Aelis ran too, flat out and blind with terror through the wood. There was a thump, a blinding light and she was down. Witless with fear, she had blundered into a tree.
She could hear the monster behind her, his pace quick and light. She knew that to hide was suicide. Raven had sunk two arrows into her shield from thirty paces, through the deep darkness of the trees. He would find her, she knew. There was his call again — horrible, almost mocking.
She ran on, as quickly as before. She couldn’t afford caution, though she stumbled and tripped on roots, sudden dips and unseen rises. She crashed into a thicket of ferns, sensing the river’s cold before she saw its glitter, the moonlight turning the water to a road of sparkling ice. But it was no road you could walk on. The cry was near her now; she had no choice, and she leaped in.
In her haste she had forgotten the mail coat. It was heavy but not so heavy that she couldn’t keep her head above water. Her brother and his men held races across the Seine in full war gear in times of peace, and she told herself she was of the same stock, though her limbs were tiring quickly.
Aelis hadn’t expected the current to be so strong. It swept her downstream, and she had to pump her arms to keep her mouth above water. The cold was a serpent, crushing the breath from her body and dragging her down. She kicked for the opposite bank but she was exhausted and couldn’t fight the pull of the freezing river. The black mass of a fallen tree loomed in front of her and she snatched at a branch. No good. Her numb hands couldn’t grasp it. The water took her and spun her, but then the little breath she had in her body was driven from her. Her leg had caught on something submerged. She gulped in an icy mouthful and was certain she was going down. She cried out and beat her hands against the current’s pull.
Her foot was stuck fast but she managed another breath. As she did, her hand touched something rough, cold and hard. It was a tree trunk, beneath the water. She hugged it, turning her back to the stream, clinging on. She was pressed against the trunk of the tree, frozen but breathing.
She looked around. The tree emerged from the water and went under again, but it was attached to the bank. If she could free her foot she could pull herself to the shore. She tugged at her foot. It had become wedged at the ankle between a branch and the trunk. Every time she tried to free it, the bitter cold water threatened to shove her forward and down. There was nothing for it, though, she had to try. Aelis crossed her feet and used her left leg to hook back on her right. The ankle came free, the water tried to tear her from the trunk but she was ready and clung on. She felt her way along the tree to the shore.
The ravaged face of the sorcerer looked down at her from behind a drawn bow. Aelis looked up at him and realised that all hope was lost. She shook and shivered on the trunk.
‘Go on then.’
The Raven put down the bow and crouched at the side of the river. His eyes were just blank spaces; his face under the moonlight was a moon itself, pitted, torn and unreadable.
She went to climb onto the bank; she had to get out of that icy water no matter what. Hugin moved his head to one side and looked down at her. Then he drew a long thin knife from his belt. He wasn’t going to let her get out.
She knew she was going to die. How long would it take?
Longer than she had expected. It got lighter, and lighter still. She didn’t die, though she shivered and her hands were blue. She knew it was impossible to get across the river, impossible to get past the Raven. How much time passed? The spring hours, the divisions of twelve between sun and dusk, seemed as long as those of high summer. How many had gone by since she entered the river? One? Two? Still he sat there, a great carrion bird, watching her like a crow watches a dying sheep. The sharp moon hung in a sky of duck-egg blue and the sun through the trees turned the air to crystal. It was day, she realised.
Her vision faded, the moon dancing and wheeling, blurring and finally fading from sight. A sharp crescent of light split the darkness and at first she thought it was the moon again. But it was not. It seemed she was standing inside a cave, and the crescent of light was its mouth. She walked to the mouth and saw that the cave was set in the wall of a dizzying cliff. The air seemed to rush beneath her; wisps of clouds hung like mountain spirits at her feet. She held something heavy in her arms — a man. He was dead and he had died for her. She looked behind her. Somewhere inside the cave was someone else she had loved, she could sense it.
A thumping, rhythmic song came into her head.
‘Then fares Odin to fight with the wolf…’
She had never heard it before, but she knew its meaning was bound up with her life. The cold sent pins and needles through her body, but it wasn’t just a physical sensation; something seemed to fizz and spit in her mind.
She could see more now — a huge wolf, its head bloody and its jaws red, was tearing at a fallen warrior beneath a sky of ravens on a wide bleak plain. As it shook and ripped the man’s flesh, shapes seemed to appear in her mind, and she knew them for what they were — magical symbols, expressions of the fundamental relations of the universe, living things that could plant themselves to shine and chime from the dark shadows of the mind.
She spoke the words in her head:
Runes I took from the dying god,
Where the wolf tore men on Vigrid plain.
She should be dying, she knew, but there were things inside her that did not want to die, and would not let her do so until she had fulfilled a purpose.
She saw another symbol, a jagged tear in the fabric of the blue sky. It was one of the magical shapes, a rune, as the rhyme had said, but different from the others. What did it mean? A hook, a trap, a trap for a wolf. But it meant more to her than all the other shapes combined, more than the one that seemed to burst with flowers, wither and grow again, the symbol of rebirth, more than the symbol that seemed to her like a shield around her, more even than the one that gabbled and talked, to chuckle at the good fortune that it brought.
Again, that voice in her head. She seemed to recognise it. It was like a child’s but worn and heavy with experience.
The fetters shall burst and the wolf run free
Much do I know and more can see.
A strange realisation swept over Aelis. She would not die because she was linked to something so much greater than herself through those strange shapes, the runes that had taken root in her in lifetimes she had lived before when she had watched a god die under the teeth of a wolf. One of the symbols emanated in her mind — the horse rune, which sweated and stamped and now careered and galloped. There were others too, growing within her, whispering to her, coming to bloom.
She came back to herself. She was still on the trunk in the river. The Raven was still crouching, his cruel knife in his hand.
When he saw her move he stood up and retreated a pace, but she remained within his reach and the knife was pointed towards her. She clawed herself up onto the bank and lay retching and convulsing on the ground. The Raven prodded her with his foot, examining her, almost as if he was trying to understand the woman he had made his enemy. There was a sound in Aelis’s mind like the rushing of blood, like drums to call the wind.
She didn’t know where the words came from, but she spoke to him: ‘The thread of my fate is woven. It doesn’t end today.’
The Raven didn’t seem to notice that Aelis had spoken in Norse, a language she barely understood. He just shrugged and took her by the throat.