Valmar and Karin walked by the seashore. She was restless all the time now, and Valmar walked or rode with her wherever she went, but if she knew herself what was wrong she was not able to tell him.
King Kardan, Valmar thought, did not yet seem to realize that his own father was busy planning their wedding. Karin had not spoken of it again, and it seemed too impossible to be real. But last night he had surprised himself into wakefulness from a dream of lying in her arms.
It was only the sudden change from his father’s court to this castle, he told himself, only the unusualness of seeing Karin dressed like a queen, that made him think of her as other than his sister. And it was the same change that had made him begin to think there might be more to life than the future his father had laid out for him, that his attempt to run after Roric had been more than the folly of a boy. At this rate he would soon want to be like King Thaar in the old tales, he thought, riding out to protect Karin from a dragon-except that no one had ever seen a dragon in this part of the world.
Karin looked out to sea; the north coast of the channel was too far away to be seen. Valmar looked instead at her, her great gray eyes, the angle of her cheekbones, the fine blond hairs around her forehead which were too short to be worked into her braids and blew back in the breeze. If she too had dreams, they were certainly not of him.
“Look at the ravens,” said Karin. “I wonder what they’ve found.”
A pair of ravens hopped along the strand, giving harsh cries and disturbing the gulls. Their jet-black plumage stood out among the light-colored sand and pebbles. They stayed just ahead of the waves that broke rhythmically against the shore. But there was nothing obvious washed up on the sand to attract them.
And then one of the ravens spoke. “Karin,” it said.
The word came out all sharp-edged and harsh, but it was certainly her name.
“It’s a message!” Valmar cried. “It must be a message from-” But here he stopped. His father, he knew, was one who spoke to ravens, but this was a strange way to send word to his foster-daughter.
But she had already rushed forward and dropped to her knees on the wet sand, heedless of her dress. “Yes, I am Karin,” she said, looking from one raven to another.
One spoke: “Karin. Roric is coming.”
And then the other: “Karin. Valmar. Beware of Roric.”
Then with deep caws the birds rose, almost in her face, and flapped away, back over the dark, foam-dotted waves of the channel. A single black feather drifted down to the wet sand.
Valmar hurried to Karin and helped her up. “Was that one message,” he asked, “or two?”
But her face was joyous, transformed. “Roric is coming! That means he’s safe!”
“But the other raven said to beware of him!”
“It must only have meant to watch for him. Valmar, he’s coming!” She startled him by hugging him hard, then took his arm to walk back to the castle.
“So he’s returned from the land of the Wanderers-or wherever he has been,” said Valmar. “Do you think he’s won treasure there?”
“I don’t care,” said Karin, still smiling so widely everything she said came out as a laugh. “I just want him with me again.”
“It will be good to see him,” Valmar agreed. With Roric here-although he did not say this to Karin-this plan to have him marry his big sister would all be forgotten. He told himself he would be glad for that.
Karin turned suddenly. “I cannot return to the castle. I must go down to the harbor. He may be crossing the channel even now!”
Valmar held her by the arms until she looked up at him. “Karin,” he said quietly, “it’s time for dinner. I don’t know if you’ve noticed these last few days, but your father is worried about you. That’s part of the reason I’ve always been with you-to keep him from sending his warriors along to watch you. Do you want him asking Queen Arane to come analyze what is wrong?”
“No, no, of course not,” she said with a laugh, but she looked yearningly toward the harbor as he steered her back home.
But at first light she went down to the harbor alone, not waiting for Valmar, not saying anything other than that she would not be back all day.
King Kardan took Valmar aside. “This may sound curious coming from her father, lad,” he said, striding back and forth in the middle of his hall, hands behind his back and his eyes down. “But I no longer feel I know my daughter. She grew into a woman in the years she was away, and I cannot hug her or tease her back into good humor the way I might have ten years ago. I had expected her to be joyful to be home again.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s happy to be here,” Valmar stammered.
“She may have been at first,” said the king, shooting Valmar a quick glance. He had the same direct gray eyes as Karin. “But since we went to the burial mound-or even since that second day she was here, during the All-Gemot, when she went on that long ride with you and suddenly decided to spend the night in King Hadros’s tents again-she has been distracted, uneasy… I would have to call her miserable.”
Valmar actually agreed but did not want to say so.
Kardan put a hand on his shoulder so that Valmar had to join him in his restless pacing. “She told me she thinks of you as her little brother.”
“I am not her little brother,” Valmar startled himself by thinking. “I am going to be her husband.”
“She seems more content to be with you than with anyone else,” said the king, who fortunately could not read his thoughts. “Do you understand why she is miserable? Can you stay with her, cheer her as you may?”
An unexpected vision of how he might cheer her flashed through Valmar’s mind. He pushed it firmly away. Karin had been too distracted to sense his changing feelings for her, and he hoped to hide them from her forever.
“I think she misses our foster-brother,” he said. “His name is Roric; he was brought up in Hadros’s court along with the rest of us. But he should be coming here shortly to see her, and then I expect she will be more content to settle down. You see, he was away from the castle when we left for the All-Gemot, and she never had a chance to tell him good-bye.”
“Curious,” said Kardan. “She has never spoken of him.”
“You see,” added Valmar in what he hoped were friendly and confidential tones, “she doesn’t like to speak to you too much of life in Hadros’s court. She’s afraid you’ll think she considers it more her home than this, her real home. But I’m sure in a few more days- And especially once she’s seen Roric-”
The king nodded slowly. “Then if she is waiting for this Roric at the harbor, I hope he comes soon.” He slapped Valmar on the back. “You are a good little brother, lad. And when you are twice as old as you are now, I am sure you shall be a worthy successor to your father. At least I will not need to worry on my deathbed of a renewal of war between our kingdoms!”
Valmar kept thinking of the strangeness of the raven-messages. Who had sent them? Roric himself, King Hadros, or someone else entirely? Raven-messages were by their very nature brief, so if one had more than a few words to convey one needed more than one bird, but one of these messages and not the other had been addressed to both of them.
He did not like to say anything to Karin, who looked forward to seeing Roric with a joy that bordered on pain. Her face was openly eager, and her eyes looked right past him to the ocean beyond. But the message to beware of Roric suggested that something important had changed. Had he come back from the Wanderers’ realm with no back?
Three ships came into the harbor that day, but none of them bore Roric. As the sun grew lower, Karin’s eagerness became mixed with misgiving. She stared at the waves, rough under a strong wind, and kept murmuring about the Cauldron Rocks until Valmar realized that that was where her older brother’s ship had foundered.
She would not return to the castle that day even for meals, but ate the bread and cheese Valmar arranged to have brought to them while standing on the headland above the cove, straining to see into the distance. She was dressed like a queen in gold brocade, but under the imperious facade lay the terror of a girl whom Valmar longed to take in his arms and comfort.
But he did not dare. He knew that her expression had nothing to do with him. The moon was rising, when at last he took her by the elbow.
“Karin, listen to me. No more ships will arrive tonight.”
She turned toward him sharply, as though she had forgotten his presence, then clutched at him for support. “Do you think- Do you think-” He could sense all the questions she could not ask: did he think Roric’s ship had gone down, did he think Roric might have fallen overboard during the crossing, did he think Roric had been knifed in the night?
“I think he will be here tomorrow, or perhaps the next day.” He had both his arms around her, his beard in her hair, and rocked her gently as though she was a child. “You know there are not nearly as many merchant ships that cross the channel as there are that stay on this side,” he murmured reassuringly. “None of the ships we saw today came from the north. And you know that with the sea this rough the ships will postpone their crossing anyway. It may take Roric a few days to find a ship coming here-I doubt my father will lend him his! Or he may have to take passage to another of the southern kingdoms, then ride over here.”
“Then he may already be back at the castle!” cried Karin.
“No, no, of course not.” Her face was clear and pale in the moonlight before him. “You know they would have sent word. But you have already frightened your father enough. Come back home now, and be yourself again.”
“I could do it in Hadros’s court,” she murmured, mostly under her breath. “Why cannot I do it here?”
They walked slowly back toward the castle. She shivered without a cloak, so he wrapped his around both of them. His arm went around her shoulders, and hers around his waist. The west darkened, but the eastern sky was light where the nearly full moon floated. He could feel her breath warm against his neck, her softness against his side. This, he thought, was how lovers walked.
What was he going to do? If Roric was suddenly here, he would have trouble explaining that he was merely supporting her as a solicitous little brother, yet he would not care to have his foster-brother furious with him. He might be able to conceal his feelings from Karin, but could not imagine him fooled. If Roric appeared tomorrow, their brotherhood could be broken forever. Would Valmar have to fight him, either kill him or be killed himself?
Anyway, Karin loved Roric, not him. This was terrible, he thought, tightening his grip around her. One point however was clear. In the last few days he had changed his mind. He would much rather marry her than Dag or Nole.
They had walked over half the way back to the castle and could see its lights beckoning them when Valmar abruptly stopped. Karin stumbled and caught herself with both arms around his waist.
There was a third person on the path beside them.
He wore a broad-brimmed hat that hid his face from the moonlight. “I have spoken with the others, Karin Kardan’s daughter,” he said conversationally, as though his presence there was unsurprising. “We can indeed use you.”
Karin clutched at Valmar. “It’s the Wanderer,” she hissed. “The one I met on Graytop.”
He stood frozen, unable to move, while the Wanderer tilted his head as though looking toward him. “You are a long way from home, Valmar Hadros’s son. Have you perhaps been outcast?”
But Karin did not give him a chance to answer. She broke away from Valmar to whirl on the Wanderer, her fists on her hips.
“Do not come here,” she said in a low, furious voice, “picking out mortals you think you can use like someone picking out apples at a market stall. You may think you want me, but I have no use for you!”
There was a momentary silence. “This outlook will certainly make things more difficult,” the man then said dryly. “Would you like to tell me why?”
“ That is why! Because you do not know anything! You make us pay a terrible price, but then do not even give us the little information we ask for that price!” Her voice was shaking, but she still had it under control.
Valmar remembered his wild surmise of what that price might have been. If she was already Roric’s even more truly than he had thought, that meant- He did not know what it meant, except that he could never ever tell her now what he felt.
“I had thought I did you a favor,” commented the man, “rather than exacting a price. And I think you tell the story wrongly-the woman was not visited by a lord of voima, but by a lord of death.”
Karin gave a half-choked cry, almost a scream. Valmar tried to take her arm, but she shook him off.
“I must say,” added the man in the broad-brimmed hat, “that your absolute commitment to what you believe helps make you appealing to us. Since we do not take mortals against their wishes, it certainly is irritating to have that stubbornness turned against us…”
Karin managed to answer, coherently if furiously. “Lords of voima, the great, terrible beings to whom we burn offerings! And all you do is try to make us carry out your will, without any ultimate power or knowledge of your own.”
“It bothers you that we are not all-powerful, that even we are governed by fate? I would have thought a mortal would be flattered to be asked to help at all.”
“I doubt if you have any powers at all!” Karin shot back. “I am going to live here on earth, then go to Hel when I die, and never associate with anyone but other mortals!”
“Oh, we have powers all right,” said the other, sounding amused. “I had assumed you would prefer not to see them.”
And abruptly the ground beneath their feet was gone, and they were suspended in the air over a pit of orange flames and molten rock. They swung ever so slightly back and forth, as though suspended by a thread no stronger than cobweb. A belch of hot gas broke through the lava, then suddenly the road was again solid beneath them.
Valmar and Karin clung to each other. But she had not changed her mind. “Try to frighten me all you like,” she got out between chattering teeth. “Ever since I saw you on Graytop I have not been mistress of myself. I do not belong to you, and I will not belong to you. I am Roric’s alone!”
“By the way,” said the other, “I meant to tell you. You were asking about Roric No-man’s son. He was spotted in our realm.”
“And again you do not know the real truth!” she said triumphantly, though the tears were pouring down her cheeks. “He is back under the sun, and he is coming to me even now!”
They still had not seen the man’s face. He turned his back toward them and addressed his remarks to the sky. “You certainly have courage and will, but as I say we force no one to our bidding.”
He began then to walk away, and as he walked it seemed that his feet did not touch the road, but rather that he walked on moonlight. He grew smaller and smaller as he strode on the moon’s rays up over the headland.
Valmar stared immobile after him. Karin had shoved him away, sobbing hard, when he tried to put his arms around her again.
And suddenly Valmar began to run, pounding back down the road toward the harbor. Moonlight washed all around him.
The man stopped and turned toward him.
“Wait for me!” Valmar cried. “I’m coming with you!”