Wren helped the shaking old woman back to her sodden mattress on the other side of the room. “Come along, dearie. That’s enough excitement for now. Let’s just sit down again and rest for a bit.”
Freya watched the girl carefully undress her mistress and change her skirts. The wet ones were thrown into a corner, on a pile of several others just like it. “Well? Who is Skadi? What was she talking about?”
Wren shoved her thick red hair behind her ear, and it promptly came free and fell in her face again. “Skadi was Gudrun’s apprentice, a long time ago. She left here to become the vala of Hengavik. That’s who Gudrun must mean.”
“Why would Gudrun think Skadi has something to do with the reavers?”
“From what I’ve heard, Skadi liked the old stories a little too much. Trolls and dragons and elves and such. She was a dreamer. Spent her life with half her mind someplace else, telling tales of Fenrir and Grendel. And when she was older, some people said that Skadi was actually looking for those creatures, trying to find their dens in the earth, their nests and whatnot, like they were real. Apparently, she spent a lot of time on Mount Esja, and in caves and holes.” Wren picked at her lip. “I can’t imagine the Allfather would be too happy with that.”
“Why?”
Wren looked up sharply, her eyes wide with confusion. “Because the good lord Woden spent ages killing off those beasties and locking them away. He didn’t go to all that trouble just so some witless vala could go about digging them all back up.”
Freya shrugged. “Fine. Whatever you say. So do you think Skadi might actually know how to help my sister?”
“Maybe, if you can find her.”
“You said she’s in Hengavik. My father took me there once when I was small. That’s not too far away.”
“You’re assuming the city is still there at all.” Wren crossed to the open window and looked down. “And that is a very large piece of meat you left standing down there. The reavers don’t wander around much in the daylight, but they might make an exception for your shaggy friend.”
“Forget about Arfast,” Freya said. “Tell me about Hengavik. Are you saying the reavers are there too?”
Wren grunted a humorless laugh. “This village used to have a hundred homes, with a hundred more spread out along the edge of the lake. It only took the reavers a few months to kill everyone or carry them off. And they pulled down half the cottages doing it, too. If this tower wasn’t so heavy and strong, it wouldn’t be here anymore, and neither would we.”
“How many are there?” Freya joined the girl at the window and peered out over the hills. The world stretched on and on in rippling waves of grass and stone and snow, in layers of muted grays and browns, and icy whites.
“More than I could count,” Wren said softly. She pointed at a set of rusty iron bars at their feet. “I keep the window barred except when I go out to find food during the day. At night we hear the reavers howling off to the north. But some nights I hear sounds down in the village by the water. Footsteps and breathing and sniffing and grunting.” The girl shivered.
A heavy hand grabbed Freya’s shoulder and Erik turned her to look at Gudrun. The old woman was standing up again, her legs bent, her back hunched, her arms crooked like a raven’s talons. Her mouth still hung open, the tip of her pink tongue visible between her toothless gums, her chin shining with drool. But she blinked her colorless eyes, and again, and again. Each time that she opened her eyes, they were a bit clearer, her irises a bit darker.
Her eyes shifted to Freya and the two women stared at each other. Slowly, Gudrun pulled her tongue back inside her mouth and closed her lips, and wiped her chin with her hand. She smiled a hideous smile that twisted all the loose flesh of her cheeks like curling smoke rolling up inside itself on a windless night.
“Reavers,” the old vala said. “There are reavers in the hills of Ysland. The last time such things prowled these lands, the Allfather came down to earth to slaughter Fenrir, the demon wolf, and left the beasts lying thick upon the heather in bloody heaps and piles. Now the reavers have returned, but the demon wolf is still dead in his cairn and the Allfather isn’t coming to save us.”
“Mistress!” Wren rushed to the woman’s side. “You shouldn’t be fully awake, you need your rest.”
Gudrun shook the girl off her arm and limped back to Katja. “I remember this one. Nordasdottir. I met her when she was barely able to walk. So much promise. Heh. But she can’t walk at all now.”
“She’s a very wise vala,” Freya said. “A good healer. A good ghost-talker. She’s helped a lot of people since her own mistress died.”
The crone nodded. “And now look at her. Burning up from the inside out, and well on her way to becoming one of them. A reaver.”
“No!” Freya grabbed the old woman’s arm. “There must be a cure. Katja thought you would know of one.”
Gudrun bared her naked gums in another hideous smile. “I don’t.”
Outside, the white elk whickered and thumped his hooves on the soft mud.
Freya stared at the woman’s withered face. “So that’s it? She’s going to turn into one of those things?”
“Unless you kill her first,” the vala said.
Freya grimaced and swallowed. A sharp snapping drew her attention back to the window where Erik was looking down at the ground. He snapped his fingers again, and started signing rapidly.
“What’s he doing?” Wren asked.
“He says there’s something out there, in the village, around the north side of the tower, out of sight.” Freya gripped one her bone knives and thought of her spear down on the ground, leaning against the tower’s wall. “It’s one of them. A reaver.”
Wren dashed to the far wall and scrambled up a crooked rope ladder to the ceiling and pushed her way up through the grass thatching to the roof.
“Stay or go?” Erik signed.
“Go.” Freya grabbed the knotted rope, slipped out the window, and climbed down to the ground. She snatched her spear from the wall and crept to the corner to spy out at the northern ruins of Denveller. The broken walls already looked more like a graveyard than a village, and with no one to maintain the houses, the heat of the lake would no doubt draw every last stone down into the soft mud within a few years, leaving no trace of Denveller but the defiant black tower.
Erik padded up softly behind her. Together they moved along the wall of the tower, peering down the muddy lanes and listening to the dim wet sounds of feet creeping about unseen beyond the broken homes. The morning sky was a perfect skin of pale blue, mottled only by the thinnest of white clouds hanging in the motionless winter air.
At the corner of the tower, yet another lane came into view. And there in the clear morning light stood two hunch-backed reavers. They had the bodies of men, stretched and crooked as though they’d spent a year on some torturer’s rack and had every bone in their bodies broken and mended poorly. Their pale gray flesh stretched tightly over their sharp ribs and shoulder blades, and every bit of them was covered in a thin coat of black and white and red fur.
Freya and Erik leveled their spears at the creatures, and the creatures fixed their eyes on the two hunters. Just like the one from the night before, these two stared out through bloodshot orbs stamped with dark golden irises. The reavers had blunt snouts and Freya could see the long matted hair still hanging from the backs of their heads in braids and knots, and hints of silver flashed in their ears and on their fingers. One wore the ragged remains of a filthy shirt around its shoulders that hung in tatters over its chest, and the other wore a belt with a single strip of cloth hanging down the side of its leg, but nothing hid the fact that both were female. Their mouths hung slightly agape, their yellowed fangs gleaming dully behind their black jowls, and bright beads of slobber hung in slender threads from their mouths.
A pair of low growls rumbled from their throats.
Two small stones whistled down from above and struck the creatures’ heads in quick succession, and Erik hurled his spear through the left beast’s chest, sending the reaver flying backward into the mud where it fell quivering and whimpering.
The second reaver sprang forward with fangs bared and claws outstretched, its blazing yellow eyes fixed on Freya’s naked throat. She dashed forward to meet it and planted the butt of her spear in the mud and stamped her boot on it. In the instant before the beast fell on her, she thought of the black figure that had wrestled her to the ground the night before.
Not this time.
Freya yanked her spear up and let the huge vixen impale itself on the blade, and she bore down hard with her legs, holding the shaft firm as the body slammed into it. The blade slipped cleanly through the creature’s gut and it slid swiftly down toward her, its long bloody claws reaching for her throat. Freya let go of her spear to pull her two bone knives from her belt and slashed one white blade across the reaver’s throat as she plunged the other knife into the palm of the nearest claw.
The beast’s full weight fell against her outstretched arms, but Freya dug her boots deep into the mud and held the dead body at arm’s length. It hung there a moment, its steaming black blood pouring from the wounds in its belly and neck. The two golden coins rolled back into the reaver’s eye sockets, its jaw trembling, and its lungs gurgling with blood.
And then it collapsed into the mud.
Freya slipped her knives free, wiped them in the dead grass, and put them away while Erik went to retrieve his spear. They both pierced the reaver’s hearts again just to be certain, and then trudged back to the tower, offering short waves to the girl on the tower roof, who waved and then climbed back down inside.
“Nice throw,” Freya said.
“Thanks,” Erik signed, grinning. “And you, a spear and two knives all at once?”
“I wanted to be sure.”
“Fair enough.”
A beast snarled, a girl screamed, and an elk snorted.
Freya bolted forward half a step ahead of Erik and she rounded the corner of the tower just in time to see a third reaver leaping down from the top of a cottage wall to land on Arfast’s shaggy back. Erik’s spear flew just as Arfast stumbled, and he missed his mark. Freya saw the claws shoved into her mount’s sides, the dark blood just beginning to trickle down through the elk’s dirty white hair.
She leveled her spear as she ran and thrust the blade up at the reaver, but the creature leapt clear, shoving Arfast down and the elk fell to the ground. The reaver hurled itself over Freya’s head and as she turned to look over her shoulder, she slipped in the mud, dropping to her knee.
The beast crashed down onto Erik, planting its feet on his thighs and slashing both clawed hands at his face. Erik raised his fists and blocked both claws as he staggered back under the reaver’s weight, and then he fell flat on the ground with the beast hunched on his chest. The monster’s head slammed down on the man’s throat.
“ERIK!” Freya felt her blood boiling and her skin burning as she scrambled to her feet and dashed back to his side. She hurled herself at the creature’s belly, planting both of her knives between its ribs and letting her own weight wrench the beast off of her husband and they all crashed down into the mud together. Freya rose up on her knees, her knife raised in her hand to cut the reaver’s throat.
And she saw a hand.
Erik’s hand, his red and white fingers straining at the beast’s neck, holding the fangs at bay as he crushed its windpipe. She leaned over the hairy, misshapen head and saw Erik grinning at her.
He winked and mouthed the words, “It’s over. Dead.”
The reaver’s claws were sunk deep into the man’s shoulders, but its foul maw was still some distance from his face. And when he took his hands away from its throat, the reaver’s head fell limp to one side. Freya gently pulled the claws from her husband’s flesh, wincing at the silent expressions of pain on his face. But after a moment, he sat up and heaved an easy breath and nodded.
“I’m all right,” he signed.
He’s all right.
She sat down on his lap, her calloused hands on his dirty cheeks, staring into his bright blue eyes. His lips parted and Freya kissed him, slipping her tongue deep into his mouth, feeling the soft wet warmth of his living body, tasting his breath and sweat and adrenaline and fear and joy. He gripped her waist tightly for a moment, and then let her go and they stood up together.
She looked at his bloody shoulders. “Can you climb back up?”
He grimaced and signed, “I’d rather not.”
So she sat with him on a broken stone wall and bandaged his wounds while Wren watched them from the open window. Arfast stood by the tower’s base, his eyes wide, his breathing swift and ragged. As Freya sat and listened to the tiny waves of the lake lapping at the black stones at the edge of the village, Wren disappeared from the window, but she stuck her head out a moment later and called down, “Freya! Come quick!”
Erik nodded and picked up his spear with only a slight grunt, so Freya jogged to the knotted rope and climbed back up to the tower window. Inside she squinted at the shadowy figures of the vala and her apprentice crouched by Katja’s head.
“What’s happening?” the huntress asked.
“Gudrun is trying to help your sister,” Wren said.
Freya knelt by the bed and saw that the crone had one shriveled hand resting on Katja’s forehead. On her frail middle finger, Gudrun wore a pale yellow ring. Freya inhaled sharply. It was only the second time she had ever seen rinegold in her life. Katja’s mistress had never owned such a relic, but she had told the children of Logarven more than a few stories about the powers of the strange metal. Legendary valas of Ysland had used the rinegold to save the injured and sick, to find long-lost treasures, to guide ships through the Sea of Ice, and to battle the hideous beasts that survived Woden’s war with the demons of Ysland. But most of all, they used the rinegold rings to speak to the souls of long-dead valas, to unlock the secrets of their ancient seidr-sisters.
And now a sliver of that rinegold was touching Katja’s sweaty brow.
Gudrun sat hunched and shrunken, folded in upon herself under a heavy wool blanket so that only her wrinkled face and desiccated fingers could be seen. The vala muttered, her dim and hazy eyes pointed across the room at the wall, seeing nothing. Her fingers closed, clutching Katja’s head, and Freya jerked forward but Wren held her back saying, “Wait.”
The crone’s head tilted back, the wool blanket slipping off her spotted head to her shoulders. Gudrun gasped, shivered, and convulsed forward. Wren grabbed the old woman’s chest and arm, trying to hold her upright, but the vala shoved off her apprentice. Gudrun wailed a horrid wordless cry, her head back, her jaw stretched wide, and her shriveled pink tongue flicking between her naked pink gums.
“Immortality!” The vala cackled, and then slammed her thin gums shut on the tip of her tongue. A tiny mote of pink flesh tumbled from between her pale lips, and a trickle of dark blood spilled over her chin.
Wren gasped. “No!”
Gudrun flashed a bloody grin at them and then smashed her head down onto Katja’s face. Wren shoved the old woman back and saw Gudrun’s head lolling on her limp neck, her face gray, her skin cold to the touch. Freya stared down at her sister’s face and watched as the smear of Gudrun’s dark blood crept across Freya’s skin and vanished into the rinegold ring on the vala’s finger.
Freya grabbed the crone’s arm and held up the crooked fingers to stare at the ring. “What the hell just happened? Is Gudrun dead? Did she just kill herself?”