Freya the Huntress (Europa #2: A Dark Fantasy) (24 page)

Freya saw the pain and fear in the girl’s darting eyes, and she laid a reassuring arm across Wren’s shoulders. “It’s all right. I understand. I’m thankful that you saved her, but I would have understood if you hadn’t, or couldn’t. I’ve known for days now that Katja may not survive this. And that I might have to kill her myself.”

Wren nodded.

“Come on.” Freya led her friend down the hall to the bedrooms and they were about to turn through a curtain on their right when she heard a heavy boot tread on the stones behind her. She turned. “Leif.”

For a young man who’d been maimed, thrown into a river, and forced to cross countless leagues of reaver hunting grounds alone and unarmed, he looked surprisingly well. But the closer he came, the more clearly she saw the strain in the lines of his neck and the creases around his eyes and mouth.

It’s a front. He’s a walking corpse. But who is he trying to impress? Me?

“How’s the shoulder?” she asked.

“It hurts,” he said.

“And what did Skadi say when you told her what really happened to your arm?”

Leif frowned.

“Did you tell her?” Freya narrowed her eyes. “Does queenie know who’s out there?”

Leif looked away.

Wren tilted her head and said in a sing-songy voice, “Oh, queenie doesn’t know.” Then she looked up at Freya. “Know what? Who’s out there?”

“Someone who knows the truth about the reavers,” Freya said. “And the truth about Skadi and Leif here.”

“He’s not who you think he is,” Leif said. “He’s a freak of nature. A demon. A liar. A sorcerer. He doesn’t care about you or the plague or saving lives. He only cares about himself, and about his power.”

“He’s a very old man from a far away land, and he has a very dangerous sword,” Freya said. “It’s that simple. And when he comes back here, you’re going to have to answer for the things that you’ve done.”

The young warrior stepped closer to her, and for a moment she saw a glimmer of real steel and ice in his eyes. “Pray to the gods that he stays away. Because if he does come back, you can be sure that I’ll kill you and your little pet before he kills me.”

Freya heard the venom in his voice and knew the threat was real. This was a young man who had spent the last five years fighting reavers, even fighting Fenrir himself.

He is a traitor and a liar and a coward, but he’s also a killer.

She stepped back against the wall and let him pass, and he strode by, his back straight and head held high as he slipped through the curtain into Thora’s room.

Freya nodded slowly.

So that’s who he’s trying to impress.

Chapter 20. Council

Omar Bakhoum sat down in the bottom of the rocky pit in the shadow of Ivar’s Drill and dangled his legs over the lip of the tunnel. The hole stared up at him, the darkness gazing into him in silence.

Near silence.

The tiny buzzing of the mosquitoes kept him scowling and jerking his head away, trying to keep the pests from whining in his ears. He gripped his sword and called the names of his inner council, his ghostly advisors, a few chosen souls from among the countless thousands that resided in his sun-steel blade.

One by one their faces and forms loomed darkly before him, standing on the floor of the pit around him dressed as they had been in life, aged as they had been at the moment of death, and wearing varying expressions of interest, annoyance, and boredom.

An elderly Indian physician with short white hair framing his lined brown face and stooping over his crooked little cane appeared on the left. A beautiful Hellan oracle with curling brown hair and soft olive skin sat on the right in her carefully folded white robes. A little Aegyptian girl dressed in a threadbare gray dress lay on the ground, staring up at the darkening sky and playing with a lock of her black hair.

And the young samurai from Nippon, Ito Daisuke, stood on the far side of the pit, pacing slowly along its edge. His green and black robes were immaculate, and his black hair was knotted at the back of his head, but a few long strands had escaped the knot and hung from his temples in such perfect balance that Omar suspected the youth had plucked them loose intentionally.

All of the others were there as well, as always. The vast multitude of the dead, thousands of souls collected from every nation and every era, hovered in the distance like pale stars, ringing Omar on every side and pressing in with hungry and pleading stares. There were even a few Yslanders among them, plague victims set free of their curse as the shreds of the fox-soul dissolved within the seireiken, as all animal souls did. And they too gazed hungrily at Omar, eager to speak and be spoken to. But he held them all at a distance, as always. He could search them and question them at will, on command, as he had on many occasions searched through this vast library of humanity for answers time and again.

But not today.

He sighed. “For five years, we’ve been trying to unravel this little riddle, haven’t we, dear friends?”

The physician and oracle nodded solemnly.

“We need to try something new, something different. We know the reavers cannot be treated with herbs or leeches, or even with sun-steel.” Omar stood up and took a few steps toward the rusting hulk of the drill. “We can’t pull the fox-souls out of the people. So if we cannot take the contagion out without killing the patient, what can we do?”

“Kill them quickly,” said Daisuke. “Hunt them down, and kill them all. It is the only solution and the only mercy they can hope to receive.”

Omar shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

“You know,” said the physician, “simply because none of the medicines have worked so far does not mean that no medicine will work in the future. You had only the crudest of instruments and materials in that cave behind the falls. Surely with the help of the valas, with their tools and their knowledge of the plants here, a balm can be created that will soothe both the minds and the bodies of the victims.”

“I doubt that, old friend,” Omar said.

“Perhaps we can bind them,” said the oracle. “Trap them. Control them. Even cast them into a deep sleep, to hibernate until you can find a true cure, if ever. At least then they might find some peace in oblivion, or even in dreaming. Perhaps their lives in this world cannot be salvaged, but in the dreaming world they might live a hundred better lives before their bodies expire.”

Omar smiled sadly. “We’ve been over this before. Even if we could sedate the reavers, even if we could grant them that peace, as soon as the warriors in Rekavik learned that their enemy was vulnerable they would hunt them down and slaughter them in their dens. That’s not the answer I want. I want a real cure. I want to give these people back their lives. All of them.”

“If you can’t get the fox-soul
out
,” said the Aegyptian girl, “then you should put something else
in
.”

Omar turned slowly to look at the little ghost lying on her back, wiggling her bare feet through the thin snow without troubling a single white flake. “Put what in, exactly?”

“I don’t know, something nicer. Like a fish-soul or something. Foxes are hunters, right? Kill or be killed. Fighting over the spoils of the hunt. Always competing for things. Food, mates. That’s what’s driving the reavers crazy, isn’t it? All those wild instincts creeping through their brains. Especially mating, I guess. So put something else in there. Maybe a deer-soul. Or even a tree-soul.”

“There are no trees in Ysland,” the oracle reminded her. “But the idea has merit.”

“Put something else in.” Omar nodded thoughtfully. “Something to balance the vixen. Something calm, controlled, stable.” He ran his thumb slowly down his stubbled jaw.

“Trouble.” The samurai stood on the western edge of the pit looking out over the slopes of Mount Esja and the bay below. “Two figures.”

Omar trotted across the frozen earth and snow and stood beside the ghost. Over a league away at the base of the mountain he could see shapes moving in the deep shadows, almost hidden from the fading daylight.

“One is a man with long hair,” said Daisuke. “The other is a reaver. A large one.”

“What?” Omar squinted. “Are you sure? I can barely see them.”

“Strong eyes. The advantages of youth,” the samurai said.

“Your eyes have been dead for over eight years,” Omar said with a grin. “But I believe you. Are they fighting?”

“No. They are standing very close together, but the man has not drawn a weapon. I think they are speaking to each other.”

Omar tightened his grip on his sword.

With Ivar dead, what reaver could possibly be talking to a man?

“Can you see anything else?”

A sharp howl split the silence, and Omar stepped back from the edge. He grimaced and looked at the samurai.

“Strange.” Daisuke paused. “The man is heading back along the edge of the bay toward the city now. The reaver is running in the opposite direction.”

“A meeting?” Omar turned away and walked back toward the hole and his other dead companions. “Could Skadi actually be working with the reavers?”

“If there are other reavers that can speak, then they must also have larger portions of the vixen’s soul,” said the physician. “Enough to have clear fox-instincts and clear human-thoughts, and not the muddled madness of the simple reavers.”

Omar shook his head. “I suppose so, but who?”

“Hey!” The Aegyptian girl sat up, leaving no mark in the snow to prove she had been there. “I want to talk about my idea some more. What are you going to put in the reavers to make them nice again?”

Omar felt his boot knock against something loose on the ground, and he knelt to pick up the hard brown lump dusted with ice crystals. Several tiny mosquitoes were crawling on the lump and buzzing their wings.

“I have an idea of what to use,” Omar said. “And I have an idea of how to deliver it. But we should work quickly. If Skadi is somehow in league with the reavers, then God only knows what she could be planning. But whatever it is, it will not be pleasant for our lovely young friend with the silvery hair.”

“You like her? The huntress?” The little girl scowled. “Her tattoos are ugly.”

“I think they’re quite nice, actually.” Omar picked up a second brown lump covered in mosquitoes. “Now help me look for more of these. We’re going to need a lot of them.”

Chapter 21. Feast

Freya stood at the top of the steps looking down at the iron door of her sister’s cell. The sun was resting on the western edge of the world, setting the sea and sky afire with crimson and molten gold as the eastern heavens draped themselves in princely violet and frozen stars.

My sister is a monster, and I keep her in a cell.

Freya shivered.

Wren shuffled through the snow to her side and stood with her, looking down at the door. She said, “I wish I’d had a chance to know her. If it hadn’t been for the reavers, I wouldn’t have been trapped in that tower. I would have been out in the world, learning and studying. I would have met your sister and traded secrets with her. Stories. Herbs.”

Freya nodded. “You would have liked her. She was always the funny one.”

Wren sniffed.

“You’ve been awfully quiet all afternoon,” Freya said. “Come to think of it, I haven’t heard you talk to the Allfather once since I got back.”

“No.” Wren sighed. “No, we’re not speaking right now.”

Freya glanced at the girl again. She was sweating and shivering, with dark shadows under her eyes, and her breathing sounded just a bit labored, and wet. Freya grabbed Wren’s shoulder and yanked her thick red hair up and away from her face, revealing the tall and pointed ear beneath it. Wren tried to pull away, but Freya held her still as she stared at the ear.

Wren too?

“When did this happen?” she asked as a lump began to form in her throat.

“Last night.” Wren wrenched herself away and Freya let her go. The girl stepped back and kept her eyes on the ground. “I was guarding the cell, and a good thing too, because some men came to kill Katja. But after they left, I went to check the door because it looked rusty. I shook the handle. And I shook the bars on the window.”

Freya glanced at the iron door. “And she bit you.”

Wren nodded.

“I’m sorry, Wren.”

“It’s all right.” The girl sniffed and dragged her sleeve across her nose, revealing her hairy hands for a moment. “It probably would have happened anyway, right? I mean, back in Denveller. They would have gotten me sooner or later. At least this way, I get to live. Instead of being killed by the reavers, I’ll be one of them. I can run away. Far away. I’ll live in the north, and I won’t hurt anyone, I promise.” She dropped her chin to her chest and began to cry.

Freya held the girl to her chest. “Maybe not. That man I told you about, the one who cut off Leif’s arm and Fenrir’s head, he’s working on a cure, a real cure.”

“There isn’t time,” Wren said hoarsely. “I only have another day or so. I should leave the city now, while I still can.”

Freya stared down into the wild nest of red hair resting on her chest, and she saw one of the tall white ears poking up through the girl’s ragged braids.

She’s right. I can’t protect her, even if I lock her up in a cell, she won’t be safe as long as she’s in the city.

“Okay. You’ll go tonight, during the feast. It’ll be loud and dark, and everyone will be drunk, and I’ll make sure you walk out of here and no one will notice. All right?”

Wren nodded. Together they walked back around the side of the castle and saw the men building up the bonfires in the courtyard and setting out benches and tables made from whale bones and tightly bound leather sheets. They continued inside past the cooks and butchers arguing about the food, and they were nearly back to Wren’s room when the girl paused and pointed to the end of the hall. “There’s something else. Something you should know about,” the girl said.

Freya followed her down the hall, and then down a narrow stone stair. When they reached the bottom it was so dark that Freya couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, and she was about to suggest that they fetch a torch when a faint orange glow lit up Wren’s face. The light came from the ring on her finger and it gleamed just barely bright enough to reveal the dim outlines of the stones of the floor and sacks of potatoes around them. They crossed the room, and Wren stopped, pointing to the corner. There in the darkness, Freya saw a gaunt woman with dark skin and curly black hair.