part0008

The missionaries gasp when they hear it. Quick fingers mark some rune unknown to me, from their heads to their bellies and across their chests, and they do not speak to us again. No matter. We laugh when they cower at milk-sweet girls only eighteen, nineteen winters alive, our hair unbound and childish, because what have they to fear from us?

Plenty, in truth. And in moments like this, I see how we’ve earned that name.

The earth itself opens up beneath our feet. Bare heels dig into black soil, lichens and moss exploding outward beneath our toes. There are few enough woods left in Iceland untouched by the reavers who use the trees for their ships to go a-Viking, but this one is ours, and we know it by heart. I duck a branch and grab the trunk, slips of birch flying free beneath my fingers as I spin from it and turn in a new direction. It doesn’t help. I hear the laughter of the other girls behind me giving chase, and in my delight, nearly stumble over an upturned stone from the last time we played like this.

My legs are longer than most of theirs. I’ve grown tall and sturdy as oak, hair stiff and golden as late-summer straw. But gods, they are persistent, howling laughter like wolves after a stray lamb. Lambs, though, are not so clever as I am, and vaulting over a fallen tree, I skid sideways down a hill, feet turned to stop from losing control. Sharp rocks catch my skin, but I pay them no mind now, rolling to my stomach and flattening.

I listen, no sound near me but the rush of my own breath and the hum from my heart, hammering. Their voices seem further away, but they may have split—one band in one direction, one in the other—and so I try to hold my breath to quiet it. The soil is still dawn-damp where I cling to it. I gather my wits again.

Our own people call us völva —wand-bearers. The missionaries’ name isn’t wrong—we do run, and not only in the woods to burn off energy before a long day sitting stoic with herbs and ritual. No, we are the messengers between worlds, between highest Asgard and our own Midgard, between the plains of Vanaheim and woods of Alfheim, and to fog-thick Niflheim and lower still, to Hel, where those dead reside who have not been plucked by the gods in higher branches to join them. Hela, in her kingdom beneath the World Tree, waits for us to visit and return, sharing messages between living and dead, past and present and future. I have not seen her yet, but they say that half her face is pale as fresh cream with hair black as raven’s feathers, and the other half foul with decay and hollowed by rot.

I imagine each side is beautiful, in its own way.

She draws my name out like a song, a galdr of our very own, and when I shiver, it’s little to do with the cold earth pressed against my belly.

“Eydis.” I greet her as if it were the temple we were meeting in rather than the wild woods, as if my dress wasn’t darkened with dirt from our rough and joyous games, as if there weren’t bits of branch stuck against my hair. I roll to my back, writhing until the rocks press less painfully into my spine, and regard her standing at the foot of the hill. “How–”

“Because I know you,” she answers, clever grin quirking one corner of her lips. “Don’t I?”

“You know everyone. Too well.”

“Blame the gods for that.” Unhurried, she picks a careful route up the slope, feet pressing into summer-soft mosses that squish between her bare toes. “But I know you best. I don’t have to seek you out in goat entrails.”

“I would hope you wouldn’t find me there,” I laugh, plucking a leaf off my dress. “Maybe I should court favor with the alfar to hide me when you come looking.”

“Would they listen? They’re fickle, and you run like a wild horse through their home.”

“Of course they would listen. I could talk a frost giant to Muspelheim.”

I declare this with a certainty that widens her grin, her lips an archer’s bow drawing over her broad white teeth. We have always been a people prone to bragging, although it’s typically the men who do it—and gods save us, do they ever. But our bravado dictates our actions, which we must then fulfill so as not to be liars, and our bragging spreads our legend. And we, myself and the witches, are just as free to speak and act as the men are. Our heads are bared, no betrothal ensnares us; we are married to forces greater than any man who would quiet our voices.

“Brynja Bold-Tongue,” she calls me. “Hair flaxen as Sif’s own and all the sense of Loki who stole it.”

Pressing earth-stained fingers over my face, I muffle a laugh. The sky is iron grey through the branches that vein it, and in the distance, I can hear the ocean in its ceaseless whittling of the fjord’s jagged rocks. When she stands above me, it is as though the sun has parted every cloud and come to rest only on me. Her hair is like a hearthfire, radiating warmth in copper curls that have never known a comb. It’s lucky to have red hair—Thor does, and he looks on favor with those who share it.

Sometimes I think all the gods look on her with favor. It’s the only way I could explain her.

“Surely they’ve found new quarry by now,” I tell her, resting my hands against my stomach. The muscles tense beneath my fingers as she turns her head aside as though to listen for their voices, and hearing none, brings her dark eyes back to me. “You see? I wouldn’t be worth turning over.”

“But I know how you love hearth-duty,” she teases. “Sitting up until dawn to stoke the fires so the crones don’t fuss about their aching bones.”

“I am kind enough of spirit to allow others to share that joy.”

“Truly generous,” agrees Eydis. “But what victory is mine, then, if not to hear your grumbling all night?”

“You might choose to hear another sound from me all night instead,” I whisper, grinning.

She snorts and tosses her hair like a stroppy horse, but her eyes narrow in pleasure. “I get that already.”

She isn’t wrong—she rarely is—but the words still brook a shiver, like cold sudden rain across my skin. With her, I feel more moved by the gods than by any sea or storm, temple or glen. Eydis makes my ribs feel too small, my breath shorten, and all at once I feel as though I might crack like a jug, splintering and spilling heat across her feet. I rest a hand against her slender ankle and trace the delicate bones, following the swell of her calf through the soft scarlet hair that grows there.

I only reach her knee before she hums, and my hand stops. The hunt has not gone from her yet, mischievous and snared by a possessing thought as if during a blot . My own skills pale in compare, though my galdr are strong of voice and the runes are generous to me in their knowledge. But Eydis, she I have seen become other beings entirely: gods and men, elves and monsters. I have seen her eyes go mist white as she spoke truths that a farm girl could not have known. Seeress and seidh speaker, the gods whisper in her ear as if she were their own daughter, and so when a mood catches her, it is all I can do to follow where it takes her.

“You’ve won me already,” I remind her, as if by voice alone I could bring her thoughts back to me. “You won me the night we both arrived from the farms, and you were the only one to come and sit with me at dinner.”

“But still you ran,” she teases, and I know there is no arguing with her until her curious mood is sated. I miss the softness of her skin the moment she steps away from me—my hand feels empty, my chest hollowed, though she is only a step or two away. “There is a practice.”

“There is always a practice,” I groan, flopping back onto the ground again with a wince. I pluck out a rock and toss it skidding down the hill, as she takes up a thin birch branch from the forest floor.

“There is a practice,” continues Eydis, “in the regions west of the Rus, where boys chase girls with strips of goat hide.” She shrugs out of the woven wool shawl that hid her snowdrift shoulders and tosses it aside.

“For what purpose?”

“Because they are awful.” Her teeth flash as she turns another grin to me before shaking her head. What little sun is left turns to molten gold in her hair, and I strain to hear her preternatural wisdom rather than let myself imagine burying my face in her curls and whispering torrid, terrible things to her.

I roll to my stomach, arms folded beneath my cheek, and she wanders slowly back again. “They lash the girls’ legs with them, and send them scattering, laughing, dripping goat’s blood down their skin.”

“When we make sacrifice, we use boughs to spray it all across the carvings so the gods can have it. It’s all a mess,” I tell her. “It pleases the gods. Do they do it to make the girls willing?”

“One assumes that is why boys do most things,” grins Eydis.

“I wouldn’t be particularly inclined after being flogged with bits of goat.”

Her laugh finally breaks like the sun through clouds, glittering off the swift meadow brook of her voice. The fullness in my chest is nearly painful, and I squirm as if that might make it easier to love her so much. A funny thought, really, since I’m sure that loving her couldn’t be any simpler than it is already.

“Brynja, think on it again, before you run away in your thoughts as you did on your feet.” Eydis’s scolding comes with the birch branch pointed at me. “Why do we give offering that way to the gods?”

“Because the kona tell us that’s how it’s done.”

“No,” she insists. “Why do we really?”

I grasp for Eydis’s ankle and miss, then lunge again and hook a finger in the hem of her woolen dress. Reeling her towards me, I slip my arms around both her legs so she can’t escape again. Her thigh is soft beneath my cheek and I shiver, suddenly warm.

I yield to her questions.

“Because it brings their presence to the temple to receive the sacrifice,” I answer obediently. “Because it makes the gods alive in Midgard, in the shapes we carve for them.”

“Yes,” Eydis whispers. I could moan when her slim fingers touch the messy knot of my hair and loosen it with one clever twist of her wrist. Her fingernails drag along my scalp, through my hair, and up the back of my neck. I do moan then, shameless, against the rough wool of her dress. “So when those girls are given sacrifice, does it not make them into living goddesses, too?”

“I’m sure the boys would tell them so.”

“Brynja,” she sighs, stamping an impatient heel against the ground.

“Yes.” I give, I give, I always give, and I laugh against her leg. “Yes, maybe so.”

Scraping against my thigh, the tip of her claimed wand follows high enough to catch my skirt. The white bark is spotted through with black — Freya’s favorite tree, and she the goddess as much of ourselves as of our temple. It seems appropriate, then, that Eydis would tease me with a symbol of that fair lady, and so I do not stop her when she skims her birch branch higher. She follows the curve of my hip, bared where my skirt has slipped.

Whatever path her mind follows is once again obscured to me. My own want for her, stirring deep between my legs, blinds me to anything beyond what is just before me. Her, her, always her. Since we sat beside each other as younger girls, freshly wrenched from far-flung farms and told we were to become messengers across nine worlds. Since we first shared a bed, pressed tight only for heat beneath each other’s skinny limbs. Since we discovered that mouths can be warmer still than hands.

I press my forehead to her leg, my cheeks ember-hot as she taps the branch against my backside just hard enough to sting. “Eydis,” I laugh. “I needn’t bloody you with hide to make you a goddess.”

My hands run high up the backs of her legs, and they tighten against her lithe thighs when she leaves another mark on my skin. It’s enough for me to flinch, hissing between my teeth. I shift away from her gentle torment to sit on my knees instead, clearing out the rocks from beneath with a quick hand. My fingers are cold when I bring them to rest on her bare legs again, just beneath the curve of her backside, and her spine draws tight into a shiver.

Her eyes are shadowed by the wild drape of hair around her as she stands over me. Despite being shorter than me, despite being lean and fierce where I’ve instead grown broad and strong. I sit before her in joyous reverence to worship at her body as readily as I do her mind.

Eydis tosses the branch aside, insolent little goddess, and frames my face with her hands.

Freya should envy her.

I bend when she bends me. I move when she moves me. And so when she lowers her mouth against my own, my lips part to allow hers passage against them. Every breath I held in aching for her releases at once, every coil of tension she twisted into my belly unfurls. Rising to my knees, my hands seek her hair, soft as new lamb’s wool, and I twist my fingers into her curls as if I was not already entirely ensnared.

Our tongues touch, just a brush, but it’s enough that she makes a sound like a songbird, sweet and high and trembling. I cannot stand it, even this distance, and I catch Eydis by the knees to drag her, laughing, against my lap. She spreads her legs wide over my thighs, fingers smudging earth across my cheeks, and our brows touch.

“I want to see them,” she whispers. My brow arches and I grasp her wrist. Her palm tastes of green grass and her fingertips of bark, her bones those of birds. I place her hand against my breast—enough to overfill her gentle grasp—and sigh when she thumbs across a peaked nipple.

“Not those,” Eydis murmurs, laughing scarlet-cheeked, her eyes tidepool bright when she slips her arms around my neck instead. “I’ve seen those. I have them.”

“Already you’ve lost interest in me,” I mumble. Holding her around the waist, I tilt her back until she lets her body loosen, head lolling comfortably and neck bared for my mouth to explore with lips and tongue and teeth. “What do you want to see, Eydis Spirit-Speaker? Tell me and I will show you.”

“Anything,” I swear, and as if our words were heard, the wind rises, quivering the trees and pulling at our hair and dresses. We do not fix them. We let our thighs press bare together, she astride my lap, and only when our skin heats do I realize that we are both moving, little motions to ease the tightening pleasure between our legs. “You see? Even the alfar want us to be bare.”

“I want to see the girls,” Eydis answers, laughing when she sees the dark look I send her. “Not like I see you, but—their people, the Rus, all of it. I want to travel, Brynja, I’m tired of being here. Three winters long and what else is there to know? The gods talk to us now, not just through the kona . We should be teaching them rather than stoking their fires.”

Nineteen winters alive and each of us, years before, sent here to become seers and seidr , soothsayers and spinners on the Norns’s tangled loom of destiny. And have we not become that? The volva wander—we travel between farms and villages, through fields and mountains, past seas and lakes, to seek out those who need our conveyance between other worlds and this one.

Eydis speaks truth, and though the temple is comfortable and safe, it is hard to imagine that the gods have destined her for only that. She will make peace between families long bloodied in feuds; she will bless babies newly born and ships newly built. Crops will grow bountiful in her footsteps, and she will be treated with welcome and the highest seat wherever she goes.

“And what of me?” I ask, my hands stilled against her back, searching her eyes for news of my fate, and knowing that she must see it. It is a selfish question, but I hardly care when the thought of watching her go is enough to sunder me. I hardly hear her speak again over the tidal rush of my own blood in my ears.

I swallow hard when she runs the backs of her fingers down my cheek. “You don’t need me for any of this. The gods move in you. They move you .”

Her eyes soften in the corners and she studies me as if in confusion, the crease in my brow, my lips parted slack. “I don’t need you for that,” she agrees. “I need you for me.”

I nearly send us both down the hill when I press my head against her shoulder and squeeze her tight, skinny body bending against my own. “Eydis–”

“Who else is going to bring me back from seidh -saying? Who else will keep me from wandering off chasing alfar ?” She answers with a little laugh, running her hands through my hair, down my back, the cause and ease of every shiver that shakes me now like winter winds. “Yours is the voice that carries through all nine worlds and brings me back to this one. Back to you.”

She laughs when I can do no more than nod, again and again, and kiss her, again and again. “Brynja,” she chides, tilting her head aside with a grin. “Where is your bold tongue now?”