by Liz Williams
Now, my friendship with Idhunn seemed somehow false, as though she knew everything of me and I knew little more of her than the shell she chose to present to the world. But then I told myself I was being unreasonable. Wrapped up in my own problems, as I had been for most of the past seven years, I did not think I had even bothered to ask Idhunn very much about her personal life and she tended not to take part in the gossiping sessions that some of the other women indulged in. The realization washed over me in a hot wave of guilt. I should have tried to find out more, and now it was too late. She had saved my life and probably my sanity and now I could never repay her. I knew that this was often the way, when someone dies unexpectedly and you thought you still had years together ahead, but that knowledge did not make it any easier. And then I reminded myself that I could repay her, even if I couldn’t get the truth out of Glyn Apt.
I could find her killer.
Several hours later, the wing reached the northern icefield, leaving the islands of the Reach far behind me. By the time I neared the edges of the ice, it was growing light. The wing soared under the lunar crescent of Loki, hanging pale and prim in a greening sky. It seemed strange to know that I was on the farthest limits of the Reach, away from thoughts of war and occupation.
As soon as we came to a halt, a set of instructions crept onto the navigational array. When dawn came, I was to leave the wing at the edges of the ice, its stabilizers set onto remote. It would remain here, barring accident, until my return. The icefield would be deserted, except perhaps for the occasional party of hunters, but I thought that was unlikely given the circumstances. The Reach would be calling all able-bodied citizens into the armed forces: conscription was compulsory. Besides, anyone with any sense would want to fight. The Reach wasn’t a paradise but remembering the narcoleptic look in the eyes of the citizens of Hetla, almost anything else was worth fighting for.
According to the instructions, I was supposed to meet the selk a little distance along the coast, at a place where the ice was breaking up into a series of floes. The channels would be too narrow to navigate the wing through them and it would be difficult to traverse on foot. There was a lightweight canoe packed inside the wing itself.
I wanted to stay in the relative safety of the wing for as long as possible, and put off the moment when I would have to venture out into the icefield. Memories of my last visit to Darkland were jostling close, and the seith could only limit their power, not banish it. But it seemed that I was to have no choice. I waited for dawn, and once more, I dreamed.
I was back on the ice. The fenris was standing over me, eyes golden-hot. My blood was staining the snow to a delicate pink and I stared down at the rose-and-pale as though it was something from a fairy story. My torn face burned, but the beast did not stop: it devoured me, tearing me piece by piece. I could see my own eye, staring back at me, and from its bed of snow, it winked.
I woke from my nightmare, heart hammering, and hit my head on the low ceiling of the wing as I came upright. This was not that day, the day on which the old Vali had died and a new one begun to be born, though I did not then know that. This was not the day on which Frey had sent me out on my own bloody ingsgaldir, the initiatory journey of the vitki. My ingsgaldir had failed. Had I been vitki, I would not have survived, and I only did so because a brave woman distrusted Frey and followed me, to shoot the fenris as it bent for the kill. She had been only a little late, and I had kept the scars. I did not remember being brought away from the ice and sometimes, as now, it seemed to me that I had never left it; that part of me still remained on the icefield, my missing eye in the beak of a black bird perched high on an icy crag, my blood still staining the snow, my bones whitening with frost until they cracked, to release what was left of my spirit after Frey had done with it.
There’s a legend in the north that a woman stalks the icefield, half witch and half spirit. She carries a skinning knife made out of starlight and when she catches you, she uses that knife to pare you down to the bone, stripping your flesh away, ridding you of all excess, but that excess is your body itself. She frees your spirit, whether you wish it or not. I felt as though I’d met her, that day of my ingsgaldir.
But this was not that day. I kept telling myself that as I suited up in the cramped confines of the wing, wrestled the canoe from its tightly packed cocoon form, and left the wing behind me. It had started to snow; the sides of the wing were spattered with the first fat flakes from those anvil cloud-heads. Across the curving expanse of the hull, they looked like wet meteor strikes and I repressed a sudden shiver. All I needed now was to start spooking myself, so I set up the canoe and paddled out over the bitter water beneath the lightening northern sky.
I did not want to be late, so I left in good time, but the cold was biting, even through the protective layers of the slickskin. And I found that I was as scared of the darkness, just like a child. I chided myself: the dark should be no threat to a northerner, one who lives so many days without any real sight of the sun. I told myself, too, that this brittle, fractured crust through which I was making my slow way would be unable to support the weight of anything lighter than a seabird, let alone an animal the size of a fenris. But I found myself looking over my own shoulder all the same, quick nervous glances that revealed only black cracks of water, the white glimmer of ice under Loki’s light, the fading stars. I do not know what I expected to see. My own ghost, perhaps. I felt insubstantial, unreal. If Frey had left a spirit behind him, and I hoped he had not, it would not be here. He had died on another world, torn to shreds by other wild animals, gone in a bloody instant. He was not here. He never would be here again. Once I had remembered this, I stopped looking back and stared ahead to the dawn sky.
There was a grey thread just above the horizon, spreading upward like frost. I found that I was hungering for dawn and the spring light, and soon enough it came. The edge of Muspell’s sun Grainne touched the horizon’s line and the quick flare sent a thousand suns into my sight. I ducked, blinked, and when I could see again the sun was rising. Ahead of me was the long, sharp point of the ice, a cliff a hundred feet high, jutting out into the paved mass through which I was threading the canoe. The slabs of ice glimmered in the light and at first I thought they were a mirage. The realization sent shivers through me, close to uncontrollable, as though all of it had been some huge cruel joke and Frey would be there, the trickster waiting. But then the sea heaved and the selk surged up out of the water, heads bobbing.
‘You have come.’
‘I have. Are we safe?’
Stupid question. The last time I’d been up here, someone had to drag me out of a beast’s mouth and carry my bleeding body to safety. The ice didn’t hold very positive memories.
‘Who does this wing belong to?’ I added when the selk did not reply.
‘One who wishes you well.’
I knew of no one who wished me well, except the Skald, and this wasn’t a craft from the Rock. So why did I keep thinking of the vitki Thorn Eld?
‘Will you take me where I need to go?’
‘We will. It is still long and long. You cannot paddle your craft so far. Do you have a rope?’
‘Yes, but—’
Three of the selk swam around the prow of the canoe. ‘Attach it,’ one of them said. I did as they told me, then, following further instruction, looped the rope around the neck of the nearest.
‘I’m afraid of hurting you,’ I told it.
‘You will not; you are light enough.’
It did not give me any more time to protest. We were off, shooting through the cracks and channels to the clearer water with a speed that frankly alarmed me. I did not want to risk the canoe overturning, spilling me into the killing chill of the sea. But the canoe remained stable as we whipped along and soon we were out into the glassy calm of the edges of the ocean. If the rest of the selk followed, I did not see them, but once I glanced down into the depths and thought I saw myriad bodies, twisting and turning with salmon-speed.
; The day swiftly lightened. I watched as the edge of the icefield flew by, a long undulation of solidity like a white serpent, broken by immense cracks into which the canoe could easily have become lost. The sight filled me with an old, atavistic dread: genetic memories perhaps of ancient Earth. It was said to have been melting icecaps and changing currents that had led to the drowning of the world, forcing my own ancestors to flee outward. They had found Muspell: I did not think it was a bad exchange. And yet something in me still mourned old Earth, a world I had never known, a place I would never visit, never call home.
Towards noon, the selk began to glide closer into the icy shore, bringing me up the course of a narrow inlet that was, indeed, one of these cracks. I had to fight down the panic as the blue gleam of the walls started to close in. I felt as though I was drowning in a breath of cold, the water closing over my head to filter out the sunlight. Soon, the ice walls grew even closer together until there was only a twisting chimney above me. The selk’s head shot out of the shadowy water.
‘You must climb, now.’
‘Why?’ I asked. The fear started to creep, choking, up my throat. ‘What’s up there?’
‘One who will help you.’
Carefully, I stood up. The canoe rocked and the selk helped to settle it. I climbed up the old-fashioned way, striking the metal handholds into the wall, clinging on with the canoe’s ice axe, clawing my way to the summit of the chimney with the surface scraping against the slickskin. I came out into the afternoon sun like something being born, a child of ice.
I was expecting to see another selk, but instead a bone-white sledge stood on the high shelf of the icefield, and a hunched figure upon it. It wore a cloak made from the pelt of snow lynx: pallid and dappled with tips of black. The air around it was filled with the ghosts of birds: dark shadow wings beating around its head. I took a step back and narrowly missed falling down the chimney. Vitki.
Unhurried, the figure turned and the spirit-birds disappeared. I met cold grey eyes in a round, unremarkable face.
‘Hello, Vali,’ said Thorn Eld.
NINE
PLANET: MONDHILE(SEDRA)
They say you’re not supposed to remember. Only snatches and fragments, of the life-that-was in the middle of the life-that-is-now. Childhood is not something to be recalled: no real awareness, no language, only the feral game of kill-be-killed. And so many don’t make it back from the world. Their families wait, consult the books that tell us how many moons the child has had, when they might stand on a town wall to watch a new person come out of the rainy dark or the burning day, and no one ever comes. But when some of them do come back across the moat – that’s when your life begins. That’s when you’re given your name and your voice, when you begin haltingly to speak and have opinions, when you are no longer animal – at least, for most of the time.
You’re not supposed to remember, but I did. Not all of it, true, but I remember her, and running with her, for months and maybe years, looking after one another. My sister, who never had a name because she never came home. The one who must have died, out there in the wild world.
But she did not die. She was stolen, and I meant to find out who took her.
Again, not supposed. Yet I remember the day it happened. The year must have been just on the turn, because there was still a summer haze over the land. She and I had been up in the Otrade, very high, along the glacier’s back, trekking down onto the area that’s known as Moon Moor. It was a bleak place – I’d only been there once since then, and that was to a different part, for it’s deep in the mountains and there’s no real reason to go there: this was as part of a warband, and we’d got lost. The landmarks had changed with the seasons, the snows creeping down and obliterating everything in their white wall. But when I was a child, it was a known place: lai upon lai of scrub and scree, with sinkholes in which a child could shelter and rings of stones, too regular not to have been man-made, in which we hunted the small creatures and the ground birds. I remember seeing the moor as a good place, not safe, but then nowhere was safe. I liked the soft black soil, the low-growing plants with their aromatic scent, which always seemed more intense at night to attract the huge moths.
Yet it was from here that she was taken.
Just as summer was turning away, with a sudden sharp chill in the air at night, so the day was turning. It was twilight; the air gentle and blue, with the first stars and the first moths coming out together. We had been living in a burrow, not far from one of the stone rings, having chased out the family of little predators that lived in it. Their musk still stank out the burrow, but we were not yet of an age to care about such things. We probably stank enough ourselves. Neither did we care whether it was day or night. So on the night that my sister was taken, we were not hiding deep in the burrow, but out on Moon Moor, among the stones. I can’t remember what we were doing: playing, perhaps, as young animals do, at games of chase. Or maybe we were listening to what the moor had to tell us: it spoke to us, in voices of water and earth, of stone and metal and the wind-blasted scrub, until we were dazed with its stories and its information. Others had been there, animal and human. Warbands had marched across it, or fallen: its earth was soaked with their blood and their voices rose from Eresthahan, the land of the dead, and spoke to me, relating the manner of their deaths. I was not afraid of the dead. They were thin ghosts, nothing more, blown by the night wind, gone when morning came. And sometimes the voices of the moor and the dead, the voices of stars and moons, overwhelmed me like a tide until all I could do was hide my face in the thorny branches of the scrub and wait for it to go away.
We were part of Moon Moor. So when the thing appeared that stole my sister, it came as a rupture in the world itself.
At first we saw it as a light in the sky, very high up. I remember my sister’s panicked face and then the thing growing, glowing over the stones, accompanied by a roar. It landed not far away on the moor: an insect that changed its shape to reveal three people. At the time, as far as I can recall, I saw them only as other predators, and perhaps I was not wrong. They were not human, but ghosts: with no sense of the connection to the world that I had, not even as much as the voices from Eresthahan, insubstantial as they drifted across the face of the moor. Later, when I became grown and self-aware, I saw them more clearly in my mind’s eye. They were tall and had pale hair and white faces, and they wore green armour that shone in the light from their carrier beetle, a light that was itself a kind of watery iridescence. They must have been some kind of spirit or demon, for many are said to haunt Moon Moor. But they were also female.
One of them spoke in a hard harsh voice. Even if she had spoken in Khalti, I wouldn’t have understood her then. Two of the ghosts ran after us. My sister ran in one direction and I in another, dodging between the towering blocks of the stones. Our pursuers were too large to fit into the burrow.
The ghost who chased me was quick. I darted into the scrub, but she was at my heels and her hand closed on my hair. I stumbled and she dragged me backwards. It hurt, but I was used to pain. My hair caught on the thorns and it slowed her down enough for me to be able to twist round in her grip and sink my teeth into the ball of her hand. Her blood tasted wrong: metallic, true, but rank and somehow old. Perhaps the blood of ghosts rots in their veins and does not renew itself. I don’t know. It hurt her, though, for she shouted out and struck me. But my teeth were still embedded deep in her flesh and I would not let go. She punched me in the side of the head and I tore part of her hand away as I fell. She was shouting and grunting, blood pouring from the wound I’d made, and I took to my heels and ran as fast as I could. The burrow was not far away and I threw myself into it and waited.
Nothing more to tell. The ghost did not come and drag me out, and she’d have had a hard job of it if she’d tried.
But my sister did not come, either. I waited, and grew cold. I thought I heard her screaming, but it was a thin, distant sound like a night bird and I could not be sure. I did not dare crawl out of the
burrow and look, in case the ghost was waiting. I have never blamed myself for this. Children are as they are: fiercely selfish, or they would not survive. They live in bloodmind, they are a different kind of creature from ourselves, and there is no use in applying the same standards. So I do not blame, but I do regret.
I never saw her again. Next morning, I searched the whole moor, first making sure that the insect had flown away. There was no sign that it had ever been there, except for some long black marks and flattened scrub, and spots of blood where I had savaged the ghost. I licked them but they had dried, and the rotten taste was even stronger. There was nothing else, and I know I searched hard. They had flown away and stolen her with them, or eaten her so entirely that nothing was left. I kept a watch all the same, knowing of the night birds who spit out a mass of bones and hair in a little ball. I think I half expected to find one of these little balls, all that was left of my sister, but I never did. Moon Moor was restored to peace and the uneasy balance of the things that lived there, and in time I forgot I’d had a sister, though there was always the feeling that something was missing and sometimes I would check my hands and feet, to make sure that they were still there. It was not until I returned to the clan house and became self-aware that I remembered, and even then people tried to persuade me that none of this had happened, for memories of childhood are rarely real. But I remembered, and I knew, and when the warband took me back to Moon Moor I went out one night and looked for her still, but there was nothing there.
