“I think you misunderstood something important,” said Karin. “Please listen to me.”
The All-Gemot of the Fifty Kings had ended, and after it several days of games and feasting, and at last King Hadros was preparing to start back to his kingdom. The whole area where the kings had camped was full of tents being struck, attendants packing up the gear, and kings saying good-bye to each other for the year, either with assurances of good fellowship or with threats. Ships were spreading their sails and rowing out of the harbor, the skiffs swift as birds, the great longships slower until their sails filled.
Hadros had changed out of his finery and was again dressed as roughly as his warriors. He looked down quizzically at Karin but as though his mind was already on the voyage.
“Absolutely nothing passed between Valmar and me,” she said as firmly and clearly as she could. “I know you think it did, and that we did not contradict you as we should have, but I had just spent a very long and very cold night climbing around in the dark-”
Hadros frowned. “What story is this? Where were you?”
Karin stopped herself from saying that she had climbed up a rock scree to talk to a Wanderer. Hadros would never believe she had spoken to one of the lords of voima, though she was now trying to be as truthful as she could. Instead she said, “We went to visit a Mirror-seer. I remember him from when I was a girl. I asked him for information on where Roric had gone.”
“And did he give it to you?” said Hadros in almost eager tones.
She shook her head. “He said he could not see him beneath the sun.” But then she added quickly, “And since therefore nothing untoward happened between Valmar and me, give up this idea that we should soon be wed.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “I have not yet made an offer to your father for him, little princess. I thought to let a few weeks pass, so that if the two of you were spotted coming back together there would be no gossiping tongues saying your marriage had to be made up overnight! But I shall certainly cross the channel again soon with suitable gifts. We can drink your betrothal ale here and have the wedding at home when the harvest is in.”
“But don’t you believe me?” she said desperately. “I love Valmar as a brother, but I could never marry him, or he me.”
Hadros massaged her shoulder with his massive hand. “That is why it is counseled that young women leave the experimenting until after their parents have concluded the marriage bargain,” he said, looking off somewhere over her head. “Many do not enjoy it when they first begin, but if they are already wed it does not matter, whereas if they could come and go and try different partners than the ones their parents chose, it would lead to upset and confusion.”
Karin took a deep breath. She should have known better than to try to persuade Hadros with a simple plea for understanding. “Then grant me a boon. Let Valmar stay here with me.”
For a second Hadros looked as though he would laugh. “I realize his training at the hands of the maids may have been of the roughest sort, Karin. Are you planning to teach him a better technique before your wedding?”
She realized with a cold shock that Hadros had never spoken to her like this before, as though she was an experienced woman from whom he no longer had to keep even the slightest tinge of an off-color remark. It was this more than anything else that told her it was hopeless trying to persuade him that her night with Valmar had been completely innocent.
But when Hadros, with Gizor and his attendants, left a short time later, Valmar stayed behind.
King Kardan was bemused that his daughter would want him there. “Did you perhaps become even better friends with Hadros’s family than I thought, Karin? I know captives sometimes grow to love their captors, but in this case! Hadros has not spoken to me; is not the boy a little young to make an offer for you himself?”
“I am not planning to marry Valmar or any other king’s son,” she said, meeting her father’s gaze levelly. “And that is why I want him to stay. His very presence will keep away other offers for at least the summer-I saw the way the Fifty Kings eyed me when they realized I was now your heiress. But I have become fond of Valmar as a brother. At Hadros’s court we were children together.”
Everything she said was true, but she still thought bitterly that this was a stratagem worthy of Queen Arane.
King Kardan smiled understandingly. “You and your own little brother used to be inseparable. I remember the two of you racing around underfoot, telling us you were trolls one moment and heroes the next. At the time, I thought it just as well that you were no longer here when he took ill and died…”
The evenings were long, and after dinner Karin and Valmar walked in the meadow before the castle. Beyond the meadows, beyond a narrow oak wood, they could catch glimpses of the channel, dark blue in the fading light, and the wind that rustled their hair was tinged with salt. Only the trampled grass of the meadow and the blackened scars of fire-rings showed that the All-Gemot had been held here. Even the merchants had sold the last departing kings final gifts to take home to their families, packed up their booths and left.
“I don’t understand why you’ve spoken to my father as you have,” said Valmar at last. Karin could hear in his voice an effort to be mature and detached fighting with boyish irritation. “He now assumes that you and I shall soon marry.”
“It already seemed like a good idea to him,” she said. She turned away from him to look up the valley, past the lake, invisible from this angle, where the Mirror-seer lived, toward the peak of Graytop. “Our children, his grandchildren, would rule two kingdoms.”
“But you encouraged him!”
“Would you rather let him think you’d raped me?” she said in exasperation. “Or have him announce to my father that I had been carried off by the strong hand to become your concubine? Youthful love can be rectified by marriage; youthful violence cannot. I’m sorry, Valmar, I’m no more pleased about this than you are, but I was very tired and it was all I could think to say.”
“But have you told him you love Roric?”
“I told him. Especially since Roric is gone, he did not think it mattered.”
Valmar took her hands and turned her toward him, looking down at her as though he had never seen her before. For a second, watching his expression, she feared that she had insulted him deeply by rejecting so readily the idea of marriage with him. But after a moment he laughed loudly and tossed her hands away. “It’s useless. You’re my big sister! I would be just as content to marry Dag or Nole as you!”
“Yes, but your father doesn’t want you to marry your brothers.” For a second Karin started to smile, but only for a second.
In the morning they all crossed the fields and splashed through a brackish stream to the royal burial mound.
Karin’s earliest clear memories were of when her mother had died and been put into it. The grass had long since grown over the spot where they had sliced into the mound for her, and also the spot where her youngest son, whom she had died bearing, was buried six years later. But the earth was still fresh where Karin’s drowned older brother had been buried.
Valmar stood back with the royal attendants, but Karin and her father climbed up to the top, twenty feet above the ground. Standing there, swaying slightly, she had to squeeze her eyes shut for a moment to regain her composure. She had not been back on the mound since the old queen’s funeral. For a moment the soft mud that lay over her brother’s body was the fresh earth where her mother was buried, and Karin was not a proud young woman, a future sovereign queen, but a very frightened little girl.
King Kardan lit a small fire with tinder he had brought with him. Once it was burning, the small orange blaze licking and popping in the ocean wind, he laid in it a strip of silk, a twig from the rowan in the castle courtyard, and three gray hairs from his own head. Karin hesitated a second, remembering that she had told Valmar she would burn no more offerings to the Wanderers, then glanced at her father’s profile and reached up to pull at her own hair.
As she laid the strands across the fire, she was not sure if she was offering them to the Wanderers, to the dead older brother who had seemed oddly unsaddened when she left as a hostage, as though just as happy not to be going himself, or to her living father, whose pain and loss were so visible on his face that she had to look away.
After a minute, Kardan reached out to squeeze his daughter’s hand. She forced herself to meet his eyes. He was no longer looking inward, at his loss, but directly at her, and it struck her that she was now all he had left. Standing on the mound where her ancestors had been buried since time out of memory, standing above their very bones, she felt the full weight of their tradition fall on her. When the dead were gone, it was up to the living to remember them, to honor them, to carry on all that they had begun.
Her mother and both her brothers were now in Hel where all mortals went, the brave and the honorable, the depraved and the cowardly, venerable grandfathers and babies who had lived no longer than to take one breath.
People did not return from Hel except in the oldest tales, but then beings without backs also did not appear to mortals except in those stories. Even so, those who had died peacefully or in accidents should not walk again if suitably buried. She had heard somewhere when very young, probably something the serving-maids had said that she was not supposed to overhear, that one could reach Hel by digging into a burial mound. But if so there must be more involved, for all castles and manors had large mounds into which new graves were dug every generation.
The stories had never given a clear picture of Hel, though she had the impression that it was a murky and confused land, where one’s memories and even identity slowly disappeared. But on one point all the stories were explicit.
There were no Wanderers in Hel.