The Girl the Sea Gave Back(34)

Kjeld looked up at me. “What?”

“The symbol on the girl—the eye.”

“The marks are a kind of identification, they are all different for each person. But the eye is … Only the women in her lineage have that mark,” he answered.

“Why?”

“Because it’s the symbol of a Truthtongue.”

I got to my feet, sliding the knife back into its sheath. “So, she’s like a Tala?”

“The Kyrr don’t have Talas.”

Asmund looked between us. “Then what is she?”

“What do you know about the story of Naer?” Kjeld asked.

“Not much.”

He leaned into the outcropping of rock beside him. “The god Naer had a twin sister named Lími. But Lími was fated to die. Naer buried her sister on the headlands and swore vengeance on the Spinners for taking her life. As an offering, the Spinners gave Naer a mortal child with the eye marked on her chest. They called her the Truthtongue and promised that every woman born into her lineage would have the ability to read the runes and see into the future. Naer accepted the offering and for generations, the child’s descendants have led the Kyrr and cast the stones.”

“You mean she can see the future,” I said, studying him.

Kjeld nodded. “She’s casting the stones for the Svell. It’s the only reason I can think of that she’d be with them.”

An uneasy silence fell between us, the wind stilling.

Asmund ran a hand through his hair, sighing. “So, are the Kyrr with them or not?”

“No. They’d never join with the Svell. They’d never join with anyone.”

“Then why is the girl with them?”

“I don’t know. But it means the Svell are probably even more dangerous than you think they are.” He stared at the ground between us.

I tightened my fist, letting the last drop of blood fall to the earth. I had known the moment I saw her in the glade that there was something different about her. I’d felt it. And the farther from Ljós we traveled, it seemed the more I could feel her. My gaze moved up the hill, to the forest, where I’d seen her shadow in the dead of night. Only, I couldn’t have.

Kjeld turned into the wind, looking out over the field. “Did you fight here? Before?”

“I was too young. I only ever waited for my father and my brothers to come home from the fighting season, wishing I was with them.”

“Did they die in battle?”

“No, my father died of fever when I was six years old.” I looked down to the axe in my hands, where the engraving of the yew tree looked up at me.

“And your brothers?”

I smiled. “This place gave me one of my brothers.”

He lifted one eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“And a sister. My father and my brother Fiske came home from the fighting season one year with an Aska boy named Iri who was nearly dead. I was very young. I hardly remember it, but he was gravely injured and my mother healed him, though no one believed she could. Then he became one of us. The next fighting season, both of my brothers went to Aurvanger and came home with Iri’s sister. Fiske fell in love with her.”

I still remembered the day Eelyn first came to our home in Fela. I’d watched her over the edge of the loft, my eyes wide. Her hair was like ice, dark streaks of blood staining her tunic, and I remember thinking that she looked like a wild animal with the firelight shining in her eyes. My mother had said she had fire in her blood. We didn’t know then that the gods were going to make peace. And we didn’t know that they’d use Fiske and Eelyn to do it.

“They changed the will of the gods and the fate of both our clans,” I said.

Kjeld eyed me skeptically.

“You don’t believe in fate?” Asmund turned to him.

Kjeld looked amused by the question. “No one can change the will of the gods.”

“How do you know?”

His eyes met Asmund’s and then mine for only a moment before they fell back to the water. “Because I’ve tried.”

His voice changed, the hard edge of it fading. He reached up to the collar of his tunic, pressing his fingers to a pair of leaves at the side of his throat. They seemed to move as he swallowed hard, the glimmer of tears shining in his eyes.

“Halvard…” Asmund went still, his hand going to his sword as he looked up and over me, to the ridge.

I turned, searching the sky for what he saw. Over the rise of land to the south, a stretch of blue sky was visible through a break in the thick fog. There, a pillar of weak smoke drifted above the treetops.

“Utan,” I whispered.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


TOVA


The nighthawk called out in the darkness of the forest surrounding Utan.

I stood behind the line of Svell in the silence, the sound of it crawling up my spine, its fingers wrapping around my throat like a noose and tightening.

A warning. An omen.

But we were far past any warning the gods or the Spinners could give us now. They flickered out like torches in the wind, only the scent of their smoke left behind. No one was listening.

Gunther stood at my side, his sword pulled from its sheath, his eyes on the Svell warrior in front of him.

“You have to do something,” I whispered to Jorrund. “You have to stop this.”