The corner of Roric’s mouth curved up slightly. “Yes. Tell her that. And take care of her if I do not come back-especially if you marry her yourself.”
“I couldn’t marry her!” Valmar started to object, but Roric had already turned away and was mounting his stallion.
Valmar looked after them in amazement as Roric and the being who could not be a Wanderer rode quickly away. Could this be not a nightmare but a dream, the dream he had sometimes had of all-powerful beings realizing they were not all-powerful but that they needed something, someone, him? But that he might marry Karin! One of his most vivid early memories was of her, only a few weeks after she had first arrived at the castle, coming to him and saying, “You’re my little brother now. And I’m going to teach you the games you have to play with me.”
He glanced back over his shoulder. His father, really his father this time, was galloping toward him, a crowd of warriors and dogs and housecarls with him.
Valmar suddenly jumped on his own horse. “Roric!” he screamed, his voice thin and high. The two figures were about to disappear into the forest. “Roric! Wait! I’m coming with you!”
His gelding ran all out, but he was too late. When he reached the forest edge, they were already gone.
Long, long ago, in your grandmother’s day or your great-grandmother’s day, lived a man and woman who loved each other with all their hearts. He fished in winter in the briny sea, and grew barley in summer in his fields on the hills, while she kept the cow and brewed the beer and made the cheese and bread. Their only sorrow was that they had no children.
Their only sorrow, that is, until one stormy winter’s night his ship did not return from the briny sea.
And in her despair she came home from drinking his funeral ale to a silent hall, and she called on the lords of voima to hear her. Her man was dead such a short time, she argued, he could not yet be in Hel, in the realm of the lords of death. Voima must still reach him. She demanded the lords of earth and sky to listen, demanded incessantly for three days. And on the third day, when she had almost lost hope and had returned to her duties on the farm and was once again brewing the beer, a Wanderer came to her.
“So you want your man again,” he said, standing in the door of the brewing house and looking at her from under his broad-brimmed hat. “All it will take in return is that which is between you and the vat.”
“Between me and the vat?” She looked down and saw the silver funeral buckle at her waist. “Of course,” she said. “I shall gladly meet your terms.” But even while she was loosening the buckle the Wanderer disappeared.
She looked wildly for where he had gone, then forgot him, for she heard a voice in the yard and a step she had thought never to hear again. But as she turned to rush from the brewing house she suddenly gave a great cry and collapsed in agony.
For the lord of voima had not meant her buckle. And she had not known until that moment that she had been with child.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Across the meadow, into the forest, through the tangle of the alder thickets, Roric followed the rider. The other’s horse went effortlessly through the densest underbrush, and Goldmane followed.
It disturbed him that he could not see the rider clearly. Maybe it was the sun’s glare, or the speed they were going, or the thin blue mist that rose from the boggy soil under their horses’ hooves, but when Roric looked at him directly all he could see was a shadowy outline.
And yet he had seen his face, thin and yellow, dark eyes within enormous bony eye sockets burning like the last coals on the hearth on a winter’s dawn. If it was a Wanderer who had sat and talked with him outside the manor’s guesthouse, this could not be the same one.
They came up from the boggy lowlands at last, their horses scrambling on the thin soil that overlay a steep rocky hill. Roric looked around, thinking they could not have come so far so fast. This hill marked the western boundary of King Hadros’s kingdom, and even by road and sea it should have taken a full day to reach here, yet it appeared that only an hour had passed since the rider appeared at the mares’ pen.
“Where are we?” he called to his companion. “Where are we going?”
The other did not answer or even acknowledge that he had heard. Roric looked ahead, toward the top of the hill, and saw two lichen-spotted standing stones that he could never before recall seeing, leaning together as though to form a gate.
The rider went straight through. Goldmane made to follow, but Roric held him back for a moment, looking off toward the distant sandstone escarpment that rose over Hadros’s castle. Whoever this person was, he seemed able to move space and time.
But then the stallion jerked his head against the bit and followed through the gateway of the standing stones.
And emerged into a world Roric had never seen.
2
The sea wind blew in Karin’s face, stinging her eyes and whipping her hair. She took a deep breath of clean salty air and abruptly felt awake for the first time in ten days.
It had been like a dream during a bad fever, events rushing at her too fast, incomprehensible. She must have slept during that time, but she could only picture herself working, or else lying fully awake in bed, longing achingly for Roric. She had prepared for the trip to the All-Gemot with no conscious memory of having done so, packing her clothes, making sure that Hadros and Valmar had their own finery, choosing what herbs to include in her medicine chest, preparing food to take, instructing the maids on what would need to be done in her absence.
When Valmar had tried to talk to her about a person he said could not possibly have been a Wanderer, when the king raged so that the men went to their loft immediately after dinner without drinking with him, she went about her chores with her face placid and her eyes devoid of any expression.
Now she seemed suddenly aware of herself again, the skin on her cheeks, the way her cloak tugged at her shoulders, the feel of the smooth railing under her hands. For ten days she had been constantly busy, constantly moving, but all at once there was nothing to do except watch the sailors and the sea. She ran a finger along the broad links of her gold necklace; it had been much too heavy for a child, but her father had given it to her to wear when she went to Hadros’s castle, and she would wear it coming back.
The king joined her at the railing. The ship ran with its red sail taut, rising up on the long swell that had come across hundreds of miles of empty ocean to the channel, then sliding into a trough rimmed by waves that seemed they must surely sink the ship in the next second. But the ship always rose again, the foam white under its bow, and the lines creaking overhead.
She looked at Hadros thoughtfully. He too looked almost himself again. While she emerged from a fevered dream, he was waking up from a furious nightmare.
“Be glad I did not let you marry him, little princess,” he said with a visible effort at good humor. “You would not want to be coming home to your father to tell him you had married a man who ran at the first challenge.”
“He did not run,” she said, then wondered if she had already said this. If so, the king had apparently not heard it.
“He ran from me, to save his skin if not his honor,” said Hadros, looking grimly out across the waves, “and he had best not come back with a wheedling tale in search of forgiveness.”
Karin wondered if this was an admission by the king that he had indeed intended to have Roric killed-even if he had regretted his intent. If he did run, Hadros, she thought, it was so he would not have to kill you. “The Wanderers want him,” she said, “and no one can refuse a summons from the lords of voima.”