“Where is Gudrun now? Still in Denveller?”
“Gudrun’s dead,” Wren yelled. “No on lives in Denveller anymore. It’s as dead as Hengavik.”
“And Logarven will join them soon unless we stop the reavers,” Freya added. “Can we come into the city?”
The bearded man nodded. “Come to the door.” And he disappeared from view.
“Well, that was easy,” Erik signed. “I’ll cover Katja. Maybe we can avoid an argument.” He unfolded a wool blanket and draped it over the sleeping woman, leaving only the dark brown hair at the top of her head uncovered.
They approached the iron door in the great wall and a moment later they heard the bangs and clangs of steel beams being lifted away, and stones being rolled, and men grunting. The door swung inward halfway with a vicious squeal, and then stuck fast in the passage. The man behind it grunted and jerked and shoved until the door banged free and smashed into his toe, and he limped back from the open doorway muttering curses faster than Freya could hear them.
The bearded man paused in the narrow stone passage, shaking his foot and shaking his head, but after a moment he straightened up and gave the newcomers a squinty-eyed look. “So then. I am Halfdan Grimsson, keeper of the gate and captain of the guard. Let’s have a look at you.” He waved them in.
Freya and the others filed past the iron door and through the narrow passage and emerged onto the twilight streets of the city where a dozen men bearing steel spears and swords stood frowning at them.
Halfdan waved them in away from the open door and then hunched down in front of Wren. “Show me your teeth, girl.”
“Why?”
“Just do it,” another man barked.
Wren sighed and opened her mouth. Halfdan nodded. “Good.” He inspected Erik and Freya in the same fashion, and then reached over to pull the blanket off Katja.
“No, leave her alone. She’s sick,” Freya said, stepping in front of him.
Halfdan shook his head. “We check everyone. No exceptions. Even our own hunters, even if they were only out for half an hour. This is a safe place, and it’s damn well going to stay safe. So either I look at her teeth or you can all go right back out the way you came in.”
Freya put her hand on her sister’s covered head. Erik and Wren both shuffled closer to the white elk, but the guards were quick to poke them back again with their swords. Freya nodded. “All right, look. She was bitten. But she isn’t-”
The men erupted in a chorus of shouts, some telling the newcomers to leave, others threatening to slaughter them in the street. Spears and swords flashed with the light of the torches, and the huntress grabbed the handles of her bone knives.
“Shut up!” Halfdan roared, and the men fell quiet, though their faces remained just as cruel and dark. “Now listen here, girl, if your sister’s been bit, then she’s not coming into the city, and that’s the end of it. So either you can take her and leave, or you can kill her yourself, or we can do it for you. No one will blame you for not wanting to kill your own kin. The Allfather knows we’ve all had to do the same and we’d wish it on no one. But the plague doesn’t pass these walls, not for anyone or any reason.”
“The Allfather knows a great deal more than that,” Wren said. “And the valas of Denveller know more than most. Do you know what this is?” She held up her hand with the glint of yellow on her finger.
Halfdan’s eyes widened. “Rinegold?”
“That’s right,” the girl said loudly. “I am the keeper of the souls of all the valas of Denveller, and I’ve brought them here to help Skadi cure the reaver plague and save our people. But I won’t come in unless you let Freya bring her sister.”
Halfdan’s expression fell back into stony resolution. “Then you don’t come in.”
Wren stared. “But… I have the ring… and the souls… and the cure.”
“No exceptions.” Halfdan sniffed and spat in the street. “Maybe you can end the plague and maybe you can’t, but this city stays safe either way. So what’s it going to be?”
Freya counted the men and their swords, wondering if there was any chance of fighting past them, of escaping into the city, of racing to the castle down by the sea.
No, no chance of that at all.
She took her hands off her knives. “You can lock her up.”
Halfdan smirked and shook his head. “No exceptions.”
“You can lock her up in a cell, underground, guarded, in chains.” Freya swallowed. She imagined Katja shackled to a wall, whining and whimpering in the dark, her body mangled and twisted.
“No exceptions.”
Freya lurched forward and shoved the big man back. “If we find a cure, we’ll need someone to test it on, won’t we? And when that time comes, do you want your queen to send you outside your precious walls to capture a fully turned reaver with a whole pack around him, or do you want to go down to a cell where there’s just one reaver, already in chains?”
Halfdan narrowed his eyes and tilted his head. “The latter, I suppose.”
“Then help me put my sister somewhere safe.” Freya reached back and took hold of Arfast’s shaggy coat. “And then you can take us to your queen and be done with us, and go back to guarding your precious wall.”
Halfdan paused, then grinned and called over his shoulder, “Bar the door! Back to your posts, all but Aenar and Tryggvi. We’re letting them in.”
The other guards sealed the iron door and returned to their posts on the dark wall, and most of them grumbled a few curses on their way. Halfdan took the lead and his two friends took the rear and together they all entered the city of Rekavik. The area just inside the wall looked very much like Hengavik, with the same half-buried homes and turf roofs, though here every chimney was smoking and firelight flickered around the doorway curtains, and voices echoed in every house, talking, laughing, and shouting.
A few old men sat smoking their little bone pipes in the lane, a few young women stood gossiping in the shadows, and a few small children still ran through the roads, shouting and fighting and laughing as their mothers called them in to supper. The smells of baked fish and fried fish and seared fish crept from every home and mingled in the streets, telling tales of the meals about to be eaten. Freya licked her lips and teeth, tasting the salt and oil in the air.
As the road sloped down closer to the sea, the houses stood up taller and taller, until they were no longer buried in the earth at all but free-standing and mortared with all manners of clay and mud, with whale bones and walrus tusks arching over them, wrapped in oiled leather to create bulbous roofs that looked like living beasts beached on the stone houses, their innards glowing with firelight and rippling with the shadows of those who dwelled within.
Ahead Freya saw the castle squatting in the center of the peninsula, two levels high and ringed with a high wall. The highest point of the whole building was the tower in its center, but it looked to only be one or two levels higher than the rest of the structure. A dozen trails of smoke were draining upwards from the castle on all sides, but the voices were lower in this neighborhood. There were no men smoking or children playing here.
Halfdan trudged down to the castle gate and walked straight through the narrow iron door in the castle wall, leading the way into the small courtyard where several more men with swords stood beside an open peat fire. Halfdan waved to them, and they waved back, and the bearded guardsman turned left along the inner wall.
“Here.” He pointed at a dark corner against the outer wall of the castle.
Freya saw another iron door, one older and rusted at the bottom of a short stone stair dug into the earth. She trotted down and opened the door, and saw a dank windowless cell barely large enough for two people to stand side by side. A pair of manacles hung from a chain on the back wall. Freya closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.