reassurance.
The god spoke to her. His language was strange, as was the name he called her, but she understood him perfectly. ‘Jabbmeaaakka, the wolf is ours. We have seen your intent and you will not prevail.’
There was a murmur of assent but it didn’t come from the people in the room. Others were collaborating with the god, she thought. The witch was terrified by his presence but she thought she had a chance. If the god did not know he was a god then he may not yet have come to his full power. That meant he could be defeated in magic, or at least beaten back.
She sent her mind like a belch towards the blue-eyed man, a poisonous stink of rot, mould, worms and the crawling things of the earth that spewed forward to engulf him. It wasn’t even really a spell, just an opening of her consciousness, a little glimpse of the places she had been and what she had seen there, enough to cook the brain of anyone who had not walked at least some of those paths themselves.
But something came back, a rhythm, an insistent beat that clouded her thoughts and made her long for sleep. She heard a strange rough singing, felt a blast of cold, saw white fields of snow, creatures thin as runes moving across them, and she longed to step into that cold.
Gullveig, however, was not a wise woman with potions and chants, a village seer or ragged prophet. She was the witch queen of the Troll Wall, lady of the shrieking runes, a creature born and raised to magic. She did not step into the cold; instead, her mind on the edge of disaster, a rune expressed itself in her, a rune like the point of a spear, its steel tip gleaming as it flew across a clear blue sky.
The drumming burst to a frenzy; raised voices became shouting; she had a taste in her throat, ash and sour milk, the smell of funeral fires, and when she looked again the blue-eyed man was gone. Had she killed him? She doubted it, but there were others about him and she sensed they had suffered from her attack.
Odin had felt weak to her, far from his full power. So he could not yet move against her. So what had he done? The girl with the ravaged face who sat by her side in the hanging cave stroked her hand and the answer came to Gullveig in an instant. He hadn’t the power yet to take on any of the witches directly so he was working where he could — at the girls who were being prepared to inherit the runes. If they died then there would be no women to continue the witches’ traditions. Gullveig would eventually be left alone and isolated. While his strength grew, hers would diminish.
She saw it was time to accelerate the pace of the magic. The wolfboy had been prepared. Now he had to meet his holy victim — the prince.
What is magic? Disa had sought to unite the wolfman with the prince so had called the witch. The witch had decided it was time to begin the spell to make her werewolf and so to bring the wolfman and the prince together. Was that a coincidence? Had this conjunction been caused by Disa’s ritual or was it an expression of the witch’s far more powerful magic, which worked away in her deep mind without needing to come to consciousness? Or had it come about through the strongest magic of all — that woven by the fates?
Whatever it was, Gullveig’s desire was now in harmony with Disa’s and it found expression in a spell. Gullveig reached through Disa to touch Vali.
Vali forced his heavy eyes open to watch as Disa’s body convulsed again. She coughed and shook, shivered and growled. Then she dropped onto the floor by Vali and crouched in front of him. She leaned forward, taking his face in her hands. Vali looked into her eyes and was afraid. It wasn’t Disa looking at him, he knew, but something far stranger, and whatever it was exuded cold. Vali felt her hands freezing on his face.
The witch, hanging from the torture rock, tried to work her spell, but Disa’s mind was inadequate to channelling her magic, too fastened to everyday reality. The healer needed to be sent somewhere that would banish her day-to-day consciousness completely and allow Gullveig to work through her.
Vali looked into Disa’s eyes. He could smell something. Burning. Disa, he realised, had pushed the edge of her skirt into the fire, almost surreptitiously, trying to avoid detection until the last moment.
The material caught and the room filled with light and movement and noise. Jodis pulled Disa from the fire, then people were on her, beating at her skirts, trying to extinguish the flames, but Disa was holding them off with one hand, extending the other towards Vali and hissing something under her breath. Two of the men got her down, someone else threw water, but still Disa fixed her eyes on Vali.
Vali felt a cold enter his mind, a creeping feeling of damp and dark. He fell back. Something had gone into him: it felt as though he had a toad stuck in his throat, a clammy, writhing thing that would not be coughed out. The only way to get rid of the hideous feeling was to stand, to go. He was overwhelmed by tiredness but not sleepy. He got to his feet.
His sympathy for Disa was like something on the tip of his tongue, known but distant beneath the nausea he was feeling. He had to move, he knew that. It was like the frustration of being trapped indoors through a long winter storm — dying to get outside but knowing it is impossible — but magnified many times.
He went to the back of the room, where Bragi had hung his sword next to his pack. He picked up both and left. No one followed him; they were all attending to Disa or watching her being attended to.
It was the long twilight of the northern summer. The sky was a pale silver and a big moon hung alongside a single bright star. Already, Vali noticed, the moon was not quite full. He had less than a month to save Adisla.
A large crow flapped from one tree to another and Vali’s body seemed to respond to the movement. Tired beyond thought, he saw himself start walking and noticed that he was going east along the shore of the fjord. Only his forward movement seemed to stop the nausea inside him. After that, he seemed to forget that he was travelling at all.
His movements seemed automatic, unconscious and unguided as he took the road from the village, only dimly aware of his surroundings. He was lost in a trance of thoughts of Adisla, of Disa, of the cold eyes of whatever had looked through her, and he didn’t really notice where he was until he woke.
He stood up, shook the moisture from himself and looked around. There was a depression in the grass. He had slept there, it seemed. It was dusk again. He checked his pack and his sword and looked to the distance. A dark blue range of mountains split the horizon, and he knew that was where he needed to go. The feeling of sickness was still with him and he thought that he wouldn’t bother with food, just go on until he found his wolfman.
He was high up on one side of a steep valley on a slope that, within yards of where he had woken, fell away as a cliff. He moved to the edge and peered down. There were two riders below him and they had made a camp. The men had laid blankets beneath a heavily leafed alder tree and made a small fire. They were preparing to sleep, he thought, taking advantage of the shelter of the tree.
One of them was Authun’s messenger, Hogni. Vali looked up at the mountains. A horse would halve his journey time. He dimly sensed he was enchanted and wondered if that was why his thoughts had suddenly come to clarity. Did the spell, or whatever was controlling the spell, want him to take a horse to speed him forward?
The men hadn’t seen him. It occurred to him to simply walk down the hill and command them to give him their horses. They were, after all, his father’s retainers and so owed him a duty of obedience. But his father had ordered that he should be tested against the wolfmen. Would they agree to give up their animals? And what was to stop them killing him right there if they felt like it? There were other people, cousins and uncles, with claims to Authun’s throne. If one of these men was of their party, Vali thought, they could run a spear through him and go home with no one any the wiser.
His hand instinctively went to his sword. Then he lay flat and waited for the men to sleep.
13
An hour after the men lay down Vali felt it safe to move. It was just dark, that splinter of night that pricks the long days of the northern summer. A bright moon, full save a slice of darkness on its right-hand side, shone down from a sky of deep stars. He imagined it as the eye of a sleepy god. By the time it had closed to nothing and opened to fullness again, Adisla would be dead, unless he could succeed.
His task wasn’t straightforward. He needed to steal at least one saddle and a bridle from the sleeping men without waking them up, then he had to get to the horses. Catching them would be easy because resting travellers
