By the Mountain Bound (8 page)

“Does she have a name?”

“Heythe. Some are already calling her Lady, though.”

“I see. Are you ready, brother mine?” I laid the rosined bow across the top four strings of the fiddle—the melody strings—and took a long, slow breath of the salt sea air. We would be traveling fast.

In answer, he shaped his fingers along the barrel of his flute and blew.

The music fell from our instruments cheery and light, a swirl of brightness that lifted us on a breeze so we stood some inches above the earth. Seven-league boots, but better. I took a step forward in time to the music, Yrenbend beside me. Sanura retreated to the horizon. Another step and it vanished, replaced by rolling hills.

Before noon, we saw the ragged peak of Ulfenfell on the horizon ahead. Yrenbend dropped his flute away from his lips. “Almost home,” he said. “A deep breath. And who knows what we will find? Perhaps Heythe comes to bring harmony among us.”

“Perhaps,” I answered, and drew the bow down one last time.

Witch nor woman womb of hatred

Man-mother of monsters three

—
Baldur’s Dreams

The Wolf

C
har and cold mist.

Burning.

I burn. Burning inside, and the world is cold, and I am still alone.

I taste blood and hair and fragments of bone. I smell hard winter over the reek of a fire. Something strangles me. But something has been strangling me for a long time. Half-awake, I paw at it, whining, and stop.

I open my eyes and tilt my head to look down at my hand.

A perfectly formed—human—hand.

I nose the paw—the hand—and snarl. It smells like the hand of a man. I could crunch it in my teeth, turn my head and tear—

I lunge up, as if to scramble away from the treacherous man-scent, but it follows. I cannot stand: it hurts my hindlimbs and back to move, and I sit back on my haunches in the snow to consider the strangeness and my legs bend wrong. The snow melts away from my naked flesh. My knee and elbow joints are in the wrong places along my forelimbs.

I have no tail. I put my head down and choke, clearing clogging foulness from my mouth. My tongue scrapes hair from blunt teeth, will not loll. I rub my face in snow. It melts and runs.

I remember chaos. Retching, the taste of oiled steel and my own blood. Choking. Rearing up, rearing back, pulling against the fetter that chokes me a thousand years. A sword-blade crunching between my jaws. Searing light. Sudden darkness. Hot blood and fury.

I was a wolf.

And now I seem to be . . . a man.

Dark as Hel, cold as Niflheim. No moon, no sun above, but the cold radiance of the stars reflected on drifts of snow. I breathe deeply, grateful that my sense of smell seems not much worse. I smell char under the rawness of ice like the ice at the top of the world. On the horizon is a dark, tall shape that reaches to the sky: the silhouette of a Tree. Stars sparkle among its branches, and it is the only thing in the world besides myself, and the ice.

I stand, unsteady on two bare feet. I walk. I fall, but the snow cushions the fall. And when I stand again, I move once more toward the Tree. Until, once more, I fall.

I turn, see my trail behind me, straggling through snowdrifts that, in places, reach my thighs. The snow still melts away from my touch.

Even once I am close enough to look up and make out the outline of the boughs against the starfield, the Tree seems no closer. I have been walking for days, months, years. I do not know. I fall; I stand. I go forward.

Toward the Tree.

Mortal lifetimes later, I lay one hand on the rough gray surface of a trunk so vast I can barely see the curve. The skin of my palm is . . . soft. I feel a pulse.

The sap is rising.

And within, the awareness of the Tree. It remembers battle, ice, frozen spears of winter as long as mountains are tall dripping from its branches. A ship clinker-built of the nails of dead men.

The howling of a sea of wolves.

I am alone a long time. Around the Tree, around the Tree, until I find shelter among its wildly twisted roots. I kill a snake here, in this hollow, and rip its flesh from narrow bones with my blunt and useless teeth. Its blood is pale and insipid, cold with winter. I sleep and grow stronger, leaner. But I do not hunger.

I have always hungered.

Now, the burning in my belly precludes thirst, assuages hunger.

The snow piles higher, and my hair grows long, like a human warrior’s, and matted, like the coat of an arctic beast. The sun never rises, and neither does the moon. Thinking of them, a flicker of memory. My fetter chokes me, and I cease to think. It is less painful not to think.

From the Tree, or from the snow, I come to understand something is
pending.

The snow falls and falls and melts never. It piles higher than my head, up the trunk of the mighty ash. I tunnel out, wanting the stars, the wind.

W
hen the stars have turned and turned again, she comes to me. On black wings, her eyes shining stiff gold, she settles on heaped snow. “My Lord.”

I rise from my hollow and go to her. The black wings come around, folding me away from the cold that never chills me. She pulls me close, her new name flickering against my knowing when her skin touches mine. She is my sister. Father renamed her. Or she would have died. “Imogen.”

She presses her lips to my throat where the big vein pulses like the sap up the Tree. She closes long lashes over lightsome eyes, and drinks my pain like wine.

Light flares, silver and blue as the starlight that has fallen on me these days, these months, these years that I have waited by the Tree. My collar strangles, but I throw my head back and call to the pack.

What I howl is no wolf-call. But a song.

And we fall, Imogen and me—fall between the stars, into darkness more than darkness, and I must sing, and keep singing.

The Imogen bears me up, soft-black owl-soft wings slapping air with textured silence. Below, a dark ocean ripples with starlight.

Darkness, starlight and song. . . .

A form unwinds from the water, a smooth convoluted camber like a root of the Tree. Translucent and radiant, it uncoils in an impossible, endless curve. Scales ripples along its side, and then—rising—the blunt head, broad lidless eye calm as a whale’s.

The colossal Serpent regards me momentarily. The Imogen backbeats furiously, steadies us in the tossing air.

M
INGAN
, it says, and though the name is not a name I have known, I understand that it is to be my name, that Father renamed me as well. T
ELL THEM TO REMEMBER THE
L
ADY AND THE
C
YNGE
. T
EACH THEM TO AVENGE THE MURDERED
.

It is like me. Like the Imogen. A survivor of the world before. But where we are renamed and saved, it has no name at all. The forked tongue flickers twice, long as a shaft of lightning; it brushes my face and the Imogen’s, and is gone with a parting benediction:
S
ING
.

I sing. And the Imogen makes her sound, a high soughing warble, and sometimes a keen. It’s hard for her.

She does her best.

Another voice joins mine, and then a third, and all around I see them—clad in white, singing as if they were born to sing, their hair pale and gleaming and the Light blazing around each. Below us, the ocean foams like breakers against a cliff face.

Something rises from it.

A land.

Vast and green, revealed in the sudden moonlight as a scarred silver orb rises above the ocean to the east. The Imogen sets me on the shore, her wingtips hardly brushing the earth before she speeds away toward a new and waiting mountain. Ice gleams moonlit on its heights, but its shoulders are lush.

A wolf howls from its reaches. I step forward, over sand that sticks and slides under my feet.

A hand falls on my shoulder.

“Hold,” he says. I remember the word for what he is.
Einherjar.

Except not. Not as they were. They are the opposite of me; they have kept the old name, and become a new thing.

He is taller, his platinum hair drawn back in a severe braid that makes his forehead seem prouder. My nose wrinkles at his scent, the intimacy of his touch.

“Strifbjorn.” I know his name to give it to him. My fingers itch where I touched the Tree. My back itches where the sap of its gnawed roots fell on me.

He draws back his hand and stoops. He rakes his fingers through the sand. Something long and dark glitters in his hand when he stands. “This is yours. Her name is Svanvitr.”

He thrusts the sword at me. I grasp her hilt by reflex and she flares into hurting Light. Along the beach, other swords spark, kindle—one, ten, five hundred. Some brethren glance at me and then glance down, as if recollecting something unpleasant. I hold my sword and have nothing to say.

He is our war-leader.

He will name the blades, and I will name the einherjar and waelcyrge. And I will tell them to wait for the Lady and the Cynge.

Strifbjorn lifts another blade from the strand. He stands, places his hand on my elbow.

“This is Alvitr.” And then, looking at me calmly, though the others flinch away: “Come, brother Wolf. Let me braid your hair.”

The Warrior

H
eythe, seeming to Strifbjorn contented, had assured Brynhilde that the Wolf would not die. Then she had called up a red mare from somewhere and been on her way, promising—or threatening—to return. Strifbjorn couldn’t show his concern for Mingan, who didn’t awaken quickly from his healing slumber. He thrashed and tore and cried out in his sleep, and by the next morning Brynhilde was plainly worried.

A day later, the Wolf awoke with a shout, clutching at the pale glowing cord about his throat. Brynhilde cried out for help and pushed him back on the pillow, but he fought her. Strifbjorn was at her side before it occurred to him that it was not seemly for a warrior to interfere at a sickbed.

When he saw the green tinge and the haunted expression on Mingan’s face, his repute ceased to matter.
I’ve lost my place here anyway
, he thought.
Heythe leads them now.

He went to Mingan and held his shoulders while Yrenbend’s wife pinned his wrists. Mingan writhed and clawed at first, but the tenor of Strifbjorn’s voice must have soothed him. At last, he lay still except his trembling.

“Hush, Wolf,” Strifbjorn whispered. Good, quiet Brynhilde stood and withdrew, and the war-leader spared her not a glance. He pulled Mingan into his arms as one might comfort a child. “What’s come upon you?”

Mingan pushed Strifbjorn back. “A dream. A memory.”

“A memory?”

He shook his head. His hair was out of its queue—Brynhilde had unbound and combed it. It fell across his lean, pale shoulders in a curtain of silver and black. Strifbjorn hooked his thumbs in his belt and stepped back as Mingan swung his legs down from the bench, speaking. “I . . . dreamed of thee, and the Imogen and how I came here. Of a time of ice.” He didn’t seem to notice that he’d thee’d Strifbjorn, which was a measure of his distress.

Otherwise, he only used the familiar to Strifbjorn when they were intimate. The thought brought a fresh clenching of pain. “You were screaming in your . . .” He hesitated to call it sleep.

“I am bound.” He drew his knees up, distance an echo in his voice. “Bound and tormented. The vision is unclear, as if through layers of gauze. The chain parts, and I run free. Something flees me, and I pursue it. Something threatens me, and I slay it. And then . . . darkness. I awaken afire, surrounded by
ice. This part is clearer. There is a Tree, and the Imogen, and . . . then I fall into darkness. And you know the rest.”

“I do?” Strifbjorn didn’t even remotely understand him, but as he spoke his hands relaxed on the furs.

“Raising the world from the waters. Our song.”