Thora’s hand whipped out from the shadows and smacked Wren across the face. “We had the finest men, the bravest warriors, and the finest prince, a prince worthy of standing beside the Allfather at Ragnarok, a prince who-” She broke off, her lip trembling. “But now they’re all dead. The plague took them, one by one, leaving us with the old, and with Leif.”
Wren jerked back from the doorway, clutching her stinging cheek with a sudden tear gathering in the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry. You must have lost people you loved, too. Sorry. I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too.” The apprentice stared out from her haunted, sunken eyes and then withdrew into her room, leaving Wren alone in the dark corridor.
She stared at the closed curtain for a moment, trembling and confused and tempted to press inside and talk to the tall girl again, but instead Wren turned and hurried down the hall with her eyes burning and lips squeezed tightly together. At the end of the passage she turned left and found a stone stair, and she ran down it, down and down the narrow crooked steps into the blackness until she found the earthen floor and she sat down in the cold and the dark, and she cried.
After a while she was too tired to cry anymore and she leaned back on the bottom step and stared into the utter darkness of the cellar. She was about to stand up and go back to her room to try to sleep when she heard footsteps above her descending the stairs. At first she didn’t move, content to let whatever servant find her and sneer at her and tell her to go back to her room. But then she heard the whisper.
“Morayo.”
The voice! It’s coming from down here!
Wren stood up, groping in the endless shadows for something, anything. She had no idea what she was looking for, but she had to look, and then she remembered the feet thumping down the long stone stair behind her, and she fumbled her way around what seemed to be a tall, frozen sack of potatoes, and she huddled down to wait.
Torchlight bobbed down the last few steps and one of the elderly guards entered the cellar with a lit candle in one hand and a small plate in the other. He walked across the cellar, taking his small ball of dancing light with him, illuminating the rough rock walls of the cave that served as the castle cellar, and Wren tried to see all the sacks of vegetables and grain, and all the salted carcasses, piled along the walls as he passed.
At the end of the cave the guard turned left and moved out of sight for a moment, but the candlelight continued to dance on the walls right there, just around the corner. And then the man returned, walking just as calmly and dully as before with his candle and plate, and he went up the steps, taking the light with him.
When he was gone, Wren stood up and carefully felt her way across the dark cave, rediscovering with her outstretched hands the sacks and butchered animals that she had seen a moment ago. She came to a place that she guessed to be the corner around which the man had disappeared, and she stopped, knelt down, and whispered, “Hello?”
“Morayo.”
Wren fell over backwards. The voice had been so close, just in front of her face. There had even been a faint gasp of breath, a movement of the cold air. She got back up and reached out with her hand. “My name is Wren. Who are you? Is that your name, Morayo?”
She groped left and right, and farther forward, but encountered nothing. Unwilling to move any farther from the stairs, Wren stopped trying to reach out. Instead, she pulled off her right glove with her teeth and held her bare hand in front of her face and rubbed the rinegold ring with her thumb, and whispered the words, “Wake up, you old hags.”
The ring glowed faintly, so faintly that at first all Wren could see was the ring itself floating in the dark. But the light grew a bit more until she could see her hand, and when she held the ring close to the ground she could see the face of the stone floor. She reached out again, extending her hand just above the floor. She found a plate, a dark circle of tin lying crooked on a bump, and a few small bones wearing a few small shreds of flesh and fat on them. There was a broth in the bottom of the plate as well, but it had run across the tilted surface and down to the ground.
Wren reached a little farther, and found a bare foot. Five dirty toes twitched in the light, and someone inhaled sharply.
A woman?
Wren moved her body a bit farther forward and raised her ring up past the foot, and leg, and body to find the face. She found it exactly where she expected it to be, and yet the sudden discovery of two wide white eyes in the darkness startled her and Wren yanked her hand back, blanketing the face in darkness again, which was worse. So she held out her ring and looked on the face of the woman.
She was middle-aged with gaunt cheeks and dark-rimmed eyes that never seemed to blink. At first Wren thought that the light from her ring was so feeble that it left the woman’s skin in shadows, but after a moment she realized that the stranger’s skin was naturally dark, a deep sort of brown Wren had seen in the eyes of only a handful of people from the south of Ysland, and her hair rose about her head like young heather on the moors.
The woman blinked and whispered, “Morayo.”
“Morayo?” Wren sat down beside her and tried to hold her hand up in a comfortable and non-threatening gesture so the light would fall on both their faces. “Your name is Morayo? I’m Wren. Can you say Wren?”
“Kill… Morayo.” She wasn’t just speaking slowly from exhaustion or starvation, she was struggling to speak Yslander at all. She had an accent like nothing the young vala had ever heard before. “I want… to kill… Morayo.”
“Oh, I see.” Wren nodded slowly. “All right. Good, good. That’s something. You want to kill someone. It’s good to have goals in life. It keeps you going when times are tough. I know how that is. Now, what is your name?”
The stranger looked at her with shaking eyes that stared right through her, seeing nothing. Wren watched her eyes dance in confusion and fear. It was a look she recognized all too well, the same look she had seen in Gudrun’s cloudy eyes every day for the last six years.
She’s insane.
Wren patted the woman’s hand and tried to move the plate closer to her, but the stranger grabbed the plate from her hand and pushed it back down to the floor in the exact same place, tilted up on the uneven stone floor.
“Okay then. We’ll just leave that there for now.”
The glow from her ring began to flicker and fade.
“I’m going to go back upstairs now, but I’ll come back tomorrow. I promise.”
The woman shuddered. “Morayo.”
Wren nodded and exhaled slowly. Then she turned and fumbled back across the dark cellar to the bottom of the narrow winding steps and climbed back up to the main floor. Only a glimmer of starlight fell through the small barred windows, but it was enough to make the upper world seem like a brightly lit paradise compared to the black pit of the cellar.
She hurried back to her room and crawled into bed, where she lay shivering, alone. Her injured hand started to throb again, and when she closed her eyes she dreamed of fangs and blood.
Chapter 14. Glymur Falls
The next morning Freya awoke to Erik’s strong hand gently massaging her shoulder. In the darkness they had moved another mile to the northeast of the crevasse where the two dead reavers lay, and now the first cool rays of the sun fell on the eastern hills and fields to the faint rustling sounds of crickets, rabbits, and sparrows. She kissed her husband, tasting the trace of salt on his tongue, and then they gathered their spears and blankets, and looked at Leif. The youth sat cross-legged on a rock, his chin on his fist. He glanced at them, frowned, and hopped down to the ground. Without a word, he set out for the east, and they followed.
The eastward trek was easier than skirting Mount Esja, though the constant interruptions to cross a stream or hike over a steep hill slick with frost slowed their progress. The brush was sparse here, offering few handholds and no food, and vistas of nothing but grass and earth and stone dusted with ice and snow. But at the crest of each hill, Freya looked out at the landscape and saw their destination growing closer.