He felt their eyes upon him as he lifted the bowl. The brownish liquid smelled awful, and at first sip the broth soured his tongue and deposited bits of grit that drifted irritatingly between his teeth and sore gums. He spat the mouthful onto the floor. “Are you cooking with dirt now, Tora?”
Thidrick and Helgi giggled and doubled over. He shot them a glare. They’d pay for their insolence.
“What about that calf I just gave you?”
Tora snatched the wooden bowl from him and dumped its contents back into the cauldron. “It’s not ready. You’ll have to wait along with the others. And while you’re waiting you can go find our missing cow.” She flung the emptied bowl at him.
“Maybe he can find some cheese, too,” Ketil muttered. “He’s always smelling of it.”
Coward that he was, the cripple didn’t dare deliver his comments eye to eye.
So the chickens were ruffling their feathers. Ever since Asa had galloped away, they’d given him a wide berth, watched him with suspicion. Well, they didn’t deserve his guidance, his generosity. Here he’d supplied them with meat and received only scorn. With surging blood, he rose to his feet. “You charcoal-chewers can rot in your own pus!” Feeling for the sword at his waist, he cast a menacing glare around the room and saw his wavering power yet evidenced in their hunched shoulders and averted eyes. “I want a proper stew—with meat—ready when I return.” And he stalked out the door.
Fog still eddied around the settlement’s structures, and he peered through it. Where was that cow? He needed to find it, needed to know that the bloodied calf carcass deposited on the door-slab had a reasonable explanation. But a niggling suspicion whispered otherwise. Someone … or something … was taunting him. That woman? A draugr? Well, he’d not play the fool any longer. He’d put an end to this game.
A sudden pain in his chest caught him up short and he clutched the sword’s knob, wincing and gulping for air. That made his head throb even more than it had that morning, and his fomenting anger turned his knuckles white. How dare they? How dare anyone try to thwart him? They’d not take this from him. They couldn’t. By Thor, he’d kill the next creature that crossed his path!
For some time he stood there, his chest heaving, each forceful breath a whoosh of vapor that swirled and disappeared. The wet fog gradually slicked his hair to his forehead. It beaded on his brow and ran down his nose, cooling him. When at last the pain had eased, he sought the shelter of the forest and followed the stream uphill.
From habit, he supposed, his feet carried him off the path before he reached the nearer of the outfields, and with each step his anger dulled. How many pleasure-filled days had he passed here just watching her? That brought an echo of chest pain, and he paused for a few deep breaths before continuing. Up and over the boulders he clambered, then pushed through the tangled undergrowth beside the stream. He knew he didn’t need to. Secrecy was no longer necessary. She was gone. Dead.
It still troubled him that her stiff body lay unprotected, somewhere … somewhere, somewhere! The harrowing images tormented him nightly. He pushed aside the low-hanging pine bough, crawled beneath it, settled on the hidden rock—its cold seeped through his buttocks—and slipped his feet into the two well-worn depressions on the exposed tree root. From this viewpoint he could observe the mud-soaked outfield and all who passed through it, though on this drab day nothing ventured forth. Only a few thin, green blades, choked by the muck, clustered in moldy patches. They were a teasing hint of summer, but would the season ever come? And would any of them see it? Already their dead outnumbered their living. And the dead, it seemed, walked about even more than the living. And ate their fill.
High above him the loud flapping of wings, then the rustling of pine boughs told of a large bird’s arrival. His hunger leaped and with it came the heat of blood rushing through his veins. Was it possible to catch it?
Quork, quork.
Ugh. His lip wrinkled. It was the same sound he’d heard the evening those two ravens had dumped … well, he preferred not to think of that. (Though he couldn’t help rubbing the back of his neck, then checking his hand.)
Time passed, and bit by bit his anger crept back. The clear stream below him gurgled and bubbled across stones and pooled behind fallen branches to spin decaying leaves. Idly he stabbed at the leaves with his sword, pushing them to the bottom and holding them there until they gave up floating. The unseen bird prattled to itself.
As cold sunlight broke through the fog, a noise across the clearing signaled the approach of something large. Expecting to see the vexatious horses, and savoring the thought of stabbing his sword into at least one of them, he looked up. The vision that emerged from the opposite forest sat him straight.
It was a horse, yes, but with a rider—and no ordinary rider, for sunlight glinted off the thousand jewels embellishing this rider’s blue cloak. They winked in rhythm with the horse’s steps, and he found himself gaping in astonishment.
A different hunger stirred inside him. He would have that cloak for himself and relish the taking of it. He needed to spill some blood today. His fingers closed around his sword and he held himself motionless—except for the smile teasing his lips—and let the horse and rider proceed innocently toward their deaths. His heart beat painfully fast.
But as he waited for the pair to cross the clearing, the beat slipped its rhythm and his vision swam. Snippets of stories he’d told—or heard (he was suddenly confused about that)—shot through his head. Winter winds came howling … He wandered. Alone. Until one morning … a woman rode out of the forest. And the sun blazed.
He rubbed his eyes and blinked. This was no common rider; it was the seer! Across the clearing, riding toward him—straight toward him as if she could magically look through the overhanging boughs and see him—was the seer of his father’s stories: a beautiful woman dressed in every shade of blue.
The hems of both garments (his lips moved with the words he’d committed to memory, though even his clever mind had never imagined anything as beautiful) sparkled with blue glass and clear crystal beads created in a far-off land.
The thudding in his chest doubled. Seers appeared rarely and only to a chosen few. Had she come to interpret his dreams, to confirm his wishes? Would she proclaim him clan chieftain?
Steadily she approached, steadily and slowly. Noble. Her mount could have belonged to one of the Valkyrie, for it flaunted the distinctive chopped mane, a mane that rippled like black flames with each toss of the horse’s head.
Near to trembling with excitement—he was chosen!—he pushed the bough aside and scrambled up the stream’s opposite bank. He pulled himself tall. Walk straight, he chided. No limping. The seer’s unwavering gaze was upon him.
But as he neared the field’s middle he realized with a shudder that it was no battle horse that approached, but only that runty little dun. He’d been deceived! And the rider? He squinted, his vision still wavering.
Asa! Not dead then. Or maybe returned from the dead to torment him, to prevent him from being clan chieftain. He tightened the grip on his sword. Well—dead or alive—she wasn’t going to do that. She’d had her chance. And he’d labored too many seasons now molding the clan to his way of thinking.
The jewels captured the sunlight, shattered its brilliance, and tossed it back into the air. The dazzling display triggered random words in his mind: She came to this man riding on a white horse.
That gave him pause. He was confused again because there had been a white horse once. It was not owned by a seer, however, but by a sorcerer, a witch who had bewitched his father. That horse was no more. His father was no more. And, as far as he knew, that meddlesome woman was no more.
“What is it you seek?” she had asked. The words played out in his mind and across his lips even as Asa rode closer and closer. He heard himself mumbling the lost man’s plea: “I seek to stop wandering. I seek to not shiver. I seek to be other than alone.”
He remembered how the woman of the story had walked with the man so that he wouldn’t be lonely and how she helped him build a house of stone and wood and turf so that he needn’t wander. Then one stormy day this man said, “I am still cold. I am still hungry. Will it always be winter?”
And she had done nothing.
His teeth ground together. Just as Asa had done nothing—after all he’d offered her. He drew his sword.
No, he thought, slowly swaying from side to side, testing the sword’s feel. She had done something: she’d thwarted him at every opportunity! She’d attacked him and humiliated him!
One day, while the man waited beside a stream, the woman’s white horse appeared to him. “I can make you warm,” it told him. “I can feed you. And I can bring summer.”
Was this horse speaking to him now? The blood roared through his head such that he couldn’t be certain. But he wanted summer to come. They all needed summer to come. And he’d certainly be warm in that sparkling robe. With a widening smile he pictured himself in the chieftain’s seat, the regal blue robe spilling over its sides to lap at the piles of food the others would bring him. All he had to do was slay this horse and slay its meddlesome rider, Asa. He should have stopped them long ago.
The dun horse was tugging at its reins. It did appear rather fearsome with its ears pinned flat, its yellowed teeth champing on the bit. He remembered the creature savaging him in the byre. A purple bruise still marked his thigh. But look now—it was shaking its head, nodding its head. Telling him what to do.
“Take my blood,” the horse said, “and scatter it on open ground. And take my bones and grind them into the dirt. And take my skin, emptied of all its worth, and mount it on a wooden frame at the edge of your new field so that all who see it will know what a gift I have given you.”
Yes. He would have this horse’s blood. And the girl’s, too. He had been chosen.
And this man, who was a dutiful man, did as the horse instructed. He picked up his sword and in one stroke…