The beast crashed down onto Erik, planting its feet on his thighs and slashing both clawed hands at his face. Erik raised his fists and blocked both claws as he staggered back under the reaver’s weight, and then he fell flat on the ground with the beast hunched on his chest. The monster’s head slammed down on the man’s throat.
“ERIK!” Freya felt her blood boiling and her skin burning as she scrambled to her feet and dashed back to his side. She hurled herself at the creature’s belly, planting both of her knives between its ribs and letting her own weight wrench the beast off of her husband and they all crashed down into the mud together. Freya rose up on her knees, her knife raised in her hand to cut the reaver’s throat.
And she saw a hand.
Erik’s hand, his red and white fingers straining at the beast’s neck, holding the fangs at bay as he crushed its windpipe. She leaned over the hairy, misshapen head and saw Erik grinning at her.
He winked and mouthed the words, “It’s over. Dead.”
The reaver’s claws were sunk deep into the man’s shoulders, but its foul maw was still some distance from his face. And when he took his hands away from its throat, the reaver’s head fell limp to one side. Freya gently pulled the claws from her husband’s flesh, wincing at the silent expressions of pain on his face. But after a moment, he sat up and heaved an easy breath and nodded.
“I’m all right,” he signed.
He’s all right.
She sat down on his lap, her calloused hands on his dirty cheeks, staring into his bright blue eyes. His lips parted and Freya kissed him, slipping her tongue deep into his mouth, feeling the soft wet warmth of his living body, tasting his breath and sweat and adrenaline and fear and joy. He gripped her waist tightly for a moment, and then let her go and they stood up together.
She looked at his bloody shoulders. “Can you climb back up?”
He grimaced and signed, “I’d rather not.”
So she sat with him on a broken stone wall and bandaged his wounds while Wren watched them from the open window. Arfast stood by the tower’s base, his eyes wide, his breathing swift and ragged. As Freya sat and listened to the tiny waves of the lake lapping at the black stones at the edge of the village, Wren disappeared from the window, but she stuck her head out a moment later and called down, “Freya! Come quick!”
Erik nodded and picked up his spear with only a slight grunt, so Freya jogged to the knotted rope and climbed back up to the tower window. Inside she squinted at the shadowy figures of the vala and her apprentice crouched by Katja’s head.
“What’s happening?” the huntress asked.
“Gudrun is trying to help your sister,” Wren said.
Freya knelt by the bed and saw that the crone had one shriveled hand resting on Katja’s forehead. On her frail middle finger, Gudrun wore a pale yellow ring. Freya inhaled sharply. It was only the second time she had ever seen rinegold in her life. Katja’s mistress had never owned such a relic, but she had told the children of Logarven more than a few stories about the powers of the strange metal. Legendary valas of Ysland had used the rinegold to save the injured and sick, to find long-lost treasures, to guide ships through the Sea of Ice, and to battle the hideous beasts that survived Woden’s war with the demons of Ysland. But most of all, they used the rinegold rings to speak to the souls of long-dead valas, to unlock the secrets of their ancient seidr-sisters.
And now a sliver of that rinegold was touching Katja’s sweaty brow.
Gudrun sat hunched and shrunken, folded in upon herself under a heavy wool blanket so that only her wrinkled face and desiccated fingers could be seen. The vala muttered, her dim and hazy eyes pointed across the room at the wall, seeing nothing. Her fingers closed, clutching Katja’s head, and Freya jerked forward but Wren held her back saying, “Wait.”
The crone’s head tilted back, the wool blanket slipping off her spotted head to her shoulders. Gudrun gasped, shivered, and convulsed forward. Wren grabbed the old woman’s chest and arm, trying to hold her upright, but the vala shoved off her apprentice. Gudrun wailed a horrid wordless cry, her head back, her jaw stretched wide, and her shriveled pink tongue flicking between her naked pink gums.
“Immortality!” The vala cackled, and then slammed her thin gums shut on the tip of her tongue. A tiny mote of pink flesh tumbled from between her pale lips, and a trickle of dark blood spilled over her chin.
Wren gasped. “No!”
Gudrun flashed a bloody grin at them and then smashed her head down onto Katja’s face. Wren shoved the old woman back and saw Gudrun’s head lolling on her limp neck, her face gray, her skin cold to the touch. Freya stared down at her sister’s face and watched as the smear of Gudrun’s dark blood crept across Freya’s skin and vanished into the rinegold ring on the vala’s finger.
Freya grabbed the crone’s arm and held up the crooked fingers to stare at the ring. “What the hell just happened? Is Gudrun dead? Did she just kill herself?”
Chapter 4. Frogs
With shaking hands, Wren took the dead vala’s arm from Freya and slipped the ring off Gudrun’s knobby finger and placed it on her own right hand. The apprentice’s face twisted and glared, and for a moment Freya thought the girl was going to vomit on the floor. But then she swallowed and sat up straight, and looked the huntress in the eye. “It’s all right.”
“What is?”
“Gudrun gave her soul to the ring, passing on her knowledge just all the valas of Denveller have done for generations.” Wren licked her pale lips. “It shouldn’t have happened until I was ready to take over. Not for years yet. I don’t know exactly what to do with it. It feels…”
Freya laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Worry about how it feels later. Did all that wailing and bleeding do anything to help my sister?”
Wren shook her head. “No. But I know why Gudrun did it.” She held up the ring. “I can hear her voice in my head. I can even see her face, just a little, over there in the corner of the room. She looks a bit dark and dim, like a reflection in the water. She says she killed herself like this because she knew she couldn’t leave this tower, and because she wants me to go with you.”
“To help Katja?”
Wren nodded. “To cure the reaver plague.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.” Wren went to the body of her mistress and arranged the old vala in a more restful pose on the floor with her eyes closed and the blood on her chin wiped clean. “We have to find Skadi first. She has the rinegold ring of Hengavik, and she’ll probably know more about reavers than any other vala in Ysland.”
“Fine.” Freya shoved her hands under her sister’s arms. “Help me.”
Together they wrestled the feverish woman to the window and lowered her on the knotted rope into Erik’s waiting arms. Freya helped her husband to settle her sister on Arfast’s back while Wren lingered in the tower, but eventually the girl in black came down from the window and stood with them in the mud. Two small sacks of stones clicked and clacked on her belt, and her sling was wound loosely around her right wrist.
“Uhm.” Wren glanced around, looking lost and sick. “All right then. I guess we just, that is, I guess we should, well, find Skadi. Allfather willing.”
The girl gave one last lingering look at her tower and then trudged off along a westward path out of the village with the others following a short distance behind. Freya kept one hand on Arfast’s shaggy neck and the other hand on her knives, while Erik thumped along with both of their spears resting on his bandaged shoulders.
After an hour of walking, Erik signed, “What are you thinking about?”
Freya said, “I’m just wondering if we’re doing the right thing. We could have stayed home and tended her ourselves. We could have taken her up into the hills to the hot springs above Logarven. But instead Katja’s lying like a sack of barley on Arfast’s back and we’re wandering through dead villages. Her skin is on fire, and her ears look bigger, and the hair on her arms looks darker. She’s getting worse, and this isn’t helping her. We should be helping her.”