Europa (20 page)

She was probably just like me. Content. Even happy. Looking forward to the future. And now look at her.

Wren said her goodnights and drew the curtain to her room, and Freya followed Erik into theirs. Starlight spilled through the barred window onto the bed, and thunder rumbled across the sky as the soft patter of icy rain began to fall on the heavy turf roof.

Freya and her husband shed their clothing, letting their knives and coats and shirts and trousers all slip to the floor in furry, leathery piles. She watched him move to the bed, his bare chest and arms distorted by the shadows, his muscles rippling like a snow lion’s in the night. Erik stretched out on top of the blankets and closed his eyes.

Freya paused, then untied the tight cotton stay from around her small breasts and let the cloth fall away. She walked slowly onto the mattress and stood over her naked husband as she stared out the window at the storm growling and pouring on the dark city outside. The cold air swirled over her skin and she felt the gooseflesh pricking down her back.

The black marks inked into her arms seemed to ripple and come alive in the shadows, and she ran her fingers over them. Katja had made them, working the ink into her skin with a single needle, one prick at a time, to create the ancient icons for bears, and elk, and eagles, and snakes, and everything that Freya had ever hunted and killed. And woven around the black animal heads were the runes, the words of strength and faith and health and luck that her sister had given her, years and years ago.

Warm fingers played on her ankles and she knelt down on Erik, feeling the heat rising from his bare skin as his hands traveled up her legs and belly and breasts. She sighed and closed her eyes as her husband gently massaged her tired muscles, and she felt his thighs begin to rock beneath her. Freya looked down at him, at the faint smile on his lips and the icy blue glimmers of his eyes. She said, “You know, there are times, not often, but sometimes, when I wish I could hear your voice, not much, but just to know what it would sound like. To hear you laugh.”

He nodded seriously.

“Or maybe sing?”

He shook with silent laughter as he plucked at her nipples.

“Or just… say my name.”

Erik took one hand back to sign, “Me too. Sometimes.”

“But back there, tonight.” Freya sighed again as his hands pressed hard into her thighs and buttocks, and he began shifting her down lower onto his hips. “Tonight, back there, I wish you could have spoken for me. Just that one time. Just because… seeing Katja like that was just, you know, I kicked her.”

Her lip trembled and she felt the corners of her eyes burning. “I kicked her in the head. In the face. I kicked her so hard. I looked at her and it wasn’t her. Not anymore. And I was scared, and I wanted to get out, and I kicked her in the face, and… a part of me wished that she would just die right there.”

The tears spilled down her cheeks, and Erik reached up to pull her down against his chest, and she huddled there against his warm skin.

“I wished she was dead, so it would all end, so we could go home.” She lay very still in her husband’s arms, staring at the wall. There was a blazing knot in her chest and she forced herself to keep breathing. “And then that bastard Leif made me think she was dead for a moment, and as much as I wanted to kill him for it, I was almost grateful to him. And then I told Skadi I would… that I would hunt that thing for her. For her ring. So that maybe she could help Katja. Maybe. All for a
maybe
. I’m going to hunt a demon for a
maybe
.”

Erik’s hand reached out in front of her and he signed, “
We
. We will hunt it, together.”

“I know. We. I just keep thinking that soon it will be over. When we get to Gudrun. When we get to Skadi. But it just keeps going.” She whispered, “I don’t want to keep going, Erik. I want to go home. I want it to be like it was before. And what if we can’t save her? What if we have to drag Katja home and lock her up like that man in the mill with his brother? I can’t do that to her. I won’t do that to her. I’ll kill her first.”

Freya gasped quietly as the pain in her chest grew tighter, and then she let go, and she sobbed a little. She wiped her eyes and said, “I will kill her. I’ll do it. I won’t ask you to. I’ll do it myself. I’ll kill Katja, when the time comes.”

Erik wrapped his arms around her and kissed her head. Freya closed her eyes and felt her body relaxing one muscle at a time, the aches in her chest and back fading gradually, the tension in her neck and shoulders unbinding bit by bit, until she finally fell asleep.

She awoke in the dark, still lying naked on Erik’s bare body on top of the blankets with the freezing rain drumming on the roof. He was snoring.

Freya shivered and climbed off her husband, smiling in the dark as she felt his erection rubbing along her leg. Fumbling in the dark, she peeled back the blankets and crawled under them beside Erik, and closed her eyes.

A woman’s wail rose outside in the night.

Freya opened her eyes, listening through the noise of the rain. The wail faded away and did not return, but another sound drew her gaze back to the doorway. A familiar soft grunt came from the hall. She stood and crossed the room, feeling the cool air moving over her warm bare skin, and she pulled back the curtain to look out into the corridor.

A dozen paces away she saw the queen’s apprentice Thora pressed up against the wall with her skirts held high around her waist. Her legs were hidden by the youth kneeling before her, his long black hair obscuring the darkness between her legs. Her fingernails dug into his shoulders, her small white teeth biting down on her lip as she quivered, every muscle in her body straining to remain perfectly still. And slowly, the youth on the floor stopped moving his head, and he sighed.

That’s Leif! He’s a bold one, right out in the hallway like this. But good for her, I suppose. It looks like she took what she wanted from him.

Thora opened her pale lids and for a moment the two women stared at each other over Leif’s head, and Freya saw the flat, dead emptiness in the apprentice’s eyes. The brown-haired girl leaned her head back against the wall, no longer biting her lip, no longer straining, without any hint of joy or release or pleasure in her face. She just stood there, holding Leif’s head to her bare flesh, staring at Freya with no expression at all.

For a moment, the huntress wanted to go to her, to say something, but Thora lowered her eyes and turned away.

Freya closed the curtain and went back to bed, crawled under the blankets, and was soon asleep. In the morning, she found Erik just as eager as he had been in his sleep, and she took her pleasure of him. He was still groggy when she started, so she led him through the motions, smiling at how naked his expressions were as he shivered and grunted beneath her.

Afterward, they dressed and left the room, and found Wren loitering in the hall with a strange pout on her lip. The girl fell into step behind them. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Instead of talking?” Erik signed.

Freya smiled and said, “About what?”

“That I should stay here and keep an eye on Katja for you, while you’re out hunting. I mean, if the Allfather wanted me to come with you, then I would, of course, but there’s been a shortage of divine signs lately that the good lord Woden wants me to see the natural beauty of Mount Esja anytime soon, and so I was thinking—”

Freya laughed. “Of course you’re not coming with us. And thank you for offering to watch my sister. I’ll feel much better knowing you’re here to keep her safe.”

“Oh. Right, good, then that’s settled.” Wren smiled nervously.

“Something else on your mind?”

“No. Well, not much. Nothing of importance, I’m sure. Just a noise I heard in the night. It sounded like a woman crying, and not in a happy way.”

Freya nodded. “I think I heard it too. Maybe the reavers killed her husband.”

“Maybe. It’s just that, well, it sounded like it was
inside
the castle.”

They found the dining hall after a moment of peering down the wrong corridors, and they nodded their good mornings to the handful of guards standing around the smoking fire pits with their bowls of mash and crusts of bread. Wren fetched a few bowls of their own and they ate standing over one of the smoky pits apart from the men of Rekavik.

Freya and Erik finished quickly and let Wren see to the bowls, said their farewells, and strode out through the cloak room and through the iron door out into the bright morning sunlight in the cobbled courtyard. Leif was leaning against the wall just outside the door, and when they stepped out, he pushed off from the wall and glared at them.

“I’m to be your guide on Mount Esja, and farther if needs be. The queen’s orders. But let’s be clear. This is your hunting trip, not mine. I don’t plan to die with you out there,” he said quietly. There was no fierce arrogance in his eyes or voice. He looked tired, even scared, which made him look even younger than before.

Freya let her eyes flick down to the youth’s sword, reliving his words from last night, reliving the sight of his blade flying at her throat. Last night he had seemed vicious and deadly, but now he was something else entirely.

Maybe he’d just come from an argument last night. Or he lost a friend. Or he was just scared at seeing a reaver in the castle cell. He’s lost dozens of friends to the reavers over the years. So all right. Today is a new day. Time to start over.

“That’s fine,” she said. “We appreciate any help you can offer.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do, but don’t expect much help from me.” Leif sniffed and turned away, and over his shoulder he said, “If we do find the demon, I’ll probably just let him kill you.”

Or maybe he’s still a prick.

“I want to stab him,” Erik signed. “Do you want to stab him?”

Freya nodded.

The hunters shouldered their spears and the three of them marched out into the streets and down the smaller lanes to the eastern seawall overlooking the bay. A grim-faced guard watched them step out through an iron door onto the gravel beach where the low tide had left a field of seaweed gleaming wetly in the cold air.

The black water of the bay sloshed up on the shore flecked with green-white foam and froth. The beach was only a few paces wide between the base of the seawall and the edge of the inky water, and the gravel sloped down sharply between the two. Leif led the way along the strand back toward the southern side of the bay and Freya noted the armed men, all massive and scarred house carls, leaning on the wall above them every fifty paces.

“This is a little faster than going back out the main gate,” Leif said. “But only at low tide, of course.”

“And at high tide?” Freya asked.

The youth pointed to the seawall beside them and Freya saw the dirty line of green and black slime several hand-spans above the wall’s base. “Oh.”

“Every now and then, a reaver will try to come at the city this way,” Leif said. “But we always hear them on the gravel, or splashing in the water. By the time they’re close enough to see, there are at least twenty men on the wall waiting for them, and then it’s over quickly enough.”

They rounded the base of the point and turned east toward Mount Esja, which rose gently from the nearby hills from a very wide base to a very distant peak. The frosted grass and scrub only rose a third of the way up its slopes, shifting to broad white sheets of gleaming snow for the second third, and from there up it was all black stone and gray ash. The summit exhaled a lazy trail of smoke into the cloudless sky.

For two hours they hiked along an old footpath overgrown with grass and weeds, and Freya kept her eyes on the ground and her ears on the wind, searching. From time to time, Erik would point out a track or a trace, a bit of fur or a depression in the frozen mud, but most looked and smelled old. And the farther they climbed into the hills, closer to Esja and farther from the water, the warmer the air and the ground became.

“How many reavers are there altogether?” Freya asked.

“A few hundred, at least.” Leif did not turn back to speak and his soft voice was muffled by the wind. “They run in packs, and sleep in dens. There are two or three dens on the northeast face of Esja, and many more farther north and east beyond Thorskull where the deer and bear hunting is better. There are also five or six dens to the south near Gulbringa, which is probably why we haven’t heard from Torsberg in a long while. We’ve had refugees from all over with all sorts of stories over the last few years. Usually the reavers just kill the people they find. Only a handful get bitten and survive long enough to turn.”

“Still, hundreds of reavers…” Freya frowned at the distant slopes of Esja. “Where should we start our search? Are we going to the ravine where you fought Fenrir the last time?”

“No. The queen told me to show you the pit where the beast was found.” At this, the youth did look back for a moment. His mouth was hidden by the collar of his jacket but Freya could see how he narrowed his eyes, and she wondered if he was merely squinting against the light shining off the sparkling bay icebergs, or if he might actually be smiling at them.

Shortly before noon, Leif pointed out a cluster of purplish-red barberry bushes and they made a light meal of the little fruits. Freya ate sparingly as she gazed down over the distant bay to the tiny walled city, half-hidden by the fog creeping in off the sea.

“Something wrong?” Erik signed.

She shook head and said nothing.

It took another two hours of steady hiking up the steep slopes of Esja, angling ever northward across the loose, ashy shale, before Leif paused again and pointed to a dark shape jutting out from the face of the mountain. “Ivar’s Drill.”

It was a dim and distant shape, a gray figure leaning out into the cool empty air from a shallow depression in the ground. Everything was silent and still. And Freya saw only a spear of rock that would take another half hour to reach, and so on they marched. As they drew closer, Freya began to see the details of the drill. It was massive steel drum, with a tangle of what looked to be pots and pans poking out of the top. Six massive steel legs reached out from the drum to stand on the rocky slope, holding the machine steady. And when they finally reached the edge of the pit, the huntress looked down and saw the long steel arm of the drill reaching down into the darkness.