Finally Jessa and Hakon ventured out. Food was running short, and they needed to find out what the Snow-walkers were doing.
Creeping silently into the hall, they saw a strange sight. Grettir was huddled in a small chair, his palms flat on the carved armrests. On a white bier before him Gudrun lay asleep; she lay still, barely breathing, her long hair loose, her dress smooth and white. Icicles already hung from her sleeves; crystals of frost had begun to form on her hair and skin.
They walked up to her, and looked down in awe.
“She looks as though she’ll wake up at any moment,” Hakon whispered.
“She won’t.” Jessa looked down at the old man. “What happens to you?”
Grettir stirred and looked up. His face was lined and gray. “That depends. Does the boy live?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’re all in his hands. He has the power now.”
He stood up and shuffled toward the sleeping woman, and looked down at her thoughtfully. “She was cruel too often, but she was strong. She knew all the secrets; she took what she wanted. Until the end, she was never afraid.”
He glanced at Jessa, who said, “She was evil. We all knew that.”
“And now Kari comes into his inheritance. How different will that be?”
“Very different,” she snapped.
He laughed wheezily. “I’m glad you think so. But I know better. I know how their power gnaws them till they must use it; how it changes them. Even she was different once.”
“But Kari’s got something she never had.”
“What?”
She smiled at him. “He has us.”
For a moment he looked at her gravely, and at Hakon, and then he smiled too. “So he does,” he said sadly. “I hope that it will be enough.”
He turned and hobbled away. “I’ll bring you some food.”
“Thank you.”
“We didn’t even ask him,” Hakon murmured.
“That’s how this place is.”
“And it’s Kari’s now. Will he stay here?”
“I don’t know.” Thoughtfully she walked to the door.
Grettir brought the food; strange stuff, most of it, but they ate it and saved some for Kari. When he finally woke up, he sat by Brochael for a while, listless and silent, no one wanting to bother him with questions. Finally, with an effort, he got up and went over to Signi.
“You must go home now,” he said.
The girl smiled at him, her silken dress pale. He touched her wrists briefly and the ice chains began to melt, dripping away rapidly.
“Don’t be sad, Kari,” she said. “It’s all over.”
Surprised, he managed to smile back. “Yes. It’s over. Tell Wulfgar what you’ve seen. Tell him we’re coming home.”
Fading before their eyes, she reached out to touch him. “All of you? Are you all coming?”
“All of us.”
And then the chair was empty, and Jessa imagined with sudden clarity the girl lying in that bed in the hold—how she would be waking now, sitting up, stiff and hungry; how she would stumble downstairs, into the silence and cold of the hall, to Wulfgar....
“What about the others?” she asked aloud.
“Gudrun’s spell faded with her,” Kari said. He sat down against the wall, knees up. “They’ll all be waking now—the noise and warmth will come flooding back. All their souls will return to them; the hold will be as we always knew it—busy, warm, alive.”
“In fact, by the time we get back,” Skapti said slyly, “they’ll have forgotten about it.”
“And us,” Jessa muttered. “It’s a long way.”
“Indeed it is. And there are places we’ll go a long way around,” Brochael rumbled.
They all laughed and fell silent.
After a moment Kari got up and went out into the hall. Brochael gazed after him uneasily.
“Let him go,” Skapti muttered.
“He’s too quiet. I thought he’d be … happy.”
Skapti rubbed his unshaven chin. “Give him time, Brochael. All his life she’s been there, a threat, a torment. When a weight comes off your back, you’re often too stiff to stand up at once.”
It was Jessa who went after him, much later. She found him standing at the side of the bier, looking down, quite still. Beside him, Jessa was silent a moment. Then she said, “Where is she, Kari?”
He twisted the frayed end of his sleeve around his fingers. “I don’t know, Jessa,” he said finally. “I stole her soul and locked it into a crystal, locked it deep, with tight spells. But he’s taken it back into that world, it’s lost there, and I don’t know how to find it again.” He looked up intently. “Perhaps Moongarm was wise. Now she’s neither dead nor alive. Because I couldn’t have killed her, Jessa.”
They turned and walked back into the little room. Brochael looked up at them.
“We leave tomorrow, after we’ve all slept. Unless you want your kingdom.”
Kari laughed suddenly. “Grettir can have it. Thrasirshall is my kingdom. And you’re its only subject.”
They all laughed then, Brochael hearty with relief, and the sound echoed in the empty rooms and halls of the palace. Jessa thought that it was a strange, new sound here, and wherever they were the White People heard it with surprise. She caught Hakon’s eye.
“You never got around to naming your sword.”
“Ah, but I have.”
“Tell us then.”
Awkwardly he touched the hilt. “You’ll laugh.”
“No, we won’t.”
“Well, at first I thought of Bear-bane....”
Despite herself, Jessa giggled.
“Not bad,” Skapti conceded.
“And then Snake-stabber. But I didn’t think that was any good....”
“It’s not.”
“So I thought of Dream-breaker.”
“Why that?” she asked.
“Because in my dream I fell from the bridge, but the sword saved me.” He smiled at them shyly. “What do you think?”
“It’s a fine name,” Skapti said.
Kari nodded, and Brochael laughed. “I never thought we’d make it then.”
“Oh, I did,” Jessa said, putting her arms around them both. “I always did.”
Acknowledgments
Chapter-opener quotations in Book 1 are from “The Words of the High One”; those in Book 3 are from “Voluspa” (translated as “The Song of the Sybil”); both from Norse Poems, edited and translated by W. H. Auden and Paul B. Taylor (Faber and Faber Ltd, 1983); reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber. The Book 2 chapter-opener quotations are from Beowulf, translated by Michael Alexander (Penguin Classics, 1973), reprinted by permission of Penguin Putnam.
Read on for a preview of
Catherine Fisher’s
electrifying book
The Oracle Prophecies:
The Sphere of Secrets
So the rumors were true. And these were elephants.
Their enormous bodies amazed Mirany. In the evening heat they stood in a great semicircle, twelve beasts, tails swishing, vast ears rippling irritably against flies. On their backs were towers, real towers of wood with gaudy painted doors and windows, within which the dark-skinned merchants sat on jeweled palanquins tasseled with gold.
From her seat before the bridge, on the left side of the Speaker, she watched the animals through the twilight. A huge full moon hung over them, the Rain Queen’s perfect mirror, its eerie light shimmering on the emptiness of the desert, the fires on the road, the black ramparts of the City of the Dead. A breeze drifted her mantle against her arm; someone’s thin silver bracelets clinked. There was no other sound, except, far below, the endless splash of the sea against rocks.
The central elephant was lumbering forward. Its great feet, heavy with bangles, thudded into the soft sand, the swaying mass of silver chains on its neck and ears and back brilliant in the moonlight. It wore a scarlet harness of tiny bells and immense pearls, the largest dangling between its eyes, a fist-sized, priceless lump.