He was dead. Jorgen, the man she’d hated and feared, was dead. The battered face chewing mud would no longer grin at her, was in fact already hardening into some useless relic. Yet serial images of his ashen face invaded her mind: the hungry manner in which he’d always watched her, the way his eyes roved from bench to rafter and back to her when conjuring his stories, his rancid breath filming her skin, his maniacal fury as he’d slashed at Rune’s neck. For every one of her fourteen summers and winters, it seemed, he’d been a thorn to her. And while the prick under her ribs had been removed, the wound throbbed hot.
Her chest heaved. She felt distinctly different; she was different. Blood pulsed through her veins, strong and eager. Was this how the warrior felt—keenly alive and ready for the next kill? Did one kill beget another and then another? She felt linked to the world; her heightened senses tasted the sea, inhaled the wind, fingered the mud’s grit. Everything around her roared, and she felt strangely calm, master of it all.
Rune was still breathing hard, too, his nostrils fluttering dark and moist. He sidled impatiently, but his injuries finally held him in place. He cocked his hind leg, the one slick with blood, and gingerly touched the toe of his hoof to the ground. When he looked at her, he sighed. Newly worried, she peered under his belly. The tender hide gaped, revealing ragged pink flesh and strands of white gristle, all of it awash in blood. But no entrails dangled. If she could pack the wound with something absorbent—maybe some moss from the stream—and somehow coax his spirit back, he’d live. He had to. He was Rune.
She laid a hand on his forehead, found it damp and matted with sweat, and momentarily doubted her bravado. “Wait for me, Rune,” she urged, and set off for the stream. Her twisted ankle buckled at once, and to her aggravation she had to make her way at an old woman’s totter to the edge of the clearing. Nor was it easy to traverse the rocky banks, and her imbalance at one point sent her leg plunging into the icy current. She yanked it out with a gasp, spied some moss upstream, and clambered with more care. As she was peeling the newest, greenest moss from the rock, a raven alit in a bare-limbed ash behind her and proceeded to report her every movement with shrieking calls.
She wasn’t surprised, then, to see Wenda standing beside Rune, examining his injuries, as she returned. What did shock her, though, was viewing her four-legged, lifelong friend from afar. His emaciated silhouette was a jarring outline of thin neck, bony withers and jutting hip, truly no more than hide covering bone. His bristled mane looked ridiculous now. How had he managed, with the weight of all his winters, to become a warrior’s horse for her? He’d battled for her life; he’d saved her life.
“Good girl,” Wenda said when she saw the fistfuls of dripping moss. She squeezed the water from it and the two of them carefully packed the wound. Rune’s head lifted and his eyes glistened with pain, but other than one involuntary grunt, he didn’t protest.
Wenda stared at Jorgen’s body, her one eye blinking in contemplation, and perhaps distrust, as if she half-expected him to rise. The wind riffled the dead skald’s hair, lifted the hem of his tunic. Abruptly Wenda booted the ground, sending a splatter of mud onto his face. It freckled his nose, where a trickle of blood wormed earthward. The two ravens descended, eager to take part in the carnage. One clawed the mangled shoulder where, in a show of triumph, he ruffled his neck feathers, snapped his beak, and voiced a series of deep kr-u-ucks. The other boldly skipped close to the smashed face to peck at a sightless eyeball. Jealous, the first bird joined him, and in moments both eyes dissolved into bloody hollows.
“He was always blind,” Wenda muttered. “So focused on his greed that he couldn’t see.” With a jerk of her chin she sent a wad of spittle arcing through the air. It fell short, foaming in a tiny pool within reach of his fingers. As she watched her ravens, Wenda worked her jaw, pursing and unpursing her lips, gnawing at something on her mind. “That man,” she said at last, “reached beyond his grasp.”
The accusatory words, though aimed at Jorgen, grazed Asa. Certainly she’d extended her reach too. Was she next to be punished? “What’s wrong with reaching?”
Wenda shot her a stabbing glare. “Jorgen used lies to extend his reach. He threaded his stories with falsehood and with malice, and what he wove was intended only to serve his own vanity.” The bitterness in her voice soured the very air around them. “He reached for something he didn’t deserve. And when anyone tried to knock away his hand, he turned that hand and choked the life out of that person—or animal, as the case often was. But he had no authority to murder. He was not a god.”
“Nor am I,” Asa mused, mostly to herself. “But I’ve killed now.” Something in her stomach dislodged as she watched the ravens savage Jorgen’s face.
“Yes, well, that was different.”
“How?”
“Eh?”
“How was it different? How does one killing earn applause and another death? I’d like to know.”
The lone eye appraised her with some indignation, then lingered, softening. “Jorgen would have gone on killing; he’s spent his lifetime killing.” The wrinkly eyelid blinked. And blinked again. Moisture seemed to glisten along the spare white lashes. “In his greedy, grasping, lascivious pursuit,” she continued, “he nearly took what is rightfully yours. Years ago he did take what was mine.” She sucked in a sudden breath, seeming almost to tremble with a rush of anger. “He took my soul’s companion, Asa, the man who was heart to my heart.” She thrust her face skyward, closing her eye to the sun’s glare, and gathered herself. The ravens left off their gobbling to watch.
Asa was expecting more, but in the next instant Wenda was busying herself with Rune. She ran her hands along his neck and back, and gently probed his leg, now crusting with dried blood. Pausing, fingers hovered above a hock wound, she added, “And he took from me my other love: my second treasure, my horse.” She was purposely keeping her face hidden, it seemed, as she went on probing. Stiffly she bent to re-examine the wound in his groin and patted the moss pack approvingly. She was certainly taking her time. Working herself up to some other announcement? “He”—there was a pause for emphasis as she straightened—“killed them both. But now you,” she said, turning toward Asa, “have killed him.”
A piercing look followed, one that gradually expanded into a conspiratorial grin. How eerily similar it was to Jorgen’s, the one he used when he leaned close to give a compliment, all the while wrapping that compliment around a coaxing—a coaxing so subtle that no one suspected him of twisting them to his bidding, of whispering his words into their ears so he could turn them this way and that with invisible hands.
Wenda’s brow rose, and the one eye slowly blinked, nay winked. Something in Asa’s stomach lurched violently as a sickness flooded her.
So … she’d been nothing more than a game piece in some longstanding dispute. Half-wit that she was, she’d allowed herself to be carefully dressed—beauteously dressed, even—and pushed into battle just as easily as her father had been pushed out to sea. To his death.
Had her own life been gambled for Wenda’s vengeance? The sick feeling ate through her; she shook, caught up in the web of a violent chill. And what about Rune? She considered her selfless companion. Had the woman gambled Rune’s life as well? He’d given everything for her when she’d not even asked. Her own anger surged. “So this was all your doing,” she managed to say between teeth she clenched to keep from chattering. “You sent me … us … to do your work.”
Wenda threw back her head and laughed. “Whose work was it to battle him?”
A biting comeback crossed Asa’s tongue, but she choked it down. Confusion muddied her mind. Whose work was it, indeed? Hadn’t she always known she’d someday have to confront Jorgen? Surely she couldn’t sidestep him forever, lingering in the byre, dawdling at her chores. But she’d never envisioned killing him.
Her eyes spotted the knife on the ground, its blade a darkened red. She didn’t remember dropping it. Well, it belonged to Wenda—in more ways than one—and so she bent to pick it up and hand it over. “This is yours.” And she glared straight into the ice-blue eye.
Wenda waved it away with an annoying nonchalance. “You’re not done with it, I suspect. It’s no weapon, anyway, so keep it.”
Asa was left standing, filled with twisted feelings of anger, self-doubt, and resentful curiosity.
As if she could hear Asa’s very thoughts, Wenda said, “He was an evil man. Evil to his marrow.” Asa remained stubbornly silent. “He tried to kill your horse, too, remember? And more than once. He did kill mine.”
“I … I didn’t know that you’d had a horse,” Asa stammered at last.
Wenda laid a gnarled hand on Rune’s withers and moved her stroking fingers in small circles. Her gaze clouded as she revisited fond memories. “I did. A white mare, as white as goose down and with a mane just as soft, and I loved her. One of the finest creatures I’ve ever known. She would have done anything for me—anything at all. And I for her.”
A bold image of Rune, dreadfully wounded yet pummeling the skald with his hooves, brought a nod of understanding. “He”—she indicated Jorgen, unable to speak his name—“often mentioned a white horse in his stories. In the last wandering man story he told, a white horse ordered the man to kill him. None of us had heard that one before, and I didn’t like it. Was he talking about your horse? Was Jorgen the wandering man?”
Wenda spoke from some distant reverie. “I haven’t heard Jorgen’s stories, only his father’s. But I wonder if he had his father’s magical skills—could he spin the stars from the skies and set them to dancing among the smoke-clouded rafters?” A honeyed smile lit her face. “That man, he could sing the fish out of the sea. He could sit at my hearth, and just by opening his hands”—and at this she parted her cupped hands and turned them palms up—“fill the room with the delicious fragrance of summer tansy, even with a winter storm gnashing its teeth at the door.” Her memories overtook her then, and she fell silent. She returned to the moment with a decisive snort. “No, the man in the story—no matter what Jorgen said—was not himself but his father, a man I cared for more than any other.” Nodding to the north, she said, “We kept a house beyond the next fjord after his wife, Jorgen’s mother, died. For some of the year he lived with your clan and for some of the year he lived with me. We were, for the most part, happy.”
“I never heard any of this.”
“It was before your time, long before your time.” Wenda shrugged. “Many didn’t approve.”
In the slanting glow of the afternoon light, they both found themselves staring at the skald and the ravens’ diligent mutilation of him. Asa’s mind was churning, trying to sift the truth from the tales. She didn’t completely trust Wenda, never would. Finally she focused on the introduction common to all of his stories. “Jorgen always said that the wandering man in his stories wasn’t happy. He said the man was searching for something but didn’t know what.”
“Now that does sound like Jorgen,” Wenda replied. “He always breathed unhappiness and poison—though he did so through grinning teeth—at most everyone around him: his father, me, your father. His mother died when he was still a boy, you know, and better that she had, for no mother should have to claim a son such as him. It was the poison that ran swift inside him that managed to kill her, I think, and later did kill his father.”
That wasn’t true. “No, his father died chopping down a tree. It was an accident. My own father told me that.”
The old woman glowered and Asa drew back. “It was no accident. A tree fell on him, crushing his leg. But that didn’t kill him; Jorgen did. He found his father, my lifelong beloved, trapped under that tree, helpless and at anyone’s mercy, and he walked away without a word. Jorgen left his father to die.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I also found him.” Wenda’s face clouded with dark memories. “It was late in the winter—very late—and, while we’d had some mild weather, the cold yet clung so stubbornly. The most fitful wind had been blowing all morning—I’d urged him not to go—and when all of a sudden it stopped, I knew something was wrong. I knew it at once; I could sense it. It was that dead calm that makes even the buck lift his head and hold his breath, and so I sent out Flap and Fancy to search for him while I followed on foot.” She gazed into the horizon, her mind traveling backward. “He was taking his last breaths when I reached his side, in more pain than any human could bear.” Vestiges of that pain contorted her voice. “For all my talents I couldn’t save him, though I tried everything. I begged him not to leave me, begged him and cried. Ach! How I cried. But he was too thoroughly crushed, in body and in spirit also, because his own son had refused to help him.”
A shiver rattled through Asa, punching prickles in her skin. If Wenda was right, all those years they’d been living cheek by jowl with a murderer—and not only that, the worst kind of murderer, someone who could willfully turn his back on that most sacred of blood ties. She gazed upon the skald’s bloodied and mud-splattered face with new disdain.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
Wenda shrugged, feigning dispassion. “It was a long time ago.”
A meditative silence embraced them. The cool breeze stirred the needled branches of the pine trees; the ravens’ gluttony created small tearing sounds. Asa’s thoughts kept returning to the white mare. She hated to ask it, but couldn’t stop herself. “How … ,” she ventured hesitatingly, “why … did he kill your horse?”
“Because I was what he was not; I had what he’d never have.” A vague smile crossed the woman’s lips.
Asa waited for more, but Wenda just stared at her birds, working her lips again, and … was she humming now?
Rune stood with the other two horses, his head drooping, his badly injured leg hitched and balanced on the toe of his hoof. Asa walked over and laid a hand on his sweaty neck, steaming in the cold air. His nostrils still fluttered with his rapid breathing. Mourning the bloody gashes to his shoulder and chest, she slipped off the bridle. The fight had cost him so much.
She returned the bridle to Wenda, who took it wordlessly and stuffed it in her satchel. Then Asa unfastened the blue cloak, folded it, and handed it over as well. The one eye fastened upon Asa, blinking enigmatically. Was the woman waiting for something more? Expecting something else? Time passed, and then Wenda smiled—a little—and bowed her head, just slightly. Her version of a thank-you, subtly shaded with arrogance. Then she turned and, in her birdlike manner, stalked uphill toward the forest. The ravens flapped lazily around her head like summer’s thunderclouds.