Freya the Huntress (Europa #2: A Dark Fantasy) (16 page)

Torchlight bobbed down the last few steps and one of the elderly guards entered the cellar with a lit candle in one hand and a small plate in the other. He walked across the cellar, taking his small ball of dancing light with him, illuminating the rough rock walls of the cave that served as the castle cellar, and Wren tried to see all the sacks of vegetables and grain, and all the salted carcasses, piled along the walls as he passed.

At the end of the cave the guard turned left and moved out of sight for a moment, but the candlelight continued to dance on the walls right there, just around the corner. And then the man returned, walking just as calmly and dully as before with his candle and plate, and he went up the steps, taking the light with him.

When he was gone, Wren stood up and carefully felt her way across the dark cave, rediscovering with her outstretched hands the sacks and butchered animals that she had seen a moment ago. She came to a place that she guessed to be the corner around which the man had disappeared, and she stopped, knelt down, and whispered, “Hello?”

“Morayo.”

Wren fell over backwards. The voice had been so close, just in front of her face. There had even been a faint gasp of breath, a movement of the cold air. She got back up and reached out with her hand. “My name is Wren. Who are you? Is that your name, Morayo?”

She groped left and right, and farther forward, but encountered nothing. Unwilling to move any farther from the stairs, Wren stopped trying to reach out. Instead, she pulled off her right glove with her teeth and held her bare hand in front of her face and rubbed the rinegold ring with her thumb, and whispered the words, “Wake up, you old hags.”

The ring glowed faintly, so faintly that at first all Wren could see was the ring itself floating in the dark. But the light grew a bit more until she could see her hand, and when she held the ring close to the ground she could see the face of the stone floor. She reached out again, extending her hand just above the floor. She found a plate, a dark circle of tin lying crooked on a bump, and a few small bones wearing a few small shreds of flesh and fat on them. There was a broth in the bottom of the plate as well, but it had run across the tilted surface and down to the ground.

Wren reached a little farther, and found a bare foot. Five dirty toes twitched in the light, and someone inhaled sharply.

A woman?

Wren moved her body a bit farther forward and raised her ring up past the foot, and leg, and body to find the face. She found it exactly where she expected it to be, and yet the sudden discovery of two wide white eyes in the darkness startled her and Wren yanked her hand back, blanketing the face in darkness again, which was worse. So she held out her ring and looked on the face of the woman.

She was middle-aged with gaunt cheeks and dark-rimmed eyes that never seemed to blink. At first Wren thought that the light from her ring was so feeble that it left the woman’s skin in shadows, but after a moment she realized that the stranger’s skin was naturally dark, a deep sort of brown Wren had seen in the eyes of only a handful of people from the south of Ysland, and her hair rose about her head like young heather on the moors.

The woman blinked and whispered, “Morayo.”

“Morayo?” Wren sat down beside her and tried to hold her hand up in a comfortable and non-threatening gesture so the light would fall on both their faces. “Your name is Morayo? I’m Wren. Can you say Wren?”

“Kill… Morayo.” She wasn’t just speaking slowly from exhaustion or starvation, she was struggling to speak Yslander at all. She had an accent like nothing the young vala had ever heard before. “I want… to kill… Morayo.”

“Oh, I see.” Wren nodded slowly. “All right. Good, good. That’s something. You want to kill someone. It’s good to have goals in life. It keeps you going when times are tough. I know how that is. Now, what is
your
name?”

The stranger looked at her with shaking eyes that stared right through her, seeing nothing. Wren watched her eyes dance in confusion and fear. It was a look she recognized all too well, the same look she had seen in Gudrun’s cloudy eyes every day for the last six years.

She’s insane.

Wren patted the woman’s hand and tried to move the plate closer to her, but the stranger grabbed the plate from her hand and pushed it back down to the floor in the exact same place, tilted up on the uneven stone floor.

“Okay then. We’ll just leave that there for now.”

The glow from her ring began to flicker and fade.

“I’m going to go back upstairs now, but I’ll come back tomorrow. I promise.”

The woman shuddered. “Morayo.”

Wren nodded and exhaled slowly. Then she turned and fumbled back across the dark cellar to the bottom of the narrow winding steps and climbed back up to the main floor. Only a glimmer of starlight fell through the small barred windows, but it was enough to make the upper world seem like a brightly lit paradise compared to the black pit of the cellar.

She hurried back to her room and crawled into bed, where she lay shivering, alone. Her injured hand started to throb again, and when she closed her eyes she dreamed of fangs and blood.

Chapter 14. Glymur Falls

The next morning Freya awoke to Erik’s strong hand gently massaging her shoulder. In the darkness they had moved another mile to the northeast of the crevasse where the two dead reavers lay, and now the first cool rays of the sun fell on the eastern hills and fields to the faint rustling sounds of crickets, rabbits, and sparrows. She kissed her husband, tasting the trace of salt on his tongue, and then they gathered their spears and blankets, and looked at Leif. The youth sat cross-legged on a rock, his chin on his fist. He glanced at them, frowned, and hopped down to the ground. Without a word, he set out for the east, and they followed.

The eastward trek was easier than skirting Mount Esja, though the constant interruptions to cross a stream or hike over a steep hill slick with frost slowed their progress. The brush was sparse here, offering few handholds and no food, and vistas of nothing but grass and earth and stone dusted with ice and snow. But at the crest of each hill, Freya looked out at the landscape and saw their destination growing closer.

They passed the little peak of Sandfell at the base of the volcano, and there they found an empty shepherd’s hut of broken and tumbled stones, but no trace of reavers. Then they began the long hike up the northern side of Jolur’s Hill, a huge bulge in the earth clothed in brown grass and frozen mud. A lone rabbit ran across their path more than once, and several crows stood on the high ridge above them, watching the three people slowly crossing their domain.

When they finally started down the far side of Jolur’s Hill, Freya sighted Myrka’s Lake to the south and the peak of Burfell beyond it. Burfell was the farthest north she had ever ventured before, years ago, and she wondered if that night she spent on the high hill she’d been watched by reavers, or if they hadn’t existed yet. She couldn’t remember how long ago it had been.

They continued east across the icy stream called Brynja’s Ribbon near a handful of empty cottages and trampled gardens full of old tracks that led nowhere, and then they continued up and over Mulafell Ridge. On the far side of the ridge the earth dove deep into a gorge and Leif said the river at the bottom was the Lower Botsna, and on the far side of the gorge Freya saw that the face of the earth was wrinkled and cracked with the channels of hundreds of ancient streams that no longer flowed west to the sea.

They followed a deer trail down into the gorge and crossed the river at a rocky fording where a dozen broken houses stood collapsing into the hillside. Erik knelt by the corner of one house, pawing at the ground. He signed, “There was a fire here recently. Less than a week ago.”

Freya looked at the black marks on the ground. “A very small fire. But you’re right. Someone is still alive out here. Or was.”

On the far bank they turned north to follow the river, and soon the water grew deeper and wider and faster, churning white and wild over the stones as it raced north and west to the coast. At midmorning they came to a point where a second river, the Upper Botsna, came racing down from the east to join its Lower sister. The rushing and roaring of the water made any attempt at talking useless, and Leif pointed along the eastward river, and they hiked on.

They kept close to the water’s edge, sometimes on the cold turf a few steps above the river and sometimes in the freezing spray on the stones in the river itself. Shortly after leaving the Lower Botsna, the land began to rise, angling up steeper and steeper in the shadow of the wrinkled peak to the south, and the walls of the shore rose up around them like a canyon, rising up in sheer walls of gray stone as they trudged along the river’s edge with cold wet feet in the deepening shadows. Soon the roar of the churning river became unbearable as it echoed down the stone corridor of the gorge.

“No one could live in here,” Erik signed.

“Because of the noise?” Freya signed back.

“That, and because the river would only have to rise a little bit to wash a house away.”

“So what? You think he’s leading us into a trap?”

Erik nodded.

Freya grimaced and tightened her grip on her spear. She was tempted to call a halt and demand a few answers from their guide, but with the river screaming in their ears it would be a waste of time. So she kept her eyes on the path ahead, the path behind, and the gorge walls high overhead.

Half a league farther up, Erik pointed to the stone wall about as high up as Freya’s head at a long straight black mark etched into the rock. “What sort of fire did that?”

“Maybe a torch was dragged across it,” Freya signed. “I don’t know, but it means there is someone living up here after all.”

They pressed on, and the farther they went the louder the river became. A thin, cool mist hovered on the water and a thin green moss clung to the rock walls around them. And then a gray shape appeared in the mist ahead. It was a gently curving line that stretched across the entire river from one side of the gorge to the other, and when they were close enough Freya saw that it was a heavy chain bolted into the walls and strung across the river at a height just above her head. Leif pointed to the chain, and then to the far side of the river, and mimed the act of walking using his two fingers on his palm.

Freya exchanged frowns with her husband.

Dangling exposed above a rushing river? No, he won’t try to kill us here. It’s too obvious, and too uncertain. A fall into the river might be dangerous, but not fatal. No, I need to figure out why he wants us dead.

Is he afraid we’ll succeed where he failed? Is he just afraid to be out here at all? Or did Skadi tell him to kill us? Maybe she doesn’t want to find a cure. Maybe she wants to keep Rekavik afraid, isolated, and obedient to her. She’s only a dead king’s wife, not a real queen, so maybe she could lose power if the crisis ended.

Leif reached up for the chain, but Freya pulled him back and indicated to him that she would cross first. The sullen youth shrugged and stepped back. With a hand up from Erik, Freya leapt up to the chain and wrapped her legs over it so that she hung with her back to the river, and then she began pulling herself across. Hand over hand she moved along the chain, feeling the clumps of rust on the links and the cold smooth patches of steel where the links rubbed together.

The mist was thick and she felt her clothes growing heavy as beads of water formed on her face and shimmered on her eyelashes. It was a long, cold crossing, but she reached the far side without incident. Then Leif crossed in the same fashion, and finally Erik joined them. The huge hunter had barely dropped to the gravel strand before Leif set off again along the north shore, still following the river east.

Now the river screamed at them, and the walls screamed at them, and the mist grew so thick they could only see a few paces ahead. And finally Leif stopped and pointed up the path.

Glymur Falls towered over the river, a sheer white cascade that stampeded over the edge of the gorge and crashed down over the rock walls from one mossy ledge to another. Most of the water fell together in a single torrent, but some of the water came down the rock face closer to them, running down in silvery streams before rejoining the river. And in between the white falls and the silver falls, there was a house.

It was a stone lodge built upon a ledge high above the level of the river, and it stood against the gorge wall surrounded by huge broken stones. The roof was also stone, and there were no windows, so the only clear sign that the house was indeed a house at all was the heavy leather curtain protecting the doorway.

Freya gazed up at the falls, at the impossibly high and endless rush of white water plummeting down from the surface of the earth high above them, and she signed, “It’s beautiful. It must be the biggest waterfall in all of Ysland.”

Erik shrugged and signed back, “I’ve seen bigger.”

She punched him on the arm, and they resumed walking.

Leif led the way up to the ledge and he pushed inside the house without pausing at the door, and they followed him inside. Freya stepped into the deep shadows of the windowless home and blinked through her dripping hair. It was nearly silent inside the house. She wiggled her ears and jaw, and reveled in the gentle sensation of being able to hear herself think again. She glanced around, but there was nothing to see. The floor had been swept bare and the house was empty.

Leif flopped down in the corner on the floor and sighed. “Well, here it is. Glymur House. If anyone was still going to be alive out here, I thought it might be Kjartan. He lived here with his mother. Tough old bastard.”

Freya wrung out her hair on the floor and then let the heavy blonde lock hang down her chest to her belt. “Why would anyone live here? How would they even build this house?”

Leif shrugged. “It was a vala’s house. Kjartan’s mother was the vala. The last vala of Glymur, it would appear. Kjartan fished the river, I think. There’s trout in there. He’s the one who put up the chain, too, but that was a long time ago.”