She was kicked out of her home. Made to live in the street. Garún demanded that they take her in, but neither Hulda nor Snædís wanted Fæðey in their house. Garún begged her mother to show her childhood friend some kindness. But she didn’t budge.
Garún sneaked out to feed her. She bought ointment from the healer, but it did nothing to alleviate Fæðey’s pain. Her body stiffened up in only a few days, making her unable to move her deformed limbs.
Then one early morning Garún found her standing out in the middle of the street. She stood in front of an abandoned shack she had been sleeping in, feet rooted in the earth. Beautiful flowers bloomed on her arms. The hair on her head had vanished, replaced by a thick, luxuriant crown of wild flowers. None of them were alike, each a previously unseen type of blossom. She couldn’t speak or move. But Garún saw her eyes still moving. She was crying.
When the people in the village saw what had happened, they chopped her down with an axe and burned her. Blood did not flow from the stumps where they cut her down. Only tree sap. All the while, she remained frozen and silent. But she still screamed in the fire.
Garún started to despise the village with all her heart after Fæðey died. Its ugly little houses, twisting roads, the small-minded people and their pathetic little politics and gossip. As if all these insignificant, mundane things mattered when the fucking walls towered over them and kept them apart from the country they were living in. She’d heard of the seiðskrattar and the galdramenn, powerful users of seiður and galdur who might have been able to save Fæðey. If only they’d had the chance. Of course, none of this would have happened if they could just live inside the city walls like everyone else. Not trapped out here, in their hovels, alongside the lethal nature encroaching upon them day and night. She didn’t understand how the people could stand it.
She also suspected the villagers didn’t mind that Fæðey was gone. She had started being labelled as troublesome. Every time a new blendingur was born, she’d interject herself in the naming ceremony at the church and protest as the naming council gave the blendingar their names. It was an ancient tradition, believed to be a relic of the old world, although some weren’t so sure of that. Blendingar traditionally got their names from a separate pool of options. They were odd names, cursed names, given to what had once been considered cursed children. Quite a few people in the village resented that as well, and took Fæðey’s side when she protested. Parents should get to choose their child’s name themselves, not some town committee, and blendingar should have the same kind of name as anyone else. The committee and the village elders refused to give in, and to Garún’s surprise a lot of people stood with them on that. It was tradition. A part of their culture they needed to respect and hold on to. Deciding your own name was for humans.
Garún considered changing her name, just to spite them. She was part human, after all. Why not? But she decided against it. Her name had become a badge of honour. She liked it, despite its connotations of being somehow distant from god. Her name was a corruption of the name Guðrún, meaning god-rune. The “Ga’ in Garún was a mangled pronunciation of the word for “god’. She liked that, it turned out. She denied all gods, as well as all authority. It suited her. She’d set an example and show them how far a person with a “cursed’ name could go. She’d turn it into a source of pride for others like her.
Every day Hulda worked hard, washing linens from Reykjavík in the hot pools. Most of it was dirty laundry from the city hospital, but sometimes big imported automobiles, trucks with stencilled symbols, would show up and dump a huge order to be done the same day. Later Garún learned those trucks came from the Kalmar military base. Hulda slaved away for meagre aurar on the hour, working for a hospital that would never admit her should she fall ill or injure herself, and an army that would not protect her, but instead kept her out here. It made Garún furious. When Garún confronted her mother about this, she didn’t have much to say. Sitting by the kitchen table, her hands reddened from the chemicals and hot water, smoking a cigarette before going to bed at midnight only to get up in five hours’ time. She used simple charms, channelling seiðmagn with kukl, to help her ease her tiredness and worn-out body. Garún learned from her how to manipulate seiðmagn.
“That’s just how things are, elskan,” Hulda had said wearily. “There are some fights you can win by yourself. This isn’t one of them.”
“Mamma, that’s bullshit. What if you had said that when I was born? You fought for me. For us. You didn’t just accept things the way they were.”
She shook her head, blowing smoke through her nostrils.
“Huldufjörður is different. We’ve had to change a lot, you know. For better or for worse. We’ve always been good at adapting.” She tapped her cigarette on the ashtray. “This was the next step in the right direction. People wanted to change, I just pushed us along.”
Garún had had this discussion with her mother countless times and couldn’t stand to repeat it again. Instead, she reached out to her
