Snow-Walker

Two

A farseeing witch, wise in talismans,

Caster of spells.

Lost in the frost spell, each of them walked in a dream. Brochael dreamed he was in some sort of room. He was sure of that, but couldn’t remember how he had come there. He was holding open a heavy door; a chain swung from it, rusted with age. In his other hand was a lantern; he raised it now, to see what was there.

In the darkness something made a sound. He swung the light toward it.

It was squatting on the floor, pressed into a corner. A small, crouched shape, twisting away from the light. Heavily, Brochael crossed the dirty straw toward it. The door closed behind him.

The red flame of the lantern quivered; he saw eyes, a scuttle of movement.

It was a boy, about six years old. He was filthy, his hair matted and soiled, his clothes rags. Crusts of dirt smeared his thin face; his eyes were large, staring, without emotion.

Brochael crouched, his huge shadow enveloping the corner of the stinking cell. The boy did not move.

“Can you speak?” He found his voice gruff; anger mounting in him like a flame. When the boy made no answer, he reached out for him. With that trembling touch he knew this was Kari; he remembered, and looked up, and saw Gudrun there. She put out her hand and pulled the boy up; he changed, grew older, cleaner, taller, so that they faced each other among the shadows.

The lantern shook in Brochael’s hand.

He could not tell them apart.

Hakon dreamed himself in a white emptiness. As he reached for his sword it slid away from him; alarmed, he grabbed it and the whole floor rose up beneath him, became a surface of glass, slippery, impossible to grip. Desperately, palms flat, he slipped down, down into Gudrun’s spell, and below him was an endless roaring chasm, deep as his nightmares.

An idea came to him, and he stabbed the sword into the ice to hold himself steady, but out of it wriggled a snake that wound around his hand, the cool scales rippling between his fingers. He lost power and feeling; the fingers were forced wide and the snake gripped his wrist so tight the sword fell from his numb fingers; it toppled over the brink, and fell, and he fell after it, into nowhere.

Skapti’s nightmare was very different. For him it meant standing in a green wood, watching the mist from a distance. He knew it was a spell. Shapes moved in it; his friends, he thought, each of them lost.

Under his long hand the bark of the tree was rough; leaves were pattering down around him in the wind—at least he thought at first they were leaves, but as he looked at them again he saw they were words. All the words of all his songs were coming undone and falling about him like rain. He caught one and crunched it in his fingers; a small, crisp word.

Lost.

He let it fall angrily, chilled to the heart.

Then he saw her standing in the wood: a tall white-skinned woman laughing at him. “Poets know a great deal, Skapti,” she said, “and make fine things. But even these can be destroyed.”

As he stared at her the words fell between them, a silent, bitter snow.

Signi had no idea she was dreaming. A tall woman bent over and helped her stand.

“Thank you,” she murmured, brushing her dress. “What happened? Where’s Wulfgar?”

The woman smiled coldly, and before Signi could move, she fixed a narrow chain of fine cold links to each of her wrists. Signi stared at her, then snatched her hands away. “What are you doing?”

She gazed around in horror at the frozen hall. “Wulfgar!”

“He won’t hear you.” The woman turned calmly, leading her out; Signi was forced to follow. She tugged and pulled, but it was no use. “Where are we going?” she asked tearfully.

Gudrun laughed.

As they left the hall it rippled into nothing, into mist. Wulfgar knew he had lost her. In his dream he ran through the empty hold looking for her, calling her name. Where was everyone? What had happened? Furious, he stopped and yelled for his men.

But the night was silent; the aurora flickering over the stone hall and its dragon gables. He raced down to the fjord shore, and ran out onto the longest wharf, his boots loud on the wooden boards.

“Signi!” he yelled.

The water was pale, lit by the midnight sun. Only as he turned away did he see her, fast asleep under the surface. Eels slithered through her hair, the fine strands spreading in the rise and fall of the current. When he lay down and reached out to her, thin layers of ice closed tight about his wrist.

The water held him, a cold grip.

Only Kari did not dream. Instead he slipped out of his body and stood up, looking down at the blood on his hair. Then he edged between the fallen tables and the dream-wrapped bodies of his friends to the door of the hall, flung wide. Outside the watchman lay sprawled, his sword iced over, the black wolfhound still at his side.

Stepping over them, Kari hurried out under the dawn glimmer and looked north. Down the tracks of the sky he watched shapes move, heard voices call to him from invisible realms. He answered quickly, and the ghosts of jarls and warriors and women came and crowded about him.

“What happened?” he asked bitterly.

“She came. She took one of them back with her.”

“Who came?”

They stared at him, their faces pale as his. “We know no names. Names are for the living.”

“You must tell me!”

“She. The Snow-walker.”

His mother. He wondered why he’d been so urgent; he’d known it would be her. He nodded and turned back slowly, and they made room for him, drifting apart like mist.

Coming back into the hall, he gazed across it, at the frosted trunk of the roof tree, where it stood rising high into the rafters. Two black forms sat among its branches.

“Go out and look,” he said. “There may be some trace of her. Look to the north.”

“It’s unlikely,” one of them croaked.

“Try anyway. I’ll wake these.”

As they rose up and flapped out of the window, he moved reluctantly back into his body, feeling the heavy pain begin to throb in his head, the bitter cold in fingers and stomach.

He rolled over, dragging himself up unsteadily onto his knees, fighting down sickness. Then he grabbed Jessa’s arm and shook it feebly. “Jessa! Wake up. Wake up!”

It was all a dream, Jessa knew that. She stood on the hilltop next to the grazing horse and looked down at the snow-covered land. Fires burned, far to the south. A great bridge, like a pale rainbow, rose into the sky, its end lost among clouds.

On the black waters of the fjord a ship was drifting on the ebb tide—a funeral ship. Even from here Jessa could see the bright shields hung on each side of it, and they were burning, their metal cracking and melting, dropping with a hiss into the black water. Flames devoured the mast, racing up the edges of the sails.

And on the ship were all the friends she knew and had ever known, and they were alive. Some were calling out to her, others silent, looking back; Skapti and Signi, Wulfgar and Brochael, Marrika and Thorkil, her father, Kari. Hakon with his bright new sword and looking so desolate that her heart nearly broke.

Gudrun was standing beside her. The witch was tall; her long silver hair hung straight down her back.

“My ship,” she said softly. “And if you want them as they were, Jessa, you must come and get them.”

“Come where?” Jessa asked, furious.

“Beyond the end of the world.”

“There’s nothing beyond the end!”

“Ah, but there is.” Gudrun smiled her close, secret smile. “The land of the soul. The place beyond legends. The country of the wise.”

Then she reached out and gripped Jessa’s arm painfully.

“But now you must wake up.”

And it wasn’t Gudrun, it was Kari, his face white, blood clotted in his hair. He leaned against her and she struggled up from the floor, holding his arm. Ice cracked and splintered and fell from her hair and clothes; she felt cold, cold to the heart.

“What happened? You look terrible!”

“I hit my head,” he said quietly. “I can’t see properly.”

Making him sit down, she stared around. The hall was dim, lit only with the weak night sun and a strange frosty glimmer. A film of ice lay over everything—over the floor, the tables, the sprawled bodies of the sleepers, over plates of food and upturned benches. Wine was frozen as it spilled; the fires were out, hard and black, and on the walls the tapestries were stiff, rigid folds.

In the open doorway she could see where the mist had poured in and turned to ice; it had frozen in rivulets and glassy, bubbled streams, hard over tables and sleeping dogs. The high windows were sheeted with icicles.

No wonder no one had been ready. Swords were frozen into scabbards; shields to their brackets on the walls. A woman lay nearby holding a child, both of them white with frost and barely breathing.

Jessa shivered. “We’ve got to wake them! They’ll die otherwise.”

He nodded, stood up and walked unsteadily to the fires. As she shook Hakon fiercely she heard the crackle and stir of the rune flames igniting behind her.

It took a long time to wake everyone. Some were deep in the death sleep, almost lost in their dreams, their souls wandering far among spells. Brochael awoke with a jerk, gripping her shoulder; Skapti more slowly, raising his head from the table and looking upward, as if the roof was falling in.

Gradually the hall thawed and filled with noise; murmurs grew to voices, angry, questioning; small children sobbed and the warmth from the fires set everything dripping and softening.

“Get those doors shut!” Brochael ordered. One arm around Kari, he parted the boy’s hair. “That’s deep. Get me something, Hakon, to stop the blood.”

“Where’s Wulfgar?” Jessa ran to the high table. It was overturned on its side. A knife had been flung in the confusion and was frozen, embedded in the wood. She scrambled over, tugging benches and chairs away, crunching the frozen straw underneath. She saw his arm first, flung around Signi, and with a yell to Skapti she tried to drag the heavy table off them, until men came and pushed her aside, heaving the boards away, crowding around the Jarl.

They helped him sit up, breathless and sore.

“What was it?” he managed.

Jessa crouched. “It looks like Gudrun’s work. Some sort of spell. A few people are hurt, but none are dead. Are you all right?”

He rubbed soot and ice from his face and nodded, turning to Signi. She lay cold on the straw, Skapti bending over her. The skald looked up anxiously. “I can’t wake her.”

Wulfgar grabbed the girl’s shoulders, his hands crushing the fine silk. “Signi!” He shook her again.

She lay still, still as death, but they saw she was breathing. Her face was clear, and her eyes opened, but there was no movement in her, no flicker of recognition.

“Signi?” Wulfgar said again. “Are you all right?”

When she still did not speak he lifted her, and Jessa righted a chair and they sat her in it, but her head lolled slowly to one side, the long hair swinging over her face.

A woman began to cry in the crowd.

Wulfgar chafed her hands. “Get her waiting women. Get Einar—”

“It’s no use.”

Kari’s voice was harsh, and they turned, surprised. He stood by the table, Brochael’s great arm around him.

“What do you mean?” Wulfgar yelled.

“She’s gone. Gudrun has taken her.”

“Taken her!” The Jarl leaped up. “She’s not dead!”

“Not even that. Taken her soul, taken it far away.” He put his hand to his head as if it ached, and for a moment Jessa thought he would fall, but he looked up again and nodded at the center of the hall. “Look. She left her mark.”

The roof tree was split, from top to bottom.

Carved deep in the wood, a white snake twisted, poison bubbling and hissing from its jaws.