The Girl the Sea Gave Back(11)

“Halvard!” A voice I knew called my name.

I lowered my axe, letting out the breath I was holding as Asmund slid down the incline, a cascade of fallen leaves racing behind him.

“I wondered when I’d see you.” His frayed, stained tunic was the color of the dirt beneath his furs and mismatched armor. “Espen,” he greeted. But the chieftain didn’t dishonor himself by acknowledging him, kicking the horse and taking off down the path where Aghi and the others had disappeared. He didn’t approve of Asmund. Most didn’t.

“You’ve heard?” I asked as he came through the trees.

Asmund stopped before me, his face heavy with his unspoken answer.

Above us on the ridge, the other raiders watched from the trees. As soon as Espen rounded the bend in the trail, they made their way down the slope on the same path Asmund had taken.

It had been six years since Asmund and his brother Bard left Hylli. Now, they made their living as raiders with the outcasts and exiled of the mainland, except for a Kyrr man named Kjeld. My eyes went to the black marks reaching up his neck and down his wrists to his hands. He was the only Kyrr I’d ever seen, but everyone on the mainland knew the stories about his people. It was the reason no one went to the headlands.

“We saw the smoke from the eastern valley.” Bard took my hand in greeting as he reached us. “Svell?”

I nodded. “Have you seen them?”

“No, but Ljós is gone. Burned to the ground.” His voice lowered. He may have chosen to leave his clan, but there were some things you couldn’t cut from your soul. We would always be his people.

“Did you find survivors?”

Asmund shook his head, starting down the path, and I followed beside Bard. The brothers had been among the first friends I’d made when I came to Hylli, but they’d lost every member of their family when the Herja came, and though there’d been many who’d lost everything, some couldn’t stay in the home they’d known with the people they loved. When they were only fourteen and sixteen years old, they’d left their past and honor behind in exchange for a life that didn’t remind them of the one they’d once had.

“So, it’s war?” Asmund watched my face carefully.

The years in the wilderness had weathered him in a way that made the pain he’d suffered easier to see. Maybe that was true for both of us. “We’re going to Ljós to meet with Bekan.”

“Meet with him?”

“He wants to make an offering of reparation.”

“What does that matter?” His voice turned sharp and the strain in his eyes made him more familiar to me.

“You know we can’t afford war with the Svell.”

He leveled his gaze at me. “Then spill as much blood as you can before you reach the afterlife.”

He had the heart of the old ways, fueled by all he’d suffered. We all did. “What did you see in Ljós?”

“From the look of the trail in the forest, it was maybe thirty warriors and it was quick. They killed whoever they found, set fire to the village, and left.”

I reached a hand out between us and he took it, his worry not hidden. “You should go back to Hylli. Bring every Nādhir to the border and take them.”

The same thought was written on the face of his brother, but Kjeld was unreadable as always, his deep-set eyes watching. His fingers wound around his wrist, where a copper disk and a string of bones were knotted in a bracelet.

Asmund sighed. “Be careful, Halvard.”

The others followed him as he headed back into the forest, slipping in and out of shadows. Bard looked back at me once more before they disappeared over the ridge.

“Cursed, every one of them,” Aghi called out from where he waited ahead. He grunted as he rubbed the heel of his hands into the knotted muscle above his knee. “Traitors.”

“You know they don’t raid on Nādhir lands,” I said, catching up to him.

He arched an eyebrow up at me. To him, it didn’t matter. They’d lost their honor and there was no coming back from leaving your people behind to take up life as a raider. He didn’t understand them the way I did.

“You’re quick to see good, Halvard,” he muttered.

I looked down to my father’s axe resting against my leg. The engraving of a yew tree gleamed on its blade, the same symbol that marked his armor. “You think it makes me weak-minded.”

His brow furrowed. “It makes you stronger. Wiser than I, I think.” Aghi was a man of few words, but they were weighted when he spoke. “You’re afraid,” he said. “That’s good.”

“Good?” I half-laughed.

He leaned in, meeting my eyes, “Fear is not our enemy, Halvard. You remember the fighting seasons.”

I did. It was one of the only clear memories I had of my father, sitting beside the fire and sharpening his sword before he left for Aurvanger, where the clans met every five years to quench their blood feud. “But my father and my brothers weren’t afraid to go to war.”

“They weren’t afraid of battle. They were afraid of losing what they loved. And that’s what made them brave in battle.”

I tried to imagine Aghi on the fields of Aurvanger, swinging his sword and roaring into the wind. He must have been a great warrior to have survived so many fighting seasons, but the Aghi I had grown up knowing was gentle, in a way. “What are you afraid of now?”