CHAPTER TEN
FARING FORTH
It was a family tree. And it began in the year 1066.
“See anyone familiar?” Kristin asked, craning over, pulling the sleeping bag up to her neck. They’d returned to the tent to study the paper and keep warm.
Sky cleared his throat. “There’s…Thorkell Grimsson. There’s Bjørn Thorkellsson and the other brothers. There’s…their children. Look, Ingeborg Bjørnsdottir, Bjørn’s daughter, see?”
He lifted the page to her. She peered. “That’s a strange name, right next to Thorkell’s at the top. “‘Henri de Barfleur,’” she read. “Why a French name?”
He was scanning the page ahead of her. “Speaking of strange…look at this—two English names suddenly amongst all these Norwegians: Matthew and Margaret Brakespeare.”
“‘Died 1644,’” she read. Turning, she exclaimed, “If I remember my history lessons, mid-seventeenth century was a busy time for witches. She must be ours.”
“Or he could be. There were male witches too. And Sigurd wasn’t gender-specific when he mentioned it. All he did say was that he or she was English.”
Kristin peered over his shoulder. “What are those marks beside Thorkell and Ingeborg?”
“They look like checks.”
“What do you think they mean?”
He chewed his lip. “Remember, he wrote this paper before he died here in the burning hut—”
“Died…not entirely.”
“Of course. But from my first travels back to Bjørn, I know he’d been Thorkell. And Ingeborg.”
“So all the unticked ones are those he hasn’t visited yet?”
“He may have by now. Some of them,” Sky grunted. “I hope he hasn’t visited Bjørn. He’s not ticked but…I wouldn’t want to share him.”
Kristin laughed. “Oh, Sky! You’re so sweet when you’re jealous!” Then she tapped the page. “So, for now, we can forget about Henri de Barfleur and Ingvar—Bjørn’s brother, yeah?—because they are not English?” He nodded, and she continued, “Which leaves Matt and Maggie as our prime suspects.” She tapped the page. “They’re unticked. But I’d bet he’d be able to tick them now. That one of them taught him how to possess another as…as easily as we saw him do.” She bit on a nail. “‘Brakespeare’! It’s got to be them.”
“You’re right.” He’d been half hoping they wouldn’t find anything. Wouldn’t have to act. Now they had. And he did. “What did you say before? ‘Knowledge is power.’” Sky sighed, “I suppose I have no choice. I’ve got to go.”
“Not just you, buddy! Us!”
He looked at her, at the determined gleam in her eye. “Kristin…”
“All the way, you said.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t mean—”
“Twice, in fact!”
“I know. But I meant here, now, with the runes.” Sky shook his head. “It’s tough going back.”
“Oh, and you think I’m not tough enough?” Kristin sat up, her sleeping bag falling off her shoulders, and thrust out an arm. “Want to wrestle?”
“No.” He didn’t—and not just because he wasn’t sure he’d win. “It’s not that kind of tough. I’ve told you before. Something gets switched on that can never be switched off.”
“OK,” she said, “I know there’s a price. And I’m prepared to pay it.”
“But we don’t know how high it will be. From the way Sigurd talked about it, it was pretty damn high.” He swallowed. “I think whatever it was tipped him over the edge. Literally sent him mad.” He touched the hand she still had raised to him. “I don’t want you to go mad, cousin.”
She slapped his fingers. “I’m mad now. Furious! Because you refuse to see the obvious. Sigurd probably cracked because he went back too often. Paid too many prices. You still might. But me—I’m a virgin.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
She didn’t even smile. “What I’m saying is—maybe I can handle it better than you…Wolf-boy!” She reached out, grabbed his wrist, twisted it up. “And this might be our only chance to go together. Two ancestors, ready and waiting.”
He yelped, tried to slip her grip, failed. He could sense himself weakening, giving in to her certainty. So he used his last argument. “But how do we get back to them? I’ve sent myself back, but…it’s strange, it’s not like releasing one’s Fetch here and now—”
“Which you still have to show me how to do, by the way.”
“But time travel? I’m never quite sure how it’s done. As we said before, it’s to do with the question, the runes, and the need, but…” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t have a clue how to send us both.”
She released him, sat back. She knew she’d won, and smiled. “Well, maybe I know. Remember I told you that while you sat studying your belly button in that Corsican cave, I hadn’t been exactly idle? Well, there’s a branch of lore I’ve been getting into. Getting into a lot. Connected to the runes. Different. It’s called Seidh magic.”
“‘Seidh’?” He licked lips suddenly dry. “That’s more…more ‘woman’s work,’ isn’t it?”
“Yes, Sky,” she said, slipping out of her sleeping bag, pulling on a sweater, grabbing her jacket. “And in a later time, they’d call it…‘witchcraft’!” She smiled. “These Brakespeares are not the last witches in our family, trust me. Come!”
She unzipped the tent flaps, crawled out. Through the gap he could see the very last of the daylight, and he became aware of something else that had not been there before—the wind. It was strong, getting stronger.
A storm was coming.
It was bitter cold, the wind driving ice crystals into any exposed skin. Pulling up his hood, Sky put his back to it, tried to pierce the darkness. The waning moon was less help now, with tattered clouds being driven across it. He flicked on the lamp.
“Kristin?” he called. Faintly, as if from very far away, he heard her.
She wasn’t that far. A little path from their clearing led deeper into the wood and, after thirty paces, opened into a circle of silver birch. She was standing at its center, her leather bag at her feet, eyes closed, head uncovered, arms reaching out to the side, bare hands gloveless.
“Aren’t you cold?” he said.
“Not really.” She opened her eyes, irises contracting in the light. “I need the stove, Sky. Can you grab it?”
“Can’t we have supper back at the tent? It’s a little more sheltered there.”
“It’s not for supper.”
He felt a chill within the cold. “You’re not planning on…not now!”
“No time like the present…for the past!” She smiled at him. “And certain spells are best woven at sunset. The ‘faring forth,’ for example.”
“But we can’t just…” He swallowed. “I mean, what about our bodies?”
“I know Norwegians are a tough bunch. But do you really think anyone’s going to come all the way up here…with that coming?”
She nodded into the wind. Even in the little time they’d talked, its song had grown louder. “We have to make sure the tent’s really secured,” he grumbled, still seeking some delay. “We might be in it for a while.”
“You do that. I’ll prepare here. Do it, then bring the stove back.” As she spoke, she bent to her bag. It was the same one he’d been inside as a hawk, so he knew it was roomy. But it was still a surprise to see how much stuff she had in there. Out came a knife, a corked bottle, a smoothed stick about the length of her forearm, a smaller leather bag, and what looked like an ashtray. Finally, incredibly, a small iron cooking pot.
“What, no Ouija board?”
She straightened. “I’ve gone a bit beyond that.” She pointed. “Go!”
He turned, shrugging into the ice-heavy wind. But it wasn’t the only thing that slowed him. All her…paraphernalia! It reminded him of Corsica, his great-aunt Pascaline, helping his Fetch leave his body so he could hunt as a Mazzeri, a Dream Hunter. It had been the first, necessary step to what he had achieved: freeing Kristin from Sigurd’s possession. But he’d been so close to failing, and achievement had come with a heavy price—the legacy of a murderer, and a wolf forever lodged within him.
He knew Kristin was right—to fight Sigurd they had to learn how Sigurd fought. But he dreaded the necessity, and he knew the price demanded now was going to be the greatest yet.
He used the back of his ax to hammer pegs into every loop the tent had, brought some big fire logs over to weigh them down. Then he took down the hanging tarp, which was bucking like a stallion, and shoved their packs and anything spare beneath it, folding the edges under, more rocks securing it. The work warmed him a little, but even on the short walk back down the path the chill returned.
And doubled when he saw what awaited him there.
Something else had come out of that bottomless bag. A dress, no more than a sleeveless sheath of white linen, covered his cousin now.
“Are you crazy?” he shouted above the wind.
She turned to him. Her face was as white as the snow on the trees around them, though her arms had a bluish tinge.
Her winter clothes were piled to the side, and he went straight to them. “Put these on! You’ll catch your death!”
“Uh-uh.” She bent to the stove he’d dropped, set it up, pressed the starter button. Despite the wind, it caught. Immediately she put the iron pot on top of it. Uncorking the bottle with her teeth, she poured the contents in.
He watched, her down jacket in his hand. “Aren’t you freezing?” he said.
“Yes, but it’s not so bad. All ritual requires a bit of sacrifice, doesn’t it? We both know that. This is mine.” She waved at him. “Take your coat off.”
“No way!”
“Sky!” she snapped, furious. Then she closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she was calmer. “Sky. This is going to be hard enough, more than I’ve ever attempted. We either do it, or we don’t. But if you keep saying no to everything, it’s not going to work.” She took a step toward him. “So, do we do it or not?”
He stared at her, at her blond hair falling to her shoulders, into eyes that were now an almost iridescent blue in the frozen whiteness of her face. The dress clung to her—she was full-figured, not model-skinny—and it came to him that she looked like a Valkyrie, one of Odin’s warrior-maidens, sent out to bear the best of all fallen warriors to the halls of Valhalla. There they would feast—until the day the trumpet summoned them to the last great battle, where gods, Valkyries, and warriors would fight against the fire demons, the giants, the frost lords. But they would lose. Ragnarók—the destruction of the Aesir gods, of the whole earth—would be upon them, the world sunk into darkness and ice.
Ice! Yet the Kristin who stood before him, this warrior-maiden, was not cold. Her courage warmed her. She knew his stories, knew the risks they were taking. And still she demanded that they take them.
Her courage could warm him too. “We do it,” he said, reaching for his jacket zipper, running it down. But there was no moment to feel the cold, because she had run to him and slipped between his arms as he removed the coat.
“Good, Sky,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you.”
She held him for a moment—a strange moment, pressed against each other. He felt her tense…then she was gone, back to the flame, and the chill came. He shook his head twice, as if to clear it, and followed her.
She lifted the steaming pot from the stove by the wood grip in the middle of its handle. Now she placed a small metal tray onto the flame. From the little leather bag she pulled out what looked like dried moss and dropped it onto the metal. “Mugwort,” she said, “gathered last Midsummer’s Eve. It’s the herb for helping to free the Fetch.”
Sky remembered the plants Pascaline had heated. She’d drugged him, and he shivered at the memory. “Isn’t this all, you know, a bit black magicky?”
“That’s from the movies. I don’t believe in black or white. This is Seidh magic. It’s from this land, as much a part of it as the runes.” She frowned at him. “You remember your mythology, don’t you?”
“Some.” If he was honest with himself, it was the side of runelore that interested him the least. He preferred the practical stuff. “But I’ll test you, if you like.”
She sighed, a trace of a smile. “The runes are Odin’s. But it was Freya, his wife, who taught him to shape-shift, change to bird or beast, travel through time. She was from a different race of gods, the Vanir. And they were more concerned with fertility, harvests. Love.” She bent over the herb. It had begun to smoke. “Sniff!”
He knelt, did as he was told. It was a strange smell, sweet and acrid at the same time. And it seemed to drive away the cold. No, it changed the cold from something that chilled to something that exhilarated, like plunging into a freezing river on a hot day. “What do you need me to do?”
“A rune goes with the faring forth. Which one?”
“Raidho,” he replied quickly. “Rune for journeys. To the living and the dead.”
She unsheathed her knife, reversed it. “Cut it, Sky. Over there, into a birch branch. One facing the west, the departing sun. And as you cut, sing the rune.”
“Sing it?”
She stood as he did. “It’s another part of Seidh. The Galdr. The sound of the runes is almost as important as the sight of them. The sound is magic too. Energy. Release it!” She placed the knife in his hand.
The wind was blowing from the east. He turned the other way, checked the fading of light in the west, turned back to the birch. A branch faced the way he wanted. There was a strip of bark curling on the underside of it, and he pulled it away, revealing the wood beneath. Then he laid his knifepoint upon it, closed his eyes, took a breath, began to hum a note, a deep one, deep within him. Normally, he’d have been embarrassed about his singing voice, but he wasn’t here. Maybe it was the mugwort, its scent still in his nostrils; maybe the echo from behind him, Kristin humming, too, a different note, higher, but in harmony. Maybe it was the concentration required to carve. For each rune had its own order of strokes.
“Raidho…,” they sang as one.
“Journey without
Within and on
Living to dead
Back and beyond
Time that is
Was, will be.”
The song ended, just as the knife scored that last line up and to the center. Yet if it ended, it did not leave; notes clung to the branches, almost as clear to the eye as the sound was audible to the ear. He lowered the knife, aware that even as steel fell, wood rose. Kristin had an ash wand in her hand and now she turned in each direction, first north, then east, then south, finally toward the sunset. At each point, she chanted words Sky did not recognize, yet knew had been spoken in this land before, the tongue of the Old Norse. And as she spoke, the tip of her wand described a shape in the air, the same shape he’d placed into the tree. He saw the “R” of Raidho appear, curling as if made from smoke. But it was solid, and the wind could not scatter it.
She did that; breathed, sucking the symbol from the air on a huge inhalation. Sky knew what she had done—cleared the power, yes, you didn’t leave power behind. But she had also taken the power into herself.
She turned to him and exhaled. But it was not mere breath that plumed in the air between them. A column of power linked them now. The wind gusted—but what bound them together could not be broken.
“What names do they call him?” She was shouting now, to be heard. “Wind Roarer! Tree Shaker!” She tipped her head back, eyes shut. “Odin rides at the head of the Wild Hunt. Listen to him come!”
She flung her arms wide as the storm roared down upon them like a living thing, doubling its force…and he swore that she rose from the ground!
“Kristin!” He had to bend to move forward, his shoulders hunched against the ice the wind bore; not little crystals anymore…hailstones, striking, stinging. Yet he pushed against it now with a wild joy, with the song still in his throat…and found her along the thread of power that she had breathed out to him.
“We must…get inside…,” he shouted, though his face was only inches from hers. “This is not the worst!”
“This first,” she yelled back, raising something between them. He squinted, saw that she held the pot, its sides cool enough now to touch. Yet the liquid within—wine, something else—was still hot enough to send fire down his throat, burning, intoxicating, as exhilarating as ice against the skin.
They drained it, he dropped it, turned her in the direction he hoped the tent was, bending to snatch up their discarded clothes—though he was moving beyond caring about anything so practical. Something was stirring within him, a pull of a different kind. Yet he knew: something more was needed. Something always was.
A last shove over the threshold.
He pushed her, both of them stumbling, laughing hard, into the teeth of the storm. Somehow they moved through the blasts. Somehow fingers found canvas. Metal teeth parted, rose up; he thrust her and their clothes in ahead of him. Then he turned back, offered himself for a last moment to the storm that only now was reaching its full force.
The Wild Hunt had found them, and a god flew at its head.
“Odin!” he cried. “All-Father! Guide us now.”
The wind picked him up, threw him back, between the metal teeth, into the tent. The flaps leapt like living things; somehow he managed to slide the entrance shut.
The voice came soft from behind him. “You call upon Odin. All-Father. Summoner of storms. And it is right you do so.”
“Kristin?” It was not her voice. It didn’t sound like her voice!
The voice went on. “But Freya, his wife, is near as old a god. And she has different powers. Different needs. So I call upon her.” The tone changed, dropped; the words that came next were breathed out like smoke, like runes carved into the air, hovering in the space between them.
“Come, Odin. Come…husband. Come.”
Total darkness. But he didn’t need to see, not when he could feel. The arms that reached for him. The body beyond.
Storm without. Storm within.
A last shove over the threshold.