Freya leapt across the water and quietly dashed to the roof of the mill where she searched for tracks and signs. The ground above and behind the mill was wild and unmarked, but at the edge of the stream where the earth was softer, she saw the footprints leading to the door of the mill. She pointed at them and Erik nodded. They were boot prints. And they were fresh.
“Hello?” Freya circled around the mound of the buried mill and approached the muddy bank where the door faced the water and the broken wheels spun in the stream. “Is there anyone here? We’re travelers from Logarven. We mean you no harm. We’re just looking for some food.”
A dry scrape echoed from inside the mill, the sound of a boot on earth or stone. Freya rested her hand on her favorite knife. A gift from Erik, it had a serrated edge and a sculpted handle that fit her thin fingers perfectly. Holding it tightly reminded her of home.
There were a few more soft scuffling sounds inside the mill, and Freya began to wonder if she had been mistaken, if there was no man inside at all but some lost sheep or goat. Erik lowered his spear and nodded at the doorway, and Freya pulled back the leather curtain.
Inside it was pitch black, save for the rectangle of light from the doorway that revealed nothing except for a smooth earthen floor. The scuffling sound came again, louder and faster, as though some animal was struggling to stand or to run, but couldn’t.
Wren screamed and Freya spun around, crashed across the freezing stream, and scrambled up the steep bank toward the sound. She reached the top of the slope with Erik half a step behind her. Just a stone’s throw away there stood a man in a filthy wool cloak with one arm wrapped around Wren to pin her arms down, and his other arm wrapped around her neck with a steel knife in his hand. He had a scraggly blonde beard and his grimace revealed several missing teeth between his cracked lips.
“Who are you?” His voice broke and shook, choked with phlegm. He spat in the grass.
“Let her go. Now!” Freya pointed her long spear at the man.
He tightened his grip on Wren, and the girl thrashed about, kicking at his legs and trying to smack her skull back into his face. He lifted her up off the ground and gave her a hard shake, and she fell limp, her eyes blinking and head lolling as she gasped for breath.
The man shifted his arm around her neck to press the edge of his knife to the girl’s throat. “What do you want? Where’d you come from?”
“We saw the mill and thought there might be food.” Freya edged forward as Erik moved sideways to flank the man. “Now let her go. We don’t want to hurt you, but I’ll kill you before I let you kill her.”
“Food?” The man jerked his head at the mound of white fluff on the ground beside him. “I got food. I’ll trade you the sheep for the girl.”
“No deals until you let her go.” Freya took another step closer, tilting up her spear toward the man’s face above Wren’s shoulder.
The man’s eyes darted over to Arfast, who stood serenely a short distance away. “What about that girl there, the sleeping one?”
“We don’t deal in folk. No one deals in folk, not since the old days, and even then never for Yslanders.”
The man spat in the grass again. “Yeah, well, times change.”
“Last chance! Let the girl go!” Freya moved closer still and placed one hand on the butt of her spear, readying for a side-arm thrust.
It will have to be perfect, over Wren’s shoulder and straight through his eye.
She’d have preferred Erik to do it, but Erik was standing in the wrong place. From his position he could keep the man from running, and he could keep the man turned toward Freya, but he couldn’t run him through without hitting Wren. A pity. He’d always been better with the spear, and she with the knife. Nothing to be done about that now.
A queer look came over the man’s eyes as he stared at Katja’s motionless figure on the back of the elk. “She’s bitten, isn’t she?”
“That’s right,” Freya said.
Instantly the man let Wren go, shoving the girl hard so she stumbled several steps away before she caught her balance. The man stared at them one by one. “What in the nine hells are you doing with her? Why’d you bring her here? Are you crazy? They’ll smell her. They’ll come for her, they could be coming now.” He spun about, his wild eyes scanning the horizon. He grabbed up his dead sheep and started toward the mill. “Get away from here! Get away from me! Go, now!”
Freya lowered her spear, watching the man stumble through the tall grass as fast as he could. And she was still watching him when Wren let loose a stone from her sling and caught the man in the back of the head. He went down hard, dropping the sheep and falling down the bank to the stream’s icy edge.
Wren slowly wrapped her sling around her wrist and glanced at Freya. “What? Gudrun told me to do it.”
Freya shook her head and went to the edge of the embankment to look down at the man, who was crawling out of the water and rubbing his head. She was about to turn away and suggest that they keep moving, perhaps in search of a sheep of their own, when a mournful whine cried out from the mill.
It was a pained sound, a frightened sound, a hungry sound.
It was not a human sound.
The man by the stream froze, Freya and Erik dashed to the edge of the slope with their spears at the ready, and Wren grabbed Arfast before the shying elk could bolt.
“No, no, no!” The man waved his empty hands at them. “Stay back! It’s all right!”
“Nine hells, you idiot!” Freya shouted. “There’s a reaver in there!”
“NO!” The man threw himself across the stream and stumbled to the doorway of the mill. “No! Please! It’s my brother!”
Freya stopped and stared at the man, the same disgusting man who had tried to buy her sister just a moment ago with a dead sheep, and she lowered her spear. “Your brother has the plague. How long has he had it? Is he very far gone?”
The man nodded. “He was bitten last winter, and he changed soon after. But it’s all right, because we knew what was happening, and we chained him to the wall before he changed, to keep him safe.”
The huntress grimaced. “He’s been chained up inside there for a whole year?”
The man nodded. “Yes, yes, and I feed him and take care of him, to stop the changes, to keep him as human as I can.”
Freya glanced at Erik with wide eyes and trotted down the slope to the edge of the stream. “You can stop the changes? How? You have an antidote to the poison? Did a vala give it to you?”
He shook his head. “No vala helped me. I helped myself. It wasn’t hard. One look at him and I knew what I had to do. It’s nasty work, but he’s my brother, after all. I had to do it. You can come and see if you want. Just keep your sister away. I don’t want her smell on this place.”
Freya called back to Erik, “Stay with the others. I’ll just be a minute.” She jumped across the water and leaned her spear against the wall of the house, and with both hands on her bone knives, she ducked inside the mill behind the man. As she stepped into the shadows, she kept her eyes on her host, watching his hands for some sign of treachery, but he stood back in an empty corner, his hands empty and shaking and running through his greasy hair. Up close, she realized he was younger than he had looked before, and against her own better judgment she felt a slight kinship to him, a young man trying to save his plague-bitten brother, alone in a desolate land.
Then she looked to the far end of the room. For a moment she froze. Then she yanked her knives from their sheathes and shoved the man against the wall with one blade to his throat and the other to his belly as she snarled, “What did you do to him?”
The thing at the end of the room shivered and whined, its chains scraping softly on the stones and earth of the walls. The floor around it was carpeted in old hair and dried blood, and the air stank of urine and feces. The creature edged forward away from its wall, its chains rattling, and the light fell upon it.
It was stretched and crooked like a reaver, the shape of
its body elongated and knobby like the beasts Freya had fought in Denveller. But there the similarities ended. This reaver had no fur because it had been shaved with a knife, which had left the creature covered in gray stubble and festering red cuts where the blade had slipped. It had no claws because its fingers and toes had been removed at the knuckles, and the small stumps on its hands and feet were black and yellow where the wounds had been closed with fire.
The top halves of its ears had been hacked off at jagged angles, and the rest of its face had been shaved in the same manner as its body—badly. Its eyes were gone, sliced out to leave the sockets dark and empty, and crusted with blood and flies. And around its short snout was a crude leather muzzle, wrapped over and over again around the thing’s jaws to hide its nose and mouth completely.
Stripped of its fur and claws and ears, blinded and bloodied, the thing before her did not look like either a beast or a man, but a mangled corpse.
It shivered and whined again.
“What did you do?” Freya whispered.
“What I had to.” The man’s voice shook. “I took away all the unnatural bits. Cut out the poison. That’s what you have to do, so I did it.”
The creature reached out to paw with a severed limb at the dirt blackened with its own blood.
“He was your brother.” Freya swallowed.
The man nodded. “That’s right. You understand. I couldn’t kill him, not my own brother. I had to save him. I had to do what no one else could do. I had to—”
“He was bitten,” Freya said. “He was changing. He was in pain. He was afraid.”
“Yes.”
“So you shackled him to the wall.”
“Yes.”
“And you mutilated him.”
“I… no, no!”
“Maimed him.”
“No!”
“Tortured him. Your own brother.”
“No, no, no! I had to—”
Freya slit the man’s throat and watched him slump to the floor, choking on his own blood. He reached out toward the muzzled creature across the room, and died. The huntress wiped her knife on his clothes and put it away, and then stepped outside to grab her spear and bring it back in. She leveled her weapon at the blind monster in the shadows and said, “I’m sorry, but it’s over now.”
And she ran her spear through its heart.
When she left the mill, she said nothing to the others, and they asked nothing of her. She handed the miller’s steel knife to Erik, whose tired eyes said all that he would ever say on the matter, and Wren just bit her lip and looked at the ground. Freya led the way back to the road and set out west again, with the others trailing behind. They walked all afternoon, pausing only once when a chorus of howls rose in the distance behind them.
Chapter 7. Guards
“That’s it,” Wren said. “That’s Rekavik. If there is a vala left in the west, Skadi or otherwise, she’ll be in there.”
On the western rim of the world the sun sat blazing in cold silence, and Freya looked down on a city beside a sea painted with bright splashes of blood and gold. The city sprawled across a broad peninsula jutting out into the sparkling bay where chunks of blue-white ice bobbed on the waves. From end to end it was three times the size of Hengavik, and much of it was twice as tall. The houses were all built of the shoreline stone, the same iron gray color as the rumbling clouds overhead, and each home looked to have an arching roof of turf supported by the bones of whales, bears, and deer, and each one so high that Freya guessed they held hanging attics of food stores and rope beds.
A heavy stone seawall ran along the water’s edge, as thick as a tall man and half again as high. The outer face of the wall was slimed with weeds and algae, but the top was pale and smooth, and the wall broke only twice that she could see for two iron doors that stood above the ancient stone quays reaching out into the bay. A few men stood on the quays casting fishing lines and nets over the dark, icy waters.
Another, taller wall ran across the south side of the city, cutting the small peninsula off from the rest of Ysland. This wall was three or four times the height of a man, and newer, and clumsier. The stones had been jumbled every which way and mortared in clumps and drips, leaving huge rocky bulges in some places and tiny sky-filled gaps in others. A handful of men stood on top of the wall, each one armed with a spear and sword, and the only breach in the inland wall was a single doorway, barely large enough for a horse to walk through, and that portal was sealed with an iron door as well.
Freya marched down the road to the door with a wary eye on the armed men above her. They watched her approach, slowly clustering together in the center of the wall so they could all get a good look at the newcomers in the deepening shadows below. Wren hurried up to Freya’s side and muttered to her, “Lord Woden is ever a friend to those who tell the truth, but he’s also one to appreciate the art of not getting yourself killed.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning there’s no reason to tell these people more than they need to know about Katja.”
Freya glanced back at the snoring woman on the back of the elk. “I think they’ll notice the hair and the ears, sooner or later.”
“If that’s our choice to make, then I choose later.”
The huntress nodded.
“Who’s there?” called down a huge bear of man with a wild brown beard and naked scalp steaming in the cold sea air.
“I’m Freya Nordasdottir of Logarven,” she answered. “My husband, Erik. Wren of Denveller. And my sister Katja, the vala of Logarven. Who are you?”
The man smiled a broad white-toothed smile. “I’m the fellow on the wall asking the questions. What’s wrong with your sister?”
“She’s hurt, and sick. We need shelter for the night.”
“Oh? Just a night, is it? Planning to move on in the morning?”
“We’re looking for a vala named Skadi, from Hengavik. Or any vala, really. Gudrun of Denveller sent us to speak to her.”
The men on the wall talked among themselves for a moment before the bearded man called down, “What business do you have with the queen?”
“Queen?” Wren frowned at Freya. “The vala is a queen? That’s not good.”
“Valas have been known to marry. I suppose they can marry a king as easily as any other man,” the huntress said. She called up to the warriors, “We’ve come to learn about the reavers, which have destroyed Denveller and reached Logarven in the east. Gudrun said that Skadi could answer our questions.”
“Where is Gudrun now? Still in Denveller?”
“Gudrun’s dead,” Wren yelled. “No on lives in Denveller anymore. It’s as dead as Hengavik.”
“And Logarven will join them soon unless we stop the reavers,” Freya added. “Can we come into the city?”
The bearded man nodded. “Come to the door.” And he disappeared from view.
“Well, that was easy,” Erik signed. “I’ll cover Katja. Maybe we can avoid an argument.” He unfolded a wool blanket and draped it over the sleeping woman, leaving only the dark brown hair at the top of her head uncovered.
They approached the iron door in the great wall and a moment later they heard the bangs and clangs of steel beams being lifted away, and stones being rolled, and men grunting. The door swung inward halfway with a vicious squeal, and then stuck fast in the passage. The man behind it grunted and jerked and shoved until the door banged free and smashed into his toe, and he limped back from the open doorway muttering curses faster than Freya could hear them.
The bearded man paused in the narrow stone passage, shaking his foot and shaking his head, but after a moment he straightened up and gave the newcomers a squinty-eyed look. “So then. I am Halfdan Grimsson, keeper of the gate and captain of the guard. Let’s have a look at you.” He waved them in.
Freya and the others filed past the iron door and through the narrow passage and emerged onto the twilight streets of the city where a dozen men bearing steel spears and swords stood frowning at the
m.
Halfdan waved them in away from the open door and then hunched down in front of Wren. “Show me your teeth, girl.”
“Why?”
“Just do it,” another man barked.
Wren sighed and opened her mouth. Halfdan nodded. “Good.” He inspected Erik and Freya in the same fashion, and then reached over to pull the blanket off Katja.
“No, leave her alone. She’s sick,” Freya said, stepping in front of him.
Halfdan shook his head. “We check everyone. No exceptions. Even our own hunters, even if they were only out for half an hour. This is a safe place, and it’s damn well going to stay safe. So either I look at her teeth or you can all go right back out the way you came in.”
Freya put her hand on her sister’s covered head. Erik and Wren both shuffled closer to the white elk, but the guards were quick to poke them back again with their swords. Freya nodded. “All right, look. She was bitten. But she isn’t—”
The men erupted in a chorus of shouts, some telling the newcomers to leave, others threatening to slaughter them in the street. Spears and swords flashed with the light of the torches, and the huntress grabbed the handles of her bone knives.
“Shut up!” Halfdan roared, and the men fell quiet, though their faces remained just as cruel and dark. “Now listen here, girl, if your sister’s been bit, then she’s not coming into the city, and that’s the end of it. So either you can take her and leave, or you can kill her yourself, or we can do it for you. No one will blame you for not wanting to kill your own kin. The Allfather knows we’ve all had to do the same and we’d wish it on no one. But the plague doesn’t pass these walls, not for anyone or any reason.”
“The Allfather knows a great deal more than that,” Wren said. “And the valas of Denveller know more than most. Do you know what this is?” She held up her hand with the glint of yellow on her finger.
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