“Hanne!” cried her sister.
The man had his hand out, scrambling for his pistol, which was just out of his reach.
This was dull. Hanne reached for the gun and blew the man’s face away.
There was one left, the little one with the tin star pinned on his coat, and he was puking in the bushes.
“Hanne, STOP!” shrieked her sister’s voice, but Hanne pulled a thick, sharp knife from a leather sheath at the dead man’s leg and she leaped over the hedge. She drew the deputy to her and inserted the knife elegantly, softly, kindly, into his rib cage. She wiggled the knife, just a little, between the rib bones, and knew it had punctured the heart. The deputy fell, and she saw he wasn’t very old at all.
Hanne’s eyes flickered over the horses, the brush. Oh, how she wished there were another enemy to kill.
A keening rose from behind her. She saw her sister bent over the body of her brother Stieg, bandaging his arm. Something in the sprawl of his body, some extra sense she had, told her he would be fine.
Now Owen, her cowboy, was walking, running to his horse. He was not a threat. Hanne watched him with her head cocked.
He made his crippled dog sit with Hanne’s siblings and went off at a gallop.
She recorded only the fact of his movement. The meaning did not settle until a few moments later.
* * *
SHE BECAME AWARE of the sticky feeling of her fingers.
And her brother Knut talking to her.
He was telling her he was going for a doctor for Stieg.
* * *
LATER.
Hanne felt a terrible gnawing in her gut. She blinked, looking around her.
She was in the middle of a terrible, bloody battleground. Three men lay around her. Her hands were covered in blood, the cream-striped sleeves of her rose-colored coat splattered with it.
“No,” she mumbled. “Please, no!”
She rose and saw her sister sitting against the wall of the cabin. Stieg’s head lay in her lap.
“What happened?” Hanne asked. “Oh, Sissel, what happened?”
“You killed them. They shot their guns into the house, and you killed them all.”
“Where’s Knut? And Owen?”
“Knut went for help. And Owen … Owen just left.”
Hanne brought her hands to her face but could not bear to touch her own skin. Her stomach was roaring, demanding to be fed.
Hanne walked away from the shack. She waded into the knee-deep grasses of the meadow, crossed a patch of snow in the shadow of a lean pine tree.
“Where are you going?” Sissel called.
But Hanne started to run, tearing through the grass, then down to the creek. She plunged into the shallow water, falling to her knees. Her fingers scraped up coarse sand and mud from the streambed, and she scoured her hands and the sleeves of her coat. She scrubbed and scrubbed until her skin was red, chafing.
There was no choice for her. Hanne put her face into her icy hands and wept. She could not control the Berserker within, so she must put an end to it the way her uncle had. Such was her loneliness and her misery.
She would not eat. She would deny the bellowing of her stomach and let her body burn out.
Hanne curled into a ball on the banks of the stream and tried to shut out all sensation. She was prepared to wait a long time.
* * *
ONLY AFTER NOT very much time had passed—ten minutes? an hour?—she felt a terrible pull. A flooding of clear, direct energy.
Someone she loved was in danger. She was on her feet and away from the creek in two seconds. The danger was a magnet, drawing her near. Her feet could barely keep up with her rib cage.
She got flashes of images in her mind. A stand of aspens. A wicked knife. The images shook free with the jarring of her footfalls. Ropes binding wrists and that knife again. Blood! She crashed through brambles, and her feet flew over rocks. Water shook from her clothing as she ran, freezing in the air.
She had a rock in her hand as she came to the aspens she recognized from her vision. And there—there was Owen.
He was bound to a tree.
Bleeding from a gash to his lower arm.
He had a cloth in his mouth and was trying to speak. He was calling to her.
Hanne came closer.
Where, where, where was his assailant? Slaughter awaited. Her senses were all honed to the point of a knife. She was waiting to smash and murder. Her pupils were dilated, wholly black.
“Hanne!” came a voice. Not Owen’s voice—the enemy.
Where was he?
“Listen, listen to me. I know what you are. I know the state you’re in. Just listen.”
She could smell him, but where was he hiding? There were so many trees.
“I’m here to help you.”
Up. He was up.
Her head tilted and there he was. He was hiding up in a space where two aspens laid their trunks together.
She strode to the trees and shook the trunks. She would shake him down.
“I mean you no harm!” the man called down. He had a pocked face. She knew him somehow, but he was not beloved, nor of her tribe.
“I only cut him to draw you here. I can help you!” he yelled. She could not shake him down so she began to scale the tree.
Now he climbed down, stumbling away. He was old. So old and weak she might as well have killed him already.
“Hanne, I have studied the old texts and here is what they say. Stop fighting the Nytte. Let it flow through you. Can you hear me, Hanne? Open your heart to it.”
Hanne grabbed up the rock and advanced on the man.
He fell back, one hand raised. “Breathe, Hanne! I am no enemy. See me with your heart!”
Then he began to say some words.
“Heill dagr. Heilir dags synir,” he said. “Hanne, heill nótt ok nift.”
She had the rock up to brain him, but the words were so beautiful. They were an old map, calling her down a road she long remembered.
“Ásáheill!” he shouted. “Nyttesdotterheill!”
She drew in a breath.
“Daughter of Odin. Daughter of the Nytte. I am no enemy,” he said. “I promise.”
He laid his forehead onto the frozen earth. His breath steamed up from where he pressed his mouth to the ground at her feet.
“Heill nótt ok nift. Hail to the night and the daughter of night.”
Hanne came rushing back into herself. The fresh cold air came in her lungs and she gasped. Colors and sparks swirled and receded in her vision. She knew, again, who she was.
“What were those words?” she said in Norwegian. “What is that? And who are you?”
The man looked up at her. He rubbed his head with a shaking hand.
“I am Rolf Tjossem,” he said. “I was sent here by the Baron Fjelstad. I want to help you. That is all I want to do. And that was Old Norse. A rune poem dedicated to the Æsir—the ancient Norse Gods, the Gods who gave your family the Nytte many thousands of years ago. The Gods who protect and love you now.”
Hanne stepped back, and the man rose shakily. He went to Owen and cut away the rope that held the kerchief in his mouth. Owen spat out the cloth.
“Hanne, are you all right?” Owen asked, his voice coarse from shouting.
Hanne bowed her head in shame. Owen had left her, she remembered it now. He had tried to leave them, once and for all, and this man, Rolf, had captured him.
Rolf cut Owen free from the trunk. Then Owen punched Rolf square on the jaw.
“Damn you!” Rolf said. “I am here to help!”
“You got a funny way of showing it!” Owen shouted. “You jump me and cut up my arm. And if you saw those men attack us, why didn’t you help?”
“I knew the girl would finish them. I would have only been in the way.”
Hanne rose. She found herself very weak. Hunger was consuming her. She stumbled a few steps to a fallen log and sat on it.
“I had to get her away from the uncle’s sha
ck,” Rolf said. “The best way to do it was to put someone she loves in danger.”
Owen’s eyes ricocheted to Hanne’s.
Oh, the shame of it! She felt her cheeks bloom red. Now he knew, he knew without a doubt, that she loved him.
“You can go,” Hanne told Owen. “I know you meant to leave us. Please just go and say no more.”
“Hanne,” Owen said. “You got it wrong.”
He walked to Pal, who was tied to a tree near the edge of the wood. He removed something that was slung over the saddle.
It was a big jackrabbit.
“I went to hunt you some food. You told me … you said you could die if you didn’t eat.”
Hanne felt the blood drain from her face.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I can’t leave you,” Owen said. “I wouldn’t. I can’t. And I don’t want to, damn it.”
“You must go!” she shouted. “Do not care for me, Owen Bennett! It is dangerous to care for me! For you and for others! You see how he used you as a weapon against me?”
Hanne staggered. The hunger was flaring up, eating her from the inside out.
“You must go,” she said to Owen. “Please.”
Rolf crossed to Hanne and pressed three crumbling biscuits into Hanne’s hands, and a hunk of hard cheese.
“Eat!” he urged her.
She turned her back on the men and shoved a biscuit into her mouth.
“I’m not leaving,” Owen said to her back doggedly.
“We have no time for this argument,” Rolf said. “There’s a man hunting you. A very dangerous man. A Berserker of power greater than yours. He’s trained and he’s vicious.”
“See,” Owen said. “How could I leave with a man like that hunting you?”
Hanne rounded on him. “Do you honestly think I need your protection? After what you saw?”
Owen gritted his teeth.
“I’m not leaving.”
Rolf interrupted again, pointing to the cheese. “Eat that, now. We need to gather your siblings and leave right away.”
“But first, she must eat,” Owen said.
Rolf nodded in agreement, though it seemed to pain him. He took the limp rabbit from Owen.
“I’ll prepare the meat,” Rolf said. “Please go for the others and bring them here.”
“That okay with you?” Owen asked Hanne. She nodded. “Then I’ll be right back.”
“Owen, we will pay you and you will leave us. You must leave us,” she said.
“Not today I won’t,” Owen said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Knut felt bad for the dun-colored gelding. He pitied any animal he rode. They’d eye him warily when he approached, sizing up his bulk and heaving great sighs.
He was in a hurry, though. He had been thinking since he’d learned that there was a reward out for him—he ought to turn himself in. He’d thought about it for many miles, yesterday and the day before. He would do it in Wolf Creek. Today.
It was the only way to make things good for his siblings. Otherwise, the law would keep hunting them and Hanne would have to keep killing.
Knut knew that every time she used her Nytte, it pained her. He saw how she suffered. He felt it.
It didn’t hurt him when he used his Nytte, but he’d never tried to explain it to Hanne. Maybe he should have. When he used it, he felt good. Like he was a part of the world and doing the work he was meant to do.
Sometimes his body shimmered when he used his Nytte. Only no one else seemed to see how his hands shone or how the blood pumping through his heart gave off a pattern of light under the skin, like a lantern. So he’d kept it to himself. A private happiness. It made him laugh. His family thought he was dull, and he knew he was dull about many things. Because the letters Stieg tried to teach him would not stay fixed in his mind, and he sometimes couldn’t remember the beginning of the question by the time the end had been reached, but there were some things his brother and sisters didn’t know. And how pretty the Nytte could be was one of them.
Knut wanted Hanne to be happy. She was happy with Owen Bennett. Owen Bennett had got his sister dancing. She had not danced since their mother had left. With Owen around, she could go on with him and keep dancing.
Knut did not think of what would happen after he confessed. He was scared to imagine the rest. All he allowed himself to think about was entering town with his hands up.
He prodded the horse with his heels, asking it to go faster, and it did.
Knut shivered as he rode into town. The town was rowdy and mean looking. Lots of people, but no one friendly. It was a rocky, hardscrabble place.
He headed for the squat stone structure with barred windows that he knew must be Wolf Creek’s jailhouse.
Knut’s great body began to shake, as if beset by palsy. He had known an old man in Øystese with palsy.
He tried not to think about the fact that at any moment someone could recognize him and shoot him for the reward. Stieg had told him the poster read “dead or alive.”
Knut tried to remember Hanne’s advice to him, that when he was frightened, he ought to try to think back to a pleasant time.
He thrust back in his memory in a panic. His mind raced quickly past moments of fishing in the glacial rivers, of laughing through a mouthful of boiled potatoes at a tale Stieg told, of watching the sunrise over the haycocks. He settled down on a memory of Hanne reading to him at the fire. Reading out from the illustrated collection of fairy tales that Stieg had brought home. The fire golden on her face. Her bright eyes twinkling as she read of trolls and billy goats and berries collected in a basket. He loved his sister. He kept that warmth in his chest, stoked his heart with the image of his sister, as he dismounted.
He loved her enough to turn himself in.
Knut tossed the reins over the hitching post and held his hands high over his head.
A voice came from inside the jail, near the door.
“Hell if I know where Ruben is. He went for supper and never came back.”
Then the man the voice belonged to came out to stare at Knut. He wore a tin star on his chest and a slack expression on his face as he regarded Knut and sought to place him in his recollection. Then he scrambled to draw his pistol. He leveled it at Knut.
“Sheriff!” the deputy hollered, his Adam’s apple bouncing as he gulped. “You better come see this!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Owen watched Hanne as she paced, eating. The rabbit had been consumed by the time he’d returned with Stieg and Sissel. He suspected she might have eaten it raw, but he wasn’t going to dwell on it. Now she ate johnnycakes as fast as Owen could fry them up.
Sissel had done her best to bandage Stieg’s shoulder wound—luckily, the bullet had merely grazed his shoulder.
“Knut should have been back by now,” Stieg said as Sissel put away the supplies. “Something has happened. Why did you let him go?” he said, turning to Sissel.
“I was to stop him?” Sissel asked, incredulous. “You were shot. Hanne was in a trance, and Owen had run away!”
Owen flipped a johnnycake while the siblings argued in Norwegian. He knew they were concerned about their brother, and he was, too.
The man named Rolf said something to them in Norwegian that seemed to irritate Hanne.
“What’d he say?” Owen asked.
“Speak English, Mr. Tjossem, so our friend can understand,” Stieg said.
“I said that they need not be concerned about Knut,” Rolf said. “If he were in danger, Hanne would sense it.”
“But town’s over a mile from here,” Owen said. “Can she feel him so far away?”
Hanne stopped eating and seemed to pause as if searching for a feeling inside herself.
“Yes, and farther,” Rolf said. “I knew a Berserker who sensed his brother being attacked on a battlefield, a country and a half away.”
“I am feeling better,” Hanne said. She brushed the crumbs from her hands and rose. “I will go
for him.”
“No. We must leave, right away,” Rolf said.
“We must all go after Knut,” Stieg said. “If something bad hasn’t happened already, it will soon.”
“Listen,” Rolf said. “Listen to me. You will not like to hear this, but we should send the cowboy for Knut, and the rest of us should go into hiding.”
“I’ll do it,” Owen said.
“What?” Hanne cried.
“If Ketil senses Hanne’s presence—”
“We’d never leave our brother behind!” Stieg said.
“But! But! Consider. The cowboy is no relation to Knut. The Berserker will not know him or sense who he is. We can send word when we get somewhere safe and secluded—”
“You are as well as sentencing both Knut and Owen to death!” Hanne said.
“We should leave,” Stieg said. “I don’t want to hear any more from this man—”
“Please, be calm. Listen. We must keep your sister safe from the Berserker Ketil,” Rolf said. He turned to Hanne. “If he is waiting for you in Wolf Creek, he will provoke you, Hanne. If you try to fight him, he will kill you. You cannot win against him!”
“I would rather die than leave my brother behind,” Hanne said through her teeth.
“Very well,” he said.
“Do not try to separate us again,” Stieg said. “We have little enough reason to trust you as it is.”
“Yes. Why are you helping us?” Hanne asked. “You have come very far. Why are you turning against your partner this way? Why should we trust you?”
“I heard you speak to the boy there”—Rolf nodded toward Owen—“back before the killings at your uncle’s home. I heard you say you did not want to kill. Believe me, that is rare for a Berserker.”
“You did not answer my question. Why should we trust you?”
“I have given all my adult life to serving and protecting the Nytteson. It’s as simple as that.”
“And why are you turning against your partner, this Ketil?” Hanne demanded.
Rolf bent down to the fire, poking it with a stick.
“Ketil is not my partner. He is a fool, a dangerous one. I was persuaded to take him with me on this journey by my employer and friend, the Baron Fjelstad.”