Birds. Huge, rough-voiced birds, calling to her. Loudly. The geese! Drawing summer on their wings.
Asa struggled to waken, her heart already skipping. She would tell her mother first—nudge her shoulder and whisper the incredibly good news—and then they’d tell the rest of the clan, and together they would breathe in the promise of warmer days and greening grass and new life. They’d made it!
Except that when she pushed onto her elbow, it dug into damp sand and not her straw mattress. The fingers she lifted to her face rubbed stinging granules of the same stuff into her eyes. She bolted upright, blinking in pain. Where was she? Handicapped by her watery vision and the predawn gloom, she managed to identify a massive rocky wall an arm’s length in front of her and she felt the pressure of its mate at her back: the shore’s bluffs. She was waking near the ocean—and she wasn’t alone. Within that same arm’s length she saw booted feet poking from beneath a dark gray cloak. Her heart left off its skipping to drum an alarm; she craned her stiff neck upward, following the shrouded form. Silhouetted against a horizontal strip of sky that still sparkled with a few stars was the deeply furrowed and well-weathered face of a one-eyed old woman. Scowling. Behind the woman’s shoulder a large black bird—a raven—strutted back and forth on the rock.
Asa had never given ravens much consideration, but at that moment this one seemed the very embodiment of evil. It was the bird’s demanding, guttural calls that were shattering the morning. Gronk. Gr-r-o-n-nk.
She had to flee. Where was Rune?
Through the slits of her crusted eyes Asa spotted him beyond the rock, closer to the ocean. Only his uplifted head showed against the strip of sky, but she could tell he was annoyed, and then she saw why: Another raven swooped past his ears, worrying him with beak and claws and that same harsh cry. Rune shook his head as his teeth snapped on air.
The raven on the rock complained again, loud and insistent, which brought her back to her own tenuous situation. It was shifting anxiously from foot to foot and making hungry stabs with its beak. But not at her, she realized—at something cupped in the palm of the stranger. While she stared, thickly, trying to get her mind to work, the hand extended toward her; the palm opened. On it lay a nut-brown barley cake.
In a flash she had it inside her mouth, her tongue swelling with water, her eyes brimming with unexpected tears. A rich oily flavor permeated the cake; it tasted of the summer sun, nothing like her clan’s recent crumbly cakes stretched too far by bark and peas. And like a flash of sunlight on a clouded day, it was gone too soon.
To her amazement, her shrunken stomach protested the thick sweet lump, and immediately vomited up the precious food. She flushed. What was wrong with her? And what would the old woman think of such ingratitude? Doubled over, breathing fast, she didn’t dare look past her own knees.
Teetering on the edge of living, she watched with bewilderment as the woman calmly reached into the pouch slung across her shoulder. Another cake appeared and, ignoring the anguished rumblings in her stomach, Asa snatched it and devoured it in three barely restrained bites. It hurt but she held it down.
The raven, obviously jealous, shrieked and unfurled its wings as if they were weapons. The feathers slid apart with the sound of rustling leaves. Even without the sun, their blue-black color glinted to iridescence. When the bird opened its bill to repeat its displeasure, its stub of a black tongue twitched spasmodically. The woman elbowed the creature aside to offer a third cake, and this time Asa remembered to nod a thank-you. She shoved it into her mouth with no less haste, however, and as she was plucking the crumbs from her lap, she cast a curious, upward glance at the stranger.
The woman was old to be sure, older than any person Asa had ever seen, and the winters she carried seemed to have dragged her into a permanent stoop. That put her in the same no-neck posture as the raven at her shoulder, which wasn’t the only feature they shared. Its downward-curving bill was mimicked in her drooping nose, the fleshy point suspended like a globule of cold sap. Its beard of feathers found a likeness in the blackberry-colored scarf she’d wound round and round to her chin. But while the bird continued to strut and fret, the woman stood motionless, her clawlike fingers gripping the pouch’s leather strap with a strangulating possessiveness. Her good eye, which she fixed on Asa, was the palest of blues and nearly concealed by folds of gossamer wrinkles, though that did nothing to diminish its intimidation. Even the grotesque hollow beside it, empty of eyeball, seemed threatening. When an ocean gust whipped through the short white hairs not fastened into the woman’s braid, it haloed them around her face in a display that was nearly majestic.
“Who are you?” Asa asked.
“Who are you?” came the reply. In her voice Asa found yet another resemblance to the raven: It, too, grated as harshly as splintering wood.
“Asa Coppermane.”
A dismissive snort. “An unlikely enough name for a girl, though not a horse.”
Rune, trying to escape the other raven’s devilment, galloped up to the bluff and pushed his way into the narrow gap. His keen senses immediately detected the barley. Brazenly he bumped his muzzle against the pouch, demanding a share.
“Rune!” Asa scolded even as the woman was producing one of the precious cakes and feeding it to him from her palm.
“Ach! He’s forgiven. The winters get longer and longer, and we old ones have to tend to each other.” Her scowl belying her genial words—which made Asa wonder if it was a permanent expression—she pulled out yet another barley cake. Rune took it and, as he chewed, nodded his head with intense equine pleasure. The woman returned her attention to Asa. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Of me? How? Where do you live?”
A storm cloud seemed to skid across the woman’s face, screwing the scowl tighter. “You ask too many questions for one so young. Just how many winters have you seen?”
“Fourteen.”
“Too few to ask so many questions. You should squawk less and listen more.”
Asa found herself bristling. “My father is clan chieftain. He taught me to ask as many questions as I needed.”
“How noble of him.” The throaty response reverberated as from a deep chasm. “And how very nearsighted. He’d have better spent his time teaching you to divine some important answers, such as one for this question: What are you doing so far from your clan? You’re a fool. I could have slit your throat while you slept and fed you to my birds.” Sensing an invitation to a feast, the other raven flapped its way toward the rock and joined its twin in a raucous chorus—a crowd of two chanting for a sacrifice.
Flushed with new alarm, Asa climbed unsteadily to her feet. Every bone and sinew in her body ached. Her movements accidentally disturbed the hem of the woman’s cloak, which released an odor of blood and something else strong-smelling but indefinable. “Thank you for the barley cakes,” she said, pushing at Rune’s chest to get him to back away. “I’ll be off now.”
With unnatural quickness, the woman had Asa’s arm in her grip. “Off to where?” Beneath her angular brow her one birdlike eye glinted, callous and cold.
Ice chugged through Asa’s veins. She’d thought it would end differently; she had expected hunger or a storm to take them, but it was going to be this stranger. This was how she was going to die.
The woman shook her arm. “Off to where?” she repeated.
“To my clan. They’ll be wondering where I am.”
That snort again. “Who will—the dead ones or the dying ones? Who will be wondering about a headstrong girl who took her horse and ran off in the night? Who will care?”
Jorgen will. That thought came to her unbidden, and while she knew it was true, the idea made her squirm. Instead she answered, “My mother will care.”
The woman released her arm with a dramatic flourish, the fingers of her rheumatic hand splayed against the lightening sky. She sucked in a sharp breath as the fingers stiffened; her blue eye rolled upward and back until only the mucous, yellowy white showed beneath her fluttering lid. “Your mother is dead.”
All the smells trapped in the close space conspired to strangle Asa: the moldy dampness lining the dark crevices; the sour haze enveloping unwashed bodies; the briny tang of decay that filmed every surface, hovering. As if from a distance, she heard Rune’s hide scrape the jutting wall and her own breath rushing out of her nose.
“That’s not true.”
The woman melted back into the present. She fixed her eye, returned to its faded blue, on Asa. “So now you think you have answers. Tell me, then, little girl of only fourteen winters: Where is your father?”
A challenging tone, and an archly confident one, as if she already knew the answer and—Asa forced herself not to shiver—as if it were the same one given for her mother. She refused to accept either. A lot of people had died, true, but not her father and not her mother. Her mother was strong, and in a month’s time or less she’d be standing at the shore welcoming the Sea Dragon’s return.
Jerking her chin toward the ocean, that great gray-green monster that swelled and retreated like a breathing entity, she replied, “He’s there, sailing south.” She didn’t know for certain that her father had sailed south, but the details seemed unimportant. “He and six men from our clan sailed yesterday … or maybe it was the day before … to find food. Last year’s rains rotted most of our crops and all our meat’s gone. This winter a lot of people got sick and some …” But the odd woman had already mentioned the dead and dying. How had she known? “Your people,” Asa began hesitantly, cautious about asking yet another question. “Has someone from your clan seen the ship … or heard news from it?”
She half-expected to be struck across the face, so she was taken aback when the woman laughed, revealing a stubble of small brown teeth. “I don’t have a clan, unless you count these two black beasties here.” She indicated the ravens, which had turned to tormenting each other with knocking bills and indignant cackles.
“Then where do you live? How do you live?” Asa couldn’t help it; she asked questions. She had always asked questions. They spilled out of her as naturally as breathing.
The woman ignored her to scold the two quarreling birds. She made a throaty noise, sort of a drawn-out croak ending in a clacking of her tongue. Her raven speak halted the birds’ bickering. One lifted into the air and flapped to a perch on her left shoulder while the other hopped onto her right. They bobbed and conversed anew in a soft, whining language that blended human and bird. Reaching into her pouch, she fed each one something small, something different from the barley cakes. That got Rune’s attention and he nickered. The woman handed him another barley cake, then flicked her fingers at him, sweeping him away. Obediently he backed out of the space and wandered off toward the shoreline. They both watched him in silence before the woman turned Asa’s questions back on her. “Where are you going to live? How are you going to live?”
“I don’t know.” The answer, inadequate even to her own ears, tightened her jaw. “Last night our skald tried to kill him,” she said, nodding toward Rune, “so we ran away. If we’re going to stay alive we have to find food.” To let the woman know she wasn’t expecting any more handouts, she explained, “I’m going to search the shore some more, then I’m going to try to get up into the mountains, look for leeks or some fallen nuts. If there’s a lake, I can catch a fish.”
The woman blinked dispassionately. “A leek. A fish. Why not a barley field? Why not a whale? You are thinking only of a single mouthful.”
A whale. Her mouth leaped to water. How long had it been since she’d tasted boiled gryn, salted spikihval, chewy mylja? Two summers ago, at least, when that unbelievably enormous whale had stranded itself. She swallowed her saliva to her stomach’s disappointment. Such thoughts were ridiculous, precious time wasted on extravagant dreaming. If she and Rune were going to stay alive, they had to begin searching out food for their very next meal, not go chasing after a feast for a season. “Well, two mouthfuls is what we’re after right now,” she said, pulling her cloak around her. She began making her way to Rune, newly realizing how stiff and sore she was. “Thank you for the barley cakes.”
“You don’t want a whale?”
That involuntary rush of water crossed Asa’s tongue again. A pleading rumbled in her belly. Temptation sat on one hand, suspicion on the other. She paused, considering. If this strange woman knew of a stranded whale, she could ride back and tell her clan. A whale would feed them for months, well into the summer. A year from now the oil would still be lighting their lamps; the bones would be crafted into smoothing boards and gaming pieces and traded for other foodstuffs.
“Ach! I see it in your eyes.” The ravens bobbed noisy agreement. “You want a whale.” The stoop-shouldered woman extended a claw. “Then you will have to follow me.”