Silence grew and widened between them, filling the air with tension and, for Dagmar, torment. It wasn’t until Ivo spoke again, several minutes later, that Dagmar’s heart began to slow and his fear to diminish.
“I dreamed of her too, Dagmar,” Ivo admitted. “Last night, the night before that, and many nights before that. I didn’t know what it meant. But the woman . . . she reminded me of you. She looked like you. That is why I asked you to come to me. And here you are.”
Dagmar’s breath caught, and he bowed his head, desperate to keep his feelings to himself.
“Bring the child to me,” Ivo commanded.
Dagmar obeyed, his legs trembling so violently he thought he would fall. He moved past the altar and up the steps to the dais where his master sat waiting. He had no idea what the man would do. His lips and eyes, blackened like those of all the Highest Keepers since Saylok was formed from the sea, moved with Dagmar’s approach, his lips forming words Dagmar couldn’t hear.
Master Ivo’s long nails were sharp and curled, but he took the child between his palms with a gentleness that both surprised and relieved his uncle.
“His mother said he would be strong?” the Highest Keeper whispered.
“Yes, Master.”
“I can see already that it is true. Look how he holds his head! That is unusual in a newborn child. He is watching me, Dagmar. His eyes are clear and fixed.”
They were. The tiny babe was staring at Master Ivo with solemn wonder, his pink body clutched between the claws of the most powerful man in Saylok. More powerful than the king, for Master Ivo had the power to choose who would wear the crown. More powerful even than the gods and the three Norns that spun the fates of mankind, for in that moment, he held the child’s life in his hands.
“What was your sister’s name, Dagmar?”
“Desdemona.”
“Desdemona,” Master Ivo whispered, drawing the word out in a long hiss. “She who slays demons.”
“Yes,” Dagmar replied. “She was a great warrior in our clan.”
“Women don’t make great warriors,” Ivo spat.
Dagmar didn’t respond. He didn’t agree. A mother was the fiercest warrior of all.
“If I told you to leave him in the Temple Wood, a gift for Odin and all the gods of Saylok, would you obey me?”
“No, Master,” Dagmar replied, firm.
Ivo cursed Dagmar for his insolence, but his eyes didn’t leave the child.
“We have not had a child at the temple since Bjorn, and he was ten years old,” Ivo protested. Bjorn was now one of the higher keepers, a man well into his fiftieth year. “We have no way to know if this child will be a worthy supplicant.”
“We have soldiers on the mount. Cooks and gardeners and laundresses too. We aren’t all keepers or supplicants,” Dagmar said carefully.
“This is true,” Ivo allowed. A smile had begun playing on his lips as he gazed at the infant he held. Even soiled and stained, the babe was the picture of health and hope.
“What shall I tell the others?” the Highest Keeper muttered, and Dagmar’s heart quickened at Ivo’s obvious weakening toward the child.
“Tell them of your dreams, Master. No one will question your dreams.”
“And your dreams, Dagmar?”
“I will say only what you tell me to say,” Dagmar said humbly.
“So you will obey me in this?” Ivo’s disdain was back. “But if I command that you give him to the gods, you refuse? You will take him and go? Mayhaps throw yourself off the cliffs of Shinway, eh?”
“Mayhaps. But his fate will be my fate, yes, Master,” Dagmar confirmed.
The child bellowed suddenly, loudly, and Dagmar and Ivo both started. Ivo came close to dropping him, and his nail scored the child’s skin, causing a thin weal of blood to rise along his tiny ribs.
“Bayr of Saylok,” Ivo mused, his eyes on the blood. He laid the child on the altar before him and, running the soft pad of his finger over the oozing scratch, painted the child’s forehead in the star of Saylok.
“Bayr of Saylok,” Ivo intoned. “Bayr, nephew of Dagmar, child of Desdemona, son of the temple. Your life will be spared and guarded for a purpose I do not yet know, but I seal your mother’s prophecy on your head, and will do my part to see that it is fulfilled.”
Dagmar’s strength left his legs, and he reached for the altar where the infant lay. Gratitude, guilt, and grief combined to send him to his knees. He had not told Ivo everything, and Ivo had just sealed Desdemona’s words in blood on the infant’s head.
“Take him. Make arrangements. Your duties will remain the same, Keeper Dagmar, with or without the child. Let us pray that he is amenable to life in the enclave. If he is not, he . . . and you . . . must go.”
Bayr cried only at night when the temple was dark and silent, when the sound of his infant wails echoed through the corridors and made the keepers quartered in the same wing as Dagmar complain bitterly that the temple was no place for a motherless child. During the day, Bayr slept and blinked and cooed and kicked his small legs, but the nights were hard in the sterile room with the stone walls and the narrow bed.
Dagmar fashioned a cradle from a tinderbox, but the babe would not sleep or settle in the dark hours before dawn unless Dagmar was holding him, and Dagmar was too afraid to close his eyes for fear he would drop him while he slumbered. A week after Bayr’s birth, Dagmar was so exhausted, he fell asleep spread out on his floor with the babe on his chest. They both slept so deeply, Dagmar relented, and from that day forward, the boy slept in his arms on a pile of straw and Dagmar’s bed remained unused.
Having lost his own mother at an early age, Dagmar knew none of the soft ways of a woman. He had no breasts to offer sustenance and comfort, no songs or benign stories to entertain a child. His voice was rough and low, his hands large and clumsy, but his heart was broken and bleeding, and the baby boy, in all his helpless innocence, soothed something in him.
A woman from the King’s Village, whose child had recently been weaned, agreed to come to the wall around the temple grounds thrice a day to nurse the boy, but it wasn’t enough, and little Bayr was never full. Dagmar fashioned him a teat from sheep intestines and fed him goat’s milk before bed and between feedings with the village woman, and the milk was reinforced with prayers. Dagmar pled for strength and stamina, that his arms would not fail him in the night, that the child would not wake his brothers, and that his own inadequacies would not result in tragedy.
Initially, the other keepers frowned in dismay and made life more difficult for Dagmar, but after the first sleepless weeks, they grew to accept the infant’s presence among them, and more than one of the higher keepers had been caught smiling and waggling their fingers in the baby’s face when they thought no one was watching. The Keepers of Saylok were all members of an exclusive brotherhood, but none of them would be fathers, and the small boy gave them a taste of something they would never have.
Dagmar fashioned a sling of sorts to free his hands, and wherever he went and whatever duties he carried out, Bayr accompanied him, secured in his pouch on Dagmar’s torso. Dagmar practiced his runes with the babe strapped to his chest, began his day in chanting with the babe listening with wide eyes and cooing lips, and carried out his chores—including milking the blasted goats—all carrying the boy in the sling that he quickly outgrew.