Betsy Tobin Read online

  “I’ve brought you something.” He holds out his hand. Something dangles from it, but in the darkness she cannot see.

  “You bring nothing but trouble,” she says coldly. “Why would I accept a gift from you?”

  “Because this is no gift,” he says, holding it out to her. “It belongs to you.”

  She hesitates, then reaches out for the object. He drops it into her hand, and at once she recognises the feel of it. She looks down: the amulet matches her own exactly. Her fingers close around it instinctively, even while her stomach plummets. Her voice drops to barely more than a whisper. “Where did you get this?”

  “I found it with my mother’s things after she died.”

  She reaches inside her gown and pulls out her own amulet, holding the two next to each other. “They were commissioned for my parents as a wedding gift, but my father’s was lost. It was taken from his body . . . “ Her voice trails off.

  Vili stands silently for a moment. “My father gave it to my mother,” he says finally. “Before his exile.”

  This last word stretches out between them. It takes a moment for his meaning to reach her. “No!” she says hotly. And in the next instant she reaches out and slaps him hard across the face. A bright patch of crimson appears on his cheek. “The blood of a murderer flows through your veins!” She says through clenched teeth.

  “I am not my father’s keeper,” he replies, “any more than you are. His sins are not my own.”

  For a moment, they stand facing each other in the darkness. Her eyes come to rest on the tiny silver cross at his throat.

  “You follow this Christian god?” she says in disbelief.

  “My mother’s family is Christian. They came from Norway. Her people converted.”

  “And you?”

  “I follow neither.”

  “You wear the cross,” she says accusingly.

  “It was my mother’s.”

  They hear the sound of shouting in the yard. Fulla hesitates, then crosses to the stable door, peering outside. She sees two farmhands running towards the house, and further behind, a third man follows across a field, leading a horse.Vili peers over her shoulder.

  “They’ve found your mount,” she says turning to him, a note of triumph in her voice. “Your fate is sealed. I cannot help you now.”

  “Fulla!” he says urgently. “They’ll kill me!”

  “Pray to your Christian god. Maybe he will save you.”

  He nods towards Bor. “Give me your horse!”

  She stares at him incredulously. “You must be mad! Why should I help the son of my father’s killer?” She turns to go.

  Vili lunges forward and grabs her arm. “Why should I die for the sake of a trinket?”

  “You should have asked yourself that before you set out!”

  Vili hesitates, still holding her arm. “Go on, then,” he says, nodding towards the house. “Raise the alarm.” He pauses, watching her defiantly. “What are you waiting for?”

  She glowers at him for a long moment, her face burning with anger. “His tack is in the corner.”

  Vili drops her arm and moves at once to the corner. Within moments, he is saddling and bridling the mount. “Is he fast?” He asks from inside the stall.

  “That depends on the skill of the rider,” she says sharply.

  “No need to worry on my account.” He flashes her a grin.

  “My only concern is for the horse,” she counters. She steps in front of him. “Swear you’ll bring him back.”

  Vili stops. “What? And risk my neck again? Now it’s you who are mad! Anyway, my mount is worth twice yours.”

  “Swear now,” she counters. “Or I’ll scream so loud you’ll wish you’d stayed in bed this night.”

  He looks at her aghast, then shakes his head. “All right, I swear,” he says finally.

  She steps aside while he finishes cinching the saddle. “Bring him back in three days’ time,” she says, “at midnight. I’ll wait for you here.” He nods, swinging himself up into the saddle. “There is another door at the back,” she continues. “Go as quietly as you can over the hill, then circle round to the east. I’ll distract them at the front of the yard.”

  Vili hesitates briefly. “Thank you,” he says.

  “You can thank me in three days,” she replies swiftly. She moves to the far end of the stable and unlatches the door, quickly peering outside, before motioning him to come. Vili guides the horse through the narrow opening, ducking his head. She watches as the horse trots silently through the tall grass and disappears, then latches the door and dashes out of the opposite end of the stable and into the farmyard. She pauses for a long moment, then screams with all her might.

  FREYA

  Hekla’s outburst leaves me numb. For some time, I do not move, the damp grass slowly seeping through my cloak. Is the prophecy true? I do not know. Even as a child, I understood the Aesir were riddled with corruption. Envy and malice run right through us like a vein. So it is perhaps nothing less than we deserve.

  I return to the house and go at once to the ornately carved wooden box that houses my feather form.The box is made of honey-coloured sandalwood, a gift from my father from a trader in Byzantium.The cloying perfume of the wood nearly overwhelms me as I lift the lid and peer inside. I have not used the form in many months; the pile of pale grey feathers lies inert. I reach inside and run my fingertips across the grain of their plumage. Taken separately, each feather is worthless. But joined together, they produce the miracle of flight. How can it be that something with so little mass can lend the feeling of weightlessness to something so much larger?

  Minutes later, I take to the skies in search of Skuld. I have not yet formed the question in my mind, yet I know that I must ask it. Skuld is a seer: she can look through time as clearly as I can see through water, yet the enormity of this does not daunt her. She lives with her sisters on a small farm atop a pass on the northern edge of Asgard. By horseback it is a vast distance, but with the falcon cloak I can reach her in the space of an hour. As I approach the farm, I see her elder sister Urd in the yard, bent double beneath the weight of a wooden yoke. It has been almost a year since I was here last, and I am shocked by how much she has aged in the interim. I land softly behind her, and quickly shrug off the cloak before calling out a greeting.

  Urd looks up from beneath the yoke, startled. Her face is long and round, like a generous wooden spoon, and her light brown hair hangs in untidy wisps about her face. Her forehead is smudged with dirt, and as she turns, the water slops over the top of the wooden pails, splashing her leather shoes. “Freya,” she says breathlessly, her expression harried but no longer alarmed. Nothing truly surprises Urd.

  “Greetings, Urd.”

  “Skuld is within,” she says, nodding towards the house. She knows I have not come for idle talk. I smile gratefully and turn away.The house is set into the hillside, the doorway narrow and fringed with turf. I duck inside the dimly lit room, and take a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.The room is long and low, with a thin trench of fire down the centre. Two small square windows are cut into the wall on my left, covered with the taut membrane from the sac of an unborn calf. Each emits a pale, ghostly glow of morning light.

  The remaining walls are hung with thick tapestries woven from all the colours of the earth: deep russet red, nut brown, forest green and sandy ochre.The house feels both warm and alive, like the inside of some great beast. Someone has massed a pile of fir cones upon the fire; they spit and crackle in the flames, offering a faint smell of pine.

  At the far end of the room, Skuld sits on a raised wooden platform, lost in concentration at her loom. Her dark tangle of hair shadows her face completely. Her long fingers dart with alarming speed back and forth across the loom, like delicate spiders. I watch, fascinated, for when Skuld weaves, it is as if time itself pauses and waits for her to finish. Finally, I make a sound and she turns to me, her gaze unseeing at first. After a moment, a smile blooms upon her face.
She rises and crosses to me.

  “Freya.” Skuld squeezes my hands with affection. Her face is thinner and more lined than I remembered, and there are dark circles beneath her eyes.

  “You look tired,” I say.

  “I wove all night,” she explains with a guilty smile. “Do not tell Urd.”

  We hear a noise at the door. Urd enters just then, her expression irritated. She shoots a dark look at her sister. “You’ve shirked your chores,” she says.

  “How so?” asks Skuld.

  “The clay is too thin. Father said it should be to the depth of your wrist.”

  Skuld raises her eyebrows at me conspiratorially. “Father is dead, Urd,” she replies. “The tree thrives, in case you hadn’t noticed.” She speaks of an enormous ash tree in the garden, a legacy remaining from their father.

  “For how long, with you tending it?” retorts Urd.

  Skuld shrugs. “Tend it yourself.”

  Urd purses her lips. “It’s not my place and you know it,” she says in a clipped voice. Skuld does not reply, and after a moment, Urd picks up a small axe and quits the house once more, the door banging behind her. Skuld turns to me with a smile.

  “Poor Urd,” I say.

  “It’s the tree I pity. She will kill it with care.”

  “Where is Verdandi?”

  “Who knows? She is never at home. Urd says she has taken a lover.”

  “And has she?”

  “Perhaps.” She gives an unconcerned shrug. Skuld is unlike other women. She has a keen mind and a closed heart, and cares nothing for the world of men.

  “You knew I was coming?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you also know why.”

  She looks past me. “You are afraid.”

  “Should I be?”

  Skuld frowns. “Fear is like the beast that lurks behind us in the dark,” she says slowly. “Sometimes it is real. More often it is imagined.”

  “And now?”

  Her eyes roam towards the loom. “Now we must wait.”

  I am reminded that one must tread carefully with Skuld. The future is not hers to trifle with. “What does the loom say?” I ask. If Skuld will not tell me, then the loom may speak for her. I watch as she crosses over to the weaving. Her fingers reach out to touch the warp, as if they cannot bear to be apart from it. She plucks gently at the last thread of weft.

  “Sometimes we cannot trust the loom,” she says.

  “What do you mean?” I ask. She says nothing so I move beside her, watching as her fingers gradually undo the last two threads of weft. I peer more closely at the tapestry. What strikes me first is the absence of beauty, for there is something jarring about what she has woven.

  It begins normally, with a brightly coloured pattern of tawny oranges and yellow, arranged in a neatly plotted design. But halfway down the loom, the pattern becomes erratic. The colours bleed into one another, then gradually fade in their intensity, before turning suddenly to black. The bottom portion of the tapestry is a broad band of black. Something in the fabric catches my eye. I bend down more closely and see a tiny glint of gold, made by a lone metallic thread. “Gold,” I murmur, surprised.

  “Yes,” she says simply.

  “Where is it from?”

  “The place of dwarves. In the mountains.”

  I stare at her in disbelief. “Nidavellir?”

  She nods. Slowly I reach a hand out to touch the thread. It is hot, as if lit from within. I pull my hand back, alarmed. “What does it mean?”

  “Go and see,” she says intently.

  “To Nidavellir?” I ask.

  She nods.

  The name sparks a memory. From the earliest age, we are taught to revere the stories of the poets, but not all of them are true. Still, as a child, there was one tale that caught my fancy. The poets said that deep in the mountains of Nidavellir, there was a necklace wrought entirely of gold. According to legend, just to gaze upon the necklace was enough to throw one’s senses into disarray. Grown men would weep in its presence; women would fall to their knees with the blunt force of longing.To possess the necklace one became privy to the earth’s secrets: the age of the mountains, the source of the rivers, the path of the sun, the depth of the oceans. But that is not all. The necklace had the power to alter the course of things, and to safeguard its keepers. They said it had been fashioned by dwarves, master goldsmiths who dwell in caves deep inside the belly of the earth. These dwarves are infinitely wise, according to the poets, but distrustful of the world outside the caves.

  I have never believed in the existence of the necklace. But the look in Skuld’s eyes is unyielding.

  “How do I find it?” I hear myself ask.

  “Ask for the Brisings.”

  The name is unknown to me. I fix it in my mind, even while my gaze is drawn back to the thread. For a few moments, I am entranced by the sight of it, as if everything else in the room has disappeared. Finally, with some degree of effort, I turn away from the loom.

  “What of the black weft?” I ask. Black is inauspicious in her weaving. It signifies the dark face of death.

  Skuld’s face becomes a mask, her expression instantly unreadable. There is a limit to what she will impart, and I know that I have reached it. “Fate is woven,” she says then. “But the future is uncertain.”

  FULLA

  It’s a bad omen,” says Hogni, the morning after Fulla’s horse is stolen. They sit side by side on a bench by the fire, and eat skyr mixed with bilberries from wooden bowls. Fulla steals a glance at him: a large fleck of white rests on his upper lip.

  “Skallagrim and his kin are land-crazed,” he continues. “They will not rest until they have stolen everything that is ours.”

  “Skallagrim is dead,” Fulla reminds him.

  “Yes, of course,” he says, with a wave of his hand. “But at least when he was alive, I could look him in the eye and hold him accountable. These sons of his, they have no code. The law for them is a plaything! Who knows what their intent was last night? We might have all been burnt alive in our beds!”

  Fulla nearly chokes on her skyr. One hand inadvertently goes to the amulet at her throat. The one she wears this morning is her father’s. Her own lies hidden beneath her mattress. Hogni continues speaking, unaware. “When I first came to this island thirty years ago, a man could ride for days without meeting a soul,” he says, shaking his head. “Now every blade of grass is spoken for. Every tree.” He lifts the bowl and drinks deeply, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. The fleck of skyr vanishes from his lip. “Perhaps our time here is drawing to a close,” he says heavily.

  “What do you mean?” asks Fulla with alarm.

  Hogni regards her with a frown. “Maybe it is time we considered moving on. There is land for the taking in Greenland.”

  “And give up everything we’ve built here?”

  Hogni casts his eyes about the room. “What good is this house, if they reduce it to cinder and ash?”

  “They will not,” she says earnestly.

  “How can you know?”

  She bites her lip, for she dares not speak of Vili or the amulet. “I do not think they will return,” she says finally.

  “And if they do? What choice have we, but to fight?”

  She leaves him muttering oaths into his wooden bowl, and escapes into the scullery, where Helga is grinding grain in a large soapstone mortar. The older woman pauses from her labour. Her hair is bound tightly back in a pale blue head-scarf, and her broad forehead is smudged with dirt. Fulla reaches into one of the earthen jugs that line the walls and fishes out a pickled walnut, popping it into her mouth. Its sweet syrup explodes with flavour.

  “You look well enough this morning,” Helga says, eyeing her closely.

  “Why should I not?”

  “For someone who’s lost her favourite mount.”

  Fulla stops chewing. “Bor isn’t lost,” she says after a moment’s hesitation. “Grandfather says we may be able to re
cover him at the Althing.”

  “Aye?”

  “He promises to raise the matter with the lawspeaker.” She reaches into the jar and picks out another walnut. “Anyway, the mount he’s left behind is very fine.”

  “Who?” Helga fixes her with a questioning eye.

  Fulla feels a flush rising in her cheeks. “The one who took Bor,” she stammers.

  “Then perhaps he will return,” says Helga, “if his mount is so fine.”

  Fulla stares at her, speechless. Helga picks up the pestle and begins to pound the grain with renewed vigour. Fulla watches her for a moment, then slips outside, her heart racing. She runs across the yard to the stables and ducks inside with relief. The mare is in the corner stall. The horse shuffles uneasily, one eye fixed on her, as she approaches. “Good girl,” murmurs Fulla. She raises a hand to the mare’s shoulder and it flinches beneath her touch. Fulla picks up a brush and begins to comb the horse in long strokes, talking to it softly all the while.

  Minutes later, she is leading the saddled mare out into the yard, when Hogni emerges from the house. He stops short when he sees her.

  “What is this? One of theirs? Have you gone mad?”

  “It’s a horse, not a spy,” she counters teasingly.

  Hogni frowns. “Their animals are not to be trusted.”

  “Nonsense. She’s a fine mount, you can tell by looking.”

  Hogni eyes the horse disapprovingly. “Perhaps,” he concedes. “An even match for your Bor. Though we shall still raise the matter at the Althing.”

  For three mornings Fulla takes the mare out, riding it harder each time. By the third day, the mare is no longer wary of her, butting her shoulder impatiently with its nose when she arrives in the morning. That night, Fulla feigns illness and retires early, shutting herself in her bedchamber. She dozes for a few hours, waiting for the household to settle for the night, before finally rising. When she emerges from her room, the large hall is lit only by the glowing embers of the turf fire. She treads carefully around the sleeping forms of her grand- father’s manservants lying on made-up pallets near the hearth, and manages to slip silently out of the house. Outside, the night is cold and a light rain falls.The moon is barely visible through a dark haze of cloud.Vili will have a long, wet ride, she thinks with satisfaction as she crosses the yard. Inside the stable, she waits while her eyes adjust to the darkness, then crosses over to the corner stall and greets the mare affectionately. She settles herself on a haystack in the corner, pulling a woollen saddle blanket over her for warmth. She dozes fitfully, waking every few minutes, her limbs beginning to ache from the cold. When she wakes for the fourth time, she realises she has been sleeping deeply. She looks around her in the darkness; there is still no sign of Vili. Only then does she wonder whether he will come at all. Perhaps the prospect of the mare is not enough to lure him back, she thinks angrily. Perhaps she’s been a fool.