorway to the Wanderers. I am not at all sure whether to believe you, Princess.”

  The Mirror-seer had better be right about this, Karin thought. “The doorway is hidden,” she improvised, “only open or even visible at certain times. There is only one person who knows how to find it, and that is the Witch of the Western Cliffs.”

  For a long moment Wigla did not answer, and Karin wondered wildly if she herself might be called a witch. But when she answered it was almost agreeably. “Well, if you and your keen sight can find her, maybe you will find this doorway. But she may demand more than you care to pay!”

  “Oh, I can pay,” said Karin airily, keeping imminent despair from her voice. Her fingers closed over the broken necklace in her belt pouch with the sick feeling that it would not be nearly enough.

  “Then come,” said Wigla. For a moment she smiled, a slow, almost sardonic smile, that Karin tried to persuade herself was an expression of sympathy and understanding. Then she turned and led the way down the corridor, stepping carefully, almost soundlessly.

  Karin decided that when she emerged on the mountainside she would determine south from the sun and try to find her way back down to the river.

  That is, unless the dragon was real and found her first.

  2

  ”Yes, of course we were running from you,” said Roric in an expressionless voice. They had paused in their climb and leaned against the rocks while the dogs tried to pick up the scent again. The two kings were on either side of him, not exactly holding him captive, not exactly letting him walk freely.

  “Valmar left to join the Wanderers before I reached your kingdom,” Roric said to Kardan. “When I appeared there—with you, Hadros, right behind me—Karin feared you would not believe us. That is why we had to go after him immediately, before you could stop us, before you could tell us we were only chasing old stories.”

  “This doesn’t sound to me yet like an excuse for stealing a ship,” growled Hadros. “You’ll keep the Gemot occupied for days.”

  But Kardan interrupted. “What were you chasing?”

  “We had to rescue Valmar, of course.” Roric did not tell them he had let Karin persuade him he could also best preserve his own life in flight. His honor was already in tatters as it was. “The Weaver said there is a door to the Wanderers’ realm somewhere here in the Hot-River Mountains.”

  “And you believed him?” demanded Hadros.

  “I certainly believe in the Wanderers’ realm,” said Roric quietly. “After all, I’ve been there.”

  “And why should you go there safely, but not my son?”

  Roric turned to face Hadros fully. He really did not resemble the solidly-built king, he thought—being his son had been nothing more than a brief dream to help him overcome Gizor. “It’s all changed now. I never met the real Wanderers. Valmar may have, but according to the Seer they plan to send him to Hel . . .”

  “And maybe Hel is the best place for you,” said Hadros, mostly under his breath. “I’ll tell you one thing, Roric. After we rescue the princess—we know they won’t have killed an attractive young woman like that—we’re going straight home so you can face the Gemot. No fooling around here looking for doors into the land of voima.”

  They were interrupted by the abrupt baying of the dogs, who seemed to have found Karin’s scent again. All of them hurried after the sound, up a steep little path almost hidden behind a boulder. Roric kept trying to look ahead, to see the fortress where they would have her, but saw nothing but bare stone.

  Karin, Karin, he thought, seeing her smile in his mind’s eye, her russet hair half hiding her eyes as she laughed at something he had said. If he thought of her this intensely then surely her spirit must hear him, and she must give him some indication of where they had her hidden. But he reminded himself that even when she lay in his arms it was hard to know her thoughts—so much harder therefore now, when he was not certain, in spite of the reassurances they all kept trying to give each other, that she still lived.

  The morning had started clear, but thin high clouds came out of the west to filter the sunlight and chill the wind. Roric’s muscles all ached from his fight with Gizor, and climbing and knocking against the rocks caused several wounds again to start bleeding. Loose stones underfoot kept turning, threatening to strain an ankle or, worse, to crush a foot.

  Sometimes they seemed to be following a path where stones had been arranged to form steps leading up narrow defiles barely as wide as a man’s shoulders, but at other times they scrambled over lichen-grown boulders that gave no sign that anyone had ever come this way. At every turn where there seemed more than one way to go, the kings sent some of their men in each direction. Very quickly Roric lost all sense of direction, seeking only to find a way upward. Kardan and Hadros started quarreling about which direction was
best, and after a few minutes started resolutely in opposite directions. The dogs’ voices echoed so that it was harder and harder to tell where they had gone.

  Roric dragged himself up onto a high dome of rock and suddenly realized that he was alone. Without even meaning to he had eluded both kings and all their warriors, who must be scattered now over several square miles of rock.

  He sat for a moment, breathing hard and looking around. From his perch he could look back toward the rift valley and see Hadros’s longship, looking impossibly small at this distance, pulled up beside the salt river. In the opposite direction, to the north, smooth-sided, nearly vertical mountains rose from the rubble through which he had been climbing, their peaks lost in the clouds. Over to the west the rocks were high and jumbled; they must drop abruptly into the sea beyond.

  And then he picked out motion on those rocks. For a second he thought it must be one of the dogs, separated from the rest, but it appeared to be human. One of the warriors, he thought, but there was no glint from helmet or mail. And the hair, even at this distance, looked blond tinged with russet.

  Karin! She had escaped somehow! No one seemed near her, not Hadros’s men, not the raiders. She was over close to the western cliffs, working her way rapidly southward back toward the rift valley, having emerged from somewhere among the rocks nearer the sea. She did not appear to have spotted him.

  He shouted but his voice was carried away by the wind, and the tiny hurrying figure gave no sign that she had heard. Roric strained his eyes looking for a line among the rocks that would intersect with her path, that would take him to her.

  He heard then voices yelling for him, Hadros’s bellow among them, but the echoes made the voices bounce all around, and he could not have been sure which direction to go even had he wanted to obey. His stiffness forgotten, he started scrambling down, trying to keep his eye on Karin at the same time.

  He paused abruptly, fingernails scraping at lichen. Very high up on the vertical mountain face, far above where it should be possible to climb, was another human figure. Roric closed and opened his eyes but the figure was still there. It appeared to be wearing a broad-brimmed hat.

  Before he could react he saw something else that made him forget entirely about the figure. Closer, emerging from the rocks a few hundred yards behind Karin, came the long green head and neck of a dragon.

  Unable to help her, almost unable to move, he stared as the creature worked its way out from between the boulders. It had the long, heavily muscled neck of a snake, scales glinting gold and green. The neck kept growing and growing before his horrified eyes as he realized how enormous the creature must be. The other warriors too had seen it, for the shouts from the scattered men abruptly took on a note of wild panic, clear even though he could not hear their words.

  A long forked tongue dangled from the dragon’s mouth, open to show the rows of needle teeth. The mouth was wide enough to snap up three warriors at once, and those teeth were longer than any spear. Fringed ears flapped above eyes that glowed like fire, eyes that looked about alertly as though in search of something to eat. Behind, far behind the head, a clawed foot emerged, pushing the serpent slowly toward Karin.

  3

  She turned, hearing the scrape of scales on stone, and saw the dragon not a hundred feet behind her.

  In a horrified second she took in the intelligent, burning eyes, the huge leathery wings folded down the back, the slow-moving neck and body, and the jaws that looked as though they could snap together very quickly around something soft and tasty.

  She began to run, down the raiders’ track toward the salt river, holding up her skirt and taking huge, desperate breaths. The track zigzagged, descended, doubled back on itself so that for a few seconds she was actually approaching the dragon again from lower down the slope. Muscles rippling in its neck, it lowered its head toward her.

  Then the track doubled around again. She sprang up and over a boulder in the path and kept wildly running. When her legs had to slow for a series of rough steps, she looked back to see the dragon lowering itself sideways down the slope, its clawed feet tumbling the rocks Eirik and his men had carefully levered into walls. She was running as fast as she could and it moved deliberately, not even having unfolded its wings, but its slow pace was still more rapid than hers.

  Now she raced down a straight stretch, and a glance over her shoulder showed it gaining on her, sliding and scraping along the stones, its mouth open in anticipation. Faint cries came to her on the wind, so others must have spotted the dragon too, but she had no time to look for them.

  She could not dodge it, and she was not going to be able to outrun it. The track turned sharply, away from the edge of a rock slide. Her only hope was to find a crevice narrow enough that the dragon could not follow. Karin sprang forward and over the edge, launching herself down a stone face so steep she immediately regretted it. She slid more and more rapidly, just managing to keep herself vertical, bouncing off stones in her path and grabbing at the stunted bushes that grew among the rocks to slow her slide.

  At least, she thought, she would be dead before the dragon began to eat her.

  She smacked feet-first into a dense brush and came abruptly to a halt. She looked up wildly to see the dragon’s fiery eye peering over the edge of the cliff she had just come down. Before her was a narrow crevice, narrower—maybe—than the dragon’s head. She plunged into it headfirst. It was pitch black, but her fear of being closed in was nothing compared to the needle teeth behind her.

  The floor of the crevice was unexpectedly smooth to her scraped hands and knees. Karin crawled rapidly, deeper in, around several sharp curves. This was more than a crevice; this was a tunnel. Behind her came a rattling noise that sounded like the gnashing of long teeth. Karin crawled even faster. Daylight was completely gone and so, she hoped, was any chance that the serpent’s head could reach her.

  She stopped at last, sobbing with fear and exhaustion. No wonder Wigla had given her such a strange look when agreeing to let her out of the castle. She had known that the potential rival for Eirik would be gone even more surely than she had expected. Karin could still hear a distant, echoing scraping and snuffling, but after a moment the sound seemed to move off.

  She took a long breath then and leaned back against the strangely smooth stone wall, trembling and weak. In the distance she heard more shouts, muffled from where she was, then a horrible shriek abruptly cut off. Later, maybe tonight, she would try emerging from this crevice, try again to find her way back to the river, to see if the dragon had eaten Hadros and all his men.

  And then, staring into blackness, she thought she could see a faint green light. For a second that light brought back visits to the faeys’ burrows, of conversations with beings who accepted her as she was, neither demanding her love nor seeking her life.

  She shook her head sadly and blinked to get rid of that deceptive green light, but it was still there. This was strange. For a moment she thought it must be daylight filtered through green plants, but the faint sounds that accompanied that light were not the sounds of the outside world. They sounded like high voices.

  Not daring to believe, she began crawling forward again. The light grew stronger, the voices more clear. “I tell you I heard somebody! You just heard the dragon! But this was somebody breathing, and I know what the dragon’s breath sounds like! Well, why don’t you go look then?”

  The green light was approaching her, bobbing as though being carried, though the source was still hidden by a curve in the tunnel. And suddenly she came around the corner face-to-face with someone her size.

  Both of them gave startled cries and pulled back. “I did hear someone!” the being before her shouted, crawling backwards rapidly. “And it’s got blood on it!”

  “Wait! Don’t go!” she said, holding out a hand. “I won’t hurt you. I just got scraped on the rocks and bushes coming down the cliff. Are you— Are you a faey?”

  It couldn’t be a faey, she thought; he was much too big. Bu
t he stopped his retreat, picked up the lamp again, and squinted at her. “What do you know of faeys?”

  “Back in the southern kingdoms,” she said—of course everyone in Hadros’s lands considered themselves to be in the northern kingdoms, but up here everything else was south—“I was a friend of the faeys.” After a moment she added, “They tamed me.”

  “It’s a tame mortal!” he called excitedly over his shoulder, then added reluctantly, “Or so she says.”

  “That’s right,” she said eagerly. She had no idea what faeys were doing here, especially such large ones, but faeys meant safety.

  He called back over his shoulder again, answering excited questions while keeping a careful eye on her. But at last he said, “As long as you’re here, would you like to wash off the blood? And would you like something to eat?”

  Karin groped out of the tunnels by the insufficient light of the faeys’ lamps. Since it was now night, they reassured her, the dragon would have retreated to its lair and would no longer be a problem. “We never can understand why you mortals insist on being outside during daylight. Daylight is dangerous!” they told her.

  And climbing around in the night was also dangerous. But there should be a moon for at least the early part of the night, she thought, and maybe, somehow, by morning she could find her way back to the salt river—that is, if the ship was even still there, if any of the men were still alive. Eirik and his men had, after all, taken her up to their fortress in no more than half an hour; all she had to do was find the path.

  She felt strangely heartened by her day with the faeys. They had rubbed herbal pastes on her scrapes and bruises and fed her mountain blueberries. They might be almost as big as mortals up here in the north, but they were still the eager and easily-worried beings she had first known as a girl. If beings like this could exist even here, within a short distance of a dragon, then safety might not be as illusory as she sometimes feared.