“What happened?” I prodded when she didn’t continue.
“We finally decided to split up at the Bergen crossroads. The Quick’s name was Melient. He continued north, and I turned east—we hoped it would give one of us a chance. The wolves took the bait and followed me. And I lost them in the hills.” She bowed her head and brought her thumbs to her lips and then her forehead. “Tonight I will say a prayer to the Rover King that Melient has reached his Quick companions by now and is safely on his way to the Brocee Leon Forest.”
“You pray to the Rover King?” I asked. He was mostly a Fremish god, though it was said he was friendly to all roamers.
“No, but some of the Quicks do. Melient shouted his name when Uther touched her torch to the pile of straw beneath our feet.”
Morgunn picked up the knife again. “Are you sure you lost the wolves, Gyda?” She watched the druid closely, all laughter gone. “Did you lead a pack of dogs right to our doorstep?”
Gyda shook her head and put her fist to her heart. “Your steading is far from the Stretch and hidden by the surrounding hills. I wouldn’t have discovered it myself except by chance. They won’t find us here.”
“I’m not sure I believe you, druid. If you found our farm, so will they.” Morgunn’s eyes moved from Gyda’s to mine.
I read my own thoughts echoed in her gaze. So we survived the snow sickness just to end up dying at the hands of some dirty, stinking wolf-priests?
Ten years before, I watched my father march off to sea, though he’d sworn to my mother when he married her that he was done with ship-life for good. He never came home.
Four weeks before, I burned the servants in the east field and then buried my mother and a shepherd named Viggo.
Now I was alone on a farm with my sister and a bare-skulled druid, with a pack of Fremish wolf-priests burning nearby villages.
I let Morgunn open the cask that night. I didn’t want my sister to drink, but neither did I want her to be terrified and melancholy.
When I brought the mead from the storeroom, my sister grinned. When I poured her a tall mug, amber liquid dripping down the sides, she laughed.
Gyda drank the mead as well. We all did. We ate the last of the cheese, and we drained the cask. We forgot about the wolf-priests. We forgot about the snow sickness. We forgot about everything.
The druid proved a good drinking companion. We sang bawdy songs at the top of our lungs and danced, arm in arm, down the length of the hall. Morgunn built up the fire, and we stripped to our shifts. We sweated and drank and laughed.
It’s easy to become friends with a stranger when everyone else you know is dead.
Sometime near dawn we staggered down the east corridor. Morgunn stumbled into her room and fell onto a pile of sheepskins, asleep as soon as her body hit the bed. I took Gyda to Aslaug’s old room at the far end. She fell onto the furs there, closed her eyes, and slept.
I returned to the long, dark corridor alone. It smelled of dust and cold air. I didn’t stop at the door to my mother’s room as I passed. I didn’t even look at it.
I thought back to that frigid day last winter, crisp air and an indigo sky. A messenger had come that morning with an offer of marriage from Eric Tather.
Mother and I had been fishing in the stream, casting our lines between chunks of ice.
The Tather steading was five times the size of our own, and their Great Hall was nearly the size of a jarl’s. All the Tathers were large men, tall with broad shoulders, thick arms, and slim hips. They were a wealthy family, dating back to the days of the Elshland raids. They had a handful of Iber horses and enough gold to pay a band of Quicks to protect their land. They had ties to Jarl Sindri at Black Dyre, and the oldest of the Tather brothers had married one of the jarl’s seven daughters.
“I will not wed him, Mother,” I said. “I will not marry Eric.”
She threw her net onto the bank and put her hands on her hips.
“Torvi, your only chance at greatness will be to marry this Tather. You are too lazy, too cautious, to do anything else. Your heart is too soft. You are not Vorse.”
She paused, just long enough to make sure that I wasn’t going to weep at her cruel words, that I was at least Vorse enough not to cry.
“You have big dreams,” she said, “like all young girls. But mark my words, you will live out your days on these hills, drifting through life, sunset after sunset, season after season. This is all you will ever do.” She paused. “Aslaug has filled your head with tales from the sagas, of simple farm girls who grow up to win themselves a jarldom, but the few Vorse jarldoms that were ruled by women were obtained through magic or war, and you are neither a wizard nor a witch nor a warrior.”
It was true. I was none of those things.
Not yet.
I did not fall asleep as easily as my sister and the druid. I sat on the end of my bed and watched the moonlight flow in through the square window. I tried to keep my mind light and simple, as it had been before, when we were drinking, but I sobered up quickly in the quiet and the dark.
I thought of Gyda, knifing two wolf-priests to rescue a Quick she didn’t know. I thought of my father on the deck of a ship, sailing some foreign sea. I thought of my mother, her tall, strong body trapped forever under the earth by the rowan trees.
I heard a howl outside the window. It was faint but real. Then I heard another. And another.
Morgunn was right. They would find us eventually.
I took a deep breath and sighed. I stretched out and pressed my cheek into the soft sheepskins that covered my bed. I imagined myself sinking down …
… into the ground, under the dirt.
I curled up with Viggo, relaxed, and fell asleep.
FOUR
I squinted in the sunshine. My head hurt—from too much mead, from lack of sleep. Gyda looked as bad as I felt: red eyes, swollen face, the bruises still a vivid purple across her neck. Morgunn, by contrast, was bright-eyed and cheerful.
We were eating boiled eggs outside on the front steps of the Hall. The morning light was clear, slanting across our knees, striking the brown eggshells at our bare feet.
I gave Gyda another egg and then handed her the pitcher of cold water I’d collected from the spring. “How did you sleep?”
She let out a low laugh and shrugged. “Deep and dreamless for a while. Then I tossed and turned … I can still smell the wolf-smoke on my skin. Even after all the rain. The scent echoed through my dreams.”
I leaned toward her and put my nose to her wrist. “You’re right. I smell it, too. I’ll take you to the stream for a bath, and you can use Aslaug’s yarrow soap and juniper skin oil. I’ll fetch you a new tunic to wear as well.”
“Burn this one,” she said.
* * *
We all bathed in the beck, the water frigid but the sun warm. Afterward, we stretched out naked on the grassy banks, waiting for our skin to dry, soaking in the sunshine after all the months of cold and dark.
Gyda eyed my hair, the dripping-wet curls cascading down my spine. She ran her hands over her own bare head, palms moving from her temples to the base of her skull. “My hair has never been long enough for me to know its true color. Perhaps I will let it grow now that I’ve left the Boar Islands.”
“Why did you leave?” I asked.