Gormánuður
The Slaughter Month
October
We landed in a fjord, surrounded by gray mountains and dense, frost-covered pines. The beach was a narrow, rocky strip, but the cliffs broke the ocean waves. The waters of the fjord were as smooth as blue silk. Kingfishers swooped alongside the ship’s bow and a pair of fur seals flipped and chattered in our wake. Still, by the time the ship ran aground, my arms were close to giving out. I had taken my place on the rowing bench again, since the storm had wrecked our sail and we’d lost a crewman to the ocean. My lower back ached from the cramped position I’d had to hold to keep the oar tucked under my arm to compensate for my missing hand.
I disembarked first, stumbling from the ship on shaky sea legs. Inhaling the crisp, wintergreen air, I wandered up the beach. I didn’t want anyone looking over my shoulder as I studied my marks and planned a new course.
Wherever we had landed, we would have to make do. The ship would not sail again. I had hoped to coast proudly into my kin’s harbor—to greet them as a worthy potential ally, not a weak girl leading a crew of resentful, half-starved sailors. Forseti’s Arm might never have been a large ship, but she had possessed a certain dignity; a stark, practical sort of beauty. She had been mine. Now, with her broken mast and broken slats, she cast a much less imposing shadow.
The maps showed that we had landed just a few miles up the coast from where I had intended. We would have to cross the mountains, and make our way through forest, but Skjordal was not far away. I breathed a sigh of relief. We were ill-provisioned for a long journey. The last of our fresh water had been polluted with sea water during the storm, and the men had salvaged only enough dried meat for half-rations at breakfast.
Ersel trotted over to me, wobbling on the rocks. She no longer staggered when she walked on her human legs, but she was still learning to run. She wore a spare tunic from the hold—a monstrous, yellow-white thing that hung askew on her shoulders. We didn’t have any spare trousers to fit her, and her alabaster thighs were bare. Trygve had given her his second pair of boots. The fastenings were undone, and she nearly tripped over the long toes.
“Where are we?” She asked, breathless. After a life lived under the waves with her weight supported by water, she tired easily on land. We would have to move slowly, even if it might mean spending a night in the forest. The men would complain, but her bravery during the storm might have saved us. Risking the unnatural waves, she had jumped over the ship’s rail and pushed us forward.
I knelt beside her and pulled off the seaweed that clung to her boots. It was tempting to kiss the faint contour of muscle above her knee, softened by inviting, smooth skin, but with the men watching, I’d never hear the end of it.
“We’re close.” I rose and pointed to the mountains behind the beach. “A few miles. But the ship is beyond saving. We’re going to have to cross those.”
She took my arm and studied the course. My breath quickened at her touch and the compass above my heart tingled. When she was in human form, it was sometimes as if my skin had its own mind, and every inch of it became hyper-aware of her proximity. A smile twitched at her lips when she felt me shiver. She traced the lines of the coast and the dotted trail that led inland through the trees.
From the map, it was still impossible to tell if Skjordal was a small town or a great city. My grandmother had never reestablished contact with her family there, and it had been half a century since she had set sail as a girl. The town could be prosperous, with ten dozen well-fed warriors willing to seek their fortunes under the command of a godsmarked styrimaðr. Or it could be a ruin. Either way, without a ship, there was nowhere else I could lead us.
Trygve led the rest of the men toward us. He tossed a threadbare dress to Ersel. She touched the fabric, and her nose wrinkled with distaste, but she donned it over her tunic anyway. It hung all the way to her feet and had a hood to hide her turquoise hair. That was better. For all the sight of her bare legs was appealing, I remembered how my crew had looked at her the first time they had seen her—before they had learned the power of her tentacles and learned to be afraid. Their staring, hungry eyes had roved over her skin. Ersel was not mine, but I didn’t like the idea of strange folk staring at her either.
“We’ll have to proceed on foot,” I said to the men.
A few of them turned to each other and grumbled.
I pointed to the crumbling ship. “If you think you can make that seaworthy, be my guests. I would have thought you’d be glad to be on land for a spell.”
The tide was rising in the fjord. Even from the beach, all of us could see the leaks springing from the ship’s deck. The men silently shook their heads.
Nodding, I started to march up the beach. We could easily walk the distance to Skjordal, but what would we do when we got there? We had no ship, no horses, no reputations, and no money to pay recruits upfront.
I straightened my shoulders and walked faster. I couldn’t afford to show hesitation to the crew. I’d lost our ship. I couldn’t give them any more reason to doubt me, not when they so obviously preferred Torstein. They would follow me or stay here on the beach with nothing.
I heard sighs behind me, but they followed. I pressed my lips together to hold back a smile. With the crew in tow, I climbed up the dune that framed the beach. I had lost my fitness at sea, and, by the time we reached the top of the mountain, my face was red and sweat trickled into my eyes. On the other side of the slope clung dense pines. But beyond the tree line, a cluster of houses and grazing fields glowed gold on the horizon. Smoke rose from the chimneys, and, if I squinted, I could make out sheep dotting the pastures. It didn’t look like much, but it was inhabited.
I took Ersel’s arm as we descended. The ridge was even steeper this side of the beach and covered in loose stones. I was suddenly glad we’d lost the food and water to the storm. I was hungry, but carrying provisions across terrain like this wouldn’t have been easy.
The sunlight faded to a dim shimmer as the pine forest grew so dense we could barely pass between the trees. We dodged between low branches and tangled roots. The ground a blanket of pine needles. The air smelled of evergreen and damp earth.
Ersel stopped to touch one of the trees. Her eyes widened in wonder as she ran her fingers over the gnarled bark. It was an ancient foxtail with a trunk the width of three men. Lacey frost clung to its bark and ice made fragile icicles at the end of each needle. Ersel plucked one of the crystals and cupped it in her palm, transfixed as it melted in her hand.
When she noticed me watching her, she shrugged. “Plants in the sea don’t grow anything like this. It reminds me how far I am from home.”
I plucked one of the crystals and popped it into my mouth. The fresh water soothed my dry tongue. The water was faintly sweet, infused with sap from the pine. Ersel laughed and took another icicle from the tree. She placed it on the edge of her tongue cautiously, then a grin stretched her cheeks.
For a few blissful minutes, I forgot about the men, the ship, and the invasion. We ran around the tree, gathering the sweet crystals and sucking on them until our foreheads ached and our teeth tingled.
Behind us, Smyain cleared his throat. He was a quiet man, who mostly kept to himself and was one of the few who didn’t seem to hang on Torstein’s every word. Ersel turned to him, and he pressed a frost-covered pinecone into her hand. She turned it over and then held it to her nose. She inhaled deeply, as if committing the crisp scent to memory.
“All of these trees start out like this,” Smyain said. He peered down at her shyly. “If you plant this in the ground, in a hundred years you’ll have a tree like this one. You should take it with you. You can start a forest anywhere.”
Ersel tucked the pinecone into the pocket of her dress. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Smyain didn’t meet my eye. He blushed and scuffed his foot on the wet ground.
I scowled. We’d been foolish to let our guard down. What had I been thinking? Running about, gathering sweets like a child? I couldn’t afford to let any of them see me like that. Taking Ersel by the arm, I steered her straight ahead. I walked quickly to put distance between us and the crew.
She didn’t pull her arm away, but I felt her stiffen. The wonder in her expression slipped, replaced by annoyance as she struggled to keep pace.
“I didn’t come all this way to be pushed around again,” she hissed under her breath. “I can look after myself. You’re acting like Havamal.”
Shame heated my face, and I dropped her arm. Havamal was a merman from Ersel’s glacier home. Growing up, they’d been best friends and had dreamed of running away together. Then, abandoning their dreams, he had joined their king’s retinue. He had thought Ersel would outgrow her wanderlust, as he had, and settle down to be his mate.
Then, he’d caught us together. The encounter was forever burned into my memory. After I’d been shipwrecked, Ersel had helped me rebuild the skiff I’d used to escape. I’d rowed out into the open ocean, with her floating beside me, to test the skiff’s seaworthiness.
On impulse, I’d asked for a kiss—a magical, transcendent kiss—and when we’d broken apart, still flushed and breathless, Havamal had appeared. He had given Ersel the choice: Come with him and be his mate or watch him drown me. She had gone with him and saved my life. I knew that Havamal had later regretted his actions, but after the day my town had burned, the memory was the worst of my life. I would never see him as a friend.
“I’m sorry,” I said earnestly, and glanced over my shoulder to make sure the men were too far away to hear. “You can do what you like. I just don’t trust the crew. Whenever they do something nice, I can’t help thinking they are lulling us into security. They mean to trap us.”
Ersel sighed. She pulled the pinecone from her pocket and held it up to my face. “Luring us into a trap with a tree seed?”
I looked down. No one on this crew had truly been my enemy, but in their faces, in the blood-red tunics some of them still wore, I saw the shadows of my captors. It wasn’t fair to any of them, but I didn’t know how to change how I felt. Sometimes, the light would catch them at a certain angle, or they would say something in their Bjornstad accents, or shout, or laugh, and I was right back in my home town, watching the flames spread through the streets. I was on the beach with Lief and Yarra, and we were sparring for the last time.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I’ll stop.”
Ersel cupped my cheek with damp fingers. The action was gentle, but her voice was hard as she said, “Yes, you will.”
We trudged on through the woods. Ersel held my arm, but we didn’t speak. The wind grew colder the farther we walked from the beach. The ground hardened and a light dusting of snow covered the needles. It was still early in the autumn, and I wondered what this place would be like at midwinter. We crossed a stream, and then the unmistakable scent of fresh, buttered fish filled my nose.
“Do you smell that?” Torstein boomed from the rear of our little column.
The crew stopped. They whispered excitedly among themselves and turned in circles, looking for the source of the smell. A sharp pain gnawed at my side, and my stomach rumbled. After weeks of living on salt pork, ale, and dry bread, I was ready for a real meal. I’d lost weight and had already needed to cut an extra hole in my belt. Ersel was the only one who had eaten well at sea, as she could dive beneath the waves to hunt for herself. She had offered us part of her catch, but it was too dangerous to make a fire on the deck, and the rest of us hadn’t wanted to eat raw fish. The thought of well-cooked, flaky whitefish, maybe accompanied by a wedge of crumbly goat’s cheese, was enough to make saliva drip down my chin.
We couldn’t stop. We needed to keep following the map and find my kin. We had no money to pay for food. A few of the men wandered off in the direction of the food. I opened my mouth to shout after them, but my legs moved with their own mind. I jogged after them.
The smell came from a small, thatched cottage, built between two mighty firs. The little house stood alone. It had the look of a building long abandoned, with boarded windows, crumbling daub walls, and dark patches of rot on its thatch, but torchlight flickered under the door. The aroma of food was now so strong that it made my knees weak. I could already taste the fish.
Steinair and Brinholf rushed forward. They thrust their shoulders into the cottage’s door to break it down. I watched them as if in a trance. Real food at last! I imagined coarse brown bread, smothered in drippings and winter berries, the way Papa had made it when I was a child. I would sit in the snow and eat until my belly burst.
A throaty scream broke through my stupor. What was I doing? I wasn’t a thief. Pulling my axe from my belt, I ran toward my surprised men.
“Get back!” I shouted.
An old woman emerged from the cottage. She was barefoot and wore a torn, dirty wool dress. For the second time that day, my face heated with shame. My men had been about to pillage this woman’s home and steal what little she had. She was helpless. Taking things from her would make me no better than Jarl Haakon.
Steinair and Brinholf backed away, hands raised. We all stared at the woman. I wanted to apologize, but didn’t know what I could say. Ersel finally broke the standoff. She reached into her hair and tugged out a few of the sea pearls she’d braided into it. Ersel pressed the pearls into the old woman’s shaking hand.
I was so used to seeing them that I hardly thought about their value anymore. The pearls came from clams that lived in the deepest part of the ocean. It was rare for the creatures to wash up on shore in North. Most of the pearls I had seen at market came from the East, where they had a method of farming the clams.
Those pearls could buy another ship. The thought came so fast and unbidden that I hated myself. The pearls were not mine to take. They were Ersel’s only connection to her home, and she had only given them away to smooth over our transgression. Still, surely the old woman couldn’t need more than one.
Biting my lip, I snapped my fingers at my crew and walked into the woods. Today, I’d come too close to acting like the people I despised.
* * *
We walked through the night and arrived at the village as the first rays of morning sun crested the mountains. I instructed the crew to wait behind the tree line while Trygve, Ersel, and I went ahead into the hamlet. Leading a band of armed seaman into a peaceful village seemed a sure way to scare the inhabitants. I didn’t want them alerting the local jarl to our presence, and we needed information. If the leaders here were allied with Haakon, then no matter what my magic indicated, we would flee. I kept my sleeves pulled down to cover my tattoos and my hook. Ersel wore her hood over her bright hair. I hoped we would pass for ordinary travellers.
The village of Skjordal was tiny, comprising a central square with cottages and workshops clustered around it. The houses were single -dwellings made of daub and yellow straw. The workshops were squat, with rotting beams. The central square was little more than a ring of mud. Dirty, underfed children played with a bloated sheep bladder in the street. They watched us with wary, hungry eyes as we approached. I tried to swallow my disappointment. We were not going to find warriors here.
I knew that my grandmother had left this place after severe winter storms had driven the ocean too far inland, ruining the soil with salt, but I hadn’t been expecting it to still look a harsh winter away from disaster. The last few weeks at sea was the first time I’d gone hungry. My body was still strong and healthy. In this place, poverty was deep and everywhere.
A small girl ran up to us, holding a bouquet of crumpled dandelions in her hand. Her feet were bare; her toes blue in the cold. “You’d like to buy them?” she asked hopefully.
Ersel started to reach into her hood, but I shook my head. We couldn’t leave a trail of sea pearls for our enemies to follow.
“We don’t have any money,” I said.
The girl heaved a mournful sigh and went to sit on a stool outside one of the dwellings. From her face and height, she had to be about Yarra’s age. My cousin had never known hunger—at least, not before the raiders came. Who knew what she was experiencing now? I bit my lip, wishing I had saved some of our ship’s provisions to share with the town.
Hoofbeats sounded up the road. The children put aside their makeshift ball and gathered in the square. Trygve tugged Ersel and me into the shadow of the nearest cottage. Three warriors on midnight-black horses cantered into the village. Two were lean and muscled, each carrying a bronze shield. The third had a softer, rounder build and wore a thick, black band of fabric as a chestbinding. The horses shone in the sun. Tossing glossy black manes, they snorted and pranced as the children gathered around them. The warriors carried baskets heaped with brown loaves of bread tied behind their saddles.
The thegns all wore identical tunics: pine-forest green with yellow trim and a white stag embroidered at the center. I didn’t know that sigil. Their fingers glittered with gold rings, and they wore matching ruby armbands. These were not mercenaries.
I pressed myself tighter against the cottage wall. Had a jarl sent them? Had the warriors somehow received word of our landing already? I glanced toward the woods. We were too far from the trees to run. Maybe leaving the men behind had not been the smart thing after all. The thegns carried polished steel swords. If we had to fight our way back to the forest, I didn’t like our odds.
“I thought you were going to fall off in the mud! The way that mare can spin!” The largest thegn chuckled. He leaned over in his saddle and jovially clapped the small warrior on the back.
“They put us all to shame on a horse,” his companion called. He held out his hand to the first thegn. “I’ll take my silver now. I told you they’d stay on.”
“You were betting on me? I am your commander! How dare you?” the smaller thegn demanded. They crossed their arms over their chest, but a wide grin stretched their cheeks. “Well, at least Warik has faith.”
Still laughing together, the thegns took no note of us as they dismounted. The children swarmed them, and older people began emerging from the cottages. The commander removed their helm, revealing short blond hair, a crooked nose, and a rounded chin. They unfastened the first basket from their horse, then almost disappeared as the people scrambled to get close.
Where I was from, it was so rare to see a thegn who wasn’t male that I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Growing up, I’d always known that earning my place in a jarl’s hall would be a difficult task. Even if I was the best fighter, most of the jarls and kings on Brytten wouldn’t have allowed me to join their ranks. This warrior’s presence and obvious wealth made me curious about their leader.
The thegns began passing out the loaves. More aid was clearly needed, but my respect for this local jarl was increasing. Our jarl hadn’t cared enough to send soldiers to stop the raiders attacking my village. He never would exact reprisals, and Haakon had known that. If we’d had a jarl who cared for the small villages in his province, everything might have been different.
Trygve shifted beside me and took a step toward the square, but I held up my hand. We were hungry, but our hunger was different than what these people experienced. This food wasn’t for us. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to draw the thegns’ attention. The hamlet was small enough for all the inhabitants to know each other by sight. If these thegns had come before, they might recognize us as outsiders. Until I knew more about the jarl they served and his allegiances, we could not be seen.
The commander looked right over the heads of the crowd. They had storm-gray eyes, which bored into mine. They looked at Trygve and then at Ersel. A single lock of her turquoise hair had escaped her hood. My breath caught as the thegn’s eyes widened. They tapped the arm of one of the other warriors and pointed to us. I reached up to tuck the hair behind Ersel’s ear, but it was too late. I knew they had seen. Trygve wrapped a protective arm around me.
We were the only ones hanging back, and my caution had made us more visible. I waited for the warriors to approach us, but they just watched from amid the crowd. When they had distributed all the bread, they remounted.
“We should go,” Trygve murmured. “They haven’t arrested us yet, but they’ve seen us. If they don’t take us now, you can bet they’ll be riding straight back to their jarl to make a report.”
I nodded but didn’t move. The crowd had parted to allow an old man to pass through. He was so ancient that the skin on his face seemed to melt from his bones; it was translucent enough for all his veins to be visible. He walked with a pronounced limp, and his back was stooped. Most of his hair had fallen out, but a ring of pure white surrounded his bald crown. In his arms, he carried a teal-blue and red woven rug. I sucked in a sharp breath and took a step closer to him. It was the same pattern that my grandmother had perfected and used to weave her famous sails.
With a bow of his head, one of the thegns accepted the rug from the old man. “The jarl thanks you for this gift. We will return later this week with more bread and seed for your fields.”
The adults in the crowd murmured their thanks and began to disperse. With a final glance toward us, the thegns turned their horses and galloped up the road.
“We should go,” Trygve repeated and shook my shoulder. “Ragna, we need to get out of here. Those riders could come back with an army.”
“We need an army,” I whispered. My attention was now on the old man. He was limping into a house at the edge of the village.
I trotted toward him, leaving Ersel and Trygve behind. When he heard me running up behind him, the old man turned slowly. Up close, I could see that one of his eyes had succumbed to the same moon-blindness that had affected my grandmother in her last years. My palm was sweating. The shape of his nose was the same as hers. I felt unsure and shy. I had wanted to meet my kin and hoped for their aid, but besides Yarra, this old man might be the only family I had left.
Now that I saw him, I wondered if he would believe me. I didn’t look like my grandmother. She and my birth father had shared Lief’s dark hair and blue eyes. I couldn’t prove my identity. And my grandmother had fled this village half a century ago. Her memory might have vanished with her. If they were related, he might never have met her.
He looked at me warily and, when I stared and said nothing, he cleared his throat. “Yes? Who are you? Did you come from the jarl as well?”
“No,” I took a deep, steadying breath. “I come from Brytten.”
He cocked his head to the side. “I don’t know anyone from over the sea. I’m a simple weaver and village elder. I barely travel even as far as the next village.”
“I think you knew my grandmother.” My voice emerged as a squeak. I had never felt so stupid and so hopeful at the same.
He squinted at me, and his clear eye roamed my face for any sign of familiarity. I held my breath, praying that he would see something in me, a trace of my grandmother that would make this easier. But he just shrugged.
I tried to bury the disappointment and not let the hurt show on my face. He didn’t recognize me. I didn’t know him. It was irrational that my stomach clenched, and a sob lodged in my throat. But other than a child, who might be dead, I had no one left. It was foolish to hope that a stranger might replace what I’d lost.
I shook my head and said, “No, how could you remember her? My grandmother was Aela. She left this town many, many years ago, after a crop plague. It was so long ago. At least fifty years.”
The old man’s jaw slackened. His eyes scanned me with a new urgency. Before I could step back, he reached for me. His hand closed around my wrist, and he drew me in for a closer look. He exhaled. “You don’t look at all like how I remember her, but it’s been so long. My memory isn’t what it was.”
“I don’t look like her.” I pulled my arm back and hugged my chest. His touch brought me closer to tears. The façade of strength I’d maintained for so long felt as fragile as new ice, ready to crack beneath me. “I look like my mother. My father was Aela’s son.”
He sat on a stool beside the door. His eyes crinkled in a smile. “Aela was my sister. My eldest sister. This town has never been much, but years ago we had a vibrant weaving industry. When the famine came to this country, our parents couldn’t afford to feed all five of us, so Aela agreed to go. My other two sisters died that year, and fever took my brother a few years after that. I never heard from Aela. I always thought she’d been lost at sea.”
He remembered her. Lightness expanded inside my chest, and I wanted to laugh. “I’m Ragna.”
“Halvag. The last weaver left in Skjordal,” he said, beaming. Then his expression clouded. “Why are you here? This town is dead. Just a few families are left now, left behind while everyone else has sought their fortune elsewhere.”
“My family is dead.” I had meant to make my case sound grand, to tell him that I was raising an army. But the bleak truth slipped out before I could stop it. Looking him in the eye, I slowly peeled back my sleeve to reveal the hook and my navigator’s marks. The maps showed the village, the edge of the coast, and the path we’d taken through the forest. The miniature ship had vanished.
Halvag traced a wrinkled finger over the waves, then sharply drew his hand back when they started to move. His gaze hovered on the hook. I swallowed and fought the urge to cover it with my sleeve. I had chosen the hook to invoke fear, not pity.
“A glove might have been more elegant,” Halvag said. “But that looks practical for a seafarer. Catch any sharks with it?”
The idea of dangling from the bow and fishing for sharks with my arm in the water was so absurd that I laughed. It was the kind of thing my grandmother might have said. His grin blossomed into a wide smile. I knew it mirrored my own.
“I came here to look for help.” I gestured to where Trygve and Ersel stood. “My family was killed by raiders. They wanted to take children like me, with the markings. I have a crew waiting for me in the forest. They will come when I signal them.”
Halvag pointed to his cottage. “I don’t have much, but you are welcome to stay here for a night or two before you continue your journey. I can’t feed many men for long, but you are welcome any time. I am an old man and don’t get many visitors.”
“Who were those warriors who came through here?”
“Jarl Honor’s thegns. They come one or twice a week to bring some supplies and food. Sometimes they bring seeds. They’re helping us rebuild this place.”
“Does the jarl have an alliance with any of the earldoms in Norveggr? With… Haakon?”
“We have no love for the late Haakon here if that’s what you mean,” Halvag said. “No one in this earldom was sad to learn that he was dead. He has raided coastal towns like this one for years.” Halvag spat on the ground. “Jarl Honor is fair and would listen to you. If you want to seek aid in Djalsfor, I will see you on your way in the morning. You can say that you are my kin.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
My kin. Ducking my head, I bit the inside of my cheek to hide my smile. I walked toward the tree line to signal the crew.