by Jess Owen
At last he turned again to Stigr. “Who is Tor?”
Stigr stepped back, wings lifting. “Who indeed. It is Tor who commands the sea, she who brings the thunder when Tyr brings the wind and rain, she who guides a gryfess in her season. Tyr’s mate, Shard. She is Tor.”
He lifted his face and it turned silver in the moonlight. Shard swiveled hesitantly to follow his gaze up to the moon. Perched as a queen in the sky. Tor.
He wanted to argue, to laugh, to say that there was nothing at all anywhere to rival the power of bright Tyr in the heavens, but there she flew. And she did this to the sea. As there is light, there is shadow. As there is stillness, wind. As there is Tyr …
“It was only by knowing the other,” Shard whispered, “that they came to know themselves.” Memory and understanding and confusion sparred in his head.
“That is called the Song of First Light,” Catori said quietly. “And it is known by the same name among wolves and gryfons alike. It is to remind us that we can only see who we are by first understanding who we are not.”
“Who will you be, Shard?” Stigr watched him. Shard grasped for his anger, and his purpose. He had come here to learn what powers lay in him, but he would have to be careful. Stigr seemed intent on turning him against Sverin and the Aesir. The old exile and the wolf witch knew tricks and words and songs, and ways of tangling thoughts in his head. He would have to guard himself and be strong in order not to betray his king, or Kjorn. Or himself. He drew a slow breath.
“I want to learn from you.”
“Learn what, exactly?” Stigr cocked his head, as if Shard were an imploring kit, as if he’d begged to come here instead of Stigr asking him.
“Of the Vanir. The old ways. I want to learn …” he paused, phrasing carefully. What do I want to learn? “I want to learn what I could be.”
“You’re nearly ten.” Stigr paced away, wind ruffling up his feathers the wrong way. “That is old to start learning the way of the Vanir. And I understand you now have a settlement to oversee.”
Shard slanted an ear to Catori, wondering if she and Stigr spoke often, or if ravens passed between them, bearing news. Shard shifted his feet. “I’ll come at night. I’ll come every night and meet you here, and learn as much as I can.”
Stigr stopped and faced him and Shard stared at the black gryfon’s missing eye. How did he lose it? Maybe Shard would learn that, too.
“Then we have a bargain.”
Clouds muddied the moon. Wind sifted through their feathers and Catori’s fur and Shard dipped his head.
“You haven’t asked me about your sister.”
Stigr’s ears perked, then he glanced away. “Not this night. I don’t know how much more my old bones can handle.”
Shard wasn’t sure what that meant. Stigr seemed somehow disappointed. Inwardly, Shard huffed.
He has no right to be disappointed by me. All I do is for Kjorn and the king. Stigr’s opinion didn’t really matter to Shard, not the opinion of an exile who lived on a dead island.
“Fine then,” Shard said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at midnight.”
“Fair winds, nephew.”
Shard lifted his wings, pausing to glance at Catori. He had absolutely no idea what to say to her. She was unlike her brothers. She had been willing to defend herself if he attacked her, but, Shard realized, he had been the one to start the fight.
“I would like if we could be friends,” she said softly.
Shard backed away a step. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I can’t.”
He shoved into the sky before she could respond. He’d meant to say that it wouldn’t work at all, that he had to be loyal to Sverin and follow his laws, but he had no personal grudge with her. I’m already meeting with an exile, a Vanir, a traitor all in one. Friends with a wolf?
For Shard, it was too much. He hoped she wasn’t there the next time he flew to Stigr.
It was only when he reached his den that Shard realized he never asked her what words he had said to Lapu.
Stigr watched Shard’s flight. He noticed that the young gryfon took the longer route. Pleasure fluffed his feathers. Despite his bravado and his pride in serving the Aesir, at least Shard truly took pleasure in flying at night, in seeing what mysteries lay under the full moon. There might be hope.
“His blood is red. Through and through.” Catori pressed her shoulder to his and all the scents of Star Island came to him in her fur. She had skipped hunting with her pack to come visit him, though Stigr wondered if she’d known Shard would be there too.
“Funny you should say that,” he murmured, thinking of the raven. “What else have you seen, in your dreams? Do you think he’ll come around?”
“Too many choices and others involved to say.” She dipped her head and snuffled the ground, distracted. “But you were right when you said that ten is old to learn the way of the Vanir. It isn’t a thing you learn. It’s a way from birth.”
“He learned some from birth.” Together they glanced toward the Sun Isle. “But it has all been forgotten. Burned away by red glory and gold and greed.”
Catori huffed and thrust her cold nose behind his ear to shock him from his gloom. She kept him young, that was sure enough. “You should’ve been born in a wolf skin. Speaking fatalistically of balance and doom.”
“And you, a gryfon’s wings,” Stigr muttered back. “Perhaps he would listen to you then.”
“How I wish.”
“Tide is returning.”
She perked her ears and showed her teeth in what he’d come to learn was a gesture of affection. “Is that my dismissal, old wing?”
“Unless you wish to spend the next moon among the dead Vanir.”
“They aren’t such bad company.” After a moment she perked her ears and stepped forward, watching him. A breeze stirred the black feathers in her fur. “I would stay if you asked me, my friend.”
Stigr considered her earnest face, then looked away toward the silver sea. Another moment of silence stretched between them.
“Go,” Stigr said, since she wouldn’t take the hint. Her ears laid back in disappointment. “Go feast and sing with your pack, live, be a proper young wolf. All this company is too much for an old outcast.”
“You aren’t that old.”
“And you are that young.” He stretched his wings, letting one nearly bump her from the rock. “I’ll see you again.”
She nipped his wing. “Fair winds then, Stigr.”
“Good hunting to you, Catori.” Without needing further words, she bounded away into the moonlit night.
~ 13 ~
Changing Winds
He stood in the bones of the dead. Silver moonlight shone at the edge of the earth, and sunlight on the other, both in the sky. Daynight. Under this light the dead rose and the light and wind flickered together to make their colors. The wind sang through their bones and they told him their names as he walked among them.
“I am Ivar,” said a hulking warrior of pale mossy color.
“And I, Freja.” Dusty yellow and rose. “I was queen.” Shard saw a flash of her life, and her death, drowned in a flooded river to save a kit. More names whispered to him. All who came before. Ingra, Kor, Jaarl, a pale blue king who spoke with whales and, at the end of his life, flew to the top of the world with them.
“Don’t forget us. Don’t forget us. Don’t forget yourself. The winds are changing.”
He picked up to a trot as their names brushed his feathers up like winds. “Where is he? Where is my father?”
He does not lie here, sang the dead. He is not here. He fell. He fell and his spirit is trapped there in sorrow and fear.
He shoved from the island but the dead reared to catch him, and it was like dragging his wings through water again. “Don’t forget us.” He broke free of their silvery talons and thrust into the air. Storm gathered. Dark.
A bolt of red skyfire struck him and he fell. Fell to the sea. His face hit a salt wave and red fire spread like blood.
Shard rolled, staggered to his feet and crashed into the rock wall of his den.
Since spending more nights with Stigr, more dreams had come to him, vivid and pressing like flocks of starlings, clamoring for his attention. The dream of dead gryfons slipped from him and he stood panting.
The last few nights, when Shard confessed his dreams to Stigr, the exile told him to try to remember them, that sometimes the Vanir dreamed truths. But Shard could never recall them in detail. This one, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Shard stretched, shook himself, took a moment to sharpen his talons against the thick vein of lime near the front of his den, and dove into the morning.
A long and windy spring soared through the isles. Caj and Kjorn continued to train the young male gryfons. As hunting became easier in the warm season, the females joined to learn what skills they could that they hadn’t learned while hunting.
Shard struggled to focus, to learn and grow stronger. Even Stigr said it was wise that he learn to fight in the way of the Aesir, so he worked, sparring each night with Stigr as well, to learn what advantages could be found in being smaller, lither, quicker. Never had he thought he might be able to beat any of the full-blooded Aesir in a spar. Now, hope grew that he might have strengths that, though they were different, were equal to Kjorn’s.
“There are as many ways to fight and defend as there are creatures who walk and fly,” Stigr instructed. He taught Shard graceful, flight-like movements of evasion from the ground that led into roundabout attacks. Old secrets of the Vanir. Shard had no trouble focusing on those nights, though he was weary.
“Think of the sparrow,” Stigr said, one dark night of the moon. “Small, weak, helpless?”
He swept talons at Shard’s face. Shard swiveled in a graceful ramp, hind paws firmly on earth with talons in the air, and flared his wings to draw Stigr’s attention.
“Fast as skyfire,” snapped the old exile, “agile, invisible in the tree, and by all winds, impossible to catch if it goes for your eyes.
Shard twisted and lunged, threw Stigr to the ground and pressed talons to his throat.
“Good,” Stigr crowed. “Again! Observe and learn from all creatures, nephew. Think of the fox.”
Shard lost that round, and decided to continue thinking of the sparrow. Every night they learned and sparred. Catori didn’t show herself on the next full moons, but Shard had the sense of being watched every time he took off from Windwater at night.
Every sunset Shard napped until dark. Sometimes he caught sleep in the afternoon when the females hunted. He had begun to wake at sunset, and waited until true, quiet dark, when the others would be well asleep, before walking to the edge of his den. If any gryfon woke, or saw him standing at the entrance, ready to fly, he said only that he heard a sound, but didn’t think it was a wolf. That was usually enough to send a weary gryfon back to their nest. Shard could wait as long as he needed to for all to be asleep.
Then he then flew out to Black Rock.
Stigr taught him to fish from rocks in the shallows and Shard ate well, feeling more energy with the extra meals, more strength. There was a new sheen to his feathers that Stigr said was oil from the fish, and would help him if he ever again fell into the sea.
The first night, Stigr had dashed his argument that hunting from the sea was forbidden. Eventually Shard decided he must be right. Bright Tyr hasn’t struck me down, after all, or Stigr, who has fished all his life.
In fact Shard felt healthier and stronger than ever before. The Aesir forbade fishing. Sverin, who had lost his mate in the sea, forbade fishing. Shard accepted that. Sverin didn’t want to lose any more of his pride to the sea. But that didn’t make the sea itself evil. Shard didn’t like to doubt the king, began to wonder if he could be wrong.
“Besides,” Stigr had said gruffly, “it wasn’t the sea or the fish that had killed Sverin’s mate. It was lack of skill, a crash, and bitter winter.”
Stigr said he would die before he saw Shard afraid of the sea.
“You are the last full-blood Vanir born in the Silver Isles,” Stigr reminded him one night. They met every night from midnight until the gray of dawn glowed. “If you forget yourself, we will truly be conquered.”
Stigr taught him to look to Tor’s gentle light for guidance in his dreams and fears, just as he looked to Tyr for strength and courage. He showed him the spirits in the sky formed together by the stars, great points of light arcing across the starswept expanse that could help him remember history and songs, and guide his flight if he ever left the Silver Isles. His favorite was the Dragon, a long and coiling constellation that extended along the rim of the windward sea almost from one horizon to the other.
“The star dragon is called Midragur,” Stigr told him. “It is from the myth of the dragons themselves. They who believe the earth was born from Tyr and Tor, and that a great dragon of stars still coils around it, protecting it as a mother dragon would her egg. That egg will still hatch one day, and that day will be the glorious end of the world.”
He flicked some fish gut off his claws. Shard stared up at the dragon of stars. Stigr could speak in the rhythm of great songs, but an ironic edge in his voice always hinted that it was probably best to leave songs in their place and continue with the daily fishing rather than plan for the hatching of the world.
“How do you know a dragon song?” Shard looked back to him, eyes wide as a kit in awe. He’d grown fond of Stigr’s rough voice, his gruff teaching, even the cuff of his talon when Shard said something stupid. Even the familiar, frightening sight of his mutilated eye. If there hadn’t been the Conquering, Shard thought, he could imagine there would’ve been many starlit nights like this, lounged on the edge of a cliff with the wind in their ears, bellies full, and stories to last until dawn.
“The migrating cranes have told me some. An albatross. The whales.”
“You speak to whales?” Shard stared. Dreams flickered up and clawed his mind. Stigr chuckled.
“Not well. Their voices are long and slow and they take a good deal of time to say anything. But they live the longest of any creature on the earth or in the sea. If one of them speaks to you, you take the time to listen.”
“Like Jaarl?”
Stigr swiveled to focus his eye on Shard. “Where did you hear that name?”
Shard hadn’t meant to say it. He ground his beak. “I don’t remember. Just, once. Maybe someone told a story.”
“Sverin allows stories of the old Vanir?”
Shard saw the gryfon’s ghost emblazoned in his mind as the dream winged back to him. The ghost’s feathers were a rich, dull blue, shifty like the ocean under cloud, and he knew the gryfon had been real, and so had the dream. “I don’t–I don’t remember. Did he really speak to whales?”
Stigr stared at him and Shard began to feel like a mouse. Then his uncle looked away. “Yes. He was a great king of the Second Age, when the Vanir first came to the Silver Isles. One of the founders of our ways and our life here. He spoke to all.”
“Oh,” Shard whispered. He wanted to ask of the other names that rushed up from his dreams, but didn’t dare, in case Stigr asked about his dreams, encouraged them. Shard wasn’t sure he liked this part of learning his history. “Will you tell me stories of Vanir?”
“The kings?”
“Any of them,” Shard whispered, and perked his ears as his uncle laughed.
“The Vanir are as old as the sea,” Stigr taught him. “We are not like the Aesir prides of the windward lands. The Vanir know of balance, of harmony and humility. We learn from our past. We take guidance from our ancestors.
“The Aesir plod ahead and let the past die,” Stigr said. “Vanir are made of our past. All that came before, and all that will come after.”
Every night, Stigr taught Shard to see himself, his father and his father’s father and all those who came before in every blade of grass, in the rolling waves and brush of wind and falling rain.
Through all that, Shard managed
never to ask his father’s name, or where his bones might lie. Stigr’s silence on the topic told Shard with frightening certainty that they weren’t on Black Rock with the others. He told himself that he still didn’t care.
“The Vanir never die,” Stigr sang to him in an old, old song. “We live on in each other.”
Dreams flickered at the edge of Shard’s waking mind and he became less able to outfly them.
They were things his father would have taught him, Shard mused as he flew under the stars, as he feasted on his catches from the sea. Or his mother if she was able.
He kept his promise to himself and never asked about his father, his name, or whether he had been a fighter, or, great in flight as Shard. That much he could do to keep his promise to the king. Still, as the days wore closer to summer, even an outsider would have said he had become as much a Vanir as any could under the talon of a Red King.
~ 14 ~
Omens
Six red deer raced along the shore. Shard flanked them in the air, and across from him flew coppery Einarr. The deer had walked right below the cliffs of Windwater, and Kenna, the violet gryfess who had supported Shard, called an impromptu hunt. She had risen to a leading female at their little colony, and shouted at the males to join and learn.
They would need to know how to hunt in winter, when most of the hunting females would be carrying kits in their bellies.
She flew point, high and far ahead, showing them the way. A tawny yellow female flew with Shard, and one of pearly white flew with Einarr.
“Not to the forest!” Kenna shouted at Halvden, who seemed bent on driving the deer to the woods.
“They can’t maneuver in the trees!” snapped Halvden.
“Neither can we,” snarled the tawny female near Shard.
“Halvden!” Shard wheeled up and around to face Halvden as he closed in toward Shard. “Heed them.”
The yellow female tossed Shard an admiring look and dove forward to continue driving the panicked herd of deer. Shard fell back, flapping in place to meet Halvden in the air. The larger green gryfon snapped his beak and slashed frustrated talons through the air. For a heart-tightened moment, Shard thought he wouldn’t duck around, that he meant to attack. He forced himself to remain aloft, to hold his air. He had faced down a charging boar. Halvden was no different.
