The Girl the Sea Gave Back(50)

I had wondered many times if losing her entire family when she was younger was the reason she’d decided never to have one of her own. But together, we’d built our own kind of family. My mother and Aghi had watched over the whole of us and I didn’t know what it would feel like to sit at the table without him now.

I went to the wall and opened the heavy lid to the trunk we’d brought with us from the mountain ten years ago when we’d come to live in Hylli. My father’s armor sat neatly on top of the dress clothes, the iron and dark leathers so familiar to me. I still remembered watching his body turn to ash on the funeral fire, carried away by the smoke to the next world. Most of my memories of him were like pictures half scratched out, but others were so clear. It was his face that was most shadowed. As if the only life I’d ever really lived was here, on the fjord. As if the time before that never happened.

Sometimes, I wondered if I’d even recognize him in the afterlife. But one moment had stayed with me even after so many others had disappeared. The day my father died was the day I’d first understood that death was coming for me. And I’d decided then that when it was here, I’d meet it willingly, the way he had.

I pulled the clean tunic on and took my father’s armor vest into my hands, holding it before me. The leather gleamed in the low light, clean and oiled, and I fit it over my shoulders and buckled the clasps, tightening them until it pulled across my chest.

Myra’s eyes ran over me, almost sad as she stood back and surveyed me. “Let me help you.”

She picked up the sheath from the table and stood up onto her toes to drop it over my head. “They would want to be here,” she said, her voice strained.

“I know.”

But I was glad that my mother, brothers, and Eelyn wouldn’t be standing in the ritual house to see me become chieftain. I wasn’t ready to face them and I didn’t know if I ever would be. The story of what happened in the glade was still one I wasn’t ready to tell. And more than that, my family knew me. Every fragile, unworthy thing that lay deep in my heart. I wanted to feel strong as I stood before the Nādhir. I wanted to believe that I was what Espen believed I was.

“Are you ready?” Myra asked, brushing her hands down the sleeves of my tunic.

I nodded, taking my father’s sword from the wall and sliding it into the sheath at my hip before we stepped outside. We walked through the village in silence, following the string of people already making their way to the ritual house in the dark. The drums beat like a steady heart, the glow of the altar fire blazing ahead, making silhouettes of the bodies gathered before the huge arched doorway.

“Halvard.” Myra stopped, her eyes lifted to the east.

A feeling like cold water running in my veins reached around me as I saw it. The blazing stave afire on the hill in the distance. It was the Svell.

“What is it?” She took hold of my arm.

I didn’t know the symbol. The Svell were probably making sacrifices to their god in the valley, readying to march through the forest to Hylli. I shifted on my feet, the weapons at my side and at my back suddenly heavy.

“It seems wrong,” I said, watching the stave glow in the darkness.

“What does?”

“To spend time on a ceremony. None of this will matter tomorrow.”

“That’s why we have to do it.” She took hold of my vest. “If we’re going to fight, we have to know that we are still who we are. If we’re going to die, we have to know that we’re dying for something.” When I said nothing, she pulled me toward her. “What else?”

I measured the words before I spoke them. It was something I’d never said aloud, only the faintest whispers in the back of my mind daring to ask the question. “What if they were wrong?”

She stared at me, not understanding.

“What if they were wrong to choose me?”

She smiled sadly, her hand sliding into mine. “You’ve never seen it. You’ve never seen your own strength. You think that because you’ve never faced war that you aren’t strong. You’re wrong, Halvard.”

She turned, pulling me with her as she walked toward the ritual house. It was already full, people spilling out the doors and into the paths that snaked through the village. They circled around the building, standing shoulder to shoulder, and at the sight of me, every voice quieted.

The drums fell quiet and I stopped, standing beneath the archway, where the carved faces of Sigr and Thora looked down on us with wide, open eyes. The heat swelled in the silence, my boots hitting the stone the only sound as we made our way down the center aisle toward the altar. Myra’s hand fell from mine before she disappeared into the crowd and ahead, Latham stood tall before the fire with the Tala and the other village leaders, their eyes fixed on me.

I took my place before them, standing with my back to the room. The warm air was too thick, my heart racing beneath the tight, woven leathers of the armor vest. A bead of sweat trailed down my brow and I resisted the urge to wipe it, my hands resting on my belt.

As the drums started again, the Tala began to sing and every voice joined him, filling the walls of the ritual house until it felt as if they were trembling around us. It was an old song, one that was engraved on the bones of the people long before they’d become the Nādhir. It told the story of the gods. Triumphs and defeats. Fate at the hands of the Spinners. The destinies carved into the Tree of Urer. I sang the words, my voice bleeding into the others around me. Words I’d known by heart since I was a small boy.