The Girl the Sea Gave Back

by Adrienne Young

  “You’re my friend.”

  I looked at him, but he kept his eyes ahead. After the Herja came, friends had become family because so many families were broken. But Asmund hadn’t considered himself Aska or Riki or Nādhir in a long time. “You know you can stay, don’t you?”

  He looked up at me then, his brow pulling. “Stay?”

  “You know you can come back to Hylli. Whenever you want.” I wasn’t giving him permission and I wasn’t asking him to fight. But I wondered if he knew. If he thought he couldn’t undo what he’d done. “There’s a place for you, if you want it.”

  “I know that. But I can’t go back.”

  He didn’t look at me as he kicked his heels into the horse, riding ahead. The river curved again and we moved to the right side of the water as the left side deepened. I knew what he meant. Fighting and living were two different things. But in the span of three days, everything had changed. And I wondered if the future of the Nādhir was changing again, like it had ten years ago. Maybe we’d outwitted fate and it was coming back for us now. Maybe the gods Sigr and Thora had remembered their taste for war.

  Again, the feeling of someone’s eyes on me crawled over my skin and I pulled the reins back sharply, stopping. The water rippled against the horse’s legs, moving around us like liquid moonlight, and I studied the forest with the breath held in my chest until my eyes caught sight of a figure in the dark. My hand lifted to my axe and I focused my eyes, watching it move in the shadows. It seemed to float, disappearing behind one tree and then reappearing behind another.

  Kjeld stopped ahead, turning back.

  “What is it?” Asmund called out.

  “There.” I pointed toward the trees, trying to focus my eyes in the dim light, and my hand fell from the handle of the axe as I realized. It was a girl.

  “I don’t see anything,” Asmund said, his horse splashing in the water as he made his way back to me.

  My lips parted, my hand winding tighter in the reins until the leather stung against my skin. It wasn’t just a girl. It was the Kyrr girl, from the glade.

  I watched her move slowly through the haze, her face cast to the ground before her and her hands hanging heavy at her sides. Like a spirit wandering. Like the undead souls from the old stories the Tala used to tell the children around the altar fire.

  Where are you?

  A voice whispered hot against my ear and I stilled, the chill in the air turning to a biting cold.

  “Halvard?” Asmund set a hand on my arm and I flinched, blinking.

  His uneasy eyes ran over my face.

  And when I looked up again, she was gone.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled, shaking my head. “It’s nothing.”

  Asmund surveyed me for another moment before he nodded and pushed past me, leading his horse to take the front of our line.

  Kjeld watched me warily, reaching for the bracelet around his wrist. The copper disc shone in the moonlight. “Alright?”

  “It was nothing,” I said again, but to myself.

  He turned, following Asmund around the cliff face, and I lifted the bottom of my armor vest, my hand going back to the bandaged wound beneath my tunic. Maybe infection was spreading faster than I thought. Or maybe it was the nights of no sleep that were casting visions in the fog. I looked back once more to the trees as the others disappeared ahead. But there was nothing. No one.

  Except the heat of breath still warm against my ear.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TOVA

  I pushed my frozen hands toward the heat of the fire until I could almost feel its sting. My head ached, the pain of it reaching down my neck and into my shoulders and back. The henbane would take days to leave my blood, but the Spinners had given me what I’d asked for.

  The vision had been clear, as if they wanted me to find him. The Nādhir from the glade was in Utan.

  The flames licked up the dry wood, turning it black in the freshly dug fire pit before me. The Svell camp had expanded beyond the glade so far that I could see no end to the tents that spread into the forest. In only hours, they’d be on their way to the fjord.

  Warriors from every Svell village stood together in the clearing as Vigdis recited the funeral rites for Bekan. The sound of their voices rumbled like thunder in the distance, the sacred words spoken on every tongue. I had heard the chieftain talk of his people many times, often with a conviction that seemed to rattle the walls of the ritual house. But I’d never seen them. Not like this.

  Every one of them was ready for war, but no one had told them that it was Vigdis’ blade that had gotten their chieftain killed and I suspected no one would. If they knew Bekan’s own brother had betrayed him before a knife was driven into his chest, they may not follow him to battle. It was a secret he could trust Siv and the others who saw what happened in the glade to keep.

  “Are you sure?” Jorrund leaned in closer to the fire, his eyes wide with concern. They gleamed beneath his bushy eyebrows as he studied me.

  “Yes,” I answered, watching the pillar of smoke lifting from Bekan’s funeral fire in the distance.

  The pyre was engulfed in fire and I could just barely make out the form of Bekan’s body as it was eaten up by the flames. A lump curled tight in my throat and I blinked back the tears threatening to fall.

  I didn’t know why my heart ached at the thought of his death. Bekan had no more than tolerated me in the years since I’d come to Liera and when Vera died, he’d made no secret of the fact that he’d come to hate me. But I remembered how soft he was with his daughter. How his hand absently reached out, touching her fair hair as she stood between him and Jorrund. And even if I wasn’t one of his people, I could feel the weight of what the loss meant. Something had shifted for not only the Svell, but for the web of fate. And for the first time, I was beginning to feel like a fly trapped in its threads instead of the spider walking them.

  I had only summoned the Spinners once before. I’d snuck away in the early morning to burn the henbane on the same beach Jorrund had found me on. I huddled over the poisoned smoke until I was close to retching and asked the only question I’d ever had.

  I wanted to know why.

  Why my people had given me to the sea. Why Naðr had taken her favor from me. Why I’d washed up on the Svell shore instead of drifting out into the lonely death I’d been sent to.

  That was before I knew never to ask the Spinners why. Because the answer was something too twisting and turning for mortal minds to comprehend. They sat at the foot of the Tree of Urðr, spinning. Always spinning. Past, present, and future all on the same loom.

  They didn’t answer. Instead, they gave me only darkness. Silence. I fell into the emptiness of my mind when I breathed in the smoke and when I woke the next morning, drenched by the rising tide and barely able to open my eyes, I swore I’d never ask them why again. Now, I knew only to ask them what, who, and when if I cast the stones. Because they were the only answers the Spinners would ever give to me.

  “It wasn’t the only thing I saw,” I whispered, careful not to let Gunther hear me.

  Jorrund sank down before the fire. “What is it? What did you see?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to bring the vision back to my mind. “The water. A fire. I could hear…”

  But heavy footsteps in the dirt made us both look up and I squinted against the pain that awakened in my head. Vigdis walked toward us from the glade, the fire still raging behind him. His muddy boots stopped before me, planted into the earth like the roots of a thousand-year-old tree.

  “Tell me.” His voice was rough, his face still streaked with dirt and soot. Siv found a place beside him.

  “He’s in Utan.”

  “How do you know?”

  I pressed my palm to my forehead, breathing through the ache between my eyes. “Because I saw him.”

  Vigdis stared at the ground, unblinking. “Then we go to Utan.”

  Siv and Jorrund both looked up, surprised.

  “Get them re
ady,” he ordered.

  “I’ll go,” Siv offered. “I’ll take ten warriors and meet you before you reach Hylli.”

  But the edge in Vigdis’ voice deepened. “We all go to Utan. Together.”

  The look on Siv’s face turned from confusion to concern. “All of our warriors have arrived, Vigdis. We should move on the fjord and take Hylli. Now. There’s no need to waste time with the border villages.”

  “We go to Utan. Then we go to Hylli.”

  “You don’t need an entire army to kill one man.” I stood, wavering on unsteady feet.

  He turned, towering over me until I was hidden in his shadow. “Speak again, and I’ll cut your tongue out,” he snapped. “I don’t want to only kill one man. I want him to watch us slaughter every soul in Utan before we kill him.” The words suddenly took on a soft, unnerving tone.

  “You asked me to find him. Not tell you which village to attack.”

  “There are no warriors in Utan. They’ve called them to Hylli.” Siv seemed to agree, but Vigdis’ sharp look silenced her.

  Behind them, Gunther appeared the most unsettled. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, watching Vigdis warily.

  My stomach turned, my skin suddenly stinging against the fire’s heat. Jorrund’s arm steadied me as the glade tipped to one side and I leaned into him, almost tumbling to the ground.

  “Hylli will still be there when we reach the fjord. They’ll wait patiently for their deaths because they have no other choice.”

  He was right. There was nothing else to do unless they ran. And it wasn’t likely the Nādhir would. But the expression that crossed Siv’s and Gunther’s faces looked as if they’d already seen more blood spilled than they wanted to. The Svell were fighters but this wasn’t a generation built on battle. They’d defended their homes and their lands from raiders and thieves, but it had been more than a hundred years since they’d been at war with another clan.

  Siv had taken Ljós with Vigdis and the others and she’d cut down the Nādhir in the glade. I wondered if she was willing to destroy another village of old men, pregnant mothers, and children not old enough to hold up a sword.

  “We go to Utan. Now,” Vigdis said again, and this time, Siv answered the command with a tight nod.

  She turned on her heel and headed back to the Svell gathered before the funeral fire, and Vigdis set his attention to Jorrund. “She better be right.”

  Jorrund looked at me, and I could see that he was thinking the same thing. He was wondering. Doubting. He had only the power I gave him and that realization had given way to fear—something I had never really seen on the face of the old Svell Tala.

  He twisted his fingers nervously into the wooden beads strung around his neck and I turned, pushing through the Svell making their way to their horses. The fire was still raging, but I could no longer see Bekan. He had disappeared, the ash floating up into the air the only thing left of him in this world.

  It was an honor that the Nādhir warriors lying in the trees would never get. They’d have to rely on the sympathies of their gods and the prayers of their people to take them to the afterlife. The same fate would find the young Nādhir who’d killed Bekan, along with every living thing in Utan.

  At my word.

  The prophecy that had moved over my tongue. Just like the glade.

  I’d only ever watched the funerals from the forest, when the people of Liera gathered to send their dead to the afterlife, and I didn’t remember enough about the Kyrr to know what words they spoke or what customs they performed. I eyed the circular symbol on the inside of my wrist, tracing it with my finger. If I knew what the marks meant, maybe I would remember. Maybe the things I’d forgotten would return to me.

  The smell of burning flesh and sizzling tree sap filled the air and I stood before the pyre alone, unable to feel its warmth. I was only cold. Deep inside my bones. In every shadowed corner of my soul.

  The little house outside Liera didn’t seem like a cage now. It seemed like a refuge. One that I couldn’t reach.

  My stiff muscles trembled, sending a tremor through my entire body as the poison moved deeper through my veins. Maybe this was what the undead spirits were like, the ones that filled stories. But I wondered if maybe they weren’t stories after all. Maybe I was one of them. Flesh and bone on a corpse with no soul.

  The weight of the rune stones hung heavy around my neck, pulling me forward, to the fire.

  For a moment, I wondered if I’d even be able to feel it if I reached out and touched it. If I wrapped myself in its flames like a golden cloak. Maybe death would just feel like going home.

  I watched the flecks of white ash floating up from the pyre before me, dancing in the air like lifting snowflakes, and I thought the thing I’d been so careful not to. The words I was afraid could come to life and strangle me. Make me disappear.

  That I was the one who’d put Bekan on the pyre, not Vigdis. Just like Vera. And by the time the Svell reached the sea, I’d have a lot more blood on my hands.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HALVARD

  The first time I’d seen it, I was only eight years old.

  A rolling sea of red wildflowers burrowed up through the earth at the last of winter, bleeding into a wide stretch of the pale green valley. The evening fog pushing in from the sea hovered over it, like hands clasped carefully over the fragile wings of a moth.

  My fists wound tighter in the reins at the sight.

  I stopped the horse on the hill and slid down, standing waist deep in the tilting stalks of early spring blooms. My hands brushed over their tops as I walked, the smell of them bringing back countless memories of taking the path to the border villages with Aghi to trade crates of salted fish for herbs and dried venison. The valley dipped down in the center, the river slicing through it like a crack in the ice that covered the shallows of the fjord.

  “Aurvanger.” Asmund spoke the hallowed word softly, looking out over the view. His own brother had died in this very field during the last fighting season our people ever fought. Only weeks later, the Herja took his parents in a raid on Hylli.

  I’d heard so many stories about the battles that took the lives of the Aska and Riki for generations. Aghi had recounted the fury between the gods spilling out on the earth to my nieces over and over and I’d listen from where I sat beside the fire. Now, it was overgrown with wildflowers, making it hard to imagine death here.

  “They say those flowers didn’t start growing here until the Nādhir made peace.” Kjeld looked over us from where he still sat on his horse.

  “You sound like you don’t believe it,” I said.

  He dropped down, pulling the water skin from his saddlebag. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” I answered without hesitation. I’d seen too many unbelievable things to think anything was impossible.

  Asmund watched the top of the hill behind us. “We’ll wait until sundown. If Bard doesn’t show, we’ll meet him in Hylli.”

  But the sound of his voice carried his worry for his brother. If Bard didn’t show, there was no guarantee that we’d ever see him again. If the Svell had found his trail or caught up to him in Utan, maybe he was already dead. I could see that Asmund was thinking the same thing. His jaw clenched as he unbuckled the sheath beneath his arm.

  I walked out farther until I reached the boulders that lined the river and pulled my axe free, digging a trench into the soft earth that overlooked the water. Asmund followed me to the edge and I took one side of a large stone that was half buried in the sand. When he realized what I was doing, he took hold of the other side and we heaved it up onto the bank, setting it down on its end in the divot I’d dug. I packed the earth around the stele, stamping it down with the head of my axe, and sat back onto my heels before it. The flat side of the stone glittered in the sunlight with flecks of silver and black. It stood like a ghost in the fog before the legendary valley of Aurvanger.

  A lump rose in my throat and I swallowed it down, pulling my knife from my
belt. I wound my fingers tightly around its blade before I slid it against my calloused palm. The hot blood pooled in the center of my hand before I pressed my finger into it, carefully writing Aghi’s name across the face of the stele. Below it, I wrote Espen’s.

  I opened my mouth to say the ritual words, but they didn’t come. They wound tight in my chest like a fist, making it difficult to breathe.

  Once, Aghi had stood on the other side of battle from my father on this very field. Then, he became a father, an uncle, a grandfather to the very people he’d spent his life killing. He’d survived a lifetime fighting an unquenched blood feud only to die at the hands of the Svell and waste away in the forest with no funeral fire to honor him as he went on to the afterlife.

  But it was the death he wanted. He’d watched the clansmen he’d grown up with die protecting their people. He’d spoken the rites over their burning bodies and now, he had the same privilege, saved from the shame of dying quietly as an old man in his bed. It had been his greatest fear, being given an unworthy end.

  “… you have reached your journey’s end…” Asmund uttered the words I couldn’t, his voice trailing off in the wind.

  I breathed through the pain in my throat. It had been a long time since I’d prayed to Thora or Sigr. Not because I didn’t believe in them, but because I wasn’t sure they listened. The will of the gods was incomprehensible, their favor ever-changing, shifting like the bending rays of sunlight that dropped through the trees. But the sound of prayer still made my chest feel hollow with memories. Because on the lips of my family, it was still alive. And in many ways, they had become my gods.

  I’d held Aghi in my arms as the light left his eyes. I’d watched him take his last breath. And I hoped that had been enough to honor him.

  I pulled the taufr from inside my armor vest and rubbed my thumb over its smooth surface. The etched words were barely readable now, but I had carried the stone since the day my mother gave it to me as a small boy. It was a plea to Thora. A request for protection of the one who carried it. And it had protected me, many times.