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Sprawled at the roots of the Speaking Tree, Rostfar slept as she hadn’t slept in days.
For all its deepness however, the sleep wasn’t peaceful. Nightmares came at her from all sides as she lay, steaming and sweating. Isha’s hands and face swam to her through the fog. A cold nose pressed under her chin, flush against her pulse.
“She’s weakening,” someone said. Rostfar tried to push the reaching hands away, but she was grasping at nothing. Her whole world throbbed and shuddered around her.
“You need to wake up, Mama,” said Arketh. Rostfar blinked sleepily at Arketh, who sat on the edge of their dining table with a skein of yarn in her hands.
“I don’t feel too good today, Ket.”
“You need to wake up,” Arketh repeated, more urgently. “You need to listen.”
Unable to control her own limbs, Rostfar staggered out of bed. She knew she shouldn’t be here, at home – but couldn’t remember why not.
“Ket?” The room swayed. Rostfar reached out for the wall, pressing her other hand to her forehead. “You need to . . . I need—” The floor leapt up into Rostfar’s face and knocked the air from her lungs. Her palms and knees smarted from the impact.
“Mama?” Arketh sounded terrified and so, so far away. Rostfar twisted around, scrabbling for a handhold on the swaying floorboards, and came face to face with Other. It snarled at her, blood and flesh hanging in ropes from its maw. “Mama!” Arketh again; her voice was no longer in the room.
Rostfar threw herself at the door. It dissolved beneath her hands, and the hut spat her out at the roots of the Speaking Tree.
The Tree was thrumming with gentle light as it always did, but tonight the warmth Rostfar associated with its presence was gone, and a gentle coolness had taken its place. It seeped through her to the bone, drawing the heat from her wounds.
[Listen.]
“Who are you?” Rostfar wasn’t even sure if she had spoken. Her throat was so dry and her tongue so heavy. She leaned her forehead against the leatherlike, living bark and closed her eyes. The Tree’s heartbeat slowed in time with her own; the bark was yielding to her, softening, pulling her into an embrace.
“I know this isn’t real,” she murmured. “I’m sick, is all.”
[Rostfar.]
“Hm?” Rostfar yawned. Drowsiness was stealing into her bones again, dragging her back into the fever-depths. She couldn’t fight it; didn’t want to fight it.
With a sigh, Rostfar let the last of the tension leave her body – and the Tree swallowed her.
Clarity doused Rostfar like water. She struck upwards for the surface and broke through the membrane of her sickness with a painful gasp. Her body was caught in space, suspended amid a sea of green and sickly violet hues. Panic chased through her head, then horror, and finally the numbing awe of a huge realisation.
Treading water, Rostfar turned in place. A small part of her was still sceptical, but that part was fading fast. It was impossible to remain sceptical when she could smell the salt and feel the water soaking through her clothes. Currents eddied around her, but never caught her in their grasp. The cold didn’t affect her too deeply either.
“I’m so glad you came here.” Rostfar looked up at the great cliffs and forgot how to breathe. How she knew that she was looking at Norðunn, Rostfar couldn’t say. She just knew, and that was enough.
Great ram’s horns curled back from the bony ridges of Norðunn’s forehead, and her eyes were a deep, warm amber. She was vast – too vast for Rostfar to truly comprehend. Sometimes she looked vaguely humanoid; sometimes she looked like the Speaking Tree. Holding one form seemed to be causing her difficulty.
“Forgive me, I can’t bow, or . . .” Rostfar trailed off as Norðunn shook out her wings and laughed.
“I don’t want to you to bow, Rostfar,” she said. Norðunn’s body flowed towards Rostfar over the surface of the water, her wings creating a dome like a starry sky above them. Up close, Rostfar realised with a jolt that there was a gaping hole on the left side of Norðunn’s chest, right where her heart should have been. Rostfar reached out for it with trembling fingers, and Norðunn let her. “My gift to your kind – to all kinds.”
“I don’t understand.” Rostfar blinked sea spray from her eyes.
“Don’t you?” Norðunn laid two fingers over Rostfar’s heart, her two seeing eyes glittering. Rostfar listened to her own heartbeat in dumbfounded silence, as something in the back of her mind connected.
“The Speaking Tree,” Rostfar whispered. “The stories say you planted the seed to bring us together, but I never realised that meant your . . .” she pointed to the hole.
“Hrafnir and Erdan lent their magic and strength. I gave my heart,” Norðunn said with a nod. “It was the only way I could bind the enchantment that protects this world from the more malicious of my kind.”
“If you’ve been here all along, why didn’t you reach out?”
“I did. But you wouldn’t listen,” Norðunn answered, no reproach in her voice. “Your daughter listened, but she’s gone somewhere I cannot follow.” Sighing, she withdrew her hand from Rostfar’s heart. “At least you are here now. It is more than I could have hoped for.”
“But you’re a god,” Rostfar said, unable to wrap her head around the idea of Norðunn, the great trickster, asking for help.
“No.” Norðunn shook her head. “Your people made me into a god. I am just another creature, albeit one far older than the world as you know it.”
Rostfar nodded and frowned at the water, trying to eke out the words she wanted from all the noise in her head. Some of that noise was anger, betrayal; some was sadness; but most of all, she felt an overwhelming amount of pity. She placed her hands over the back of Norðunn’s.
“My children will burn,” Norðunn murmured, and although her voice seemed perfectly calm, Rostfar could feel her panic. “They will burn, and I don’t know how to stop it.”
“Then let me go.” Rostfar was proud of herself for how she said it: not a plea, but a command. Norðunn turned those sad eyes on her.
“But you’re burning too,” she said. One clawed finger reached out and touched Rostfar’s forehead.
And Rostfar tumbled backwards into the sweat of her fever-dream.
There wasn’t even time to cry out before Rostfar slammed into her own body again, shivering and coughing up salty water. She lifted her hand to brush a tangle of seaweed from her eyes and pain lanced through her from head to toe.
A hand landed on her shoulder and gently turned her onto her back.
“Isha?” Rostfar croaked, reaching for his face. Isha stared at her hand as if he had never seen it before.
“You were . . . you vanished.”
Rostfar swallowed and tried to smile, but the smile made her dry lips crack. She tasted blood when she licked them. “I . . . sleepwalked, I think.” She tried to touch the Speaking Tree, but her arm was too heavy. Numb. She was so cold.
“No – you actually vanished. I found you here, and when I tried to lift you up my hands just went through you.” Tentatively, Isha touched his fingertips to hers and then kissed her knuckles. Rostfar could almost feel his tension dissipate as if it were her own. “What happened?”
“I saw Norðunn,” Rostfar replied and slumped into the bark behind her. She frowned at Isha. “What’re you doing here, anyway?”
“You’re sick, Rost. I’m going to carry you back to the den—”
“No!” Rostfar pressed herself against the trunk until her spine hurt. Panic shot through her gut and she slapped Isha’s hands away. “She’s so lonely, Isha. She’s hurting and I – no, I won’t leave her.”
“It’s no good for you, being out in the open. Please.” There were tears in Isha’s eyes.
Rostfar didn’t think there was anything to cry about – she had found Norðunn, they should be glad. She smiled. Isha didn’t smile back.
“Alright,” he said, and lay down at her side. “Alright, but I’m staying with you.”
Rostfar curled up with her forehead against the roots of the tree and sank back into the sea. She did not wake again.
⁂
Yrsa watched. She waited. But the horizon remained stubbornly empty. Other pack members came, they sat with her, they went. Myr brought her a fish from Rostfar’s store, but she didn’t eat it. Didn’t have any appetite. How could she? Rostfar was dead. She lay at the roots of the Speaking Tree, her boundmate, Isha, holding her as if his warmth might bring her back. Rostfar was dead, and Grae was gone, and Yrsa couldn’t stand the thought that she was alone.
The moons dipped and rose. Time flattened out.
“He’s gone,” Bryn said, creeping into Yrsa’s vigil with his tail between his legs.
Yrsa bristled. “He’ll be back.”
Bryn said nothing. It was only the two of them, alone in a bitter, bloody morning with the world crumbling around them. Yrsa howled out her grief and rage into the still air, but only silence answered her. If Grae heard, he gave her no sign. Bryn nuzzled her shoulder.
“He’s gone, Yrsa.”
“I know.” The words felt like defeat. Nothing in Bryn’s body spoke of surprise – he was resigned, grief-wracked, but in a way that suggested he had expected this to happen. Yrsa couldn’t look at him, so she looked at the ravens huddling around Other’s corpse. “You knew, didn’t you? That he was slipping.”
Bryn’s silence was an answer in itself, but he eventually found the words. “I suspected. I’ve always suspected.”
“Why not tell me?”
“Because you weren’t there when Nessen died.” Bryn’s shiver was strong enough that Yrsa could feel his distress in the air. “It was so . . . so—” Bryn bit down on his words with a growl. “Can I show you?”
Yrsa nodded.
The wyrdness that surrounded Bryn began to sprawl out. There were dozens of pale threads, each one imbued with myriad fragments of Things That Had Been. Here a raven, circling against a washed-out sky; there the taste of regurgitated meat, the bitterness that swelled in the throat. The strands were like cool water against her fur, but they didn’t soak her. Yrsa waited with tensed muscles as the net wove itself together, binding around her head.
—Grae, crying.
Nessen, dead.
The stench of blood.
Snapping a raven out of the air, scattering stones and freshly dug earth.
Sweat. Spittle. Pain.
And Grae again.
Hauling him out from under the corpses.
Half-mad, eyes rolling, fur matted with blood.
(—the wyrdness, where’s the—)
He can’t hear Bryn’s pleas.
Pain. Grae’s teeth, needle-sharp.
(It’s me, it’s okay)
The ravens are back.
A fox utters a high, keening shriek.
Victory. Meat. Hunger.
Running—
She came out gasping for breath, shaking all over. Bryn was there in an instant. He waited patiently as Yrsa returned to the world of flesh and bone.
“I brought Grae back to Deothwicc and he cried for days. I think . . . I think I knew then that the only thing this world offered was more of the same for him. And I knew he wouldn’t—” Bryn broke off with a sound that was suspiciously similar to a whine. It startled Yrsa. She nuzzled into his shoulder and gave his ear a tender lick.
“None of us could have saved him,” she said and the pain in her chest grew even tighter. “And besides, we shouldn’t talk in possibilities.” The irony of that was like a claw in her throat as she spoke. “There’s only what is, and what has happened – and what we must do now.”
Bryn turned and looked down at Yrsa, fondness written in every inch of his body.
“Little Yrsa, wiser than the rest of us,” Bryn said and returned her earlier nuzzle with gentle affection. “When did you grow up?”
“Not very long ago at all.” Yrsa’s head hung low. “All it took was losing all my littermates.”
