Freya and Erik leveled their spears at the creatures, and the creatures fixed their eyes on the two hunters. Just like the one from the night before, these two stared out through bloodshot orbs stamped with dark golden irises. The reavers had blunt snouts and Freya could see the long matted hair still hanging from the backs of their heads in braids and knots, and hints of silver flashed in their ears and on their fingers. One wore the ragged remains of a filthy shirt around its shoulders that hung in tatters over its chest, and the other wore a belt with a single strip of cloth hanging down the side of its leg, but nothing hid the fact that both were female. Their mouths hung slightly agape, their yellowed fangs gleaming dully behind their black jowls, and bright beads of slobber hung in slender threads from their mouths.
A pair of low growls rumbled from their throats.
Two small stones whistled down from above and struck the creatures’ heads in quick succession, and Erik hurled his spear through the left beast’s chest, sending the reaver flying backward into the mud where it fell quivering and whimpering.
The second reaver sprang forward with fangs bared and claws outstretched, its blazing yellow eyes fixed on Freya’s naked throat. She dashed forward to meet it and planted the butt of her spear in the mud and stamped her boot on it. In the instant before the beast fell on her, she thought of the black figure that had wrestled her to the ground the night before.
Not this time.
Freya yanked her spear up and let the huge vixen impale itself on the blade, and she bore down hard with her legs, holding the shaft firm as the body slammed into it. The blade slipped cleanly through the creature’s gut and it slid swiftly down toward her, its long bloody claws reaching for her throat. Freya let go of her spear to pull her two bone knives from her belt and slashed one white blade across the reaver’s throat as she plunged the other knife into the palm of the nearest claw.
The beast’s full weight fell against her outstretched arms, but Freya dug her boots deep into the mud and held the dead body at arm’s length. It hung there a moment, its steaming black blood pouring from the wounds in its belly and neck. The two golden coins rolled back into the reaver’s eye sockets, its jaw trembling, and its lungs gurgling with blood.
And then it collapsed into the mud.
Freya slipped her knives free, wiped them in the dead grass, and put them away while Erik went to retrieve his spear. They both pierced the reaver’s hearts again just to be certain, and then trudged back to the tower, offering short waves to the girl on the tower roof, who waved and then climbed back down inside.
“Nice throw,” Freya said.
“Thanks,” Erik signed, grinning. “And you, a spear and two knives all at once?”
“I wanted to be sure.”
“Fair enough.”
A beast snarled, a girl screamed, and an elk snorted.
Freya bolted forward half a step ahead of Erik and she rounded the corner of the tower just in time to see a third reaver leaping down from the top of a cottage wall to land on Arfast’s shaggy back. Erik’s spear flew just as Arfast stumbled, and he missed his mark. Freya saw the claws shoved into her mount’s sides, the dark blood just beginning to trickle down through the elk’s dirty white hair.
She leveled her spear as she ran and thrust the blade up at the reaver, but the creature leapt clear, shoving Arfast down and the elk fell to the ground. The reaver hurled itself over Freya’s head and as she turned to look over her shoulder, she slipped in the mud, dropping to her knee.
The beast crashed down onto Erik, planting its feet on his thighs and slashing both clawed hands at his face. Erik raised his fists and blocked both claws as he staggered back under the reaver’s weight, and then he fell flat on the ground with the beast hunched on his chest. The monster’s head slammed down on the man’s throat.
“ERIK!” Freya felt her blood boiling and her skin burning as she scrambled to her feet and dashed back to his side. She hurled herself at the creature’s belly, planting both of her knives between its ribs and letting her own weight wrench the beast off of her husband and they all crashed down into the mud together. Freya rose up on her knees, her knife raised in her hand to cut the reaver’s throat.
And she saw a hand.
Erik’s hand, his red and white fingers straining at the beast’s neck, holding the fangs at bay as he crushed its windpipe. She leaned over the hairy, misshapen head and saw Erik grinning at her.
He winked and mouthed the words, “It’s over. Dead.”
The reaver’s claws were sunk deep into the man’s shoulders, but its foul maw was still some distance from his face. And when he took his hands away from its throat, the reaver’s head fell limp to one side. Freya gently pulled the claws from her husband’s flesh, wincing at the silent expressions of pain on his face. But after a moment, he sat up and heaved an easy breath and nodded.
“I’m all right,” he signed.
He’s all right.
She sat down on his lap, her calloused hands on his dirty cheeks, staring into his bright blue eyes. His lips parted and Freya kissed him, slipping her tongue deep into his mouth, feeling the soft wet warmth of his living body, tasting his breath and sweat and adrenaline and fear and joy. He gripped her waist tightly for a moment, and then let her go and they stood up together.
She looked at his bloody shoulders. “Can you climb back up?”
He grimaced and signed, “I’d rather not.”
So she sat with him on a broken stone wall and bandaged his wounds while Wren watched them from the open window. Arfast stood by the tower’s base, his eyes wide, his breathing swift and ragged. As Freya sat and listened to the tiny waves of the lake lapping at the black stones at the edge of the village, Wren disappeared from the window, but she stuck her head out a moment later and called down, “Freya! Come quick!”
Erik nodded and picked up his spear with only a slight grunt, so Freya jogged to the knotted rope and climbed back up to the tower window. Inside she squinted at the shadowy figures of the vala and her apprentice crouched by Katja’s head.
“What’s happening?” the huntress asked.
“Gudrun is trying to help your sister,” Wren said.
Freya knelt by the bed and saw that the crone had one shriveled hand resting on Katja’s forehead. On her frail middle finger, Gudrun wore a pale yellow ring. Freya inhaled sharply. It was only the second time she had ever seen rinegold in her life. Katja’s mistress had never owned such a relic, but she had told the children of Logarven more than a few stories about the powers of the strange metal. Legendary valas of Ysland had used the rinegold to save the injured and sick, to find long-lost treasures, to guide ships through the Sea of Ice, and to battle the hideous beasts that survived Woden’s war with the demons of Ysland. But most of all, they used the rinegold rings to speak to the souls of long-dead valas, to unlock the secrets of their ancient seidr-sisters.
And now a sliver of that rinegold was touching Katja’s sweaty brow.
Gudrun sat hunched and shrunken, folded in upon herself under a heavy wool blanket so that only her wrinkled face and desiccated fingers could be seen. The vala muttered, her dim and hazy eyes pointed across the room at the wall, seeing nothing. Her fingers closed, clutching Katja’s head, and Freya jerked forward but Wren held her back saying, “Wait.”
The crone’s head tilted back, the wool blanket slipping off her spotted head to her shoulders. Gudrun gasped, shivered, and convulsed forward. Wren grabbed the old woman’s chest and arm, trying to hold her upright, but the vala shoved off her apprentice. Gudrun wailed a horrid wordless cry, her head back, her jaw stretched wide, and her shriveled pink tongue flicking between her naked pink gums.
“Immortality!” The vala cackled, and then slammed her thin gums shut on the tip of her tongue. A tiny mote of pink flesh tumbled from between her pale lips, and a trickle of dark blood spilled over her chin.
Wren gasped. “No!”
Gudrun flashed a bloody grin at them and then smashed her head d
own onto Katja’s face. Wren shoved the old woman back and saw Gudrun’s head lolling on her limp neck, her face gray, her skin cold to the touch. Freya stared down at her sister’s face and watched as the smear of Gudrun’s dark blood crept across Freya’s skin and vanished into the rinegold ring on the vala’s finger.
Freya grabbed the crone’s arm and held up the crooked fingers to stare at the ring. “What the hell just happened? Is Gudrun dead? Did she just kill herself?”
Chapter 4
With shaking hands, Wren took the dead vala’s arm from Freya and slipped the ring off Gudrun’s knobby finger and placed it on her own right hand. The apprentice’s face twisted and glared, and for a moment Freya thought the girl was going to vomit on the floor. But then she swallowed and sat up straight, and looked the huntress in the eye. “It’s all right.”
“What is?”
“Gudrun gave her soul to the ring, passing on her knowledge just all the valas of Denveller have done for generations.” Wren licked her pale lips. “It shouldn’t have happened until I was ready to take over. Not for years yet. I don’t know exactly what to do with it. It feels…”
Freya laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Worry about how it feels later. Did all that wailing and bleeding do anything to help my sister?”
Wren shook her head. “No. But I know why Gudrun did it.” She held up the ring. “I can hear her voice in my head. I can even see her face, just a little, over there in the corner of the room. She looks a bit dark and dim, like a reflection in the water. She says she killed herself like this because she knew she couldn’t leave this tower, and because she wants me to go with you.”
“To help Katja?”
Wren nodded. “To cure the reaver plague.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.” Wren went to the body of her mistress and arranged the old vala in a more restful pose on the floor with her eyes closed and the blood on her chin wiped clean. “We have to find Skadi first. She has the rinegold ring of Hengavik, and she’ll probably know more about reavers than any other vala in Ysland.”
“Fine.” Freya shoved her hands under her sister’s arms. “Help me.”
Together they wrestled the feverish woman to the window and lowered her on the knotted rope into Erik’s waiting arms. Freya helped her husband to settle her sister on Arfast’s back while Wren lingered in the tower, but eventually the girl in black came down from the window and stood with them in the mud. Two small sacks of stones clicked and clacked on her belt, and her sling was wound loosely around her right wrist.
“Uhm.” Wren glanced around, looking lost and sick. “All right then. I guess we just, that is, I guess we should, well, find Skadi. Allfather willing.”
The girl gave one last lingering look at her tower and then trudged off along a westward path out of the village with the others following a short distance behind. Freya kept one hand on Arfast’s shaggy neck and the other hand on her knives, while Erik thumped along with both of their spears resting on his bandaged shoulders.
After an hour of walking, Erik signed, “What are you thinking about?”
Freya said, “I’m just wondering if we’re doing the right thing. We could have stayed home and tended her ourselves. We could have taken her up into the hills to the hot springs above Logarven. But instead Katja’s lying like a sack of barley on Arfast’s back and we’re wandering through dead villages. Her skin is on fire, and her ears look bigger, and the hair on her arms looks darker. She’s getting worse, and this isn’t helping her. We should be helping her.”
“We are helping her,” he signed. “We’re looking for someone who can heal her. That’s all we can do.”
“Maybe.”
Wren squinted back at them, then turned around and began walking backward so she could face them. “Excuse me, but Gudrun wants to know about your friend there.”
“Erik is my husband,” Freya said loudly.
“Right, Erik. My mistress wants to know why he doesn’t talk.”
“Your dead mistress whose soul is in your little ring, and who speaks to you in your mind? Or you?”
Wren grinned. “I confess to being a little curious, as the good lord Woden wills, he being a seeker of arcane knowledge himself. But Gudrun wants to know too.”
Freya glanced at Erik and he nodded. She said, “When were young, Erik’s father took him hunting on the southern downs. They found a few deer, and the stag turned to defend his mate. Erik was standing too close to his father, and when the killing blow brought the stag down, one of its antlers pierced Erik’s throat, nearly killing him. The vala saved his life, but not his voice.”
“Oh, I see.” Wren stumbled over a small stone on the path, and she turned back around to continue walking. But a moment later she turned around again. “And he talks with his hands?”
Freya sighed. “Yes.”
“How did he learn that?”
“It’s something we made up together, him and me and Katja, when we were children. Only a handful of folk in Logarven understand it, but most know it well enough to get the gist of what he means, most of the time.” Freya stroked her sister’s damp hair back from her face, looking for more signs of the change.
“Can you teach me?” the girl asked.
“Why don’t you ask Erik to teach you? He’s right there,” Freya said.
“But how will I understand him?”
Freya grinned. “Well, now, that is the trick, isn’t it?”
Wren turned back around to watch where she was going as she muttered, “No, lord, that wasn’t very kind of her at all. And here I am, the very soul of kindness leading them on their way, walking myself into danger on their account. It’s a terrible trick you’ve played on me, lord, making me so wonderfully generous and filling up the world with less kindly folk to take advantage of me.”
They followed the western path along the shore of Denveller Lake and shortly they came across a pair of houses buried in the hillside above the steaming waters. Wren stopped and frowned at the empty doorways and the broken jug on the ground and the torn cloth flapping in the breeze between two stones in the mud.
“What is this place?” Freya asked.
Wren shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just a place. Just a home. But not anymore, I guess. The reavers have been here, too. They’ve been everywhere.” She paused to gaze out at the lake. “I’m sorry, but there’s something I need to do. Good luck. I hope you find help for your sister.” And she headed down toward the tall reeds at the lake’s edge.
“Wait, where are you going? What about Skadi and the reavers and Gudrun? You can’t go off on your own.” Freya followed her, and Erik led Arfast after her. “We should stay together. It’s too dangerous to split up.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” the girl said, casting a nervous grin over her shoulder. “But I can’t ask you to take the time when your sister needs your help now.”
Freya frowned. “How much time? What’s going on?”
“My family.” Wren reached down into the tall grass and pulled a flimsy reed boat out from under a turf outcropping in the shallows. “I need to know if they’re still alive. They’re on Delver Island. I don’t know if… whether… the reavers can swim, or use a boat…” She sniffed and dragged her sleeve across her nose. Her face was pale, her cheeks red with windburn, and her hair flying wild in the wind.
Freya glanced back at Erik and her sister, and then out at the lake. “How long will it take to check on them?”
Wren shrugged. “Less than an hour of paddling. You can almost see the island there.” She pointed to the south.
Freya saw a dark blot on the horizon. She looked at her sister’s motionless body again. “Is it on the way to Hengavik?”
“It’s to the south, so it’s more or less on the way.” Wren sat down in the shaky little boat. There was no paddle. “Allfather knows, I don’t want to leave you, and neither does Gudrun, but I have to know if my parents are still alive. And if they’re still there, I
need to get them out.”
Freya nodded. “An hour, that’s almost nothing at all. I’ll go with you. Erik can follow the edge of the lake and we can meet up with him later this afternoon. Right?”
Wren stared up at her. “Right. I mean, if you were to, that is, to go, I mean come, with me, then it would only be an hour there, and less than that to come back to the road. I just need to see them for a minute, just a few minutes, just to tell them…”
“I know.” Freya gently squeezed the girl’s arm. So they agreed on a meeting place that Wren described, a crossroads marked by a broken stone pillar where Erik would wait for them. Moments later Freya sat down in the thin, rotting boat behind the girl in black and they pushed away from the reeds into the warm waters of the lake, and began paddling with their bare hands.
A thin green slime clung to the surface of the water and to their hands, and Freya winced at the muck coating her skin. “There isn’t anything dangerous in this lake, is there?”
“Just flies and frogs.”
Freya nodded.
They swept their hands through the warm scum, shoving the flimsy reed boat along the surface. The bottom of the boat rippled and wrinkled with the undulations of the lake as they headed due south, and Freya kept one eye on the western shore of the lake where Erik and Arfast were plodding along the dirt road, until the shore became a thin black line and her husband disappeared.
The gnats buzzed and the frogs croaked, and the lake steamed lazily in the afternoon sun. The blot on the southern edge of the world quickly grew into a wide mound of rock rising above the water and Freya stared intently at the island as they approached it, scanning for black clouds of flies, for dark mounds of bodies, and for any other signs of predators. But there were none.
Thick green grasses hid the edge of where the island met the lake, and as they pushed through them and emerged into a shallow lagoon, Freya looked up at the two great ridges to the east and west of them. The rock faces were gray and barren, but the center of the island sloped down to form a gently curving bowl where lush grasses and untended fields of barley and wheat waved in a riot of greens and golds.
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