The Girl the Sea Gave Back(31)

My lips parted, my hand winding tighter in the reins until the leather stung against my skin. It wasn’t just a girl. It was the Kyrr girl, from the glade.

I watched her move slowly through the haze, her face cast to the ground before her and her hands hanging heavy at her sides. Like a spirit wandering. Like the undead souls from the old stories the Tala used to tell the children around the altar fire.

Where are you?

A voice whispered hot against my ear and I stilled, the chill in the air turning to a biting cold.

“Halvard?” Asmund set a hand on my arm and I flinched, blinking.

His uneasy eyes ran over my face.

And when I looked up again, she was gone.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, shaking my head. “It’s nothing.”

Asmund surveyed me for another moment before he nodded and pushed past me, leading his horse to take the front of our line.

Kjeld watched me warily, reaching for the bracelet around his wrist. The copper disc shone in the moonlight. “Alright?”

“It was nothing,” I said again, but to myself.

He turned, following Asmund around the cliff face, and I lifted the bottom of my armor vest, my hand going back to the bandaged wound beneath my tunic. Maybe infection was spreading faster than I thought. Or maybe it was the nights of no sleep that were casting visions in the fog. I looked back once more to the trees as the others disappeared ahead. But there was nothing. No one.

Except the heat of breath still warm against my ear.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


TOVA


I pushed my frozen hands toward the heat of the fire until I could almost feel its sting. My head ached, the pain of it reaching down my neck and into my shoulders and back. The henbane would take days to leave my blood, but the Spinners had given me what I’d asked for.

The vision had been clear, as if they wanted me to find him. The Nādhir from the glade was in Utan.

The flames licked up the dry wood, turning it black in the freshly dug fire pit before me. The Svell camp had expanded beyond the glade so far that I could see no end to the tents that spread into the forest. In only hours, they’d be on their way to the fjord.

Warriors from every Svell village stood together in the clearing as Vigdis recited the funeral rites for Bekan. The sound of their voices rumbled like thunder in the distance, the sacred words spoken on every tongue. I had heard the chieftain talk of his people many times, often with a conviction that seemed to rattle the walls of the ritual house. But I’d never seen them. Not like this.

Every one of them was ready for war, but no one had told them that it was Vigdis’ blade that had gotten their chieftain killed and I suspected no one would. If they knew Bekan’s own brother had betrayed him before a knife was driven into his chest, they may not follow him to battle. It was a secret he could trust Siv and the others who saw what happened in the glade to keep.

“Are you sure?” Jorrund leaned in closer to the fire, his eyes wide with concern. They gleamed beneath his bushy eyebrows as he studied me.

“Yes,” I answered, watching the pillar of smoke lifting from Bekan’s funeral fire in the distance.

The pyre was engulfed in fire and I could just barely make out the form of Bekan’s body as it was eaten up by the flames. A lump curled tight in my throat and I blinked back the tears threatening to fall.

I didn’t know why my heart ached at the thought of his death. Bekan had no more than tolerated me in the years since I’d come to Liera and when Vera died, he’d made no secret of the fact that he’d come to hate me. But I remembered how soft he was with his daughter. How his hand absently reached out, touching her fair hair as she stood between him and Jorrund. And even if I wasn’t one of his people, I could feel the weight of what the loss meant. Something had shifted for not only the Svell, but for the web of fate. And for the first time, I was beginning to feel like a fly trapped in its threads instead of the spider walking them.

I had only summoned the Spinners once before. I’d snuck away in the early morning to burn the henbane on the same beach Jorrund had found me on. I huddled over the poisoned smoke until I was close to retching and asked the only question I’d ever had.

I wanted to know why.

Why my people had given me to the sea. Why Naer had taken her favor from me. Why I’d washed up on the Svell shore instead of drifting out into the lonely death I’d been sent to.

That was before I knew never to ask the Spinners why. Because the answer was something too twisting and turning for mortal minds to comprehend. They sat at the foot of the Tree of Urer, spinning. Always spinning. Past, present, and future all on the same loom.

They didn’t answer. Instead, they gave me only darkness. Silence. I fell into the emptiness of my mind when I breathed in the smoke and when I woke the next morning, drenched by the rising tide and barely able to open my eyes, I swore I’d never ask them why again. Now, I knew only to ask them what, who, and when if I cast the stones. Because they were the only answers the Spinners would ever give to me.

“It wasn’t the only thing I saw,” I whispered, careful not to let Gunther hear me.

Jorrund sank down before the fire. “What is it? What did you see?”

I closed my eyes, trying to bring the vision back to my mind. “The water. A fire. I could hear…”

But heavy footsteps in the dirt made us both look up and I squinted against the pain that awakened in my head. Vigdis walked toward us from the glade, the fire still raging behind him. His muddy boots stopped before me, planted into the earth like the roots of a thousand-year-old tree.