NORWAY 1652
FOR THE FIRST TIME, I was reborn near enough to a previous life that I could return to visit my old loved ones. Unfortunately, those loved ones were altogether spooked when a tall, pale girl with waist-length blonde hair darkened their doorstep, claiming to be their daughter who’d died seventeen years ago. Especially when said daughter had been short and slight, with hair the colour of a roasted walnut.
The journey from Kuopio to Finnmark had been an arduous one atop a stubborn horse’s back. I had stolen her from a neighbouring farm, and she’d resisted my command for the first hundred miles. The map I’d copied down was also woefully out of date, and, despite pilfering the finest compass I could find, I’d taken several accidental detours into western Russia. It had been a long, hungry few months, but there had been nothing left for me in Kuopio. I was an only child to two parents who had died of smallpox within days of each other, and my heart was tugging me towards the last place my soul had felt at home.
Little did I know that Vard? would be in the middle of quite a serious witch trial by the time I returned. Paranoia had tucked itself into all the dark nooks and crannies of my old hometown, panic lapping at the island’s shores.
Despite sitting on top of the world, the port was ice-immune thanks to a warm and steady North Atlantic drift. By the time I finally arrived, the midnight sun was a dusty pink behind the village kirke, washing the treeless tundra and sprawling fortress in a soft lilac light.
My chest ached with the familiarity of it, but one thing was new: the row of grim pyres by the port. I tried not to look at them as I wound along my path home, passing countless houses with fearful crosses nailed above the threshold.
At my knock on the door – oh, the door, the same old door, how was it possible to miss a door ? – Mamma’s head appeared in the curtainless window. She frowned before opening the door just a sliver, afraid of a vague evil force that wore many masks.
Her face was more lined than before, her hair now the white-silver of winter frost. She wore her summer dress, a pale heather-purple with thick white stitching round the squared neck. It hadn’t aged well, with its ragged seams and dark stains around the pits. I’d always been the best at darning. Who had taken up the mending after I’d died? Certainly not fire-hearted Hedda, who hadn’t the patience for such things, nor Branka, who hadn’t the head.
‘Can I help you?’ Mamma asked, her voice so cold and clipped it stole the breath from me. I couldn’t remember her ever talking like that when I was alive, though the isolated island saw few strangers.
‘I’m sorry it’s so late.’ Despite not having spoken in this tongue for nearly two decades, it flowed from me clear as water. ‘Only, I know you do not sleep well.’
Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘And how would you know how I sleep?’
I didn’t know how to begin. ‘Where is Pappa? I mean – Anders. Anders Nilsson.’
Suspicion twisted my mother’s expression. ‘My husband died last year. What business is it of yours?’
Something inside me crumpled. My wise, gentle father. A voice like powdered snow. Knowledge of the sea so intimate it was almost arcane. His rough hands deboning fish in seconds. His endless patience with Branka when my mother’s had long since worn thin.
Dead in the ground.
Time was such a cruel thing. Hard enough for most mortals to bear, but uniquely ravaging for me, the relentless forward rush of it, a ship that never anchored, the flotsam of everyone I’d ever loved bobbing in its wake.
I wanted to drop to the floor and wail, but it would not help my cause.
Wringing my trembling hands, I mumbled, ‘I do not know how to explain this, and so I am asking you to just … believe me, for a moment. I can prove it.’
‘Prove what?’ Mamma’s words were smooth and hard as pebbles.
‘In my last life, I was your daughter. I remember everything. And I miss you very much.’
Mamma’s searing stare could have cauterized a wound, but she said nothing.
‘My name was Urszula. You named me that because it means “small bear”, and you always called me your cub. I had two sisters. Hedda and Branka.’ My throat choked with tears unshed. ‘Hedda is strong-willed and stubborn and hates the smell of fish. Branka was fifteen when I last saw her, and she had never spoken a single word in her life. Pappa … he always went very quiet whenever we sisters fought. Like he was studying us. In the summer we picked white reinrose for –’
A wall of black went down behind my mother’s eyes. ‘Speak another word, witch, and I’ll have you burned.’
‘No, Mamma! I’m not –’
‘I am not your mamma,’ she snarled, low and monstrous. ‘And I am not afraid of you.’
And then she started shrieking.
‘Heks! Heks! Heks!’
Witch.
Witch.
Witch.
Desperation clawed at me. ‘Please, let me come inside. I have travelled so far. How can I prove to you who I really am? Bring Hedda out. She’ll know it’s me. Please.’
Shrill as a church bell, she continued to scream. ‘Heks! Heks! Heks!’
‘Mamma, don’t do this,’ I begged, the little girl at the heart of me splintered by the rejection. ‘I did not mean to frighten you.’
‘Heks! Heks! Heks!’
‘Jeg elsker deg,’ I whispered. I love you.
A long, low hiss slipped through my mother’s teeth, as though I’d cursed heinously.
‘Hedda!’ I yelled into the narrow house behind my mother’s body. ‘Hedda, are you in there? Branka, v?r s? snill,’ I begged.
Hulking bodies spilled out of neighbouring houses. A man I didn’t recognize wielded a pair of leg irons, and he set off towards me with a hungry lurch to his gait. Next to him was Eyjolf, the noaidi – a shaman from a long line of shamans, but not so kind as his predecessors.
I looked around wildly. I had left my horse tied up on the mainland before borrowing a small boat to sail over to the island, but that left my situation precarious. A quick getaway with travel-leaden legs would be impossible. Why had I not anticipated this hostility? Whispers of the witch trials had grown louder the further north I’d travelled. I’d ignored them at my own peril.
How long would it take an immortal soul to burn on the pyre? How long would the flames lick pain up my skin before it melted?
I was doomed.
But then a cloaked figure appeared at the end of the street, running towards me in a fearless sprint, and I knew before I knew.
Arden.
In the body of a Norse god, tall and sculpted and golden.
The man wielding the leg irons was knocked out with a single blow to the back of the head. Arden bellowed at the others to back off, his voice a low rumble of thunder – and despite his coarse Finnish accent, they did.
Thick arms scooped me up and, with a grunt of effort, Arden tossed me over a broad shoulder. The last thing I heard before we rounded the corner was my mother’s hysterical wails, the word heks indelibly etched on my eardrums.
Hastily, Arden set me back on my feet and we sprinted down to the port, clambering back into the peeling red boat I had stolen to cross from the mainland. Another tiny vessel bobbed next to my own, which hadn’t been there when I’d arrived.
Breathless, we pushed away from the shore, and Arden rowed with long, rotting oars. The harbour stank of smoke and salt and burning whale fat.
‘How did you find me?’ I gasped, winded from the confrontation, winded from being tossed over a shoulder, winded from running, winded from Arden, here, now .
‘You stole my horse,’ he snorted, brushing a long lock of blonde hair from his piercing blue eyes. ‘I have followed you ever since. You are … not good at reading maps. I thought we might end up in Novgorod.’
I buried my face in my hands, breath ragged against my palms. ‘You couldn’t have put me out of my misery a little sooner?’ I wasn’t sure whether I meant by showing me the right direction or by killing me. Not a distinction most people had to consider.
Voice gruff over the soft lapping of seawater, he said, ‘This journey seemed important to you.’
I laughed bitterly. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘Perhaps.’ He did not look back at me, his gaze on the icy horizon to the north, where a pod of whales danced as though human hysteria was of no consequence to them. ‘But I understand why you did it.’
The harsh reception from Mamma had left me aching in places I hadn’t known it was possible to hurt. I was so tired of sailing through history like a hunk of driftwood that could never grow roots.
Once my breath fell back into a steady metronome, I raised my head and studied every line and curve of Arden’s body. The penny-dent in his chin, the bulge of muscles in his arms, sealskin coat taut across his shoulders. I tried not to think of our naked bodies pressed together in an Ottoman hammam, hot and breathless and desperate.
No matter how many lives I lost, no matter how many families moved on without me, I would always be known by Arden. Perhaps he was my true homeland; our existence a language only we could speak.
‘You’re here,’ I half whispered, half moaned, and then I threw myself forward, the boat pitching dangerously beneath my shifting weight, and hugged him tight. My face pressed into the warm, soft skin at the crook of his neck, his fast pulse fluttering against my cheek.
He rearranged himself so that I pressed more comfortably into his arms, my body nestled between his broad legs, and we sat like that for a few moments, both relishing the feeling of not being alone.
I brushed my lips just below his ear, savouring the sound of his breath hitching in his throat.
One of his palms came to the back of my head, thumb stroking my tangled hair.
‘I missed you,’ he whispered, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it.
My voice choked. ‘I missed you too.’
There was always Arden.
There would always be Arden.
Even when our families grieved and moved on, even when our ancestors lay in the dirt, even when we slipped through the cracks of time like ghosts, there would always be us. No matter how twisted and broken, we were the one true constant, our love like a river wending its way through the earth year after year, century after century, growing deeper and wider with every twist and bend. A certain peace came with knowing the water would always flow a particular way.
‘Sometimes it feels like my heart breaks when yours does,’ he murmured in my ear. ‘I knew the moment your mother rejected you, even before I rounded the corner and saw it for myself.’ A sigh, as his hand went from my head to the small of my back, warmth spreading through me. ‘You deserved better. You have always deserved better.’
Before I could convince myself it was a mistake, I pulled my head back from his neck, cupped his rough, stubbled face in my hands, and kissed him as though I had spent six months battling through the frozen wilderness just for this very moment.
And perhaps I had.
He reciprocated, soft and uncertain at first, then harder as he gave way to the longing I knew he felt too. He tasted of sea salt and windswept skin and the cold itself, of hope and salvation and loss.
My heart clenched in a fist as I released our lips, pressing my forehead against his, gazing into those furnace-like eyes. There was always so much behind them; emotion churning and writhing, so rarely given a way out. I often felt like I could spend another thousand lifetimes trying to coax it free, and it wouldn’t be long enough.
After a strange, loaded beat, he leaned back ever so slightly, raking a hand through his golden hair, broad chest rising and falling unevenly.
His hand was tanned and knotted with stark veins, and the sight of it loosed a memory: our hands fastened together with red ribbon, both speaking a language not unlike this one. The sea whipping itself into peaks, the scents of pine resin and sage oil, a voice so crisp and cutting it chilled me to the bone.
But then the image was gone, taking the moment of raw passion with it.
I hugged my knees to my chest on the narrow bench, palms pressed against the thick woollen stockings covering my shinbones. ‘You know, Aristotle once said that “a soul is something human beings risk in battle and lose in death”. But we do not lose ours in death. So what does that make us? More than human? Or less than?’
Arden did not answer, instead becoming fixated on the small puddle of rank water at the bottom of the boat. A shoal of red fish darted below us.
‘Maybe I am a witch,’ I muttered, to weigh his reaction more than anything. ‘Maybe we both are.’
His grip on the oars tightened, knuckles stretched white. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘It would offer some sort of explanation, at least. Folklore says witches are just women who made a pact with the devil. They offered something valuable in exchange for magic powers. To cure infertility, to smite a former lover, to save their own skins.’ I leaned forward on the bench once more, resting my hands on his knees. He jolted at the touch, and delicious fire kissed my palms. ‘Is that what happened to us, Arden? Did we make a deal with the devil? And is the valuable thing we sacrificed … adulthood? Our futures?’
Finally, he lifted his rough jaw and met my searching stare. ‘Something like that.’
But from the way his eyes darted from mine a second later, I knew he was lying.