"You hate her," he said. "That's why you are here. Because… because she had the snake bite you!"
He could see she was surprised, hesitating for the first time. "I don't love her, no," she agreed. "But I wouldn't be here because of that."
"Why then?" Bern asked, a little desperately.
Again a pause. He wished, now, that there were light. He still hadn't seen her face.
She said, "We are kin, Bern Thorkellson. I'm here because of that."
"What?" He was stunned.
"Your sister married my brother, on the mainland." "Siv married…?"
"No, Athira wedded my brother Gevin."
He felt abruptly angry, couldn't have said why. "That doesn't make us kin, woman."
Even in darkness he could see that he had wounded her.
The horse moved again, whickered, impatient with standing. The woman said, "I am a long way from home. Your family is the closest I have on this island, I suppose. Forgive me for presuming."
His family was landless, his father exiled. He was a servant, compelled to sleep in a barn on straw for two more years.
"What presumption?" Bern said roughly. "That isn't what I meant." He wasn't sure what he'd meant.
There was a silence. He was thinking hard. "You were sent to the volur? They reported you had a gift?"
The hood moved up and down. "Curious, how often unwed youngest daughters have a gift, isn't it?"
"Why did I never hear of you?"
"We are meant to be unattached, to be the more dependent. That's why they bring girls from distant villages and farms. All the seers do that. I've spoken to your mother, though."
"You have? What? Why…?"
The shrug again. "Frigga's a woman. Athira gave me a message for her."
"You all have your tricks, don't you?" He felt bitter, suddenly.
"Swords and axes are so much better, aren't they?" she said sharply. She was staring at him again, though he knew the darkness hid his face, too. "We're all trying to make ourselves a life, Bern Thorkellson. Men and women both. Why else are you out here now?"
Bitterness still. "Because my father is a fool who killed a man." "And his son is what?"
"A fool about to die before the next moon rises. A good way to… make a life, isn't it? Useful kin for you to have."
She said nothing, looked away. He heard the horse again. Felt the wind, a change in it, as though the night had indeed turned, moving now towards dawn.
"The snake," he said awkwardly. "Is it…?"
"I'm not poisoned. It hurts."
"You… walked out here a long way."
"There's one of us out all night on watch. We take turns, the younger ones. People come in the dark. That's how I saw you on the horse and told her."
"No, I meant… just now. To warn me."
"Oh." She paused. "You believe me, then?"
For the first time, a note of doubt, wistfulness. She was betraying the volur for him.
He grinned crookedly. "You are looking right at me, as you said. I can't be that hard to see. Even a piss-drunk raider falling off his horse will spot me when the sun comes up. Yes, I believe you."
She let out a breath.
"What will they do to you?" he asked. It had just occurred to him.
"If they find out I was here? I don't want to think about it." She paused. "Thank you for asking."
He felt suddenly shamed. Cleared his throat. "If I don't ride back into the village, will they know you… warned me?"
Her laughter again, unexpected, bright and quick. "They could possibly decide you were clever, by yourself."
He laughed too. Couldn't help it. Was aware that it could be seen as a madness sent by the gods, laughter at the edge of dying one hideous death or another. Not like the mindlessness of the water-disease-a man bitten by a sick fox—but the madness where one has lost hold of the way things are. Laughter here, another kind of strangeness in this dark by the wood among the spirits of the dead, with the blue moon overhead, pursued by a wolf in the sky.
The world would end when that wolf caught the two moons. He had more immediate problems, actually.
"What will you do?" she asked. The third time she'd seemed to track his thoughts. Perhaps it was more than being a youngest daughter, this matter of having a gift. He wished, again, he could see her clearly.
But, as it happened, he did know, finally, the answer to her question.
Once, years ago, his father had been in a genial mood one evening as they'd walked out together to repair a loose door on their barn. Thorkell wasn't always drunk, or even often so (being honest with his own memories). That summer evening he was sober and easy, and the measure of that mood was that, after finishing the work, the two of them went walking, towards the northern boundary of their land, and Thorkell spoke of his raiding days to his only son, something that rarely happened.
Thorkell Einarson had not been a man given to boasting, or to offering scraps of advice from the table of his recollections. This made him unusual among the Erlings, or those that Bern knew, at any rate. It wasn't always easy having an unusual father, though a boy could take some dark pride in seeing Thorkell feared by others as much as he was. They whispered about him, pointed him out, carefully, to merchants visiting the isle. Bern, a watchful child, had seen it happen.
Other men had told the boy tales; he knew something of what his father had done. Companion and friend to Siggur Volganson himself right to the end. Voyages in storm, raids in the dark. Escaping the Cyngael after Siggur died and his sword was lost. A journey alone across the Cyngael lands, then the width of the Anglcyn kingdom to the eastern coast, and finally home across the sea to Vinmark and this isle.
"I recollect a night like this, a long time ago," his father said, leaning back against the boulder that marked the boundary of their land. "We went too far from the boats and they cut us off—Cuthbert's'household guard, his best men—between a wood and a stream."
Cuthbert had been king of the Anglcyn in the years when Thorkell was raiding with the Volgan. Bern knew that much.
He remembered loving moments such as that one had been, the two of them together, the sun setting, the air mild, his father mild, and talking to him.
"Siggur said something to us that night. He said there are times when all you can do to survive is one single thing, however unlikely it may be, and so you act as if it can be done. The only chance we had was that the enemy was too sure of victory, and had not posted outliers against a night breakout."
Thorkell looked at his son. "You understand that everyone posts outlying guards? It is the most basic thing an army does. It is mad not to. They had to have them, there was no chance they didn't."
Bern nodded.
"So we spoke our prayers to Ingavin and broke out," Thorkell said, matter-of-factly. "Maybe sixty men—two boats' worth of us—against two hundred, at the least. A blind rush in the dark, some of us on stolen horses, some running, no order to it, only speed. The whole thing being to get to their camp, and through it—take some horses on the run if we could—cut back towards the ships two days away."
Thorkell paused then, looking out over summer farmlands, towards the woods. "They didn't have outliers. They were waiting for morning to smash us, were mostly asleep, a few still singing and drinking. We killed thirty or forty of them, got horses for some of our unmounted, took two thegns hostage, by blind luck—couldn't tell who they were in the dark. And we sold them back to Cuthbert the next day for our freedom to get to the boats and sail away."
He'd actually grinned, Bern remembered, behind the red beard. His father had rarely smiled.
"The Anglcyn in the west rebelled against King Cuthbert after that, which is when Athelbert became king, then Gademar, and Aeldred. Raiding got harder, and then Siggur died in Llywerth. That's when I decided to become a landowner. Spend my days fixing broken doors."