She hurled her knife with a desperate prayer in her heart and a broken scream on her lips. “NO!”
There must have been something different in that last shout, something ragged and raw and vicious that startled the youth, because he hesitated in mid-throw to look back over his shoulder. He hesitated, and Freya’s knife ripped into his thigh. Leif snapped backwards with a wordless cry, slamming down onto the foam-kissed stones, twisting and shuddering.
Freya leapt the last few steps and crashed down on top of him, crushing his wrist and fingers in her two hands, sinking her jagged nails into his flesh. “Give it to me,” she gasped, struggling to catch her breath. “Give it to me!”
“No!” He twisted and rocked and kicked beneath her, but without a second arm to grapple with her, he had no leverage to push her off or get control over the muddy nest in his hand.
Freya bore down on his neck with her elbow as she kept both hands digging deeper and tighter in his arm and hand and fingers until dark beads of blood glimmered on his pale skin and trickled down over her nails.
Almost.
His fingers cracked open, shaking.
Almost.
Leif shrieked and kicked with both legs, rolling both of them together in a vicious tangle into the cold sea foam, and he smashed his hand down on the wet stones. The mud ball burst apart and Freya saw the dark splatter of tiny legs and wings glistening in the starlight.
“No!” She yanked his arm back up to stare at the dead bloodflies with every frayed nerve in her body screaming out, It’s isn’t fair!
But a sharp buzzing whine in her ear made her jerk to the side, almost rolling off her prey. And then something bit her bare hand. And something bit her neck. And her ear.
Freya leapt up and ran back from the water’s edge, trying to swat away the flies without smashing them.
Damn, that stings!
Leif jerked from side to side before getting his feet under him and staggering up and away from the smashed nest. He limped and hopped with Freya’s bone knife still hanging from the gash in his thigh as he tried to shield his head and swat away the flies. Freya grabbed a damp tarp from a pile of fishing tackle, waved it through the air once to fan away the flies, and then threw the tarp over Leif as he stumbled to his knees. She also reached down under the tarp and yanked her knife out of his leg, and was rewarded with a pitiful yelp and moan.
A stiff breeze blew in off the bay and the buzzing of the flies faded into the distance, and she hoped that they were moving back toward the center of the city, and not scattering out to sea to die.
When she was sure they were gone, she pulled the tarp off of Leif to reveal the shivering, coughing, bleeding wreckage. The blood shone brightly on his leg, and his arm was shaking as he tried to hold himself up with it.
After a moment he leaned back and looked at her. “Am I supposed to thank you?”
Freya glanced at the tarp and tossed it aside. “I didn’t do it to help you. I did it to save the bloodflies. I didn’t run all this way just to watch you swat them to death.”
She took a long, deep breath and exhaled slowly. The burning in her lungs was gone and the throbbing in her legs and back were fading quickly. She was still bone tired, but the edge was gone. She didn’t feel as raw and miserable as before. She took another breath.
The sea air can do wonders, I suppose.
Freya leaned back against the wall of the house behind her and took another long breath. “Well, I suppose I can either kill you now, or I’ll have to drag you back to the castle, don’t I?”
Frowning, she pushed off the wall and walked over to Leif, but the young man took a long steady breath and rose to his feet. He was breathing easy now, his whole body relaxed. Even the cut on his leg seemed to be bleeding less.
Leif blinked and looked her in the eye. “That damned fool was telling the truth, wasn’t he? He really did make a cure, didn’t he?”
“A vaccine.”
“Whatever,” Leif snapped. “The point is, it works. Look at me. Look at you. You were dead on your feet a moment ago, and I could barely sit up. And now we’re both fine, just fine.”
Freya looked over at the smashed lump of the nest and the flies that hadn’t survived. “Why’d you take it? Why try to destroy it?” Another fly nipped at her neck, and she grimaced, straining to keep herself from slapping at the pain.
“I thought it was more of the ones that bit Ivar, the ones that brought the plague.”
Freya nodded. “You thought Omar wanted revenge against you and Skadi?”
“Of course! Who wouldn’t?” Leif blew out a long breath and stood up a bit straighter. There was no trace of pain or fatigue on his face now. His expression was one of pure contempt and cold steel. “I split the man’s chest with my own sword. I saw him fall. He should be dead. Maybe southerners keep their hearts on the other side. Who knows? But what sort of fool would I be to believe that he’d been out in that cave for five years trying to cure the plague and not dreaming of killing me?”
“A trusting fool,” Freya said quietly. “Otherwise known as a good man.”
Leif chuckled. “Well, I suppose that isn’t me.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Don’t be so smug. I’ve known good men. Honorable men. Valiant men,” Leif said. “And I watched them die horrible deaths on the battlefield and in blood feuds, ever since I was a boy. Oh sure, they’re remembered as heroes. They’re remembered in songs. They’re remembered by their sons. But they’re dead all the same. And as much as I enjoy the women and the songs and the feasts, I enjoy being alive even more.”
“No one wants to die,” she said. Her knife was still in her hand, still dripping with his dark blood.
“No, but that’s not the fear anymore, is it?” He took a few casual steps toward the water. “In this war you might die, maybe even torn to pieces and eaten while you’re still alive. Or you might be bitten. Infected. Forced to watch as you turn into one of them, into a mindless beast, listening to your bones crack and your skin stretch and your hair bristle as you slowly go insane.” He swallowed loudly.
“It’s a hell of thing to happen to a person,” she said. “A hell of a thing to live in fear of for five years.”
“Hell is right.”
She wiped her knife carefully on the sodden tarp beside her. “You threw me off that wall. Threw me down to die.”
“Of course. You did the impossible, you killed Fenrir,” he said with a cocksure grin. “I couldn’t have you replacing me, could I? Besides, real heroes always die. I was just ensuring that you got the very best songs written for you.”
“You’re a murderer.”
“I’m a soldier. I follow orders.” He looked her squarely in the eyes and for a moment she thought she saw something more than just arrogance and vicious pride in them, but only for a moment. “We saw the bloodflies on Ivar. We saw him fall. And we saw him climb back up and turn into that demon thing, watched him tear three men to pieces not ten paces from us. I had the blood and entrails of a man sprayed all across me.” He gestured down the length of his body. “The stench of blood and shit in my nostrils, the innards of a man that no person should ever see. Not just dead, not just cut, but shattered and shredded. No one should ever know what a man looks like burst inside-out. It’s something you can never unsee, never forget.”
“But Ivar ran away.”
“And Skadi told me to kill everyone. No survivors, no witnesses,” he said. “I didn’t argue. I didn’t question. I didn’t think. I just killed them, quickly and cleanly. They were better deaths than what any reaver would have given them.”
“You murdered those men.”
“I served my queen!” he roared. “I was her bodyguard, her servant, her sword. I didn’t take my place in the royal castle by defying commands. When I was born, I was nothing and no one, and I knew from the first day I was old enough to think for myself that I would end up a rotting old fisherman or a corpse unless I became something more, something better.�
�� He pounded his fist on his chest again and again. “And I did! I was the great swordsman in the city, the greatest duelist, the greatest warrior. I won those fights with my strength and my steel. That was mine! And I won my place in the castle at the queen’s side. It was mine! I earned it!”
“And once you had something so precious, you suddenly had something to lose, for the first time in your whole life. And that scared you more than death, didn’t it?” she asked. “You couldn’t stand the thought of losing what you’d won.”
He didn’t answer.
“So you served loyally when it suited you, and you killed mercilessly when it suited you. And Skadi knew the truth of it. She saw right through you,” Freya said. “She knew you would do anything to keep your place in her house. She knew you were not a man of honor. You were a man to be bought and sold. And she bought you. She used you to clean up her mess on Mount Esja. She sent you to make sure Ivar’s son died in the wilderness. She had you cover her tracks and mistakes. And when there was no one left to kill, not a soul left she could trust, she even took you into her bed. She bought you, soul and flesh together.”
“Only when I wanted it,” he said hoarsely.
Freya smiled sadly. “Keep telling yourself that.”
The salty sea wind whipped the young man’s hair up into a writhing tangle of black snakes around his pale face. “When Skadi dies, Thora will become both vala and queen, and I will be her king. And then I’ll have everything.”
“You really think it will be so easy?”
“Easy? Haven’t you been listening? I’ve been fighting and killing and whoring all my life to get this far. I lost my arm!” He glared at her with serpentine eyes. “I’ve suffered more than any man twice my age, and my reward will be twice as great for it.”
“Are you going to try to kill me again?” She held up her knife. “I’m no murderer, but I’ll kill a man in self-defense.”
“Maybe another time.” He nodded past her.
Freya turned to see Halfdan and a handful of carls trudging up the lane toward them.
“I guess you really are Leif the Lucky,” she said. “If you were any other man, it would be a small matter to kill you, even with witnesses. But you’re too well-loved now, aren’t you? You’re too popular to just die like a common criminal. Politics.”
“Which just leaves the question,” he said, “of whether you will tell them what really happened to the king.”
Freya sniffed. “If I tell Halfdan and he believes me, it’ll mean chaos in the city. Some will take his side, and some will stay loyal to the queen. There might even be someone else out there with dreams of sitting in Skadi’s throne. Dozens, maybe hundreds, would die before the matter was settled. But nothing would really change. Ivar will still be dead, and the reavers will still be out there.”
“That’s very true.”
“So I won’t tell him yet. Just remember that Omar also knows the truth, and he’s not as easy to kill as I am.”
Leif snorted.
She looked at him one last time. “But when the time is right, the truth will come out. And as a friend of mine once said, that will be an interesting day.”
Leif smiled coldly, and they waited in silence for Halfdan to arrive.
Chapter 25
Wren walked slowly through the predawn gloom. A miserable gray fog clung to the city, drifting down the streets with the aether and she hurried through it.
Woden, I’m still angry at you, but I’d be willing to reconsider my feelings a bit if you just get me out of this city without seeing another ghost.
She pulled her blanket tight around her shoulders even though she could feel the sweat trickling down her arms and running down the small of her back. She wanted to hurl the blanket and her coat away and run through the cold air, feeling the chill on her bare skin. But she knew her skin wasn’t bare anymore. The fur chafed her arms and legs.
Her teeth chattered.
Allfather, shield me from sight. Let me walk out into the world alone and unharmed, and I’ll forgive you, I promise.
She went west, hurrying down the narrow lanes between the dark and silent houses as the sky began to lighten in the east, as the first faint hints of the sun began to swallow the stars. The western seawall of Rekavik stood in poorer repair than the eastern wall, and with fewer guards upon it. It was a small matter to slip out one of the unmanned doors in the wall and then to quietly walk down the pebbled beach with the salt-pocked stones on her left and the open sea lapping on her right.
A lone guard called out to her, his voice thin and half-hearted somewhere behind her, but she gritted her teeth and kept her back to him, and she reached the end of the wall and the open fields without being stopped. An hour after leaving the castle she stood on the dead, frozen grasses of Ysland, looking south across the snowy hills.
Gudrun used to tell tales of Alba where there were trees as far as the eye could see, and bushes dripping with berries, and flowers of red and yellow. She said her own father had gone on one of the last raids and seen it for himself. Back when there were ships to sail. Back when heroes walked the earth and the gods were kind and the demons stayed in their hells.
I wish she’d never told me about all that.
Wren set out on the road heading east. Every foot step crunched on the frosted earth, and in the early morning stillness each step sounded like an avalanche, but no one called out to her from the south wall of Rekavik, and soon the entire city had disappeared behind her over a small rise in the road, and she was alone.
She walked slowly. There was no hurry in her bones or blood. There was only the burning and the hunger, and beneath them, the fear. She felt her heart pattering and pounding in her chest as her eyes darted about the road and across the hills.
They’re out there, somewhere. Sleeping in their dens. Dreaming beast-dreams. Or hunting rabbits. Or killing people. I wonder if they can remember being people themselves. I wonder if I’ll remember. Maybe that’s what drives them mad. They remember what they were and can never be again.
The dirt road crunched on and on underfoot. A cool breeze blew through the frozen grass and the air keened softly and sadly, but she did not feel the chill in the air at all. She knew it was cold, and she knew she should be cold, but she wasn’t. Wren paused and took the blanket off her shoulders, and then took off her black coat, leaving her in just a thin black shirt and skirt and boots. She pushed her sleeves up to her elbows and looked at the thick, dark red hair on her arms.
Fur. Not hair. It’s fur. My fur.
The longer she stared at it, the less horrific it became, fading to the merely strange, and then settling into something that was almost familiar.
Fur is just hair. Everything has hair. Rabbits, mice, beavers. And they’re not monsters.
She set out again, quicker this time, moving lightly with long easy strides. There were faint scents on the breeze, the pheromone traces of grouse in their nests and rabbits in their burrows, all sleeping safely tucked away in their holes in the earth, their little bodies wrapped around each other for warmth in the long night of winter. And for a moment, Wren looked to her right and considered following the smell of rabbits back to wherever it was coming from, and digging the delicious morsels out of their holes.
She blinked and gulped the cool air through her mouth.
An eagle screamed and she slowed down to scan the skies, and after a long moment she spied a tiny black dot on the northern horizon in the no-color space between the fading darkness of the night and the growing light of the morning. As she stared at the bird, wondering how far away it must have been, another sound whispered in her ear and she jerked her head away from it.
“Damn flies. You know, Allfather, not that I’m speaking to you, but after everything you’ve done to me and everyone else in this poor land, the very least consideration you might have made would be to spare us the whining of bloodflies in our ears.”
She hissed as the fly bit her ear, and she slapped the bite mark. Her
fingers froze, and she swallowed, and closed her eyes. Under her fingertips, she felt the long pointed shape of her ear poking up through the thick tangle of her hair. This wasn’t like the fur, there was nothing normal to compare it to, to wave it away. This was her flesh, grown and twisted out of form. Her hand shook and she took it away from her head.
In a flurry of gestures and gasps, she ran her hands over her face and chest and legs, and then held her hands closer before her eyes, searching for more changes. And she found them. Her nose felt rough instead of smooth, and her fingers looked shorter and thicker, and her skirts no longer reached all the way to the bottoms of her boots, having rising above the level of her foot.
There was also a soreness in her back.
It’s not from walking, though, and it’s not from sleeping in that soft bed in the castle.
Wren tried to reach back to touch her shoulder blades and spine, but felt nothing strange.
I’m cracking apart, splitting and tearing. And when the pain is more than I can bear, I’ll scream until I can’t scream anymore, until I’m not human anymore, and I’ll go running mad across the hills, naked and crazed, to kill some frightened child in her bed, to kill some brave young man, to go on killing until someone kills me. It’s happening. It’s happening right now.
But there was something else, something both like and unlike pain, a warm dull throbbing between her legs. It had been easy to ignore as long as she had been moving, but now, in the stillness, she felt the heat in her sex slowly rising. Hesitantly, and then gingerly, she pressed her hand against the firm curve of flesh between her thighs, and a rolling wave of fire and hunger and joy crashed upward through her spine and down through her legs. She moved her fingers slowly and stood on unsteady legs, her chest heaving.
Wren sank to her knees, licking her lips, closing her eyes and thinking of Arn, lovely young Arn standing in the darkness, his naked arms wrapping around her, his warm flesh rising sharply inside her. Her hips shuddered again, and again, trembling in ecstasy.
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