Chapter 5
As we returned to the docks, riding the writhing waves like a dead leaf in the wind, I remained at the back of the boat, staring out into the fog and mist and cloud. Something had been out there, I’d never been more certain of anything in my life. Something had appeared in the fog, a passing shadow, a fleeting hint of danger. My heart beat fast within my chest, warming my core and filling me with energy. Father and Albrekt may not have believed me, but I didn’t need them to. I trusted my own eyes. There was something on the water and the shiver in my muscles told me it was out of place.
“Catch, Ósa,” my father shouted, tossing me a rope with just barely enough time for me to react. I gripped it tightly with my gloved hands, the joints of my fingers aching from the cold, and helped to pull us to the docks. The wind howled, as though it came straight from the mouth of an angry goddess. Waves lashed the boat; snowflakes stung my eyes.
“Get yourself home,” Father called, while he and Albrekt worked to pull the full crates from the boat. They were two strong men who’d spent a lifetime doing this, and the turning weather acted like a fire beneath them. I’d only get in the way. Without responding, I pulled my cloak as tightly around my frame as I could and made my way up the icy dock to the village. More than once I lost my footing. I was like one of those baby deer I’d seen in the woods, with their long, spindly legs that weren’t used to walking. They’d teeter and shake and fall over as they worked to learn how to balance.
Amid the snapping wind and wall of snow, I recalled the folktales some of the elderly villagers recounted at gatherings, when we’d all sit around a giant bonfire and share food and drink while the children played with carved wooden animals. Some of the stories were more like ancient rumours passed down from long ago, of warm lands somewhere far to the south, where the sun shone every day and it never snowed. They said you could swim naked in the sea there and the sun would darken your skin. You could eat the colourful fruit that grew on the trees and there was never a need to stockpile for the frozen months because there was no winter.
As the wind beat the snow against my face, I imagined lying naked in the sun, falling asleep in its warmth. Anneka would condemn me, probably skin me alive at the very thought of lying out of doors, unclothed for all to see. But the dream of a warm sun, of snowless ground beneath my skin, was too inviting to care about what my sister thought.
A shadow up ahead.
My feet stopped.
Thoughts of that sail – if that’s truly what it was – flooded my mind like a broken dam. I stood still, blinking snow out of my eyes while I watched it come closer, closer, cutting through the storm toward me. My heart was a drum. My pulse was thunder.
“Ósa?”
My name reached my ears, though barely. Instantly, the wind whipped it away, dashing it against the wall of a house or the trunk of a tree outside the village, shattering it beyond recognition. Through the furious snow between us, I could just make out Ivar’s eyes behind his layers of wraps.
He extended a heavily-mittened hand to me, which I took, and after the loneliness of the sea and the apprehension of what I’d seen on the water, the contact sent a pulse of warmth through my body.
He turned and leaned into the wind, leading me further into the village. Even without being able to see due to the storm, I knew we weren’t headed to my home. He didn’t have to explain. From where he’d found me, his house was much closer. Within minutes, he was kicking aside drifted snow and shoving open the heavy wooden door.
The wind screamed behind us as he closed the door, and it faded into nothing more than a dull roar in the periphery of my senses. It was jarring, for a moment, having spent so many hours exposed to the elements, to be now suddenly removed from them.
“Perhaps next time your father can tie an anchor to your feet and sink you to the bottom of the sea,” he said with a mock cheerfulness that conveyed precisely what he thought of the ordeal. But buried beneath the harsh words was sincere concern. He was angry at my father, that much was clear. I moved on.
“They’ll worry.”
“I stopped by there to find you. Anneka told me you’d gone out. I let her know I’d take you in until it passed.”
Relief tickled my mind, knowing I didn’t have to go back out in the storm, though I couldn’t imagine Anneka was thrilled with the prospect. As it was, she complained frequently to Father that I spent too much time with Ivar.
“People will start to talk,” she’d said.
“I wish they would,” I’d answered. I could think of worse rumours than something going on between me and Ivar. There was a point last year when it almost had. For a while, I’d told myself that I’d imagined it. That some time over the course of our lives, of growing up together in a world so cold that we were fuelled by thoughts of comfort and warmth, I’d allowed myself to dream it. To create a spark where there was nothing except ice. But it had happened. Or, almost.
We’d gone out with a sled to collect wood from a fallen tree that had already been chopped into firewood. Loading it turned into a snowball fight, and we’d ended up tackling each other on the ground. We’d rolled around, snow clinging to our hair, our clothes, our skin. And then there was this fleeting moment, this handful of seconds where we’d stopped moving and our bodies were pressed together, Ivar’s face close to mine. His eyes had never seemed so blue.
I could have closed the distance and pressed my lips to his, and I almost did. The temptation to kiss him, to discover how our lips felt when they touched, was more consuming than the winds of even the strongest blizzard. Then the moment ended and, like one of those stars that streak across the sky and vanish in the blink of an eye, never came back.
I’d thought about it again, on days when the sun was bright and brilliant and the air was crisp and frozen, when his eyes shone bluer than the sea and his cheeks were pink from the cold, I’d find myself watching him for a second too long. Sometimes he’d notice, and when he did, I wouldn’t look away. I’d just keep staring until his mouth twisted into a smile that could melt the snow around us, along with whatever anxieties the day had brought with it.
I edged closer to the fire, longing to feel my fingers and toes again. They didn’t feel like my own, rather like foreign appendages stuck to my body. I held them out to the flames, dimly contemplating submerging them in the blaze. A burning sensation had to be preferable to this feeling of unfamiliar leather wrapped around bones that weren’t mine.
A few scrolls lay around the room, and I stared absently at their partly unrolled forms. For me, I knew the stars. I knew which ones appeared where at certain times of the year. I knew the stories behind the pictures they painted in the sky. I knew the names of the shapes they created. But Ivar’s gift was just … different. Fascinating. It seemed impossible, the way he could read ancient writings like it was the language we spoke now. Translating was hard work. Language had to change, once the Löskans established themselves in Skane. Not everyone from the continent spoke the same language or the same dialect. Over time, the use of runes had been phased out, until it died altogether. More than once, Ivar had expressed his sadness over that fact. “A lost art,” he had called it.
In my periphery, I could feel him staring at me, his eyes on my face like tiny flames.
“Your father is a damned fool.”
“And yet he brought me back alive.” There was nothing Ivar could say that I didn’t already know. He looked away, sourly, the firelight casting half his face in shadow. “There was a sail,” I said. I didn’t know when I’d realized what it was, but saying it aloud filled me with certainty. The jarring contrast of our two lines of thought caused a brief lull in the conversation. He still stood near to the door, part way through pulling off his mittens. After a moment, he tossed them into a basket, then pushed a wooden stool nearer to me with his foot. I sat.
“A sail.” It wasn’t a question.
“A sail. Out on the water. No one else saw it.”
“No question?”
“No. I only saw it through the fog and waves, but I saw it.” I kneeled to be closer to the flames. The tips of my fingers began to tingle as they were reignited with life.
“Could it have been debris from the storm? The trunk of a tree, or a boat torn from the docks?” I cut him a look, sensing how he was attempting to walk a line, to not assume my eyes had failed me but not to take it at face value either.
“Yes, it could,” I said, and it was the truth. “But I feel … certain. Certain like I know you’re standing here. Like I know this fire is hot.” They were basic examples, ones I might give to a child, but they worked to illustrate my point.
Ivar hesitated, then dropped to his knees across the fire from me. The flames flicked in his eyes, blue like mine, but darker. He was a shadowed reflection of me: where my hair was light, his was darker. Where my eyes were the blue of the sky, his were the blue of the sea before a storm. “I can’t think of anyone else who would have gone out in this. Hell, I’m fairly certain no human being would, no matter where they’re from.” He scratched the back of his head and rumpled his hair, lines of worry around his eyes.
“They didn’t. All the village boats were tied at the docks.” There wasn’t a chance it was anyone from the continent. It was so far, and the waters so rough, that it was too dangerous to attempt in all but the most dire of circumstances. It hadn’t happened in generations. Not since Löska had fallen to the Ør, the barbaric peoples of the Ør Isles, even further to the north than Skane. The isles were dotted into the far north of the White Water like droplets of blood, nearly impossible to access with the wild waters of the open ocean acting like a barrier. No longer content with their small islands, the Ør had invaded the nearby country of Löska, the former homeland of my people, from which some had managed to flee.
And they came here. It was far from the Ør, far enough that, with any luck, they’d never be found.
Thoughts of the Ør reminded me that reading the runes wasn’t always a gift. Some of the runes were stories about the Ør, stories of how they wore leathers made from the skins of those they conquered, stories of their jewellery, made from human jawbones and teeth.
“Perhaps the Löskans are fleeing again,” Ivar mused. “Perhaps things have only grown worse over there.”
Hearing his voice, familiar and calm, chased away all thoughts of the Ør and skin and teeth. But what he said turned my stomach. If things had grown worse, then it was to a level I couldn’t comprehend. The stories that had come with our people were so dark, so evil that we were certain nothing could be worse.
“You should eat,” Ivar told me suddenly and firmly, rising and moving across the room. I knew him. The change of subject was to allow him more time to think, uninterrupted by my own musings. He placed a slab of dried fish between two chunks of bread, a favourite meal of his, and offered it to me on a wooden plate. I ate, both hungry and not, and we didn’t speak again until I’d finished. I wondered, as I watched his face, what thoughts were moving through his mind. Mine were a mixture of worry and frustration and curiosity. Skane was usually quiet, uneventful, save for the weather or local village disputes that were almost always quickly settled. But since last night, the sky had shone red and I’d seen an unfamiliar sail out at sea. So much could change in one night.
“Huh.” He broke the silence. “And I thought nothing could tear our minds from the lós.”
I saw red again. Sweeping tendrils of blood reached out for me, and in the midst of them, a black sail. My hands shook so hard, I dropped the wooden plate. It clattered to the floor, spun a few times, and then settled.
Ivar said nothing, only watched me until I’d calmed. Shutting my eyes, I breathed in and out steadily, feeling the air as it passed through my nose and into my lungs, then back out again. A strange sensation that only became stranger the longer I concentrated on it, but it worked to distract my tumultuous thoughts.
“Something has to be done,” I told him, opening my eyes. “The red lós, now a sail. I can’t. I can’t just sit by and wait.” Tears burned behind my eyes. Never before had trying to be strong made me feel so weak.
“What will you do?” He asked it quietly, uncertainly, but something in his tone made me feel like he believed in me.
I shook my head, pulling all of my curls to one side and gripping them tightly. “I’ll start with the Goddess.”
“Ósa…” he said softly. I hated the way he said it. Hated the way he trailed off as if I was a child he was about to let down. “I know what this means to you. I understand, you know I do. But we can’t… We can’t stop it.”
“I know that,” I said through my teeth. This was our curse. Stay in Skane and submit ourselves to the will of the sky, and lose a few hundred people at a time – not only when I was born, but time and again before that – or flee the island and return to Löska. Return to face the Ør, where we would all die. There was no option where everyone survived. “I know,” I repeated. “But I was barely alive last time. I’m here now.” Despite the sadness and anger and fear warring within me, a single, tenacious spark found enough fuel to start a fire. “I cannot change history, but the future is still mine to live.”
Silence reigned.
Not all of the runes had been translated yet, especially in the further, more remote caves. While Skane had been a symbol of hope for the Löskans, it was also vast and cold and filled with predators. Few people travelled from the villages alone.
“There’s a cave a few miles from here, further inland.” Ivar tapped a scroll that bore only a few bits of writing. “I’ve been to it once before but I was forced to return early when a storm came in. I only managed to grab a few snatches of writings.” He leaned forward, resting both elbows on his knees. “I don’t know what else is in there, and I can’t promise it will be useful, but it’s the best I can do, short of scouring the countryside for undiscovered caves.”
I tapped my forefinger against my chin, thinking. That wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Caves we’d never been to might hold writings about things we’d never—
“No.”
I could tell by his face that he knew my thoughts. I hugged myself and looked away.
“I’ll go with you. To the cave.”
He eyed me, as if deciding whether or not to fight me on that point. “It isn’t an easy walk.”
I tapped my fingers rhythmically against my upper arm and didn’t reply. He knew that was a poor excuse for me to not go.
“Even less so with the new snow.” His eyes moved to the door, thoughtfully. “Perhaps we should start praying for the storm to end.”
“Stop that,” I said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying to put me off. I’m going with you.”
He looked at me for a moment, absentmindedly running a finger back and forth over his forehead as he considered my words, then smiled ever so slightly. My heart jumped with relief. We would do this together.
The creaking and rattling of the door was dying down, each passing minute bringing the smallest amount of quiet. That was the thing about these storms: they came with the fury of a thousand angry goddesses, but left as quickly as a wave broke on the shore. Within perhaps an hour, the wind would be all but gone, and outside dainty little snowflakes would be lazily falling the short distance from the low-hanging clouds to the ground. In its wake, the storm would leave snow drifted so high, our houses would seem small in comparison.
We didn’t say more. Not yet, anyway. For now, we both stared into the flames, lost in the wanderings of our own thoughts.