“Look!” he said to her suddenly, and she jerked her bewildered gaze back to the flames and saw there was something there. It drifted and blurred; became shapes that moved behind the peats and black, smoldering chars of wood, but she couldn’t see it clearly. And then suddenly, it was Gudrun.
The sorceress was looking out at them, as if reflected in a pool or a lake, the water rippling over her face, her silvery hair, the ice blue dress she wore glinting with crystals and snow shards. She was speaking, and Jessa heard the words close, almost inside her ear, so that she put up her hand and scratched at it.
There are plans working here. And not only mine. And each one thinks he plans for himself and is unseen. But I see.
Jessa looked at Brochael and saw that he heard it too; his lips were tight with distaste. Kari sat silent, knees bent, looking away. Then the image dissolved into flame light and the ripple of heat over wood, but her voice still hung and echoed as if from somewhere far distant.
Feast yourself. Take the dark one if you want, the Jarl, the arrogant one. But leave my son alone.
Kari looked up at that. He looked so much like Gudrun that Jessa almost thought it was he who had spoken.
“Who’s she talking to?” Brochael asked gruffly.
Kari shrugged. “Perhaps this beast of hers.”
“So it’s Wulfgar she wants dead. I’d have thought it would have been you.”
Kari watched him sidelong. “So would I. We may have missed something. She may be keeping something worse for me.” He twisted the laces of his shirt around his fingers. There was silence a moment, then he said, “And is this your thief, Jessa?”
Vidar sat among the flames. It was some dark, shadowy place, and he was leaning forward, and her heart leaped as she saw the thin rat-faced man drinking opposite.
“That’s him!”
“Looks a skulking little cutthroat,” Brochael observed.
“He tried to cut mine. Where is he?”
“I don’t know.” Kari watched the men. “I think he’s near, in the hold or not far outside, but I can’t tell. I do know this is happening now, right now.”
“Vidar’s got his sword,” Brochael growled. “He doesn’t wear that in the hold.”
“But he can’t be far because he was here an hour ago.”
“One of the farms then. It’s fair to think he’d get this scum away, if he thought you’d seen him. What are they planning?”
But the images spluttered, became burned wood. Kari shook his head wearily. “I’ve lost it.”
Brochael looked at Jessa. “Will you tell the Jarl?”
“No!” It was Kari who answered quickly.
“Why not?”
“Because he trusts Vidar. He doesn’t trust me. And we have no proof.”
Surprised and uneasy, Jessa said, “Of course Wulfgar trusts you.”
“No, Jessa.” He gripped his fingers tight together. “Vidar is turning him against me. I know that, I can see it, the fine threads of mistrust that he’s spinning, like a web over this hold. It began long ago, before you came, before we came.”
“That’s nonsense,” Brochael said gruffly.
“No, it isn’t. Think about it, Brochael! To Vidar, I’m the pale approaching danger. I’m Gudrun’s son. I was the last Jarl’s son. He wants Wulfgar to see me as a threat.”
Jessa clenched her fists without noticing. “But Wulfgar knows you!”
“Does he?” He turned his strange, colorless eyes fiercely on her. “None of you know me, really! Sometimes I don’t think I know myself, what I might do. This is her curse, remember, that you’ll never quite trust me, that I might turn on you as she did.” He looked away bleakly. “And I might! I can feel it in myself.”
“We can all do evil—”
“Not like I could!” He gripped her fingers suddenly; she felt him trembling, as if he suppressed fear.
“Power, Jessa. Feel it? It’s burning in me. Sometimes I want to cry out with the strength of it, let it rage in a crackle of light and flame. Things call to me out of the snow, out of the endless wastes—wandering things, spirits, elements. And people—I can’t be near them because I want to change them, to move them, to slide into their minds and make them do what I want them to do. And I could, and they’d never know! But I daren’t, because that’s how she started....”
Numb, she stared at him. “We trust you.”
Brochael gripped his shoulder. “I know you better than you know yourself. I taught you to speak, boy. Carried you out of her prisons myself. You’ll never be like her.”
Kari watched them a moment, calming himself. “So why didn’t you ask me about this?”
He slipped the snakeskin band off, held it up on one long finger. “Why not, Jessa? Because you weren’t sure?”
In all honesty, she couldn’t answer him. No words would come.
Eighteen
The warriors slept whose task it was to hold
the horned building—all except one.
“Don’t go skulking off again, thief-thrall.” Skuli’s breath stank; he swayed as he stood. All evening, Hakon knew, he’d been flat on his back among the dogs and the straw.
He dragged a blanket into a corner by the fire and lay there, listening to the group gambling in one corner, the sleepy talk of the house carls about the fire. This was the man who owned him; this drunken, potbellied fool. He thought of wild, impossible things—running away, hiding out here, appealing to the Jarl—but all the while he knew he was dreaming. A runaway thrall was hunted down—everyone saw to that. None of them wanted their own thralls trying it. And what would Wulfgar want with a one-handed man? Best to go back to the sheep and learn how to forget.
He thought about them all at the high table that night, their fine clothes, their easy ways, their freedom. Going where they wanted, saying what they thought. They would all be on the hunt tomorrow, even Jessa, and he’d be left here.
Then he remembered the thing in the wood and felt a shiver of pride. He’d been the only one even to glimpse it, that pale shadow in the snow, the flicker of strange, colorless eyes that had stared into his. It had been hungry, raging with hunger. It was only now, quite suddenly, that he realized that.
And surely it would be difficult to find. The hold was full of men, they’d been riding in all day, but out there the fells were endless and the forests black. Somewhere in those snowfields the creature was waiting. Maybe waiting until now, until it was dark. He shivered, pulling the rough blanket closer. His right hand lay outside the folds, but he left it there. He could never feel anything with that, even the cold.
Deep in the night, something woke him. Opening his eyes, he saw the hall was black; the last fire had burned low, it was a red smolder in the shadows. Sleeping shapes breathed and snored about it.
Lying still, he listened, and fear prickled on his skin. Outside the hall, something was moving. It shuffled and scraped; tiny unnerving sounds in the night’s silence. He lay rigid and unbreathing from noise to noise. A scrape against the wall; the bang of something heavy. Then footsteps, slow footsteps near the door.
He sat up quickly.
The windows were safely shuttered, the door barred. Men slept around them, their swords close at hand. The fire stirred peacefully. But Hakon knew it was out there. It was prowling the hold.
He wished someone else would hear it and wake up, but no one did. Guthlac, Wulfgar’s steward, slept near the fire, wrapped in a warm fleece. Hakon decided to wake him.
But then a noise at the door made him jerk his head; with a whisper of terror he stared across the hall. It seemed to him suddenly that the great wooden structure was not as solid as it had been, that the bar across it was somehow less distinct. He gripped the blanket tight, stared harder through the dark. Was he imagining it? No. There was a faintness there, a fading, and suddenly he knew that the door was going, dissolving in some sorcerous mist. He turned to shout, to jump up.