“That’s it,” Wren said. “That’s Rekavik. If there is a vala left in the west, Skadi or otherwise, she’ll be in there.”
On the western rim of the world the sun sat blazing in cold silence, and Freya looked down on a city beside a sea painted with bright splashes of blood and gold. The city sprawled across a broad peninsula jutting out into the sparkling bay where chunks of blue-white ice bobbed on the waves. From end to end it was three times the size of Hengavik, and much of it was twice as tall. The houses were all built of the shoreline stone, the same iron gray color as the rumbling clouds overhead, and each home looked to have an arching roof of turf supported by the bones of whales, bears, and deer, and each one so high that Freya guessed they held hanging attics of food stores and rope beds.
A heavy stone seawall ran along the water’s edge, as thick as a tall man and half again as high. The outer face of the wall was slimed with weeds and algae, but the top was pale and smooth, and the wall broke only twice that she could see for two iron doors that stood above the ancient stone quays reaching out into the bay. A few men stood on the quays casting fishing lines and nets over the dark, icy waters.
Another, taller wall ran across the south side of the city, cutting the small peninsula off from the rest of Ysland. This wall was three or four times the height of a man, and newer, and clumsier. The stones had been jumbled every which way and mortared in clumps and drips, leaving huge rocky bulges in some places and tiny sky-filled gaps in others. A handful of men stood on top of the wall, each one armed with a spear and sword, and the only breach in the inland wall was a single doorway, barely large enough for a horse to walk through, and that portal was sealed with an iron door as well.
Freya marched down the road to the door with a wary eye on the armed men above her. They watched her approach, slowly clustering together in the center of the wall so they could all get a good look at the newcomers in the deepening shadows below. Wren hurried up to Freya’s side and muttered to her, “Lord Woden is ever a friend to those who tell the truth, but he’s also one to appreciate the art of not getting yourself killed.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning there’s no reason to tell these people more than they need to know about Katja.”
Freya glanced back at the snoring woman on the back of the elk. “I think they’ll notice the hair and the ears, sooner or later.”
“If that’s our choice to make, then I choose later.”
The huntress nodded.
“Who’s there?” called down a huge bear of man with a wild brown beard and naked scalp steaming in the cold sea air.
“I’m Freya Nordasdottir of Logarven,” she answered. “My husband, Erik. Wren of Denveller. And my sister Katja, the vala of Logarven. Who are you?”
The man smiled a broad white-toothed smile. “I’m the fellow on the wall asking the questions. What’s wrong with your sister?”
“She’s hurt, and sick. We need shelter for the night.”
“Oh? Just a night, is it? Planning to move on in the morning?”
“We’re looking for a vala named Skadi, from Hengavik. Or any vala, really. Gudrun of Denveller sent us to speak to her.”
The men on the wall talked among themselves for a moment before the bearded man called down, “What business do you have with the queen?”
“Queen?” Wren frowned at Freya. “The vala is a queen? That’s not good.”
“Valas have been known to marry. I suppose they can marry a king as easily as any other man,” the huntress said. She called up to the warriors, “We’ve come to learn about the reavers, which have destroyed Denveller and reached Logarven in the east. Gudrun said that Skadi could answer our questions.”
“Where is Gudrun now? Still in Denveller?”
“Gudrun’s dead,” Wren yelled. “No on lives in Denveller anymore. It’s as dead as Hengavik.”
“And Logarven will join them soon unless we stop the reavers,” Freya added. “Can we come into the city?”
The bearded man nodded. “Come to the door.” And he disappeared from view.
“Well, that was easy,” Erik signed. “I’ll cover Katja. Maybe we can avoid an argument.” He unfolded a wool blanket and draped it over the sleeping woman, leaving only the dark brown hair at the top of her head uncovered.
They approached the iron door in the great wall and a moment later they heard the bangs and clangs of steel beams being lifted away, and stones being rolled, and men grunting. The door swung inward halfway with a vicious squeal, and then stuck fast in the passage. The man behind it grunted and jerked and shoved until the door banged free and smashed into his toe, and he limped back from the open doorway muttering curses faster than Freya could hear them.
The bearded man paused in the narrow stone passage, shaking his foot and shaking his head, but after a moment he straightened up and gave the newcomers a squinty-eyed look. “So then. I am Halfdan Grimsson, keeper of the gate and captain of the guard. Let’s have a look at you.” He waved them in.
Freya and the others filed past the iron door and through the narrow passage and emerged onto the twilight streets of the city where a dozen men bearing steel spears and swords stood frowning at them.
Halfdan waved them in away from the open door and then hunched down in front of Wren. “Show me your teeth, girl.”
“Why?”
“Just do it,” another man barked.
Wren sighed and opened her mouth. Halfdan nodded. “Good.” He inspected Erik and Freya in the same fashion, and then reached over to pull the blanket off Katja.
“No, leave her alone. She’s sick,” Freya said, stepping in front of him.
Halfdan shook his head. “We check everyone. No exceptions. Even our own hunters, even if they were only out for half an hour. This is a safe place, and it’s damn well going to stay safe. So either I look at her teeth or you can all go right back out the way you came in.”
Freya put her hand on her sister’s covered head. Erik and Wren both shuffled closer to the white elk, but the guards were quick to poke them back again with their swords. Freya nodded. “All right, look. She was bitten. But she isn’t-”
The men erupted in a chorus of shouts, some telling the newcomers to leave, others threatening to slaughter them in the street. Spears and swords flashed with the light of the torches, and the huntress grabbed the handles of her bone knives.
“Shut up!” Halfdan roared, and the men fell quiet, though their faces remained just as cruel and dark. “Now listen here, girl, if your sister’s been bit, then she’s not coming into the city, and that’s the end of it. So either you can take her and leave, or you can kill her yourself, or we can do it for you. No one will blame you for not wanting to kill your own kin. The Allfather knows we’ve all had to do the same and we’d wish it on no one. But the plague doesn’t pass these walls, not for anyone or any reason.”
“The Allfather knows a great deal more than that,” Wren said. “And the valas of Denveller know more than most. Do you know what this is?” She held up her hand with the glint of yellow on her finger.
Halfdan’s eyes widened. “Rinegold?”
“That’s right,” the girl said loudly. “I am the keeper of the souls of all the valas of Denveller, and I’ve brought them here to help Skadi cure the reaver plague and save our people. But I won’t come in unless you let Freya bring her sister.”
Halfdan’s expression fell back into stony resolution. “Then you don’t come in.”
Wren stared. “But… I have the ring… and the souls… and the cure.”
“No exceptions.” Halfdan sniffed and spat in the street. “Maybe you can end the plague and maybe you can’t, but this city stays safe either way. So what’s it going to be?”
Freya counted the men and their swords, wondering if there was any chance of fighting past them, of escaping into the city, of racing to the castle down by the sea.
No, no chance of that at all.
She took her hands off her knives. “You can lock her up.”
Halfdan smirked and shook his head. “No exceptions.”
“You can lock her up in a cell, underground, guarded, in chains.” Freya swallowed. She imagined Katja shackled to a wall, whining and whimpering in the dark, her body mangled and twisted.
“No exceptions.”
Freya lurched forward and shoved the big man back. “If we find a cure, we’ll need someone to test it on, won’t we? And when that time comes, do you want your queen to send you outside your precious walls to capture a fully turned reaver with a whole pack around him, or do you want to go down to a cell where there’s just one reaver, already in chains?”
Halfdan narrowed his eyes and tilted his head. “The latter, I suppose.”
“Then help me put my sister somewhere safe.” Freya reached back and took hold of Arfast’s shaggy coat. “And then you can take us to your queen and be done with us, and go back to guarding your precious wall.”
Halfdan paused, then grinned and called over his shoulder, “Bar the door! Back to your posts, all but Aenar and Tryggvi. We’re letting them in.”
The other guards sealed the iron door and returned to their posts on the dark wall, and most of them grumbled a few curses on their way. Halfdan took the lead and his two friends took the rear and together they all entered the city of Rekavik. The area just inside the wall looked very much like Hengavik, with the same half-buried homes and turf roofs, though here every chimney was smoking and firelight flickered around the doorway curtains, and voices echoed in every house, talking, laughing, and shouting.
A few old men sat smoking their little bone pipes in the lane, a few young women stood gossiping in the shadows, and a few small children still ran through the roads, shouting and fighting and laughing as their mothers called them in to supper. The smells of baked fish and fried fish and seared fish crept from every home and mingled in the streets, telling tales of the meals about to be eaten. Freya licked her lips and teeth, tasting the salt and oil in the air.
As the road sloped down closer to the sea, the houses stood up taller and taller, until they were no longer buried in the earth at all but free-standing and mortared with all manners of clay and mud, with whale bones and walrus tusks arching over them, wrapped in oiled leather to create bulbous roofs that looked like living beasts beached on the stone houses, their innards glowing with firelight and rippling with the shadows of those who dwelled within.
Ahead Freya saw the castle squatting in the center of the peninsula, two levels high and ringed with a high wall. The highest point of the whole building was the tower in its center, but it looked to only be one or two levels higher than the rest of the structure. A dozen trails of smoke were draining upwards from the castle on all sides, but the voices were lower in this neighborhood. There were no men smoking or children playing here.
Halfdan trudged down to the castle gate and walked straight through the narrow iron door in the castle wall, leading the way into the small courtyard where several more men with swords stood beside an open peat fire. Halfdan waved to them, and they waved back, and the bearded guardsman turned left along the inner wall.
“Here.” He pointed at a dark corner against the outer wall of the castle.
Freya saw another iron door, one older and rusted at the bottom of a short stone stair dug into the earth. She trotted down and opened the door, and saw a dank windowless cell barely large enough for two people to stand side by side. A pair of manacles hung from a chain on the back wall. Freya closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.
It’s only for a day or so. That’s all.
“Erik? Can you bring her down, please?”
A moment later her husband came down into the darkness beside her and laid Katja gently on the floor. There was no room for three bodies, so he went back up the steps while Freya gently closed and locked the manacles around her sister’s wrists and then tried to arrange her sleeping body more comfortably on the cold stone floor.
She brushed the hair back from Katja’s face and saw the plague warring with her sister’s flesh, wrinkling her skin and thrusting out the coarse red fur, deforming her nose into a canine snout, blackening her lips, and sharpening her teeth. Katja’s breathing was quick and shallow. Freya leaned back and looked away to wipe her eyes. And then Katja growled.
The fox-woman lurched up and wrapped her long hairy arms around Freya’s waist, shoving her down to the floor and nearly smashing her skull against the wall. Freya looked down once at the huge golden eyes in the feral head, and then she drove her elbow into the black nose, and another elbow to the eye, and another elbow to the ear, and each time Katja would snarl or whine, her eyes impossibly wide, her long black tongue flopping around her mouth, her long white fangs lunging and snapping at Freya’s bare throat.
The huntress wrapped her arms around Katja’s head, pinning that beastly mouth shut against her own chest, and she rolled violently to her right. The twisting motion pulled the chains taut and Katja yelped and let go. Freya leapt to her feet and jumped for the door over her sister’s sprawled body, but a long crooked claw snatched her leg in midair and yanked her down again.
Freya fell flat on her face with the doorway right in front of her nose. Her chest and legs were ablaze with pain, and her brain was boiling with adrenaline and naked fear. She kicked and kicked as hard as she could, smashing her heels down on anything she could strike, and she felt the hard impacts to her sister’s head jarring both of their bodies to the bone.
Katja let go again with a horrible high-pitched yelp and squeal, and Freya lunged up out of the cell and onto the stairs. She turned to grab the door handle and saw her sister’s monstrous face flying toward her out of the darkness.
Freya froze.
The chains clanged taut and the creature stumbled back into the shadows, and Freya slammed the door. She sat there on the ground a moment, the cold air shooting in and out of her sore lungs, stinging her throat. Her blood pounded in her bruised hands and chest, and tiny white spots fluttered across her vision.
She could feel Erik and the others standing over her. They might have been talking, but she couldn’t focus on them, couldn’t worry about them. She could only stare at the iron door. But after a moment, she stood up and climbed the steps, avoiding Erik’s gaze and Wren’s stare as she turned to the bearded guardsman.
“It’s done,” she said, wiping her hands on her trousers. “Now take me to Skadi.”
Halfdan led them inside past the guards into a small dirty room where dozens of heavy fur coats hung on the walls, and then into a long, smoky dining hall where countless bone stools stood or laid against the walls in small piles and three long fire pits glowed full of embers. A handful of old men sat around the last fire, huddled under their blankets, chewing on roasted seal ribs. They were wrinkled and gray men, hunched and dim-eyed, but the bare swords on their belts were bright enough and sharp enough.
At the end of the hall was a curtained doorway where Halfdan paused to say, “Wait here.” As soon as he spoke, two of the old men stood up from their seats and rested their hands on their swords. They still looked wrinkled and gray, but they stood as straight as their blades and the thick veins on their hands hinted at their strength.
“Wait for what?” Freya kept her eyes on the two older men.
“For me!” Halfdan shook his head as he pushed back the curtain. “I have to tell the queen that you’re here.”
“Can’t we just tell her ourselves?” Wren asked. “It might save time.”
Halfdan stared at her a moment. “No.” And he left.
Freya, Erik, and Wren exchanged confused looks to confirm that they all found the procedure ridiculous, and then settled into gazing dully at the two men-at-arms standing by the fire. The other men went on eating as though nothing at all had happened.
The iron door beyond the cloak room clanged and a sharp pair of boots clacked on the stone floor behind them. “What idiot brought that damn animal into the city?” The voice was high for a male, and a moment later a very young man strode into the dining hall.
Freya guessed he was just a bit older than Wren, maybe twenty winters at most, and he wore his youth proudly. His beardless cheeks were pale, his long black hair shone in the torch light, and his sealskin trousers clung to his slender legs. His short leather jacket had been dyed black and his cotton shirt was bleached bone white. His left hand rested on the silver pommel of the sword on his hip, and his knee-high boots shone with oil as he strode across the hall.
He jabbed a finger at the old guards and his voice rose with every word until he was shouting with flecks of spittle on his lips. “How hard is it to understand? You don’t let reavers into the city, you don’t let them past the walls, and you don’t put them in a cell inside the damn castle!”
Freya stepped in front of him with both hands on her knives. “That reaver is my sister.”
The youth stopped and bared his teeth in the most vicious smile she had ever seen. “Then you don’t have a sister anymore, do you?”
What? Did he kill her?
She drew both knives at once, shoving one at his throat and the other at his belly. But the youth’s long-fingered hands were faster, whipping his sword from its sheathe. He smashed her hands aside with the silver pommel and shoved the edge of blade at her neck. Freya’s eyes went wide as she saw the bright gleam of the steel vanish under her chin.
Steel clanged in her right ear, and then scraped harshly beside her head. She turned and saw Erik holding his new steel knife just above her shoulder, blocking the youth’s sword. Her husband grabbed the collar of her coat and yanked her back as he stepped forward, still holding his small knife against the long sword.
Freya glanced once at the older guards, but the two men on their feet looked bored and the four men sitting at the fire were merely watching over their shoulders as they ate.
“I don’t know your face,” the youth said. “Who the hell are you?”
Erik began to sign with his left hand.
“He’s my husband,” Freya said.
Halfdan burst through the leather curtain behind them. “Leif! Put that blade away before I use it to show you your own bowels!”
The youth called Leif shoved Erik’s knife aside and slipped his sword away. “Does the queen know about this?”
“She does now,” Halfdan said. “She wants to see them. Should I tell her that you kept her waiting?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Leif said so softly it was almost a whisper. “Let’s all go see Her Highness together.”