Witches, Princesses, and Women at Arms

by Sacchi Green

  Hjørdis knew she was no beauty, but she had never lacked for suitors, and it was not merely that her father’s great meadhall above Hardangerfjorden claimed the allegiance of Jarls over a vast territory, or that she herself would inherit lands high in the mountains from her mother’s brother. Her body was lush as well as strong, with much to offer beyond the promise of tall sons. If there was no man to whom she wished to offer it, all the better now that duty left her no choice.

  The true choice of her heart had never been possible. Still, she had known two summers and a winter of great joy, more than many people were granted in their lifetimes. And the high mountains were still there, beyond the Trollveggan massif, even if Styggri was gone from them these five years now. Once her vow was fulfilled, Hjørdis would leave this flat land, leave even the child, which would doubtless be taken from her in any case. Better not to think of that. Better to be lulled by the voice of the water, close her eyes and see the mountain home of her memories.

  At first, when the voice of the water changed, that too seemed a mere echo of those memories. The longer her eyes remained closed, the longer she could imagine that Styggri was there, moving through the stream…climbing the bank…circling to stand behind her in the utter silence only a troll could manage… and Hjørdis felt a sudden presence like an unseen shadow cast across her. A troll, some troll, stood there.

  “Good day, Elder Cousin.” Hjørdis spoke the formal greeting in the ancient troll tongue, as she had been taught by her uncle. Whether the trollfolk were truly distant kin of mankind, as they might well be, there was no denying that they had followed the retreating ice high into the mountains long before her own people had arrived. And more than likely that many a family had traces of troll blood in their background.

  “You do not cross the bridge?”

  Not a voice like the rumbling of stones at all. Closer to the murmur of fine gravel sifted through their fingers when they had searched together for blood-red crystals of garnet, like the silver-wrapped pendant that hung between Hjørdis’s breasts. Not Styggri’s voice as it had been when she was young, in the Huldra form, able to be-spell men…and Hjørdis.with her song; yet it was her voice.

  Hjørdis could not bring herself to turn and look. Hope leapt, then wavered, weighed down by disbelief, even a shiver of dread. In five years you would not know me, Styggri had said, even if I returned from under the mountains and did not cross over into the ice world. And Hjørdis had known it to be true. Troll women lived long, but left youth and any fleeting grace or beauty behind quickly. There were fewer and fewer of the trollkind left, even high in the mountains, and all she had known until Styggri had seemed very old indeed, including Styggri’s mother.

  She must look, soon, but first she spoke. “There is nothing across the bridge for me.”

  “Your prince is there.”

  “No one of mine is there. No one of mine is still in this world, or so I was made to believe.”

  Another spell of silence. Then, in the day-to-day speech of the mountain Norsemen, easier for them both, Styggri said, “I came back after all, and found you had gone off to wed a king’s son.”

  Hjørdis’s neck was stiff from the effort of not turning. She stood and swung around in a single motion. “How can I know you are not a shade, an illusion, a snare?” But she did know. The deep-set gray-green eyes, shadowed now by thicker brows and creased at their corners, were still clear as mountain pools. The hair, even paler than it had been, arched back from a thong cinched high on her head, a traditional style seldom seen now even among the oldest trolls. Her nose was more pronounced, her face broader than it had been, and so was her body, arms and legs heavily muscled as was the way with trollkind, male or female. In elk-hide breeches and loose wool tunic she could have been either, to a casual observer.

  “What would you take as proof?” Styggri’s face remained carefully expressionless.

  Hjørdis moved forward until the fine velvet of her gown brushed the homespun wool. She had been the taller by a little when they were younger; now they stood nose to nose. Slowly she bent her head, pressed her mouth to the hollow of Styggri’s throat, and drew her tongue along exposed skin that shivered at her touch. “Taste does not lie.”

  She raised her head. The wide smile on Styggri’s face was the final proof. Years rolled away. They might have been lying on the sunlit rock beside a reed-edged mountain stream where Styggri had first spoken those words.

  Hjørdis had followed Harald that day only because he was so determined not to be followed. Whatever drew him must be worth seeing, since he had at last stopped pining for the fjords and his dragon ship and his friends, and the girls at home, as he’d done throughout the visit to their uncle’s domain. It must have something to do with a girl, though. She’d seen him out past the cattle byre last night with the cowherd, their expressions and gestures and rough laughter reeking of lascivious intent. The fellow must have told him where to find some particularly tempting morsel.

  It was easy enough to keep out of Harald’s sight, especially since Hjørdis wore a pair of his brown leggings rather than her own skirt. She could move upslope and down, from boulder to boulder, with far more ease than her seafaring brother. She was at home here in ways that he was not, which was why her uncle had decreed that she should inherit his lands and responsibilities when the time came.

  Harald crested a ridge and stood, enthralled, before starting down into the stream-carved vale that Hjørdis had thought of as her own personal retreat. From the look on his face it was not the stream spreading out into a little marsh that drew him, nor the waterfall from which it flowed, nor the reeds and wildflowers, nor the dense growth of spruce on the slope beyond with tender new growth at the tip of each branch so brilliant a green it looked like a host of tiny flames.

  No, it was some woman. Some brazen, naked woman, she saw, when, forsaking stealth, she reached the ridge top. By then Harald wouldn’t have noticed if she’d hurled stones at him, as she was sorely tempted to do. Or at the woman, scarcely more than a girl, reclining on the sunlit rock where Hjørdis liked best to sit.

  Slim, seductive, long-legged, with pale hair streaming past her exquisite face over her shoulders and across breasts that peeked in and out between the flowing tresses; surely this was an illusion born of Harald’s fantasies! And, Hjørdis had to admit, of her own.

  Then the girl tilted back her head, gazed up at them both, opened her lovely mouth, and sang. The clear, high sound flowed over Hjørdis, piercing her body, pulsing in her veins. An illusion indeed, an enchantment out of the storied past, when there was magic in the world far beyond what little remained. When troll girls in the Huldra form enticed men with their songs, enslaved them, making them forget all else.

  Harald, besotted, charged down the slope, stumbling, falling, rising, lurching forward, compelled by the song and the promise of that enticing body.

  A surge of rage saved Hjørdis from just such madness. The song, the allure, the enchantment; none of it was meant for her! Never for her! She stood on the height, glaring down upon them like an avenging Valkyrie even as she shook inside with a longing as fierce as her anger. Let the seductress do as she would with him! Let her…

  But as Harald stumbled again, just short of his prize, the girl vanished. When he looked up there was nothing to see but empty rock. He searched all around in a frenzy of thwarted desire, thrashed through the reedy marsh, peered into the stream as though she might have swum away like a mermaiden.

  Hjørdis descended without hurry. “Go on home,” she told her brother. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. The air this high in the mountains can have that effect on those not suited to it.” Harald was not convinced, but neither was he about to tell his sister what he’d been hoping for, though the persisting bulge in his trousers was evidence enough. He stomped off, sulking, and by the top of the ridge he was breathing as hard as though the air was indeed too thin for comfort.

  Hjørdis perched on the edge of the rock. When she wa
s quite sure Harald was gone, she said calmly, “You might as well come out now.” There was a long bulge in the stone that had not been there yesterday. Stones did not grow overnight. Besides, Hjørdis had had a better view of what transpired than Harald.

  The hard surface shimmered for a few seconds, and then a shape emerged. Not so slim or long-legged now, with a round, laughing face that, while scarcely fairy-tale perfect, did possess a certain charm. To Hjørdis the sturdy naked body was just as alluring as the one seen through the haze of illusion, but she had no intention of revealing her vulnerability. “I can’t say much for your taste in men,” she said coolly.

  The girl sat up and shrugged. “There is so little entertainment here. And are you certain it was he I sang for?”

  Hjørdis’s brows arched in skepticism even as something lurched inside her. Then she frowned and looked more closely. “I should know you. You’re the healer’s girl Styggri, aren’t you? Old Hilgra’s? But you were just a small child…”

  “No smaller than you! And I did not hide behind my mother’s skirts, while you always hung back behind your uncle.”

  Even that long ago they had eyed each other with as much challenge as curiosity. Hjørdis had been taken to the troll healer several times over the years to learn the simpler skills of herbal healing that she might need as Lady of her uncle’s Hall, but Styggri had seldom been present, and not seen at all for several years. Now Old Hilgra was gone as well.

  “Your mother…” Hjørdis paused. None knew for sure whether the healer had died or simply moved on.

  “Gone to another place. As I have been, studying troll lore.” She stopped abruptly, as though she had said more than she ought, then went on, “I’ve returned to be healer for the few of trollkind still here, but I must leave again in two years.”

  Hjørdis, too vividly aware of Styggri’s casually naked body, kept a stern hold on herself. “So is lounging about wantonly like this…” she gestured along the sprawling form, “any way for the healer to behave?”

  “Was bathing naked in the stream yesterday any way for the future Lady of the Hall to behave?” Styggri’s impudent grin was triumphant.

  “It was you moving behind the spruce boughs! I thought some small animal was browsing.” Hjørdis was startled, but not entirely displeased.

  “I saw. And afterward I let that cowherd view me briefly, in hope that he would spread the word, and you might come, and I could test whether my song worked on a woman as well as a man.” She raised one leg and let it lie negligently across Hjørdis’s lap.

  Hjørdis pretended to ignore it, though her lap was all too aware of the tantalizing pressure. She hoped the heat rising through her body was not too evident on her face. “So now you’ve played your little game, and lost.”

  “Do you forget that a healer must know all the ways of the body?” Styggri moved up to straddle Hjørdis, pressing her round breasts against Hjørdis’s own, covered only by a thin linen shirt. “I do not think that I have lost.”

  Hjørdis did not think so, either, but by the goddess Freya, she would not admit to it. No matter that the scent of Styggri’s body, mingling with that of wildflowers and sun-warmed spruce needles, sent desire racing through her veins like those of any spring-crazed creature. She stared into the troll girl’s brook-green eyes with all the stern challenge she could muster. “I will not be toyed with!”

  “No?” Styggri slid her hands up under Hjørdis’s shirt to cup her breasts, which certainly did enjoy being toyed with; then, too soon it seemed, she removed one hand to work it down deep, deep into the borrowed leggings. A shudder of pleasure rose all the way to Hjørdis’s hairline, though she kept her gaze on the other’s round face, and managed to stifle a whimper of disappointment when the fingers were slowly withdrawn.

  Styggri raised a finger to her mouth and licked at it. “Taste does not lie,” she said, and slid the finger into Hjørdis’s mouth. It was not the first time Hjørdis had tasted her own arousal, but never on any hand but her own. No, her taste did not lie.

  “If you are to demonstrate more…more of how much a healer knows of the body”—she could scarcely speak coherently—“we’d best move out of sight of any cowherd or bull-brained brother who might return.” They both looked toward the little waterfall, then at each other, realization dawning that the small cave screened by flowing water each had thought her own private hideaway was not so private after all. That in itself seemed nearly as powerful a bond as their shared lust.

  A pair of white gyrfalcons circled high overhead, calling shrilly to each other, but once shielded behind the quivering wall of water no sound from outside could reach the girls. They could scarcely hear themselves at first, until it became a game to see who could force the most extreme cries from the other; and then there was no more game to it, only the rush of mind and body to the keenest, highest peak of the precipice, and the glorious plunge over its edge.

  It was a very long time before they remembered that voices could also be used for speech. And it was a long, glorious summer together, but still all too short, before Hjørdis had to go back for the winter to her father’s Hall by the sea. Another summer followed, and winter as well, when she took up the permanent position of Lady of her uncle’s Hall, seeing to his care in his old age and to the well-being of all the people of his lands.

  Styggri was healer of both trolls and men, as her mother had been before her, and came often to the Hall, but was never at ease within its walls. Hjørdis took every chance to be with her in the troll’s hut, more cave than structure, where they lay wrapped together in furs or hides and the heat of their own bodies. It was never enough, and the time of parting came ever closer.

  By then they had no secrets from each other. Hjørdis had known from the first that Styggri could merge her body into stones; now she knew that certain trolls, with enough instruction, had the power to travel through entire mountains. And she knew that Styggri was bound by oath and heritage to return to the great undergound Hall sacred to trollkind, and from there, after yet more years of training, to pass through walls of stone and time into a world where trolls still lived and hunted as they had ages ago, where there were great cliffs of ice, and massive long-haired creatures with trunks and curving tusks, and the elk were twice as tall as any now living. A world from which there was no return.

  Hjørdis knew more surely than all else that Styggri was torn, longing to stay with her, yet eager to see the wonders of that distant world. It didn’t matter. Duty and tribal bonds were inviolable.

  Hjørdis did not want to be told the day of departure, so one day Styggri was simply gone. It was weeks before Hjørdis could bring herself to revisit their grotto behind the waterfall. If she shed tears when she found the polished garnet pendant left there as a gift for her, a blood-red token of their wounded hearts, she could tell herself that the dampness was merely droplets of the torrent’s spray.

  Now, by this bridge across a placid stream in a hostile land, Hjørdis was bound by oath and duty, while Styggri was free.

  “How did you…”

  “You bound me to this world after all.” Their arms were tight around each other, and Styggri spoke against Hjørdis’s tawny hair. “I could not pass beyond the final barrier, and at last they understood that my heart was held to this world too strongly to let me leave it. The council of wise women took it as a sign that I would be of better use remaining to care for the remnant of trollkind who must stay behind. I will travel the high places where the old ones remain, but come always home to you. Once I get you there.”

  Hjørdis pulled away. “You know I am bound here by oath.” She did not believed for a moment that Styggri truly thought she had come here by choice.

  “Then why aren’t you well on the way to fulfilling it? And why you? The king has daughters, and your goat of a brother is under lock and key. What more does he need to ensure a strong grandson? Harald has sired more husky bastard sons already than he can count. Make him marry one of the girls. They seem qui
te obsessed with goats as it is.”

  “The king holds that the mother’s strength is the key. His own wife was beautiful but frail. If his son cannot manage to mount me, he has made it plain that he will handle the matter himself, which, since that is not part of my bargain, would result in grievous bodily injury to him and a likely death sentence for me.”

  “Not while I am here,” Styggri said grimly. “But if you’re set on breeding with the prince, mount him yourself. I’ve watched their games. What that lad wants is tying up and ravishing.” Her mood lightened. “I could hold him down for you.”

  “You would frighten him into spending his juice before I had a chance at it. Now that you’ve told me what I should have known myself, I’ll handle it. And no, you may not watch. I would be too tempted to laugh.”

  There were sounds of the merrymakers returning from their sport. “I’ll meet you here early in the morning while they think I still sleep. Go now!”

  Styggri hesitated, then drew a packet from the pouch at her belt and nudged it into Hjørdis’s hand. “Take this with your wine. For success tonight.” In another instant she had melted away through the birches downstream.

  That night in her bedchamber Hjørdis prepared for her husband’s coming. His eyes widened when he saw her, all but naked in the most revealing of the undergarments from her wardrobe, and when he tore his gaze away from her full breasts thrusting out above tight lacing his mouth gaped wide at the sight of the willow switch she was tapping against one hand.

  “Take off your clothes, boy,” she said sternly.

  Oh…yes! Yes, Mistress!” He fumbled at his garments, never looking away from her even when she applied the switch to his bared flanks with some force.

  “Now lie back on the bed and grip the bedposts.”

  He complied without a word, only an occasional whimper when she flicked the switch across the most tender of his exposed parts. Tying him was clearly unnecessary, but she did it, and even though he was not tall enough for his ankles to reach the foot of the bed with his wrists bound with cords to the headposts, he writhed in place as though they too were restrained.