Chapter Thirty-Four
‘TYRA!’ SIV CALLED for her, again.
Tyra made herself small, sitting in her tree. Her heart beat so fast she thought it might jump out of her chest. She hadn’t slept all night. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Siv launch at her, like a wild beast.
‘Tyra, I know you’re here,’ Siv said. ‘I wasn’t myself. Can you forgive?’ She was nearby. Tyra was well hidden in the yellow leaves of her oak tree, but she knew she couldn’t hide from Siv.
That was why she had climbed the tree, like her father had taught her to do if a pack of wolves came chasing her. A bit like how Siv had helped her climb the ash tree back in Ash-hill to hide from the southerners. Siv had saved her life then.
‘Are you yourself now?’ Tyra asked aloud. She didn’t like being scared of Siv. Not when Siv was supposed to be the only person left in Midgard who was on her side. Last night, too, she had been on Tyra’s side, attacking those warriors because they had made Tyra cry. Tyra knew that, but she still shivered at the memory of being attacked.
‘I am,’ Siv answered, but that wasn’t enough.
‘Will you swear a promise to me, then?’ Tyra asked.
‘I will,’ came the answer.
‘Swear on your honour and your true name that you will never not be yourself around me.’
From the foot of the tree, Siv said the words. ‘I swear it, on my true name, and my lineage, and on the honour I have earned, and all the honour I shall ever have.’
Tyra nodded. If that was it, then she could forgive. It would take long to forget it, if she ever would, but she could forgive.
‘Will you come down from the tree, now, Tyra?’ Siv asked. Not like her mother might have—in a commanding tone, that meant she had to crawl down immediately or be in big trouble—but like a friend who was sad that she wasn’t included in some game. Tyra scooted off her wide branch and crawled down from the tree.
‘What are we going to do now?’ she asked, as she made her way down to Siv.
‘We continue on our road,’ Siv answered, but when Tyra had changed back into her blue dress and when they regained the Oxen Road and began to move along it again, Tyra noticed that they were going the wrong way.
‘Why are we going back north to Jelling?’ she wanted to know. It seemed stupid to walk into a big town like that with blood-stained clothes. Especially when they had travelled so far around the town yesterday, on their way south. People might misunderstand. People were usually good at misunderstanding, and bloodstains were difficult to explain.
There had to be a reason they were heading towards Jelling. Siv had a reason, for everything. Even for what clothes she put on in the morning, not that they had much to choose from anymore.
Siv didn’t tell Tyra why they were going back north, just told her that it was better if she didn’t know, but Tyra hated not knowing what they were doing, or why. She thought about what Siv had told her in the runemistress’ hut, and everything else she had ever said, and tried to figure out why they were walking to Jelling, when they had avoided the town on their way south. Somehow, everything Siv did, and had ever done, was connected.
Trying to understand it made her head hurt, and even if she guessed correctly, Siv wouldn’t tell her anything. Tyra’s father had always told her everything, even how hard his morning poop had been. Tyra giggled to herself at the memory, ignoring the uncomprehending stare Siv gave her. Sometimes remembering him made it feel like he was still there, and sometimes it just made her miss him more.
The clouds hung low. ‘It’s going to rain,’ Tyra predicted, playing that she had Siv’s skills. Siv could sniff the air in the morning and know, right then, if it would be sunny or rainy, and she would tell Tyra: “Put on another fur, it’ll rain at high-day.” And the weather always did exactly what Siv said. Everything in Midgard listened to Siv, even the clouds.
A raindrop hit Tyra’s cheek. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth to gather all the raindrops she could. Her stomach growled.
A sudden thought entered Tyra’s mind. ‘Shouldn’t we hide our weapons?’ she asked.
Jelling wasn’t much further, and the bloodstains on Siv’s dress would be more obvious if she also carried her seax. The yellow dress Tyra wore was large on her and with her bow and arrows, it made her look parentless.
‘A lot of people wear weapons in larger towns,’ Siv said.
‘I thought it was only guards,’ Tyra pouted. At least that’s how she remembered Hedeby, from when she had been there. The guards had carried these enormous swords and she and Hilda had very quietly slipped past them. She knew she had been to Jelling when she was younger too, but she couldn’t remember how the town looked from the inside, or why they had been there. She had gone with her sisters though, a long time ago.
‘You could just kill anyone who gets in our way,’ Tyra told Siv.
Siv stopped up suddenly, as she only did when something bad was about to happen, or something unexpected.
‘Guards.’ Siv grabbed Tyra by the arm and forced her off the road, out to the forest to hide. They crouched down behind a wild thicket. Not long after, a dozen guards rushed past them on the road, looking about themselves as if they were searching for something, or someone.
Tyra waited until she couldn’t hear the guards’ steps anymore, and then she stretched to whisper into Siv’s ears. ‘They’re looking for those two girls from the wagon, aren’t they?’
The retinue had been rich and must have been expected somewhere. The girls had rushed off into the woods while Siv had fought the six warriors, and although Tyra had known she should have stopped the girls, she hadn’t thought she could, not with a mere bow and arrow. In truth, she hadn’t thought about it at the time. Unlike her sisters and parents, Tyra had no warrior instincts.
‘The guards won’t take long to find those girls,’ Siv said.
Tyra didn’t quite understand why that was important.
‘They want to be found,’ Siv clarified, but that didn’t make much sense either. If the girls wanted to be found, and if Siv knew where they were, then why hadn’t they gone after them to prevent any witnesses? The questions flooded Tyra’s mind, as they always did whenever Siv told her something.
Like a good daughter, Tyra waited with Siv, crouched down behind the thicket, and didn’t ask a single question though she had so many.
Half the day passed as they sat there, and all the silent mind games Tyra knew became boring and her stomach growled. The rain continued to fall and Tyra thought they might stay there until night, though she didn’t know if she could stay seated all afternoon. The morning had gone by slow enough, and she wasn’t the least tired, though she had stayed awake through the night.
Siv poked Tyra and pointed to the road.
The guards from earlier were walking back to their town, and with them were the two rich girls from the wagon. Even though Tyra knew the girls had slept in the woods if at all, scared of running into Siv, the girls looked flawless. Not a single stain on their dresses. Their hair was combed back and didn’t in the least curl from the rain, as Tyra’s did.
Siv elbowed Tyra and moved along the forest, following the two girls and guards to Jelling.
‘Come,’ Siv whispered to Tyra, then, and stumbled out onto the road. Right behind the guards.
She was going to kill them all.
‘It’s them!’ Siv exclaimed in a strange accent, instead. She turned to Tyra and tried to drag them both off the road, but the guards had already seen them by the time they hid back in the forest. Two guards chased after Siv and Tyra. The rest rushed off towards Jelling with the two girls.
Tyra and Siv legged through the forest, but Siv didn’t run as fast as Tyra knew she could. She ran sloppily, as if she had never run in a forest before. She stumbled over tree roots and twigs, and thickets caught her dress. Tyra tried to rush her along, but the guards were closing in and Siv was stalling too much.
‘Hurry,’ Tyra urged.
The guards yelled after them, and before Tyra could do anything, they had caught up.
Siv smiled to Tyra.
Tyra glanced around, hoping the guards wouldn’t scream too loudly when Siv killed them, and hoping she would do it quickly.
Siv turned to the guards. ‘Don’t hurt us,’ she cried, in that strange accent. Tears streamed down over her cheeks. The guards moved in and grabbed Siv. She tried to wrestle loose as she cried and repeated her plea: ‘Don’t hurt us.’
Tyra just stood there wondering what she should do, and then she turned on her heels, and off she ran. But before she could get further than five paces, the second guard caught her.
The guard pulled her back towards Siv, who continued to repeat her plea, over and over, and the more she pleaded, the more Tyra thought these guards really would hurt them, and for some reason Siv didn’t have her usual strength, and it made tears swell up in her eyes.
‘We won’t hurt you,’ the guard who had caught Siv tried to reassure them.
‘You’re with them,’ Siv cried and shook her head so her hair swung out in front of her face and a few locks got stuck on her wet cheeks.
‘Who?’ he asked.
The tears continued to stream down Siv’s face. ‘They attacked us,’ she whispered, as if afraid to say it out loud. ‘Those girls and their friends.’ She sounded like a foreigner when she spoke.
‘The girls?’ asked the guard who held Tyra.
Siv sniffed and stopped crying now that someone was listening to her. Tyra didn’t know how she could lie so well. Even Tyra believed it.
‘I don’t know what they wanted.’ Siv’s lips trembled. ‘This girl. She saved me.’ She nodded to Tyra. ‘I offered her some bread. And then they burst out from the forest and attacked us. There were so many of them. They killed my guards. I would have been dead if this girl hadn’t taken me with her.’
Siv was so good at pretending. Tyra tried her best to pretend too, though it was difficult when she didn’t know what Siv might say or do next. But she liked the idea of pretending to be the one who had saved them.
‘We’ve been out here all night. I hoped he might send someone for me,’ Siv continued, and she was so convincing that she made Tyra wonder who he was.
‘You should have come to Jelling right away,’ one of the guards said. He believed them.
Tyra was certain Siv had influenced them to believe her story, although the way she had told her story was convincing enough on its own.
‘I thought they might have gone to Jelling,’ Siv muttered and glanced up at the guards.
The guard’s grip around Tyra’s arm was not as firm as earlier. He returned a sympathetic smile to Siv. ‘Don’t worry, this will all be over soon,’ he said. ‘Come with us.’
They walked back towards the road. The guards let them walk on their own, and Tyra thought that Siv might attack them when they least expected it, but she didn’t. The rain came down in heavy drops and the road was empty apart from the four of them. The other guards and the two girls from the retinue must have reached Jelling while Siv and Tyra were running away, because they were nowhere to be seen.
Jelling’s outer walls were taller up close than when Tyra had seen them yesterday on the way south. It didn’t seem to have been stained by a fight this summer; the southerners must have made a wide circle around the town when they had snuck up through Jutland in the summer. From the guards to the painted gates, Tyra already hated everything about Jelling.
The gates opened for them. In the town, wooden houses mixed with painted clay ones.
‘Are you taking me to him?’ Siv asked the two guards. The unnatural accent she spoke with was subtle but just enough to remind Tyra that they were playing a game.
‘We expected you yesterday,’ the guard said. ‘King Harald asked us to bring you to his hall as soon as we found you.’ Tyra’s eyes widened, she had never met a king before. She wondered which part of the south this Harald was from; he couldn’t be from too far south if his name was Harald. That was a name of the north.
The guards and Siv walked on in silence before Siv spoke again. ‘What about…?’ She looked down at the muddy ground without finishing her sentence.
‘Those who attacked you?’
Siv nodded to confirm, and the guard carried on. ‘The girls will be with him.’
‘The others too? The men?’
‘We only found the girls, but don’t worry,’ the other guard said. ‘We’ll be there to protect you.’
Siv said something in a foreign tongue Tyra didn’t understand, but she supposed she had thanked them. The guards didn’t seem to understand either.
The guards brought Siv and Tyra up a road Tyra imagined would be full of people on a less-rainy day. They passed another barricade and continued along a muddy path past a grassy lawn where apple trees grew and runestones had been raised on a long row. The ground had been marked and a few wooden planks readied for a house to be built, though there were no builders.
Behind that rose a large gravemound, taller than any grave Tyra had ever seen before, and it looked like a hill, but it was too round and perfect to be anything but a barrow, and huge runestones continued along the edge of the mound. Beyond that was a great longhouse, bigger than Siv’s house back in Ash-hill, and that had been pretty big.
One of the two guards rushed ahead towards the longhouse, knocked once, and entered. The other guard made them wait outside, by the main door. The rain ran down from the roof and onto Tyra’s head and shoulders, but Tyra didn’t mind at all. Her dress was already soaked and her hair hung at the sides of her face, heavy with rain.
Tyra expected Siv to strike at any moment. Instead, the door swung open and the guard urged them inside.
‘Whoever she is, she’s lying,’ a woman was yelling as they entered. The guard put a hand on Tyra’s back, and on Siv’s too. Tyra flinched away. It reminded her of the battle up at Ash-hill, but when she saw his face she realised it had been meant to reassure.
No shoes had been left at the little entrance by the door, and the guard did not remove his either, so Tyra proceeded onto the wooden floor with her shoes on, leaving a trail of mud behind her. Her mother would have yelled at her for that, especially since this was in a stranger’s house, and there was a king inside.
Tyra stopped and waited for Siv when she was far enough around the corner from the entrance to look inside.
There were more than a dozen guards inside the hall, standing up against the walls, with their hands on their weapons. Tyra had never seen warriors act like this. It looked funny; as if they were dolls a little child had placed around the room.
‘It’s her,’ one of the two women from the retinue yelled. She rose from a chair by a fire in the middle of the hall. She was alone; the other woman was nowhere to be seen. ‘She’s the one who attacked us.’ She pointed at Tyra.
‘That little girl?’ asked a man, seated on a platform. He leant back in his chair, covered with warm woollen blankets. Tyra had to tilt her head back to look up at him, like she had used to do with Einer, who had always been tall. This man wasn’t very tall at all, but the platform made him look a lot taller than everyone else. His clothes were pretty, blue and embroidered with silver threads.
‘The two of them,’ the woman from yesterday said. She wore the same clothes as then: a dark yellow dress with a strange round cut for the neck, and embroidered edges. She must have been really careful all throughout the night to have avoided stains on a brightly coloured dress like that.
‘Lock them up,’ she squealed in a strange accent, like the one Siv had put on out in the forest when they had run from the two guards. That was why she had sounded like that. It all began to make sense to Tyra, what Siv’s plan had to be and why she hadn’t killed the guards.
Acting shy and scared, Siv made her entrance into the hall. She kept a few steps behind Tyra. According to Siv’s story Tyra had saved them both.
Tyra tried to act the part, and took another few steps into the hall, watching the man on the raised platform. He had to be this King Harald the guard and Siv had talked about outside.
He didn’t look like a king. His face was ordinary, and if he changed into less expensive clothes, Tyra would neither have noticed him, nor been able to recognise him.
Tyra walked closer to the fire, while keeping her distance from the woman from yesterday, who was even now demanding that the King do something.
The warmth of the hall made Tyra feel cold. Outside, she hadn’t noticed how frozen her hands had become. Now, her entire body shook from the cold of the rain soaking her.
‘Who are you?’ Harald asked Siv and Tyra.
‘She’s the one who attacked me,’ the woman from the retinue yelled. ‘I told you, I’m Tove, protector of Slavs and daughter of Mistivoj, leader of the Obotrites.’
Siv took a shocked step backwards, and as if all hope was lost, the tears streamed down her face once more. She covered her face with both hands and took a few deep breaths before she sweeping the tears away.
‘Why are you crying?’ Harald asked. He leant forward in his seat with interest, and Tyra was certain that if it hadn’t been for the other woman, he would have run to Siv and pulled her into his arms. Siv had that effect on people: whatever she wanted them to do, she could make them do.
Tove Mistivojudóttir watched Siv, uncomprehending, and confused.
‘I…’ Siv sniffed and dried the tears and snot from her face gracefully with her wet sleeve. ‘I didn’t realise she knew my name.’
Finally, Tyra understood why they were there. Why Siv hadn’t attacked the women, and why they hadn’t gone to Jelling before the guards came back with the girls. Even Siv hadn’t known the woman’s name.
‘Your name?’ the woman from the retinue yelled. Now that Tyra saw her, Siv kind of looked like the woman. They had the same golden colour of hair and the same grey eyes, only their faces and noses were a little different—and, besides, Siv was a lot prettier.
‘Don’t you see she’s lying?’ the woman demanded, staring up at King Harald.
‘How do I know you’re not the one who is lying?’ he asked. The look he gave the woman was full of reproach. Kings were all-powerful. If he discovered that Siv and Tyra weren’t who they said they were, he could kill them, right there, without giving it another thought. He didn’t have to do it himself, he could just point at them and make his guards slit their throats.
‘She’s wearing my dress,’ Siv muttered, and then she burst into tears again.
‘What did you say?’ the King wanted to know, but Siv didn’t repeat herself. ‘What did she say?’
None of the guards seemed to have heard either, so Tyra took a brave step forward. She glanced back at Siv, hoping that maybe Siv could help her be strong, but Siv was crying a lot, and she didn’t return Tyra’s stare. Tyra had to be brave on her own. ‘She said: that woman’—Tyra pointed to the rude woman from the retinue—‘that woman is wearing her dress.’
King Harald and all the guards turned their attention back to the woman, who was yelling that Tyra and Siv were lying, that they were only doing this to take her wealth, that they had killed her entire retinue, but King Harald wasn’t convinced by that explanation, for all it was the truth.
‘I was out in the forest alone all night, hiding from them,’ Tove Mistivojudóttir claimed. Tyra knew that was a lie, there had been her handmaiden. ‘They murdered my guards. They’re beggars. Look at them. An orphan and a wench.’
The words stung. ‘You don’t look like someone who has been out in the mud all night,’ Tyra yelled, upset all the way down to her stomach. ‘Not a single muddy stain. You haven’t stayed outside all night in that.’
‘She’s lying,’ the woman shrieked, already short of any explanation. ‘An orphan like her would say anything to get food.’
‘You’re right,’ Tyra retorted. ‘I am an orphan, but you aren’t this great person you say you are. This woman’—she gestured to Siv—‘had the kindness to offer me food. I might have been dead already if it wasn’t for her.’ All of it was true, a neat trick Hilda had once taught Tyra. Lying was easier if you didn’t actually lie, and it couldn’t be held against you either. At least that was what Hilda had once said, though Tyra was pretty certain that when you lied to a king, even if you didn’t really lie, it could still be held against you. Right now, she was too angry to care. ‘This woman saved my life,’ Tyra said. ‘Don’t you dare make her out to be like you.’
Her heart was beating out of control, and she tried to calm her breathing. She still had Siv, she tried to tell herself, but she couldn’t keep herself from thinking about her parents, and her sisters, and how happy they had been at Midsummer, and it made her go from angry to so sad she was struggling to hold back the tears. All because of this stupid woman who had called her an orphan and insulted Siv.
‘My father can tell you who I am,’ Siv suggested. She brushed the last few tears off her swollen face with the back of her hand and stared up at King Harald with that power in her gaze that Tyra knew well. Siv was definitely using her influence.
‘My father is already on his way. And he wouldn’t entertain something this silly,’ the real Tove insisted. ‘And what’s going to happen to us while we wait? That woman might kill us all in our sleep.’
‘What will happen?’ King Harald asked and it was clear that he had already made up his mind about who to trust. ‘She’—he nodded to Siv without taking his eyes off her—‘will regain her rightful place at my side.’
‘But she’s lying,’ the real Tove yelled. ‘She’s luring you in with her tears.’
‘As for you,’ King Harald said, raising his voice over the woman’s protests, ‘you will greet God.’