Spellbreakers (33 page)

She had woken up alone some time earlier, and padded
out to the main room of the house to see if Daria was around, and had found her
and Ljung sleeping together in the first soft grey light of dawn. She had
quietly closed the door again and gone back to bed.

She was not angry at having found them together. After
all she had done her best to keep them both at a distance since that night in
the forest. She felt almost, almost, in a way, relieved.

Whether she wanted or not, her quest would drive her
further and further away from Daria, whom she had always loved, and from Ljung,
whom she had just found, and yet had awakened such deep, strong, different
feelings in her that it was as if love had been just newly revealed to her in
all its
dazzling, painful splendor.

She could not love them now. She must bestow her love
somewhere else, all of it, with all her strength.

Somewhere I must find the way to love a man I have
never met. How can I do that with them taking up every thought, every dream,
every wish I have?

She must kiss Hawkeneye back to life.
The kiss of life.
It was an almost inconceivable thought. It
had sounded almost easy back home in Escarra. Take a good horse, ride the whole
length of Hassia, cross the Narrows, go to Dalarna, kiss the sleeping hero,
break the spell. What could be more straightforward? But here she was now,
needing all her heart for this quest, and her heart was full of Ljung’s voice,
eyes, hands, his sinewy body and his dancer’s step.

It was better that he was Daria’s, and hers alone.

She needed to forget them both. Daria would be mad at
her, when she realized, but she would not be so hurt, if Ljung was all hers.
She would be fine.

In Ljung’s arms.

And she, Leal, would have her heart to herself, for
her quest and her high destiny. Sure? Sure.

She sat on the bed, in real, physical distress,
rocking back and forth, biting down an agonized whine, clasping her hands and
her eyes in the piercing anguish.

Sure it didn’t matter that her heart was breaking.

It was as pure as she could keep it, and that was all
there was to it.

****

That afternoon, as the light grew mellow in the west,
and their last resting day in Elverhjem drew to a close, Julie and her
assistants came back to the house with three enormous panniers full of their
new clothing. They must have been sewing and beading all day and night, because
not only each set of clothing had been adjusted to a perfect fit, but also
slashes and facings of pale blue quilted silk had been added, and fringes of
blue and white feathers, jay’s and swan’s. Even the royal blue, iridescent down
of peacocks breasts had been somehow sewn among the plush white and silvery
pelts, turning them to a changeful glittering azure. Daria and Leal had no idea
how such a thing had been done. They could only exclaim in wonder. It was
almost sacrilegious to bundle such beautiful garments unceremoniously into
their packs, ready by the door by dinner time.

They spent their last evening in Elverhjem dining with
all their new friends, Ingri, Leif, Julie, and several other hunters, musicians
and craftsmen. Some stories of the Ice Waste in the olden days were told, but
the elvers mostly asked questions about the unknown lands in the south. Perhaps
they were trying to distract Leal and Daria’s minds from the trip they would
begin tomorrow, or perhaps they were just genuinely curious.

****

The next day, Kilian Kjellsen, a tall fair-haired
elvren hunter of the northern watch whom they had first encountered the evening
before, met them outside their door at dawn. He led a sturdy Kalevan pony by a
knotted rope halter. The pony, a short-legged, broad-backed chestnut mare with
a mop of pale mane on her face and pasterns you could moor a boat to, was
loaded with an empty pack saddle.

“This is Kaywinnith,” said Kilian as they came out of
their house with their packs. He patted her neck affectionately, and the mare
nickered. “She’ll carry your stuff as far as the glaciers, but you cannot bring
her on the ice. Most likely you’ll find hunters of the northern watch around
the border. You can leave her in their care, or just set her free. She’ll find
her way home.”

“Will she be all right on the moors?” asked Daria
doubtfully, because she had heard horror tales of the harshness of the ground
and weather and of the scarcity of fodder of the high moors of the northern
Elverlaen. Everybody had warned them that their horses would never make it in
such a place. But Kilian just laughed.

“She’s not a fancy steed like you brought from the
south. She’s the real thing. She’s at home on the moors.”

So they set out lightly enough. Kaywinnith carried her
enormous panniers and bundles without any fuss. They had provisions for a
month, although they hoped to be back long before that, if all went well. The
broad green paths of Elverhjem were lined with silent people come to watch them
leave. Among them Daria spotted the three Elders, in plain working clothes.

They followed, more or less, the course of the Leiro,
the river that ran and tumbled down the length of the Elverhjem dale. It was a
trifling stream by the end of the first day, rippling fitfully in dark shady
hollows of the forest floor.

They went slowly at
first,
because the pony’s large bundles were somewhat unwieldy in the thick of the
woods. They mostly walked in silence, each busy with their own thoughts.

Daria studied Leal’s face with some concern. She could
not make out any sign of reproach for the night she had spent with Ljung in the
princess’s expression or behavior, but she felt a distance growing between them,
and she was scared of it. For all her bravado Daria knew that she needed Leal
as much as Leal needed her. They had always been together. She could not
remember a time when they had not been inseparable. That anything might come
between them was unthinkable.

She had determined to speak to Leal and make her
understand this, but it was astonishingly difficult to find a good moment. She
suspected that Leal was actually avoiding this talk. Daria settled for the
second best thing, which was to give up on any intimacy with Ljung, for the
time being, hoping Leal would eventually see that nothing had changed between
them.

By the end of the second day they came out of the
forest. The last trees were thin on the ground. Many were just gnarled,
wind-bitten stumps. The land was rising slowly but steadily, becoming ever
rockier and poorer. Leal’s Escarran mare would have been lame in a half a day
of walking on this terrain, but Kaywinnith actually picked up speed as soon as
the forest was behind her, attacking the stony slopes in front of her with no
more trouble than if they had been strolling on a sandy beach on the Enskalan
shores. Sometimes Daria, who was theoretically leading her, was at a loss for
picking a path among the brush and stones, and then the pony would forge ahead
impatiently, dragging Daria up her own chosen path by main force.

Daria soon became full of respect for this stumpy
legged, tenacious creature. She was not fast, but she could climb up all day
under her heavy load eating no better than a goat.

On the third day the ground stopped rising, and they
suddenly passed a last stony crest to emerge on a boundless, windswept, gently
undulating plateau. It was a hazy day and it was hard to make out anything in
the distance, but Daria thought that she could see a flash of white on the
horizon, lower, sharper and more substantial than the clouds.

The Leiro had disappeared, or at least it had
scattered into a thousand converging burns and rills that ran treacherously in
deep, soft beds hidden in the heath. The ground was soggy up here, and it
sucked up at their boots and at the pony’s hooves like a hungry sponge. From
time to time one or the other of them had to hop ludicrously on one foot while
trying to recover a trapped boot.

The moors were a famished, scraggy landscape, but also
colorful. The heather was dark and almost grey, but the ling bloomed in a mauve
haze here and there. There were patches of bright mosses, lush dark green or
silvery white just tinged with celadon; tall undulating drifts of bracken,
turning gold and russet at this time of the year; and patches of a fiery-red,
weedy shrubs carrying sharply tart ruby-red berries. In places these plants
covered acre after acre of the boggy ground, and the travelers waded in
blood-red pastures like heroes of some dark ancient legend.

The mornings were invariably foggy, a thick grey fog
that covered the land in glittering dew and mystery. Slowly, towards midday,
the fog would lessen to a golden mist to finally open to the purest blue
overhead, with steamy clouds rising from the ground on all horizons. The nights
were the clearest that Daria had ever seen, with enormous twinkling stars
bathed in the brilliance of the
Via
Làctia, the milky-pale starry river
 
in
the sky of which the Lord Dionis had often spoken, when feeling especially
solemn about his wizardry, but that Daria, even in the clearest Escarran nights
had ever actually
seen.

There was life on the moors. Small grey deer with wide
splay feet roamed around in huge herds. Elks, deer-like creatures taller than
horses, with enormous flat antlers, waded majestically through the deepest fens
regarding the travelers with lofty disdain. Grouse, ptarmigans, and
capercaillies were as common as pheasants in other parts of the world, and
Tuula often provided their dinner. The red berries were a pleasantly refreshing
relish on the warmest hour of the afternoon, and mashed with some honey they
went surprisingly well with the roasted birds.

It could have been a pleasant time, and sometimes it
was, despite the wet feet, the mosquitoes, and the damp chilly nights. As if by
unspoken agreement all three had reverted to a relaxed camaraderie, as if the
blazing passion that had taken them for a while had been all a dream. Daria was
still hungry for Ljung’s body, but now that they were so close to Dalarna,
dread was finally stealing over
her,
and with it a
heart-sickening worry for Leal, and for her own survival. Under these
circumstances, even the mellow companionship they all three shared these days
was a wonderful comfort, and she asked for nothing more. Sometimes she wished
these moors would go on and on forever, so that the chilly end of their journey
could be postponed until eternity.

But the pale mass on the northern horizon grew higher
each day, ominous and threatening.

During their fourth night, Daria was roused by a loud
trumpeting snort. It was the pony, standing on tip toe and staring in the
darkness, all tense. Ljung, who had been on watch, had an arrow nocked.

“What is it?”

“
Hati
.
A kind of warg.
Grab the pony and stay close to the fire.”

The fire was little more than embers, but in the
faintly moonlit darkness she could see eyes, two blazing eyes like cold jewels
circling the camp. It was all Daria could do to keep the pony from bolting.
Then the eyes leapt forward, and Ljung’s arrow hissed and hit. There were a
yelp and a thud, then silence.

The next morning she walked out of the camp at first
light to regard the beast. It was a wolf of sorts, but almost the size of their
pony, with grotesquely massive shoulders, heavy jaws with saber fangs and
clawed paws like a bear’s. Its eyes were still open and looked blindly at the
sky, pearly white.

In the afternoon of the fifth day, when the mists
lifted entirely, in front of them was a
 
snowy mountain range, peak after peak after peak of shining whiteness,
etched by blue shadows and bare black rocky sides, and between the two closest
peaks a monstrous tongue of ice, like a petrified slow-flowing river,
 
barred their path.

****

“We shall camp here tonight,” said Ljung. It was still
relatively early, and there must be a couple of hours of daylight left. Leal
glanced at him with a questioning frown, but Ljung shook his head gravely. “We
won’t spend the night any closer to the seracs. It is a nest of evil spirits.
They cannot really touch us, but they have other ways to hurt people... Nobody
in their right mind spends the night close to the labyrinth. We will be lucky
if we get out of it in one day.”

Leal nodded, resigned. She was getting desperately
impatient to get to the end of this torment one way or the other. She’d sleep
smack in the middle of a hundred labyrinths if it would hasten the conclusion
of the journey one hour.

It was torture to travel with the two persons she
loved most in the world knowing she must forsake them both to devote her heart
to someone else, to something else. She knew she might be unable to do so in
the end, and she was haunted by a feeling of impending failure.

Pure heart, pure heart.
I have no such thing. I am the wrong person for this
quest after all. Much as I try to banish it, my love for Daria and Ljung will
always be there. I only wish it was all over one way or the other.

Ljung was already putting down his pack however, so
she complied, and went to help Daria unload the pony.