He rose and walked toward the cave entrance. If he met someone he might be able to tell from their reaction who he was before they realized he did not know himself.
He should have emerged from the cave at the bottom of a little waterfall, but instead as he went forward he smelled salt spray. The splashing water he had heard no longer sounded like a waterfall but like waves breaking against the shore. As he stepped into sunshine the singing birds he had heard all became gulls, wheeling with sharp cries overhead.
Frowning, he climbed out of the cave mouth and started walking slowly along the shingle. He was quite sure he had never seen this stretch of coast before. Sunlight flashed on green waves and white foam. He had to walk carefully amidst great boulders, packed between with pebbles and wet sand.
He came around a boulder and saw a young woman sitting on a rock before him. Her hair, tousled by the sea wind, was black and curling, and the sunlight glinted in her eyes. She smiled, showing a row of sharp little white teeth. “Greetings, Valmar Hadros’s son.”
Then he was Valmar. His identity swirled for a second, then settled itself. He was the heir to the yellow sandstone castle, but he also knew that within him now, and for the rest of his life, was a fragment of the wisdom of the immortals. But she-
“You can’t be here,” he said. “You can‘t. ”
“Why not?” She rose with an amused smile and came to take his hands in hers. She appeared younger than he remembered.
“Because you and all the other Hearthkeepers have been joined with the Wanderers, to rule earth and sky united. You must have restored both mortal and immortal realms before they were unmade, or neither we nor this shore would even be here.”
“But I am not a Hearthkeeper!”
“Then what are you?” asked Valmar, trembling between fear and delight, hoping he knew the answer.
“I think I am a mortal.” She grinned up at him. “We were thirteen sisters, including the one who had just joined us. Only twelve of us could join in the new union to rule earth and sky. Since we had just told her she could be one of us, it would be hard to eject her from our numbers! The sister who had most recently been living in mortal lands had come back to rejoin us as the sun set in realms of voima, and she had no intention of leaving. That left me. I was, after all, the only one carrying a mortal child. Twins, actually!”
She laughed at his expression. “Are you not flattered, Valmar, that I left the realms of voima to become a mortal’s wife-even if I did take care to choose a man who had saved those realms from destruction?”
He crushed her to him, one hand around her small, straight back, the other plunged into her hair. He felt too full of joy even for desire. “If you are now mortal,” he was able to gasp at last, “be careful about daring people to cut off your head.”
She caught her breath as he held her a little away from him to look at her. “By the Wanderers!” she said with a laugh. “That is what mortals say, isn’t it?” she asked as an aside. “Since I have become mortal, your embrace is so strong it could keep me from breathing! And you haven’t even said yet you’ll have me.”
They sat down together on a stone, his arm around her shoulders. “It will be, how shall I put this, interesting to have you as a wife,” he said with a smile. “You won’t be like the queens of any other of the other Fifty Kingdoms.”
“Is that a problem?” she asked with a quick, sideways look. “You wouldn’t perhaps prefer to have-Karin?”
His eyebrows shot up. He had not known she even knew about Karin. But then-she had until very recently been an immortal. “No,” he managed to say in an even voice. “Karin is my foster-sister. I have given up any thought of making her mine. She would never think of me or treat me as other than her brother-not like you!” He pulled her to him, tickling her until she shouted with laughter. And he realized with his new wisdom as she tickled him back that he spoke truly: when he left Karin sleeping in his father’s castle he had put off any love for her other than a brother’s love.
When they had caught their breaths again, Valmar said, “There is one problem. If you are going to be my wife, you have to have a name.”
“You can call me Wigla,” she said promptly.
“Wigla?! But-”
“Well, I never had a name the way you mortals have names when I was a Hearthkeeper. Now that the woman you used to know as Wigla has become an immortal, she won’t need her name any more. Since we have, you might say, changed places, I have taken her name.”
He took her face between his hands and kissed her. “Well, Wigla, if you are a mortal now you’ll have to learn that you can’t just decide to be one place or another. And we humans need to eat. Unless you care to swim in the surf and eat raw fish, we had better start trying to find a house or manor around here.”
4
Early in the morning the two kings, Queen Arane, Karin, and Roric all sat together by the shore of the salt river. The men had bailed out the ship and had nearly finished salvaging what could be salvaged from the tidal wave. Counting and checking had yielded the good news that no one had drowned.
King Kardan looked assessingly at his daughter. She nearly glowed with joy. She had Roric’s hand clenched in hers and kept looking at him as though not able to believe the good fortune fate had brought her. The man who had been chosen by the Wanderers to save their realm and had walked living through Hel had returned to her, and she did not even care what glorious deeds he had done as long as he was with her.
“We don’t need a formal Gemot,” she said. “Since Roric did not kidnap either me or Valmar, there is no reason to outlaw him.”
“I can certainly outlaw him for stealing my ship,” said Hadros fiercely, thrusting out his bearded chin.
“Roric did not do that,” she said coolly. “ I did. To outlaw a future sovereign queen would take the All-Gemot of the Fifty Kings, which means you’ll have to wait until next year. Unless you planned to declare war on me? I’ve heard you say, Hadros,” with the faintest smile, “that you do not war on girls.”
“He still has the blood-guilt of three men on him,” the king said roughly, “and we have not seen Valmar.”
For a second Karin’s face became clouded-thinking doubtless of her little brother. Kardan answered for her. “I shall pay the blood-fee, Hadros, for my future son-in-law. Karin has told me she is ready to swear on steel and rowan that when Roric killed your warriors Rolf and Warulf they had attacked Roric as three against one, and I witnessed his single combat against Gizor.”
Karin unexpectedly smiled. “Roric and I can pay the blood-money ourselves. We know where there’s a dragon hoard-and the dragon is not coming back.”
The other king grunted and stretched out his stiff leg. “Even if the money’s paid,” he said, “I don’t like a man who’s foresworn his loyalty.” He kept glancing at Roric as though extremely proud of him, and then he would make himself scowl again.
“I think,” put in Roric, sober but with a hint of laughter at the corners of his mouth, “that Gizor has forgiven me.”
“The wight that appeared on the grave mound,” commented Kardan, “was said by many of the men to be one-handed…”
They all looked at Roric for a moment. The story he had told them, how he had gone from what Karin had been sure was a fatal fight against Eirik’s men to stepping alive out of Hel, was hard to believe yet impossible to doubt. They had already dug into the mound where Roric had emerged to bury King Eirik’s lyre next to Gizor’s body.
Karin seemed determined to make Hadros agreeable, or as agreeable as he could be given that his heir was still missing. “Are you two the first man and lord ever to quarrel?” she asked with a smile. “The Gemot would be busy indeed if it had to hear about everything said in a fit of anger.”
This would be much easier, Kardan thought, if Hadros would acknowledge that Roric was his son rather than treating him like a rebellious warrior. But perhaps he did not want to tell him the truth until the blood-guilt was cleared away. Or perhaps he did want to appear too quick to claim parentage of a man about whom they were already telling stories and would soon be making songs.