“Ew.” Wren peeled her arms off her friend, but grabbed her empty hand. “And you cut your hair? Why would you… Oh gods, Erik! Is he really gone?”
“No. At least not yet. He was bitten,” Freya whispered.
“By a reaver? Oh no!”
“Actually, no. It wasn’t a reaver. It was a tainted bloodfly. Don’t worry. He’s resting at the water mill we passed on the road. I’ll explain everything as soon as we’re alone.”
Wren nodded. “I have things to tell you too.”
The group moved back through the dining hall toward the many doors and corridors at the center of the castle. The queen paused. “Well, it has been a momentous day, and there will be a feast tonight, so I suggest we all get some rest. I certainly have enough work ahead of me with this ring, and I imagine there is still a long road ahead before the reavers are gone for good.” She nodded and the group nodded or bowed or curtsied in reply, and Skadi passed through the curtains to her audience chamber.
The guardsmen slapped Freya on the back and congratulated her on her kill before wandering off to their own duties. One man relieved her of the sack containing the demon’s head, and Freya gave it away with a grateful nod. In the bustle of that moment, Freya noted that the apprentice Thora turned toward the bedrooms on the right instead of following her mistress to the left. So Freya held Wren back a moment before following the tall girl back to their own rooms.
Wren fidgeted with her fingers.
“Something wrong?”
The girl wrapped her hands up in her blanket and used the fringe of it to wipe the sweat from her brow. “No, nothing. Katja’s fine, by the way.”
“Good.”
“No, I mean, I stopped them.” Wren swallowed. “When Leif came back, we thought you and Erik were dead, and there was no hope of finding a cure, so there was no reason to keep Katja alive. Thora and I went to make a poison to kill her. I didn’t want to, I swear, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say or do. It was all happening so fast. But then, while we were waiting for the poison to set into a pellet, I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill her. So I ruined the pellet and there wasn’t any other poison left, so now they’re just going to starve Katja to death. Of course, I’ve been slipping her bits of meat through the bars of her cell, so I think she’s all right. For now, at least.”
Freya saw the pain and fear in the girl’s darting eyes, and she laid a reassuring arm across Wren’s shoulders. “It’s all right. I understand. I’m thankful that you saved her, but I would have understood if you hadn’t, or couldn’t. I’ve known for days now that Katja may not survive this. And that I might have to kill her myself.”
Wren nodded.
“Come on.” Freya led her friend down the hall to the bedrooms and they were about to turn through a curtain on their right when she heard a heavy boot tread on the stones behind her. She turned. “Leif.”
For a young man who’d been maimed, thrown into a river, and forced to cross countless leagues of reaver hunting grounds alone and unarmed, he looked surprisingly well. But the closer he came, the more clearly she saw the strain in the lines of his neck and the creases around his eyes and mouth.
It’s a front. He’s a walking corpse. But who is he trying to impress? Me?
“How’s the shoulder?” she asked.
“It hurts,” he said.
“And what did Skadi say when you told her what really happened to your arm?”
Leif frowned.
“Did you tell her?” Freya narrowed her eyes. “Does queenie know who’s out there?”
Leif looked away.
Wren tilted her head and said in a sing-songy voice, “Oh, queenie doesn’t know.” Then she looked up at Freya. “Know what? Who’s out there?”
“Someone who knows the truth about the reavers,” Freya said. “And the truth about Skadi and Leif here.”
“He’s not who you think he is,” Leif said. “He’s a freak of nature. A demon. A liar. A sorcerer. He doesn’t care about you or the plague or saving lives. He only cares about himself, and about his power.”
“He’s a very old man from a far away land, and he has a very dangerous sword,” Freya said. “It’s that simple. And when he comes back here, you’re going to have to answer for the things that you’ve done.”
The young warrior stepped closer to her, and for a moment she saw a glimmer of real steel and ice in his eyes. “Pray to the gods that he stays away. Because if he does come back, you can be sure that I’ll kill you and your little pet before he kills me.”
Freya heard the venom in his voice and knew the threat was real. This was a young man who had spent the last five years fighting reavers, even fighting Fenrir himself.
He is a traitor and a liar and a coward, but he’s also a killer.
She stepped back against the wall and let him pass, and he strode by, his back straight and head held high as he slipped through the curtain into Thora’s room.
Freya nodded slowly.
So that’s who he’s trying to impress.
Chapter 20. Council
Omar Bakhoum sat down in the bottom of the rocky pit in the shadow of Ivar’s Drill and dangled his legs over the lip of the tunnel. The hole stared up at him, the darkness gazing into him in silence.
Near silence.
The tiny buzzing of the mosquitoes kept him scowling and jerking his head away, trying to keep the pests from whining in his ears. He gripped his sword and called the names of his inner council, his ghostly advisors, a few chosen souls from among the countless thousands that resided in his sun-steel blade.
One by one their faces and forms loomed darkly before him, standing on the floor of the pit around him dressed as they had been in life, aged as they had been at the moment of death, and wearing varying expressions of interest, annoyance, and boredom.
An elderly Indian physician with short white hair framing his lined brown face and stooping over his crooked little cane appeared on the left. A beautiful Hellan oracle with curling brown hair and soft olive skin sat on the right in her carefully folded white robes. A little Aegyptian girl dressed in a threadbare gray dress lay on the ground, staring up at the darkening sky and playing with a lock of her black hair.
And the young samurai from Nippon, Ito Daisuke, stood on the far side of the pit, pacing slowly along its edge. His green and black robes were immaculate, and his black hair was knotted at the back of his head, but a few long strands had escaped the knot and hung from his temples in such perfect balance that Omar suspected the youth had plucked them loose intentionally.
All of the others were there as well, as always. The vast multitude of the dead, thousands of souls collected from every nation and every era, hovered in the distance like pale stars, ringing Omar on every side and pressing in with hungry and pleading stares. There were even a few Yslanders among them, plague victims set free of their curse as the shreds of the fox-soul dissolved within the seireiken, as all animal souls did. And they too gazed hungrily at Omar, eager to speak and be spoken to. But he held them all at a distance, as always. He could search them and question them at will, on command, as he had on many occasions searched through this vast library of humanity for answers time and again.
But not today.
He sighed. “For five years, we’ve been trying to unravel this little riddle, haven’t we, dear friends?”
The physician and oracle nodded solemnly.
“We need to try something new, something different. We know the reavers cannot be treated with herbs or leeches, or even with sun-steel.” Omar stood up and took a few steps toward the rusting hulk of the drill. “We can’t pull the fox-souls out of the people. So if we cannot take the contagion out without killing the patient, what can we do?”
