a knife, long and thin. She was trembling and worried at the outside of her leg with it, so the shift was torn and stained at the thigh. Around her neck was a thin rope tied in an elaborate knot that made Aelis shiver. The figure next to her was a boy of around twelve years old — from the Danish war band, by the look of him. His eyes were dead and his face marked with blood from two puncture wounds at his cheek. He held the hand of the sorceress and guided her to where Aelis could see her clearly.
‘My men are here. They will take you, witch,’ said Aelis.
Another symbol flashed into Aelis’s mind, two upright lines with an X between them. She felt a different kind of cold, saw a different light. It was a symbol of the new day, revelation, clarity. Aelis knew it was inside the sorceress. It washed like a sunrise over the darkness and then disappeared again, leaving the cloister to the moonlight.
Aelis screamed. All around her were the bodies of Franks, lying at grotesque angles, some with their faces to the floor, some with their eyes to the heavens, arms wide as if pleading with the stars to spare them. The symbols inside her seemed to increase her sensitivities, and the colours that attended the warriors, the night music that seeped from them, was not that of death but of sleep. They were enchanted, she knew, but alive.
‘What are you?’ Aelis heard herself speak.
The woman bowed her head. ‘You,’ she said. ‘I am you.’
‘You make no sense to me, witch.’
‘We are pieces of a broken urn. But the urn can be mended.’
‘You are my enemy.’
‘Yes. I have struck at you. But it was no good. I cannot harm you, and you cannot harm me.’
‘Then why do you tremble?’
‘Because of the certainty of death.’
‘Whose death?’
‘Yours and mine.’
‘I will not die. Not by your hand or the hand of any of your disciples.’
‘No, you will not. But the runes will come together. He will be here on earth again, erasing you, erasing me. This is the truth of it.’ The woman touched the knot at her neck. ‘The dead lord’s necklace, the triple knot that was untied, shall be made anew when he is here again, present in the runes.’
‘When who is here again?’
‘The god of the runes. The god who is the runes. I know what is in you. It is more than just the howling rune.’
Aelis swallowed. The howling rune. That was as good a name for it as any, the rune that stood apart from the eight others, the one that cried out with the lonely voice of a wolf in the hills. Calling to what? To the thing that had seemed to stalk her in her midnight walks at Loches. The wolf.
‘That is why you and your hideous brother pursue me?’
‘It is why I pursue you. My brother would not understand those motivations. He cannot understand the true nature of the runes, what it means that they are in me, the unshakeable destiny they decree.’
Aelis felt a strong sensation come from the woman, not unlike the one she had felt coming from the merchant with the taste of vinegar and pitch. Deceit. The witch had lied to her brother. But about what?
The woman continued: ‘When the runes are united by death the god will be here, the wolf will kill his brother and fight with the corpse lord. My destiny will be complete as I die under the teeth of the wolf.’
Aelis couldn’t make sense of what she said but the symbols inside her were now in tumult. They jabbered and clanged, moaned and shook. Images came to her — the sheen on a horse’s coat, the flow of water over a slick black rock, the spray making rainbows a waterfall, the sun firing the tops of the clouds, the glowing fields of the Indre Valley, the glimmer of light on a scythe’s edge as it reaps the golden wheat, the bright bushels of corn loaded onto a wagon and the great light of joy in the windows of Saint-Etienne, casting blue pools on the flagstones below, where she knelt asking for salvation and grace. The runes gleamed and shone and she knew it was with the light of God. But what had awakened them?
Something was calling to them, winter to their summer. The same light lit them up in towering columns of shining ice, gleamed off frosted leaves thick with thorns, turned a fall of hail to a silver veil, gleamed on the steaming skin of a white wild ox. These visions too were caused by symbols but not those that lived inside Aelis. These, she knew, belonged to the witch. The discomfort Aelis felt told her very clearly that the runes inside her were screaming to join the ones the witch carried.
Somehow, the witch must die.
It was as if Munin caught her thought. She threw the knife towards Aelis. It clattered at her feet and Aelis picked it up. The knife was a wicked gleaming splinter of steel under the moon. The witch said nothing, the vacant pits of her eyes staring into nothing. Aelis walked towards her and went to drive the knife into her belly. But she hesitated. It was as if her arm was no longer hers to command.
The witch spoke: ‘If it was that easy you would have been dead years ago.’
Aelis summoned up her strength, took the knife in both her hands and tried to stab it into the witch’s neck. But she couldn’t do it. She could sense what was stopping her: the runes, the ones the witch carried. They wouldn’t let her act and yet they wanted to be together. Each set of eight runes, it appeared, wanted the other’s host to die and defended its own.
Aelis threw down the knife in frustration.
‘There may yet be a way,’ said the witch.
At a sound Aelis turned. Moselle and Ofaeti were coming into the cloister, Astarth, Egil and Fastarr behind them. Ofaeti and Moselle carried a long rope between them. Instantly Aelis noticed what was odd about them. They were both unarmed. Neither man would ever forget his weapon in this company, she thought. Where was Moselle’s sword? Where was Ofaeti’s axe?
She ran towards them. ‘This woman is my enemy. Strike her down,’ she said.
Neither man spoke; they just stared at the witch.
Aelis shook Moselle, but he didn’t react. She withdrew her hands. The knight, for some reason, was soaking wet.
55
The tide was out but they didn’t sink the stake near the waves. Moselle and Ofaeti drove it in further up the beach though still on the flats, before the sand became lighter and drier. They tied her to the stake in a sitting position. Aelis felt the cold water seeping into her trousers, glanced at the pools by her side and knew she was within the reach of the tide. They intended her to drown — but slowly.
Of course she had struggled, but Ofaeti was terribly strong and he and Moselle had bound her easily. They were enchanted, she could see. Neither spoke nor seemed to focus on what they were doing, and Moselle kept licking his lips, clacking his teeth together and even belching in a way he would never allow himself to do if he had been in possession of his mind.
She remembered Sigfrid and how the rune had manifested inside her to cause his horse to bolt, and she looked inside her now, to try to find something that might break the spell they were under. Nothing came. She could not make the runes hear her. They were occupied with something else — the presence of their sisters in the mind of Munin.
‘I know what you are trying to do,’ said Munin, who stood beside her,’ but such control comes at a high price.’ She gestured to her face. ‘They move in their own way unless you force them, in agony and denial, to move to yours. You will suffer and you will give up what you have to me.’
Aelis looked up at the bright half-moon and called out to the witch, asking why she didn’t just have her slaves kill her there and then, as she had tried to do with her enchantments before. The witch said nothing, but Aelis guessed that had failed. The words of the wolfman came back to her. When she had asked him why Hrafn, as she thought of the male sorcerer, had tried to kill her, he had said, He is afraid of you. So Aelis and the witch were not
