Snow-Walker (18 page)

The forests were endless.

Ranks of motionless trees stood weighted with snow, deep in unprinted drifts. Far above, the pale sky was streaked with cloud, unmoving, as if claws had scored it.

Crouched in a snow hole, the rune creature watched with its pale eyes. It watched a small, white thing with a scampering run. The creature had no name for it. Stiff with hunger, it let the nervous, furred thing run nearer and pause.

The stoat lifted its head and blinked. It turned, eyes alert, but before it could even tense, the claws struck, killing it without a sound. Blood splashed onto the snow, sinking in, melting.

The creature ate greedily. Warmth moved in its throat; a welcome fullness flushed momentarily inside it. When it moved away, it left nothing but small bones and the stained, trampled snow.

Now it slid and slithered downhill, into a small valley where a stream ran deep under the ice. Smashing through the thick, bubbled lid, the creature bent and drank, crystals of ice forming instantly on its lips, thin icicles that snapped as it raised itself and roared. It tore berries from bushes, twigs and needles from pines, chewing them and spitting them out. Thought stirred in it; it crouched and scrabbled at the roots of a tree, flinging snow aside, but the topsoil was frozen deep and nothing lived in it.

The rune beast hugged itself, rocking silently. Snow from the branches above drifted down on it, dusting its limbs and shoulders. It was growing stronger. Slowly, meal by tiny meal, it was hardening, becoming less a web of runes and shadows, more a thing of hunger and teeth and frost. The voice in its head spoke endlessly to it, sometimes comforting, sometimes mocking.

Reluctantly the creature gathered itself and stood, swaying. It staggered on, always south. For long hours it trudged through the aisles of trees, torn at by brambles, soaked with falling snow. Somewhere far ahead was something it must have, a distant tugging at its nerves.

Only when the noise came did it stop.

The noise was strange, and the smell that drifted with it made the creature whimper with excitement and pain. It crouched in the snow, clenching and unclenching its long, clawed fingers. The sound was high, an echo, a clang. Not a tree murmur, not one of the feathered whistlers. In all the leagues of its journey the shadow maker had heard nothing like this. Silent, it dragged itself to a tree and stared around, clutching the mossed trunk.

It saw an animal, large, four-legged, gray-white. Branches sprouted from its head. The sound came from a tiny round thing that clanked and jangled on its neck. There were others too, behind, tearing lichen from the trees with their long, quick tongues.

This is good,
the voice told it, laughing.
You must strike now. You must feed. This is your strength that has come to you.

She was kneeling by a small pool. Around her the courtyard was deep in snow, but the pool was liquid, silver-gray. Reflections of cloud drifted across it.

“Where?” she asked.

“I don't know where,” the voice behind her said quietly. “But look, Jessa, look harder. Please.”

She bent closer. Her own face stared back, the long ends of her hair brushing the surface. And then, far under, far through, she saw the movement of something through trees, something large, pale, undefined.

“I can't see it clearly.”

“Because I can't, not yet. But it's coming. It's coming closer every day.”

A coal shifted. She opened her eyes quickly.

“Kari?” she murmured.

But the small room was empty and dim. The draft from the window had blown the rushlight out.

Stiffly she got up from the chair and crossed the room and looked out. The Jarlshold was dark. Stars glimmered over the smoke; the pale mountains on the other side of the fjord were jagged and immense against the black sky. She let the cold air freshen her. It was strange to have fallen asleep like that, though she hadn't slept much the night before, what with talking to Skapti and then lying bundled in fur in the stern, feeling the ship rise and plummet beneath her.

And the dream. Already it was fading, and she groped after it. Kari had been there, and had said … but she couldn't remember what. She wondered if he could be watching her now and made a face at the empty air. “That's for Brochael,” she said aloud. But the room was silent, and wherever Kari was, he wasn't here.

She slammed the shutter suddenly and latched it and went downstairs. The Jarlshall was busy, and the feast was for her. It was Wulfgar's welcome, and rightly so, she thought wryly, after all the things they'd been through in the past, both outlaws, both hunted. She smoothed the embroidery on the scarlet dress old Marrika had sewn for her; it was tasseled and laced with sealskin and hung with ivory. On each shoulder she had pinned the two great discs of interwoven gold that had been her mother's, and her grandmother's before that, the last treasures of the family hoard. They felt heavy, and reassuring.

The hall was warm as she pushed her way through the crowd. Many of them knew her, some were old friends of her family, and it took her a long while to get to the high table, already tired with polite talk. Skapti had a chair ready for her, next to Wulfgar's empty one.

“Place of honor.”

“Quite right,” she said, sitting. “So where's the host?”

He grinned and sat beside her. “Down there talking. He'll be along.”

“I hope so. I'm hungry.”

And the word broke the dream and she remembered it, the pool, and the white shape Kari had tried to show her, and the hunger. That most of all. But what she had seen was vague; she put it to the back of her mind. Later she'd remember.

She leaned her chin on her hands and looked down at the crowd, talking, arguing, carving meat, laughing. All those hands and faces. All those words. The three fires were well ablaze, roaring out heat; smoke rose straight to the roof where it hung about the smoke holes and the ring window. Doves flapped up there, restless. On the walls hung heavy tapestries, and Jessa remembered how some of them had burned with Gudrun's rune fire on the night the witch had left. In the center of the hall stood the roof tree, a mighty pillar rising into the dark, its trunk carved with ancient signs for power and luck. In Gudrun's time a white snake had been cut deep into the timber; Jessa could still see parts of its sinuous outline, scored over with new runes cut by Wulfgar's priests and shamans.

She looked past and saw Wulfgar coming, but then Vidar caught his arm and came with him, talking all the time.

“Now what's so urgent?” Skapti muttered.

“You don't like him, do you?”

“Who? Wulfgar?”

She smiled impatiently. “You know who I mean, clever. This Vidar.”

The skald ran one long finger around the lip of his cup. “Sharp, Jessa.”

She thought of the innkeeper and frowned, but Wulfgar was sitting beside her now. “I'm sorry, Jessa.” He waved to the house thralls to serve, and great dishes began to appear, bobbing through the crowd. The food was good, and Jessa began to enjoy it. As they ate, Wulfgar told her he had begun a search for the thief.

“I'll have no footpads—not if I can get rid of them.”

“Which you won't,” Skapti muttered.

“We'll see.” He looked down the long hall thoughtfully. “Things have begun to change, Jessa, and there's so much more I want to do. Gudrun nearly destroyed us; she tainted us with evil, with the stink of witchery. No one dared speak out—you remember how it was. Sorcery doesn't need weapons, or a knife in the ribs; it poisons courage, robs men of will, makes them fear shadows, things that move in the dark. We've finished with all that.”

She nodded, but was silent, thinking of Kari. Sorcery was in him too. Sorcery that had won Wulfgar his land. Had he forgotten that? Was that why Kari kept away?

Vidar was watching her. He'd been listening; that annoyed her. Now he said, “Wulfgar is right. We can do without such things.”

She couldn't help it. “What about Kari?”

Vidar shrugged; Wulfgar looked uneasy. “Kari is different, of course.”

“And far away,” the priest added.

And you want him to stay away, she thought, watching him speak quietly in the Jarl's ear. His eyes watched the men in the hall, darting from group to group.

“Well,” Skapti whispered, “I don't think you like him either.”

She pushed him away. “Rubbish.”

“Not so, Jessa.”

“Is he one of the wasps you mentioned?”

Slightly, he nodded.

When the conversation came around to Gudrun, everyone was listening.

“Nothing has been seen of her since that day she went,” Wulfgar said. “It's as if she walked off the world's edge.”

“We wouldn't be that lucky,” Skapti remarked.

“And the White People?”

“Nothing. Except that a man from Thykkawood was here last week—that's well up in the glacier country. He says a strange mist has been seen up in the mountain passes, full of sparks and colors, curling into shapes, as if something walked there. The local wise woman says the White People are brewing some sorcery. No one has seen them—but then no one ever does.”

“Do you think,” Jessa said slowly, “that they—that she—might take some sort of revenge on us?”

“Sometimes I think it.” He drank from the cup. “Sometimes.”

Vidar said, “She was very beautiful, they say.”

Jessa stared at him. “You never saw her? Yes, she was, and deadly too.”

“A frost candle,” Skapti muttered, standing up and reaching for the kantele. He turned a peg on it and a string hummed quietly. “A woman with an ice heart. That was Gudrun.”

Silence fell in the hall as they saw him stand.

While he sang, Jessa let the lilting words warm her like the wine; a song of praise for Wulfgar, for the new order that had come to the land, for peace. The words, woven in long complex lines of rhythm and kenning and music, filled the silent hall, and when the last complicated chain of sound ended, there was a pause before the storm of noise, as if he had somehow reached their hearts and hushed them.

Jessa realized she was sleepy. She leaned over to Wulfgar.

“I'm going outside for some air.”

He nodded. “Take my coat.”

She brushed the scraps from her, dragged the heavy robe from his chair and pushed her way to the outer door. Near the biggest fire a juggler was tossing three axs recklessly around his head, his friends cheering him from a safe distance. He dropped one, and it thudded into the straw as he leaped aside to a roar of derision.

Jessa slipped outside, tugging the heavy door shut behind her. The sky was black, frosted with stars. She took a deep breath of the air, felt its cold shock clear her head of wine fumes and smoke, and she pulled Wulfgar's big coat tighter, her hands well up inside the sleeves.

The night was silent. Smoke drifted from the turf houses; a few hens clucked. Even the dogs seemed asleep. She wandered a little way between the buildings, her boots quietly crunching the frozen mud. Above her, abruptly, the sky rippled into an aurora, a curtain of colors drifting silently over the stars as if a wind moved it. Scarlet, green, faintest blue. She had seen this a hundred times but it always surprised her. Some said a giant named Surt made this light; others that it was the walls of Asgard glimpsed in the sky. Skapti believed it was caused by frost in the air, but that was surely poet's nonsense.

The hall door behind her opened; a burst of talk and laughter drifted out, and with it a figure that moved quickly into the shadows of the wall. Then the man stepped out, and a flicker of blue-green light stroked his face. She realized it was Vidar. He made his way cautiously between the houses and, as a woman came out of one, Jessa saw him jerk back into shadow, as if not to be seen.

That surprised her. What was he doing?

She watched as he moved behind the smithy and then slipped after him carefully. The priest walked on, his coat swaying, the amulets at his neck and sewn to his collar making tiny clinking noises against each other. He walked hurriedly to the farthest end of the settlement to a small crooked-looking hut built against another. Goats bleated from behind it. Not far off the waters of the fjord rasped the shore.

Jessa watched from the corner of a wall.

Even in the frosty silence the knock seemed quiet and secret. The door opened slightly; a face peered out, lit briefly by the green ripples of light. Then Vidar slipped inside and the door closed.

Jessa turned and leaned back against the wall and whistled a silent cloud into the air. She was too astonished to be cold. She had known that face, recognized it at once. She would have known it anywhere. It had been the little rat-faced thief who'd robbed her at the inn.

Sleep was a new thing. Obeying the heaviness in its stomach and head, the rune creature had hidden all day in a cleft on a fellside, and the strange darkness had come down inside its eyes and taken its mind away.

When it woke, the daylight had gone. All the stars looked down at it. For a moment the thing lay there, still curled. Then the voice came out of the whiteness and spoke sharply, and coldly; it uncramped its limbs and staggered up, stiff with frost.

Outside the cleft was open land, far below. This was a different country. There were trees, yes, but among them open smooth slopes, white and untrodden. The land folded into valleys, running south.

The creature began to trudge. It had come through long weeks of weariness and ice, and there was a long way to go yet, but the desire inside it was sharpening. Somewhere ahead, there was something it must have.
Yes,
said the voice quietly. The voice ruled it. She would never let it go, let it escape—dully, the creature knew this. She … when had it first known the voice was she? Recently. Memories and thoughts were confused, stirring into being like a pain.