by Voima
“Then who do you fear?”
Eirik grinned broadly, showing gapped teeth. “I thought your princess here would have told you I fear no one. But we serve the lords of death.”
Roric stepped in front of Karin, his hand on his hilt. “I can help you meet them if you like. I already have three men’s blood-guilt on me—I will not hesitate to kill another man, especially an outlaw whose death would bring blood-guilt on no one.”
“Be careful, Roric,” Karin murmured behind him. “He is trying to make you angry. He must have a dozen warriors outside this cave. He either plans to sacrifice you or else to persuade you at the point of the sword that your best hope is to join his band.”
But why, she thought, was Roric trying to make Eirik angry?
“You are very sure of your Wanderers, aren’t you,” said Eirik to Roric, making no move toward his own sword. “But we choose to serve the lords who were there before the Wanderers, who will be there after they are gone. Different lords of voima may rule earth and sky, but only Death was there at the beginning and will be there at the end. The princess tells us you were searching for the door to the Wanderers’ realm, but we serve those who door is never hidden.”
Roric had given no indication he had even heard Karin. “What a coward’s service,” he jeered. “You know that all mortals must die, so you meekly accept the inevitable. You do not fight against your fate but try pathetically to glory in loss. If you want no part of voima, no part of life, why even bother making songs with your lyre? Why even bother noticing the beauty of the princess? Why not sacrifice yourself at once to the dark lords you serve?”
Eirik’s mocking all vanished. “I have heard enough,” he started to say, the sword halfway from its sheath, but the woman beside him suddenly gripped his arm.
“He is right!” she cried. Her green eyes darted back and forth between the two men. “Listen to him, Eirik! There has to be life that does not serve death!”
Eirik, startled, stared at her a second then gave a shout. There were answering shouts outside, the rattle of weapons at the entrance to the sea-cave. The outlaw king turned back triumphantly to them. “The way from here is well guarded, No-man’s son. Will your Wanderers guard you if you swim in the sea like seals?”
Roric shot Karin a sudden grin. “The Wanderers keep appearing in mortal realms for their own purposes,” he said to her. “We’ll see how they like a crowd of mortals appearing in their realm!”
He grabbed her hand and sprang at Eirik, his sword out. The king deflected the stroke with his own blade, but then they were past him. Straight out of the cave, where salt spray leaped against the stone, past the startled faces of Eirik’s warriors—a lot more than the dozen she had expected—they dove like seals into the bitterly cold waves of the northern sea.
And emerged with a thump, not even wet, onto the grass of a hilltop field. Karin stared around wildly, at the sun sitting, blood-red, on the horizon, at the grazing cows who looked at them plaintively, at a cluster of buildings in the lush valley below them. Soft air touched their skin, not ocean wind but an inland breeze of late summer.
Roric jumped up, pulling her with him. “So far the witch has kept the bargain,” he said with a laugh. “I see the sun has still not set here—though it’s a lot lower than when I was here before. Let’s get away from this hill before your renegade king shows up with all his men.”
“This— This is the realm of voima?” Karin said. They hurried down the hill toward the manor house.
“Copied after mortal lands by the Wanderers’ mother,” said Roric. “We should warn the people here that they’re about to be invaded. When we do not come back up through the waves again, Eirik will send some of his men diving after us to see if we really have found a door to this realm. He’s furious enough now that he won’t let us get away. That woman of his—she may follow on her own. And if any get through, well, the rest should soon follow.”
A woman came to meet them at the manor house door, but only after repeated knocking. “Excuse me,” said Karin, “but we wanted to warn you. We think some warriors may soon be—be coming over your hill. I think they are looking for booty.”
The woman smiled vacantly and turned back into the house.
“Is she deaf?” muttered Roric.
Two housecarls lounged in the yard. Karin tried them next; they listened as attentively as dogs might listen, then wandered away without answering.
“Roric, what is this?” she cried in frustration. “Do they not see me? Am I not real here?”
The woman reemerged, carrying a tray with milk and bread. She stood stiffly while they thanked her and took some.
“I should have thought of this,” said Roric. “You are real, Karin. But these people may not be. I met some of them when I was here before but just thought them vague. The lords of voima built a whole world here and had to populate it all, but I don’t think there are very many of them, and probably not many of the ‘second force’ either. And you heard the witch—the Wanderers cannot create new immortal beings without the women. So instead they made manors, complete with animals and people, but people who can no more use reason than can the animals. They’re not much more than illusion—no more real than the bear I killed.”
Roric had killed a bear two winters back, but Karin was fairly sure this was not what he meant. She would ask him about it later. “How about that ‘third force’ you were with before?” she asked.
They finished the milk and replaced the mugs on the tray. The woman bore them away with the same vacant smile. “They were real and could talk and think,” said Roric, “even imagine they could overcome the Wanderers. This time I’d like to find the real lords of voima.”
In the distance they could hear loud voices, shouted commands, and heated quarreling. “It sounds as though Eirik has arrived,” commented Roric with a grin. “If he is expecting to find piles of jewels, he would have done better in the dragon’s lair. We’ll let them sort it all out on their own. And while everyone here is distracted by a few dozen murderous mortals, you and I can find Valmar.”
As they slipped back out of the manor and through the woods beyond, Karin realized that they had never asked the Witch of the Western Cliffs how, once they reached the Wanderers’ realm, they could get back again.
3
The trip through the Wanderers’ realm was much slower without Goldmane. And Roric was not sure where they were going. The hills and valleys all looked vaguely familiar, but he saw no landmarks he recognized for certain from his first visit here.
“Well,” he said to Karin, “let the immortals find us. They seemed so interested in you and me before, and they must certainly know we’ve entered their realm.”
But whether the immortals were no longer interested, or whether they had been so thoroughly distracted by King Eirik and his men that they had no time for anyone else, Roric and Karin spent two days—or a period that seemed to them some two days long—walking through a lush landscape without meeting anyone but more beings without will or thought. The sun, which had been sitting on the horizon when they dove into this land, was now partially gone.
“This would be an easy enough land for a fatherless man to conquer,” said Roric as they sat under a tree. He batted at a swarm of flies; there were many more flies here than he remembered. “No one in any of the manors we’ve passed seems truly alive. They’ll do what we tell them, bring us food, and would probably find a bed for us if we asked, though I must say sleeping with them all around would give me duck’s flesh! So what do you say, Karin? Shall we make our kingdom here?”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “You would not be satisfied. There is no honor in conquering a people without self-knowledge or will, and there would be nothing but frustration in trying to rule them.”
“Oh, I think I could rule them fairly easily once I trained them,” he said, keeping his voice cheerful.
“There will soon be nothing here to rule, Roric,” she said gravely. “Look at the sun�
�before long it will be night here, and who knows how many days or years the night will last? In the meantime the cows here all look ill, the fruit is rotting on the trees, and the bread they gave us at the last manor was moldy.”
“But a fatherless man can’t be picky,” he said lightly, “especially one fleeing his own blood-guilt.”
She was still looking at him. He found it hard to hide anything from those level gray eyes. “Just because you know now you’ll never learn your father’s name,” she said, “is no reason to settle for what would never satisfy you.”
“By the Wanderers, Karin,” he said gruffly, looking away, “I am only trying to find a future that holds any hope for me, a future that might give me enough that I could ask you without shame to stay beside me.”
She entwined his fingers with hers and put her head on his shoulder. “I loved you and pledged myself to you when you were Roric No-man’s son, one of the warriors of the king who held me hostage, and I am still pledged to you. What matters a man’s father if the man himself is true and strong and honorable?”
“And has blood-guilt on him he can’t repay,” he muttered.
“I am heiress to my own kingdom,” she continued, playing with his fingers. “I can pay Hadros whatever compensation he asks for Gizor and the other men. I would love you the same even if I knew for certain you were the son of a drab and a housecarl.”
She slid her arms around his neck and began to kiss him. No man could ask for more than this. He tried his best to embrace her with his old enthusiasm.
But she realized something was wrong. She drew back, eyes glinting in the horizontal sunlight. “There is something else that’s happened,” she said, “something you have not told me.”
“No,” he said seriously, “I have told you all that happened.”
“You feel even worse about killing Gizor than you have said?”
He tried not to meet her eyes. “No. I told you all about that.”
She put her hands on the sides of his face so he had to look at her. “Is it this land, then? You do not feel right lying in my arms in the Wanderers’ realm?”
He pulled away and stretched out on the grass. “Nothing like that!” he said, trying to laugh. “If that was a problem, would I be asking you to stay here with me? Maybe I am just a little tired after the last few days.”
“And maybe,” she said quietly, with an undertone to her voice that he could not tell was teasing or dead seriousness, “there is a woman in this land, a member of the Hearthkeepers, whom you are waiting to see again and love more than me.”
“Karin!” he cried in protest, sitting up and clasping her to him. She kept her head turned away so he could not find her lips.
“Tell me truthfully and tell me now,” she said in a low voice, angry but with a note that sounded as though she might burst into tears.
He held her against his chest; she leaned limply, waiting. “Karin, I wanted to keep this from you.”
“I thought so,” she muttered.
“Yesterday or whatever you would call it, I began thinking again about what the witch had said—and what the Weaver told me this spring. Karin, I think I may be your brother.”
She went absolutely rigid. After a moment he could feel the front of his tunic growing wet and realized she was crying. He rocked her gently back and forth, his own eyes stinging.
“Why else would the Weaver have told me knowledge of my father would destroy me?” he said after a moment. “I know, I know what the witch said,” he went on when she tried incoherently to protest. “The witch tried to explain the Weaver’s words by saying that sure knowledge would leave me with no goal to strive for, not even an imagined father to try to emulate. But I think the meaning is far more direct. The Weaver knew what it would do to me if I could never be your lover.”
“The Weaver could have meant all sorts of things,” she mumbled.
“Such as that I was a warrior’s or housecarl’s son? That is what I always assumed when growing up. I wanted to know which warrior or housecarl, but the knowledge could not have hurt me. For a while I thought I might be King Hadros’s son, but Queen Arane told me she was quite certain I was not. That leaves your father.”
“It can’t be true,” she said, lifting her head sharply and rubbing her wet cheeks with her fists. “You could have been fathered by a hundred different men. Hadros and my father were always enemies! My father would never have sent him a child of his own, even a child born to a serving-maid.”
“Your father sent him you,” he said, stroking her hair. He had already thought of these objections and had, he feared, also thought of all the answers. “And they cannot always have been enemies. We do not know what relations were like between them before we were born. They have both long been numbered among the Fifty Kings. They had plans and wars—and alliances—for many years before we appeared and started thinking of them only as they affected us. Might I not have been a hostage left over from an earlier conflict? Or might not the war we remember have begun because your father—or, I should say, our father—objected to some aspect of how I was being raised?”
“My father would have told me,” she said against his shoulder.
“He may have intended to tell you, but remember, you were only home a short time, and he did not know I was your lover. Might this not be why Hadros refused to let us wed?”
“The witch would have told us!” Karin gasped.
“The witch wants to unite everyone, mortals and immortals alike. That is why I can never know my father.”
She was sobbing in good earnest now. She threw herself on him, giving him tear-soaked kisses. “I don’t care! I don’t care if you are my brother! I love you and don’t want anyone else! It’s too late anyway. We’ll stay here, Roric, and no one will ever know!”
He held her gently until her wild sobs subsided. “This goes beyond blood-guilt,” he said quietly then. “We are both cursed already, and the curse would be made far, far worse if we committed incest in full knowledge.”
“Then we might as well die,” she said, a little more calmly but in tones of black despair. “In the old stories, the brother and sister who did not recognize each other and became lovers threw themselves over a cliff. We’ll find Valmar and send him home, then you and I can go down to Hel together.”
“No, remember? The witch did not think that would work.”
“I wasn’t thinking of seeking death for the Wanderers,” she said in a voice lacking all expression. “I would seek it for us.”
4
The iron gates of the fortress resounded with the blows of the battering ram, but no one looked out from the narrow windows above or shouted defiance at them.
“Are you all dead in there?” King Kardan yelled up at the empty windows.
“Just cautious,” said Hadros, sharpening his knife. “They know we want Roric and the princess back again and are hoping we will pay well for them, so they hope to frighten us with this silence.”
The night before, after the terrible day in which they had not found Karin, lost Roric, lost one man to the dragon, and for a while thought they had lost a great many more of their warriors until the final one staggered into camp by moonlight, they had at last buried the dead. They had raised a great mound of earth, sand, and stones above the tide line and sung the funeral songs; the best songs were for Gizor One-hand.
“I should never have told Gizor I wished I was rid of Roric,” Hadros had said regretfully as the two kings rolled up in their blankets on the pebbled beach by the salt river. “I am getting too old to do things like that without thinking through the consequences.”
Kardan had not been sure whether to be more horrified at hearing Hadros say he had intended to kill his foster-son or at the black-bearded king expressing regret over anything.
Today they had started systematically hunting for the raiders, keeping careful watch for the dragon though it had not reemerged from its lair. “The old tales say dragons only have to eat once a week,” comm
ented Hadros. Now, after a long day’s searching of the stony lower slopes of the mountains they had found the raiders’ fortress, but if anyone was home they were not answering the pounding on their front door.
“Nothing here to build ladders,” said Hadros, “but the stone is rough enough that some men should be able to climb up to those windows if no one’s defending them. Want to send a few of your lads, Kardan?”
But defenders appeared at last as two of Kardan’s men scaled the sides of the gate. They shot at the men from the narrow windows above, missing but sending them scrambling hastily down again, and bringing a flurry of answering arrows from the attackers.
“I could threaten to fire their fields,” said Hadros with a sudden grin. “That brought you out quick enough, Kardan, as I recall! But I haven’t seen any fields except those scorched ones across the river. They must live by raiding ever since their castle burned. A good life for a young man, but no life for someone who used to be one of the Fifty Kings.”
Kardan was not interested in how this renegade king might live. Karin must be inside the castle, and he would set her free if he had to rip it down with his bare hands. “Again!” he shouted at the men with the battering ram, and again the ram smacked into the wood and iron of the gate.
The defenders had disappeared from the windows again. Late afternoon shadows lay across the fortress before them. “They should be shooting at us,” said Hadros with a frown.
Kardan glared at him, wondering how the black-bearded king could be so calm about it all, could even joke when his oldest son had been snatched away to unreachable realms, and when the princess he had raised like a daughter was held captive by an outlaw.
But then he noticed that Hadros was still sharpening his knife. He had brought the blade to a fineness that could split a hair yet was continuing to stroke away with the whetstone, now removing half an inch of edge.
“Are they trying to make us uneasy by their silence,” said Hadros, “or are they really as confused in there as it seems?” But then he laughed grimly, and the blade snapped in his hands. “Maybe Roric and the princess are leading them a merry chase already! Gizor told us she has a handiness with a knife I’d never appreciated, and you told me Roric is good enough to defeat my weapons-master in a fair fight. I’ll back those two against any renegade king.”
