White Stag (Permafrost #1)(76)

Soren stroked my hair. “I won’t let him hurt you.”

I closed my eyes again, letting Soren pull me back to the comfort of his body. “I think I’m going to have bad dreams.” Stupid. You sound like a child. But I also was a child in a way, here among creatures that were centuries older than I was, despite their youthful looks. If we survived this, I would look like that too, no matter the time that passed. If Soren was human, I would’ve pegged him in his early twenties, not nearly into his eight hundreds.

“Bad dreams are better than no dreams,” he said, twining a lock of my hair around his finger. “At least they tell you what you’re afraid of knowing.”

My eyelids were getting heavy. I was warm and comfortable lying here with Soren while the cold wind whistled outside the cave’s entrance. The numbness in my bad hand was ebbing away, leaving behind the fiery agony that I remembered. Instinctively, I reached for it, only to have Soren grab my wrists.

“Don’t pick at it,” he said, examining the red and blackened skin of my right hand. The smell coming off it was gone, as well as the sores and oozing clear liquid, but the skin was still inflamed and scaly where the iron had touched it. “You’re healing better than you would if you were truly a goblin. You’ll be able to use it fine, soon. There’ll be scars, though. The scaly patches of skin sometimes don’t go away. I don’t know how they’ll affect you, since you’re technically human.”

“Scaly patches of blackened skin I can live with. As long as I can still grip a bow.”

Soren released my hands, and with great self-control, I managed not to pick at my wounds. I closed my eyes again, letting his scent wash over me.

“You know,” he said softly, “I remember when you first came here and kept trying to plant a garden. It was in the place where my mother died. My father left it in ruins, and I always thought it was tainted by death.”

“I never managed to grow anything.”

“When we’re finished with this, maybe you will.” He kissed my forehead and started to hum under his breath until I feel asleep.





18


BURNT LANDS


LIKE ALL GOOD things, my relatively peaceful time with Soren ended. I stood at the mouth of the cave, a hand shielding my eyes against the glint of sun off the snow. The clothes Skadi had gifted me fit perfectly: a hooded tunic lined inside with rabbit fur, leather armor that covered my chest and shoulders, trousers made of bear skin, and a cloak of wolfskin around my shoulders. At first, the wolfskin cloak struck me as odd—Skadi’s family were wolves—but that was the natural cycle, Breki explained. When the pack died, they went on to continue to serve their goddess. Besides, he mentioned, the wolf I was wearing hadn’t been well-liked anyway.

Soren was beside me, pushing jerky in my hands. “You need to eat. Your hand will heal faster.”

Despite the charred skin and the pain that never truly went away, my bad hand had healed well enough for me to grip a bow. Nerves made it nearly impossible to eat, but I choked down a few pieces of jerky anyway. The moon hung almost invisible in the sky like a cat’s claw.

“Seppo.” Soren looked back into the cave. “Are you almost ready?”

“Ah—in a moment!” There was a scuttle of claws across the cave floor, and Seppo came out, Hreppir on his heels. Both of them looked slightly haggard, Seppo sporting a black eye and scratching his arms raw. The younger wolf was nibbling on his shoulder as if he too had an incurable itch.

The black eye was my fault. When Seppo came back from his time trying to rid the wolf pack of fleas, he noticed Soren and me as we’d been before I fell asleep. His laughter and declaration that he knew it would happen was enough to wake me up and make me charge him—completely naked—and give him a few bruises. In the end, Soren made me stop. But it took a while.

“How long do you think it’ll take to get out of the mountains?” I asked the dark wolf beside me. Breki’s shoulders were a bit higher than mine, so he bent down to look in my eyes. “And to find the path of the stag?” There had been a feeling spreading through me ever since last night, my own insatiable itch that nothing mattered more than finding the stag before Lydian. Nothing. In the swirls of snow, the shape of the animal formed and spun before bounding away. In the wind, a voice was beckoning me forward. We needed to find the stag. We needed to do it soon.

The wolf snorted. We’ll be there before the new moon.

Soren glanced at them from the side of his eye. “Are you sure you didn’t pick up any fleas?”

Seppo hissed as he dug his nails into his shoulder and continued scratching. “Skadi said that fleas don’t bother goblins.”

Soren blinked slowly and took a deep breath. “Of course she did. Well, just stay away from us until you sort yourself out, you understand?”

Seppo harrumphed and pointedly turned his back on Soren, rubbing Hreppir between the ears.

Beside me, Breki knelt so I could mount him. It was like riding a horse, if that horse were ten times more agile and swift, with a thousand times the ferocity and predatory grace. I gripped his thick, gray-black fur; it was warm in my freezing hands. I’d gotten a pair of leather gloves from Skadi too, like Soren and Seppo had, after my old ones were misplaced on some mountainside during the battle with the draugr. Even if my old fingerless gloves had been threadbare, they were better when it came to using a bow. I was already in bad shape due to my hand; I didn’t need anything else holding me back, so I forewent the new gloves.