They were well onto the eastern face of Esja and descending quickly toward the lower hills when the sun finally kissed the western edge of the world and the shadow of the mountain painted the world in black and gray and more black. Stars gleamed in the eastern darkness and as the sunset reds washed out of the sky, the heavens transformed into a blue and violet sea sparkling with diamonds.
Erik pointed to a crevasse just below the trail and signed, “We should be all right in there for the night.”
Leif glanced back and groaned. “Oh, what does it want now? Do you need to feed it again? Does it need to piss?”
“We’re going to sleep here.” Freya nodded down at the crevasse. “I’ll take the first watch. And if you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head, then you won’t have a tongue to keep for much longer.” She held the youth’s gaze for a moment, and then followed Erik down into the dark crack in the mountainside.
Her husband placed the butt of his spear on the ground and the tip against the rock wall, and draped a blanket across it to form a simple little tent, and he slipped inside with their second blanket and was soon snoring softly. Leif gave the tent a quick glare before stretching out in a patch of starlight on the bare ground and closing his eyes.
Freya climbed up to the top of the crevasse to look out at the mountainside. She saw the ancient lava flows frozen in time, and the gravel cascades resting in their dry river beds, and the thin clusters of grass standing in the cracks in the earth, shivering in the cold night breeze. Thick blankets of snow and thin sheets of ice glistened everywhere in white, gray, and blue. Overhead a thousand times ten thousand stars spread out from horizon to horizon, drawing crude images of wolves, bears, eagles, dragons, ships, and spears in the sky.
She thought of Wren in the castle of Rekavik, perhaps talking with Skadi and Thora about ghosts and death and monsters, eating warm food and sleeping on soft beds. She pitied the girl and her lonely life trapped in Gudrun’s tower, all alone with a madwoman, and she was glad that Wren would have these days and nights among decent people. Even strange company was better than no company at all.
And then she thought of Katja, deformed and insane, snarling and drooling, and locked in a cold windowless cell buried in the earth under the castle’s wall.
Does her head still hurt from when I kicked her?
Freya curled up as she sat on the lip of the crevasse, wrapping her arms around her knees. A few days ago they’d been talking about taking a few days to visit their cousins to the south in the river lands, down near Kivaberg.
If only we had left then, left Logarven far behind, left before the demon came… But this was no one’s fault. No one was in a hurry to leave and no one had any reason to linger. It was just bad timing. Bad luck. Nothing more.
She stared at the rolling hills off to the east and the distant snowy mountains gleaming blue and green beneath the shining stars and the rippling auroras.
But luck can be changed.
A wolf, a real wolf, howled in the darkness far to the north, and Freya smiled, and she howled back.
If there are still wolves out there, then the reavers must not be so frightening, or so many. Maybe Leif was wrong. Maybe there are only a few of them. Maybe Erik and I already killed half of them in Denveller. Maybe they were starving and dying, and the last three in the world died at our hands beneath Gudrun’s tower. Maybe the plague is already over.
When the stars told her that midnight had come, Freya climbed down into the crevasse and shook Leif awake. “Your watch.” She paused only long enough to make sure the youth was truly awake and moving about, and then she slipped into Erik’s tent and curled up in his warm arms with a smile on her lips.
She was still smiling when the sound of stones tumbling down the slope snapped her eyes back open. It was a small sound, a distant sound, but it was far more noise than she had heard all evening.
Maybe it’s nothing. Freya blinked.
Or maybe it’s something hunting us.
She crawled out of the tent as quietly as a ghost and looked around for Leif, but there was no sign of him. Frowning, she climbed up to the top of the crevasse and peered out over the mountainside below. Gravel crunched under a foot, and Freya’s eyes widened. Two dark shapes were creeping up through the shadows. Two long, crooked, inhuman shapes.
For the first moment, she felt nothing and did not move. She just watched them, watched how they moved, how their long bodies reached and pulled and stretched from handhold to foothold, from ledge to ledge. She watched them pause to sniff, cocking their heads to listen with their tall hairy ears, and sometimes even nipping at each others’ legs when they came too close together.
When the reavers passed behind a rocky outcropping, Freya dropped down into the crevasse and yanked the blanket from their spears, letting the starlight spill on her husband’s face, which shone bright with sweat. She grabbed her spear and shook Erik, and he woke suddenly with a jerk and wild look in his eyes.
A nightmare? I’ll have to ask him about it later.
“Two reavers coming up the slope to the east,” she signed.
He nodded and took his spear. “Where is Leif?” he signed.
Freya squinted into the shadows, but could not see the black-haired youth anywhere near them. “I don’t know,” she signed.
Together they climbed back up out of the ravine on the higher western end and knelt down behind a low line of broken stones. After a moment, they spotted a reaver at the far edge of the crevasse where it leaned out, sniffing and peering down into the darkness. Erik wiped the sweat from his brow and shivered, and then he pointed to the beast and nodded, and Freya nodded back.
Erik took a long silent breath. Then he leapt to his feet, took three running steps down the slope, and hurled his spear. The bolt of steel flashed through the starlight and slammed straight through the reaver’s back and clanged on the rocks beneath it. The beast yelped once and toppled forward, tumbling clumsily into the crevasse with the spear stuck fast through its ribs. Erik heaved a sigh and turned back to their hiding place as his fingers said, “Well, that’s one of-”
The second reaver burst from the shadows on Freya’s right, scrambling across the loose stones on its four clawed feet and its nightmare eyes blazing in the darkness. Freya dashed out, planting herself and her spear between the beast and Erik, readying herself for the moment of impact.
Steel flashed in the starlight, a great white arc in the darkness, and the reaver’s head spun high in the air leaving its body to crash down into the earth. From a thin black gap in the mountainside, a space so small it looked to be merely a shadow, Leif stepped into the light. He did not look down at the body, nor did he note when the creature’s head thumped back down to the ground. He stared out at the distant hills below them, his naked sword at his side.
“You!” Freya bolted forward and swung the butt of her spear in a wild circle at Leif’s head, but the youth jerked back and the steel shaft missed him by a hair. “You were on watch. You left us. We could have died!” She swung at him again and heard Erik running up behind her.
Leif swatted her spear aside with his sword and glared down his nose at her. “I had to piss.”
“You left us to die!” Freya swung again, but Erik grabbed the spear and held it fast in midair. “You’ve been talking about us dying since we came out here. You want us dead. You want us to fail, you coward!”
Leif flicked the reaver’s blood from his sword and slipped it back into the heavy leather scabbard on his belt. “Obviously, I didn’t leave. I’m right here. And I killed this thing.” He kicked the body at his feet. “Show some gratitude.”
Freya pointed to the dark hole behind him. “Who crawls down into a crack like that to piss? You were hiding!”
“I heard the reaver come up behind me,” Leif said lazily. “So I found this place to hide and wait for it. Which seemed to work out quite well.” He kicked the body again. “But if you don’t want to trust me, then I’ll be happy to sleep the rest of the night while you keep watch.” He sauntered past them back toward the crevasse.
Freya whirled and grabbed Erik’s shirt. “Why did you stop me?”
“You were giving him a reason to hurt you, and he might have tried to kill you right here and now,” Erik signed. “He’s a soldier. He slaughters reavers for a living, and he seems just as comfortable with killing his own men as killing the enemy. I’d say it would be bad luck to make someone like him angry.”
“But he betrayed us! He’s actually hoping that we die out here. He said so!”
