THREE
Years earlier, under a starry autumn sky, Svala the High Priestess moved through the camp towards me. In the firelight, surrounded by revelers, she might have been our warrior-goddess herself, robed in violence and armored with divine purpose.
There was blood in her crown of braids, spattered where black hair met tawny skin, and a slim ring of bronze glistened above her bloodied tunic. Its runes had worn smooth long ago, but I knew they were clear on my own, only a year old. The Brave. The Vengeful. The Watchful. The Swift. All that Eang was, and all that we must endeavor to be.
Yske and I sat against a boulder on the edge of the celebration, between our comrades and their fires, and the quiet of a far northern night. The trees were sparse here, gnarled and windblown. The expanse of open rock was still warm from the sun and pocketed with shivering clusters of seeding flowers and moss, while above the sky arched toward the distant, shadowed hulk of the Algatt’s high mountains.
This was Orthskar, in northern Eangen, where we’d spent the last three weeks hunting down a group of Algatt raiders. Raiders that, today, we’d finally routed and driven back into the mountains under the leadership of the woman who beckoned me now.
“Hessa,” the High Priestess held out her hand. “Come with me.”
Yske looked up, a cup of honey wine halfway to her lips. When we were children, I might have seen a flash of jealousy in her eyes at the High Priestess coming for me instead of her, but there was none of that now. We were old enough to know that the interest of our leaders was not always a good thing.
I nodded obediently, though the day’s battle had left me sore and exhausted. I eased myself onto my feet and slipped my plain, unadorned axe through its leather loop at my belt.
The High Priestess headed off into the darkness. I, it seemed, was expected to follow.
Yske grabbed my hand. She and I still shared our fathers’ curling dark hair, dense brush of freckles and brown eyes. But by now our progression into womanhood had begun to accent our differences; where Yske had her mother’s lithe form, every muscle calculated, every curve measured, I had my mother’s compact power.
“What does she want?” Yske asked, low enough to nearly be drowned by a thunder of drums. We both flinched as the warriors of the camp roared with approval and someone began a familiar song in a deep, rolling voice. “What did you do wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I hissed back.
“Hessa,” Svala called.
Yske’s hand dropped away. We exchanged one last uncertain glance, then I hastened off into the night.
The songs of the warriors followed us as we left the camp behind. They told the history of the gods, taught to us by Eang herself, of how the Gods of the Old World – their names lost over the millennia – had woven themselves from the darkness of the heavens, borne children, and created mankind from the dirt and divine birth-blood. Eang had been among their offspring, and the Gods of the Old World had quickly learned to fear their most violent daughter.
Svala and I walked until the older woman halted under the shadow of a tree. The firelight could not reach us here, but the stars gave enough illumination for me to make out the planes and shadows of her face – and the runes carved into every inch of the leafless, barren tree at her back.
Svala followed my gaze. “It’s a binding tree, Hessa. Have you seen one before?”
Distantly, I heard Yske’s voice join the chorus in the camp, vibrant and sweet.
“No…” Cautiously, I circled the tree, squinting at runes for protection and suppression, warning and foreboding. My nerves, already worn, began to fray, but I resisted the urge to draw back. Svala was watching me, and she would not overlook any weakness. “What is bound inside this?”
“What? Or who? It matters little.” The High Priestess nodded back towards the camp. Our comrades’ song continued to wash out towards us, now recounting how Eang had gathered her cousins and siblings, the so-called Gods of the New World, to overthrow the Gods of the Old. “Eang’s power will keep them asleep until the Unmaking of the World, along with the Gods of the Old World and a hundred other enemies besides. But the tree is not why I brought you out here.”
I retraced my steps, settling before her at a respectful distance – and letting her remain between me and the hushed, rune-laden tree.
“You killed today.”
Tears surged into my eyes, ready and eager. Horrified, I blinked hard and kept my back straight, but I had no doubt Svala saw how the act had shaken me.
She offered me no comfort. Instead she scrutinized me, crowned by the binding tree’s stark, wind-blown branches. “I had a vision of you, in the eyes of a dying man. It is not uncommon… Today was your first raid as full Eangi. Your first kill, since you came to us. So Eang showed me your future – a vision from Fate herself.”
I remained quiet, squinting away my tears. Fate was the most mysterious of divine beings, elevated and withdrawn from Eang and the New Gods, or any other assembly of gods for that matter. She had no physical form, but there were corners of the High Halls, the high priesthood said, where one could hear the clack of her loom on a starry night, as she wove the destinies of us all.
That Fate had showed Eang a vision of me was both awe-inspiring and troubling.
“I saw a man,” Svala said.
“A man?” I could not help myself. I was fifteen and, despite living in close quarters with men of all ages, her words made my cheeks flush. My eyes darted away from her and the lording tree to the chanting masses back in the camp, a hundred warriors releasing weeks of tension. Leather. Muscle. Nerves and grief, clawing for release. Eidr was there, somewhere, singing and laughing.
I shuffled on my feet. “Was he mine? The man in the vision?”
“I don’t know.” If she saw my embarrassment, she didn’t comment. I sometimes wondered if Svala had ever passed through those painful, formative years, or if she had spawned in all her mature, feminine glory. “But he stood with you in the Hall of Smoke, with a hound at his heel and a golden eye.”
A few tears escaped my blockade and trickled onto my upper lip. I licked them away. “What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure. But you were a little older, perhaps by three or four years.” Svala looked at me askance and, back in the camp, the song entered a resounding, final verse. I thought I saw a rare smile in the corner of the priestess’s mouth, but before I could be sure, it vanished into a frown. “When that day comes, you must kill him.”
FOUR
I turned away from the baby in my arms and muffled a cough in my shoulder. The Algatt guard who paced around the huddle of prisoners shot me a glare and shifted his grip on his axe.
My captors had brought Sixnit, the baby and I to the horde just after dusk, thrusting me down in the middle of twenty other Eangen. Most of the captives were young women like me, though there were a handful of boys, a smattering of older women and two men. I was the only Eangi.
My body had given into cold and fatigue, the result of Eangi Fire and a night in the rain, but it helped excuse the steady trickle of tears from my eyes. It was a pitiful shield, but it was something; a lesser suffering to focus on while a chasm of loss festered beneath my skin.
Sixnit and her son were the only things that kept that chasm from swallowing me. Sixnit had regained consciousness on the road but had yet to speak, lying with her head in my lap and slipping in and out of consciousness. The infant had recovered, though his breath was still so thin that my heart wrenched every time he inhaled. I wished he would cry, because at least then I could hear the life in him. For all that he moved now, he might have been carved of pale, clammy stone.