The beast shuffled forward through the snow, bringing his arms and shoulders around the corner, but then he stopped again, sniffing at the snow, sniffing at the ledge where Omar had run before his fall.
“Come on, Ivar! You want Skadi, don’t you? Skadi? Remember her? She left you, abandoned you. Hell, it’s her fault you were stung by the bloodflies in the first place!” Freya straightened up, focused only on the head of the creature.
The great reaver licked its fangs, and said, “You think me a fool? You think me a simple beast?” His snarling voice was broken, deep, and gurgling, but his words rang out clearly enough. “I am a king. I am a god!”
Freya took half a step back.
He can talk!
“I know what I am. Do you, little girl? Pretty little girl…” The monster laughed, a sound choked with phlegm and bile. And then Ivar reached up to the rock walls on either side of the pristine snow covering the snare, and he lifted himself up off the ground. He was clumsy and awkward as he braced his arms and legs across the width of the crevasse, scraping for footholds on the icy ledges, and at any moment one of his claws was slipping and scrambling to reset its grip on the wall. But he did hold. And he did climb forward, far above the snare.
Freya shouted, “I am Freya Nordasdottir, and I’ve come for your ring! That’s all we want. Please, King Ivar, just give us the ring and we’ll leave you in peace! With the ring, we can cure you. Can you understand me?”
Her only answer was a bloodcurdling roar that echoed and shrieked down the gorge.
I guess not.
Freya let go of the cord and took two running steps before she hurled her spear at the giant fox demon climbing through the ravine toward her. The weapon flashed across the snow and struck the beast a glancing blow across the shoulder. He roared and his claws ripped free of the wall, and he crashed down into the snow atop the snare.
Fall! Damn you, fall all the way down!
She spun back to grab the dangling cord behind her as she drew her serrated knife from her belt. And there, not three paces in front of her, was a reaver.
It was one of the small ones, like the ones she had killed in Denveller with Erik. Just a person covered in hair with twisted bones and yellow eyes. Somehow, after seeing the bestial form of the king in all its inhuman strangeness, the common reaver suddenly didn’t look so frightening. In the darkness, she could almost mistake the creature in front of her for a person wearing a mask and a tattered fur coat.
The reaver snarled.
Behind her, the king rose out of the snow, roaring, “Freya Nordasdottir! I am your holy king! Kneel before me and I will give you the blessings of my flesh!”
“And become a monster, like that?” She pointed at the reaver crouched below her.
“One bite from me will make you like that one,” the king growled. “But you are no craven fool. You are a huntress. Stronger, braver than the others. Submit to me, girl, and I will bite you again and again. Ten times. Twenty times. Serve me, and I will make you a goddess like me, little girl. A goddess of the wild! A goddess of the hunt!”
Freya glanced back at the king and saw him rising above the snow, his claws clutching the rock walls of the gorge.
When in doubt, take the weaker one.
Freya dropped the cord and ran, plowing a deep furrow in the snow as she drew a second knife and lunged at the slavering plague victim. It swung its crooked claws at her head to grab it in a violent bear hug, but she drove inside its reach and slammed her knives into the reaver’s flesh, plunging one blade straight up through the jaw into the brain as she slipped the other between the ribs. The reaver went limp instantly, collapsing with its full weight on top of her, driving her down to her knees in the snow.
With a sharp kick and shove, she pulled her blades free and shoved the corpse off of her just as the blood began to pour out of the open wounds onto the ground. The hot blood steamed in the snow, melting round holes in the white drifts.
Ivar!
Gasping for breath and feeling her lungs burning with the cold night air, Freya spun to face the other beast with her two dripping knives. But the king was not just a step behind her, poised and ready to strike her dead. The king was still up in the narrow pass, knee-deep in the snow, and struggling to claw his way forward into the wider part of the ravine.
Her eyes wide with astonishment, Freya slammed her second knife back into its sheathe as she bolted up the slope toward the little nook in the wall where she had waited all night, where her braided cord of hair still dangled. She ran easily over the trampled snow and reached back into the nook for the cord just as Ivar roared and stumbled out of the narrow turn and crashed down into the snow several paces away from the snare.
Freya froze with her knife in one hand and the slender cord in the other. She stared as the huge vulpine monster reared up out of the snow and shook the icy white clumps from its fur. She swallowed, and raised her knife in a shaking hand.
Ivar shook his head again, and suddenly his head snapped to the right, facing her, staring at her with his golden eyes, his entire body visible in the bright starlight. Freya saw that he wasn’t twisted or stretched or broken. His limbs were smooth and massive, a gleaming coat of red fur over sinewy muscles from his broad chest to his long legs. His head was entirely inhuman, entirely that of a fox, long and sharp. And writhing about his buttocks she saw not one but three thick red tails.
His dripping fangs parted and his huge clawing hand reached down between his legs to hover over his transformed sex. “It burns,” he rasped, his claws shaking in the air. “Always burning, always craving, always hungry. It wants… it needs… I need…”
He slowly lowered himself to all fours, his jaw trembling with excitement, his haunches shivering, his hips jerking in short, sharp thrusts. Panting, his huge golden eyes shining in the starlight, the reaver king crept toward her. He lowered his head and raised his buttocks, and whined.
She felt her tiny bone knife in her hand, and her thin cord in the other.
He’s too big. Too heavy. Too fast. It can’t be done.
She let go of the cord and lowered herself into a crouch, gripping her knife so tightly that she could feel her own blood thundering through her hand.
The throat. I can slit the throat before he grabs me. I can kill him just before he kills me. And then it will end. The plague will begin to die out as soon as he’s gone.
I’m sorry, Katja. I’m sorry, Erik. I failed you both. But I can still save everyone else in Ysland, and that’s worth a good death. It’s worth dying for.
So here I come, Woden.
She lunged and the beast lunged. Her knife swept up and his claws swept down. For a tiny instant she looked into the creature’s face, searching for some hint of a man who had fallen in love, and been betrayed, and left to suffer in the wilderness for five long years, trapped between pain and fear and madness. But all she saw were fangs.
A muscular hand grabbed her shirt and yanked her down into the snow, and as she fell Freya saw Omar stagger up with his burning white sword in his other hand. His collarbone had erupted through his chest and his head was tilted back at an impossible angle, but he shoved his head back onto his neck with a crack, and the protruding bone slowly pulled itself back into his chest as he gasped and shook and groaned. But then it was over, and he stood up straight, and lifted his sword.
Ivar screamed and hurled himself at the man, both enormous claws reaching out, his bright fangs yawning wide and his black tongue rising in his open maw.
The white blade slashed in three luminous arcs across the monster’s body, and then Omar grabbed her and jumped down the slope. They crashed down the icy patch that Freya had trampled a moment ago, and they slid headfirst into the body of the reaver she had stabbed.
But they both rose to their knees and looked up the slope in time to see the demon king’s arms peel off his body at the shoulders with a sick, wet sucking sound and thump down into the snow. The beast’s body leaned forward and crashed to the
ground. As the shoulders struck the earth, the impact shook its fur and the head tore free of the neck and rolled down the ravine floor until it bumped up against Freya’s boot. She saw the burnt and blackened stump at the severed throat, and the only blood trickling out of the head came through the mouth, not the wound.
For a moment she couldn’t quite accept that it was simply over, that the huge beast was already dead, and that she was still alive without a scratch on her.
“You saved my life,” she said softly. “That was… amazing.”
He nodded and smiled. “Why thank you, fair lady. It was, wasn’t it?” They rose to their feet and stood together for a moment to catch their breath.
“You were dead?” she asked.
He nodded. “Momentarily, I suppose. I hit a rock under the snow. Out like a light. Sorry. Did I miss much?”
“Not really.”
Freya moved first, stepping over the glaring head of the dead king to trudge back up the slope one more time. She paused just one step away from the body. Even dead, even headless, even with its arms lying apart from its shoulders, the corpse was still enormous, unnatural, and terrifying. It looked like four bears sleeping together in a den, stretching on and on, mound after mound of flesh and fur in the snow.
She head Omar’s boots crunching up the path behind her and she started forward again. A quick glance at the claw at her foot showed no hint of rinegold so she circled around the body to the other severed arm and kicked the snow from the long, bony fingers. The light from Omar’s sword came closer and fell upon the body.
“It’s here.” She stared at the metallic gleam between the fox-fur and the ice. “It’s actually here.”
Omar stepped up beside her and looked down. “Of course. Did you really doubt it?”
“Every minute,” she said. “I mean, what were the chances that it would still be on his finger? After five years in the wilderness, shouldn’t it have been smashed or lost by now?”
Omar grinned as he knelt down and lifted the claw. It was three times the size of his own brown hand. “You call it rinegold, for the color of course, but it’s not any sort of gold at all. It’s nothing so soft or malleable as that. Forging raw sun-steel is very similar to forging common steel from iron ore. Challenging, but not impossible. However, once the sun-steel is charged with aether and souls, once it begins to glow with this light and heat, it becomes far harder than steel. When that happens, the sun-steel cannot be reforged or unmade by any common fire or forge.”
Freya nodded at the ring on Ivar’s claw. “That’s not glowing.”
“No, it isn’t. A sword needs about fifty souls to have a steady light in it, and even then it’s a dull orange sort of gleam. This old thing has about ten thousand souls in it.” He glanced at his sword a moment, and then slipped it away into its clay-lined scabbard. With the blade’s light shielded, the ravine was plunged back into the shadows of the night and the pale shine of the stars.
Freya blinked in the sudden gloom, trying to restore her night vision.
“This little trinket probably only has a dozen or so souls in it, and all of them valas, I suppose.” Omar cracked the claw back and forth as he worked the ring of Rekavik off it. He grunted at the task for a moment before Freya offered him a knife, which he used to remove the claw and then he slid the ring easily off the stump. He handed the knife back. “Thank you. You see? Even though his finger grew to be twice as thick, the ring is still perfectly round. It must have pinched off the blood and nerves in this finger though. Ah well.” He tossed the claw aside and straightened up.
Freya sighed.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t want to kill any more of them. They’re people. They’re all victims, like Katja and Erik. Someone’s sister, someone’s husband. How many did you kill on the hilltop tonight?”
“Six.”
She nodded. “And he spoke. He spoke to me. He wasn’t quite sane, I don’t think. He was in heat, and very much so. I can’t imagine what that did him, year after year. But he could still think and speak, and… and we just killed him.”
“He must still have so much of the fox’s soul in him,” Omar said. “Enough to transform him so completely into this prehistoric animal, a giant three-tailed summer fox. But also enough for him to understand his fox-soul. These others, the reavers, they’re just tainted a little bit. It must be like a splinter in their minds, just enough fox instincts to confuse them and keep them raving. But Ivar had enough fox in him to be both a fox, and on some level, a man at the same time. He was still in control, to some extent. Fascinating.”
Freya shrugged. “I guess.”
“I’m a little curious what you planned to do with that.” Omar pointed up at the rock poking out over the edge of the ravine wall and the woven hair cord tied to the small stone under it.
Freya looked up and sighed again as she touched the back of her head and felt the strange new shape of her hair.
What a waste.
“After Ivar’s leg was caught in the snare, I was going to throw a loop of this cord over his hand,” she said. “When he yanked the stone off the ledge, it would roll down the slope, pinning him down and stretching him over the ground out so I could get the ring off his hand without killing him.”
“Ah. Well, there’s an old saying among generals. No plan survives first contact with a giant transgendered fox monster.” He smiled.
She nodded back.
What a strange man.
“Come on,” she said, trotting down the path to retrieve the king’s huge deformed head. “We still have a lot of work to do.”
She reached for the head, but froze. There had been a sound. The crunch of fresh snow.
“Omar!”
A small reaver leapt down from the ravine wall directly onto the unsuspecting man, knocking him back over one of Ivar’s arms and pinning Omar on his shoulders.
Freya ran up the slope, snatched her dangling hair cord, and jumped onto the reaver’s haunches. It reared back with a scream that was almost human. She wrapped the cord around the beast’s throat and fumbled a single loose knot before a bony elbow smashed her in the ribs and threw her back into the snow with the wind knocked from her lungs. Gasping and wheezing, she reached up and yanked on the cord.
The tiny stone popped free of the wall and the large, round stone rolled smoothly over the edge and smashed down onto the reaver’s head. Stone and bone crashed into the ground with a muted crackle, and the creature stopped moving.
Freya straightened up slowly, clutching her ribs as she regained the ability to breathe. Omar climbed back over the severed arm and wiped at the bloody gashes on his face, which were already knitting themselves back together again.
He gestured at the stone. “I thought it was supposed to roll down the hill.”
Freya looked down at the fresh body. It almost looked human in its hairy nudity, almost like a boyish woman with freakish hands and knobby knees, but she was just too tired to feel anything except the cold relief that she was still alive. There had been too many shocks, too many floods of fear and adrenaline, too many strange sights and sounds, and too many long hours in the dark and the cold. All the sad words she had just spoken over the king’s body seemed hollow and stupid.
“Yeah, well, I thought it would roll down the hill.” She smiled a little.
And then she laughed. She covered her mouth, feeling foolish, but the moment itself was foolish, standing over the monstrous bodies and bemoaning her cut hair and poorly designed snare.
Omar laughed with her, but he stopped himself and said, “We need to get out of here before more of those things come sniffing around.”
The walls of the crevasse were slick with fresh ice and their fingers were too cold and numb to climb anyway. The eastward path led down to the shores of Redar Lake, a place neither of them knew but both suspected to be wide open with nowhere to hide from prowling reavers. So westward they went, climbing uphill through
the narrow crevasse until the walls sloped away and they could clamber off the trail and strike out for the south.
They hadn’t gone far when the pale claws of dawn appeared in the eastern sky and Freya was the first to admit that she needed a rest. Omar merely nodded and sat down beside her on the leeward face of a low hillock where very little snow had gathered during the night.
“I’ll keep watch,” he said. “I’m not tired yet. Not that I’m ever really tired.” He held the rinegold ring between two fingers, staring through the yellow circle at the earth at his feet.
Freya hesitated. He may have been an ally, he may have even been a friend, but he was still a stranger. He claimed impossible things, but he had also done impossible things, and she was far from ready to turn her back to him. She considered foregoing her rest and pressing on, running all the way back to Rekavik to deliver the ring so she could sleep in a room where she felt safe.
I can’t. I’m already struggling to keep my grip on my spear. I may not make it all the way back if I try. And besides, I’ll need my wits about me when we get back. When the queen and the people of Rekavik see Omar, and see Ivar’s head, or Fenrir’s head, or whatever they all make of it… well, that’s going to be an interesting day.
So she fell asleep.
When she woke up the sun was halfway to its zenith and a fresh snow was falling lightly through the still air. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, feeling slightly more solid, more real, more focused. Omar sat beside her, rolling the rinegold ring across his palms.
“You shouldn’t play with that,” she said. “I’d hate to lose it now and have to tell everyone that you dropped it in some hole in the ground by accident.”
“It would be no great loss, fair lady,” he said slowly. He sighed deeply and turned a very serious face toward her. “While you were sleeping, I took the liberty of speaking with the dead valas inside it. All nineteen of them. As far as I can tell, this ring is only three hundred years old and none of the wise old souls within it have ever heard of anything like this plague of yours.”
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