Trekking back to the cave by the sea was long and arduous, as was trying to find that hidden entrance through which we had sneaked the first time. Not only that, but the sudden silence of the birds and the way the sun had slowly been blotted out spoke of an oncoming storm, for which I had very little patience. I’d been overcome with a sort of intense determination, even if I didn’t fully know what I was going to do, and I didn’t want to sit idly by and wait for a storm to pass.
My mind was far away as we walked, so far that I saw no trees or snow around us, only shadows and stone. That song the villagers were going to sing to me before I died crept back to me, all cold and damp with blood and fear.
May the river of death be shallow and calm And may the god in the shadows forgive you your wrongs.
We didn’t speak about such a god, if he did exist, only the Goddess and her brilliant, entrancing stars. But she was all light and beauty and kindness, what with the warnings she gave us in the sky. I needed someone who dealt with death, though a plan had not yet come together in my mind.
“Janna, I can see you thinking, but I deserve to know what we’re doing,” Enja said from where she trudged on a few steps behind me. “I am part of this now.”
She was right, of course.
“I want to get back to that cave. It’s the only safety I can think of.”
“Obviously,” she said, since we had nearly reached it by now. “I was looking more for a reason.”
I was thinking about how to best answer her when, finally, the dark entrance loomed before us, though we remained hidden behind boulders, trees, and snowdrifts from past storms, approaching cautiously. The memory of the giant wolf was fresh on my mind, and I didn’t fancy a run-in with it if it could be avoided. We waited, listened, stared into the woods around us, and then listened some more before quietly stepping out of hiding and into the entrance of the cave. I kept a close eye on Siiva, watched the way his ears twitched and waited for any sign that he might hear something approaching. But as far as I could tell, we were on our own.
To fight off the darkness of the cave, I lit a small candle tucked away in one of my pockets, and the flame flickered in the blackness around us. It did little by way of lighting our path for much of a distance, but there was a comfort in not being swallowed by shadows. The flame licked the air, dancing and waving in a stark contrast to our tight, nervous movements in the cave.
The sunlight had only just disappeared behind us when Siiva froze. His ears stopped twitching, his head stood tall, and not a muscle on his body moved. Enja and I stood perfectly still, watching him, as my pulse quickened. There were precious few places to hide. Siiva seemed to be more concerned with something behind us than in front of us, and even though if it were wolves they would be able to pick up our scent, I wanted us to be out of sight.
“Come on,” I whispered hurriedly, moving further into the cave. If we could keep ahead of it and find shelter, we may stand a better chance. I tried not to think about the large form, claws nearly as long as my fingers or its teeth like the icicles that formed outside our doors after storms. I just hurried us through the stone labyrinth of the cave, thinking of almost nothing but the kind woman and her baby, of her pale face and the sweat on her brow. It wasn’t the baby making her ill, it wasn’t, and I wouldn’t let … couldn’t let…
We rounded a bend in the tunnel and before us rose a few tall pillars of naturally formed stone. I didn’t think, I just pointed for Enja to duck behind one, and extinguished my candle. I heard her gently sweep Siiva up into her arms, perhaps in a vain effort to try to mask his scent somewhat, but it would do very little. Beasts of that size would wield senses of equal power, and how we had escaped the last time was still a mystery.
And not an accident, I was fairly certain.
I could see nothing in the cave, but I heard their presence only moments after we had hidden ourselves. Heavy – but still somehow light – paws tapped against the icy stone of the tunnel, coming closer and closer. This time, there wasn’t just one of them. Judging by the sounds of their footsteps, there were at least two. I held my breath, stood as still as I could, and feared to even move my eyes until the sounds of their movement began to fade away.
Then they stopped.
All sound of their movement ceased entirely, and a moment later, the subtle scraping of their claws on the floor told me that they had turned around. They’d sensed us. Smelled us. Something had given us away. If I thought I had been still before, I was almost certain that now even my heart stopped beating.
There was no sound in the cave. I was surrounded by the deafening silence as if I had fallen into a deep snowbank and been left there. I shivered as I imagined them silently creeping along the tunnel, their gaping mouths opening to bite into my neck, my shoulder, and any moment now they could clamp down. Any second, I could feel those long, treacherous teeth sinking into my skin, and once they were done with me, they would move on to Enja…
Not if I could help it. Perhaps if they found me, they would look no further. They knew something was in the cave, but maybe that was all. One would be enough.
So I did the most reckless, foolhardy thing I could think to do, and I lit the candle. The brightness of the flame blinded me for a moment, but I tried to blink it away and focus on what waited nearby. A few yards away, four glowing eyes stared back at me, set into large, shadowed forms that the light from the candle couldn’t reach. Their gazes were nearly at my own eye level, a fact that hit me like a punch in the gut. I had known they were large; I had seen them before in that clearing with Eri, but…
One, then the other, took a few steps closer to me. I heard Enja draw in her breath, but they seemed to take no notice of her. Their eyes remained locked on me as they approached. They had been further away than I thought, the sounds no doubt magnified by the quiet and the closeness of the cave. If perhaps I waited a little bit longer, if perhaps I hadn’t lit the candle, then maybe they would have continued on their way. Maybe I wouldn’t be facing them right now, fear setting my hands to shaking.
We faced off for a long moment, none of us moving. I held my breath, stared into their glowing eyes, and waited. Did wolves not fear fire? Perhaps the flame was too small and I was too near, prey far too easy to let go.
The glowing eyes moved suddenly, their great heads turning to glance at one another in a bizarre, unspoken conversation. Then one circled to stand behind me and pushed me forward with its snout. I stumbled on the slippery rock and turned to the one who’d pushed me, shaking like a dead leaf. I opened my mouth to ask a question, and then caught myself. They couldn’t understand me, of course.
Again, the wolf pushed me forward, and the other came to stand beside me. So, surrounded by fur and teeth and claws, I walked with them along the tunnel to some unknown destination.
Glowing blue lights lit up the room, and again my skin tingled as I found myself in the presence of those strange markings on the wall, dancing and flickering like flames hidden behind the stone. I’d wanted to come back, to study these very symbols and see what answers they held, but I hadn’t expected to be led in by wolves. A surge of questions rose up within me, but I stayed silent, waiting to see what they would do. To see why they had brought me here. I laced my fingers together as though I were praying and squeezed, desperate to dissipate some of the anxiety.
One of the wolves, the one who’d been nudging me along, moved to the centre of the room and raised its head, so impossibly tall. Then, as the markings around us began to glow brighter and flicker faster, it let out a powerful drawn-out howl that shook the very stone beneath my feet. I stared at the walls, dumbstruck, as the shape morphed and changed, the letters and symbols rewriting themselves into ones that, the longer I gazed at them, I realized I could read.
Slowly, and in pieces, they’d transformed into runes. The ones we read and wrote on cave walls. The common language of those who had come before us: symbols and pictures that told stories and relayed important information. A language that could last for aeons, carved into stone that would never decay.
I stared at each of the symbols in turn, trying to understand their meaning, their context, what they were trying to tell me.
Questions, I guessed. Answers. You seek answers.
I nodded, once, twice, then over and over again. “Yes. Yes, I want answers.”
Another howl split through the cave, and the markings changed again. I watched them, going back and forth as I fought to piece together the message. It was never designed as a language for detailed conversations. It was meant to be scratched on a wall and left, telling stories of great hunts and long winters. It was never read immediately, used to speak.
The sky. Blood. Red. I worked to connect one to the next quickly, and though I could be wrong, I suspected I knew their meaning. “The red lights,” I said, and I waved my shaking hands up towards the invisible sky. It was then that I realized the runes weren’t changing when I spoke, only when they howled. Could they understand my words?
Woman.
Baby.
And then the wretched, skull-like symbol for death.
I sank back a step, shaking.
How did they know?
“She’s dying.”
Her kind, warm face hung before me, smiling through her illness. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. How could someone as cruel and wretched as Ragna walk free and well, while the kind woman tumbled towards her death?
There was a long pause, and the air grew heavy with sadness that was not only mine.
North.
Fire.
Again, the symbol for death.
It had been sneaking up on me over the past day or two, or perhaps since I was nearly burned alive, and I’d heard that song about the god.
May the river of death be shallow and calm
And may the god in the shadows forgive you your wrongs.
A few years ago, Sølvi had traded an ornately carved bow with a hunter in exchange for a story from the man’s grandmother. One of those murky stories no one was supposed to tell. If it isn’t making us stronger, it is making us weaker, the village had said. And so some stories were forbidden: the ones that bore no lesson, no warning about the island, or the ones that enticed us away.
It was about a god, and fire, and a man who had tried to sell his soul in exchange for food during an especially hard winter. The man never returned, but spring came early that year, and until his story was forbidden, people used to whisper of travelling to the cave of fire, seeking this or that, or just to see if it held any truth.
I had thought of it more and more, as memories of what had happened to Sølvi tried to smother me.
“The god,” I said. “The god of death. He can help?” I didn’t explain everything to them; how my life had been saved once, in a way I could never repay. My throat tightened and tears threatened to well up. I couldn’t let another innocent person die if I could do anything to stop it. “Who are you?”
But the blue lights began to fade and the wolves moved away from the centre of the room.
“Wait,” I said. “Why have you come? How do you know me?”
I’d never been terribly far from my village, despite my habit of leaving it. I’d never gone far enough to know that there was anything out there other than forest, except, of course, for the sea. I could have left the village, if that was truly what I had wanted. But running away from home would not take me away from myself, and that was what tormented me. The memories. The thoughts. The questions that sneaked in with every breath, and hung above my head at night while sleep lurked just beyond reach.
But neither of the beasts seemed to hear me. They simply kept walking, on and on until they had disappeared down the tunnel, and all sounds had vanished.
Moments later, Enja and Siiva shuffled towards me, their eyes wide.
North.
I filled Enja in with a rush of words that, spoken aloud, made no sense. She stared in disbelief at the now dull blue markings that covered the walls. They had faded almost to the point of nonsense, carrying no meaning. I comitted the words to memory, determined to forget none of it. Somehow, it all made sense. They had shown me something, something that I could do, if I was willing. It was as if they knew what weighed down my heart, the guilt that had pressed against me for the past year. Like they knew what had happened to Sølvi.
I told Enja, in a whisper, the story of the god that I had heard from her brother. And this time, as I said it out loud, the words carried a spark that told me it was more than just a story. There was more to it, perhaps, more detail than we knew, but whatever those details were, I would find out.
When we reached the opening of the cave once more, there was no sign of the wolves, but the sky had finally begun to unleash its snow. It swirled this way and that, dancing and taunting me and begging me to come out and play. But I’d seen too many people dance with winter before, only to wind up blue and stiff, their eyes glassy with death. That wouldn’t be me. Couldn’t be me. I was driven by a bonfire deep within my chest, compelling every movement. I wouldn’t let this land, this season, trip me up and end it all too soon. Not now that I knew what I had to do.
So we decamped back to the room with all of the Löskan artefacts, and I sat down with a sharp bit of stone and scratched out a map containing everything I knew about Skane. Which, it turned out as I stared at my small markings, wasn’t all that much. It was trees, mostly, and my village and the one by the sea. The one with the kind woman who was ill.
North.
None of us knew very much about the north. There were mountains, we knew, from stories told by those who had long ago tried to reach them. Many died, and some turned back before the mountains could claim them, to come and tell us what they had seen, which was very little. Many were taken by storms, or beasts, and some of the stories were so peculiar or unusual that we assumed the cold had confused them. Some of those odd stories had been transformed and used in bedtime stories or warnings for children. Like the one about Grulla.
We were told if we misbehaved, a snow troll named Grulla would come down from the mountains and steal us away in the night. It frightened me at first, but as I grew older I found the thought of being stolen away to the distant, unknown mountains more intriguing than frightening. But that wasn’t the intended effect, so I had kept it to myself.
“My uncle once ventured north,” Enja said from where she sat in the corner staring at a piece of parchment. Siiva rested his head on her lap. “He never came back.”
I stared at her for a moment, and then looked back at my map. “Well, that’s … grim,” I replied, deflated. “It isn’t safe,” I continued. “We know that much, and you do not have to come with me. I don’t know what we’ll find, or what will happen. I don’t know where the rest of the journey will lead. As the closest thing I have to a sister, I cannot ask you to come on a search with me for a death god.”
“I’m coming with you,” Enja said, her voice heavy with a sense of finality that seemed out of character.
“Why?”
She paused for a long moment. “I’ve never known much about much. I think, like you, I was always better known for leaving the village than helping it. I never liked staying inside.” Seeing that flash of myself in her brought a small smile to my lips. “So I never contributed much. Never helped with much. And this time I can.”
“We aren’t helping our village, though,” I reminded her. “We’re doing this for the woman” – I had never remembered to ask her name – “and her baby.”
“I know.” The glint in her eyes told me just what she thought of our own village.
“We might not make it through the forest. I can’t even be sure we’ll make it out of this cave. You know what Skane is like. More die trying than succeeding.”
“But those who don’t try never succeed. Just think how lucky you’ll be to have two pairs of eyes to watch out for danger, instead of just one. Three, in fact.” She motioned to Siiva.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and rolled back to crouch on my heels. It was like arguing with Sølvi sometimes, and as frustrating as it was, I could not fault her for it.
It was one of those nights when Skane fought to stay hidden, shrouding the moon until it was little more than a dull glow behind a mantle of sombre clouds. Somewhere behind them hung the stars, brisk and vigilant, but they were shy tonight. Sometimes I wondered, on nights like these, if we couldn’t see the stars, were they still there?
Our footsteps were light in the forest, a gentle padding beneath the trees. Now and then our hands brushed together as we walked, gently, uncertainly, as though they were trying to come together of their own free will. Now and then, Sølvi’s lantern illuminated a pair of small glowing eyes through the trees that disappeared in a flash. But it was a reminder that, while the village slept, the forest was very much alive.
We reached a clearing in the trees, and I fell to the ground and lay on my back, staring up through the darkness to the shadowed treetops. For a moment, Sølvi stood over me, filling part of my vision with his face lit up by the lantern, until he lay down beside me and silence fell. The hoot of an owl erupted nearby, eerie and beautiful all at once. Something small, probably a rabbit, rustled through some bushes. A breeze made the fir needles whisper to one another.
“I don’t want to live in a village,” I said presently, shattering the silence. I could hear him roll his head so he could see me. “I want to live in the forest, build a small house in a clearing just like this one. Live alone.”
“Ah,” he said, looking away again. “I take it that’s not an invitation, then.”
I smiled. “I’ll allow you in. But no one else. Just us.”
He thought for a moment. “I like the sound of that, but the village will hate it.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t have to be much, just something small and comfortable.” He launched into a description of how he could do it, how he could build it, and it seemed suddenly almost attainable, as if that sort of happiness were just barely within reach. I could see it hovering just an inch or so beyond my grasp, beyond the mundane existence that had awaited me all my life. Within reach was the village, the rows of houses all alike; the superstitions and the unease and the leaders breathing down my neck.
I pictured our little earth-and-wood house standing in this very clearing, nights sitting under the trees right outside our door, a warm fire within, and my heart blossomed with joy.
“Children, I’d imagine,” I heard Sølvi say, and then, much quieter, “well, one day, I suppose. No rush.” He cleared his throat.
“How many?”
“How many what?”
“Children.”
“Hmm.” A thoughtful pause. “Two. Maybe three.”
“I hope it’s just one, like me.” I had never given much thought to not having brothers and sisters, because I had never felt a loneliness without them.
“One, then, though I suppose the Goddess will have something to say about that.”
“Perhaps,” I said, though I was never quite certain exactly how many things the Goddess could control. Children seemed as though they would be uninteresting to a goddess, who had far greater things to think about. It didn’t matter, though, because right in that moment, I thought I would never feel so whole, so content, again.
Hours later, as I sneaked back into the warmth and quiet of home, I could feel the wide-awake presence of my father before I had fully closed the door. He sat on a stool by the fire, staring into the flames, though he looked up at me when I turned to him. Half of his face was cast in shadow, and the other half was lit up a fiery orange.
“Out late,” he said, and it was neither a statement nor a question. There wasn’t anger in his voice, I noted – my father rarely got angry – but a sort of resigned heaviness as though he were terribly displeased.
“I wasn’t alone,” I hurried to assure him. “I was with Sølvi.”
“I guessed as much.” He poked at the fire for a moment while I removed my cloak and boots. Mother lay on their bed nearby, though I couldn’t hear the steady breathing of someone who was asleep. Listening, perhaps.
“I’m back now,” I said. “Safe and sound.” I made to move towards my bed, the weight of sleep finally pulling at my eyes, but my father spoke up.
“We must speak, Janna,” he said calmly. “Perhaps not tonight, but tomorrow. It’s … important.”
I stopped walking and looked at him through the glow of the fire. I hated the tenderness I found in his eyes, because I knew that whatever he had to say, he would say it from a place of love and honesty, and I couldn’t fight that. Or, I could, but I would almost certainly lose. “Speak now,” I said, filling my voice with a challenging sort of strength. “We are both awake, after all.”
“It would be better after some sleep,” he cautioned me.
“I understand, but please, go on.” I sat cross-legged on the floor across from him. I heard my mother roll over, perhaps to hear better.
A long moment stretched away in the quiet room, the flames flickering and dancing on my father’s face, and the occasional crack and pop of the fire bringing my wandering thoughts back to the present.
“I know … I understand how you feel about Sølvi. You are young, and your feelings can sometimes—”
“Don’t do that,” I warned him.
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t try to undermine my feelings by passing them off as childish.”
He was quiet for a moment, drawing in a long, deep breath, and folding his hands in front of him, elbows resting on his knees. “You are young, Janna. Pretending that you are anything but is dishonest. Skane does not allow us the luxury of living however we choose, doing what we will, when we will it. If we do not bend to its rules, we will die, and that is a truth that, as a father, weighs heavy on my mind. Your whole life we have had to watch your every move, never let you out of our sight, watch the signs of approaching storms when you were too young to read them yourself. We have held your hand and guided you to adulthood, and this is a final thing with which you should trust us.”
I could not fight the logic of his words, but I was so angry – so hurt – that I couldn’t find another route, so I stayed silent.
“Sølvi is … kind, and a friend. I know. But kindness isn’t everything, especially not in Skane. You need a fighter, a hunter, someone who can adapt along with a changing landscape, who can anticipate dangers—”
I stopped hearing him after “hunter”, because, as though he had shouted the name in my ear, I knew who he was talking about. I knew where this was going. “I will never be with Eri,” I said, more firmly than I’d ever said anything in my life.
My father bit his top lip and stared at me. “How can you, at such an age, be so completely certain that you are meant to be with one person? If you’ve never considered the possibility of anyone else, you are strictly limiting yourself. Eri is a good man, and a strong one, and the sort that you will want to have by your side in the life you will lead here.”
“But I have no feelings towards him. None that are good, anyway. Sølvi understands my writing, my hopes, my fears. Eri speaks little, and often of himself. He’s a good enough sort of person, I’m sure, but I care little for him. Not like I care for Sølvi.”
“And have you tried to care for him?”
“I – no. I have no interest in speaking with Eri.”
My father returned his gaze to the fire for a long while, carefully considering his next words. “If you will not work with us in this matter, Janna, then we’ll have to work for you. We are going to limit the time you spend with Sølvi, one way or another.”
“Go on,” I dared him, rising and walking to my bed. “And I’ll still see him, one way or another.”
I knew that, deep down, they only wanted what was best for me. But it took them a long while to realize that would be Sølvi.