twenty-three
Sonya’s hands shook where they wrapped about the handle of the iron dirk.
The cold bit bitterly into her unsteady fingers, the rain lashing at her with unrestrained ferocity, but Sonya knew her trembling came from her nerves, not the weather. She stood with Calder and Anton on the far banks of Uruz, facing the raging waters of the tossing sea, and if she braced her eyes against the surrounding gloom, she could detect the shape of Gebo in the distance, outlined by the passing veins of lightning.
Uruz provided the nearest possible access to Gebo if one were to draw a line across a map connecting the two indiscriminate landmarks, but there was no bridge, no port, no dock. Just a miserable, rocky shore and an equally miserable spit of land inhabited by the fewest number of draugar in Vidarheim. Sonya could not say she’d enjoyed her visit so far, having tripped once on the salt-encrusted outcropping, only to find the dirt saturated with chips of fey-iron. Every time the wind kicked up, it caused what bare skin she had exposed—namely her face and her wrists—to burn.
Neither Anton nor Calder seemed to give the hazardous dust much thought, if they even noticed it at all. Calder again wore his stately black cloak that snapped and curled upon itself in the wind like a furious dog, and Anton wore something similar in a navy blue, his face all but hidden in the depths. Sonya had given up on the hood of her own dark cape, unable to see anything at all when it fell over her eyes.
“ Your senses will improve with age ,” Anton had said. “ It is not instant, the progression from one life to the next. It is like being reborn; a child must learn to crawl before they walk, before they run, and so too must their minds and bodies mature. Humans fear getting older as a sign of weakness and depleted virility—but the draugar welcome it. ”
So there Sonya stood, half-blinded by the storm, barely a few days into her draugr existence and wondering if she’d see a full week.
Anton turned one bothered eye to the sky, then to Calder, a silent, unvoiced grievance hovering over him like a private cloud.
Calder scoffed. “I am not in control of it.”
“No?” Anton looked upward again. “Well, that is something.”
“You’re welcome to try, Light-Hand. ”
And so Anton raised that eponymous hand and allowed seidr to pool and crest from his fingers, the feeling in the air like heat from a stove as Sonya stood at his side and watched. The storm abated in increments and then seemed to resist, bucking and surging against the calming pressure Anton exuded until he furrowed his brow and growled in defeat. Calder looked smug.
“I don’t know why you look so pleased with yourself. If she’s managing to interfere with the main cluster over Vidarheim, we’re in more trouble than we anticipated.” Anton moved his hand in a different direction, the seidr shifting, and the rain in their immediate vicinity thinned.
“She doesn’t usually, but she knows we’re coming.”
“Gods, I should have listened to Gudbrand when he called her a hag.”
Calder sank ankle-deep in the water without a care, letting it swirl toward his knees as he sucked in a deep breath, chest expanding. He released a word—a spell, an invocation—in a frigid display of his own ability, the sound shimmering in Sonya’s poor, anxious bones as it rushed outward from the shore. The water seized and crackled like firecrackers as it froze in a narrow, black pathway.
“Is there a particular reason we can’t take a boat?” Sonya nervously asked as both men stepped onto the ice. It groaned underfoot.
“Yes,” Calder barked, jabbing his finger toward Gebo in the distance—toward the waves that gathered and rose like the shoulders of giants before crashing against into the ocean. Sonya had never seen the water so unsettled before. “We would not make it past the breakers. The riptide would sink any vessel, regardless of our influence.”
She eyed the ice path with considerable doubt, but she’d trusted Anton this far and decided that trust could extend a bit farther. She stepped up next to them, and when the ice shifted under her, Anton’s hand caught her own, keeping Sonya steady.
They walked forward into the whistling wind and the harsh, frigid spray of the sea, and the water did its damnedest to crack and break the ice as it formed under Calder’s power. The rain returned when Anton had to add his own ability to block the coming waves, huge walls of ice springing toward the sky to catch and scatter the blows. The ice would shatter, covering them in glittering shards, threatening to kick the trio into the violent depths.
Sonya clutched Anton in one hand and the dirk in the other for dear life.
For a mile—or perhaps two—they battled the onslaught until Anton and Calder could go no farther, repelled by an unseen force that would not allow them to take a step nearer the island’s black shores.
“Go, girl,” Calder snarled as his boots slid on the ice, frost clinging to his hands and the edges of his hood. “This is where you must go on without us.”
They had explained the night before about lodestones and wards and how easily they could be disrupted if one knew what to look for. The wards had been tuned to specific people, and the stronger the ward, the bolder it had to be.
“There will be a stone,” Anton explained again, still holding the wall to protect them from the breakers. “A large stone on the beach, infused with fey-iron. It will have a rune upon it—trust me, you will know it when you see it. You must deface the rune. Use the sword. All you must do is disrupt the rune, nothing more.”
“Yes, okay.” Sonya’s heart leapt into her throat as she looked to the path before her, the heaving sea and the land still some forty meters away, the ice not quite meeting the sand or rocks. She took one breath for courage, then another—and Calder growled, a low, menacing sound of frustration making her hair stand on end.
“I suggest you run, girl. Lest you wait too long and the bridge gives.”
“Go, Sonya,” Anton urged. “I know you’re capable of this. But be careful.”
She kept both their words in mind as she pressed forward, urging her pace into something just short of a run, finding the ice unsettled her less when she spent less time feeling it shift underfoot. It began to crack and crumble as she neared the end, and Sonya had to jump before it could give way completely.
She landed waist-deep in the frigid shallows, gasping against the stinging chill.
A wave struck her hard in the back, driving Sonya forward, though she managed to keep her feet and climb from the water.
The rain that beat the sea dwindled here as if the island sat in the eye of the storm, though the wind still howled with ferocity and cut across Sonya’s bare face. She had to squint to see, and even then, the sand burned her eyes and obscured the long stretch of beach. The gorse around the cliffs spilled out upon the beach like a thick, dangerous fog, leaving only a narrow precipice where one could walk between the jagged jetty and tightly woven thorns.
Sonya yanked her feet from the muck and set off in search of the runestone.
She found it as Anton said she would, knowing the black outline against the slightly brighter horizon must be something to stand out as it did—a plinth as high as the ones in Stonehenge, towering over Sonya’s head. When she neared it, she could see a rune emblazoned on the surface, the orange vivid in the gray, drawn surroundings. Sonya sucked in a breath as she visually traced the lines of the Web of Wyrd, the very symbol she’d seen so long ago above Anton’s prison cell.
Fate was a tricky beast.
Steadying her nerves, Sonya drew the dirk from its scabbard and approached the rocks leading to the flat slab where the standing stone was housed. She had only progressed a handful of feet when she caught a flutter of fabric against the solid sheet of night, and Sonya tore away from the shore as Dagmar—tall and lean and vicious with a black tattoo wending about her wrist—came bounding out from behind the stone with a snarl.
Sonya bolted toward the gorse, diving under the frazzled branches without a care for how they ripped at her cloak and wet hair because Dagmar had to follow, and she was much larger than Sonya. “ Hrafnasueltir! ” the witch raged.
Back bent almost double, Sonya dashed through the tangled plants, cursing her luck when a twig snapped across her face and nearly put out her eye. Dagmar snarled, and a wisp of fire and smoke fell over the gorse, but the storm had left it too damp to catch. Sonya kept running, arms raised and braced to protect her face with the dirk turned outward against the snagging limbs.
Dagmar was forced to follow.
Sonya dipped deeper into the vegetation until it tightened to a point where even she couldn’t pass through, and only then did she divert her course and almost double-back toward Dagmar. She kept quiet, skinning her knees on the gravel through her thick trousers, and sprinted as fast as she could, listening to the other woman thrash and curse her way through the thicket.
Sonya burst back onto the beach at a full run, gasping for air as she saw the standing stone ahead of her—unguarded—and darted for it. The sigil was high—too high—and seemed to rise ever higher the closer she got, but Sonya did not give up. She charged forward and, with what bit of athleticism stomping about the university had granted her—jumped onto the plinth and scrambled to find handholds. The fingers of her freehand bent and threatened to break from the pressure, her knees and toes aching, and still Sonya levered herself higher, until—.
The dirk slashed against the lowest part of the Web of Wyrd, and the light broke with a shriek of metal on rock. Sonya descended, elbows dragging on the stone—and landed atop Dagmar, torn and snared by the thorns. The seidkona howled in fury—and the dirk, still clasped in Sonya’s tiny, pale fist like a lifeline—fell with her, plunging into the other woman’s unprotected chest.
Sonya barely registered how she landed, how she rolled and gasped, floundering on the rocks as Dagmar crashed onto her knees. The seidkona’s silvered eyes gazed at Sonya, befuddled, and then—.
She toppled like a flag gone limp without a breeze. Her body landed upon the sand with a thump, but it was such a small noise for such a weighty thing. The seidkona fell, and Sonya’s breath went with her, forced from her lungs with a short, shocked whine.
Dear God , Sonya thought, eyes wide, terrified. She’s dead. She’s—I—!
A bird shrieked. From the sky, the gilded hawk dipped and landed by Sonya’s feet, and suddenly Calder appeared, gazing down at Dagmar with vindictive glee. The glance he spared Sonya was almost approving.
Sonya didn’t want his approval.
“Wh—where is Anton?”
A harsh smile broke his severe countenance, and Sonya’s hand itched for the dirk despite the anxiety in her chest—.
“I left him to swim.”
He did, indeed, leave Anton to swim—as the four-legged dog came scrambling onto the shore, shaking salt and water from its coat. The dog’s form gave way to Anton’s, and he swore like an incensed pub-crawler as he whipped his drenched hair back from his eyes. “You arsehole , Calder, I swear on Ymir’s bones—.”
He stopped, seeing the body upon the stones, the blood that even then still pooled underneath Dagmar’s unmoving torso, the dirk standing like a bare mast from her chest. He looked to Sonya, who sat trembling with her reddened hands, and a quiet, patient sorrow took over his eyes. “You did well,” he told her. “You did what you had to.”
Calder kicked the dead seidkona over with little fanfare. Above him, the blackened rune looked savaged with a large, white slice bisecting its edge.
“Don’t we all?”
The house and its garden sat empty as a tomb before them.
Sonya had not thought it homely on her prior visit, but now it exuded a terrible dread, like the sight of some gruesome crime, haunted by its furious victims. It could be haunted for all Sonya knew, but she hoped whatever spirits lingered there would not hinder them in taking vengeance on the person who had crossed them.
The wooden steps creaked like dead tree limbs under Calder’s boots as he approached the main door.
“Do you think it wise to go through the front?” Anton asked, standing back with Sonya, away from potential danger.
“She will know we are here from the moment the ward went down.” Calder shrugged. “It does not matter now.”
The door eased open with a swipe of his hand, and the draugr strode inside. Sonya made to follow—but Anton tightened his hand upon her wrist.
“No,” he murmured. “Let him go first and draw their attention. We’ll go around the back.”
Sonya hadn’t known there was a back, but the house was large and sprawling, and she trusted Anton’s judgment as they quickly skirted the porch and made to run by the hedges on the western wall.
The quiet clung eerie and thick in Sonya’s ears, the house still, the constant vibration of seidr humming just beneath the surface of her skin. Minutes ticked by.
Where had Calder gone? Had he been discovered?
Anton eased open the door to a sunroom at the property’s rear—the smell of decay and disuse heavy in the air, like mildew thick on a wet rug. Like the front steps, the wooden decking creaked under their boots and bowed in places, threatening to give out from the rot.
Anton held a finger to his lips, and Sonya all but held her breath as he listened, his senses keener than her own, though he heard nothing moving in the house. He retrieved the small iron knife from his pocket and looked to Sonya, whispering, “Stay behind me.”
Given she’d lost her only weapon, Sonya listened to his instruction and kept close, terrified out of her wits and desperately wishing she was holed up in Gudbrand’s house away from psychotic vampire witches and their intolerable houses.
I would have driven myself mad, she told herself. Waiting for Anton and Calder to come back, not knowing what had happened, thinking one of those shadowy creatures might return. I wouldn’t have been able to stand it.
They entered the foyer, not a single candle lit the cavernous building, the only illumination brought by square blocks of moonlight slanting through the windows or the bright flashes of lightning from the clouds ringing the island. The silence pervaded every inch of every room, so much so it became its own entity, and the stray patter of saltwater dripping from their clothes startled Sonya.
Where did Calder go? For an awful moment, Sonya wondered if he’d betrayed them—if he’d run like a coward or had found Ylva to warn her—but she shook her head. Perhaps out of every person she’d ever known, Calder Halfdansson was the one she thought could abide by masters the least. Ylva may not be his sire, may not be his v?rdr, but she held power over him nonetheless, and Calder would take any chance he could to rid himself of that oversight.
Even if it meant allying with Anton and Sonya.
They came to a second corridor off the main junction, and light beckoned from the end of it. It was dim, only a single candle throwing its glow past the open door, and Anton approached with a kind of grim certainty, already knowing they must be expected. He pushed the door in.
The image beyond haunted Sonya, as most memories of her brief visit to the seidkona’s home did. She recognized Eydis only by her lithe build and the unspooled tendrils of her blond hair, her still face painted red by the blood spilled from the wound chewed open on her throat. Above her and the upturned chair, Ylva looked down at her dead protege with little emotion, the front of her velvet gown streaked crimson. She licked blood from her teeth.
Sonya did not feel at all prepared to deal with this. She was an odd and bookish scholar with an eye for culture and violence in its historical purview—but not like this, not in the present, not with the smell of dust clawing at her nose, skin shivering from the rain, the blood of a dead woman still tacky on the underside of her palms. Ylva looked at Anton and smiled.
“How lovely to see you again, darling Anton.”
Anton didn’t appear to know what to say, his attention torn between Ylva and the dead witch half-fallen atop her tipped chair. There was a broken goblet on the floor, the rug stained with wine or blood. “That is how your power has grown,” he commented as if in a daze. “You haven’t just killed the children. You’ve eaten them.”
To which Ylva laughed, a sound perversely like church bells coming from the mouth of an unhinged devil. “Aye. And it worked out better than even I suspected.” She smiled. “You always were my best student. I have often wondered in recent years how you would taste.”
The sudden blast of magic came on like a hurricane, throwing Anton hard into Sonya as his hands burned with seidr and she pushed at him with all her might. It seemed a puzzling scene of contrasts; Anton frozen in the doorway, snarling, Ylva with her hand outstretched, both struggling to master a building pressure that had blood rising in the back of Sonya’s throat and oozing from her nose. Anton cursed, his posture wavering—.
Sonya pushed with her aching, scraped hands, urging him forward, willing it to happen—.
Something snapped, glass shattering, and Ylva stumbled half a step backward. In the greater scheme of things, it seemed such a silly, petulant victory, but it was all that was needed for the inky black form of Calder to ooze out of the darkness that flickered about the candle’s tattered edges at her back. Ylva moved to rally, seidr brewing, Sonya convinced she’d blast them both out of the house or into a million bits and pieces, when Calder brought a dagger to her throat.
“Should I give you the mercy you gave the others?” he hissed. “The same chance of freedom if you run fast enough? What will you do, Ylva? Will you submit and never show your face in Vidarheim again? Or will you die?”
Ylva, hands raised, narrowed her eyes. “ No . I will not submit —.”
Magic shuddered like the great booms of thunder in the distance—and the iron dagger flung itself from Anton’s hand of its own volition, jerking backward, landing point first in Sonya’s chest. She barely had a chance to exhale in shock and feel the hilt thump against her bones before she was falling—falling and falling, a witch’s screams following her down into the depths of the lightless unknown.