‘Thank you,’ Snorri said beside me. ‘It was an honour to fight beside you, Baraqel, an honour to hold back the night.’
‘I can see it.’ Words so faint now you might think them imagined.
‘What can you see, Baraqel?’ I’d mocked him, I’d thought him a pain in my royal arse when we were bound, but now my throat tightened around the words and I had to grit my teeth to speak them unbroken.
‘The sunrise … can’t … can’t you … see it?’
‘I can see it,’ Snorri said.
‘It’s … beautiful.’
‘Yes.’
The box was dark in my hands. Silent.
It’s a strange thing to watch the death of a spirit that has shared your mind. Neither Snorri nor I spoke as we walked back to the road.
Stranger still to discover he was once a man with hopes and dreams like yours and all the foolishness that men carry around with them. I thought about what Baraqel had said in those final minutes – about how he had escaped the flesh and felt like a god, his potential without limit, only to find himself drawn into the stories people told about him, constrained by their expectations and finally fashioned by those tales, shaped into something new.
‘I feel sorry for him,’ I said as I crossed the ditch and turned back to see the others kicking their way through the remnants of the hedge. ‘Never getting to be his own man … or spirit … or whatever.’
Kara looked up at me as she passed, a faint smile on her lips. ‘You think you’re so different, Prince Jalan?’
I frowned at that, about to contradict her, but the witch had the right of it. People’s expectations drew me north, against every instinct I owned, a bond every bit as tight as the Sister’s magic. The word ‘prince’, the name ‘Kendeth’, the story of the Aral Pass, all of them snares I’d been caught up in. Certainly I’d tried to use them, escape them, twist them … but as I twisted I’d turned into something new. Just like Baraqel. Just as unsuspecting.
The surviving horses proved easy to round up. Perhaps they were as scared of being alone out in the wilds as I was, but all three came nosing back onto the road not long after we assembled there. We rode on along the dark road, just to put distance between us and the unborn’s remains. None of us liked the idea of sleeping with it lying out there, unseen but close.
‘Come on.’ I hauled Hennan up behind me on Murder, noting quite how much heavier the lad had grown. I nudged the stallion into a walk, pulling him away from Kara’s mount. ‘Easy. And no biting or I’m changing your name to Deserter.’
A couple of minutes later we reached the ruin of the cardinal’s procession. The road lay like the floor of a charnel house, spare pieces of men that the unborn hadn’t the time to incorporate decorated a hundred yard stretch of the cobbles. Snorri closed his fist about the orichalcum and hid the worse of it from us.
‘Wait.’ I drew up as we reached the shattered remains of Cardinal Gertrude’s sedan. ‘I need a moment.’ I swung out of the saddle and remembered how all of me hurt. Careful placement of each foot brought me to the wreckage without stepping in anything that used to be a person. I turned over several of the larger pieces, picking up a number of splinters before finding what I was looking for. I wiped the corpse blood from my hands and hauled the cardinal’s luggage over to the others.
‘You’re still hoping to find the seal?’ Kara asked.
‘It was the bait. The prince would have kept it to use again if this ruse failed. But he wouldn’t have wanted it on him or any of his dead.’
‘He killed them all just to trap you?’ Hennan asked, looking awkward perched on Murder’s flanks.
‘Probably enjoyed doing it. Good cover too for heading north, stand the dead men back up and walk the high road. Who’s going to stop a cardinal? And the unborn know I need something like … this!’ I pulled out the seal from a tight-bundled bag of purple vestments. ‘If I’m hoping to survive an encounter with my sister.’ I turned it over in my hand, a cubic inch of silver ornately wrought on four sides, formed into a ring on the fifth and carved into a seal on the sixth and opposite side. Stamped into a blob of cooling wax such a seal could authorize the burning of a heretic, found a monastery, or recommend a sinner for sainthood. I tried it on each finger, managing to work it past the knuckle of the ring finger on my left hand. Fortunately Cardinal Gertrude had been a woman of some girth and pudgy digits. ‘And of course the cherry on the top of this little plan was that the threat of a Papal Inquisitor, with their famously low view of heathens, was likely to mean I presented myself alone.’
I stood, discarding the bag, having found no other symbols of the cardinal’s office. I might have looted the golden crucifixes if I’d been alone, or perhaps even before an audience of non-believers, but heading toward Osheim didn’t seem like a good time to rile the Almighty.
‘This fine fellow saved me.’ I slapped Murder’s neck. ‘Well, and you Snorri, and Baraqel.’
Kara coughed into her hand.
‘And Kara. Hennan too probably. And the other horses.’ I stared at her to see if she was satisfied. ‘Anyway. If Murder hadn’t been quite so good at running away the hero of the Aral Pass may have met a sticky end right here.’
28
Charland reminded me of the Thurtans. Which is never a good thing. The peasants were muddier and rougher than one might encounter in more civilized southern climes but at least we weren’t so far north that we’d slipped out of Christendom. By and large your Christian peasant knows his place better than the heathen, being more likely to tug the forelock and respect the God-given authority of a nobleman. In the north few jarls are more than two generations away from the bloody-handed reaver who carved out the miserable clutch of rocks they currently claim to rule.
Fortunately, apart from being dank and overburdened with streams, lakes, ponds, rivers, bogs, marshes, fens, and mires, Charland had been blessed with ten years of unbroken peace. This meant that with coin in one’s pocket one could cross large distances in short order on well-maintained roads, and find half-decent accommodation each evening.
The closeness that had grown between Snorri and Kara, and between Snorri and the boy, on our journey south, started to grow again. There’s a magnetism about the Viking that draws people in, and something in the man needed to be a father. Some women grow broody for a babe at breast; perhaps some men need a son to raise. At best I had served Hennan in the role of disreputable uncle, but Snorri took on a broader responsibility, teaching the boy without ever seeming to be a teacher, everything from tying knots to throwing knives, reading the lie of the land to reading the runes of the north scratched into the dirt.
Watching the three of them, I’ll own to pangs of jealousy, but mixed with caution. In some ways it was like envying a man on a high cliff edge the view, whilst being thankful no such urge steered my own feet to any such precipice. Snorri loved too easily: that capacity for love, for unselfish giving of himself, drew people to him but at the same time opened him to the possibility of grave hurt. With axe in hand Snorri had proved himself nigh unstoppable, needing to fear nothing. And yet here he was handing the world a stick to beat him with. In Osheim a man has a hard enough time hanging on to his own skin. Taking a child in was bad. Taking a son in was like holding a knife to your throat and asking the world to cut you.
Only as the border with Osheim grew closer did the air of prosperity and good cheer start to wane. Villages grew fewer and farther between, fewer people kept to the roads, fields looked poorly tended and swathes of forest grew unchecked, their interiors dark and worrisome.
Hundreds of miles behind us, deep in hostile territory, my grandmother and the flower of Red March’s army would be fighting a desperate battle to hold on to Blujen and maintain the siege of Lady Blue’s tower. Little time could remain to them, and not much more remained to everyone else according to the oft-repeated prophecies of doom. And yet with each mile that passed beneath Murder’s hooves I wanted to slow down, to drag the journey out, to do anything b
ut step once more into Osheim and let the Wheel draw me down into the horrors at its midst.
‘The world is changing.’ Kara rode alongside me as we forded a stream that cut across our trail through the ill-named Bright Forest. She had that tone she used when being profound – I think she copied it from Skilfar.
‘It is?’ I’d really rather it wasn’t. Then we could go home.
‘Can’t you feel it?’ She nodded up at the bright line where the trees failed to meet across our path. The sky had a brittleness to it. As if a sufficiently loud noise might shatter it and set the pieces tumbling down. ‘Everything is growing thin. Magic is spilling through the cracks.’
‘That spell of yours, trapping the unborn in the hedgerow, worked well.’
‘Better than it should. Better than I’ve seen outside the Wheel.’
That night we camped in the woods, a cold, black night in which the whole forest seemed to move around outside the thin walls of the tent.
Somewhere on along the course of the next day, following old and overgrown lumber trails through a nameless expanse of woodland, we passed into the kingdom of Osheim close to the point where it meets with both Charland and Maladon. Already we were north of Os City where King Halaric cowered on the edge of his own domain as if scared to venture any farther into it.
After another day the trees also appeared to lose courage and their advance gave way to a miserable and blighted heathland where the only things to slow the wind were frequent heavy downpours, sometimes laced with wet snow.
In the distance a shadow loomed, a bruise on the sky, letting us know the Wheel waited, letting Hennan know he was coming home. That night I felt the pull of the Wheel for the first time in nearly a year, though it seemed then as if it had always been there, ever since it first sunk its hook as we fled the Red Vikings. I slept fitfully, a poor meal of dried meat and hardtack roiling around in my stomach, and in every moment I knew the Wheel sat out there in the distance, I knew exactly the direction, and I knew that my legs, restless with the need to take me there, would not let me spend long asleep.
The sunrise found us already up and about, readying ourselves for travel.
‘It’s stronger this time.’ Snorri crouched over a little fire, heating oats and water in a small, blackened cauldron.
In the east the sun hid behind a louring bank of cloud, sending rose-tinted rays fanning out across a pearl sky. To the north the Wheel waited, reeling us in.
‘Much stronger,’ Kara said. ‘It’s turning faster, approaching the breaking point.’ She had an ethereal beauty in the dawn light, her eyes having that strange blurriness they take on when working witchcraft, stray hairs lifting up from her braids as if we stood in the midst of an electrical storm. The power of the Wheel echoed in her.
‘How far now?’ The land had run to the low hills and rolling valleys of Hennan’s homeland, the sky above us bruised a yellow-purple, and swirled in some great spiral about a centre point directly ahead of us.
‘About two miles less than when you last asked, Jal.’ Snorri led the way, swaying to the gait of his steed, offering me no view but broad shoulders beneath a leather cape, and thick black hair reaching down past his neck.
‘Twenty miles, maybe.’ Kara took pity on me.
Hennan rode with me on Murder, perched on a collection of blankets secured to my saddle. His words had run out as we reached the margins of the Wheel-lands where his grandfather had once tended goats. Approaching from the south this time we saw no signs of life, either on four feet or on two, save once a pair of ravens flying west.
The countryside had not yet taken on the twisted and alien aspect encountered further in but everything about it felt wrong – the grass an unconvincing shade of green, the wind whisper-laden and beating strange patterns into the rushes that grew thick around the valley fens.
‘Do you see them?’ Snorri asked.
‘No.’ I had been hoping they were figments of my imagination. ‘What are they?’
‘Figments of your imagination,’ Kara said behind me, struggling to keep her nag from panic.
‘Oh good.’ It had seemed that shadowy shapes had been pacing us on both sides, quite far off, and either vanishing when I looked directly at them, or refusing definition, remaining indistinct blurs in the middle distances, like a stain on the eye.
‘It’s bad. Very bad.’ Kara glanced around. ‘The Wheel is reaching out this far and starting to put flesh on our fears. I had expected something like this, but much closer in.’
‘Hell.’ Several weeks’ worth of good intentions melted away like a snowball tossed into a furnace. ‘This is never going to work. We don’t stand a chance.’ I’d spent my time worrying about what I might do if we really got to the heart of the Wheel, somehow allowing myself to gloss over the business of actually getting there. As I stared out at the indistinct shapes some of them started to look more solid, more sharply outlined. One in particular darkened and began to sprout long thin legs … ‘Shit! We need to run!’ I hauled on Murder’s reins. He’d galloped me to safety before, he could do it again.
‘Jalan!’ Kara’s voice stabbed through me, taking the strength from my arms. ‘You need to calm down, empty your mind.’
‘Empty my mind? What the hell are you talking about?’ My mind was a bubbling cauldron, I’d never been able to still its voices, even enjoying a goblet of wine out on a balcony after a tumble in the sheets my thoughts would be a seething mass of this and that and maybe and when. ‘I can’t!’
‘Then concentrate on something else, some good memory, something peaceful.’
‘I … I can’t think of anything, damn it!’ Every image that sprang to mind my imagination rapidly warped into some terrifying nightmare, and out across the grass yet another faint shadow grew darker and started to take on the shape of the horror in my head. I thought of Lisa DeVeer but no sooner had I pictured her, deliciously striped in light and shade, than my treacherous imagination started to speculate how the Wheel might hurt me with her – the flesh fell away around her mouth, revealing triangular teeth around a devouring hole. ‘I’ve got to go! I’ll get us all killed.’
I shook Murder’s reins, but Snorri leaned across and took them in one hand.
‘Jal!’ He snapped his fingers beneath my nose. ‘You don’t have to empty your mind, or fill it with something good, you just need to listen.’ Snorri steered Murder back toward the Wheel and walked his horse on, slowly. ‘A story will lead a man through dark places. Stories have direction. A good story commands a man’s thoughts along a path, allowing no opportunity to stray, no space for anything but the tale as it unfolds before you.’
‘What story have you got, Snorri?’ Hennan asked. ‘Is it the one about the jötun who stole Thor’s hammer?’
‘Christ don’t tell one of your monster sagas!’ I could see it now, frost giants shambling out of the mist just as Snorri described them.
‘Oh, it’s darker than that.’ Snorri turned in the saddle to look back at us. ‘But if I tell it true there will be no space in you for anything else. You won’t think of Hel coming out of the Wheel for you, because I will have already laid it before you.’
And like that, riding toward the Wheel of Osheim, Snorri ver Snagason spoke for the first time of his quest through Hel. Perhaps Snorri’s storytelling had always been a kind of magic, and being so close to the Wheel had taken that gentle spellbinding and made something more powerful of it. All I know is that the words ran around me and like a bad dream I was back in Hell, seeing only what Snorri’s tale laid before me.
Snorri turns from the many-pillared hall of the judges and looks out into the Hel-night, alive now with the rushing wind of her approach.
Jalan! The dry air shrieks it. Jalan!
There she stands before him, a child no older than his own sweet Einmyria, ghost-pale but lit with some inner glow. Gone. Now the swirl of the wind reveals her on his right, a slim young woman, hollow-eyed, clothed only in the wisps of what rides her, her head cocked to
one side, studying Snorri with alien curiosity. The wind speaks again in a voice that stings, grit-laden and cold. Now she’s a baby, lying some yards to his right pale and silent, regarding him with eyes darker than Hel’s night. Tendrils of the lichkin to whom she is bound rise about her like translucent serpents, their light devoid of warmth. The child who has never seen the world, and the lichkin to whom she was given, both woven together, waiting to be unborn into the living lands.
Jalan!
‘I’m not him,’ Snorri says.
The unborn hisses, its shape twisting into some ugly thing without permanence or definition, the lichkin coming to the fore.
‘You can smell it, can’t you?’ Snorri says. ‘The destruction of one of your kind? He came against me in Hel and now he’s nothing.’ Snorri raises his axe. ‘Try me?’
The wind howls and the ghost-like unborn breaks apart, swirling away toward the judges’ hall. Snorri shivers and lowers his axe, hoping he has bought Jal enough time to win clear.
In the distance, where the wind has dropped and the darkness fallen back to the ground from whence it was lifted, the dead-sky shows. It is the colour of sorrow and broken promises. Snorri starts to walk once more, the pain, thirst, and hunger of Hel woven into the meat of him so that each step is its own battle.
He hopes Jal will win through – the boy has grown in the time they have journeyed together. Less than a year, but the softness in him has been worn away to reveal some of the same steel so evident in the Red Queen, though perhaps Jal has yet to realize it. The afterlife feels too quiet without the prince’s constant complaining. Snorri misses him already. A grin creases his face. Even in Hel Jal can make him smile.
Snorri walks on, out into the wilds where Hel’s domain borders other places, the lands of ice and the lands of fire where the jötun dwell and build their strength for Ragnarok. Other places too, stranger places, all bound together by the roots of Yggdrasil. The land heaves and breaks as if frozen in its death agonies, mounded into compression ridges, scarred by deep rifts, stepping up toward daunting heights.