The Girl the Sea Gave Back(51)

At the sound of the Kyrr god’s name, Naer, the altar be fore me seemed suddenly to change, rippling in the firelight until a shape pulled together in the dim light. I could see her. The Truthtongue. The voices grew around me, making the room spin, and I closed my eyes, trying to erase the vision. But when I opened them again, she stood before the altar fire in her black linen dress, the mark of the eye on her chest wide open. Looking at me.

When I blinked again, the sting of sweat in my eyes, she vanished, and the orange light filling the ritual house returned. I looked around us, searching the sea of faces for her, but she was gone.

The Tala stepped forward, pulling a long, thin knife from his robes, and the village leaders stepped aside, leaving me to stand alone. I held out my hand and the Tala took it, lifting the blade between us. The voices continued to sing, rising louder as he shouted.

“We ask you, Thora and Sigr, to entrust your people to Halvard, son of Auben.”

I closed my fingers tightly around the blade and the Tala placed a wooden bowl beneath it before he pulled the knife in one swift motion through the wound I’d cut only the day before in Aurvanger. The hot blood poured freely, trickling out between my fingers and dripping into the bowl as the voices roared around us. When it began to slow, I pulled the strip of linen from my vest and bound it around my palm.

The Tala lifted the bowl before him, chanting the ritual words before he handed it to me. I stepped forward into the line of village leaders and took my place before the multitude of warriors, all looking to me. I swallowed hard, stopping before Latham first.

He stood tall, his chin lifted.

“Latham, leader of M?or.” I kept my voice even. “Will you accept me? Will you follow and fight beside me?”

He didn’t hesitate, a small smile igniting beneath his thick beard as he reached up, taking the bowl from me. His eyes didn’t leave mine as he raised it to his lips and took a drink, and then he was pulling me into him, wrapping his arms around me so tightly that I could hardly draw breath. I swallowed back the burn of tears in my eyes.

“I will need you,” I said, before he let me go.

He nodded. “Then you will have me.”

Espen had been right about him. So had Aghi. And if Latham followed me, I knew they all would.

He squeezed my shoulder before I moved to Freydis. Her pale face shined beneath a crown of red braids wound up around her head.

“Freydis, leader of Lund. Will you accept me? Will you follow and fight beside me?”

Her hands took the bowl from mine and she lifted it, taking a drink. She pulled me close, setting her chin onto my shoulder. “I will.”

I moved down the line as she let me go, looking into the eyes of the men and women I’d grown up under. They were twice, some of them three times my age, and they had trusted Espen with not only their lives, but with the futures of their own families.

Now, they were trusting me.

As I stopped before Egil, the last village leader, a feeling like a faint whisper drew my eyes to the back of the ritual house, where the doors were still open to the night sky. And I knew before I saw. My breath caught in my chest as I found their faces among the others.

My family.

My brothers Fiske and Iri stood tall beside Eelyn beneath the archway, peering over the crowd. My mother came through the doors behind them, her eyes finding me, and her hand went to her mouth, her fingers pressed to her lips.

I swallowed hard, my hands gripping tighter around the bowl to keep it from shaking. “Egil, leader of ?era. Will you accept me? Will you follow and fight beside me?”

He took the bowl as I looked back back to Fiske. He didn’t take his eyes from mine as his lips began to move around a prayer I couldn’t hear. Iri and my mother followed, but Eelyn stood frozen, the glistening of tears falling down her face visible even from where I stood. I knew that look on her, though I’d rarely seen it in the time I’d known her. She was made of iron and steel. She was the solid ice beneath my feet on the frozen fjord in winter.

But in this moment, she was afraid.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


TOVA


The Skj?ldr burned like a beacon in the night.

I sat in the dirt before my cot, staring through the opening of the tent. Outside, the Svell gathered around smoking fires, drunk on ale and eating what would be for some of them a last meal. But Gunther still stood beside the door, his feet planted side by side and his shadow drawn onto the canvas.

The foul smoke of the pitch on the grass still clung to me and I could only think that Hylli would smell the same in another day. I’d stood on the hill as the sun set, watching the Nādhir village disappear beneath the fog in the distance.

I wondered if Halvard was home now. I imagined him sleeping in his bed beside his family with the warmth of the fire and the sound of the sea. But if he was home, he wasn’t sleeping. The Nādhir would be preparing for a battle they couldn’t win. The battle I’d brought to the fjord.

Being Kyrr on the mainland was like living as a ghost. A tormented spirit, left behind in the world of mortals to wander. When I closed my eyes, the same vision I’d had in Ljós when I took the henbane played in the darkness. The silver gray waters. The black rock that disappeared up into the mist that hovered over the sea. Careful hands working at my markings by candlelight and the soft, rasping hum of a song on a woman’s breath.

Home. But even that wasn’t true. Because though the marks still stained my skin, the blood that ran through my veins was a stranger to me.