The Girl the Sea Gave Back(54)

Village of Liera, Svell Territory

Tova set one finger on the rune stone before her and slid it across the table. “Mannaz.”

“Mannaz,” Jorrund repeated, picking it up and setting it into his palm.

He studied the symbol carefully, turning it in a circle in his hand to see it from every angle. It had been almost a year since he’d brought Tova to Liera, but their lessons had only just begun. The Svell Tala wanted to know the runes the way she did. He wanted to understand them. But when the stones were cast, he couldn’t see their patterns the way Tova could. He couldn’t string their meanings together or fit the pieces where they belonged.

“Mankind, friends, enemies,” she said, quietly, “social order.”

She remembered the runes like she remembered how to buckle the bronze brooches of her apron dress or fasten her hair into the intricate braids that fell over her shoulder. She just knew. Somehow, she remembered. But when she tried to pull back the memories from before she’d come to Liera, everything was washed out. They were the crumbling edges of pictures that never came together.

Sometimes, they appeared in dreams, spinning like a wisp of smoke until they disappeared again. She’d wake with her heart racing, trying to go back. Trying to summon the vision again so that she could fit it to the other pieces that floated in her memory.

She looked down at the marks that covered her arm, winding together in a maze that she couldn’t navigate. Why could she remember the runes, but not these? Why couldn’t she unearth them from where they were buried in her mind?

“What is it?” Jorrund leaned forward, his voice gentle. He looked down at her with soft, slanted eyes.

“It’s nothing,” she answered, setting her hand into her lap and clenching her fingers into a fist. Jorrund was never cruel to her, but she didn’t know how deep the well of his kindness was. She didn’t want to find out.

He tilted his head curiously. “What is it, Tova?”

She thought carefully, saying the words in her head before she dared to say them aloud. She’d asked him before about her people and the place she’d come from. But Jorrund never gave her answers. He only turned her questions into something else. “Have you ever been to the headlands?”

He looked surprised by the question, his eyebrows lift ing as he took his elbows from the table. “I haven’t. No one has.”

Tova swallowed hard, thinking that maybe she’d misread the moment. She shouldn’t have asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

She picked at the unraveling linen that frayed at the edge of her sleeve.

“You can tell me.” He attempted a rigid smile.

Tova studied him, trying to see beneath the look on his face. She’d learned not long after Jorrund brought her into the village that he rarely said what he meant. He was always molding the people around him. Always scheming.

“I want to go home,” she whispered in the most brittle voice. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t remember the place she’d come from. With everything inside of her, she wanted to go back.

Jorrund surveyed her, his back straightening. “You can’t go home, Tova.”

The sight of him blurred in the tears springing to her eyes. “But why?”

He took a deep breath, pressing his mouth into a hard line. “I didn’t want to tell you this.” He paused, waiting for her to look up at him. “You didn’t get lost from the headlands, sváss. You were sent away.”

She wrung her hands beneath the table, trying to understand. “What?”

“I didn’t want to tell you,” he said again. “But your people … they cast you off.”

“Cast me off.” She repeated the words, as if saying them with her own lips would help make sense of them.

He leaned in closer to her. “Do you know what a sacrifice is?”

She nodded slowly.

“That’s what you are. Your people tried to sacrifice you. To their god.”

A sick, twisted feeling pulled behind Tova’s ribs and she pressed her slick palms to her knees, trying to steady herself.

“You can never go back,” he said. “If you do, they will kill you.”

The tears welled in her eyes and though she swallowed down the cry in her throat, she didn’t try to keep them from falling. Jorrund set the small rune stone back onto the table and slid it toward her. She stared at it.

Mannaz.

Friends. Enemies.

Her eyes flickered up to Jorrund, and she blinked, wondering which he was.

Village of Fela, old Riki Territory

Halvard stared into the pail of water at his feet, where his wavering reflection looked back at him. His eyes were red and swollen, his hair a tangled knot at the nape of his neck. He wiped the tears from his face with both hands before he opened the door, where his mother waited inside.

She looked up from where she sat beside his father’s body, giving him a small smile. He’d woken in the loft to the sound of both his brothers crying, and as soon as he’d opened his eyes he’d known his father was dead. When the sun had set the night before, he’d wondered if he would go to sleep and never see him again and he was right. Having a mother who was a healer had taught him to recognize the look of death.

“Come.” Inge held her hands out for the pail and he took his place at his father’s side as she lifted the hot kettle from where it sat on the coals in the fire pit.