Despite himself, Edain laughed. At the High King’s inquiring glance he admitted: “That is most exactly what I said to me little brother Dickie when we got home, word for word, midden and all. And him grown so tall and roynish while we were gone.”
“Then be off. We’ll have our fill of risk this year, and you can throw yourself between it and me. This day I’m going to spend with my mother and stepfather and my sisters in the place I was born. You and your bride the sword-maiden go down to Dun Fairfax and do likewise!”
Edain chuckled as he set foot on the steep path that led down from the plateau of Dun Juniper to Dun Fairfax, where it was tucked away in the valley of Artemis Creek. The quiet of the hillside forest swallowed it, greenumber distances between the tall candle-straight trunks of the Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, red cedar and hemlock, with the odd big-leaf maple or garry oak, and black walnut thickly planted long ago for variety. A jay went sheunk-sheunk-sheunk, squirrels ran chattering like gray streaks, and a hedgehog scuttled off into the underbrush.
Asgerd Karlsdottir looked at him and raised one yellow brow. She was only a finger shorter than his five-nine, but with a slender strength in contrast to his broad-shouldered, thick-armed, barrel-chested build; she wore breeks and tunic rather than the kilt, a seax-knife and Norrheimer broadsword at her belt but a Mackenzie-style quiver on her back. They both took the steep way effortlessly, ducking and twisting now and then when tree branches or undergrowth nearly caught at the arrows in their quivers, their feet making little sound despite the boots they wore. Now and then one would bend a fern gently aside with the tip of the longbows they both carried in their left hands, leaving no trace of their passing.
Neither was conscious of taking care not to make noise or leave trail. It was a manner you learned when you hunted for food’s sake, not to mention scouting and tracking and skirmishing across a continent with life and death for the table stakes.
“What’s the jest?” she asked.
“No jest; just thinking that I’m a lucky man.”
“Lucky in your lord, or your wife?”
He grinned at her; freed from the helmet his oak-colored curls tossed around his tanned face, and she restrained an impulse to smooth them back.
“The both, which is as much luck as a man can decently ask of the Powers, eh?”
They both made protective signs, though different ones; he the Invoking Pentagram, she Thor’s Hammer.
“And I was happy that the Sword gave Rudi a happy vision for once, those children he told us of. It’ll be a fine rare thing to have a little princess and prince about.”
Asgerd sighed. “I wish we had such a foretelling,” she said.
“Well, as a general rule folk don’t need a vision from a magic sword to produce children, you see. The usual way suffices,” he said solemnly.
A glint came into Edain’s gray eyes as he deliberately looked her up and down. “We’ll just have to keep practicing over and over until we get it right, so to say…”
He dodged as she pretended to clout him along the head with her bow, then said more seriously: “Though we’ve plenty of time; we’re both of us younger than Rudi and his lady. Why, look at me ma and da; I come back after only two years away, and I’ve a new brother and sister tumbling about the place like puppies. Twins, I admit, and born no more than nine months after I left almost to a day, but it’s scarce daycent, at their ages. Da’ll be seventy, come Samhain and a bit!”
Asgerd snorted. “Your mother is younger, and that’s what counts.”
“Aye, eighteen year younger, near nineteen; she lost her first man in the Change, my half sister Tamar’s father, he was some place far away. And Tamar was nobbut a wee one then. Not that I’m not glad to have little Nigel and Nola, of course. The more Aylwards the better for the Clan and the world-”
“They do set an example of modesty,” Asgerd said in a pawky tone.
“Modesty is a vice I leave to Christians, as the Chief likes to say. But it’s odd to think they’re younger than Tamar’s children, my nieces and nephews. It’s taken a good deal out of Ma, too. Fifty is old to be brought to bed of a hard labor, and they say it was painful hard. Thank Brigid we have fine midwives and healers.”
Asgerd shivered a little inwardly; her people did too, but you went to the mouth of Hela’s realm to bring forth life, nonetheless. Then her mouth quirked. “And she’s not all that happy you’ve brought a foreign wife home, and one who follows other Gods than hers.”
Edain shrugged. “Could be worse, darlin’; you’re not of the Old Religion, but you’re not quite a cowan either. Now if you’d been a Christian, one of the ones who scorns all other Gods and won’t so much as set aside a bowl of milk for the house-hob… that would have put the manure-fork in the soup kettle, right and proper it would.”
Asgerd wore the triple interlinked triangles of Odin on a thong around her neck, the Valknut; she was Asatru, like most of the folk in her distant homeland of Norrheim, what had once been northernmost Maine.
Her man went on: “ And she’s not overhappy her grown children are near all off to the war-Tamar’s man Eochu, and me, and Dickie, and even young Fand as an eoghann. Tamar would be too, except that she has a babe at the breast. We’d best remember that there’s been war here, with battles and all, while we made our way to Nantucket and back, tricking and twisting and fighting. Not to mention runnin’ like buggery when we could, though the bards will leave that out, I’m thinking.”
“Only from Norrheim to Nantucket and all the way back here, for me, but that was long enough! Three thousand miles, is it?”
A chill ran down her back as she remembered what had happened on Nantucket. The details were hazy, as if in a fever-dream that slipped away when you woke; but she knew she had stepped out of the light of Midgard’s common day there. And the Sword… she could hear the seeress’ voice, deepened and roughened as the All-Father took hold of her on the high seat of seidh in the hall at Eriksgarth: More potent than Tyrfing, forged for the hand of a King!
They came out of the deep woods, onto a spot where the trail turned downward in a switchback; it had been roughly reinforced with logs and rocks to prevent the soil from washing in the winter rains, and those in turn worn by boots and the odd hoof. From here you were a hundred feet above the funnel shape of the little valley running out into the broader stretches of the Willamette and could see it all with a sweep of the eyes.
A winding strip of forest followed Artemis Creek; the rest of the vale was divided into small fields by neatly trimmed hawthorn hedges studded with lines of poplars and oaks, well grown but usually no older than Edain. Some of the fields were the pale brown-blond of reaped wheat, or the gold-shot green of standing barley a month or two from harvest. The vivid grass of cropped pasture lay dreaming beneath the warmth of a sun that brought out the rich smell of earth and sap; white-coated sheep and red cattle grazed there, and beneath orchards. Plots of potatoes and vegetables were grouped closer to the walls of the Dun. Beeches lined the white-surfaced dirt road that followed the tumbling water, and dust smoked away behind an oxwagon that moved there, small as a child’s toy with distance.
“And isn’t this a brave bright sight,” Edain said, his voice soft with love. “I can remember the time my father took me to this spot, after the first harvest I recall clear, and pointed out our fields and our neighbors’, where I’d worked carrying water to the binders and myself so proud to be part of it. Often and often I thought of this on the journey there and back again.”
Asgerd tried to see it as he did; tried and failed.
Oh, it’s was beautiful enough, she thought; beautiful with an alien comeliness. And rich, richer than Norrheim.
Some of the crops were the same; her folk grew wheat and barley and oats and spuds too. But here they planted wheat in the fall and harvested it in the summer, instead of putting seed down in spring and making prayer and blot to Frey and Freya and Thor that the weather held long enough to get it in come fall. Norrheimers reaped with one eye on the sky, dreading clouds and cold driving rain to make the grain sprout and rot in the stack, hail that could beat it flat, and even early snow. Here it was one fine warm day after another for the ripening.
So in the Mackenzie duthchas barley went mostly to beer and oats to horses and they didn’t bother with rye. Everyone ate fine feast-time white bread made from wheat flour every day if they pleased, like a great chief. There were fruits here she’d only heard about in tales, apricots and cherries, pears and peaches and nectarines, even grapes for wine. You could graze stock outside ten or eleven months of the year, too; she’d never seen such a wealth of strong fat beasts. Winters here were chilly and wet, not the endless gray iron cold and driving blizzards
