The king’s footsteps always boomed along the corridor as he returned. The boy who had been set to listen came running for the queen, so that when Ari, Hárugur King, pale as uncooked bread, stumbled out of the King’s Passage, it was into her waiting arms. Nyr was there, too, ready to lend a strong shoulder to support his father over to the throne.
They said nothing. It was better not to talk to the king when he came back, until he had readjusted himself to the real world again. Halda put a mug of warm mead into Ari’s hand, and guided it to his lips. He drank, shuddered, and drank again, the color slowly coming back into his face. She could see Nyr wondering, not for the first time, whether he would have the necessary courage, when it was his time to confront the Ice King.
Finally, Ari stood up. It was time to call the others in. Nyr went to the door of the Council Cave and announced: “Ari, Hárugur King, has returned!”
A cheer went up. It was never certain that a king would come back sane and whole, and Ari was a respected and valued ruler. The council crowded through the door first, as was their right, but Ari waved them back out again and went to stand by the central hearth of the big hall, where everyone could see him.
He basked in its warmth for a moment, then he said, “The Ice King sends his greetings to his people.”
Halda and Nyr knelt on one knee, along with everyone else. It was always a moment of wonder, that the Power of Ice would deign to notice them. Ari went on, “I asked our king if we should send a trading party to the east, and He had no objection.”
Another cheer went up, from the younger men who wanted to go with Nyr, and from their mothers and sweethearts, who would much rather they went trading than into battle. Except for some older women, who looked sour. They didn’t like any change, Halda thought.
After the return feast and the dancing, Ari took Halda and Nyr aside privately in the Council Cave. “He didn’t care,” Ari said, frowning and puzzled. “It was like something else was holding his attention. He just didn’t care, one way or the other.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Nyr asked.
“I don’t know,” Ari said. “It may mean that the attempt at trading is doomed, and you will have to fight anyway. When you go, make sure you are fully armed.”
Halda felt her heart clench. She couldn’t bear it if Nyr was taken from her, too.
“Yes,” she said. “Be even more careful than on a raid. You may not mean to attack, but they don’t know that.”
Someone sniffed loudly, with disapproval.
“Trading!” a voice said over Halda’s shoulder. “Like weaklings or southerners. It wasn’t so in my day.”
It was Gytta, the oldest woman in Mountainside, standing just inside the entrance to the main tunnel, where the sun would not get in her eyes. Halda could only spare her a glance—her eyes were fixed on Nyr’s golden head as he rode at the front of the trading party. He rode without a hat. The snow was only fetlock high on their horses, and the sun was clear on the eastern horizon. A fine spring day. She hoped it was a good omen.
“Our men should take what we need, like their fathers and grandfathers did,” Gytta went on.
Ari rode next to Nyr; he would leave them at the plateau’s edge and return home, and he would be in no mood to hear criticism of his decision.
“The Ice King agreed,” Halda said firmly. But Gytta was past the age of being intimidated by anyone, even the queen.
“The king said he didn’t care either way. It was that boy of yours that convinced the Hárugur King.” Her tone rang with disdain. “You’d think he didn’t want to fight.”
Even age didn’t excuse that. Halda turned to look Gytta right in the eyes.
“Nyr, as you know, is a fine and courageous warrior,” she said, her voice as sharp as an icicle. “As for trading—tell me, Gytta, how many sons and grandsons have you mourned when they did not return from a raid?”
Gytta met her eyes defiantly for a moment, but as memory overwhelmed her she turned away, looking at the granite doorstep beneath their feet.
“Ae, it was too many, too many, I’ll grant you that.” She looked after the trading party wistfully. “Your boy had better keep my youngest safe.”
Bren, Gytta’s youngest, was older than the king. Ari had insisted that his trusted adviser accompany Nyr, and Halda was glad of it. Bren had a canny mind and a smooth tongue. It made her feel better, remembering he was there to shepherd Nyr through this unprecedented journey. Halda smiled and took Gytta’s arm, leading her back in. She had too much to do to stand around wasting time. “I’m sure he will,” she said.
But instead of organizing the cleaning out of the caves, ready for their spring exodus, Halda went to the women’s altar. It was a small cave. The women came in twos and threes, when they could slip away, unlike the men, who worshipped together at sunset, to welcome the night cold, the Child of the Ice.
It was just a simple space with benches around the walls and a small hot pool, gift of the king, to warm it. Like the other women, Halda loved this quiet nest. This was a space where she felt protected, cherished. Loved, even. It was as though the face the king showed the women was a different face altogether to the one he showed the men. But that was not spoken of; women’s worship was private.
She sat and prayed for Nyr’s safety and the success of the venture. The pool of hot rock flared suddenly, and she took it for a good omen from the king and was comforted. Then, for a blessed moment, she just sat, her thoughts wandering to her own first venture away from home, when she had come from her tribute tribe, the High Fjord People, to become Ari’s wife.
It was a great honor, and it was what she had been born and bred for, but she had been frightened none the less, as all girls were who were sent off to marry strangers for the good of the tribe.
When she had seen Mountainside, its forbidding cliffs rearing up above the plateau, she had gasped with awe. For the first time she had believed the stories, that the Mountainside people, the Hárugur King’s people, were specially chosen by the Ice King.
It wasn’t until after her marriage to Ari, in the dark early days when she still hated him, that the older women had taken her to this place, to the altar, and explained why He had chosen them, and had sung the Song of the Sacrifice to her.
Ari’s mother, Asi, had begun the story:
“Once, there was a brave warrior called Sebbi, from the peoples of the far south,” she began. “And it was in his time that the Ice King woke, and being freshly woken was hungry, as hungry as a wolverine, and He came from the north, and ate everything, and left nothing behind.”
This was a version of the same story her own people told, about the coming of the king.
“But Sebbi was braver than all others, and he offered himself as a sacrifice to the king,” Asi said.
Then the women started to sing the Song of the Sacrifice.
I was there and I saw it
I was there and I smelled it
Sebbi’s bright blood sprayed out on the ice
In her mind’s eye, Halda could see it even now: the small valley being eaten by the king, Sebbi offering himself, the hunters chasing the prey with prayer and desperation, the women rending their garments and wailing afterward as they scattered the flesh and bones before the king.
It had not bought their valley safety; the king had eaten it anyway. But He had communed with the first Hárugur King, and told him of a way through to the middle of the mountains, to safety, to Mountainside. He had granted them Mountainside as a sanctuary, when he had pushed all the other tribes far south. He had made the Hárugur King his mouthpiece to the tribes.
They were blessed. The hot pools, the eternal fire, the strong stalwart walls of the mountain—these were the gifts of the king, and they meant that the king’s tribe was the only one not to fear the dread claws of winter.
So Sebbi had not died in vain.
Halda wondered how old he had been. Young, she thought. The young are always eager to trade death for glory.
She pushed down the thought that she would rather spend her winters shivering in the women’s longhouse, as she had done all her childhood, than be caged under a mountain of rock for months on end. Without the warmth and brightness of the fire she would go mad, she thought, and sent a prayer of thanks to the king. The fire flared again as if in answer, and she smiled.
Time to get the caverns ready; although the end of winter was a ceaseless round of work, she welcomed it, both because it meant spring was coming, and because it would stop her worrying about Nyr. She said another prayer, for her son Andur’s soul, feasting somewhere in the King’s Hall. No doubt the fire there was warmer still.