He had never known Halvard to be so vindictive, but the journey had exposed aspects of his personality that Jarl found deeply revolting. It was beginning to feel like he had less and less in common with him.
For the next few hours they hiked down the mountainside in silence, Astrid ahead of them, her wolf-skin bouncing on her shoulders as she made her way along the rough path. Several rock slides covered parts of it and they had to clamber over the stones to reach the other side. Astrid practically danced over them and the others couldn’t help but notice just how light footed she really was. She seemed to get more and more elven by the moment.
‘An elf, a damned elf!’ Halvard grumbled as he climbed over the stones, getting more and more irritated that Jarl and Knud were walking closer to Astrid than they were to him. Feeling rejected, his anger towards Astrid increased.
‘Damn elf!’
A Master
33 years ago...
Astrid walked down the stairs and groaned as she heard Dag outside talking with Skad. It was the third year that he had gone back to Bjargtre for the winter; another peaceful winter without his foul temper and constant degrading remarks to put up with when Dag wasn’t around.
Once again, the snow storms had trapped them indoors and Astrid had spent her time poring over Dag’s old books: Astronomy, calculation, languages... Language books were Astrid’s favourite, along with the many maps Dag had of Ammasteinn, the older ones in particular fascinating her. The territories and kingdoms were often wildly different from each other and Astrid was intrigued about why they had changed so much. Dag always refused to answer though; his face would darken and he’d pull the maps away from her and try to change the subject. Astrid eventually stopped asking him and looked at them in secret.
Many cities listed along the Haltija pass and the Riddari no longer existed in the newer maps, and she wondered what could have happened to have wiped so many of them away. Some of the cities had been so large that they looked like mountains at first glance.
But now the winter was over and the books had been put away. Spring had arrived, and with it, Skad.
Traipsing outside, Astrid stood quietly behind Dag. Skad stepped to the side so he could see her and she looked up at him, noticing that either she had grown considerably in the last few months or Skad had gotten shorter.
Skad made the same observation. Her long black hair reached her lower back and now she was almost as tall as he was, but without the solid build of a dwarf woman. Her neck was too long and her body too slender, and she walked lightly on the tips of her toes instead of the balls of her feet.
‘You’ve grown.’
‘Yes she has!’ Dag said proudly, and Astrid smiled at his reaction. His food certainly had no part to play in it so it was quite amusing to see him responding so proudly.
‘How old are you now?’ Skad asked, barely concealing how irritated he felt. The journey to the Red Mountains felt as if it had taken twice as long as last time for some reason.
‘I’m nine. I’ll be ten soon,’ Astrid said quietly, knowing Skad didn’t care and that he was just making conversation so that Dag would have no reason to get angry at him.
‘Well, we can train tomorrow. Let’s hope you haven’t forgotten everything I taught you.’
* * *
‘Astrid! Astrid get up!’ Skad bellowed from the ground floor. She awoke with a start and rubbed her eyes, grunting as she rolled out from under the blanket.
And there’s another thing I liked with him gone, she grumbled to herself. A good lie in.
She grabbed the hammer axe from next to her pillow and scrambled down the stairs to see Skad waiting for her by the door with a face like thunder.
‘I’m not waiting for you any longer! Move it!’
Dashing ahead of him, Astrid stood in the clearing and felt a pair of eyes watching her. Glancing up, she spotted Ragi high in the branches of a pine tree, smiling at her.
They were both excited for this moment.
Storming into the clearing, Skad didn’t even bother to say anything. He swung his heavy sword down towards her and caught her by surprise, knocking her hammer axe from her hands.
‘Three years!’ Skad shouted at her, swinging his sword again. ‘Three years teaching you, and you still can’t hold your damn axe!’
From up in the pine tree Ragi snarled, but quickly replaced it with a knowing grin as Astrid threw herself back from Skad. She spread her feet and braced herself.
‘The dwarf won’t even know what hit him!’ Ragi laughed to himself.
Almost as if she were dancing, Astrid easily dodged Skad’s next swing at her, twisted around towards him and slid under his arm. Skad turned in shock, glimpsing an excited smile on Astrid’s face. She dodged his swing again and twirled around him.
She had realised last summer that she was already better than the old dwarf, but Ragi had convinced her to wait another year until she was a vastly superior fighter.
‘You don’t want to just beat your enemy! Wait till you can beat them so completely that they know there is no point in trying to fight back because they’ll just lose. It is the best way to fight because you only fight once!’ he had told her. She had waited patiently, and now patience was no longer required.
Snarling, and realising to his horror that she was toying with him, Skad began to lose control for one of the first times in his life. He swung his sword like a madman, his face reddening, his eyes wide. He felt humiliated and angry.
‘Think you’re better than me, do you?’ he bellowed.
Astrid said nothing and ducked around him again, took the small knife which hung from his side as she did so, and tossed it towards a nearby tree. The dagger was thrown with such accuracy that it hit the centre of the trunk and stayed there, quivering.
Up in the pine Ragi burst out laughing and Skad, hearing the noise, looked around for the culprit, not thinking to look up at the tree tops.
‘Just like an elf to cheat! That’s not how a real warrior fights! Pick up your axe!’ Skad bellowed, heaving like an angry bull.
Picking it up, Astrid spread her feet apart again and centred herself with a firm grip on the handle. Her eyes narrowed. This was going to be easy!
As he moved forward to attack her, Astrid slipped under his arm just as he swung his sword towards her. The sharp edge of the blade passed within millimetres of her face as she dodged it. Her face remained emotionless and calm, every movement executed with deadly precision.
Before Skad even realised that she had dodged his attack, Astrid grabbed him by his arm and threw him to the ground, kicking the sword out of his hands. She picked it up and twirled it around her like a baton.
‘That’s how a warrior really fights!’ Astrid laughed and bowed mockingly. She lifted Skad’s sword and sheathed it into the ground so firmly that she nearly pushed it down to the hilt. Her smile faded and she looked at him with barely restrained contempt.
‘You are no longer in Dag’s debt; you can leave,’ Astrid said. Ragi heard her clearly even from the tree top, and as she strode away from the clearing, Ragi looked down with a satisfied grin on his face at Skad, on his back, panting in shock.
Slowly Skad hauled himself to his feet, shook his head as if he was sure he was in a dream, then stumbled over to his sword and tried to tug it out of the earth. His face reddened as he pulled at the hilt with all his might, and when the sword suddenly slid free, he fell backwards in an undignified heap.
Smiling, Ragi climbed down from the pine and strolled away from the clearing, following Astrid. He caught up with her a few minutes later.
‘How do you feel?’ Ragi asked, surprised to see she wasn’t smiling anymore.
‘Horrible,’ Astrid confessed, shame in her eyes. ‘I shouldn’t have been so mean. He looked at me like...’
‘Like?’
‘Hurt! He looked hurt! I’ve never seen him look like that.’
‘He deserved it!’ Ragi said remorselessly.
They reached Ragi’s
hut but continued past it, up over the mountain and towards his forge. Astrid rubbed her fingers together nervously.
‘He did deserve it. But I shouldn’t have done it.’
‘You’re right. Dag should have done something.’
‘It’s not his fault!’ Astrid said quickly. ‘Skad never says anything nasty around him, and I never tell him how he treats me. I don’t want him to know! I asked him to teach me to fight and he did.’
‘No, you asked Dag to teach you! He did what he always does, buries his head in the mud and gets someone else to do what he should have done,’ Ragi snapped. Astrid was surprised to hear so much anger in the goblin’s voice.
‘Ragi?’
‘Ugh, don’t mind me. Sometimes I just get angry at him.’
‘Why? What’s he done?’
‘It’s what he hasn’t done that annoys me. He’s a warlock! He is meant to stop people like Skad! The old fool’s forgotten what he was trained to do. He’s a coward! It’s because of people like him that Angh was destroyed. Weak men who were happy to learn magic and be revered, but too cowardly to stand up to those who they were meant to judge.’
‘What do you mean?’ Astrid asked, confused.
‘Those maps Dag has, the old ones. That was Ammasteinn before The Purge. Everyone had different stories about how it started or who started it, but the result was the same. The goblins were pushed into the northern plains and the elves and the dwarves fought-’
‘But Dag couldn’t have been there.’ Astrid interrupted, not sure how to take this new information. ‘He’s old, but he’s not that old!’
‘Dag is at least three thousand years old, Astrid,’ Ragi said calmly. ‘He would have been around five hundred years old when it happened; a fully trained warlock.’
‘Ragi, what’s wrong?’ Astrid asked, sensing something else beneath the sudden anger at Dag.
‘My father and two young sisters were killed, twenty-nine years ago today.’ Ragi snarled. ‘Dwarves; I don’t know why they attacked. My mother always thought it was as revenge for a raid a nearby tribe had run. The dwarves didn’t care that we weren’t the same tribe. We were goblins, so it was all the same to them.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Just ignore me. Sometimes I have to get angry or I’m afraid I might burst.’
‘I want to leave!’ Astrid said suddenly, stopping and turning to Ragi. ‘I’ve wanted to leave for a while now. I want to see elves and dwarves! All those beautiful places in Dag’s books!’
‘A lot of them aren’t beautiful anymore,’ Ragi said, but Astrid ignored him.
‘I can fight now! They can’t hurt me anymore! I want to see my parents’ homes...their people, the places they would have known!’
‘They will hurt you Astrid,’ Ragi said, his voice serious. ‘Even if they don’t know who you are, to the dwarves you will always be an elf, and to the elves a dwarf. You’ll be miserable.’
‘Where can I go then? I can’t stay here anymore.’
‘No you can’t,’ Ragi agreed, pausing for a few moments to think. ‘You should go to the human lands.’
‘Would they like me there?’ Astrid asked, and Ragi laughed at the question. Even now, she was still so desperate for acceptance. It would be charming if it wasn’t so heartbreaking to see.
‘Some would, but you would be an outsider. Some would be fascinated, others afraid.’
‘Would you come?’ Astrid asked, deadly serious. Ragi was taken by surprise. ‘It would be nice to have a friend with me. Dag would never come...’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Ragi agreed. ‘When you want to leave, yes, I will come with you.’
Conversations
‘I’m sorry, but we can’t light the fire here,’ Astrid said.
Halvard faced her, his hands on his hips. ‘Why not?’
‘There’s no cover. If there are any raiders they’ll see us. Most of them like to hunt at night.’
‘Do you want us to freeze to death?’ Halvard yelled. ‘What about food? Can we cook food?’
‘I brought food so we don’t have to cook,’ Astrid said, reaching into her bag and pulling out one of several small parcels wrapped up in black muslin. She passed it to Halvard who opened it up hungrily, grabbed one of the flat oat cakes and passed the rest to Jarl and Knud. Jarl waited for Knud to take the food he wanted before helping himself, then passed it back to Astrid and flashed her an apologetic look for Halvard’s behavior.
They sat on the grass, pulling their cloaks around them, trying to get warm. Knud shuffled closer to Jarl as the wind picked up and started to howl. Astrid took off her veil for a moment to tighten it around her neck and head. Some of her long hair had come loose at the back and she quickly wrapped it away under the veil.
‘How long do these plains last?’ Jarl asked as he ate.
‘Two more days. There’s a small forest after that, there’s a place we can stay while we’re there. An old friend used to live there.’
‘If it’s an elf friend I’m not staying,’ Halvard said quickly, almost spitting out the food in his mouth.
‘I don’t have any elf friends,’ Astrid snapped at him, her eyes flashing, her veil coming loose for a second. All her scars looked so much more pronounced in the low light. ‘And if you don’t like it then you can sleep outside!’
‘No elf friends? I don’t believe that. Your kind stick to each other like shit!’
‘Hal!’ Jarl shouted. ‘Stop it!’
‘No! No I won’t! She’s an elf!’
‘I am NOT AN ELF!’ Astrid bellowed, her voice deep. She thumped the ground with her fists and the grass around her burst into flames. Even the dirt seemed to catch fire for a few seconds.
All of them jumped in shock and Halvard smiled delightedly.
‘Not an elf, eh?’
Getting to her feet, Astrid moved towards him, her eyes murderous. Halvard jumped up and drew his sword, pointing it at her, the tip barely an inch from her collar bone.
To everyone’s shock, Knud suddenly rushed forward, wrapped his arms around her, turned to look at Halvard over his shoulder and glared at him. Astrid gasped, frightened that someone was touching her. Her hands shook but she didn’t push him away.
‘She’s my friend! Leave her alone!’ Knud yelled. Jarl moved his hand over Halvard’s sword and made him lower it.
‘She has magic!’Halvard hissed. Knud took Astrid’s hand and led her away so that Jarl and Halvard could battle it out. Jarl had a face like thunder, and Knud knew his uncle was tired of Halvard’s constant trouble making.
‘So do some dwarves!’
‘Are you blind? Are you all blind?’ Halvard shrieked, exasperated. ‘Look at her face! Look at her eyes! Everything about her screams trouble!’
‘No! You’re the one causing trouble! That woman has done nothing but help us and save our lives since we left. But for some reason you’re hell bent on driving her away.’
Suddenly, Halvard raised his fist and hit Jarl as hard as he could, sending him spinning backwards. Spitting blood, Jarl returned the blow, landing a second one just a moment after the first blow had hit Halvard squarely on the jaw. The second blow broke his nose, blinding him temporarily, and taking the advantage, Jarl swept Halvard’s legs out from under him. He crashed to the floor.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Jarl shouted down at him furiously. ‘You’ve got to stop this! It’s not helping anyone!’
‘You’re right,’ Halvard muttered, slowly getting up. Jarl reached out to help him but Halvard pushed his hand away. ‘I’m not helping anyone. I should just go.’
‘No, Hal, you know that’s not what I meant.’
‘Well one of us has to go!’ Halvard shouted back. ‘I’m not traveling with a Brojóta burðr any more!’
In the distance, too far for Knud to hear what was being said, Astrid winced and her eyes filled with tears. She bit her lip and forced them away.
‘You can hear them?’ Knud asked, amazed.
‘Yes,’ Astrid hissed, staring angrily into the distance. ‘I can hear everything. I always do.’
‘You’re mad!’ Jarl said, glad that Knud was too far away to hear them. ‘You know we need you to come!’
‘Good. So she goes then!’ Halvard snapped, stomping off in Astrid and Knud’s direction as if to tell her. Jarl yanked him back.
‘And you know that without her, none of us will reach Lǫgberg alive.’
Halvard stepped back, glaring at him. ‘So you pick the elf over your own kin? Of course you would! A Vǫrn would!’
Even being so far away, both Astrid and Knud heard Halvard fall heavily to the ground. Jarl hit him so hard that he span around before he fell.
“Leave! Jarl spat.
He stood back, his fist still clenched, and waited as Halvard got to his knees, steadied himself, and stood up. He ran the back of his hand under his nose and looked down at the smear of blood on his skin. With gritted teeth, he walked over to his belongings, gathered them up, pulled his bag over his shoulders and stormed off, quickly disappearing into the darkness.
For a few brief seconds, Jarl considered running after him, but the thought was quickly replaced. It was far more important that they get to Lǫgberg, and over the past few weeks of travelling, Halvard had started to become more and more insufferable. If the worst came to the worst then it was better that Knud was left in the care of strangers than a dwarf who would wear him down and make him cynical and bitter.
Seeing the silhouettes of Astrid and Knud in the distance, Jarl strolled towards them, Knud still holding Astrid’s hand and refusing to let go.
He trusts her, Jarl thought to himself, reaching them and looking down at Knud. ‘Halvard’s gone. He’s doesn’t want to come with us anymore.’
‘Good!’ Knud said to his surprise. ‘Is Astrid still coming with us?’
‘If she still wants to,’ Jarl said, looking up at her. Her veil was down, her face exposed. Astrid looked at him, confused.
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