he had never known. ‘Get some provisions. If we’re lucky you’ll be able to wade to shore.’
The wolfman did as he was bid, and Vali stepped uncertainly into the water. It only came up to his thighs. He began to wade with the wolfman watching him. He made it easily — the sea was chest deep at most. Feileg followed. Vali was surprised to see how hesitant he was. Could someone so fierce in battle really be afraid of wet feet?
They were on a small beach beneath a long broken cliff of that reddish rock. Vali said nothing, just made his way towards it. The cliffs were tall but uneven and climbable and they found their way to the top quite easily, Feileg pausing to take some birds’ eggs. The view was immense. They had reached a spot overlooking a green land of birch forests falling towards long fjords and a wide grassy plain stretching to distant mountains that rose like black dragons on the horizon.
Vali breathed in. He smelled smoke on the wind and something else. Cooking meat. He held his hand to his forehead and squinted into the distance. There, beyond the barrier of a fjord, over a short hill in the grassland, a plume of grey reached up, curving in the wind. It was a fire.
‘What is this land?’ said Feileg.
‘I don’t know,’ said Vali, ‘but I intend to ask.’
The two made their way around the fjord and over to the grassy plain. The fire was three day’s walk away but still Vali did not feel hungry. He thought of the blood he had vomited. It was possible something was wrong with him, though he didn’t feel at all ill. In fact, he felt uncommonly well, like that point after a drink of beer when you first feel its effects — your tongue seems looser, your wit quicker, your body more able, and yet a dullness stalks you, as if your reason and discernment are fading away. Reindeer herds were moving in the distance, he could tell, and thunder coming in on the wind.
Feileg gathered herbs to dress his wound but it was clear to Vali the wolfman was not well. He was sweating heavily and visibly hot with a sweetness to his breath that Vali could smell ten paces from him. The prince was irritated to have to stop to let him rest, irritated beyond reasonableness, he recognised, but he wanted to press on. In fact, he was angry with Feileg, and that anger seemed caught up in how he had been feeling since he had woken on the boat. Why couldn’t he leave him? He just couldn’t. He felt utterly bound to Feileg, like the rain was bound to the land.
He had tried to kill him at Hemming’s court and told himself the intervention of the boy had saved Feileg’s life. But in reality his own will had failed. As his senses changed and his thoughts distorted, Vali realised why he had not been able to stab him. The wolfman felt like kin. The thought was heavy inside him, but he couldn’t acknowledge its weight any more than he could deny it.
A storm swept over them hard and cold but Vali did not pause. The fire was invisible now but he still could scent its wet embers through the downpour. There was another smell too — the sour smack of the wolfman’s wound. Vali tried to ignore what it was doing to him but a bubbling growl seemed to fill his mind and he struggled against acknowledging it for what it was. A call for blood. Blood. The taste and the scent of it had not left him since the ship and he could not shake its savour.
They found the remains of a camp as the sun was beginning to dip behind a large black peak, spreading a span of rays across the sky. There was no one around, but the earth was flattened and there were the cold ashes of a fire and the smell of animal skins on the grass where people had slept.
‘They went inland,’ said Feileg.
Vali nodded. He knew. ‘Then follow,’ he said. He spat. For a day he had been salivating heavily.
The prince seemed possessed to the wolfman. Feileg looked at him with fear in his eyes and he did as he said.
The storm had gone and the sun was rising by the time they came upon the reindeer hunters. A new fire had led them there, seductive in its smell of cooking meat.
A single family was gathered around two squat conical tents of birch poles and reindeer skins. The tents were open at the top where the sticks met, and in one of them was the small fire that had drawn Vali and Feileg in. Of more immediate concern, however, were the two men who challenged them a bowshot from the camp. A bowshot was an appropriate measure of distance because both of the hunters had strange short bows in their hands. Arrows were stuck in the ground in front of them, not nocked, but available for easy access.
Vali felt his blood rising in his veins, ready for the fight, and tried to tell himself there was no need. Yet his focus had shifted, it seemed. His first response was to think of murder. He felt a hand at his side and his sword was drawn without him touching it. Feileg tossed the sword towards the bowmen and sat down on the ground. Vali exchanged a glance with him. The wolfman was wounded but Vali had only ever seen him respond to newcomers with seething anger before. Now he acted as Vali himself would have wanted to act, had he been in more control of his mind. Vali remembered the raid on the monastery. Hadn’t he made a gesture like that once? He tried to recall that thought, to drop an anchor to hold him still in the tide of animosity that was engulfing him.
The hunters, who wore dark blue coats trimmed with red and gold bands, gave a friendly wave and walked towards the brothers. They were an interesting people, thought Vali, with dark hair and blue eyes like his own. They all exchanged smiles, and the hunters said something in a strange language and sat down in front of them. Vali didn’t understand a word.
The wolfman was opening his pack with weak fingers. He offered the hunters wine in a skin, which they drank from gratefully. It was the same skin Vali had tried. He had thought it was bad but the hunters seemed to like it well enough. One of them gestured towards Feileg’s wound and then to the camp. Vali stood to follow them but realised that Feileg could not get up. He had spent the last of his energy on the overnight trek. The prince had never seen the wolfman weak before. He knew what had happened — his wound had turned. There wasn’t long for him now.
Vali forced himself to think, to be the boy who had grown up around Forkbeard’s farms, the young man who had loved Adisla and had vowed to die for her. That dirty mire water was in him though, and he struggled to frame his thoughts. It came to him that he should help Feileg to his feet. He crouched, put the wolfman’s arm around his shoulders and got him up. The human gesture seemed to restore Vali and his head cleared some more. These were Whale People or their kin from the interior of the country who lived from reindeer. Hemming had said that Haarik intended to exchange Adisla for his son. Perhaps they would know where or who this Domen was that Bodvar Bjarki had spoken of.
At the camp the men made signs for the brothers to sit inside one of the tents. A woman was in there, holding a young child. She looked at them with wary eyes but pointed to some furs for Feileg to lie on. Vali lowered the wolfman to the ground and then went outside. The interior of the tent was unbearably stuffy. He needed to be under the sun.
Feileg lay breathing heavily on the deerskins. The pace Vali had demanded had nearly killed him. The wolfman was convinced that some sort of sorcery had taken the prince but he was still determined to follow him. Something had moved in Feileg when he had spoken to Adisla and he was set on following his impulse to find her until the end. He breathed in the aromas of the tent: cooking and curds of goats’ milk, reindeer hide and the birch fire. Feileg found it all immensely comforting and recalled evenings sitting in the dark with his brothers and sisters and listening to stories of adventure and glory. He had had no idea he was different then, marked for a special destiny among the wolves. Feileg had not wanted to be inside for years, but now he was content. It was Vali who sat in the open, head bowed and looking at his feet.
A man came in. He was smaller than the others and wearing a hat of four corners, like a parcel of cloth folded back on top. He nodded and smiled a greeting, sat down and put a hand on the wolf pelt Feileg wore. The wolfman felt no threat and allowed him to pull it aside. The man examined the wound. He shook his head and ran his fingers lightly across it. Then he turned and said something to the woman. She brought Feileg some stew in a bowl and he ate it gratefully.
‘Ruohtta,’ said the man to Feileg. He pointed at him and made a gesture of lying down on his side and turning up his eyes. Feileg realised he was telling him he was going to die.
Feileg had never feared death. When he was with his family he had been told it was glorious; when he was with Kveld Ulf he had seen it as simply a happening — a transformation, a different kind of day among other days. He thought he would be happy to die in the little tent with its domestic smells, among the kindness of these strangers, although the peace of that place, the company of the children and the women, the smiles of the man in the four-pointed hat, made him want to live. He wanted this for himself, he thought. The words ‘I am a wolf’ came to him again, but what wolf ever thought that? He was separate from his forest brothers, for all that he had been
