Sometimes the world slows and you notice every small thing, as if you stood between two beats of eternity’s heart. It seemed to me I had felt something similar before, with Corion, with Sageous, even Jane. The air hung heavy with the metallic scent of rain. I wondered: if I stood out there, in the flood, would the rain wrap a grey life and make it shine? Should I stand, arms spread, and raise my face? Let it wash me clean. Or did my stains run too deep?
I listened to the fall of it, to the drumming, the drip, the pitter, and the patter. The others moved around me, handing over reins, taking saddlebags, the business of living, as if they hadn’t noticed me step outside such things. As if they couldn’t sense her.
Rike stumbled from the great hall, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“Christ, Rike,” I said. “We’ve been gone a day. How did you grow a beard?”
He shrugged, rubbing at stubble near deep enough to lose his fingers in. “When in Roma.”
I ignored his bad geography and the fact that he even knew the phrase, and asked the more obvious question. “Why are you up?” On the road Rike always came last from his bed-roll and would never rise without some kind of threat or enticement.
He scratched his head at that. Sindri came back from the stables and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “He’ll look good with a beard. We’ll make a Viking of him yet!”
Rike frowned. “She said to meet her at the end of the lake.”
“Who said?”
He frowned again, shrugged, and went back into the hall.
I looked out across the lake. At the far end, faint through the grey veils of rain, a tent stood, a yurt, yellowed with age, a thin line of smoke escaping through the smoke-hole. The strangeness came from there. That was where she waited.
Sindri looked too. “That’s Ekatri, a völva from the north. She doesn’t come often. Twice when I was young.”
“Völva?” I asked.
“She knows things. She can see the future,” Sindri said. “A witch. Is that what you call them?” He frowned. “Yes, a witch. You’d best go to her. Wouldn’t do to keep her waiting. Maybe she’ll read your future for you.”
“I’ll go now,” I said. Sometimes you wait and watch, sometimes you walk right on in. There’s not much to learn from the outside of a tent.
“I’ll see you inside.” Sindri nodded to the hall, grinned, and wiped the rain from his beard. He’d be waking his father before I got to the end of the lake, telling him about the trolls and Gorgoth. What would the good duke make of all that? I wondered. Perhaps the witch would tell me.
The ground trembled once as I walked along the lake, setting the water dancing. I could smell the smoke from the witch’s tent now. It put an acrid taste in my mouth and reminded me of the volcanoes. The wind picked up, blowing rain into my face.
Old Tutor Lundist once taught me about seers, soothsayers, and the star-watchers who count out our lives by the slow predictions of planets rolling over the heavens. “How many words would be needed to tell the tale of your life?” he had asked. “How many to reach this point, and how many more to reach the end?”
“Lots?” I grinned and glanced away, out the narrow window to the courtyard, the gates, the fields beyond city walls. I had the twitchies in my feet, eager to be off chasing some or other thing while the sun still shone.
“This is our curse.” Lundist stamped and rose from his chair with a groan. “Man is doomed to repeat his mistakes time and again because he learns only from experience.”
He smoothed out an old scroll across the desk, covered in the pictograms of his homeland. It had pictures too, bright and interesting in the eastern style. “The zodiac,” he said.
I put my finger on the dragon, caught in a few bold strokes of red and gold. “This one,” I said.
“Your life is laid out from the moment of your birth, Jorg, and you don’t get to choose. All the words of your story can be replaced by one date and place. Where the planets hung in that instant, how they turned their faces, and which of them looked toward you…that configuration forms a key and that key unlocks all that a man will be,” he said.
I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Lundist was always a man for enquiry, for logic and judging, for patience and subtlety. All that felt rather pointless if we walked a fixed path from the cradle to whatever end was written in stars.
I’d reached the yurt without noticing. I made an abrupt stop and managed not to walk into it. I circled for the entrance and ducked through without announcement. She was supposed to know the future after all.
“Listen,” she said as I pushed through the flap into her tent, a stinking place of hides and hanging dead things.
“Listen,” she said again as I made to open my mouth.
So I sat cross-legged beneath the dangling husks, and listened and didn’t speak.
“Good,” she said. “You’re better than most. Better than those bold, noisy boys wanting so much to be men, wanting only to hear the words from their own mouths.”
I listened to the dry wheeze of her as she spoke, to the flap and creak of the tent, the insistence of the rain, and the complaints of the wind.
“So you listen, but do you hear?” she asked.
I watched
