“You must not, Desi. It is forbidden. Only the keepers can use the runes.”
“I’m dying,” Desdemona spat. “Who will punish the act?”
Dagmar winced, but she continued, and her blade moved in the earth as she spoke.
“I loved him,” she confessed.
“Banruud?”
“I loved him, and it became inconvenient for him. He wants power more than anything else. He is just like his father. He wants to be king. He will marry the daughter of King Ansel. He thinks it will give him standing, and she will give him many sons. But my son will be the only child of Banruud.”
With a trembling hand, she drew yet another rune, a rune Dagmar didn’t recognize, not at first. “Banruud will deny him again. And in his denial, he will deny all Saylok. Salvation will come through my son, and only through him.”
The child began to wail again, and with his cries, Desdemona began to slump into herself, the loss of blood stripping her of her strength. Dagmar wrapped his arms around her, overcome. His cheeks were wet, his sight blurred, and he pressed his lips into her hair, willing her to cease speaking. Her words were a blood curse, the most powerful kind, because the blood that spilled into the ground was her lifeblood, and her death would seal her prophecy. Her voice was a mere whisper, but her blade continued to carve lines into the sodden earth as she spoke again.
“We are abused. We are used. We are bartered and abandoned. But rarely are we loved. So be it. From this day forward, there will be no daughters in Saylok for any of you to love.”
The ground rumbled as though pained by Desdemona’s knife, and for a moment, Dagmar feared the earth would open and swallow them. But the tremors ceased almost as suddenly as they’d begun.
“I love you, Desdemona,” Dagmar choked, wiping his tears in her hair. “I have always loved you. Do not speak this way.”
“You left me, brother. And now I will leave you,” she breathed, but the words caught and rattled in her chest, and the knife fell from her hand, her runes completed, her life finished. The babe cried again, a short, sad protest, and then he fell silent, his bow-shaped mouth rooting for his mother’s breast.
But his mother was gone.
Dagmar felt the life lift from his sister and her limbs loosen. Her head fell back, exposing her throat, young, lovely, and streaked with crimson from her own hands. Dagmar shook her, demanding she wake as her babe latched onto a still-warm breast, taking what was left of her into himself. Dagmar was repulsed, horrified even, and he wept as the child drank, his little cheeks hollowing out, his tiny hands fisting the white flesh as he suckled his dead mother.
Dagmar wanted to pull the child away but knew the babe was innocent. Hungry. There was no evil in the act, and suckling was an innate response. Whatever sustenance her son received was the only gift Desdemona could give him. Dagmar looked away, ill and shaken, not wanting to release his sister because he would jostle the child. So he held her—held them—and studied the runes his sister had drawn into the bloody ground.
She’d drawn the sign of the woman and child, but the tail of a snake encircled them, its head and forked tongue rising up through a crown with six spires. Six spires for six clans of Saylok. She’d also drawn the rune of strength and power, but the ring around the second rune was not closed, and Dagmar wondered if that was intentional or if Desdemona had simply died before she could finish. He could close it, but the blood was not his, and he feared his interference might make things worse.
A closed circle meant finality. In a strength rune, a gap in the circle meant weakness. However small, however slight, but still . . . weakness. If the rune of strength was for her young son, Desdemona had inadvertently left an opening for a fatal flaw. With a flick of Desdemona’s blade across his hand, a hand that still bled, Dagmar closed the gap.
“He will have no mother. No father. No clan. He will have only me, Allfather. And I don’t know how I will provide. But as to any weakness he—Bayr—is cursed with, I will make up the difference,” Dagmar prayed, and with an odd calm, he laid his sister against the earth she would return to and lifted the child from her chest. The babe had fallen asleep, releasing his mother’s breast. He was warm and sticky, covered in blood and grime, but dark hair covered his head, and his limbs and trunk were well formed and pink, with small rolls of fat making him look like an oft-fed piglet. He was a healthy man-child, Dagmar thought. Perfect, even.
“You must come with me now, Bayr,” he said to the child, calling him by the name his mother had chosen. She’d cursed Banruud, yet she’d still given his son the sound of his tribe. All male children of a tribe were given the first sound of their father’s name. A female child was given the beginning sound of her mother’s name. Dagmar wished briefly that his sister had given the child the sound of her own clan. The child’s father had claim to him, but clearly Banruud had rejected both mother and son, and Dagmar vowed, anger swelling in his chest, that he would not let the man have him now.
Following his sister’s lead, Dagmar tucked the child beneath his robes against the warm skin of his chest and began the long climb back to the temple, promising his sister he would return to her when her child was safe.
2
Dagmar almost turned back several times. He should keep the infant and leave the keepers. They would never allow him to raise the child in the enclave. There were a few women living on the temple grounds and more living in the servants’ quarters in the palace, but no women lived within the walls of the temple itself. The keepers cared for themselves and the temple without female assistance, each brother assigned in rotation to the duties that daily life demanded. One could not pray, read, and write all day. The chores kept them grounded in the physical, which was easy to lose sight of in a meditative state.
There were soldiers on Temple Hill too, and a small contingent from the king’s army were assigned to guard the temple from raiders and those who sought to trespass where they didn’t belong. Temple Hill was like a small village run mostly by men, and Dagmar was quite certain he wouldn’t find a nursemaid in the castle or living on the grounds.
Dagmar ran through all these details, mundane as they were, trying to imagine a child among the community on Temple Hill. The Highest Keeper, Ivo, would send him away. Dagmar hesitated again and turned in a circle, his eyes seeking the sky and the trees, looking for an answer to the situation he now found himself in. The infant against his chest began to squirm, but he didn’t cry, and Dagmar patted his back instinctively, soothing him, soothing himself.
Dagmar couldn’t leave. He had nowhere to go. He had no home in Dolphys. Not anymore. He shuddered to think what his father would do. He would start a war, that’s what he would do. He would take the infant and ride into Berne, to the home of Chief Banruud. He would demand recompense for his dead daughter. The child would either be taken in by Banruud or raised by Dred of Dolphys, or whichever woman he hired to look after him while he pillaged and plundered the lands east of Saylok, across the waters.
Banruud had already rejected Desdemona and the child.
Dred was unfit.
And Desdemona had entrusted the child to Dagmar’s care.
“Odin, Father of Saylok, have mercy on this child. He is of the lineage of your son, a direct descendant of the bear Berne and the wolf Dolphys.” It was the prayer Dagmar had been uttering since leaving Desdemona, and he repeated it again as he resumed his climb and neared the gates of the temple.