Chapter 24
We had rabbit stew and honey-glazed sprouts for dinner.
I should have been resting, but spent most of the afternoon helping the invisible Nanna in the kitchen instead, chopping meat, slicing onions, kneading dough for tomorrow’s bread.
As long as I was moving, as long as I could focus on nothing but the satisfying thwacks of my knife and the texture of flour and water and yeast between my fingers, I didn’t have to think of Kjell.
Study your runes, Thraga. You’ll need them one day.
Why?
Had he been raising me to be the next little soldier in whatever fight he’d been fighting? The next to die in the fireborn flames?
Onions. Focus on the onions. They were the reason, surely, that my eyes were burning.
I chopped, I stirred, I washed. The edges of the windows were turning a pale lilac by the time the work was done and Estegonde laid the table; dinner itself passed without any mention of rebellion, Aranc, or Cimmura.
I retreated to the kitchen as soon as we were done, to scrub the pans or tend to the fire or whatever else needed doing.
I made you a knife. You must be able to protect yourself.
Against witch hunts?
Or against something far worse?
I gritted my teeth and scraped bits and pieces of rabbit from the bottom of the cast-iron pan, soap stinging the skin of my hands.
Or had he never intended me to join any fights?
Had he truly just wanted to keep me safe, away from the eyes of the world – and Varraulis in particular – until the end of our lives?
Look away!
The last words he’d yelled at me, and I hadn’t. Had seen the stones fly. Had seen him fall. Had seen—
‘Oh, here you are.’
Durlain.
I whipped around as if he’d announced an attack, splattering water and soap over my woollen dressing gown.
He had appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, wearing a long black coat and holding another in his arms. In the glow of the fire and the purple moonlight that filtered through the windows, his tousled curls glistened like raven feathers – unearthly, inhuman, mesmerising colours, and I was overcome by a sudden mortifying urge to run my fingers through the strands and learn what those shimmers felt like.
Fuck’s sake.
‘What?’ I snapped, to compensate.
‘Kind-heartedness herself,’ he said with an arch of his brow, then turned his eye to the knives that were sticking themselves back into their wooden block. ‘Would you mind if I borrowed her for a moment, Nanna? Need to check the defences.’
The knives made a shooing motion, as if to say, Get on with it.
‘Defences?’ I said.
‘Defences, yes.’ He stepped forward, held out the second coat, then gave a short, brisk sigh when I didn’t take it. ‘Thraga, if you insist on hiding from your own thoughts all day, you might as well get some fresh air in the process. Put on the bloody coat.’
That hit home. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Glad to see the Svala didn’t take your unmatched eloquence with it,’ he said, so pointedly unruffled one could consider it an act of war. ‘If it helps, the defences in question are a set of lengthy runic inscriptions. I have no idea what they actually say. You might.’
I blinked at him.
There was a glint of triumph in his eye as he extended his hand and coat again.
‘You manipulative bastard,’ I said, snatching it from his fingers, and he gave me a flash of a grin that suggested I’d paid him the most flattering compliment imaginable.
Durlain Averre, grinning. I felt a little dizzy as I pulled the coat over my dressing gown and followed him outside into the darkness and the icy cold of night – unsure what had changed but damn certain that something was different between us, that there’d been a shift in our familiar non-friendship and non-alliance.
Was it his own home and family? My near-drowning?
My suggestion he cease his stubborn attempts to come across as an utter arsehole all the time?
He still was an utter arsehole, of course.
He was just dragging me out of the house, too.
I was too occupied by my thoughts to notice the giant, hairy silhouette the moment it moved ahead of us. Only when Durlain stood still did I jolt and start, ‘What—’
The silhouette turned.
A pair of blue, glittering eyes glared directly at me.
I shrieked – three shrieks in a day, for hell’s sake, and yet there was no stifling the sound.
The creature was enormous. More wolf-sized than dog-sized, its head reaching to my shoulder, its white fur rippling menacingly as it padded towards me.
Bits and pieces of its skin and muscles were missing.
One of its back legs was nothing but bone and sinew; its ribs lay bare on its left flank.
Rather than flesh and blood, though, it was ice that glittered between its bones and fur – the same scars Durlain wore, the Niflheim cold turned physical.
Garm.
Death’s dog.
I inched back from those frost-coloured eyes, hands unthinkingly reaching for knives I wasn’t wearing, and squeaked, ‘You could have warned me.’
‘Oh, warnings would not have saved you if he’d wanted to do you harm,’ Durlain said, his face a fraction too stony as he patted the monster on the fluffy white head.
Bastard. ‘He’s quite friendly though, don’t worry.
You might want to let him sniff your hand so he knows not to tear you apart in the future. ’
Extremely reassuring.
I swallowed a sting of fear and forced myself to step forward again, extending my arm.
The hellhound’s breath was cold as ice as he snuffled at my fingers, then gave me a single firm lick with an equally frigid tongue; the honours done, he turned around and happily padded down the path away from the house, towards the silhouette of a forest beyond.
I stayed behind, blinking at the white blot in the shadows. My hand tingled with the cold.
‘Coming?’ Durlain said, starting along the path.
Fucker.
I hurried after him, wiping my fingers on my borrowed coat. ‘So how exactly did you end up stealing Death’s bloody pet, if I may ask?’
‘Spur of the moment.’ There was a hint of a grimace in his voice.
‘We were sitting in Niflheim, the both of us newly revived, Muri in tears, and I figured I ought to do something to cheer her up. She’d just seen me being tortured to death.
And had her neck slit by her very own brother – not a particularly beloved brother, but all the same. ’
‘So you stole the dog.’
‘So I borrowed the dog.’
I squinted. ‘And just haven’t returned him yet?’
‘Oh, I tried,’ he said, and this time the grimace was unmistakable. ‘Turned out he’d become rather fond of warmth and Muri, though, so he simply refused to step through that portal. I’ve not been on the best of terms with Death since.’
With Death.
With the actual god of death.
‘What is he like?’ I asked cautiously.
‘Prick.’ A small, mirthless smile hovered on his lips. ‘Not that I have any right to talk, of course. Muri deals with him more easily, so whenever we have the choice, she’s usually the one who goes down.’
I remembered his hollow eyes in Nettle Hill and decided it was probably not only his strained relationship with the ruler of Niflheim that had him staying away from the misty cold – but he was talking bafflingly easily, and he hadn’t insulted me for ten sentences or so, and I didn’t quite feel like spoiling that unexpected ceasefire by digging into things he clearly didn’t want to talk about.
Instead, I remembered something that had occurred to me during dinner.
‘Speaking of Cimmura …’ We’d reached the forest by now, the pine branches stealing the last of our moonlight.
I should have been scared out of my mind, walking into the pitch-black dark with a man I ought to be careful of, unarmed, in a place I didn’t know – but my feet didn’t falter.
‘I’m really sorry we got delayed because of me.
If you want to ride on tomorrow, I’ll try my best to be ready to leave. ’
He was silent beside me for a moment. Ahead, Garm was a white wraith between the trees.
‘I appreciate that,’ he said finally, voice tight. ‘And of course I’d have preferred to be faster, but there’s no sense in continuing before we know you’re not concussed or about to relapse in the saddle. So let’s give it a day or two before we make our plans.’
‘But—’
‘Thraga.’ Too sharp – a tone that was all restraint, all tightly controlled feeling.
‘I know I want to leave. I know very damn well I want to leave. But I need to keep my head about me if I want both her and us to survive this, and as Aunt Gon has reminded me about five hundred times in the past few days, Muri is not exactly a helpless damsel anymore. She’ll survive a few more days.
I’ve sent some lies around to delay any negotiations, and Vai is doing what she can, too.
You making a martyr out of yourself doesn’t help anyone. ’
There was the insult, then.
Or was it an insult? It sounded vaguely like one. His strained breath certainly suggested he might be angry. On the other hand, he’d said he appreciated my apology. So perhaps he wasn’t necessarily saying I had done something wrong?
You’re making this very hard for both of us, witchling.
No. That was Lark.
Durlain …
Had Durlain ever said anything like it?
Garm had come to a standstill before us, waiting with a happily wagging tail until we’d caught up. The road split into two paths on either side of him. At the centre of the crossroads, a tall stone pillar rose from the earth – like a tree made of marble, runes winding like ivy around it.
‘There are eight of these,’ Durlain said before I asked, nodding at me to follow him as he turned to the left.
‘Seranon told Aunt Gon to check them regularly, so we do. They’re supposed to keep trouble out, although I clearly don’t have the faintest idea what exactly their protection entails – it looks a lot more complex than your shields. ’
I glanced back over my shoulder. ‘Are they all the same?’
‘As far as I’ve been able to see, yes.’