The Girl the Sea Gave Back(45)

“I think it was a memory. From before.”

He stilled. “Before? You mean, before Eydis brought you to us?”

But I didn’t believe that anymore, and I didn’t know if he did either. It was just something he said to make sense of things that couldn’t be understood. “I don’t know. But I think the Spinners are trying to speak to me, Jorrund. And there’s something about Halvard…” I called him by name without even realizing it and the word stung on my lips.

“Who?”

“The Nādhir from the glade.” I looked up at him. “I think this path is tangled with mine somehow. I think the gods will be angry with us if we don’t—”

He stood. “Tova, we cannot undo what has been done. We cannot stop a war that has already spilled this much blood.”

“But the gods—”

“Silence!” he roared suddenly and I flinched, recoiling. “What do you know of the gods? You’re a child.” He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand, taking a deep breath. “Remember your place, Tova. This is not for you to decide.”

I stared into my folded hands, pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth to keep from speaking. Whatever bound me to Jorrund was like the ice clinging to the shores outside of Liera, growing thinner every moment.

“You need sleep. We’ll speak of this in the morning.” He looked at me for a long moment before he pushed outside, taking the torch with him and leaving me in the pitch dark.

I lay back on the cot, curling onto my side. But my hands were still shaking against my chest, sticky with the dead man’s blood. I could smell it. Everywhere. The stench of death and rot had clung to me in Utan and I wondered if it would ever let me go.

I pulled the vision of the water back to me. The gray deep. The stream of bubbles trailing up to the bright surface. My hands, floating out before me. And the sound. A deep hum that wrapped itself around me and pulled me down into the cold.

Until a flicker of light ignited around me. It lit the darkness like a flash of lightning and I held my breath, waiting. My heart pounded as a flash lit behind my eyelids again and I sat up, clamping my hands to the side of the cot as another vision surfaced in the darkness.

The wavering image of a slender woman pulling long pale fingers through fire-red hair as she sat before a fire. And there was a sound. The soft, gentle hum of a song that some part of me recognized.

More fragmented pictures spilled over one another. High, jagged cliffs. Bare feet on black stone. The sharp teeth of dripping icicles clinging to the edge of a thatched roof. They loosened the seams stitched tight around the memories bound up in the back of my mind and I breathed through the pain that throbbed in my chest.

I pushed back the furs and stepped lightly across the dirt to the fire pit. Gunther’s shadow was painted on the canvas, where he was posted outside my tent, and I held my breath, sinking to my knees. I didn’t bother to roll out a pelt. I pulled the runes from around my neck and held them before me. Jorrund would never allow me to cast the runes by myself. He said it was too dangerous. That we needed Eydis’ favor to protect me from the wicked gaze of the Spinners. But it wasn’t the Svell’s future I was looking into this time.

It was my own.

I emptied the pouch into my hand and my palms pressed together around them. I closed my eyes, sitting up straight with a deep, centering breath.

“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir syn.

“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir syn.

“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir syn.”

The words rolled off my tongue, a warm tingle running over my skin.

Eye of the gods, give me sight.

For the length of a breath, I could hear another voice echoing the words. One that I knew, even if I didn’t recognize it. It widened the stream of memories flashing in my mind and my own voice bled into it.

“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir syn.

“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir syn.

“Augua ór tivar. Ljá mir syn.”

I chanted, my voice deepening as I held my hands out before me and I pulled every whisper of hope and desperation from where it was hidden inside me and pleaded with it. And between the uneven beats of my heart, I let the stones fall.

The breath curled in my chest as I reached out, finding the runes in the darkness and carefully tracing their symbols with the tips of my fingers. But I needed to see them. I crawled across the floor, using a flat stone that rimmed the fire pit to push a large glowing coal onto the dirt. I rolled it before me until its light illuminated the stones just enough so that I could make them out.

Eihwaz sat in the center. The yew tree. Strength and trustworthiness. I bit down hard on my lip, my heart quickening. Dagaz was beside it, their sides touching. Dawn. An awakening. And to their right sat Pethro, the die cup and the rune of secrets.

But my gaze drifted to the corner of the spread, where one more stone was pulled up and away from the others.

Othala. The land of birth. A heritage. The story of a people.

The crunch of rocks beneath boots sounded outside and I looked up to see the shadows on the canvas moving. I frantically raked the stones together and swept them under my cot, getting to my feet as the voices grew louder.

I cursed, picking up the hot coal with my fingers and tossing it back into the fire pit with a hiss between my teeth. I pulled the furs over me just as the canvas moved and my heart slammed inside my chest as a long shadow stretched over the ground before me.