“We are helping her,” he signed. “We’re looking for someone who can heal her. That’s all we can do.”
“Maybe.”
Wren squinted back at them, then turned around and began walking backward so she could face them. “Excuse me, but Gudrun wants to know about your friend there.”
“Erik is my husband,” Freya said loudly.
“Right, Erik. My mistress wants to know why he doesn’t talk.”
“Your dead mistress whose soul is in your little ring, and who speaks to you in your mind? Or you?”
Wren grinned. “I confess to being a little curious, as the good lord Woden wills, he being a seeker of arcane knowledge himself. But Gudrun wants to know too.”
Freya glanced at Erik and he nodded. She said, “When were young, Erik’s father took him hunting on the southern downs. They found a few deer, and the stag turned to defend his mate. Erik was standing too close to his father, and when the killing blow brought the stag down, one of its antlers pierced Erik’s throat, nearly killing him. The vala saved his life, but not his voice.”
“Oh, I see.” Wren stumbled over a small stone on the path, and she turned back around to continue walking. But a moment later she turned around again. “And he talks with his hands?”
Freya sighed. “Yes.”
“How did he learn that?”
“It’s something we made up together, him and me and Katja, when we were children. Only a handful of folk in Logarven understand it, but most know it well enough to get the gist of what he means, most of the time.” Freya stroked her sister’s damp hair back from her face, looking for more signs of the change.
“Can you teach me?” the girl asked.
“Why don’t you ask Erik to teach you? He’s right there,” Freya said.
“But how will I understand him?”
Freya grinned. “Well, now, that is the trick, isn’t it?”
Wren turned back around to watch where she was going as she muttered, “No, lord, that wasn’t very kind of her at all. And here I am, the very soul of kindness leading them on their way, walking myself into danger on their account. It’s a terrible trick you’ve played on me, lord, making me so wonderfully generous and filling up the world with less kindly folk to take advantage of me.”
They followed the western path along the shore of Denveller Lake and shortly they came across a pair of houses buried in the hillside above the steaming waters. Wren stopped and frowned at the empty doorways and the broken jug on the ground and the torn cloth flapping in the breeze between two stones in the mud.
“What is this place?” Freya asked.
Wren shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just a place. Just a home. But not anymore, I guess. The reavers have been here, too. They’ve been everywhere.” She paused to gaze out at the lake. “I’m sorry, but there’s something I need to do. Good luck. I hope you find help for your sister.” And she headed down toward the tall reeds at the lake’s edge.
“Wait, where are you going? What about Skadi and the reavers and Gudrun? You can’t go off on your own.” Freya followed her, and Erik led Arfast after her. “We should stay together. It’s too dangerous to split up.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” the girl said, casting a nervous grin over her shoulder. “But I can’t ask you to take the time when your sister needs your help now.”
Freya frowned. “How much time? What’s going on?”
“My family.” Wren reached down into the tall grass and pulled a flimsy reed boat out from under a turf outcropping in the shallows. “I need to know if they’re still alive. They’re on Delver Island. I don’t know if… whether… the reavers can swim, or use a boat…” She sniffed and dragged her sleeve across her nose. Her face was pale, her cheeks red with windburn, and her hair flying wild in the wind.
Freya glanced back at Erik and her sister, and then out at the lake. “How long will it take to check on them?”
Wren shrugged. “Less than an hour of paddling. You can almost see the island there.” She pointed to the south.
Freya saw a dark blot on the horizon. She looked at her sister’s motionless body again. “Is it on the way to Hengavik?”
“It’s to the south, so it’s more or less on the way.” Wren sat down in the shaky little boat. There was no paddle. “Allfather knows, I don’t want to leave you, and neither does Gudrun, but I have to know if my parents are still alive. And if they’re still there, I need to get them out.”
Freya nodded. “An hour, that’s almost nothing at all. I’ll go with you. Erik can follow the edge of the lake and we can meet up with him later this afternoon. Right?”
Wren stared up at her. “Right. I mean, if you were to, that is, to go, I mean come, with me, then it would only be an hour there, and less than that to come back to the road. I just need to see them for a minute, just a few minutes, just to tell them…”
“I know.” Freya gently squeezed the girl’s arm. So they agreed on a meeting place that Wren described, a crossroads marked by a broken stone pillar where Erik would wait for them. Moments later Freya sat down in the thin, rotting boat behind the girl in black and they pushed away from the reeds into the warm waters of the lake, and began paddling with their bare hands.
A thin green slime clung to the surface of the water and to their hands, and Freya winced at the muck coating her skin. “There isn’t anything dangerous in this lake, is there?”
“Just flies and frogs.”
Freya nodded.
They swept their hands through the warm scum, shoving the flimsy reed boat along the surface. The bottom of the boat rippled and wrinkled with the undulations of the lake as they headed due south, and Freya kept one eye on the western shore of the lake where Erik and Arfast were plodding along the dirt road, until the shore became a thin black line and her husband disappeared.
The gnats buzzed and the frogs croaked, and the lake steamed lazily in the afternoon sun. The blot on the southern edge of the world quickly grew into a wide mound of rock rising above the water and Freya stared intently at the island as they approached it, scanning for black clouds of flies, for dark mounds of bodies, and for any other signs of predators. But there were none.
Thick green grasses hid the edge of where the island met the lake, and as they pushed through them and emerged into a shallow lagoon, Freya looked up at the two great ridges to the east and west of them. The rock faces were gray and barren, but the center of the island sloped down to form a gently curving bowl where lush grasses and untended fields of barley and wheat waved in a riot of greens and golds.
Just ahead near the shore of the lagoon, Freya saw a smooth mound of mossy earth and stone, the telltale shape of two long houses built back to back, with several small gardens with low stone walls of their own nearby. And looming above the man-made earthworks was a single finger of stone, a tall gray spear of rock with ragged edges but a smooth face, and on that face Freya could already see, even at a distance, the long lines of runes carved into the stone.
Wren glanced back at her. “Have you heard the story of the rune stone of Delver Island?”
“No.”
“The Allfather himself carved it.” Wren nodded as she turned back to her paddling. “It was in the ancient days, long before Woden made war on the demons and the giants. The Allfather walked the earth in search of power and wisdom, speaking to serpents and birds. But he learned nothing, and he despaired. So when he came to this island and saw that rock spire, he climbed to the top of it and hurled himself upon it, impaling himself on it, sacrificing himself to the world in exchange for its secrets.”
Freya frowned, only half listening to the girl’s story. Her eyes kept straying to the open waters of the lake and the unseen shore where her husband and her sister were waiting for her. Somewhere.