Bloodmind (34 page)

And perhaps it did.

I thought I was dreaming. I remember falling asleep, and I think I recall Eld bending over me to tell me that it was up to Sedra and myself to keep watch. I even remember turning to Sedra and asking her whether Mondhile had the veils of light that were now sweeping across the northern sky. But that is all. The next thing I recall, I was out on the glacier.

I turned back, but there was no sign of the others, nor of our canoes. Therm still towered in the near distance, but the land looked different, somehow: grander, and even more ice-locked.
Looking out over the sea, there was less water, and the bergs clustered closer together, floating whales of ice. I could hear something singing and knew it was the selk. A great gladness rose in me
and I went in search of them, stumbling out over the ice. It was hard going at first, but then it became easier until I was gliding across the thin covering of snow towards the shattering sweetness
of the song. The sun had long since risen and the sky was again that hazy rose.

The snowstorm came up out of nowhere. One moment the sky was perfectly clear, and then next, I was staggering through a full blizzard. Icy needles of snow hissed against my face but they did not
hurt and I was not cold. I knew that this was a very bad thing, that it meant that I was close to death, but I could not bring myself to care. Anyway, I could see a light through the snow and that
indicated safety. I went towards it and saw that instead of one light, there were two, shining in beacon brilliance through the falling whiteness. And even when I realized that they were not lights
after all, but eyes, I still did not care and walked on. This is how it should have been that last time, the time of my ingsgaldir, I told myself. Either the fenris should have killed me or I
should have killed it. Now, I’d have another chance.

It was very close now. I saw the round cat ears, tufted with fur, the long canine face and the glistening teeth. Its fur was banded black and white, shading into grey beneath. It had a bright,
quick light in its golden gaze: it knew who I was and why I had come, and when I stopped a few feet away from it, I saw that it was not an animal at all, but a woman.

Skadi was no longer wearing her armour. She was dressed all in furs, with small neat boots and gloves made of something soft that I thought might be catskin. Her hair was loose and she was
smiling, but the golden eyes were the same. I had not thought her eyes were golden.

‘It was you,’ I said. ‘It was you, out on the ice that time. You tried to kill me.’ But that beast was dead: it had been shot. They could not be the same and she shook
her head.

‘Not I. But not a beast, either. Someone you never knew. A vitki, brother of Frey Gundersson.’

‘Frey had a brother?’

‘I can’t remember his name.’ She looked dismissive. ‘The purpose of your ingsgaldir wasn’t to permit you to control animals, as Frey tried to convince you –
more mind games. It was to see through illusions to what lies beneath. Yes, pack control is part of being a vitki, but only a part.’ She came close to me. I could smell her and she was rank
and musky. Woodsmoke clung to her like a pall. She leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. Her lips were icy.

‘Congratulations. You’ve passed. It’s a good thing to achieve, before you die.’

And that’s when I saw the blade.

The witch of the north, who pares you, frees you from your frail unnecessary flesh. The woman who, with her skinning knife, flays you and strips you down to the whistling bone, the hollows of
your body, so that the north wind whips through. The woman who liberates your spirit, allowing it to wander the earth while she and her beasts feed on your discarded, rotting meat.
That’s
who Skadi was. I’d been right. She wasn’t human.

Everything slowed. The blade drifted down through the air like the arctic lights, floating towards my throat. I felt its breath before I felt its bite – but the bite never came. Years ago,
the fenris had exploded in a burst of bone and brain, as my rescuer fired a bolt into its head. Now, it was as though the whole world exploded: the ice shattering, the sky breaking apart and the
stars cascading down. It was only for a moment, as Sedra threw me backwards and my head hit an outcrop of icy rock. I heard Eld and Glyn Apt, shouting out, and I sat up.

I was still alive. So were Eld and Glyn Apt. But Sedra and Skadi were gone.

We watched them searching for us, from the vantage point of a nearby crag. They could not see us, of course, and my niece’s magical birds made sure that we would not
show up on any of their mechanical devices. I’d have gone down and reassured them, but I wanted to keep an eye on my niece.

Skadi was sulking. But she wasn’t in the bloodmind that the feir warriors love so much; she was perfectly self-aware.

‘What did you think you were doing?’ I asked. ‘Were you going to kill us all?’

‘Maybe not you,’ she muttered. ‘But the rest – why not? They want to kill me.’

‘Niece, you are a liability.’

‘Why don’t they just leave me
alone
?’ She sounded like a young girl, newly returned from the world. ‘That’s how this started. I did what they told me to do,
in Sull Forest. I killed who they told me to kill. I linked my mind to their machinery; I folded the forest.’ That made me prick up my ears, but she went on, ‘But then they began asking
me questions – how did I kill so well? How is it that I can cast such illusions, when even the foremost vitki struggled to do so?’

‘It’s because of what you are,’ I said.

‘I know that
now.
But they didn’t bother to tell me, so how was I to know?’ She paused.
‘Her
lover – the one called Frey – he understood me. He
took me to a hunting range in Morvern, set me against the captives. I killed as many as I could find and he was very pleased. But then the vitki insisted that I came back and be tested.’

‘I can see how you would not want that.’ I looked at her. ‘So what do you want, niece?’

She hesitated. ‘My name is Skadi, not “niece”.’

‘A good name,’ I said, though it seemed outlandish for this almost-Mondhaith girl to bear a foreign word, and it grated on me to be speaking to her through the medium of the box,
that she did not understand her own tongue. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means “Shadow”. And you ask me what I want. I want to be myself, nothing more. To do what I am called to do.’ She reached out and grasped me by the arm. It was a
warrior’s grip. ‘And you can help me, can’t you? You can show me what kind of thing I’m supposed to be.’

‘Skadi, I am not even supposed to be here at all. I never thought I’d see another planet, another world. I went out into the wilds to die. This is like the afterlife for
me.’

‘Then that proves it, doesn’t it?’ she said eagerly. ‘You can never have been intended to die. The spirits must have meant you to live – to come here and teach
me.’

I didn’t know what spirits she meant. I knew nothing about the beliefs of these people. But her grasp of my arm was so tight that it hurt. I heard myself say, ‘Perhaps that’s
true.’

‘You can show me how to control the illusions, to make them real – without the aid of the machines. How to wield the ability.’

I laughed. ‘You seem to be able to do that quite well enough yourself.’ But her words made me deeply uneasy. Make illusions real? I’d heard of a few folk doing that, stories
from the very long-ago. No one could do it now.
I folded the forest.
Something told me not to betray my concerns, however. If she felt that it was a common trait of our people, maybe
she’d be more wary of me.

‘Tricks,’ she said, almost spitting. ‘Technology and trickery. I have enough stuff in
here,’
she tapped her forehead, ‘to power a planet, it sometimes seems.
I want it gone. It makes me weak. I know that what I do doesn’t depend on it, or on their technology.’

I could understand that well enough. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll teach you, if you wish to be taught. We’ll start now. Do you see those three, your
enemies?’

They were plainly visible a short distance across the icefield, huddled together over some piece of instrumentation. My niece made a sound in her throat like a growl. ‘I see
them.’

‘Then watch and learn,’ I told her. I cast an illusion of my own, calling upon the swirling blankness beneath the ice, the cold rush of the air, the whiteness of the snowscape. It
was easy to work with such a canvas. So little colour, just pearl and pale against the pink backdrop of the sky. I drew the blankness up around the three who stood on the ice and blotted them from
view. I saw Skadi’s eyes widen as she half-realized what was happening. Then I reached out as if to reassure her and jabbed the pressure point below her jaw. Machines may not have let her
down, but trust had. She crumpled to the ice but I caught hold of her and let her down as gently as I could. I estimated that she would be unconscious for a little while longer and I went down from
the cairn of rock.

My niece could not see them and neither could they see me. I cast further illusions, working with the world and with the materials at my disposal. Once, I looked up to see the warrior of Moon
Moor standing close by on an outcrop of ice and she grinned again when she saw me. My heart sang in me, for I thought I knew why she had come. But I also knew there was more that I had to do and
then she faded, the bright snowlight cascading through her and blotting her from view. My death would be a while longer yet.

While Vali and the others chased shadows by the sea’s edge, I made myself busy by taking one of the long folding sleds that had come with the canoes. There was some kind of engine
attached, but I didn’t bother with that; it was time to work with what I knew and understood. I looped the rope over my shoulder and dragged the sled back up to the cairn, where my niece lay
unstirring. I must confess, I was glad to find her still there. I loaded her up onto the sled, anticipating difficulty, but she was quite light beneath all the skins and the sled glided smoothly on
its long runners. I strapped Skadi down as best I could: the sled had clamps on either side, which suggested that it was intended for use in transporting prisoners. Then I located the sled’s
harness, secured it over my shoulders and over my breast, and set off across the glacier. It was hard. I was too old for this. The volcano towered in the distance and there was still much of the
long day to go. There would be time, I thought, if only my own strength did not give out first. There would be time.

It didn’t take us too long to work out what had happened. Skinning Knife had been distracted by Sedra and it was inconceivable, Glyn Apt said, that the old woman
could have killed her. So Skadi must have taken Sedra away, spirited her into the white wilderness before us. Perhaps she intended to slaughter and display her aunt as a warning to us, or perhaps
she wished to hold her as a hostage. If that were the case, Glyn Apt insisted, and Eld agreed, then we would undertake no negotiations save those that took us close to Skadi. Sedra was expendable.
I did not like the idea, but I had to agree. Besides, I did not think Sedra considered herself indispensable – but that wasn’t the point, at least if you were Skald and not vitki.

Shortly after that, we discovered that one of the sleds was missing, and that confirmed Glyn Apt’s theory. We estimated that Skadi was maybe an hour ahead of us, and she knew the lie of
the land better than we did, but the sled had made faint tracks in the ice and we followed them. We would halt when dusk fell, Glyn Apt decided. There might be other dangers beside Skinning Knife:
night-hunting fenris, for instance.

‘And maybe other things,’ the Morrighanu added.

‘What kind of “other things”?’

Glyn Apt looked uneasy, which was an achievement all by itself. ‘They tell stories about Therm, even in Morvern.’

Eld laughed and Glyn Apt bristled. Eld said, ‘They tell stories about Morvern, even in Hetla. About how everyone has two heads and keeps a pet troll.’

‘You’ve seen Skinning Knife,’ Glyn Apt retorted. ‘Imagine what kinds of thing Morvern tells stories about.’

It was twilight by the time we reached the slopes of the volcano: that deep greenness of sky with the veils of light already starting to drift across it.
After Skadi’s attack, I’d increasingly begun to feel that this would be my last night on Muspell. It so nearly had been, and nothing we could do – technology, the seith –
seemed able to protect me. With the aid of the Skald, I’d been able to develop techniques that on another planet – Nhem was one of them – could see me hanged for witchcraft, but
Skadi made me look like a mere infant. I should have gone to her in that forest cottage, something whispered to me. I should have let her pare my soul from my flesh, strip me down to air and
nothing. But then something else whispered to me that I’d fought Frey, who had called out the same kind of weakness in me, who had broken in through all the chinks and crevices in my armour.
I’d fought Frey, and won. I wasn’t a witch or a member of a super-race. I was just a woman with abilities, who had been trained in a particular way. And so was Skadi.

‘I suggest we stop here,’ Glyn Apt said, cutting the motor of the sled. We’d been running quietly, gliding along, but with the motor dead, the humming in my bones stopped and
the world suddenly seemed a place of vast silence.

‘It’s as good as any,’ Eld said. We were close to a long ridge of ice, with crevices that would provide shelter on three sides, if not from above. I agreed, but part of me
wanted to go on, just get it over with. I held tightly to the memory of setting the visen pack on Frey, of realizing that he was finally, truly, dead. Aside from my brother, I reminded myself yet
again, everyone who had ever hurt me was dead. Inductive logic was encouraging. But just because the sun has risen every day until now, it did not mean that it would rise tomorrow. At least, not
for me.