The Girl the Sea Gave Back(33)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN


HALVARD


The first time I’d seen it, I was only eight years old.

A rolling sea of red wildflowers burrowed up through the earth at the last of winter, bleeding into a wide stretch of the pale green valley. The evening fog pushing in from the sea hovered over it, like hands clasped carefully over the fragile wings of a moth.

My fists wound tighter in the reins at the sight.

I stopped the horse on the hill and slid down, standing waist deep in the tilting stalks of early spring blooms. My hands brushed over their tops as I walked, the smell of them bringing back countless memories of taking the path to the border villages with Aghi to trade crates of salted fish for herbs and dried venison. The valley dipped down in the center, the river slicing through it like a crack in the ice that covered the shallows of the fjord.

“Aurvanger.” Asmund spoke the hallowed word softly, looking out over the view. His own brother had died in this very field during the last fighting season our people ever fought. Only weeks later, the Herja took his parents in a raid on Hylli.

I’d heard so many stories about the battles that took the lives of the Aska and Riki for generations. Aghi had recounted the fury between the gods spilling out on the earth to my nieces over and over and I’d listen from where I sat beside the fire. Now, it was overgrown with wildflowers, making it hard to imagine death here.

“They say those flowers didn’t start growing here until the Nādhir made peace.” Kjeld looked over us from where he still sat on his horse.

“You sound like you don’t believe it,” I said.

He dropped down, pulling the water skin from his saddlebag. “Do you?”

“Yes,” I answered without hesitation. I’d seen too many unbelievable things to think anything was impossible.

Asmund watched the top of the hill behind us. “We’ll wait until sundown. If Bard doesn’t show, we’ll meet him in Hylli.”

But the sound of his voice carried his worry for his brother. If Bard didn’t show, there was no guarantee that we’d ever see him again. If the Svell had found his trail or caught up to him in Utan, maybe he was already dead. I could see that Asmund was thinking the same thing. His jaw clenched as he unbuckled the sheath beneath his arm.

I walked out farther until I reached the boulders that lined the river and pulled my axe free, digging a trench into the soft earth that overlooked the water. Asmund followed me to the edge and I took one side of a large stone that was half buried in the sand. When he realized what I was doing, he took hold of the other side and we heaved it up onto the bank, setting it down on its end in the divot I’d dug. I packed the earth around the stele, stamping it down with the head of my axe, and sat back onto my heels before it. The flat side of the stone glittered in the sunlight with flecks of silver and black. It stood like a ghost in the fog before the legendary valley of Aurvanger.

A lump rose in my throat and I swallowed it down, pulling my knife from my belt. I wound my fingers tightly around its blade before I slid it against my calloused palm. The hot blood pooled in the center of my hand before I pressed my finger into it, carefully writing Aghi’s name across the face of the stele. Below it, I wrote Espen’s.

I opened my mouth to say the ritual words, but they didn’t come. They wound tight in my chest like a fist, making it difficult to breathe.

Once, Aghi had stood on the other side of battle from my father on this very field. Then, he became a father, an uncle, a grandfather to the very people he’d spent his life killing. He’d survived a lifetime fighting an unquenched blood feud only to die at the hands of the Svell and waste away in the forest with no funeral fire to honor him as he went on to the afterlife.

But it was the death he wanted. He’d watched the clans men he’d grown up with die protecting their people. He’d spoken the rites over their burning bodies and now, he had the same privilege, saved from the shame of dying quietly as an old man in his bed. It had been his greatest fear, being given an unworthy end.

“… you have reached your journey’s end…” Asmund uttered the words I couldn’t, his voice trailing off in the wind.

I breathed through the pain in my throat. It had been a long time since I’d prayed to Thora or Sigr. Not because I didn’t believe in them, but because I wasn’t sure they listened. The will of the gods was incomprehensible, their favor ever-changing, shifting like the bending rays of sunlight that dropped through the trees. But the sound of prayer still made my chest feel hollow with memories. Because on the lips of my family, it was still alive. And in many ways, they had become my gods.

I’d held Aghi in my arms as the light left his eyes. I’d watched him take his last breath. And I hoped that had been enough to honor him.

I pulled the taufr from inside my armor vest and rubbed my thumb over its smooth surface. The etched words were barely readable now, but I had carried the stone since the day my mother gave it to me as a small boy. It was a plea to Thora. A request for protection of the one who carried it. And it had protected me, many times.

But it seemed as if the battle in the glade would be the last, all of its power used up. The war headed for Hylli would likely take all our lives and we would be given less than Aghi had been given in death, with no one to burn our bodies or speak the ritual words.

“What does the symbol mean?” I said, catching a tear at the corner of my eye before it could fall.