Europa (24 page)

“Why didn’t you help him?” Wren asked.

Arn shook his head. “It sounds foolish, I know. They were only flies. But you didn’t see them. No one has ever seen such a thing. They covered him like bees on a hive, like pitch on a stone, and he was screaming. Not yelling or cursing like a man in battle, or angry, or drunk. He was screaming like a child trapped in a nightmare. It just went on and on. And then he fell into the pit.”

Wren swallowed. “And then Fenrir came out?”

“And then the king climbed back out,” Arn corrected her. “The flies were falling off him like snow or ashes, all dead. But the king, he was growing bigger and taller, right in front of us. His arms getting longer, his face twisted and stretched like a hide being tanned from the inside. I saw the hair growing out from his face and hands. His clothes tore apart and hung off him in tatters. And all the while he roared at us, and snarled at us, and stared at us with those yellow eyes.”

The girl felt her face twisting into a frown as she realized the truth. “The king was the first reaver? King Ivar is Fenrir?”

“Not the real Fenrir, obviously.” Arn went on gazing into her eyes. “But just as terrible and monstrous, I’ve no doubt. The change came over him and was gone again in the time it takes two waves to sweep a beach clean. One moment he’s a man, and the next he’s a beast with claws and fangs, with tails and mad eyes, all covered in fur, white and black and red as blood.”

“Like a summer fox,” Wren whispered.

Arn nodded, and took a step closer to her.

Wren glanced down at his bare chest and then back up at his dark eyes. “And then?”

“Then the king grabbed the nearest man and tore him in half, ripping his arms off and splitting his chest open, spilling his guts on the ground with buckets of blood.” Arn paused. “But we didn’t falter. Every man grabbed a hammer or pole or pickaxe, and we ran at him. I don’t know what anyone else was thinking, but I was thinking we should push him back into the hole. I don’t suppose I thought we could actually kill a demon like that. The king killed another man, and then another, and then he hurled the bodies at us, knocking us to the ground. He roared at us, and I stared up at him and I thought, well, this is it. This is the end for me. But the beast turned and bounded off across the mountain.”

“It left you alive?”

“The king did.” Arn paused. “The queen didn’t. We were still picking ourselves up off the ground, still covered in the blood and bodies of the three dead men, when the queen’s viper struck.”

“She ordered your deaths?”

Arn nodded. “There were only four of us left, and the bastard slit our throats and split our hearts and left us there to rot in the sun.”

“What bastard? Who killed you?”

“Leif Blackmane.”

“Nine hells.” Wren covered her mouth and whispered, “Freya.”

The corner of Arn’s mouth fluttered as though he wanted to smile but couldn’t quite remember how to. “It’s the strangest thing, but as I lay there, breathing my last breath, I saw something. I could almost swear I saw the dead foreman stand back up again, and walk away.”

Wren barely heard him.

Oh, Freya.

“And that’s the end of it,” said Rolf. “What do you think of that?”

Wren stared at the dead man. “Why haven’t you told anyone? People need to know this. People need to know what really happened. Why did you wait? That was all five years ago. Five years! Think of all the people who’ve died since then!”

Arn suddenly looked ill and turned away, but Rolf glared up at her. “Hey! Don’t you yell at him. He’s only been out of the grave for a month, and he’s the first of the men who died that day to wake up. Don’t you know anything? You might lie in the ground a day or a year or an age before you wake up, if ever. So you back off! You leave him alone!”

“S-sorry, I’m sorry.” Wren pushed her hair back with trembling hands. “I do know that, I know all about it, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. Thank you. Thank you both, so much.”

“Come on, Arn!” Rolf turned and stomped away, and vanished at the edge of the yard. Arn gave her one last sad look and faded into the shadows.

Wren sighed as the smooth muscles of the ghost’s chest disappeared. Then she glanced up at the starry sky and said, “Allfather, I know that you and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I’d consider it a great kindness if you got off your drunken, whoring ass and saved Freya!”

She sniffed and marched back down the steps to the cell door and peeked into the darkness through the bars, and for the first time she noticed the flakes of rust around the edges of the door and the stains around the handle. Frowning, she grabbed the handle and shook it, but the door held soundly in its stone frame.

“Woden, I am your true and faithful vala, and I plan to serve you a very long time. So, in case you’re looking for some reason why you should bother with your daughter Freya, who is a very lovely person by the way, you should know that I’m prepared to make some very generous sacrifices to you just as soon as I have something to offer up. Maybe a seal, and some rabbits, and a pheasant. And you’ll watch over her, and maybe shove Leif off a cliff, all right?”

The night sky made no answer.

Wren sighed and frowned at the steel door again. She reached up and grabbed the rusty bars in the window and shook them.

The fangs sank into her left hand in perfect silence and the only sound that broke the night was Wren’s shriek as she felt her flesh rent open and the searing, plague-filled venom trickling into her veins. She wrenched her hand back and fell to the ground, and through the bars she heard a deep-throated growl that ululated, like laughter.

Groaning and gasping, Wren clutched her burning hand to her belly and stared up at the heavens. “Woden, you miserable son of a bitch!”

Wren ran from Katja’s cell clutching her bleeding fingers to her belly, tears streaming from her eyes. She stumbled in the snow and fell hard against the stone wall of the castle, and she lay there a moment, wheezing and sobbing quietly with her chin on her chest and her eyes squeezed shut.

I’m going to die. I’m going to turn into one of those things, those ugly freaks, those monsters, I’m going to turn into a monster, and then they’re going to come for me, and no one will protect me, and they’ll have to kill me.

Maybe Freya will kill me.

After a few moments she ran out of breath and out of tears and she just sat in the snow, exhausted and trembling, staring at a patch of stone in the wall beside her head. With her burning left hand in her lap, she raised her right hand to look at the bump of the rinegold ring on her finger inside her glove.

Gudrun’s ring.

She sniffed. “Hello, mistress? Gudrun? Brynhilda? Anyone?”

Dimly she saw three or four withered old faces hover in the air for a moment, but only a moment. The faces of the dead valas of Denveller frowned at her and faded away into the darkness. She dropped her hand into her lap and sighed.

“Why?” she whispered. Wren rolled her head against the wall to look up at the black sky and the flurries of white tumbling gently down toward her. “Why, lord? I served you, I kept my faith with you, I kept my oaths to you, and I would have been a good vala. I know I would have. Better than Gudrun, at least. I mean, let’s face it, she was crazy. She spent more time pissing on the floor than honoring you, Allfather.”

The sky said nothing.

“All right, well, maybe that was unfair. She did serve you a long time while she was able, and trained more than a few apprentices, I know. So that’s something. Sorry, lord.” Wren sniffed and shivered. “Still, I would have done pretty well, too.”

The snow began to build up on her arm, and she gently shook it off.

“You’re really not going to answer me, are you? I mean, you never do, but I was sort of thinking that you might this time, since I’m going to die now. You know, it would be nice. Just a word or two,” Wren whispered. “Good work, Wren. Thanks, Wren. Everything will be made clear in the next world, Wren.”

A clump of snow fell from the outer wall and landed on the ground by her foot with a soft thump.

“Fine.” Wren pushed herself up and trudged through the knee-deep snow to the iron door of the castle that led inside to the cloak room and the dining hall beyond, but a sound caught her ear and she paused. The crackle of the burning torch by the door seemed to roar in the silence, so she wandered away from its light and heat and noise back across the courtyard, listening.

The sound had been either very quiet or very far away, but it had sounded like a word, a single word drawn out in a long, weary breath. She crunched across the yard, head down, eyes narrowed to slits. Her hand throbbed, but with it wrapped up inside her sleeve she found it easier to push the pain to the back of her mind.

After all, I have hours, days, before anything will actually happen to me, right?

“Morayo,” said the tiny voice.

Wren froze in place, frowning at the dark walls and snowy lumps around her.

Morayo? Where did that come from? And what does it mean?

Slowly she started walking again, tilting her head back and forth. It had been a quiet voice, not a distant one, and the girl made her way around the far side of the castle, scanning the shuttered windows and even glancing at the top of the outer wall for some sign of life. But the cracks in the shutters were all dark and there was no one on the wall.

“Morayo.”

Wren looked sharply to her left, then hurried toward the castle wall. The starlight fell on a rough wall of black stone that ran straight down into the freshly fallen snow without a door or window or crack to tell what might be inside. Wren set to digging and kicking the snow away from the base of the wall, but under it all she only found the cold edge of where the wall and the earth met. There was nothing there.

“Hello?” she called softly, and then a little louder, “Hello there?”

The ground was silent, and the night was silent, and Wren’s feet were cold, so she stomped back around to the front of the castle and went inside. The dining hall was empty except for two of the old guards sitting by the fire at the far end, and she went to sit beside them for a little while to dry out her hair and boots, while taking great care to keep her left hand folded up inside her blanket, which she kept draped across her thin shoulders.

The two guards said nothing to her. They didn’t even look at her. They just stared into the smoldering coals in the brazier and chewed on their beards and gently passed gas from time to time.

With her hair dry and billowing out of control down her back and her left hand barely throbbing at all, and only a trickle of sweat on her brow, Wren stood up and quietly left the dining hall. She walked back down the corridor to the room she had slept in the night before. She stood in the corridor for a moment and stared through the open doorway at the cold, lonely bed in her room, and then she walked on by it.

As she passed a room on her left, the curtain was pulled back and a young woman with long dark hair stared out at her. “Oh, it’s you.”

Wren paused. “Thora, isn’t it? How are you?”

“Fine. Tired. Cold.”

Wren nodded.

“So Gudrun is dead,” Thora said. “You must be pleased. Skadi says she was a horror. Did she do things to you?”

“What things?”

Thora shrugged. “Things she shouldn’t.”

Wren cringed. “No! She didn’t do much at all. She could barely move.”

“Oh. Well, good for you then. Are you planning on staying here for long?”

“I’m not planning anything. I’m just waiting for Freya to come back.”

“Then I’m sorry,” Thora said. “You’ll be waiting a long time. No one ever comes back from the north.”

“Not even Leif?”

The apprentice’s face hardened into an expression somewhere between rage and sorrow. “Leif will come back, somehow. He always survives.”

“Oh.” Wren nodded. “I’ll bet he does. You know, back home we have a word for people that always survive, and it isn’t
lucky
. It’s
craven
. It’s a pity you don’t have any real men around here to remind you of that.”

Thora’s hand whipped out from the shadows and smacked Wren across the face. “We had the finest men, the bravest warriors, and the finest prince, a prince worthy of standing beside the Allfather at Ragnarok, a prince who—” She broke off, her lip trembling. “But now they’re all dead. The plague took them, one by one, leaving us with the old, and with Leif.”

Wren jerked back from the doorway, clutching her stinging cheek with a sudden tear gathering in the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry. You must have lost people you loved, too. Sorry. I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too.” The apprentice stared out from her haunted, sunken eyes and then withdrew into her room, leaving Wren alone in the dark corridor.

She stared at the closed curtain for a moment, trembling and confused and tempted to press inside and talk to the tall girl again, but instead Wren turned and hurried down the hall with her eyes burning and lips squeezed tightly together. At the end of the passage she turned left and found a stone stair, and she ran down it, down and down the narrow crooked steps into the blackness until she found the earthen floor and she sat down in the cold and the dark, and she cried.

After a while she was too tired to cry anymore and she leaned back on the bottom step and stared into the utter darkness of the cellar. She was about to stand up and go back to her room to try to sleep when she heard footsteps above her descending the stairs. At first she didn’t move, content to let whatever servant find her and sneer at her and tell her to go back to her room. But then she heard the whisper.

“Morayo.”

The voice! It’s coming from down here!

Wren stood up, groping in the endless shadows for something, anything. She had no idea what she was looking for, but she had to look, and then she remembered the feet thumping down the long stone stair behind her, and she fumbled her way around what seemed to be a tall, frozen sack of potatoes, and she huddled down to wait.