beast’s belly, flipping it back over her head.
The creature yelped and squealed as it wheeled through the air and crashed down on its spine. Freya felt her spear come free of its grip, and she rolled to her feet and whirled to face the beast again.
It was gone.
She felt her heart freeze in her chest. She didn’t breathe. Left and right she swung her spear, searching for her prey in the darkness.
Nothing is that fast!
A shuffling sound drew her gaze to the west, and there she saw the hunching figure loping away across the dark meadow. Freya stood up, hefting her spear in her right hand and tilting it back over her shoulder. And then she let it fly.
In the instant that it left her hand, the spear was swallowed up by the hideous shadow of a cloud passing across the face of the moon.
My throw was perfect.
Freya waited.
When the cloud retreated, the moonlight spilled down over the valley, painting the world in silver and gray. The beast lay flat on the ground with her spear standing tall in the center of its back. She dashed toward the body. Her hand went to her belt in search of her bone knives, only to find her belt wasn’t there. It was still lying by the fire at the top of the hill, along with the rest of her clothes.
Freya swept her hand across the ground and caught up a jagged stone. As she circled the body, she saw her spear lean slowly to the left, and then lean back to the right. With a grimace, she lifted her stone above the beast’s head.
A claw snapped out, wrapped around her ankle, and ripped her leg out from under her. Freya crashed to the earth, the air blasted from her lungs as her chest hit the ground. The beast lurched forward, dragging its stinking body over her legs, digging its claws into her calves and thighs. She stared into its amber eyes, choking on its fetid breath. Its jaws gaped a little wider, its yellow fangs dripping with thick, syrupy mucus. The beast growled.
A spearhead erupted from its temple and impaled itself in the dirt, right next to her head. The beast sagged, its eyes suddenly unfocused and dull. One last exhalation reeking of blood and rotten meat washed over her, just as Freya managed to take a full breath again with her aching lungs.
Erik’s footfalls thumped through the dead grass and a moment later Freya felt the corpse being lifted off her body. She sat up and blinked at her husband. “Thank you.”
He lifted her to her feet and signed, “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “What about Katja? Is she all right?”
Erik shook his head, just a tiny shake of his chin. He signed, “It looks bad.”
Freya dashed across the heather along the edge of the lake, leaving Erik to gather their precious steel spears and to do whatever he might do with the body of the beast. She flew through the sultry night air, breathing in the soft steam curling off the warm waters even as the ice glistened on the slopes above her. Arfast stood by the cottage, his huge brown eyes watching her bolt up the hillside and vanish inside.
She paused just inside the doorway to let her night vision fade and refocus in the bright yellow light of the rekindled fire. Theirs was a small house, just the one common room carpeted in old leathers and young furs. A handful of little stools stood long the right wall, each one a short tripod of bone with a sturdy leather seat bound across the legs. Hemp lines and leather nets and woolen sheets hung across the ceiling holding clay pots, bone spoons, spare coats, and what few other odds and ends they owned.
The two curtains on the left hid the bedchambers, little more than closets just large enough for the thick mattresses and blankets that she shared with Erik, and the smaller one that her sister slept in alone.
Katja was lying in front of the fireplace at the far end of the common room.
Freya rushed to her sister’s side. Katja was sweating and shaking, her breath whistling through her clenched teeth. Freya searched her body and quickly found the wound on Katja’s leg that Erik had bound in cotton cloth, now stained with blood. Under the bandage, Freya found a ragged bite mark with half a dozen deep punctures from the beast’s fangs. The skin around each wound looked green, veined with black.
“Oh gods. Katja?” Freya touched her sister’s cheek. “Katja, it looks bad. It’s going to need medicine. You need to tell me what to do. Katja? Katja?”
The injured woman moaned and shivered.
“Katja? Come on now, I would take you to the vala if I could, but you’re the vala, so there’s nowhere else to go.” Freya tried to smile. “Come on now, you can do it. It’s an infected bite, from a bear, or a wolf, I think. What do I do? Bleed it? Burn it? Wash it? Tell me what to do and I’ll take care of everything. Just tell me what to do.”
She was reaching down toward the wound again when a bony hand grabbed her wrist.
Katja stared up at her, white-faced and sweating. Her lip trembled. “Don’t touch it,” she whispered. “Keep it covered. It’s poisoned.”
Freya wrapped the bloody bandage back around her sister’s leg. “Poison? What sort? What do I do?”
Katja shook her head. “It wasn’t a wolf.”
“I know, I know, it was bigger and different, somehow. Look, it doesn’t matter now.” Freya shook her head. “Just tell me what to do. You’ve fixed up worse bites than this before. Remember when old Burli got his hand bit off by his own goat? Huh? Remember that? And you fixed that no problem. Well, more or less. The point being he’s still alive. So this bite here is nothing, nothing at all. How do I fix it?”
“You can’t.” Katja shook, her limp brown hair plastered to her face with sweat. “There’s no cure for this. It’s not a wolf. Remember the stories?”
Freya frowned. “What stories?”
“The old sagas. War stories. The gods and the demons.”
“Kat, this is no time for stories. We need some herbs or a powder or something. You’ve got lots of them here. Just tell me which one you need,” Freya said, glancing up at the long line of earthen pots and jars along the wall.
Katja gasped. “Ulfsark.”
“An ulfsark?” Freya leaned over her sister, wiping her brow. “No, no, no. That’s just an old story from the wars. That was just men wearing wolf-skins into battle. Berserkers and ulfsarks were just men, not beasts. And that thing out there was definitely not human.”
The young vala shook her head, and then rolled her face to stare at the doorway. Freya turned to see Erik standing there with the beast’s head swinging from his fist. The man tugged on his left ear, and then pointed to the creature’s ear as he came forward.
Freya stared. Two silver earrings hung from the beast’s tall hairy ear. She exhaled slowly. “Oh.” She turned back to her sister. “All right, just for a moment, let’s say it is an ulfsark. A real one. A real beast-man-thing. So what do we do for your leg? There must be something we can do, and don’t you dare say I have to cut it off.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Katja shivered. “Maybe Gudrun knows what to do.”
Freya nodded. “Gudrun, right, we can ask Gudrun. She’ll know. She’s old. All right, come on, let’s get you up onto Arfast. It’s a long ride to Denveller.”
Chapter 2. Tower
When dawn broke, the sun was still hidden beyond the mountains and while the sky glowed with the pale morning light the land slumbered on in the shadows. Freya strode up the ancient road with a bone-weary ache in her back and legs, but she ignored the pain. Erik marched tirelessly at her side with his spear on his shoulder, and Arfast trotted along behind them with Katja sleeping on his shaggy back.
They’d made good time from Logarven, hiking across country through the snow around the southern edge of Gerya Ridge through the long, dark night with the stars racing overhead and the aurora waves of green light lapping at the northern sky, and the thick mists drifting across the ground. And now, as the sky grew lighter and the breeze grew warmer, Freya looked out over the hills of dead and frozen grass and she saw the waves of Denveller Lake rippling with faint glimmers of the reflected sky.
“We’re almost there.” Freya glanced at Erik, but his hands said nothing in reply. She fell back a few paces and
