wrinkles out they would suddenly look as nice as Thora’s dress, and when that failed she sighed and pushed through the heavy curtains into the queen’s audience chamber. It was empty.
“Back here.” Thora held back another curtain at the end of the room, and Wren cautiously stepped through. Inside was a smaller room, one dominated by the queen’s bed, and her chair, and stool, and mirror, and table.
Wren stared at the furniture. It was all wooden. Every leg, every surface, every peg and stick and handle and frame was carved from wood. Each piece had been stained a dark red and waxed and polished to shine like glass, protecting the beautiful swirling patterns of the ancient material underneath. She turned her attention to the woman seated on the bed, but every single impulse in her young body was to reach out and touched the wood, to run her hands over it, to caress it, to smell it, and to learn its secrets.
“Wren, my dear,” Skadi said. “Come, sit with me, my little seidr-sister.” She patted the blankets beside her.
Wren sat down, hoping that she didn’t look too rustic or filthy for her hostess. It was bad enough that she had to meet at all with the person who ordered Leif to kill Arn and his friends, who kept the southern woman in the cellar on the edge of starvation. But having Skadi look down on her as some country simpleton was just intolerable.
The queen said, “I’m afraid I have some unfortunate news to share with you. It’s about your friends, the hunters.”
The young vala felt her legs go cold.
Oh gods, they’re dead. They’re both dead. Freya and Erik. Leif killed them, or the reavers killed them. And that means they’re not coming back with the rinegold ring, and that means no cure for Katja, and no cure for m…
“Leif?” Skadi looked to a second doorway across from the one that Wren had come through. The beautiful young warrior entered.
Wren felt her stomach twisting itself into knots.
Killer! You murdered poor Arn! And Freya! And now I’m going to die too!
He was even paler and thinner than she remembered from their brief encounter two nights earlier. His black hair hung in flat curtains about his lovely face and his unsmiling mouth and his cold eyes. As he moved toward the bed, Wren saw the way his left sleeve flopped against his side.
“He arrived only an hour ago,” the queen said. “Alone. Leif, tell her what you told me. She deserves to hear it from you.”
The young man inclined his head in respect, but only just. “We visited the drill and the pit, and then crossed the mountain and the hills beyond to Glymur Falls. Along the way we encountered a pair of reavers in the night, but we killed them easily enough. Yesterday morning as we reached the falls, we were attacked again, this time by eight or nine of the beasts. One bit my hand, and I was forced to hack off my own arm to escape the plague, but in doing that I fell into the river and was swept away. I awoke sometime later by the river’s edge, found myself a mule, and spent the rest of the day and night returning to the city. I’m afraid your friends are dead.”
The cold pit of horror in Wren’s stomach and all the fear and misery that was reaching its icy claws up her spine, suddenly faded. She turned the story over in her mind, and frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. If a man’s arm is cut off, he’ll soon bleed to death if he is not tended by a healer. How did you survive?”
The warrior’s eyes never wavered. “The freezing cold of the river numbed the pain. And when I crawled out of the water, I set about building a fire. It was tedious work with only one hand, but I succeeded, and when the fire was large enough, I sealed my wound with the flames.” Without hesitating, he shrugged off his shirt and let the tailored cotton slip down to reveal the firm muscles of his chest and shoulder, and the hideous blackened stump of his arm.
Wren flinched, and looked away.
Thora helped Leif back into his shirt as he said, “Your friends were fighting bravely when I last saw them, but I have no hope for their safe return. Even if they did somehow survive the reavers at the falls, I don’t see how they could hope to defeat Fenrir with only two spears.”
“I’m sorry, Wren,” Skadi said. “Not only for you, and for those brave hunters, but for all our people. I was hoping against hope, against fate and reason, that they would return with the ring and we would find a cure for this plague. It was a good plan, and worth the attempt. But now that it has failed, we must face the cold light of day together. There is no longer any hope for the poor creature in the cell outside. Freya’s sister, I believe. We will have to kill her, swiftly and mercifully, of course. Poison would be safest, I think.”
Wren nodded, her eyes fixed on the queen. It was hard to hate the woman at that moment. There was nothing sinister about her face or voice or manners. She was just a woman sitting on a bed, talking calmly, saying reasonable things.
Maybe Arn was wrong. After all, there was a lot of confusion on the mountain that day. Maybe Skadi never gave the order. Maybe Leif did it all on his own.
Suddenly she was grateful that Skadi was there to speak for her. They all knew what had to be done, but someone had to actually give the order and someone actually had to carry it out, and it eased the pain in Wren’s chest to have so many other people there to do those things for her.
If Freya and Erik had died before, back at the water mill, or in Hengavik, or in Denveller, I would have had to make that choice. I would have had to kill Katja.
For a moment Wren saw in her mind’s eye the young vala of Logarven lying on the bed in the Denveller tower. It had been her only glimpse of her before the change really began. And now, she couldn’t remember Katja’s face at all.
“Is there anything I can do?” she asked hoarsely.
“No. But perhaps you might want to get some rest,” Skadi said. “You’re looking a bit unwell.”
Wren sat up straighter and leaned back from the queen. “No, I’m fine. Although I didn’t sleep well last night. I kept hearing a strange voice.”
“Ghosts, no doubt.” Skadi smiled. “We’ve lost so many people over the last five years that the city is almost overrun with the restless dead these days. There’s a new story almost every morning of some distant relative wandering in on the aether mist to tell of the reavers, mostly. How the reavers tore down their home, murdered their families, and killed them. Horrible stories.”
Wren nodded. She felt hot and nearly shrugged off her blanket, but the cloth was rubbing on her injured hand and she could feel it pushing back and forth on the long hairs on her skin.
I probably only have a few hours left before someone sees my hand, or some other change, and then they’ll know the truth.
Then they’ll kill me.
So what’s the worst they can really do to me now?
“Last night I went looking for the sound I heard and I found a woman down in your cellar, a woman with dark skin and a strange accent,” Wren said a little too loudly and a little too quickly. She felt dizzy. “She’s as thin as a spear, and as mad as old Gudrun. She kept saying the word Morayo, but I don’t think that’s her name. Who is she?”
Skadi’s eyes narrowed a bit, but there was no surprise or anger in her expression. She said, “Wren, you told me that you saw the remains of the skyship in Hengavik. Yes?”
Wren nodded.
“The woman you found in the cellar was the pilot of the skyship. Her name is Riuza Ngozi, and she comes from a land far to the south.”
“The pilot? But I thought you said the pilot helped you to build your drill on Mount Esja. I thought she was your friend.”
“I thought so as well,” said Skadi. “But after the disaster that took the life of the king and released this plague, I learned that this pilot, Riuza, had sabotaged the drill. She never wanted the project to succeed. So she made sure the drill would never work for more than a few days at a time before needing repairs. And whenever she made those repairs, she threw out the broken parts.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong was that she was breaking the drill just so she could steal the old parts. After she repaired the drill, she would take the parts to a cave at the edge of the bay where she was building a metal ship so she could escape Ysland and go back home.”
