Snow-Walker

Eighteen

The wolf is loose.

Miles away and hours later, huddled under an overhang of rock, the travelers watched the sun strengthen.

They were silent, breathless from the long scramble into the hills. No one wanted to ask the question; it was Hakon who finally couldn’t bear it anymore.

He turned to Moongarm abruptly. “That wolf,” he said, clenching his hand nervously. “What was it?”

The gray man stared at him, expressionless. “Just a wolf. It came from nowhere. A pack leader, I would say. The others seemed to slink off when they saw it.”

His amber eyes challenged them all, levelly. Then he went back to eating the villagers’ bread.

Hakon turned a bewildered look on Jessa. She glanced at Brochael.

The big man was glaring at Moongarm, his face set with a grim, hostile fear. “So where did it go,” he asked harshly, “this convenient wolf? Does it still follow us? Has it been with us all along?”

The man did not turn. “It went into the dark,” he said quietly.

Brochael was livid; Jessa knew Moongarm’s coolness made him want to explode with rage. It was only Kari’s urgent shake of the head that kept him silent. Intrigued, she kicked snow from her boots. So the man was a shape-shifter. A werebeast. All of them seemed to have guessed that now, and all of them, she thought drily, were terrified of it. Except perhaps Kari. You never knew what Kari was thinking. And she liked Moongarm, had come to like him. He was quiet, watchful, yes, but shy, a man with a great secret. Now they knew what it was. And he obviously wasn’t going to explain anything.

“At least,” Skapti said quietly, “we’re all alive.”

“Without the horses,” Hakon said.

“There was no help for that. And I have to say I’m grateful to you all for getting my neck out of that noose. Especially Jessa.” He put a long arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. She grinned.

“Kari made the fire gate.”

He nodded.

“I know you wouldn’t have worried,” Brochael said gruffly. “Not with your courage.”

Jessa giggled.

“Thank you,” Skapti said lazily. “I was, of course, terrified. And did you also know, or haven’t you worked it out in your snail-shell of a brain yet, that I wasn’t chosen by any earth goddess, but by the shaman?”

They all stared at him. Only Kari nodded.

“The ravenmaster has, I see.” Skapti sat up, rubbing his cold hands together. “They knew we were coming, didn’t they—the Speaker knew. So we were a godsend. He made sure one of us would be the gift to their earth hunger. I had plenty of time tied up in the hut to work it out. He chose me, probably because he thought I was the cleverest.” He grinned. “They didn’t know about Jessa.”

“So they knew where the seed was?” Hakon said. “In which piece?”

“Not all of them. He knew.”

“And what about afterward? That thing in the marsh that dragged him in…”

For a moment they all saw it again, the dark bubbling of the peaty water.

“Ah, now. That’s beyond me.” Skapti sat back. “Kari’s the one for spirits and earth wraiths. Something came out of there for him, that’s sure enough. Something out of the dark.”

They sat silent, thinking about it. Then Brochael sighed and reached for his pack. “Let’s get on.” He glanced at Moongarm, as if to say something. Then he turned away.

Already they were high in the foothills, the snow here deep under a frozen crust. As they traveled north all vestige of the giant road was lost; they waded up bare white slopes, leaving a blue tear of shadow, through gloomy stunted firs whitened with thick snowfalls frosted into place.

The cold became intense; the daylight always shorter. For two days they struggled over the high passes, stumbling and falling and pulling one another up, soaked and shivering, trying to keep the food sacks dry. Their lungs ached with the tingling air. Without Kari’s rune fires they would have frozen; as it was, each night was an ordeal of cold, a quest for kindling and a place out of the raw winds that seared the exposed skin about their eyes. The world had turned white, had become an endless tilted plateau, and they seemed always to be climbing, their toes and ears and fingers raw with pain.

On the second night a blizzard swept down; a howling fury of stinging ice that drove them into the only shelter they could find, a narrow cleft where all of them huddled together shivering, the ravens perched mournfully above. There was no fire; Kari had sunk into sleep at once and none of them had the heart to wake him, but at least they were out of the eternal wind.

One by one, the others drifted off to sleep.

Jessa couldn’t; she was shivering, and the rough knobbly floor stuck into her back. She shifted, restless.

“Awake?” Brochael murmured.

“Too cold.”

“Come closer.”

She moved against him, and he put his great arm around her, just as his left held Kari. “Better?”

She tugged the blanket close. “You’re warmer than the floor.”

“That’s not saying much.”

For a moment they were silent; then she whispered, “Brochael, do you think we’ll get through?”

“Of course we will.” His voice was gruff. “They’re depending on us.”

There was no doubt about that.

“Still…,” she murmured.

“I’ll tell you what worries me more than the snow, Jessa. It’s that werecreature we’re dragging with us like a shadow. What does he want? What sort of a thing is he?”

They both watched Moongarm’s lean huddle in the corner; he slept silently, breathing deep.

“He’s one of us now,” she said.

“Oh no! He’d like to be. But I’ll never have that—I’ll never trust him, not until I know where he’s going and why, and how this curse came on him. A man who can slither into wolf-shape is no fellow traveler for me. He could turn on any of us. Is he man or animal?”

“Kari is more than a match for him,” Jessa murmured sleepily.

When he didn’t answer, she opened her eyes, surprised. “Don’t you think so?”

“Kari sometimes worries me more.”

She sat up then and looked at him. In the pale shimmer of the reflected snow all the russet of his hair and beard seemed drained from him; he looked thinner, with a gather of lines between his eyebrows.

“Why?” she whispered.

He looked at her. “Jessa, where are we going? To Gudrun, if we get there. To some land of sorcery and soul theft that’s not even in this world. And all the time I can feel him gathering himself, summoning all the skill and mind craft that’s in him. His mind is often away somehow—back in the Jarlshold, talking to ghosts and spirits and the birds… I don’t know where. I’m afraid of what it’s doing to him.”

She shook her head. “He’s done this before, the fire gate....”

“Oh, lights and fires, that’s nothing. It’s the rest. The outlaw. That guard.”

She pulled a face. “Moving minds?”

He nodded, wondering. “Imagine the power of that, Jessa, the secret, tingling power! Making everyone around you do just what you want. And they—we—would never know.”

“He won’t. He wouldn’t.” Jessa settled back firmly.

“He may have to. To defeat Gudrun he may have to become like her. Almost certainly, he will have to kill her.”

Appalled, she stared at him. On his other side Kari twisted in his sleep, the long hair falling from his eyes.

“Or she him,” Brochael murmured.

In the morning they went on, weak from cold. It froze on their eyebrows and lashes; all the brief afternoon the snow fell, relentless. Only after nightfall did the sky clear and reveal the breath-catching steely glitter of millions of stars, the aurora shimmering over them.

By the third day the travelers were worn to numbness. They were high in the mountains, a place of bare rock, frozen, icy chasms and passes, clattering rockfalls and the eternal howling wind. They rarely spoke now, plowing on in a straggling group, their thoughts wandering, lost in their own pain and hunger. There was only snow to drink; they gathered handfuls and sucked it. The food from the village was almost gone, and Brochael handed it out rarely.

Jessa’s eyes ached from the snow glare; her lips were chapped, wind sores chafed her face. Hakon was limping badly, perhaps with frostbite, but he kept up and said nothing.

They hardly knew that the land had begun to descend beneath their feet; they reached the treeline with a vague recognition, and trudged wearily in under the frost-stiff branches.

Kari stumbled and fell. For a moment he did not get up, and Brochael went back and bent over him. When they caught up with the others, the big man said, “Time to rest.” His voice was hoarse with cold.

Under the silent trees they sat and ate the last scraps of food. Skapti flung an empty sack away; the ravens came down and picked it over. Even they looked skeletal, Jessa thought.

With an effort she said, “We’re over the mountains.”

Brochael nodded. None of them answered; their relief was deep and unspoken. Below them broken forestry descended into the snow-filled glacier. On the horizon faint fog drifted. Hakon stared at it through red-rimmed eyes and roused himself. “Is that smoke?”

“Could be. Could be just mist.”

Brochael glanced at Kari, who shrugged. “I can’t tell,” he murmured.

Jessa looked at him. He looked bone weary, and frail as ice, but his pale skin and hair fitted here; he belonged, more than any of them. And the farther north they went, the deeper into frosts and whiteness and sorcery, the more he seemed to have a strength that the rest of them lacked, a power not in his body but deeper. He was a Snow-walker, she thought suddenly.

By the next day, weak with hunger, they had come to the region of smoke. It had not faded, or blown away, and now Brochael thought there was too much of it to be a settlement.

As they journeyed toward it over the bleak tundra, the air changed, became warmer; a strange dry breeze sprang up. Jessa pulled the frozen scarf from her hair and scratched wearily, looking ahead. Surely the land was gray; bare of snow.

“What are we coming to?”

Behind her Skapti shifted the kantele on his bony shoulders. “Muspelheim.”

“What?”

“The land of fire. Or to be exact, Jessa, a volcano.”