Chapter 40 #2
Fell wasn’t celebrating with them, even though he was often the first person in a gathering to pause for the sacred.
I could read him fairly well by then. He wasn’t bothered exactly, but he wasn’t pleased.
There was something concerning him as he stared at the map, so I felt concerned, and because of that, Halvar started fussing.
I wandered off to feed him, but Fell stayed behind, his gaze trapped by the map.
That was the evening Fell began suggesting I study basic combat.
I refused several times over. Fighting wasn’t for me, and I had so little time where my mind wasn’t used up by Halvar.
The time that was mine was for music or lovemaking or fawning over Dania as her stomach swelled or else teasing Rowan for the green colour his hair suddenly had—it would take a little less than a moon for the lye soap to colour it white like Norsern hair, so there was only so much time for the teasing.
“Please,” Fell said. “Come and watch at least. Let us show you some things.”
It was Fara who convinced me. “You are holding too firm,” she said. “It will keep being a bother to you. If you relax a little, let the idea flow past you, like a river, it will be done with, and you will not have to hear about it so much.”
I was tired of Fell’s constant return to the subject. I didn’t want to be annoyed with him, but he kept asking, and I kept being annoyed.
“Fine,” I huffed.
So Fara and I sat on the beach one sunny day in early summer, watching as Fell and Rowan trained—stopping and explaining themselves many times over.
“See, he keeps his legs apart like this, so it is harder to push him over?”
“See the shield raises too high, leaving the stomach open?”
“Every person has a place where their weight balances. Deep-voiced, life throwers usually hold their balance up high. Where the heart is. High-voiced, life catchers hold their balance lower, where the womb is.”
Fara’s company had become less bothersome to me by then.
Rowan was brutally and obviously in love with her, and she had a way of rubbing oil on Halvar’s forehead that relaxed him miraculously.
His little eyes would roll back with the pleasure of it, and he would remain more still than at any other time.
Fara didn’t seem to mind continuing the action for the entirety of a conversation.
As we watched, I complained about Fell, about the grotesqueness of his interest in me fighting. Of knowing his previous lover was a raider who could probably do the very things he was trying to teach me.
“He is only… sensing, no?” The wind tugged her bright, white hair around her sharp collarbone. “Things are going to change soon. Every decent reader I have spoken to has seen the white elk slick with blood—”
“I have seen that,” I said, my back straightening. “When I was learning to read stones.”
She laughed. “So then you know.”
I shook my head. “It meant nothing to me—”
“It comes to my dreams sometimes,” Fara said. “It walks, and its legs are so strong that the world turns beneath its hooves, becoming something new… sort of how a spinning wheel transforms wool into thread.”
I was distracted by a gurgle from Halvar. “Hello,” I said to him. “Are you awake now?” His eyes rolled again as perhaps a smile came onto his face. His expressions were lumpy and half-formed at the time. He smacked his lips.
Fara continued. “I am able to see—you might think I am crazy, or let us not jest, you already think I am crazy.” She laughed.
“So I need not soften my accounts. There are currents in the world that twist and pull energy… I do not think Fell sees them with his eyes as I do, but he is sensitive to them. He steps out of their way or follows them to their end. Unhappy people stand in their way and try not to be tugged along. Sometimes the currents speak to me. They were how I knew I was going to love Rowan. I saw a current, and it said that if I entered, I would meet my skael quickly. It said, to follow it, I must keep my eyes open for someone in pain, that I would be able to alleviate that pain. I walked through the streets, and when I saw Rowan, I knew. That is how the gods work, you see? They never tell you the whole tale. Just the first portion: go here, look for that, listen for this, notice. Only after you have finished the task will you be shown the next.”
I shrugged. It wasn’t the craziest thing I’d heard in the north.
“And deeper breaths, through the nose, they make it easier for the gods to show you—”
Fell interrupted. “Mira, come, I will show you how to hold the shield.”
I sighed and stood. “You are fine with holding him?” I said to Fara, leaving Halvar with her before properly hearing her answer.
“Of course.”
I approached Fell and Rowan as Fell offered his shield to me. I reached for it, but apparently, even that I did wrong.
“Other hand,” Fell said.
“This is my better one,” I said.
“Yes. So that one will hold your blade.”
I sighed again and reached for the shield with my left hand, sliding my arm into the arm band and gripping the leather inside as I’d seen others do when training. Fell adjusted my fingers, and I must have been glaring at him because Rowan laughed.
“Someone does not like being told what to do,” he said.
“I don’t want to fight anyone,” I said in Islish.
Rowan shrugged, just like a Norser. “Sometimes you don’t get to choose.”
“Here, yes,” Fell said. “Now feet apart, and—” He was standing behind me, his arms gently holding my arms, his legs tucked behind mine. How I loved his smell.
He raised my shield arm slowly, showing me.
“The range of it, you feel it? And if your right side is threatened, you turn a little, like this.” He turned the pair of us, so my left shoulder was facing out, and most of my torso was between the shield and him.
“Keep yourself small, curled in so more is covered. This is easy for you. You are small—” He waved at Rowan.
“Strike.” And then, to me, he said, “This way you can feel the weight of a blow. And pretend to pull out your weapon just before each strike. All the skill does not matter if drawing is not an instinct.”
At first, Rowan struck the shield with the softest of force, the wooden sparring axe clicking playfully against the wood.
“No, with strength. So she can feel it.”
Rowan hesitated. Women did less than half of the things back home that they did in the north. They certainly weren’t struck with sparring weapons.
“I do not know if I can,” he said with a smirk.
“What do you mean? Swing the axe!”
Rowan’s green eyes settled on me, his thick brows raised in uncertainty.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Let us get this over with. I would like to go eat.”
Rowan did swing harder. The echo of the hit travelled through my arm, pressing against my elbow in a way that felt truly wretched—like my elbow was being twisted the wrong way very quickly. Even my shoulder felt the grind of it.
“Come on,” Fell said. “Truly swing. The first time someone feels the weight of a blow should not be in an actual fight, no?”
Rowan shook his head. “She is… You do not understand our country. I must protect her. I cannot swing a weapon at her with force—steel or wood. Back home, I would be killed for what we have done already today.”
“Gah!” Fell’s laugh was so lovely, even if I hated everything we were doing when I heard it. “Fara, you come. Rowan can hold Halvar.”
Fara struck the shield I held as Fell guided me—raising my arm, sliding the shield, explaining which parts must be guarded at the expense of others. By the fourth hit, my shoulder screamed. By the eighth, I’d begun to think my elbow was permanently harmed.
“I think I understand now,” I said, sliding my aching arm out of the shield and turning to give it back to Fell. “We can stop.”
Fell pressed his lips together.
I huffed. “You are mood-filled today.”
He smiled, setting his forehead against mine. “I am never mood-filled.”
“And now you are being adorable to cover it up,” I said, catching his smile against my best efforts and then forcing it away. I took a step back. “But I am annoyed by it, so you must let me be annoyed.”
“Why are you annoyed—”
“Because you are making me do something I do not want to do.” My tone was properly sour—a buildup from many days of Fell pestering me over training. Fara turned somewhat awkwardly away from us to provide some semblance of privacy.
“I am not making you do anything—”
“Yes, you are. I have only agreed to this because you have been so insistent. Are you trying to turn me into Jura? Is that it?”
“No.” His shoulders sank, and I felt terrible for saying her name so casually and with so little warning. Fell’s voice softened as the breeze tugged at his tunic. “I am only understanding now why you are bothered.” He smiled half-heartedly. “This has nothing to do with Jura.”
“Then what does it have to do with?”
“Norser are not supposed to feel fear,” he said. “But I do. I think if something were to happen and I was away—”
“Nothing is going to happen, and you will not be away—”
His eyes flicked to the horizon for just a moment, but it was long enough… my heart tumbled.
“Right?” I said, vaguely aware that Rowan and Fara were walking back toward Aalt with Halvar, trying to give us space for our disagreement.
“I would not wish to part, but—”
My voice hardened. “But what?”
“Arik is crazy and wild—you know this. I know this. He is planning something. Of course, he always is planning thirty things—” Fell waved a hand around wildly.
“But this feels bigger… I would not want to leave him alone. I am the only person in the world who I know does not think of his crown—there is to be no raiding this summer. But there is a gathering… so many captains in one place has never been done. I must go with him—”
“No.”
He reached for me. “Mira, I—”
I took a step back. “No.”
“I would not want it this way, but I cannot stop him. I have tried.” He laughed at himself before growing serious again. “Someone must guard his back.”
“Let it be Halbjern or Ivar or any of the raiders who follow him around.” My voice ground firm like stone, like Arik’s voice did.
“I love him,” Fell said quietly.
In the distance, I heard Halvar’s croaky, near-cry grumble.
“More than you love me?”
“No, or… no. But he takes more risks than you. He is in more danger. His friends are more likely to secretly think of harming him.”
I understood in my mind, but not in my heart, not in my body. “If you leave me for long, I will hate you.”
“Do not say this. You have Rowan and Dania. Fara, too—she senses things before they come. She will anticipate danger. Arik has only me.”
I recalled so clearly my dream—the sea tugging Fell away slowly.
Him not fighting it at all. My voice cracked as I said my next words.
“If you let yourself be taken from me, I will hate you for it. Make your choice.” And then I stormed after Rowan and Fara, plucked Halvar from Rowan’s arms, and made my way back to the palace.