“Oh,” I said, because it was what I could think to say. I touched the spindle in my pocket, felt the wisp of roving at the end of the thread.
Ragnar drew a deep breath and shook himself together, turning his bright gaze back to the horses. The horses were calm, and I watched them, too. We stood together for a moment. Then he turned and grinned at me, gap-toothed, as I stared. “And that dragon, Hacksilver. That dragon’s man-long fangs drip venom. Eitr. So if you want to send your brother home, and his wife, you’re going to bring me the gall of that dragon, and you’re going to help me get my sons back, and my little girl.”
Eitr. There was a word I hadn’t heard in a while. A complicated word that could mean anger, or it could mean poison, or it could mean gall, in all the senses of gall—the sort that is spoken, and the sort that burns flesh less metaphorically. But eitr was also the source and the font of all life in the world.
Life and death are not so far apart, as it happens, and neither are venom and the truth.
“Have you turned into the cowardly sorcerer they call you, then? You’d leave your brother lying in his grave, and Bryngertha beside him, doomed to the meagre afterlife allotted those who die of pestilence?”
Ragnar was trying to get a rise out of me and coming perilously close to an insult I could not with honor ignore. But guest right stood between us. I crossed my arms the other way on the top course of the fence. A few of the horses, including Magni, decided it was a good time to amble over and see if we had carrots.
“Usually, one doesn’t have a lot of options, once a man is in the grave. Anyway, people pay more attention to what a man says than to his deeds, and even more than that to whatever lies others tell about him.” I pushed a soft, inquisitive horse nose away from my pocket. “It’s all spin. Maybe I can buy him a better afterlife if I write a few songs about him. Why don’t you go and get your own dragon venom?”
“Most folk are stupid,” Ragnar replied. “And I know the truth behind the stories. At least as far as you’re concerned. You’ve got a better chance of walking into a dragon’s lair and back out again than I do. Than any man I’ve ever met.”
“Simple. Kill the dragon, collect its gall. Raise a bunch of people from the dead and save the harvest. That’s what you want of me.”
“I’ll feed you breakfast first.”
Despite myself, when I met his gaze, I found myself smiling at the audacity in his smirk. That audacity is why I sailed with him. It’s why I did other things with him, too.
“I’d think—”
He rolled his eyes. “Nobody cares what you think. They only care what you do.”
I wished Ragnar to Hel in company with my brother. I stared him in the eyes and said, “Your word that everything you’ve told me is true.”
Without looking, he flicked his knife from its sheath and across the back of his hand. A thin line of blood formed, the wound-rain that was his byname. We’d spilled enough in each other’s company.
“My word of honor,” he said.
I sighed gustily, from the bottom of my lungs. Ash whispered past my forehead, swirling on my breath. I took my hat off and nodded.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll need some jars with stoppers. And for you to give me your fattest horse.”
“What’s wrong with your horse?”
I stroked Magni’s neck. He hated having his face touched. “I’m not going to feed my horse to a dragon.”
Ragnar pursed his lips, making the moustache jut. Then he nodded, reached out, and gave Magni a scratch under his mane. “All right. But if you get eaten he belongs to me.”
We went back inside, and when Aerndis brought me more ale I caught her attention and said, “I have agreed.”
She brought me seed-cake, too.
They gave me a sleeping place on the bench along the wall. Sometime before the brief interlude that passed for sunset, we retired. I slept alone, and better than I had any right to in Ragnar Karlson’s house.
The sun was already high in the sky when we awoke, washed, and broke our fast. I followed him outside, still trying to reckon some way to avoid the task he had set me. There wasn’t any dragon, I thought—just the living land heaving beneath us. And there was no god I knew to pray to and no spell I knew to weave that could so much as delay the eruption of a geyser, let alone make a volcano stop smoking. We’d all be lucky if it didn’t decide to send out a tongue of lava to fill up this grassy valley nestled between its previous flows.
Ragnar grumbled some more, but he brought me the horse.
The dark gelding was fat, all right. He was shaped something like a mangel-wurzel, and his hooves were overgrown, and he limped in the off hind.
“This horse is lame.”
“You said fattest, not soundest. And you’d not expect me to give you a sound one, to feed to a dragon.”
“It’s far to walk.” I gestured at the smoking hill on the horizon. “And I can’t ride him.”
“Why not?” Ragnar cackled like a raven that has spotted an old enemy. “It’s not like riding him is going to impede his healing. His name is—”
“Don’t tell me his name.” I gave the horse a withered piece of carrot. “There’s no point in getting attached.”
Ragnar didn’t have a saddle that fit the gelding, round as he was. And I wasn’t going to hop on a strange horse bareback and try to get him to take me, all alone, to the den of some monster—or even to a fiery hole in the ground. So I walked, and led him. The basalt hurt my feet through my boots; it seemed to hurt his feet, too, because he minced along like a courtier in heeled shoes. It didn’t help that he tripped on his own overlong hooves with every third stride, and limped on that bad leg. Watching him try to move was a sad old comedy.
I lured him on with bits of turnip and carrot. He wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the turnip. He grabbed at the carrot, and I knocked on his teeth. “Manners.”
I laughed at myself. Was there any point in civilizing this animal?
A sharp bit of basalt stabbed me in the sole as if my bootleather didn’t even exist. I stopped, leaned on the gelding’s neck, and inspected my foot. No blood, and it hadn’t gone through that I could tell.
I turned and glared at the horse. He put his nose in my face and blew carrot-scented breath over me. He had braced himself as if standing on tiptoe, the bad foot cocked off the ground so his weight wasn’t resting on it. I ran my hand down the leg. He didn’t like me handling it. But there was no swelling, heat, or sign of a fracture. No bulge of a bowed tendon. No sign of a bruise inside the hoof or any of the other thousand things that could go wrong with a horse’s foot.
Which meant the injury was probably a strained ligament, which might heal with a few months of rest, or might be with him for the rest of his life. If he were going to have a life beyond the next few hours.
He wasn’t badly made, if you didn’t mind the hooves and the fat and the fact that he might have been born dark as night but the long summer days had weathered him the same red-black as the crumbling lava underfoot. He was smaller than Magni but built sturdily enough to carry a grown man. The only marking on him was an ash-fall stippling of white hairs on the flat plane of his face, stretching from brow to muzzle but not defined enough to be properly called a blaze.
He had a pretty head with defined cheekbones and a tapered muzzle. Intelligent ears. I had his full attention as I stood back and looked at him.
He nickered at me.