“Out!” Loud enough to startle Snorri and Tuttugu, and to have me jump half out of my seat. “Out, night-spawn. Out, lie-born. Out, daughter of Loki! Out, child of Arrakni!” Kara’s eyes blazed with the sunset. She advanced, one hand held before her, clutching something that looked rather like a human bone.
“Well she’s a pretty thing!” Aslaug said. “Snorri will take her from you. You know that don’t you, Jalan?”
“Out!” Kara roared. “This boat is mine!” She struck the bone to the mast and all about the hull runes lit, burning with a wintery light. In that instant Aslaug seemed to collapse, flowing into some smaller shape, the size of a large dog, so wreathed in darkness it was hard to see any detail . . . other than it had too many legs. In a quick thrashing of long dry limbs Aslaug scurried over the side and was gone without a splash. I shuddered and looked up at Kara who returned my gaze, her lips set in a thin line. I opted to say nothing. The völva held like that, still with the bone to the mast, for another minute, then another, and then, with the sun gone behind the world, she relaxed.
“She is not welcome here,” Kara said, and returned to steering the boat.
“She and Baraqel are all Snorri and I have in our corner. They’re ancient spirits, angel and . . . well . . . There are people after us, things, after us that work magic as easily as breathing. We need them. The Red Queen’s sister gave us—”
“The Red Queen moves you on her board like all her other pawns. What she gives you is as much a collar as a weapon.” Kara took up the tiller again. Adjusted course. “Don’t be fooled about these creatures’ nature. Baraqel is no more a valkyrie or angel than you or me. He and Aslaug were human once. Some among the Builders copied themselves into their machines—others, when the Wheel first turned, escaped their flesh into new forms.”
“Aslaug never told me—”
“She’s the daughter of lies, Jalan!” Kara shrugged. “Besides, she probably doesn’t remember. Their spirits have been shaped by expectation for so long. When the Day of a Thousand Suns came their will released them and they were free. Gods in an empty world . . . then we came back. New men, roaming the earth as the poisons faded. New will. And slowly, without us knowing it, or them, our stories bound about the spirits and our will made them into something suited to our expectations.”
“Uh.” I leaned back, trying to make sense of the völva’s words. After a while my head started to hurt. So I stopped, and watched the waves instead.
• • •
We sailed on. Snorri and Kara seemed to find excitement in each newly revealed stretch of dreary Norse coastline. Even the sea itself could fascinate them. The swell is doing that, the wind is turning, the rocks are this, the current is westerly. Pah. I’d heard more interesting discussions between herdmen cataloguing the ailments of sheep. Or I probably would have if I’d listened.
A consequence of boredom is that a man is forced to look either to the future or the past, or sideways into his imagination. I tend to find my imagination too worrisome to contemplate, and I had already exhausted the possible scenarios for my homecoming. So, sulking in the Errensa’s prow I spent long hours considering the circumstances of my abduction from Red March and forced march across half of Empire to the Black Fort. Time and again my thoughts returned to great uncle Garyus and his silent sister—born a conjoined monstrosity, the rightful king and queen of Red March. Their father, Gholloth, had set the chirurgeons to splitting them, but neither could ever be set upon the throne when age claimed him. He passed them over for Alica, the younger sister. My grandmother. A less obvious monster. But which of them ruled? Which of them had truly set Snorri and myself upon our path north? Which of them had gambled my life and soul against the Dead King? The blood-men with their sharp knives and blunt opinions had cut Garyus from his sister, but the twins had not split even. Garyus a broken teller of stories, his nameless sister a silent voyeur of years yet to come. And Grandmother, the Red Queen, the beating heart of the Marches for a generation, the iron queen with no give in her, her armies feared across the south, her name reviled.
In the empty hours memories plagued me as they are wont to do with nothing to drown out their whispering. Garyus had given me Mother’s locket, and over years I’d so wrapped it in lies that I couldn’t see its value when sat in my palm. Perhaps I’d been equally blind to its purpose. Dr. Taproot, the man who had known obscure facts about the Scraa slopes and Nfflr ridges of the Uuliskind, had told me a thing about my mother and I had laughed at his mistake. Had I wrapped her life in as many lies as her locket? Did I look at her death with the same blindness that had hidden the locket’s nature from me?
It’s not like me to brood on the past. I’m not comfortable with uncomfortable truths. I prefer to round off the edges and corners until I have something worth keeping. But a boat and the wide sea give a man little else to do.
“Show me the key,” I said.
Snorri sat beside me trailing a line and hook into the sea. He’d caught nothing in all the hours he’d been at it.
“It’s safe.” He placed a hand on his chest.
“I don’t think that thing can be described as safe.” I sat up to face him. “Show it to me.”
With reluctance Snorri tied his line to the oarlock and drew the key from his shirt. It didn’t look like part of the world. It looked as if it had no place there in the daylight. As the key turned on its thong it seemed to change, flickering from one possibility to the next. I supposed a key that could open any lock had to entertain many shapes. I reached for it, but Snorri pushed my hand aside.
“Best not.”
“You’re worried I’ll drop it in the sea?” I asked.
“You might.”
“I won’t.” Hand held out.
Snorri raised a brow. A simple but eloquent expression. I had been known to lie before.
“We came as close to dying for this thing as men can come, Snorri. Both of us. I have a right.”
“It wasn’t for the key.” Voice low, eyes seeing past me now. “We didn’t go for the key.”
“But it’s all we got,” I said, angry that he should deny me.
“It’s not a thing you want to touch, Jal. There’s no joy in it. As a friend I say don’t do this.”
“As a prince of Red March I say give me the fucking key.”
Snorri lifted the thong from about his neck and with a sigh dangled the key into my palm, still retaining the tie.
I closed my hand about it. For the briefest moment I considered ripping it free and arcing it out across the water. In the end I lacked either the courage or the cruelty to do it. I’m not sure which.
“Thank you.” The thing seemed to shift in my grasp and I squeezed it to force one form upon it.
There isn’t much I remember about my mother. Her hair—long, dark, smelling of softness. I recall how safe her arms felt. I remember the comfort in her praise, though I could summon none of the words to mind. The sickness that took her I recollected as the story I told about it when people asked. A story without drama or tragedy, just the everyday futility of existence. A beautiful princess laid low by common disease, wasted away without romance by a flux. Isolated by her contagion—her last words spoken to me through a screen. The betrayal a child feels when a parent abandons them returned to me now—still sharp.
“Oh.” And without transition the key was no longer a key. I held my mother’s hand, or she held mine, a seven-year-old boy’s hand encompassed in hers. I caught her scent, something fragrant as honeysuckle.
Snorri nodded, his eyes sympathetic. “Oh.”
Without warning the boat, the sea, Snorri, all of it vanished, just for the beat of a heart. A blinding light took its place, dazzling, dying away as I blinked to reveal a familiar chamber with star-shaped roundels studding the ceiling. A drawing room in the Roma Hall where my brothers and I would play on winter nights. Mother stood there, half bent
toward me, a smile on her face—the face in my locket, but smiling, eyes bright. All replaced a moment later with the boat, the sky, the waves. “What?” I dropped the key as though it had bitten me. It swung from Snorri’s hand on the thong. “What!”
“I’m sorry.” Snorri tucked the key away. “I warned you.”
“No.” I shook my head. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. Taproot’s words, as if he spoke them in my ear. “No.” I stood up, staggered by the swell. I closed my eyes and saw it again. Mother bending toward me, smiling. The man’s face looming over her shoulder. No smile there. Half-familiar but not a friend. Features shadowed, offered only in rumour, hair so black as to be almost the blue beneath a magpie’s wing, with grey spreading up from the temples.
The world returned. Two steps brought me to the mast and I clung for support, the sail flapping inches from my nose.
“Jal!” Snorri called, motioning for me to come back and sit before the sweep of the boom took me into the water.
“There was a blade, Snorri.” Each blink revealed it, light splintering from the edge of a sword held low and casual, the fist at his side clenched about its hilt. “He had a sword!” I saw it again, some secret hidden in the dazzle of its steel, putting an ache in my chest and a pain behind my eyes.
• • •
“I want the truth.” I stared at Kara. Aslaug hadn’t arrived with the setting sun. To me, that was proof enough of the völva’s power. “You can help me,” I told her.
Kara sighed and bound the tiller. The wind had fallen to a breeze. The sails would soon be furled. She sat beside me on the bench and looked up to study my face. “Truth is rarely what people want, Prince Jalan.”
“I need to know.”
“Knowledge and truth are different things,” Kara said. She brushed stray hair from her mouth. “I want to know, myself. I want to know many things. I braved the voyage to Beerentoppen, sought out Skilfar, all in search of knowing. But knowledge is a dangerous thing. You touched the key—against Snorri’s strongest advice—and it brought you no peace. Now I advise you to wait. We’re aimed at your homeland. Ask your questions there, the traditional way. The answers are likely not secrets, just facts you’ve avoided or misplaced whilst growing up.”
“I can’t wait.” The boat had become a prison, the sea an endless wall. I sat trapped there, with neither space nor answers. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. I remembered, on the journey north, wiping the soup from my locket and at Snorri’s insistence really seeing it for the first time in years. The scales had fallen from my eyes and I had discovered a treasure. Now I feared what I might see if I looked again at my past—but not looking had ceased to be an option. The key had unlocked the door to memories long buried. Now I had to throw that door wide. “Help me to remember.”
“I have little skill, Prince Jalan.” Kara looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, nails bitten short, fingers callused by ropework. “Find another way . . . Perhaps the key—”
“It’s Loki’s key,” I snapped, filling the words with more harshness than intended. “It’s black with lies. I need to know if what I saw, what I remember, are true memories, or the trickery of some pagan spirit.”
Evening thickened, spreading across the face of the sea, the glow of the swallowed sun faded among the clouded western skies. A fat raindrop struck my hand, another grazed my cheek. Snorri watched us from the prow, huddled in his cloak. Tuttugu sat closer, whittling some piece of driftwood he’d snagged from the water.
“All I know of memory is in the blood,” Kara said. “A man’s blood can tell the secrets of his line. The story of his life lies there, the story of his father too, and his father’s father. But—”
“Let’s do that then. I like a good story, and if it’s about me—all the better!”
“But,” she kept to her thread with the tone that always means the speaker is heading toward “no.” “I am a novice. It takes a lifetime to learn the blood-tongue. Skilfar might show you a day of your choosing, or hunt out some secret held too deep for speaking. My art is less . . . precise.”
“Try?” I used that vulnerable look that makes women melt.
Kara pressed her lips together in a thin line and studied my face. Her eyes, very blue, moved as if I were a book she could read. I saw her pupils dilate. Somehow she was falling for my puppy dog routine. I felt slightly disappointed. I had wanted her to be more . . . magic. Stronger. I’ve found over the years that women want to save me. No matter how bad I am. No matter how bad they see me being—perhaps I’ve cast aside their friends when I’ve had my fun, or cheated with a handful of court wives, a new one each day—if I but show them some small hope that I might be redeemed, many, even some of the cleverest of them, the most moral, the most wise, step into my trap. It seems that the prospect of taming a dangerous reprobate who is unlikely to truly care for them is sweeter honey to some than, say, a strong and moral man like Snorri. Don’t ask me why. It makes no sense to me—I just thank God for making the world this way.
There in the boat though, wanting the truth, wanting for perhaps the first time in my life to know myself, I would rather have been sat beside a woman who could see right through me.
“Please,” I said, widening my eyes. “I know this will help me to be a better man.”
And like that she fell for it. “If you’re sure, Jalan.” She started to rummage in the covered space beneath the bench.
“I am.” I wasn’t sure of much except that the experience was damned unlikely to make me a better man. I was sure though that it was what I wanted, and getting what I want has always been my main priority. Aslaug says it shows strength of character. I forget what Baraqel called it.
“Here!” She pulled out a long case of polished bone from the locker and sat up. A single rune had been burned into the front of the box. It looked familiar.
“Thorns.” Kara set a finger to the rune in answer to the query in my raised eyebrow. “The first thing we’ll be needing is some blood. And for that—a thorn.” She clicked the case open to reveal the longest needle I’d ever seen.
“Ah,” I said, making to get up. “Perhaps we could do this later.” But Snorri and Tuttugu had crowded around now, both snorting as though I were play-acting for their amusement.
The weight of their expectation pressed me back into my seat. “Ha. As if I were scared of a little needle.” I managed a dry laugh. “Have at me, madam witch.”
“I have to say the incantations first.” She offered a small smile and all of a sudden despite the foot-long needle that sat between us, and the fact she’d promised to meet my next advance with a knife to the balls, I found myself wanting her. She hadn’t Astrid’s voluptuousness or Edda’s slender form, or the prettiness of either . . . maybe it was just being forbidden that sparked my lust, but more than that it was the strength in her. Old witches aside, like Skilfar and my grandmother, I’d never met a woman more capable. Like Snorri she had something about her that made it impossible to believe she would ever let you down, ever be afraid, ever run.
Kara lit a lantern. Speaking in the old tongue of the north, she dipped the needle into the sea, then ran it through the flame. She spoke my name in the mix. More than once. It sounded well upon her lips.
“When the needle is blooded you must taste it. Then whatever is to be revealed will come.”
“I’ve tasted my blood before. It didn’t tell me much.” I must have swallowed a gallon of the stuff when Astrid punched me. Once my nose starts bleeding it never wants to stop.
“This will be different.” Again that smile. “Hold out your hand.”
So I did. I wasn’t sure how deep the needle would prick but I steeled myself. Squealing like a little girl probably wouldn’t help me in my new quest to bed her.
Kara took my hand, fingers probing, as if to find the ideal spot. I sat still, content to have her hold my hand, feeling a
heat build between us.
“Now . . .” She circled the needle over my palm as if searching.
“Ow! Dear God! Sweet Jesu! The bitch stabbed me!” I yanked my hand away, transfixed by the needle that Kara had driven entirely through it in one smooth motion. “Jesu!” Six inches of crimson-beaded steel protruded from the back of my hand.
“Quick! Taste it. The longer you delay the further back the memories!” Kara grabbed my wrist and tried to steer the hand toward my mouth.
“You fucking stabbed me!” I couldn’t quite believe it. Blackness crowded my vision and I felt faint with shock. Curiously there wasn’t much pain.
“Help me with him.” Kara glanced at Snorri and used both hands on my wrist. The bloody needle lurched toward my face. Damned if I was letting her do it though. She’d stab the thing through my mouth given half a chance! I pushed back. “Stop fighting me, Jalan. There’s not much time.”
Snorri lent his strength to the task and a moment later the needle wiped the complaint off my tongue. Kara pulled the steel free then. That’s when it started to hurt—as the needle grated across the small bones in my palm.
“Concentrate now, Jalan! This bit is important.” She clamped my face between her treacherous stabby hands. She probably said some other stuff after that, but by then I’d fainted clean away.
• • •
I’m flying. Or I’m the sky. These things are equal. The day is ending and far below me the land folds, falls, and rises. The mountains still catch the sun, forests sweep out in shadow, rivers run, or dawdle, each according to their nature, but all bound for the sea. The ocean lies distant, crinkled with the dying light.
• • •
Lower.
• • •
The country below runs from plains, green with growing, toward arid hills, stone crested. Trails of smoke lace the air like threads, twisted by the wind. Fields lie blackened where the fire has consumed them. A wood, acres wide, stands ablaze.