resembling a plan. He’d been lying awake, listening to the snoring and snorting of the other two servants in the shed behind Kjellson’s house. Not unusual, that wakefulness: bitterness could suck a man from sleep. But somehow he’d found himself on his feet this time, dressing, pulling on boots and the bearskin vest he’d been able to keep so far, though he’d had to fight for it. He’d gone outside, pissed against the shed wall, and then walked through the silent blackness of the town to Halldr’s house (Frigga, his mother, lying somewhere inside, alone now, without a husband for the second time in a year).
He’d slipped around the side, eased open the door to the stable, listened to the boy there, snuffling in the dreams of a straw-covered sleep, and then led the big grey horse called Gyllir quietly out under the watching stars.
The stableboy never stirred. No one appeared in the lane. Only the named shapes of heroes and beasts in the gods’ sky overhead. He’d been alone in Rabady with the night-spirits. It had felt like a dream.
The town gate was locked when danger threatened but not otherwise. Rabady was an island. Bern and the grey horse had walked right through the square by the harbour, past the shuttered booths, down the middle of the empty street, through the open gates, across the bridge over the ditch into the night fields.
As simple as that, as life-altering.
Life-ending was probably the better way to describe it, he decided, given that this was not, in fact, a dream. He had no access to a boat that could carry the horse, and come sunrise a goodly number of extremely angry men— appalled at his impiety and their own exposure to an unhoused ghost—would begin looking for the horse. When they found the son of exiled Thorkell also missing, the only challenging decision would be how to kill him.
This did raise a possibility, given that he was sober and capable of thought. He could change his mind and go back. Leave the horse out here to be found. A minor, disturbing incident. They might blame it on ghosts or wood spirits. Bern could be back in his shed, asleep behind Arni Kjellson’s village house, before anyone was the wiser. Could even join the morning search for the horse, if fat Kjellson let him off wood-splitting to go.
They’d find the grey, bring it back, strangle and burn it on the drifting longship with Halldr Thinshank and whichever girl had won her spirit a place among warriors and gods by drawing the straw that freed her from the slow misery of her life.
Bern guided the horse across a stream. The grey was big, restive, but knew him. Kjellson had been properly grateful to the governor when half of Red Thorkell’s farm and his house were settled on him, and he had assigned his servants to labour for Thinshank at regular times. Bern was one of those servants now, by the same judgement that had given his family’s lands to Kjellson. He had groomed the grey stallion often, walked him, cleaned out his straw. A magnificent horse, better than Halldr had ever deserved. There was nowhere to run this horse properly on Rabady; he was purely for display, an affirmation of wealth. Another reason, probably, why the thought of taking it away had come to him tonight in the dangerous space between dream and the waking world.
He rode on in the chill night. Winter was over, but it still had its hard fingers in the earth. Their lives were defined by it here in the north. Bern was cold, even with the vest.
At least he knew where he was going now; that much seemed to have come to him. The land his father had bought with looted gold (mostly from the celebrated raid in Ferrieres twenty-five years ago) was on the other side of the village, south and west. He was aiming for the northern fringes of the trees.
He saw the shape of the marker boulder and guided the horse past it. They’d killed and buried a girl there to bless the fields, so long ago the inscription on the marker had faded away. It hadn’t done much good. The land near the forest was too stony to be properly tilled. Ploughs broke up behind oxen or horses, metal bending, snapping off. Hard, ungiving soil. Sometimes the harvests were adequate, but most of the food that fed Rabady came from the mainland.
The boulder cast a shadow. He looked up, saw the blue moon had risen from beyond the woods. Spirits’ moon. It occurred to him, rather too late, that the ghost of Halldr Thinshank could not be unaware of what was happening to his horse. Halldr’s lingering soul would be set free only with the ship-burial and burning tomorrow. Tonight it could be abroad in the dark—which was where Bern was.
He made the hammer sign, invoking both Ingavin and Thünir. He shivered again. A stubborn man he was. Too clever for his own good? His father’s son in that? He’d deny it, at a blade’s end. This had nothing to do with Thorkell. He was pursuing his own feud with Halldr and the town, not his father’s. You exiled a murderer (twice a murderer) if need be. You didn’t condemn his freeborn son to years of servitude and a landless fate for the father’s crime—and expect him to forgive. A man without land had nothing, could not marry, speak in the thringmoot, claim honour or pride. His life and name were marred, broken as a plough by stones.
He ought to have killed Halldr. Or Arni Kjellson. Or someone. He wondered, sometimes, where his own rage lay. He didn’t seem to have that fury, like a berserkir in battle. Or like his father in drink.
His father had killed people, raiding with Siggur Volganson, and here at home.
Bern hadn’t done anything so … direct. Instead, he’d stolen a horse secretly in the dark and was now heading, for want of anything close to a better idea, to see if woman’s magic—the volur ’s—could offer him aid in the depths of a night. Not a brilliant plan, but the only one that had come to him. The women would probably scream, raise an alarm, turn him in.
That did make him think of something. A small measure of prudence. He turned east towards the risen moon and the edge of the wood, dismounted, and led the horse a short way in. He looped the rope to a tree trunk. He was not about to walk up to the women’s compound leading an obviously stolen horse. This called for some trickery.
It was hard to be devious when you had no idea what you were doing.
He despised the bleak infliction of this life upon him. Was unable, it seemed, to even consider two more years of servitude, with no assurance of a return to any proper status afterwards. So, no, he wasn’t going back, leaving the stallion to be found, slipping into his straw in the freezing shed behind Kjellson’s house. That was over. The sagas told of moments when the hero’s fate changed, when he came to the axle-tree. He wasn’t a hero, but he wasn’t going back. Not by choice.
He was likely to die tonight or tomorrow. No rites for him when that happened. There would be an excited quarrel over how to kill a defiling horse thief, how slowly, and who most deserved the pleasure of it. They would be drunk and happy. Bern thought of the blood-eagle then; pushed the image from his mind.
Even the heroes died. Usually young. The brave went to Ingavin’s halls. He wasn’t sure if he was brave.
It was dense and black in the trees. He felt the pine needles underfoot. Wood smells: moss, pine, scent of a fox. Bern listened; heard nothing but his own breathing, and the horse’s. Gyllir seemed calm enough. He left him there, turned north again, still in the woods, towards where he thought the volur’s compound was. He’d seen it a few times, a clearing carved out a little way into the forest. If someone had magic, Bern thought, they could deal with wolves. Or even make use of them. It was said that the women who lived here had tamed some of the beasts, could speak their language. Bern didn’t believe that. He made the hammer sign again, however, with the thought.
He’d have missed the branching path in the blackness if it hadn’t been for the distant spill of lantern light. It was late for that, the bottom of a night, but he had no idea what laws or rules women such as these would observe. Perhaps the seer—the volur—stayed
