Spellbreakers (43 page)

“I thought, for a while, while we walked back through
the moors and he was so quiet and distant, that perhaps he could never really
come back,” she said. “That his life had been left behind, and I had failed, in
the end. That I had brought back just the shell of him, and not his soul.”

“Oh no.
I have
seen what an empty shell is like, Leal. You brought back the whole animal, I am
pretty certain of it,” said Ljung. “He just needs some time to catch up with
himself, is all.”

“I could not have done without your help.
Both of you.
It is not just what the witch had said, about
the heart. The Shining Ones told me, I must want him as hard as she did to
break the spell, and love him as much as she had loved him. But I feared that
it was too late for that. I
did
give my love to somebody else already.”

Daria sniffed. “Well, that didn’t stop me from falling
in love again. It’s not as if you can only fall in love once in your life. Or
love only one person at a time. Or love only in one manner. Love in real life
is more complicated than that, apparently.”

“
I
always knew that you would break the spell,”
said Ljung, nodding with a fond smile. “This thing, that you had given all your
love away, as that old troll said, it is just a lie. Love is not like a
strawberry tart, that you can nibble away, a slice and then another slice and
then another, until there is nothing left but an empty plate.”

“It isn’t?”

“No, it isn’t. Love is like a deep well. It may run
low in dry summers. Or freeze for a while in really cold winters. But deep down
there’s always a live spring of clear water.”

Leal and Daria both watched him in amazement, and he
coughed once or twice.

“At least,” he said, bowing low in a theatrical way,
“that’s what an old friend of mine once told me, but I’m a mere hunter, so,
what do I know? All I’m saying is, all this big talk of a pure heart ... a pure
heart is not a heart that never loved, it’s a heart that can always find the
strength to love again, whatever the cost, however scary it might be. You have
such a heart, princess. You would have paid the highest and last price for his
life. Sure, the dragon blood helped a bit, at that point, but alone, it would
have served us nothing. It saved your lives. But
you
broke the spell.”

Leal thought about it for a while, and it seemed to
her that he might have the truth of it.

****

Finally, among singing and cheering, the morning of
the fourth day, they set out for Nevraan. Many elvers, including the Elders,
came to see them off, with kind words of farewell. If the Elders had originally
planned to cheat the Escarran travelers out of their champion, they were now
playing nice, perhaps because Hawkeneye, the real, present and very un-amused
Hawkeneye, was a more daunting figure than even they remembered. Gerdrun saw
him off with a fluttering smile and a surprisingly girlish blush, and Leal
wondered what kind of memories she had of him.

They had taken two horses in addition to Leal’s mare
and Daria’s new black stud. Hawkeneye was a noble rider and a tremendous archer
even from horseback. Ljung was obviously more at ease with his feet on the
ground, but with his excellent sense of balance and sensitivity he quickly
became a pretty able horseman. Also, he was lucky in his mount. The elvers of
Elverhjem kept few full sized horses, but these few were extraordinarily fine,
well-bred animals. The two they had given to Hawkeneye and Ljung were brothers,
dappled greys, not much taller but heavier than Leal’s hunter, with thick manes
and tails, and long featherings around their dark, hard, unshod feet. They were
obviously of the same stock as Daria’s black stud. They had an astonishingly even
temper, although they were likely to snort nervously around the black horse, as
if they perceived something not quite natural about him.

Leal wondered if they would see Senija and Paavi
again, but for once Ljung put speed before secrecy and led them by the swiftest
way, on the old trade route, which was in any case the only really practical
riding route through the thick of the forest, and they arrived to Nevraan in
less than nine days.

Nevraan was abuzz, as if an enormous party was going
on. They had to search half a day just to find rooms and stables for a couple
of nights.

That took them aback a bit until they realized that in
the excitement of their success they had forgotten all about the harvest
festivities. It had been a long warm summer, fortunately, and the harvest had
been good. People from all corners of Kaleva and beyond had come to Nevraan’s
autumn fair.

“Excuse me,” said Daria, thoughtfully, as they finally
all sat at table in their inn that night, “is this
the
Harvest Fair of
Nevraan you are speaking of?”

“Well, yes,” said the innkeeper benevolently, “What
other? Is it mid-October, or what?”

Daria tapped her fingernails on the table for a
moment.

“That’s good to know. I know an excellent craftsman
who sells there. I’d love to pay my respects.”

Ljung gave her a piercing glance. “You might go
amusing yourself at the harvest fair, but I’d better go to the docks and find
you a ship.”

Daria nodded. “That would be kind. Look for a cargo
ship called the
Neversinks
. The mate
is a brown bear called Svarre Thorsen. You can’t miss him. He’s seven foot tall
and about half as wide.”

“Cargo ship?” asked Hawkeneye, haughtily. “That’s
nonsense. We’ll go to the king and demand a dragon ship. They can take us as
far down as the mouths of the Nekkar and save us eight hundred miles of riding.
They could even row us all the way to the Roca Entravessada. Dragon ships can
be rowed up the shallowest river.”

He had been studying Daria’s map of Hassia in the last
days. Still, Daria, Leal, and Ljung exchanged an uneasy glance.

“What?” asked
Hawkeneye.

“Nothing.
Brilliant idea.
Except, that, to begin
with, there hasn’t been a King in Nevraan for more than eighty years.”

“What? What do you mean? There’s always been a king of
Kaleva! Løve Aarnesen! What happened to him? He came from seven generations of
kings! He came to war with me.
A true berserk on the battle
field.
A fine upstanding fellow, six foot eight and as
strong as an ox.
I saw him wrestling a troll to the ground with his bare
hands.”

“Yeah,” said Ljung, scratching his chin with a
slightly rasping noise. “Except that after the war he was perhaps a bit too
full of himself, and he fell into bad ways.
Very bad ways.
And the Kalevans chopped his head off and have been governed by the Assembly of
the Sea Lords ever since. Løve never had an heir. You were the last warlord of
the Elverlaen. He was the last king of Nevraan.”

Hawkeneye glanced from one to the other of them, taken
aback. “Well,” he said finally. “Well, I see. That’s poetic, and no mistake.
Well. He always was a damn whoremonger, Løve
Aarnesen, that
he was. And his wife was very pious, if I remember right. Oh, all right, I
suppose I am a bit out of my depth, and I should just shut up, that’s what you
are saying, right?”

They all made deprecating noises, denying this most
fervently. But he settled down to drink his beer in silence, and never
mentioned the kings and dragon-ships of Kaleva again.

****

The next day Daria and Leal made their way to the
market. The elvers had gone to the harbor, looking for a ship. Hawkeneye was
not looking forward to struggling through the market’s crowd and said he’d go
to the harbor. Ljung remained with him to help him find a passage, seeing that
he was still somewhat disoriented in the new century.
 

So Leal and Daria made their hard way through the
market on their own. Hard way, because this was unlike any market they had ever
seen. First of all Nevraan didn’t have a market square. The fair had taken over
the whole city. There were stalls in every narrow little alleyway and even in
the covered passages and up the staircases. There were stalls under the terrace
of Ægir’s temple, and there were floating stalls in the harbor. And there were
more people than they knew lived in Kaleva. There were elvers from the
Elverlaen and the near Vaelta’a, apparently unconcerned by the dark tidings
from the east, and crook-legged goblins from the far north provinces of Kaleva,
and even a few giants, nine feet tall and shaggy like bears, sometimes
occupying the whole height and breadth of a covered passage and blocking the
traffic until they had finished their business, quite unperturbed by the
indignant uproar all round. You’d have to be terminally silly in the head to
start a street row with a giant, after all. Sometimes they were accompanied by
their huge but oddly handsome women. And there were humans of course, humans in
such numbers that the narrow alleyways among the stalls were packed tight with
meat, almost impossible to negotiate.

Even so, they finally found him.

His wonderful ladles and spoons were well in sight on
his little table. He sat whittling a piece of wood on his stool, as far away
from the market noise as if he had been sitting on a cloud. He hummed and sang
a little song under his breath, in a thin falsetto voice.
A
love song for the flower of his life.
 
Eventually he took notice of them.

“Spoons, ladles!
Beautiful carved ladles!” he screeched, in a cracked voice. One could tell at
once that he was not as good at peddling his spoons as he was at making them.
He belonged in the wild with his wife and his pony, in his strange tall-roofed
cottage. The crowds brought him low, somehow. Still, he tried.

“Oh,” he said, taking a good look at them. “Oh!
Oh dear, oh dear.”

“Yeah, well you may say ‘oh dear’, you skulking,
double-dealing, three times crooked goblin,” said Daria, shaking a fist at him.
“You sent us to our death! I lost a good horse, and nearly broke my neck! You
sold us!”

“Oh dear.
Oh
dear. That, my darling, is a very narrow-minded way to look at it. I was sure
your horses would outrun anything in our lands. And I had very good reason to
believe the elvers would watch over you. And I didn’t have a choice, really.
You would have crossed the fords anyway, and the outlaws keep a watch there
more often than not. If I had not done my part by them, the bandits ... there
is no knowing
what they would have done to us. I must
protect my darling, you see?”

He peered up at them from under his thick brows with
beseeching eyes not unlike those of the wolfhound they had brought from
Dalarna. Daria did not say what she was thinking, that his darling was probably
more likely to protect him that the other way round.

“My dears, I knew very well that you were on a quest,
a love quest. I didn’t fear for you. Do you believe me? I have been on such a
quest myself. Far from home and alone, and yet held by the hand of destiny. And
I knew that such a quest would not be stopped by a few provincial bandits. A
mightier doom was upon you. And it was so, right?”

Daria snorted contemptuously. In the last four months
she had heard enough talk of doom and fate to last her a lifetime.

He pulled a carved box from under his table and opened
it. “Here, a small token to remember us by,” he said, handing them a
beautifully carved ladle. They stared at it without moving to take it. It was
the fish-eats-fish ladle he had been carving the day they had first met him.

“You see, I marked the day you came to us. I knew that
I might well meet you again someday. You’ll be in our memory always.
A little token, to remember Paavi and Senija on your long, long
way.”

He handed out the ladle again holding it solemnly in
both hands, and finally Daria’s face broke into a smile. Leal took the
beautiful ladle, also in both her hands.

“We will take this, my friend, with our thanks. But
one day, we will come back, and you will tell us about your own quest. Rumor is
,
it is fit for high tragic ballad.”

Paavi bowed very deeply. “It will be a long and dark
ballad, my dear. But we will gladly sing it for you, my starlight and
I
.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

That evening, back in their inn, they met Ljung and
Hawkeneye at their dinner table. Hawkeneye had a slightly knocked about look to
him, but he looked rather satisfied.

“So, did you find our ship?”

“I did,” said Ljung with an odd smile. “And I bespoke
a passage.
Sailing tomorrow on the noon tide.
Four people, four horses, and luggage.
They had to shuffle a
load of smoked cod to a different ship to fit us all in.”

Leal and Daria gaped at him. “You are coming south
with us!” they exclaimed more or less in unison, in a shrill delighted screech.
If they had managed to preserve their male personas until then, that screech
must have given them away to any person in the inn, but it didn’t matter
anymore.