Everyone hid smiles, except Vidar, who stared at Brochael coldly.
“Have you eaten everything, Brochael?” Jessa asked him. “Because it’s about time you told us why you’re here. Not just to see me, I suppose?”
He laughed gruffly, but she saw him look quickly at Kari. “You tell them.”
Kari turned the cup in his thin fingers. He seemed to be searching for the right words. At last he said, “We came to warn you.”
“You too?” Wulfgar leaned forward. “What about?”
Kari looked at him strangely. He looked so much like Gudrun that Jessa felt cold, and suddenly uneasy.
“Something’s coming,” Kari said slowly. “Something evil. She sent it.”
“Your mother?”
Vidar asked that, and they all frowned at him.
But Kari only nodded after a moment.
“How do you know?” the priest persisted.
“He’s seen it.” Brochael flung a bone to a hound under the table.
“Seen it?”
“That’s what I said.”
Nobody spoke. Jessa knew well how Kari could see things—in water, in shiny surfaces—things that were happening far off, or in the past. She also guessed he had some strange remote knowledge of Gudrun, wherever she lived out in the wilderness of the north.
“Kari,” she murmured, “we’ve already heard of this thing. Men came from an outlying district yesterday. They said it had killed a man up there, and livestock. They seemed to think it was coming here.”
“It is.” He rubbed dust and a smudge of mud from his face. “She’s formed it out of spells, deep spells, and runes and cold, out of snow and the dark between the stars. Out of her anger with us. I know it’s coming here—something here draws it. I’ve come to find out what. I’ve seen it twice, not clearly, blurred, but each time closer to the hold. It’s changing; I think it’s growing stronger.”
Vidar stirred. “I cannot always remember what the god says through me, but did not Freyr himself speak of a pale approaching evil?”
“He did,” Wulfgar muttered.
Vidar looked dubiously at Kari. “It might be this creature.”
Jessa looked up quickly, caught up by something in his tone. She saw he was staring at Kari in fascination. It made her angry, and the memory of the thief ’s face in the doorway leaped back into her mind. She wanted to be rid of him, to talk to Kari.
“You two must be tired out,” she said quickly. “We can leave all the talk till the morning. Then we can decide what to do.”
Brochael heaved himself up at once. “That’s the girl I know. Bossy.”
“And she shows me what a poor host I’ve become,” Wulfgar said. He stood too, tall and dark. “You’re both welcome, you know that. And I think we’ll need you, Kari. There are still ghosts and echoes here, it seems.”
Kari nodded.
“And where are the birds, those strange followers of yours?”
“In the roof.”
Everyone looked up. Two hunched shadows shuffled on a high rafter. Their small eyes glinted in the red light. One of them gave a low croak.
Vidar stared at them. “What are these? Spirits?”
“Ravens,” Skapti said slyly. “That’s all.”
“Indeed.” The priest turned slowly to Wulfgar. “Jarl, can I speak with you now?”
As Skapti led the others out, Jessa glanced back. Wulfgar was sitting in his chair and Vidar was leaning over him, talking rapidly and quietly, his hands spread. What was he up to now?
Upstairs, after some searching, they found an empty room with two sleeping booths built against the walls. Most rooms in the Jarlshold were empty, untouched since Gudrun’s time. This one was both cold and damp.
“Never mind! It’s a palace after Thrasirshall,” Brochael muttered.
“You weren’t expected,” Skapti said. “We’ve no farseers in this hold.” He grinned at Kari.
“Freyr forgot to mention it, then,” Brochael said drily.
“Yes.”
They exchanged an amused look.
“Well, you’ll need a fire lit.”
Jessa turned to the door but Kari said, “No. There’s no need.”
He squatted by the pile of sticks and peats in the square central hearth and did not touch them, did not even seem to move at all, but suddenly she caught the glint of flame deep among the kindling, and in a second it had caught and was a red line crackling down the edge of the dry wood.
He looked up at her.
“Now, if Vidar had seen that,” Skapti muttered, sitting down, “it really would have made him nervous.”
Jessa couldn’t laugh. She was amazed and a little frightened. Kari sat back watching her. He looked tired. “I’ve been doing what you said. Remember? You told me once that I should know what my powers are. Find out what I can do. So I’ve found out.”
Pulling her down beside him, Brochael gripped her cold hands. “You should see, Jessa! All these months, dreaming and sleeping and experimenting until I thought I’d never get a word out of him again! And then—fires lighting, yes, and voices and movements drifting outside the windows all night, as if visions hung there, or the Aesir themselves. Branches breaking into blossom.” He laughed gruffly, with a look at Kari. “And all sorts of things he won’t even tell me about.”
There was a hint of worry in that look, she saw. “But this creature. What about that?”
Kari stared at the new, noisy flames. “She may have sent it to destroy us. And it’s close, Jessa, somewhere very near. Yesterday the birds attacked it.”
“And how do you know that?” she said.
He gave her his brief, sidelong smile. “Because they told me.”
Twelve
Nor did he let them rest
but the next night brought new horrors.
The night had many small, red eyes.
They shone, glinting and winking, far off in the dark miles of land. Squatting in the loose rocks and rubble of the pass, the creature gazed down at them. They are fires, the voice instructed it. They are dangerous, a fierce pain, a spirit that leaves dark prints deep in the flesh. Keep away from them. They are all that can harm you.
The rune beast nodded, scratching its face and eyes. It was weary; it had come a long, bitter way. And hungry. Always hungry.
Below, a great stretch of water glinted under the moon; the creature could see the tide flooding in, the gleaming currents surging upstream. Sharp smells of salt and fish and seaweed drifted up to it; the bleat of goats on the shore made it stir with pangs of memory.
Nearer, on this side of the fjord, a smoky huddle of dark shapes clustered on the fellside, with one bigger shadow in the center. These were the houses men built; the creature had prowled about several in the last weeks. But never so many together, nor huddled so close.
The still air stank of men, of smoke; the rank smell of crowded cattle rose up to it. And something else: the thing it had searched for, all the long miles. Attentively it considered the minute sounds of the night: the water’s lap, the cluck of sleepy hens, a rattle of pebbles. Then, silent, moving from rock to rock, it began to edge down the fellside. Marshland lay to its right, silver pools among black, broken reeds, soft bubbles of unknown underwater stirrings. Skirting the soft tussocks and the mud, it prowled over a black slope scattered with boulders, down to the track that led in among the houses. There it waited, breathing harshly.
A man moved among the houses, a shadow in shadows. The moon lit the sharpness of metal in his hand. Without moving, the creature watched him pass.
This is the place, her voice said. The voice was cold and remote. It seemed to come from a great distance, and yet it was close, somewhere inside, heart-deep. The words held hidden, fierce delight. This is the place. Go on! Go in!