Chapter 25. Runaway
Wren walked slowly through the predawn gloom. A miserable gray fog clung to the city, drifting down the streets with the aether and she hurried through it.
Woden, I’m still angry at you, but I’d be willing to reconsider my feelings a bit if you just get me out of this city without seeing another ghost.
She pulled her blanket tight around her shoulders even though she could feel the sweat trickling down her arms and running down the small of her back. She wanted to hurl the blanket and her coat away and run through the cold air, feeling the chill on her bare skin. But she knew her skin wasn’t bare anymore. The fur chafed her arms and legs.
Her teeth chattered.
Allfather, shield me from sight. Let me walk out into the world alone and unharmed, and I’ll forgive you, I promise.
She went west, hurrying down the narrow lanes between the dark and silent houses as the sky began to lighten in the east, as the first faint hints of the sun began to swallow the stars. The western seawall of Rekavik stood in poorer repair than the eastern wall, and with fewer guards upon it. It was a small matter to slip out one of the unmanned doors in the wall and then to quietly walk down the pebbled beach with the salt-pocked stones on her left and the open sea lapping on her right.
A lone guard called out to her, his voice thin and half-hearted somewhere behind her, but she gritted her teeth and kept her back to him, and she reached the end of the wall and the open fields without being stopped. An hour after leaving the castle she stood on the dead, frozen grasses of Ysland, looking south across the snowy hills.
Gudrun used to tell tales of Alba where there were trees as far as the eye could see, and bushes dripping with berries, and flowers of red and yellow. She said her own father had gone on one of the last raids and seen it for himself. Back when there were ships to sail. Back when heroes walked the earth and the gods were kind and the demons stayed in their hells.
I wish she’d never told me about all that.
Wren set out on the road heading east. Every foot step crunched on the frosted earth, and in the early morning stillness each step sounded like an avalanche, but no one called out to her from the south wall of Rekavik, and soon the entire city had disappeared behind her over a small rise in the road, and she was alone.
She walked slowly. There was no hurry in her bones or blood. There was only the burning and the hunger, and beneath them, the fear. She felt her heart pattering and pounding in her chest as her eyes darted about the road and across the hills.
They’re out there, somewhere. Sleeping in their dens. Dreaming beast-dreams. Or hunting rabbits. Or killing people. I wonder if they can remember being people themselves. I wonder if I’ll remember. Maybe that’s what drives them mad. They remember what they were and can never be again.
The dirt road crunched on and on underfoot. A cool breeze blew through the frozen grass and the air keened softly and sadly, but she did not feel the chill in the air at all. She knew it was cold, and she knew she should be cold, but she wasn’t. Wren paused and took the blanket off her shoulders, and then took off her black coat, leaving her in just a thin black shirt and skirt and boots. She pushed her sleeves up to her elbows and looked at the thick, dark red hair on her arms.
Fur. Not hair. It’s fur. My fur.
The longer she stared at it, the less horrific it became, fading to the merely strange, and then settling into something that was almost familiar.
Fur is just hair. Everything has hair. Rabbits, mice, beavers. And they’re not monsters.
She set out again, quicker this time, moving lightly with long easy strides. There were faint scents on the breeze, the pheromone traces of grouse in their nests and rabbits in their burrows, all sleeping safely tucked away in their holes in the earth, their little bodies wrapped around each other for warmth in the long night of winter. And for a moment, Wren looked to her right and considered following the smell of rabbits back to wherever it was coming from, and digging the delicious morsels out of their holes.
She blinked and gulped the cool air through her mouth.
An eagle screamed and she slowed down to scan the skies, and after a long moment she spied a tiny black dot on the northern horizon in the no-color space between the fading darkness of the night and the growing light of the morning. As she stared at the bird, wondering how far away it must have been, another sound whispered in her ear and she jerked her head away from it.
“Damn flies. You know, Allfather, not that I’m speaking to you, but after everything you’ve done to me and everyone else in this poor land, the very least consideration you might have made would be to spare us the whining of bloodflies in our ears.”
She hissed as the fly bit her ear, and she slapped the bite mark. Her fingers froze, and she swallowed, and closed her eyes. Under her fingertips, she felt the long pointed shape of her ear poking up through the thick tangle of her hair. This wasn’t like the fur, there was nothing normal to compare it to, to wave it away. This was her flesh, grown and twisted out of form. Her hand shook and she took it away from her head.
In a flurry of gestures and gasps, she ran her hands over her face and chest and legs, and then held her hands closer before her eyes, searching for more changes. And she found them. Her nose felt rough instead of smooth, and her fingers looked shorter and thicker, and her skirts no longer reached all the way to the bottoms of her boots, having rising above the level of her foot.
There was also a soreness in her back.
It’s not from walking, though, and it’s not from sleeping in that soft bed in the castle.
Wren tried to reach back to touch her shoulder blades and spine, but felt nothing strange.
I’m cracking apart, splitting and tearing. And when the pain is more than I can bear, I’ll scream until I can’t scream anymore, until I’m not human anymore, and I’ll go running mad across the hills, naked and crazed, to kill some frightened child in her bed, to kill some brave young man, to go on killing until someone kills me. It’s happening. It’s happening right now.
But there was something else, something both like and unlike pain, a warm dull throbbing between her legs. It had been easy to ignore as long as she had been moving, but now, in the stillness, she felt the heat in her sex slowly rising. Hesitantly, and then gingerly, she pressed her hand against the firm curve of flesh between her thighs, and a rolling wave of fire and hunger and joy crashed upward through her spine and down through her legs. She moved her fingers slowly and stood on unsteady legs, her chest heaving.
Wren sank to her knees, licking her lips, closing her eyes and thinking of Arn, lovely young Arn standing in the darkness, his naked arms wrapping around her, his warm flesh rising sharply inside her. Her hips shuddered again, and again, trembling in ecstasy.
The pain in her back sharpened suddenly, and she cried out as she stumbled to her feet, and ran.
Her legs devoured a league or three, or maybe only a half. As she ran, there was no road and no hills and no legs, there was only the blast of wind in her eyes and the burning in her blood. The sun’s fire and gold shone on the horizon, just barely, just enough to banish the black of night and leave the sky a dusky violet in the west and a pale slate blue in the east. And as she came through a dip in the road she recognized the narrow path off to the side, and she darted away from the road into the tall dead grass. She heard the trickle of the water long before she saw it, and she heard the leathery creaking of the little paddles in the stream long before she saw them.
The mill. And Erik. Erik will know what to do. He knows about animals, and traps, and habits, and instincts. He’ll know about foxes. He’ll know some trick. He’s had hours to deal with this. He’ll know some trick to hold it in, to hold it back. Erik will help me.
She bounded down to the grassy bank and leapt clear over the water and stumbled into the stone wall of the water mill. The stones were cold against the naked palms of her hands and she paused to look at her hands again.
The fur. Is it thinner? Lighter?
She moved toward the curtained doorway of the mill. Over the sloshing and trickling and babbling of the stream, she could clearly hear the slow and heavy breathing of the man inside. For a moment she thought of the miller and his brother, deformed and tortured. But she had only glimpsed the brother after Freya had killed them
