“Osheim,” Snorri said.
“What?” I spat out grit and tried to frame a better question. “What?” I asked again. Nobody goes to Osheim. And there’s a bloody good reason for it.
“The storm blew us east. We’re fifty miles past Maladon.” Snorri puffed his cheeks out and looked across the sea. “You all right?”
I patted myself down. No major injuries. “No,” I said.
“You’re fine.” Snorri let go of me and I managed not to fall. “Kara’s down the beach with Tutt. He cut his leg on the rocks. Lucky it’s not broken.”
“Seriously, Osheim?”
Snorri nodded and set off back, walking where the waves swept the sand, each of his footprints erased before he’d taken another ten steps. I spat some more grit and a decent-sized pebble from my mouth and followed with a sigh.
The Builders left us quite a few reminders of their era. Reminders that even someone like me, whose primary use for history books was for beating smaller princelings around the head with, could hardly ignore. A man who ignored the borders of Promised Land would find his skin falling off while twisted monsters ate his face. The Engine of Wrong in Atta, the bridges and towers still left scattered across the continent, the Vault of Voices in Orlanth, the time bubbles on the Bremmer Slopes, or the Last Warrior-trapped on Brit. . all these were well known, but none sent the same shiver up my spine as the Wheel of Osheim. It seemed that almost every fairy tale our nurses had spun to entertain my brothers and me when we were small had happened in Osheim. The worst of them happened closest to the Wheel. The tales Martus demanded, the most bloody and most twisted, all started, “Once upon a time, not far from the Wheel of Osheim,” and from there on it was time to hide behind your hands or cover your ears. Come to think of it, the women who looked after us when we were little were an evil bunch of old witches. They should have been hanged, the lot of them, not set to watch over the sons of a cardinal.
• • •
We sheltered in a dell behind the headlands, Snorri and me, while Kara poked around on the nearby heath and Tuttugu returned to the beach to see what might be salvaged from the wreck or lying washed up on the sands. Tuttugu’s leg still bore an angry red scar, but Snorri’s healing touch had rendered it serviceable, closing an ugly wound that had turned my stomach to look at. The effort had left Snorri flat on his back but far less incapacitated than on other occasions and before long he was sitting up to fiddle with his axe. Steel and saltwater are a poor mix and no warrior will leave his blade wet. I watched him work, pursing my lips. His swift recovery struck me as odd since the Silent Sister’s spell was supposed to have faded over the winter according to Skilfar, and such things should be harder, not more easy.
“Eggs.” Kara came back from rummaging across the heather-covered slope behind us. In her cupped hands half a dozen blue gulls’ eggs. You could probably tip the contents of all of them into a decent-sized chicken’s egg and not fill it. She sat down on grass between Snorri and me, crossing her long legs, bare and scratched and grimy and delicious. “How long do you think it will take to get to Red March?” Looking at me as if I would know.
I spread my hands. “With my luck, a year.”
“We’ll need horses,” Snorri said.
“You hate horses, and they hate you.” It was true though, we did need some. “Can Kara even ride? Can Tuttugu? Is Kara actually coming with us?” It seemed a hell of a journey to make on the whim of an old witch in a cave.
“If I still had the Errensa under me it would be a difficult decision,” Kara admitted. “But perhaps the storm was trying to tell us something. No going back until we’re done.”
Snorri raised a brow at that but said nothing.
“No going anywhere for me. Ever. I’m not leaving Red March again. Not if I live to be a hundred. Hell, I doubt I’ll set foot outside the walls of Vermillion again once I’m through the gates.” Righteous indignation swelled, driven past the bounds of my usual stoic good humour. I blame my fever and the fact of being sat in a grassy hollow, soaked, cold, exhausted, days from the nearest warm bed, flagon of ale, or hot meal. I kicked at the sod. “Fucking Empire. Fucking oceans. Who needs any of it? And now we’re in fucking Osheim. That’s just great. Fuck dark-sworn or light-sworn. I want some future-sworn. Could have seen that storm coming and got out of the way.”
“The Builders watched the weather from above.” Kara tilted a finger toward the heavens. “They could tell what storms would come but they still couldn’t stop the storm that was big enough to sweep them all away.”
“Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?’” My mood still ran sour. I couldn’t believe we’d been delivered up on the shores of a place where all my childhood nightmares ran riot.
“What will happen when I let go?” Kara held out one of her tiny eggs between thumb and forefinger, positioning her hand above a stone breaking through the sod between us.
“You’ll mess up this fine stone,” I said.
“Now you’re seeing the future.” A grin. She looked younger when she smiled. “And if you lunged forward and tried to stop me?”
My lips echoed her smile. I quite liked that idea. “I don’t know. Should we try?”
“And that’s the curse of the future-sworn. None of us can see past our own actions-not us, not the future-sworn, not the Silent Sister, not Luntar, not the Watcher of Parn, none of them.” Kara offered me the egg.
“Raw?” The sun had broken through and I was starting to feel human enough to eat. I couldn’t remember when I’d last had a good meal. Even so, my appetite hadn’t returned to the degree where raw gull’s egg looked like something I wanted oozing over my tongue. “No?” Kara shrugged, and putting her head back she broke the egg into her mouth.
Watching her it was hard to imagine that Skilfar or the Silent Sister might have been like this once-young women overburdened with cleverness and ambition, setting foot on the path to power.
“I wonder what it is that the Silent Sister sees with that blind eye of hers. Things she can’t even speak of.”
Kara wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “And if she moves to change them. . she can no longer see how they will end. So how terrible does the future have to look before you reach in to that clear pool to change it and have the silt rise up all around your hand so you’re as blind as everyone else-knowing it won’t settle again until the day, the hour, the moment of the thing you most fear?”
“I’d change everything bad that ever looked like happening to me.” I could think of a long list of things I would have avoided, with “leaving Red March” right at the top of it. Or maybe getting into debt with Maeres Allus should be at the top, because leaving Red March did actually save me from a horrific death at his torturer’s hands. But then getting into debt had been such fun. . hard to imagine all those years living as a pauper. . I suppose I could have pawned Mother’s locket. . My head started to spin. “Well. . I suppose. . It’s a complicated business.”
“And if you changed those bad things how would you know that the change wouldn’t lead to worse things that would now wait for you unseen in the years to come?” Kara ate another of the eggs and handed the rest to Snorri. They looked lost in the wideness of his palm.
“Hmmm. Perhaps the evil old witch got what she deserved after all.” It sounded as though looking into the future might be as much of a pain as looking into the past. The moment was clearly the place to be. Except this moment which was wet and cold.
• • •
An hour later Tuttugu returned carrying a makeshift sailcloth sack into which he’d loaded his salvage. There wasn’t much of it, and nothing to eat save a tub of butter that had already been rancid when purchased in Haargfjord more than a week back.