Chapter 18 #2
The songs the Nosrern sing when someone has died…
they cannot be explained unless if it is an experience you’ve had.
The best I can do is to tell you that all people in the north speak three languages.
There is the language of the gods—words they use for prayer, for casting, for accounts of death.
They call these the Old Words. There is the language of the Day, for speaking and living.
Then there is the oldest language of all, that of song.
It is more important to teach a child music than to teach them to speak words in the north.
But their music is also broader. Things like animal calls can be part of it, the screams of rage can be part of it, as can the sound of crying.
And to hear crying captured and placed in song—a song formed by collective, rhythmic crying—I am convinced it would stir even the coldest soul. This was what I witnessed that night.
Higher voices crying high.
Lower voices crying low.
A song of howls, of pain, of wavering breaths.
I felt like a deceitful wench sitting in the hall, surrounded by the people I called sea dogs as they mourned with a depth that made me certain their hearts were a hundred times the strength of my own.
I was there in the room with them, flesh like them, blood like them, but I was not what they were.
I could have been—maybe—if all my crying hadn’t been done in secret, if I’d seen other people cry at any point in my childhood.
But I hadn’t. There was a part of the self they had access to that I had never known.
I couldn’t cry alongside them, though my chest begged me to.
I couldn’t thrash my arms and toss my head, sending my hair flying around me.
It would have been artifice compared to the raw pulse of their song.
The sound of Erland’s son was the most piercing—Erland’s child and his murderer, and, in a way, his priest. Without Broder, maybe Erland wouldn’t have been worthy of the afterlife he sought.
That evening, everyone gathered in the palace were priests and priestesses. Their songs carried Erland’s spirit across the sea, to the edge of the world, where Hyrold’s Ship awaited him.
Spirit moves inside sound. All northern people believe this.
When King Arik bid it my turn, I played The Melody of the Moss—a song about the creeping of the earth, slowly, ever onward, growing and dying and growing and dying.
It was my first experience with “affliction,” what the Norsern call hreilinger.
I played my song, and people who hadn’t heard it before joined the song; they found places to hum or thump a hand against their chest. Those with instruments listened to the tune and learned it in the moment, adding their own sound, transforming the song into something new and singular.
When it became clear some people were leaving for the night, I made my way back to my chamber, knowing that I would never again be able to refer to the northern peoples as sea dogs.
When I saw King Arik the following morning for our lessons, I asked his permission to venture outside the palace for the first time. “To somewhere where the land grows untamed,” I said. “I will not be gone long. It is my way to provide for Broder.”
The king looked as if he hadn’t slept for even a moment that night.
He probably hadn’t. He nodded and bid two guides attend me: Jorn and a broad-shouldered guard with a glinting axe, with the northern stains covering his forehead and tongue.
At first, I was worried to be close to Jorn, seeing as I hadn’t completed my reading with him.
I didn’t want to be perceived as impolite, but I also didn’t want him to offer the rest of the reading.
These worries were unfounded. Jorn and the guard chatted to each other as they kept to either side of me.
We walked down dock after dock, away from the chaos of Aalt, a city I would see more of, but not for some time still.
And then I stepped onto the Land of the Northernmost Star for the first time.
The wind roared to life, wrapping around me, bending silver-dusted firs to near-breaking. Jorn and the guard hushed as the wind surged; the guard even closed his eyes for several moments, seemingly feeling the wind on his face.
My boots sank into the black, damp sand.
Red cliffs rose haphazardly to the east as black waves rushed onto shore from the west. My hair snapped in front of my face, and my dress tangled aggressively in my legs, but I carried on.
Jorn and the guard trailed after me along the beach until I found a path where the cliffs broke apart and we wandered into the rocky woodlands beyond. I found what I sought: wild thistle.
It was late autumn, nearly winter, so the flowers had already faded and gone to seed, producing wispy tufts of white.
Nevertheless, I picked some and scraped away their thorns with my thumbnail as we walked back to the palace.
I used the king’s keys to access his storerooms, taking a small portion of scrap linen and yarn.
I wove the thistle’s stem in on itself and wrapped it in linen, binding my creation with yarn.
Then I sought out Broder. The man wasn’t hard to find—he’d stayed in the same place he’d been since the funeral songs began, staring into the flames of one of the palace’s central hearths, grief bending his shoulders like a yoke.
I had none of the words I needed to explain myself to him, so I didn’t try.
I approached the man who’d killed his father slowly, taking enough time to ensure that he saw me coming.
I figured it was unsafe to startle someone capable of killing his own kin.
All the same, I couldn’t imagine the woe of living in a world where slaying a family member might be required of me.
I ignored all propriety and set my work around his neck, tying the yarn so the thistle would rest atop his heart. He smelled of sweat and mead and smoke. His eyes met mine, and I saw his pain. The endless sea of it.
My offering was an ancient practise on the Isle, nearly lost but for mention in a few songs.
To lay thistle on someone’s heart was unspoken of by my order, but certainly if it were mentioned, it would be called a crime.
Since it wasn’t mentioned apart from in the songs, I didn’t consider truly what I was doing.
The songs said thistle could pull. I gave it to Broder thinking it would pull sorrow from his heart.
Not all of it, of course; nothing cures grief entirely.
“Thank you, Soten.”
He rested his hand atop the gift, and I thought that important, that the heat of his skin would speed things up some.
Yes. I have admitted it here in ink with my own hand. My first act of sorcery, drawn from an old ballad and a misunderstanding of how power moves through the world. I did not think twice on it. Death has that influence, I suppose. The ability to stir and awaken what lies dormant.