Maybe the cure doesn’t work.
Or maybe…
Freya tugged at her sleeves and found her arms as smooth and pale as ever, marked only with Katja’s inked runes and animal icons. There was no fur there.
I’m not sweating like Katja and Erik and Wren were when they were infected. And Omar said I should keep warm. He was trying to tell me something. He was telling me that I’m not infected. Whatever is happening to me, it’s not the plague.
She hesitated a moment longer, then resumed striding down the road.
Either way, Erik and Wren need me.
With the looming south wall as her guide she eventually found the iron door they called the south gate and the stable nearby. Arfast stood in the first stall, passively watching the people of the city marching down to the water, or to the market, or to their friends’ homes. Freya threw her riding blanket over the elk’s back and was about to jump up on him when she noticed the two sacks of barley leaning up against each other in the next stall. A tiny buzz of wings whined in her ears.
What did Omar say? Give the elk a second helping of barley? Why did he say a second one?
She slipped into the other stall, glanced up to make sure the stabler wasn’t looking, and quickly searched the sacks. And there, tucked under the second bag of barley, was a familiar looking ball of mud. It had split open on one side and she saw that it was mostly empty, but there were two or three tiny bloodflies shaking their wings and skittering about inside the ball. She gently pressed the mud back together, sealing the insects inside, and she slipped the ball into her sleeve. Then she leapt onto Arfast’s back and rode him out through the narrow passage under the wall, and into the wide world again.
It didn’t take her long to find Wren’s boot prints on the road. They were fresh and sharp indentations in the frozen mud dusted with dry snow. So she turned east and followed them, knowing full well where they were leading her.
“Hya!”
Arfast dashed through the fields of dead grass, his huge antlers pounding up and down with the powerful strokes of his legs. Eventually she crested the last rise overlooking the icy stream and saw the water mill buried in the high bank beside the silvery water.
There was no sign of anyone outside.
“Erik? Wren?” She rode down the bank and across the water, and slid down off the shaggy elk’s back. She rested her spear against the wall of the mill and placed her hand on her sheathed knife. The carved bone felt cool against her palm. “Hello? Is anyone here?”
And from inside the mill, she heard the sharp scratching of claws on stone. Drawing her knife, she pulled back the curtain and stepped inside. The sudden transition from daylight to deep shadow made her pause, waiting for her vision to return. And to her surprise, her eyes quickly sharpened and easily picked out the shape of the figure on the far side of the room.
It was a reaver, long and crooked and furry, and when it moved it rattled the chains behind it. The creature sat up and stared at her, and she was glad it was too dark to see its face clearly. But it shifted its legs, turning its body toward the meager light, and she saw the tiny pink teats on its belly, and the rounded shape of its hairy sex between its hairy thighs.
Without taking her eyes from the reaver, she reached into her sleeve and brought out the mud ball, and gently broke it open, and sent the pieces rolling into the room. The unseen bloodflies whined into the air, and she slipped back out through the doorway, and drew the curtain shut behind her.
Freya stood outside, listening to the soft tinkling of the cold stream and watching the occasional bit of grass or pane of ice float past the spinning leather paddles of the mill.
I suppose that has to be Erik. He said he would use the chains. He…
She swallowed and looked up at the pale blue sky and the pale gray clouds streaming across it.
Wren. I should find Wren.
From inside the mill there came a sudden shuffling and snorting, and the thumping of a foot or hand on the stone floor, and the rattling of chains.
It’s going to hurt. And it’s not a cure, Omar said. It’s a vaccine. Who knows what it will do to a fully turned reaver?
She heard more scratching and thumping and rattling behind her, louder and faster than before. Tears burned in the rims of her eyes.
Wren needs me now. I should go.
Still she lingered, listening to the rushing water, and the buzzing flies, and her Erik.
And she sat down to wait.
Chapter 27. Fallout
Omar sat at the edge of the bed, gently petting Riuza’s hair. She had fallen asleep almost as soon as he had coaxed her into lying down properly, and now he guessed by the steady sound of her breathing that she was truly at ease, for the moment. He thought back to their time together, the three years between the ill-fated flight of their airship and the ill-fated construction of Ivar’s Drill.
Riuza hadn’t been the easiest woman to get along with, even though they were stranded together on a strange island at the top of the world surrounded by huge Europan barbarians. She’d been so impatient, unwilling to learn the language, unwilling to make friends, unwilling to consider the possibility of being in Ysland one minute longer than necessary. For her, there had only been the mission of finding a way out, a way home to Marrakesh.
Omar leaned down and kissed her forehead.
And nothing I said was ever good enough for you, was it? I was never clear enough, never stern enough with Ivar, never persuasive enough with the smiths or the miners. I just didn’t want to leave as badly as you did. Maybe I should have been. If we’d sailed away instead of digging up the mountain, none of this would have ever happened.
He sighed.
She looked very different. It wasn’t just the sunken cheeks and veined hands and thin arms. She had always kept her head shaved. The hair made her look like another person altogether. And she’d been so strong, too.
Halfdan brought them food, and Omar tried to wake Riuza and feed her, but the woman was too weary and too dazed to eat. He grasped his seireiken and summoned his dead friend the Indian physician, who could only sigh and shake his ghostly head and tell Omar what he already knew. There was little chance of Riuza surviving very long, much less recovering at all. Even now, eating too much could burst her stomach.
So he sat beside her, holding her hand, trying to remember their better nights together when they had stumbled, laughing and drunk, into their little stone house. And she had stripped off his clothes with the speed and skill of an engineer dismantling a machine, and she had ridden him as though he might carry her all the way back to Marrakesh, if only she squeezed him hard enough and clawed him deep enough, and grunted loud enough. But when morning came they were always still in their little stone house in the cold wasteland of Rekavik.
It was very late in the morning when Omar noticed the noise coming from outside. For a time he just sat still, listening, trying to sort it out. It was voices mostly, male and female, and laden with all sorts of emotion. Anger. Fear. Surprise. Confusion. There was even some laughter. He’d lived in many cities in many lands, and he had come to know them all by their voices. The gentle chanting of Jaipur, the wailing songs of Damascus, the rumbling chaos of Alexandria, and the mechanical cacophony of Tingis. Rekavik had always been a quiet place, true to its fishermen’s roots, a place punctuated by sudden laughter and sudden anger, both usually the result of some fishing mishap. But the city was not quiet now.
They sounded like separate arguments. A few shouts here or there. Some angry, some scared. The crack of a stone as it hit a house. The metallic clang of a hammer on stone. It should have been more scattered and less urgent. But it wasn’t.
Damn my curiosity. It’s going to get me into trouble some day.