She gave his hand a tug and began to walk. “Men worry too much about rule and honor. I like my kingdom, like its luxuries-the food is better than Hadros serves, and no one expects a princess to toil! But I will cheerfully give it all up to save you.”
Karin hurried down the track with new energy, her slippered feet finding a sure footing. No longer was she bound by the generations who lay in the burial mound, or by the necessity to hold herself in check in a court where she was an outsider. She and Roric together were fleeing for their lives, and she smiled as she squeezed his hand.
The darkest part of the night had passed and the eastern sky was lightening toward yellow when they came down the harbor road. Roric was still invisible. “Wait here behind these bushes,” Karin told him, thinking that men really were much easier to deal with if they could not raise objections. “As soon as the sun rises come join me. No one should observe you regaining visibility. We want the sailors to obey us, not fear us as dead wights from Hel.”
She straightened out her clothes as well as she could by the half light and took the narrow road down to the edge of the sea. She would know in a moment whether Hadros had told his men why he had suddenly decided to come here, or whether, as she hoped, he had given the orders but no explanations.
One longship, its dragon prow unmounted, lay upside down and covered with a tarpaulin on the shore. Another ship, its awnings spread, floated on the tide. The sleepy men guarding it heard her approach and jumped up. They recognized her after only a second in spite of her rich clothing.
She scanned the men on board surreptitiously as they woke and came to greet her. “Are you coming home then, Karin?” one asked eagerly. “The maid you left in charge knows nothing of your herb chest, and spends all day screeching at the other women. And we have had but poor fare since you went away!”
There were only a few warriors here with the seamen. Hadros must have taken the rest with him to the castle and spent the night there-which suggested, she thought with hope, that the king and his men had not gotten into a fight with her father and his much more numerous guards, or the survivors would have fled.
“Is the king ready to sail?” asked another seaman.
She did not answer but instead made a show of looking around. “Is Roric not here?” she asked carefully, watching their reactions.
But they only seemed puzzled. “Don’t you mean Valmar? Is Roric here too? He was home for less than a day before he left again.”
The edge of the sun was just peeking over the horizon. “Hadros sent me to sail home with you now,” she said clearly. “Take down the awnings and prepare to set out at once. The king will be detained at my father’s castle for some weeks, busy with affairs of the All-Gemot.”
“Or arranging your marriage!” said one man slyly, but the others shushed him.
“Roric said he would accompany me,” she continued, deliberately ignoring this remark. “He was going to meet me here.”
Even if they rescued Valmar from the Wanderers, even if they all lived past the change of the world the Seer could not describe, she did not know how she would escape this marriage, which kept seeming more and more imminent until even Roric half believed in it. If Valmar had already descended into Hel for the Wanderers, this would no longer be a problem. But allowing him to die was no solution, even if Queen Arane might have thought it one.
Direct sunlight now came rippling across the sea. The sailors were loosening the awnings from the pegs. Karin cupped her hands and turned toward the headland. “Roric!” she shouted. “Are you up there? We are ready to sail!”
And he appeared, himself, solid, coming down the steep road in long leaps. “We must leave at once,” she said, even before he reached the shore. “Sails up! Oars out!” By the time Roric reached the narrow quay and vaulted into the ship, the sailors were releasing the mooring lines.
“Just in time,” he said in her ear as they came out past the shelter of the headland, and the wind bellied out the red sail. “I saw a group of people heading this way from the castle. Another five minutes and they would have had us.”
4
Valmar ran into moonlight, the empty air churning beneath his boots. He kept closing his eyes against that brilliant whiteness, then opening them to take in its glory. He had run, it seemed, for many minutes, for hours, while the moon grew and grew, big enough to swallow him, the headland, Kardan’s kingdom, the sea, the entire earth. And the man who ran at his side, whom he did not dare look at, was also growing.
His eyes flew open again as he felt solidity beneath his feet and almost stumbled. The moon had caught fire.
But it was not the moon, he realized, as his feet slowed first to a walk and then to a halt. It was the sun, and he was running into a sunset that had set all the clouds around it ablaze.
They seemed to be in a meadow of grass and clover. Cows grazed on the far side, but they kept raising their heads and lowing uneasily. Everything, even the rank grass, was tinted pink by the sky.
Then Valmar turned to look at the being beside him.
He was white, brilliant white, so white the sunset did not touch him. He was more than twice the size of a man and arrayed in robes that glowed. The face he turned on Valmar was enormously solemn, enormously wise and noble, and yet there too was an almost friendly air if such were possible, a touch of good humor.
Valmar dropped to his knees. “My lord,” he stammered. He fumbled his sword free of the peace straps and out of the sheath, and held it up, hilt first, while keeping his head down.
“As I recall,” commented an amused voice above him, “you were going to ask no more of the lords of voima.”
“Lord, I did not know,” said Valmar, his face averted. He kept expecting to feel his sword taken from his hands, but it was untouched.
“You were going to make your life into the best tale your own strength and honor and manhood could create,” the other continued, “and all without asking anything of us.”
Valmar put a hand across his eyes. “Do not mock me now, Lord. I did not know-I did not know that you were the source of strength and honor and manhood.”
“In fact,” said the Wanderer, still sounding amused, “we pattern our honor on that of you mortals. Voima flows from life, not the other way around. But as you can see, our land is hastening toward night. And while you may have decided you would ask nothing more of voima, we would ask something of you. ”
Valmar sat back on his heels, daring to look up for the first time. “I am yours to command.” Strange conflicting feelings whirled through him: the way he always felt listening to the old stories of glory and death; his thoughts of Karin; his admiration for Roric, who too had been here; and his desire to make his father think well of him, all the feelings burning and swirling into a sensation that could have been a mighty song of trumpets.
“But we do not command,” said the Wanderer. “Come, and you shall meet the others.”
The sun did not set but remained frozen just above the horizon, though as the clouds blew across the sky an ever-changing display of gold and scarlet lit up the west. They went on foot, the Wanderer-as Valmar could not help but think of him, though he must have a different name here-slowing his pace to Valmar’s. When he asked how far they had to go, he always had the same answer, “Not far. Not very far.”
They traveled through shaded dells and open meadows, along the edges of woodlots and by pastures where the flocks regarded them querulously. At first Valmar thought this a perfect land, one of endless abundance and fertility, but then he started to see the gaps: shocked hay mildewing where it stood, birch trees broken so that unshed leaves were dying, pear trees whose fruit was rotting even before it ripened.
These were the sorts of setbacks every farm of every kingdom had to deal with in mortal realms, Valmar told himself, and should therefore not seem worrisome. But somehow they did. For the lords of voima any weakness or rot was a sign that their powers were beginning to wane.
He squirmed as he realized that the Wanderers must have been listening to the very conversation in which he and Karin had spoken of them as being without knowledge or power. How could he have been so foolish? Maybe
