“Well,” Skapti whispered, “I don’t think you like him either.”
She pushed him away. “Rubbish.”
“Not so, Jessa.”
“Is he one of the wasps you mentioned?”
Slightly, he nodded.
When the conversation came around to Gudrun, everyone was listening.
“Nothing has been seen of her since that day she went,” Wulfgar said. “It’s as if she walked off the world’s edge.”
“We wouldn’t be that lucky,” Skapti remarked.
“And the White People?”
“Nothing. Except that a man from Thykkawood was here last week—that’s well up in the glacier country. He says a strange mist has been seen up in the mountain passes, full of sparks and colors, curling into shapes, as if something walked there. The local wise woman says the White People are brewing some sorcery. No one has seen them—but then no one ever does.”
“Do you think,” Jessa said slowly, “that they—that she—might take some sort of revenge on us?”
“Sometimes I think it.” He drank from the cup. “Sometimes.”
Vidar said, “She was very beautiful, they say.”
Jessa stared at him. “You never saw her? Yes, she was, and deadly too.”
“A frost candle,” Skapti muttered, standing up and reaching for the kantele. He turned a peg on it and a string hummed quietly. “A woman with an ice heart. That was Gudrun.”
Silence fell in the hall as they saw him stand.
While he sang, Jessa let the lilting words warm her like the wine; a song of praise for Wulfgar, for the new order that had come to the land, for peace. The words, woven in long complex lines of rhythm and kenning and music, filled the silent hall, and when the last complicated chain of sound ended, there was a pause before the storm of noise, as if he had somehow reached their hearts and hushed them.
Jessa realized she was sleepy. She leaned over to Wulfgar.
“I’m going outside for some air.”
He nodded. “Take my coat.”
She brushed the scraps from her, dragged the heavy robe from his chair and pushed her way to the outer door. Near the biggest fire a juggler was tossing three axs recklessly around his head, his friends cheering him from a safe distance. He dropped one, and it thudded into the straw as he leaped aside to a roar of derision.
Jessa slipped outside, tugging the heavy door shut behind her. The sky was black, frosted with stars. She took a deep breath of the air, felt its cold shock clear her head of wine fumes and smoke, and she pulled Wulfgar’s big coat tighter, her hands well up inside the sleeves.
The night was silent. Smoke drifted from the turf houses; a few hens clucked. Even the dogs seemed asleep. She wandered a little way between the buildings, her boots quietly crunching the frozen mud. Above her, abruptly, the sky rippled into an aurora, a curtain of colors drifting silently over the stars as if a wind moved it. Scarlet, green, faintest blue. She had seen this a hundred times but it always surprised her. Some said a giant named Surt made this light; others that it was the walls of Asgard glimpsed in the sky. Skapti believed it was caused by frost in the air, but that was surely poet’s nonsense.
The hall door behind her opened; a burst of talk and laughter drifted out, and with it a figure that moved quickly into the shadows of the wall. Then the man stepped out, and a flicker of blue-green light stroked his face. She realized it was Vidar. He made his way cautiously between the houses and, as a woman came out of one, Jessa saw him jerk back into shadow, as if not to be seen.
That surprised her. What was he doing?
She watched as he moved behind the smithy and then slipped after him carefully. The priest walked on, his coat swaying, the amulets at his neck and sewn to his collar making tiny clinking noises against each other. He walked hurriedly to the farthest end of the settlement to a small crooked-looking hut built against another. Goats bleated from behind it. Not far off the waters of the fjord rasped the shore.
Jessa watched from the corner of a wall.
Even in the frosty silence the knock seemed quiet and secret. The door opened slightly; a face peered out, lit briefly by the green ripples of light. Then Vidar slipped inside and the door closed.
Jessa turned and leaned back against the wall and whistled a silent cloud into the air. She was too astonished to be cold. She had known that face, recognized it at once. She would have known it anywhere. It had been the little rat-faced thief who’d robbed her at the inn.
Six
It was with pain that the powerful spirit
dwelling in darkness endured that time.
Sleep was a new thing. Obeying the heaviness in its stomach and head, the rune creature had hidden all day in a cleft on a fellside, and the strange darkness had come down inside its eyes and taken its mind away.
When it woke, the daylight had gone. All the stars looked down at it. For a moment the thing lay there, still curled. Then the voice came out of the whiteness and spoke sharply, and coldly; it uncramped its limbs and staggered up, stiff with frost.
Outside the cleft was open land, far below. This was a different country. There were trees, yes, but among them open smooth slopes, white and untrodden. The land folded into valleys, running south.
The creature began to trudge. It had come through long weeks of weariness and ice, and there was a long way to go yet, but the desire inside it was sharpening. Somewhere ahead, there was something it must have. Yes, said the voice quietly. The voice ruled it. She would never let it go, let it escape—dully, the creature knew this. She … when had it first known the voice was she? Recently. Memories and thoughts were confused, stirring into being like a pain.
Half sliding, half tumbling down the smooth slopes of snow, the spell-sending watched the moon with pale eyes. The silver ball bobbed high, out of reach. Angry, the creature tried to climb a tree, a tall pine, but the lowest branches snapped under its weight and it tore at the trunk with its claws in wrath, slashing the bark into deep parallel gashes. Again and again it struck, tingling with peculiar pleasure; not stopping until the tree bole was flayed bare, its fibrous clots of bark littering the snow.
After that it went on, lumbering through the dark, crashing through branches, dim thickets, the long blue shadows of the arctic night. It had eaten well in the last days. Hare, stoat, marten; the rich juices of the reindeer herd. It murmured at that memory, floundering through the steep empty slopes, through drifts as high as its chest, tearing a long scar through the dim ghostly snowfield. Above it the moon hung, a perfect silver hole in the sky.
When dawn came, the creature paused under a bush heavy with red berries. Shaking the snow off, it crammed them into its mouth, sharp bubbles of taste that burned and hurt and burst. Then it stopped, sniffing the air.
Something was coming.
Something so strange, so deliciously and muskily scented that the rune beast dribbled red berry juice and swallowed without thought.
Cautiously it drifted to the edge of the trees.
On the snowfield a thin, gangly thing was moving. It had long flat feet, and it slid them over the top of the snow. In its muffled paws long sticks splayed to each side. A scrawny, biped thing, heavily furred, laboring up the slope.
The creature watched with ice-pale eyes. Then it moved out of the trees and stood up.
The skier turned his head. His lips moved soundlessly.
Seven
Too few supporters flocked to our prince
when affliction came.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, Jessa,” Skapti said carefully. “Of course I believe you. But you may have been mistaken. Much as I dislike Vidar I can’t imagine him as a thief ’s benchmate.”