When they had originally buried the hoard, it had been spring and the ground had been soft and supple beneath their blades. Now each strike of the shovel rang out in the silence, the frozen ground giving way only reluctantly. Her muscles ached as they repeated yesterday’s work. Stab, scoop, throw. Over and over. In spite of the cold, Sibba began to sweat and shed her furs a layer at a time until she was in only tight, brown breeches and a loose tunic. Unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched, she stopped every few strokes to look behind her, back toward the spirit village. Of course, she saw no one. But even Aeris was quiet and watchful.
The wooden box was not buried very deep. In their first days on Ey Island, Sibba had been obstinate and mean, and Darcey had been tired. It had been a quick job, and they had not bothered to revisit the site since. It shamed her when she remembered how she had treated her mother—like it was the woman's fault that her husband had been unfaithful. Many chiefs had multiple wives, but Darcey would not be one of them. To her, there was one god, and there would be only one husband. And so she packed up her things and went in peace, Sibba scurrying behind her. Part of Sibba had thought that her father would follow, but of course, he hadn’t. A Fielding would never beg. And so her resentment grew and festered, and Darcey was the only one there to receive it when it boiled over.
The iron bands around the box were cold to the touch. She lay flat on her stomach and used both of her hands to lift the heavy box from the ground. Some had accused Darcey of leaving Ottar with part of the clan's hoard, but it was all hers. Most had been gifts for her at her wedding, but some of it had come over with her on the ship that had brought her from Casuin. In spite of its disastrous end on the western shores of the Fields, much of the envoy's belongings had washed up on the beach and been recovered though the same could not be said for the lost crew.
What was her mother like before the tragic voyage? All Sibba knew was the little that Darcey would tell her. That her sisters had put her and their mother on a ship to save them from the violence and sickness that had been ravishing her home country. Darcey had contracted the illness and survived, but her mother had not, dying when they arrived in Ottar. She taught Sibba the Casuin tongue and their strange religion, but she never taught her the history. Sibba’s questions were met with distant stares and pursed lips.
Tumbling end over end as Sibba heaved it over the edge, the box fell open and spilled its contents into the dead grass at the trees' roots.
“Gods,” Sibba sputtered, her mouth feeling frozen as she spoke for the first time in hours. She scrabbled on hands and knees to the bits of metal—mostly silver and iron, though some gold glinted in the afternoon sun. They were small tokens, jewelry and armbands, hammered iron, broken blades. Sibba gathered it all back up, dropping it noisily back into the box and snapping the lid shut.
She had just finished filling the hole and had turned to pick up the box when Aeris swooped down from the treetops and alighted on top of the box.
“Here you are,” Sibba teased, poking at her with the spade, “now that the work is done.”
The bird ignored her and hopped to the ground, pecking at something in the roots of the smaller Darcey tree. Sibba watched with amusement until Aeris finally lifted her head. Clasped in her beak was a circlet made of fine pieces of gold and silver wire wound together to look like roots. As they wrapped around the circlet, they grew thicker and swept upward into branches. There were no gems but the piece was obviously valuable.
“What is that?” Sibba plucked it from Aeris's mouth and examined it closely. Even though the circlet had been under the ground for years, it still shone as she held it up to the sunlight. She rotated the band in her hands, wondering how she had never seen it before. It was too large to be an armband and didn't open for it to be a collar. The only thing that made sense was that it was a crown.
I want your crown, Gabel had said. How had he known? How had Darcey come to possess such a treasure? What had really happened in Casuin?
Something caused her to turn around then, to look back toward the forest. She couldn't have said what it was—not a sound. More like the absence of sound, a sudden stillness. There, just beyond the trees, was a dark shadow shaped like a woman. Sibba held her breath. The shadow didn't move. Was it a trick of the light?
“Mama?” Sibba asked, her voice barely a whisper. But that was all it took. In the next breath, the shadow was gone, and she was alone again.
CHAPTER SIX
Sibba
The walk back to Gerd was considerably more difficult with the heavy box, and Sibba spent less time looking for ghosts and other unseen threats than she did watching her feet so she didn't fall under the weight. The horse was just where she had left her, munching on the sparse brown grass beside the path. Sibba bound the box to the back of the saddle with a leather strap. Gerd shifted but didn't complain, and soon Sibba was mounted again and turning them away from the village and its shadows and long-kept secrets.
What secrets had her own mother kept buried between the sister trees? However many it was, she had taken them with her to wherever she was now. Sibba wished she had tried harder to learn about her mother’s past, had pushed her to reveal exactly how it was she had ended up in the Fields when it seemed like she was so unhappy. What had she left behind? What had she kept from her and what connection did it have to her death? The thought that any of this could have been prevented struck a spark of anger and desperation in her that caused her to clench her hands tightly around the soft leather reins.
Gerd tossed her head in objection and Sibba loosened her grip but gave a small kick with her heels on the horse's midsection, bringing her into a careful trot. They retreated into the forest, the mysterious crown of branches tucked safely inside the folds of her cloak.
That night, Sibba woke in the utter darkness that preceded a winter dawn, her heart racing and her hand already moving to the ax that she kept on the bench beside her. What had woken her? Had there been a sound? She didn't dare move. Instead, she listened, her eyes straining against the blackness inside the house.
It hit her then, how utterly alone she was.
Or thought she was.
There was a sound like a sigh, the whisper of a closing door. Her hand closed around the ax handle and she sat bolt upright. The door was only five steps from her bench, and she threw aside her furs carelessly, her feet already swinging around to stand. She reached the door just as it bounced against the frame to close. Throwing it open, she dashed outside. The remaining snow lightened the night, but it was still too dark to see very far. She spun on her heel, her eyes scanning the yard and the outbuilding, but there was no sign of anyone. The snow in the yard had melted and the mud frozen overnight again, so there were no tracks, if anyone had been there at all. Even the animals were quiet, Aeris still sleeping on her perch.
Someone had been there, she was sure of it. Or was she losing her mind? In Ottar, there had been a man living in a hunting cabin only a few miles away from town, but he never spoke to anyone. During the worst of her fights with Darcey, Sibba had envied him the quiet solitude, but now she remembered how the clansmen had called him crazy. How his body had been found swinging from one of the giant oaks, his face purple and swollen, his unseeing eyes nearly popping from their sockets.
Back inside, it was impossible for her to find sleep again. Instead, she sat on her bench with the ax across her knees, the stolen longsword beside her. By the time the sun came up and there had been no further disturbances, she knew only one thing for certain—the island didn't want her here anymore. It was time for her to go.
✽ ✽ ✽
Leaving Ey Island was harder than Sibba thought it would be. How long before their little cabin became like the stone remnants across the hills? Would her mother's ghost haunt this place? Sibba was leaving a part of her behind, not just her body, but her spirit. In the destroyed loom, in the frozen garden, in the smallest of the sister trees that kept a careful westward eye on the ocean, toward
distant Casuin.
Sibba gave one last pass over the house, leaving behind anything she couldn't carry, and then opened the door to the outbuilding. Gerd watched her warily, not eager to venture out into the cold after yesterday’s adventure.
“It's okay,” Sibba said. “You can stay.”
She should have butchered the animals. The hides and meat would bring a hefty price in Ottar, but the work involved would only delay her departure. And besides, her mother would have liked it this way, turning them loose on the otherwise abandoned island. So Sibba saw it as one more way to honor Darcey's memory as she unlatched each stall. Piglets squealed beneath her feet, the goats following close behind, skittish as if they expected her to scold them. Only Gerd stayed, munching on a handful of oats that Sibba produced from a bag on the wall.
“The garden will thaw in the planting season,” Sibba said, brushing a finger over the white starburst on the horse's forehead. “The flowers and vegetables will grow wild. There will be plenty for you to eat.” But Gerd did not seem comforted or particularly distressed. She just looked at Sibba with those mournful brown eyes, her ears flicking back and forth, catching the sounds of Sibba's voice and the snorting pigs and the flapping of Aeris's wings outside all at the same time.
With a final pat on her warm neck, Sibba left, determined not to look back. It was bad luck to look back on a place to which she would never return. She didn't want to remember it this way anyway, empty and lonely with a fresh mound of dirt in the garden. If she had to think of it at all, it would be with Gerd at the fence, plump with summer oats, nickering for a treat. With her mother standing in the yard unfurling a piece of bright red sail that flapped noisily in the warm breeze. Her mother turning, raising a hand to shield her eyes against a sinking sun.
“Sibba!” she would say in greeting, her hair shining and golden and loose around her neck. “I'm so glad you're home.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Getting the small skiff across the inlet to the mainland had been easy, though she didn’t dare take the tiny boat down the Rata River to the town. The water was high because of the melting snow and the current too strong for her to navigate it safely. She ran the small boat aground in a marsh and unloaded her possessions on dry ground before returning and dragging the skiff into the reeds. She dropped the rock that she used as an anchor and covered the boat with broken reeds, then stood back and surveyed her work. It would have to do.
She slung her pack onto her back. It was heavy, loaded down with whatever she could carry from her mother’s hoard and her few meager clothing items. The ax was in its usual spot at her hip, easily within reach, and the sword was sheathed on her other side, strapped to her belt with an old knife sheath that she never used anymore. She felt more like a packhorse than a girl. When Aeris tried to hop onto her shoulder, Sibba shook her off.
“Don’t even think about it,” Sibba said. “You can fly, you lazy bird.” Aeris had been uneasy on the boat and seemed glad to have land back beneath her wings. Sibba didn’t share in her relief. She was here only out of necessity. To tell her father of her mother’s death, and to find a boat and a crew. In and out. No need to revisit the past. She had only the future ahead of her, and the great unknown. The open ocean and a world to explore. Surely there would be somewhere out there that she could call home, someone who might accept her for who she was and not who they wanted her to be.
Ottar was a half day’s walk away. She had been walking maybe an hour when the heavy gray clouds that had been threatening her all morning finally cracked, dropping frozen rain on Sibba’s head. This was not the fluffy snow that had fallen days earlier, but the kind of precipitation that would cave in roofs and freeze livestock in the fields. And they were well into the Fields now, surrounded by a sea of brittle grass that would offer them no protection. So she trudged on, bending her face against the pinpricks of ice.
She kept her mind off of her frozen toes by thinking about what she would do in Ottar. The items she had for trade would maybe buy her a boat, but it wasn't so easy to come by a crew. Not a loyal crew anyway, one that wouldn't stab her in the back and leave her for dead in the roiling waters of the Impassable Strait. If she had any hope of making it out there, her father would have to give her men—good men, explorers willing to uproot themselves and travel into the unknown. And with the land battles between the clans that had been going on for decades and showed no sign of stopping, she didn't know if he would be able to spare any for her.
Around mid-day, she began to pass her father's outlying farmsteads. In the distance, farmhands herded sheep and cows into outbuildings to escape the rain. At one home, a tow-headed child wrapped in a cloak that was too big for her stood in the door ringing a bell for the noon meal. Sibba considered stopping and begging for food, but all she wanted was to arrive in Ottar. To confront her father. To move on. She didn't belong here anymore. She didn't belong anywhere.
Thankfully it wasn't long before Ottar's walls came into view. Lining the far bank of the Rata River, her father had constructed twenty-foot tall pike walls to protect his precious city. A bridge spanned the river, the gate at the other end open to the day's traffic. To her left, there was the red sail of a departing ship billowing in the wind, its crew bundled in black furs, heads ducked against the icy rain that was dripping off the tip of her own pointed nose.
She was glad that no one took notice of her, not even the posted guards. She had been gone for so long that she was unrecognizable, just another traveler. Aeris was perched on her shoulder, her head jerking back and forth on high alert. The bird had been born on the island and never known anyone besides Darcey and Sibba. The only other person she had ever seen had attacked them and thrown her across the beach. After so many solitary years there with her, Sibba thought she knew how Aeris felt.
Beyond the wall was a maze of small houses, and in the center of it all, a coil of smoke wound into the sky from her father's longhouse, its moss-covered roof standing taller than the rest, the sutvithr tree's branches reaching still higher. Even from this distance, Sibba could see the crowd around the base of the tree and feel the intense energy of the people that milled around her, all of them moving toward the longhouse.
A girl passed her carrying a pail of water, her skirts muddied and wet, her hair loose around her shoulders. Reaching out, Sibba touched the girl's wrist.
“What's happening?” Sibba asked.
The girl recoiled only a little when she saw Sibba and Aeris, but it didn’t deter her from answering. “The accused chose a sword trial.”
“What is the offense?”
“Adultery,” the girl said in an exaggerated whisper, seeming happy to impart this piece of gossip to her.
Of course. There was no better way to break up the monotony of the snow season than with a good, bloody execution. Sibba remembered attending trials, sitting beside her father and Jary, her mother covering Sibba's eyes for the worst of it while Jary had taunted her. Secretly, she had been glad for it, even though she had struggled against her mother's grip. She remembered, too, the energy, the excitement of the crowd when someone was sentenced to death, blood in her father's beard and smeared down his face. She was at once repelled and drawn to it, especially now that she knew how it felt to take a man’s life, and to bury someone she loved.
Around them, the crowd surged forward and Sibba followed, staying beside the woman even when her pail sloshed water on Sibba's toes. Aeris flapped her wings for balance and the woman balked, scooting a step away.
“Who is the unlucky woman?” Sibba asked before her new friend could scamper away. Only women could be tried for adultery. Women had a lot of rights, but sexual freedom after marriage was not one of them.
“Estrid Fogthorn,” the girl answered. “Such a shame. So young and beautiful. And can you imagine? Sharing a bed with the boat builder when she’s married to a rich merchant…”
But Sibba wasn't listening. The name was like a punch in the gut and Sibba momentarily forgot to breathe. She
could turn back now. Find somewhere to stay until the trial was over and pretend she had never heard any of it.
Couldn't she?
What difference did it make to her if Estrid Fogthorn lived or died? They had been friends once but that was a long time ago, before she and Ari had pushed Sibba out of their triangle of friends. Before Sibba had made the mistake of loving someone a little too much. Sibba’s mind immediately told her that she shouldn’t care what befell the girl. Estrid had broken her heart; they hadn’t spoken in over five years. It was none of her business if she was dead or alive, an adulteress or a wife. Happy or miserable. Estrid hadn’t loved her five years ago; she didn’t deserve Sibba’s love now.
You cannot choose who you love. It was Darcey’s voice and it took Sibba back immediately to that night in the longhouse not long before they’d left for Ey. Darcey had pressed her only daughter to her chest, stroked her hair and murmured into her ear. And if they don’t choose you, it doesn’t just go away. Love is selfless and flawed and painful, but worst of all, it is enduring. When the pain passes, you will wish her nothing but happiness, because your love for her endures.
Sibba had been backing away without realizing it and now paused in her retreat. The last thing she wanted was a connection to Ottar, but it didn't have to be that, did it? Estrid had chosen a sword trial; maybe she had found a champion, someone to fight for her. While she had never been good with a sword, Estrid had been good at talking people into doing things for her. Her words were her weapons, her bright red smile her killing blow. Sibba could go, make sure she was okay, and then?
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