“You’re making enough noise to wake the dead gods,” he muttered.
“Breca’s not here,” Orka snapped, a coil of dread in her gut putting some bite in her words.
“Outside?” Thorkel suggested. “Fetching water, firewood?”
“I do that in the morning. He sleeps until I wake him,” Orka said.
“You do? He does?” said Thorkel, frowning.
Orka scowled at him. “This, from the man who usually sleeps like a bear in his winter’s cave until the smell of porridge wakes him.”
“Fair enough,” Thorkel shrugged. “Still, he might be outside. Something might have woken him, like his bladder.”
“He’s not an old man, like you. He can hold his piss.”
Thorkel opened his mouth, clearly thought better of it and disappeared back into the bedchamber. He re-emerged, boots on and tugging on a woollen tunic as Orka was reaching for her spear in a rack, throwing open the doors and striding out into daylight.
She stood on the first step that led down into their courtyard, scanning the steading. The woodshed, forge, charcoal kiln were all clearly empty and undisturbed.
“Breca,” she cried as she hurried down the steps, mud soft under her boots. Past the herb and vegetable patch and beehive. She peered into the barn as she passed it, where their shaggy pony stood with his head over the stable door, regarding a hay bale with a two-pronged fork stuck in it, just as Orka had left it last night. Striding on, Orka stopped at the stream that flowed fast and clear through the steading, crouched beside a moss-slick rock. She stuck the butt-end of her spear into the icy water, jabbing it beneath an alcove under the rock.
“Spert, wake up,” Orka grunted.
A dark shape appeared, as long as Orka’s arm and wide as one of Thorkel’s tree-stump legs, uncoiling from beneath the rock and spreading into the stream. Its chitinous, segmented body straightened, tapering to an oily sting, sharp as a needle that curved over its back. A multitude of long legs clawed into the stream’s bank and it crawled towards Orka, its head breaking the water.
“Food,” the Spertus croaked, its voice like scratching dry skin. It looked up at Orka with a too-human face, bulbous eyes under grey sagging skin, and a mouth full of too many sharp-spiked teeth.
“Have you seen Breca?” Orka asked the creature.
“Spert sleep until food,” the creature muttered. It looked around, searching for Breca, who usually brought it a bowl of porridge mixed with blood and spit each morning. “Hungry,” it complained.
“I should kill you, you useless creature,” Orka grunted as she stood.
“Ungrateful,” the creature grated, a hiss of scraping skin. “Spert work hard. Spert protect you from vaesen.”
“If you protect us, then where is Breca?” Orka snarled.
The Spertus blinked.
“Can’t watch everything, everyone, all the time,” it grumbled. “Have to sleep sometime.”
“Orka,” Thorkel called from behind her.
She stood and turned, and there was a splash and ripple of water as Spert submerged and returned to his chamber beneath the rock.
Thorkel was kneeling by the single gate that was built into the larger gates that were only ever opened when taking their pony and cart to Fellur with goods to trade. Otherwise they came and went by this single door. It opened with an iron latch-bolt. Orka ran to Thorkel, fear pounding in her head like a drum.
“He was here,” Thorkel said, pointing at a clear boot print in the mud, half the size of hers. “And he has used this gate.” The iron bolt was drawn, the gate just pulled to. Thorkel pushed it open, looking out on the glade beyond their steading, bordered by woodland. There were more boot prints in the mud.
Panic, like a viper’s venom, flushed through her veins.
Virk’s words from Fellur village whispered in her head.
Children are being taken.
“Others?” Orka asked. She was too full of anger and anxiety to read the ground. Her eyes searched the glade beyond their walls, tried to pierce the shadows beneath the woodland. “Has he been taken, like Asgrim’s boy, Harek?”
“No signs of anyone else,” Thorkel said, rising. He passed through the rune-marked gates and turned left, Orka following. Thorkel had buckled on his weapons belt, seax and hand-axe hanging from it, and Orka had her spear.
Enough to look after ourselves, if it comes to blood.
They padded across an open glade, a few patches of snow left among the grass that was wet with dew starting to steam as the rising sun washed the glade. Then they were passing beneath high boughs, moving north-east from their home, into a twilight world. Orka followed her husband, knew Thorkel was the better tracker. He loped along, every few heartbeats his eyes scanning the ground then flitting up ahead of them. Their path curled to follow the stream that flowed through their steading, moving steadily upstream, climbing a gentle slope. Orka looked above and to their flanks, searching for the tell-tale movements of vaesen or other predators, but saw nothing. The woods were silent and still, as if holding their breath.