The Beast and The Sibyl

by A. J. Adams

  I got up and told them simply and quickly how the storm had driven me south and into the hands of the enemy. Of course, my brothers were appalled.

  “They would have flogged you and then burned you alive? Shameful!”

  “Those cowards! Why didn’t they simply kill you?”

  “That Patriarch is no priest! He’s an agent of Loki!”

  Then I told them about Bliss, so they knew straight away she was a heroine.

  “Brave and cunning! An excellent ruse!”

  “Skraeling blood. It always shows!”

  A simple showing of my newly healed wounds convinced them of her medical skills, and they listened rapt as I told them about her visions.

  “So we know the duke left a week ago?”

  “Then he’ll be here in a fortnight.”

  “If the girl is right.” That was Turid. He’s always slow to accept anything. If you told him the ship was on fire and showed him smoke, he’d insist on seeing the flames before believing you.

  Lizbeth was there too, giving me a nasty look. “Visions don’t come to anyone. How do we know she’s not making it up?”

  I would have blasted them both for doubting my word and daring to question Bliss, but Rune was giving me that look that said he was all over it.

  “Siv testifies that Bliss is a true vala, and I trust his word,” he said smoothly. “But valas all differ in their powers. Are there any here who have ever seen a vala at work?”

  There was a dead silence.

  “Bliss is a child of the goddess Freyja,” Rune said quietly. “This makes her a healer, and it gives her another gift. Our vala is a truth-sayer.”

  At that there was a general gasp of surprise. I had my cue. “Bliss, shall we show them?”

  This was it. Bliss stood there, Saga at her side, tall and proud, just like the first time I’d seen her.

  “Who would doubt her?” a brother said loudly. “Look at her! She’s Skraeling through and through.”

  I picked up a pebble and turned to him. “Knut, see this pebble?”

  “Sure.”

  I palmed it and put out my fists. “It is in my left hand. True or false?”

  “How would I know?” Knut exclaimed.

  “Guess.”

  “True!”

  I showed him. “False. Try again.”

  We did it six times, and he got it wrong four times.

  “What does that prove?” Lizbeth snapped.

  “Watch. Bliss? The pebble is in my right hand.”

  She leaned out, touching my wrists with a finger. “False.”

  “Correct.”

  We did it again and again, Bliss never failing. At that, the crowd was silent, but we weren’t done yet.

  “Bliss tells me there are entertainers in Prydain who hoax the simple people by using secret signals,” I told them. I handed the pebble to Wynne. “You do it, and then pass it to someone else.”

  By the time Bliss had picked truth over lie correctly for Wynne six times, the rest were simply trying because they were curious.

  “Please! May I try?”

  “I think I’m a good liar! Let me!”

  Turid had a go, too, and came nodding, “I agree that she’s a truth-sayer. Nobody could choose correctly dozens of times. Nobody.” Then he pursed his mouth. “But the visions are unproven.”

  Like I said, stubborn as hell.

  But funnily enough Mina, one of the more spoilt and difficult of the Guildsmen’s daughters, stood up and testified. “I’ve seen Bliss before,” she said slowly. “It was years ago. The duke was separated from his hunting party. He had an accident and might have died, except that she had a vision.”

  Bliss nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Remember there was a celebration?” Mina reminded the women. “There was a big feast at the palace, and a parade?”

  “I do remember!” Lizbeth said, “but that wasn’t her.” She gave my Bliss an unloving look. “I would have remembered.”

  “It was her,” Mina said. “She was shy and hiding behind the Lady Divine most of the time, but I was quite close, and I saw her eyes. They gave me nightmares for weeks.”

  “Hey!” I was up and ready to tear her into two, but Bliss grabbed my arm and pulled me back. She couldn’t silence me, though. “You shut up, you disrespectful little bikkja!”

  “Siv!” Bliss was loud, cutting through the uproar that exploded around us. “Look,” she said sensibly. “She spoke the truth. You can’t yell at her for something she thought when she was a child.”

  “Yes, I can.” But I knew Bliss was right. It was damn annoying. “She’s a—”

  “Hush now. Yelling won’t help.”

  Rune was calling for order. “Stop with the name-calling, all of you,” he said loudly. “Are we savages who can’t conduct a conclave without a brawl?”

  All of us brothers looked uncomfortable, but the women were angry, murmuring about witches. I heard the word Beast, too. It was maddening, but I knew Rune was right so I shut up.

  “I’m from the Vale,” Wynne was up and testifying. “I’ve never been to Salvation, but we all heard of the duke’s little sibyl.” She nodded to Bliss. “I heard her description, and they all said she had white hair and blue eyes.”

  “But did they say her visions were true?” Turid demanded.

  “Well, actually, they said she had one vision and saved the duke,” Wynne said unwillingly.

  I got onto that immediately. “Bliss had to hide her talents!” I explained why and that had everyone talking again.

  “Cowardly Prydain, destroying everything that they fear!”

  “Hey! The book of Ullr says suffer a witch not to live!”

  “And I say Freyja’s wand up Ullr’s arse!”

  I’d been expecting this so I kept an arm around Bliss, making sure that she knew she was protected. She was reading me nicely because she looked up at me and smiled. “You know you can’t kill them all, right?”

  At least she knew I’d control myself. Bliss wasn’t worried I’d do anything, but listening to the women was scaring her. She was trying not to show it, but she was shaking. Saga was uneasy, too, growling and standing in front of Bliss protectively.

  “All right, that’s enough!” Rune was itemising. “We have all witnessed, so now we vote. I say that Bliss from Salvation is a truth-sayer. Who is with me?”

  The response was immediate, with every brother calling, “I vote!”

  Wynne then said loudly, “I vote, too. There’s no doubt in my mind!”

  That got the women nodding and all of them, even Lizbeth, put up their hands.

  “Confirmed,” Rune announced. “All right. In disputes, we can all call on Bliss.”

  That caused a difficult silence.

  “You mean she gets to judge us?” Mina asked.

  At that everyone was looking anxious. One of the things, probably the only thing, that the women liked about us Skraeling is that we’re democratic. We vote on disputes and on laws, everyone getting one vote. The idea of taking that away and giving it to one person appalled all of us, even me, and I had total faith in my girl.

  “No,” Rune said quickly. “Disputes are seldom about truth and lies; they’re mostly about viewpoints. But if someone is falsely accused of stealing, for example, they can go to Bliss and make their declaration of innocence. If Bliss attests they are telling the truth, then that will be taken as evidence when we hear cases in conclave.”

  There was lots of murmuring and then one of the vixens, the Prydain women who’d chosen to live apart stood up, crying, “Rose took my hairbrush and broke it!”

  “Did not!” Another vixen stood up. “It was Petronella!”

  “It was not!”

  And right there and then they were screaming at each other. Call me an idiot but I suddenly realised why Bliss had been so shy of revealing her talents. She was going to be in the middle of this, not just judging but also overwhelmed by their poisonous emotions.

  “B
liss, will you say?” Rune spoke very formally and it didn’t even occur to me that he’d called her by name instead of vala.

  The girls crowded around Bliss who stood there with Saga at her side. The pair of them looked like a vision straight from the old tales. I felt a shiver go down my spine and I’m not ashamed to say that I had the feeling that I was standing in the presence of Freyja herself. From the hush and the respectful looks of my brothers, they felt the same.

  Bliss looked cool and collected, but I knew her. I could see her hand was trembling a little. “The Lady Freyja loves us all,” she said calmly. “She is a kind and forgiving goddess.” She put out her hands. “Ladies, will you take my hands?”

  At this, the vixens were suddenly shy. Rose was blushing fiercely, and I was convinced it was a flush of shame at being caught out in a lie. Bliss though cupped all their hands together, leaned towards them and said, “Did one of you accidentally break the brush?”

  There was a silence and the vixens were trembling and crying all together.

  “Molly never shares!”

  “My hair was a mess!”

  “It’s awful, and everyone’s always fighting!”

  “I hate it here!”

  “Me, too!”

  Bliss let them talk and cry, just standing there, holding their hands. When they ran dry, she nodded to Rune. “I know the truth of what happened.”

  Of course she’d read their minds. I knew it, Rune knew it but now I understood that we would never say so. This was just a hairbrush, a silly nothing, yet it had three women in tears. Whatever Bliss did now, one would be happy to be vindicated but the other would feel guilty, and she would probably hate Bliss for revealing her shame in front of the entire conclave.

  As the truth of the situation hit me, I felt an ice-cold pain in my gut. With the number of disputes we had, Bliss would make enemies everywhere. And I love my brothers to death, but I also know them: someone would take offence, deem Bliss to have shamed his name, and then my girl would be facing a knife or a sword.

  I just stood there, frozen with terror for her, when Bliss looked up and addressed the conclave. “The Lady Freyja has spoken! The truth has been revealed!”

  Then she took the three vixens aside and spoke quietly to them all. We couldn’t hear a thing she said, and when they all nodded, she simply kissed them, formally embracing them, and she did it so naturally that we didn’t have a clue who was guilty and who wasn’t.

  Finally, Bliss turned to the conclave. “Molly, Rose and Petronella, do you agree this is resolved?”

  They all spoke clearly, “Yes!”

  “We all make mistakes,” Bliss announced. “It’s good to own up, and it’s good to forgive. The goddess bless us all!”

  Rune was silent, but I could see him thinking rapidly. I wasn’t sure if Bliss had just done something fantastically wonderful or whether she’d just taken over as judge and jury. The others were uncertain, too, I could tell by the way they were looking to Rune.

  Rune’s not our best warrior, I am, but we picked him as our leader because he’s got a gift. If you want to fight a bear, you ask me. If you want someone to keep fifty brothers together without them killing each other, you ask Rune. He doesn’t just sort out fights, he stops them before they start. He’s tough, fair, just, and fearless. You won’t find a better man than Rune.

  Now he nodded. “The matter of the broken hairbrush is dealt with!”

  That’s typical of him. Now it wasn’t about handing over justice, it was women bickering over a hairbrush. Nobody wanted to get involved in that.

  Rune kept talking. “Bliss is a trained healer, so we can all call on her. She has a stock of medicine, but over the next few days we will ask her what she needs. I expect all of you to help, especially the women who know their herbs, and the hunters who range in the forest.”

  That was a no-brainer. Everyone called, “That’s fair!” and “I agree!” so there wasn’t even a vote.

  “Bliss has two kisa, beautiful animals, and as you can see, her wolf Saga is her constant companion.”

  At that everyone was looking at Saga who had the presence of mind to sit and look up appealingly at Bliss.

  “I also vote that we suspend hunting kisa and wolves for one year. As a courtesy to our new healer and truth-sayer.”

  That was tougher because some of the brothers are crazy about hunting, and some of the women fear predators, but we won that, too. “We have eighty-nine for and six against. The ban is in force!”

  Now it was coming. Rune would seek to appoint Bliss as our vala. I’d been looking forward to it, seeing it as validation for Bliss, and to be honest, honour for me, too, but now I was thinking differently. The pressure on my girl was going to be bad enough.

  “Now to the question of Bliss’ visions,” Rune announced, “We have heard Mina testify that the Prydain accepted Bliss as a vala, or a sibyl as they call it, and heard Wynne confirm the description.”

  “Has she seen our people?” Knut called. “Are they safe in the west?”

  There was complete uproar. I held onto Bliss’ hand, and she was stroking Saga’s ears, calming them both, from what I could see. As for me, I was shaking, too, because I knew I’d made a fearful error.

  I’d thought my brothers would welcome a vala, but now I could see that it simply crystallised their fears. We’d given so much, and now we needed to know if it had been worth it or whether our efforts had been for nothing.

  I looked at their faces, drawn with need, and realised that Bliss was now a target. They would look to her for reassurance, and if she didn’t give it... I didn’t want to think of the consequences.

  “Silence!” Rune was up and roaring. “Brothers, listen!” He got the loudest ones to quiet and went on speaking softly, forcing the others to shut up so they could hear him. “Visions don’t come to order,” he told the crowd, “but Bliss has seen our near future. The duke was preparing to leave Brighthelme six days ago.”

  There was frantic calculating.

  “He’ll be here in ten days if he’s fast, or two weeks,” Turid called, adding, “if we can trust the vision!”

  The bugger.

  “What if she’s a witch?” Lizbeth was loud and going red because the brothers near her, including her mate Bjarke, were trying to shut her up. “I’ve a right to speak!” she snapped. “What if she’s lying? What if she’s working for the duke and trying to confuse us? Or just making it up?”

  I was going to blast the evil she-wolf, but Rune was before me. He glanced at Bliss and said smoothly, “We are sensible people, Skraeling and Prydain together, so we will wait and make up our own minds.”

  “But—” Lizbeth yelled, “we don’t know her!”

  I was on my feet, roaring, “Do you doubt me?”

  I was lunging towards her, and I think I might have killed her but for Bliss launching herself in my path. “No, Siv!”

  Then Rune was dragging me back, snarling, “Leave that bikkja to me!” in my ear.

  With both of them hanging onto me, I got my control back. “I won’t kill her. At least, not now.”

  Everyone was yelling, and this time Rune let them. “They need to vent,” he said to me. “Best they do it now.”

  I didn’t like it, but Bliss was nodding, “They’re terrified,” she whispered. “They’re at exploding point, Siv. Let them blow off some steam.”

  So we stood there, waiting patiently. Funnily enough, as people saw we weren’t saying anything, they stopped yelling. Rune was acting super cool, chatting quietly to Wynne as if nothing was going on.

  I’m not good at duplicity so I stroked Saga. She knew what was going on; I swear that wolf is part human, but she was happy to take advantage, moaning as I rubbed her neck and chest. And when I stopped a moment, she looked up and yipped in half entreaty, half complaint. That got everyone’s attention!

  “Any woman who has a tame wolf is worth listening to,” Turid’s voice suddenly cut through the remaining babble.

&nb
sp; “And she did a great job with Hildegard,” Hakon was adding his vote.

  Rune took immediate advantage, calling, “It’s agreed then? We welcome Bliss as our healer and truth-sayer while we wait for her vision to prove itself.”

  He does that sometimes, framing the vote as if it’s already done. It used to make me uncomfortable, it’s not entirely straightforward, but now I was welcoming it.

  “I vote yes but we’ll also prepare for the duke’s arrival,” Brant called out.

  “That’s fair and sensible,” I called out quickly.

  “I agree,” Rune shouted.

  There was a hesitation and then Hakon called, “I agree!”

  At that, there was a chorus, so Rune nodded and announced, “It’s agreed! Conclave has ended.”

  I have to say, I can come out of a fight feeling on top of the world, but that conclave wrung me out. I didn’t show it, of course. My brothers gathered round, wanting to hear the story of how I was swept south again and dying to take a good look at Bliss.

  “Siv?”

  Bjarke was tugging at my sleeve. I’d not seen him since Lizbeth had left me and moved into his cabin. I’d always liked him, and I pitied him after his accident, so I was gentle with him. “Hello, Bjarke. How are you?”

  “I’m fine.” But he was frowning. “Brother, have I hurt your honour?”

  At that, my heart sank. Lizbeth had shamed me by leaving me for him. She’d used him to do it, taking advantage of the fact that the accident had left him almost childlike. I didn’t blame him; I couldn’t.

  “Lizbeth was your mate,” Bjarke sounded miserable.

  “Do you like her?” I asked him.

  “Yes!” The answer just ripped out of him. “Lizbeth looks after me.”

  That was a surprise. “Good. That’s nice of her.”

  “I had an accident,” Bjarke confided. “I think I’m getting better, but there are fogs. I’m not sure...”

  I put his mind at rest. “Bjarke, Lizbeth and I weren’t a good match. You two are. My honour is fine, and so’s yours.” I embraced him. “You’re my good brother.”

  When I let him go he was smiling, but Lizbeth was there, looking anxious. “Bjarke? Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” He took her by the hand. “I was just talking to Siv.”