Chapter Forty-Three Felnir
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Felnir
He woke from a dream of unusual clarity.
In place of the typical melange of sound, colour and sensation that had plagued him upon the Swathe, his brother was revealed in stark detail.
Once again, Felnir found Guthnyr embroiled in battle.
First, he killed his way through a fog-bound field, then a landscape rendered nightmarish by a storm of clearly unnatural origin.
Warriors tumbled like dolls as lightning lashed their ranks.
It ended with wrenching suddenness when Guthnyr began to claw his way up a grass slope, Felnir’s heart racing as he expected a blazing white bolt to turn his brother to ash at any instant.
His fear turned to rage when the dream shattered, Felnir wrenched from sleep by a hard prodding at his chest.
He awoke with a snarl, drawing the Sword of the Altvar as he leaped to his feet, the glowing blade batting Antak’s staff away.
“What do you do here?” Felnir demanded, furious at being denied what might well be his brother’s last moments on this earth.
If he couldn’t offer Guthnyr his aid in the midst of deadly combat, he could at least bear witness to his end.
Antak didn’t answer, his attention fully captured by the glow of the sword hovering bare inches from his chest. “Where…” he said, tentatively extending a hand towards the luminescent steel. “Where did you find it?”
“Beneath a mountain,” Felnir grunted. A quick survey of his surroundings revealed no threat. His menda still slept unmolested, save for Falk, Tyrheld and Beyorn who had been roused by the commotion.
“Back, you treacherous cur!” Beyorn hissed, advancing upon Antak with blade bared.
“Rest easy,” Felnir said, consigning the Sword of the Altvar to its sheath.
From the way Antak blinked and shook his head, Felnir wondered if he too had become enthralled by it.
But the stern, clipped tone when he spoke on told of an undimmed, if purposefully muted resentment of the Sea King’s presence among his people.
“My sister awaits you,” he said. “It is time for counsel.” He paused before directing a reluctant glance at Wohtin. “And you… Father.”
“I’m not certain you should go, my lord,” Falk said as Felnir donned his jerkin and sword belt. “Not without a guard, at least.”
“The Altvar sense no danger here,” Felnir told him, patting the sword’s pommel. “Rouse the camp and ensure all are well. I would know how many will be able to march on from here in short order.”
“That may be a small number,” the outlaw warned. “The Swathe took a fearful toll, and not just on the body.”
Guthnyr, clawing his way up the hill as lightning tore an army to shreds… “Even so, we can’t linger. Tempting though it is.”
“I’ll see to it, my king,” Beyorn assured him. “This entire menda will march at your command if I have to whip them to it.”
From Falk’s disgusted expression, Felnir divined that the only soul he would like to see whipped was Beyorn. “I think a day or two of rest and decent food might serve us better,” Felnir told him.
He turned as Antak began thumping the butt of his staff to the sand.
An unfamiliarity with being kept waiting was very plain in his impatient scowl.
Too many years enjoying blind obedience from these folk, Felnir judged, unable to resist prolonging the act of pulling on his boots.
Violence may be beneath him, but arrogance is not.
“I find myself curious about something, master Antak,” he said, having finally consented to follow the staff bearer as he led Felnir and Wohtin away from the beach. “No other man here wears a beard, but you do. How can that be?”
“All other men born to the Jewel are of pure blood,” Antak replied without obvious rancour. “Mine, and my sister’s, however, will always be tainted. My beard serves to remind our people of that fact.”
Felnir looked to Wohtin, wondering if the old man might take offence at the reference to the corrupted nature of his bloodline.
However, it appeared Wohtin’s periodic lapses into confusion had returned this morn.
He walked at Felnir’s side with a familiar, bemused frown deepening the many creases of his face.
“Do you know where you are?” Felnir asked him, having learned that bald questions were the best approach at times like this. Poor, lost Elvine alone had enjoyed the gift of gently coaxing rationality from this ancient, half-addled soul, something for which Felnir had neither time nor inclination.
“The Third Jewel,” Wohtin replied with unusual promptness, though the confusion lingered on his face. “My wife… She is here. My son takes us to her.”
Antak’s shoulders tightened at this, but his stride didn’t falter. Making for a stairwell carved into the red face of the cliff, he started up without pause. “The way is long,” he said. “If you fall…”
“We die,” Felnir finished. “I know.”
As they climbed above the matrix of ropes criss-crossing the canyon, the steps became more like a ladder.
Felnir’s hands gripped ever more shallow cuts in the stone as the stiffening wind made for an increasingly precarious ascent.
By the time he glanced up to see Antak haul his tall frame onto what he hoped would be the summit of this cliff, Felnir judged their height at well over a hundred feet.
Reaching the top, he found Kurin waiting upon a broad ledge twenty paces wide.
The sandstone wall before them was streaked with rivulets of water that appeared to have no obvious source.
Its surface differed from the weathered layers typical to this kind of rock, formed of irregular patterns that Felnir realised were carvings.
Some were too worn to discern as more than abstract patterns while others were strangely lifelike renderings of a naked female form.
They had been carved so as to make it seem like the same woman had emerged from the stone at various points.
Sometimes she reached out, other depictions had her hunched as if in pain.
Curiously, in every case she was depicted as faceless.
Adding to the strangeness was the fact that the water trickling down the carvings coalesced into a stream that traced to the roots of a small tree.
It sprouted from bare rock to a height of five feet and, hanging from its branches, was fruit.
It was, Felnir realised, a smaller version of the trees that had formed the orchard they encountered upon the Swathe.
Hearing a tired gasp, he looked down to find Wohtin attempting to lever himself onto the ledge.
The old man’s gaze was alive once again, wide eyes roving the carved wall with a near feverish hunger.
Scrambling to his feet, he rushed to the wall, hands shifting from one carving to another as he spoke the same name over and over: “Tanira… Tanira…”
“She can’t hear you, Father,” Kurin said, though it didn’t dissuade Wohtin from his desperate entreaties.
“Bring her to me,” he said, turning his imploring gaze upon his son. “I remember now. I know your power. The knoll we found. That was your doing, Antak. As this—” he cast a trembling hand at the tree “—is your sister’s work. Power over stone. Power over things that grow. Those are your blessings.”
“True,” Antak conceded. “I did indeed remake the first jewel. Our ancestors who first journeyed south across the wastes found it a place of refuge with enough fresh water to sustain them until they reached the lush southland. I hoped by making it a place of peril it would cause any of your kind who encountered it to turn back. If not, Kurin had greatly reduced the size of the second jewel, leaving only enough sustenance for them to at least die with full bellies. Our mother intended that her curse spare none who carried the blood of you people.”
“Curse?” Felnir asked but Antak ignored him. Moving to the wall, he pressed a hand to the stone.
“This, however, is not my doing. Countless times have I attempted to change it, perhaps call her back, or even just find a way to commune with her. Always I fail. She appears at her whim, mostly when Kurin and I are absent. Whether she tries to tell us something, we never know. We have only the words she left us before she joined with the stone.”
Feeling his patience thinning, Felnir said, “You said it was time for counsel. Then let us hear it. What is this place? And I would know more of this curse you speak of.”
Stepping back from the wall, Antak crossed his arms and shared a glance with his sister. After a short interval of silence, he gave a slight nod of assent.
“Our mother guided us here a great many years ago,” she told Felnir.
“Across the wasteland you call the Swathe. There were only a few hundred of us then, all that remained following the slaughters and sickness wrought upon us by the people who came from the sea. Kearling they called us, the Unwanted. Yet at first they were peaceful, they would trade with us. Some—” she favoured her father with a fond look “—tried to learn our ways, our language.
In time, a few even came to love us. But, it could never last. They brought sickness with them, these people from far away.
Wherever they trod, death would follow and our people began to perish in droves.
Such a thing brings fear, then hate, then war.
Weapons of bronze and stone could not stand against iron and steel and we were driven from one refuge to another until our mother, last of the Most Wise, resolved to lead those who still lived across the wasteland from whence our ancestors had come.