Chapter 1
Skane was built on superstition. Always enter your home right foot first. When you sneeze, someone who bears you ill will has just spoken your name. Don’t whistle while looking towards the sun or you might bring on rain.
But mostly, the superstitions were about the lights. Bright, colourful lights that danced for us in the clear night sky.
Green was common. It meant the Goddess was happy, and everything was as it should be.
Blue meant snow, and lots of it. Best round up your sheep and haul in some firewood before those first few flurries started to fly.
And then there was red. Red was different, rarer.
Red was a warning.
The lights danced. The lós, most called it, a word given to us by the old rune singers who translated it from symbols and pictures etched into cave walls. They waved and morphed and rippled like the sky was a lake into which someone had dropped a pebble.
“What are they?” I would ask my father every night as a child.
Every night he would answer differently. “They are the last remnants of the setting sun dancing for the moon.” “They’re the light of the stars reflecting off the sea.” “They just … are.” Eventually, I realized he didn’t know. No one knew. The Goddess could change their colour; that was the only certainty. What they were, why they were there – those were still mysteries to us. Perhaps they always would be.
Between those of us who were staring up at them now, the air grew still, charged, as if we were on a mountaintop and the breeze had stopped.
I’d joined a few other villagers who were seated on the large rocks that fell away into the sea. On nights like this one, when the lights shone so vibrantly that they lit up the snow in vivid greens and blues, groups of us would gather to gaze at them. When the sky demanded our attention, we obeyed.
“They’re changing,” Ivar said beside me, but his words were a fading echo, distant and hollow. My eyes were fixed on the sky, and I didn’t miss the subtle shifts here and there as the bright blues became pinks and purples. They were deep too, reminiscent of a sunset.
My skin prickled, hairs standing on end, but not from the cold. This hue was dreadfully close to another, drawing ever nearer to a shade none of us in Skane wanted to see again.
It had happened seventeen years ago, the sky glowing crimson only days before a fever outbreak had ravaged our villages. Once it set in, nearly two hundred people died in a matter of days. I was born, and lived. My mother birthed me, and died. They said I was lucky. One quarter of those who perished were children.
Lucky. I’d never know her. Lucky. I’d had to be passed around other mothers who’d recently given birth – mothers whose children would know them, know what they looked like. How they sounded. Have memories of them to cherish. I was nursed to health by strangers.
Lucky.
Seventeen years was a long time, but no one had forgotten. Whenever the lights in the sky shifted away from green, even for just a few seconds, the villagers held their breath.
“Ivar,” I whispered, but his name felt strange on my tongue. Meaningless, foreign, as my throat began to constrict. His presence usually grounded me, was my guiding point of comfort when life tried to smother me, but tonight, it did nothing. I may as well have been alone on a boat in the middle of the sea.
He drew in a long breath, one mitten-clad hand just barely touching mine.
The edges of the tendrils were changing. Shifting. Deepening. One particular whorl high overhead, waving like a scrap of cloth in the wind, was almost wholly crimson. It seemed to bleed out from there, infecting all the nearby branches with its blood-red disease. My body went cold, as if the colour had been stolen directly from my veins. Mist from the crashing waves stung my eyes, but I couldn’t close them. I raced to find parts of the lights that hadn’t changed, that were still uncorrupted, like I could singlehandedly prevent it from progressing.
It took mere minutes. Minutes for the entire sky to stain red. It bore down on us, a presage, a desperate but wordless warning we had no way to translate. It’s coming, it screamed. The plague is coming. It was always the devastating plague, haunting us every few decades since we’d first arrived in Skane. But why it was coming was as knowable as how many snowflakes would make up the next storm, or how many raindrops it took to fill the sea.
I clutched at the icy rock beneath me, my fingers long since numb through my mittens. I suddenly felt keenly conscious of the scale of the lós, and of my own fragility in comparison. What does one tiny, useless form matter in a world where such dark things can happen? How many of these poor souls around me would be dead within days? Weeks? A wave of confusion and sickness came over me, and I couldn’t tell the sky from the land. Doubling over, my head spinning as though I were falling through the dark places between the stars, I closed my eyes and forced cold, crisp air into my lungs.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
I recovered my orientation slowly, gripping the rock and setting my eyes on the stars that managed to shine through the cursed red lights. I expected fear to take hold of my heart and mind, paralysing me after all the stories I’d heard about the blood red sky, but it wasn’t fear that gripped me. Instead, anger surged to life like a springtime river, refilling my frozen veins. Anger, because I didn’t know why it was happening. Anger, because I knew the sky didn’t portend that a handful of fishermen would drown at sea or a child would get lost in the woods and be found days later, buried under the snow. Anger, because when the lights glowed red, it meant the lives of everyone I knew and loved were at stake, and I had a greater chance of thawing Lake Hornstrăsk in midwinter than stopping it.
Anger, because when the red lós shone, it meant that somewhere in Skane the plague was brewing once more and it was hungry for bodies.
Somewhere nearby, but just far enough away to be distorted by the breeze, someone began to chant the words. I’d heard them innumerable times before. Knew every word and nuance by heart, forward and backwards. Without looking away from the sky, I let my voice join in.
“Green, green, the lights glow green
Happy is our gracious queen
Blue, blue, the lights glow blue
A vicious storm nearby does brew
Red, red, the lights glow red
Beware the dangers up ahead.”