Twice she pulled the queen from the Pools of the Dead by a rope at her neck; once she took a little knife, pressed it to her breast but then drew back. Were the runes protecting the witch queen? Even Saitada could sense them now, chiming and splashing and fizzing in the blackness as the witch endured her daily sufferings by water and cold. Frustration began to overwhelm Saitada and she spent a long time trying to think how she could strike her enemy down. But every time she moved against her she faltered.
She found his sword in the lowest caves — it thumped against her knee as she stumbled on the uneven floor. She knew what it was the instant she held it — the slim curve in the jewelled scabbard, the keenness of the blade when it was drawn.
He could kill the witch. He could kill anyone. Saitada knew only one thing about him — his name. Authun. It was enough. She took the sword and went up towards the light.
47
Feileg could not sail so they were forced to travel by land. The landscape now looked entirely different to when he had come north, a wide field of white leading to distant mountains. But he knew well where they should go — a wolf can always find its home — and he headed south under the swirling skies with Adisla behind him. With her wound she could not walk far, but Feileg sat her on one of the reindeer sleighs and led the animal. The Noaidi who had owned it had not appeared to claim it. The wolfman loaded the sled with good reindeer coats, a tent, furs, snow shoes and boots, and took some flints and plenty of tinder. He also took a spear. He didn’t need it to fight but wanted a sign to warn anyone they encountered to look elsewhere if robbery was on their mind.
The Noaidis who had survived were in no mood to argue. By the time Feileg finished piling the stones all but one sorcerer had gone. The man had marked a stone with a rune, put it on the heap and left.
To Feileg the rune was vaguely familiar. He wished he had asked what it meant but he had no language in common with the holy man. Was it a seal to magically hold the beast in place? Or was it something else, a warning maybe?
He thought on it as they headed south for the Troll Wall, as he made up the tent and the fire within it and brought Adisla the things he had caught and killed for her. The wolf is the king of winter, and Feileg was almost happy, bringing in his kills and allowing Adisla to cook them rather than eat the meat raw as had been his habit. It was the life he had glimpsed as he had kissed her by the post where she had cut him free.
Adisla, however, was withdrawn. Her tears had been replaced by silence. Vali’s condition, she was sure, was her fault. There was no logic to her thinking, but she couldn’t shake her conviction that her liaison with someone so far above her social standing, what she had done to her mother, even her capitulation in agreeing to marry Drengi, were all to blame for what had happened to him. She had grown up with a powerful belief in magic, been raised to learn healing and even some divination. Things were linked, she felt. Her mother had said people stand at the edge of an ocean of events that touches unseen islands and shores. She had allowed something bad to grow between her and Vali. Now something far more terrible had grown within him.
But as they rested by their fires and Feileg described the amazing events of his childhood, the hopelessness she felt about her relationship with Vali bore the seed of hope for a future with Feileg. Slowly, she found she could talk to him. She spoke about her youth with Vali and then just about herself and her life with her brothers and, most of all, her mother. The wolfman listened without comment, and when she told him what she had done to Disa, he just sat for a while before saying, ‘I wish I had known such love.’
‘To kill her?’
‘To save her,’ he said. ‘She was fated to die and she knew it. Better quickly, at her daughter’s hand, than after the torments of the Danes. She chose the instrument of her death — you, who she loved. You are no more to blame than if she had used the knife herself.’
‘I wish I could believe it.’
‘Do you think your mother would have wanted this grief for you?’
‘No.’
‘What would she have wanted?’
Adisla looked up into the shining whorls of the night sky. ‘For me to get on with my life, to meet a good man and bear fine sons,’ she said.
Feileg smiled. ‘Then make that your aim,’ he said.
Feileg, she could see, was not a wolf. The shaman had not taken his humanity with his chants and brews. Feileg was a man, plain and simple, someone who had been raised to savagery but who had reclaimed himself from it. He would make a good husband, she was sure, and she would have been proud to be his wife, had the fates put them together before.
The days were short as they travelled through the mountain passes, but when the moon was bright, Feileg pressed on.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asked him.
‘The south,’ he said. ‘The mountains there are like a fold from this sea to the Troll Wall. We will follow the coast as best we can and then use them to steer us to where we want to go.’
Adisla was left breathless by the beauty of the northern winter, of the bleak hills and the blinding plains, though she found the country barren and threatening compared to the softer features of her coastal home. The journey was rough and bumpy, though the sled was warm beneath the furs and she even managed to doze.
They had been travelling for weeks and the snow was thick when the land in the distance seemed to buckle into ridges of black. As they got nearer they saw them, the Troll Peaks, rising up in crests like the gigantic waves of a solid sea. They appeared daunting, though the way to them was easy — the ground frozen solid, rivers turned into roads. Occasionally they came upon a family hut. There were signs of life — or rather lives that had been. No one came to greet them; no dog barked; no child called out. Clothes left in the sun to dry had bleached and rotted before they froze.
Adisla looked at Feileg and shrugged as if to say, ‘What happened here?’
He shrugged back. ‘These hills leak nightmares,’ he said, ‘they always have. Perhaps it all got too much.’
As they moved through the country at the back of the Troll Wall it seemed the leak had become a flood. Everything was abandoned, everything in ruins; not a house was inhabited.
They followed the hills inland, skirting them before climbing up through a narrow valley. In the heavy light of evening wolves howled invisibly from the ridges.
Adisla, who could walk well by now, looked at Feileg in alarm, but the wolfman was calm.
‘They are my brothers,’ he said, ‘and they are welcoming me home.’
He returned their call and Adisla saw them. What she had taken for rocks were animals, now moving down the slope. Feileg smiled and cut the fretting reindeer free of the sled.
‘The animal has served us well,’ said Adisla.
‘They would have him, tied to the sled or free,’ said Feileg. ‘This way he dies free. It is what he was meant to do.’
There was no way out for the reindeer — wolves ahead and behind. It turned one way and then the other, a pattering run forward, a pattering run back. And then it stopped. In a moment the pack was on it.
‘It didn’t even try to run,’ said Adisla.
‘It knew there was no point. Why die exhausted? It’s bad enough to die without being made to work for it.’
‘What are we doing?’ said Adisla.
‘Working for it,’ said Feileg.
‘You sound like Bragi.’
‘Thank you.’ He hadn’t told her the old man was dead. She had enough to contend with.
The wolves fed, and when they had finished Feileg shouldered the tent and they walked on up the pass. The pack followed behind. The mountain in front of them had seemed big from a distance. Close up it was immense,
