“The Tainted are interbred now, you know that. She could be both.”
A long sigh from Thorkel.
“We should leave this place,” Orka said. “Now, before it is too late. Move far from here, away from petty jarls and their petty squabbles, away from Helka and St?rr and their war of greed.”
“But this is our home. We have built it with our hands, our blood and sweat.”
“No, this is my home,” Orka said, placing her palm over Thorkel’s chest. “You and Breca are my home. Wherever we are together, that is home to me.”
They lay in silence awhile, Orka’s palm on Thorkel’s chest, fingers threaded through his wiry hair, his hand upon her hip.
“Heya, you are right,” Thorkel said, breaking the silence.
Orka felt a wash of relief. She had been expecting a hard fight.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll go to the Ash Tree in the morning, speak to the Froa.”
“Aye, in the morning,” Thorkel said. “But now…” His hand moved from her hip, tracing the dip of her waist, higher.
Orka found his lips in the darkness.
Orka slipped out of the bedchamber and closed the door on Thorkel’s sleeping form. She found an empty bowl on the table and spat into it, then pulled her seax from her belt and pricked a red spot on the heel of her hand, letting it drip into the bowl and mixing it with her spit.
That should keep Spert from mutiny, or ending his own life through hunger.
She padded through their hall, glancing at Breca, just a dark shadow curled on his cot. Vesli stirred but did not wake. At the doorway she paused and selected a spear from their rack, thick-shafted ash with a leather cover over the long blade. She glanced up at Thorkel’s long-axe that hung over the doorway, then stepped outside. All was darkness, moonglow fading with the coming of dawn.
“Spert,” Orka whispered as she strode to the stream and jabbed her spear butt under the creature’s rock. A ripple and splash.
“Mistress?” Spert mumbled as he emerged from the water.
Orka squatted beside him. “I have a task to complete, but should be back before midday. Watch over the steading until I return.”
“Yes, mistress,” Spert said. He paused, his antennae twitching. “Hungry,” he muttered. “Midday is a long time. Will you leave Spert to starve and die, like before?”
“You didn’t die,” Orka snapped. “More’s the pity.” She drew in a deep breath. “Breca will warm your porridge as soon as he wakes. He will be out with your breakfast soon enough,” she said, then stood and made her way to the gate, threw her spear over the timber wall and then leaped and grabbed its rim, heaved herself up and over and dropped down on to soft earth. She didn’t want to leave the steading with the gate unlocked.
Reaching for her spear she set off, heading south-east, crossing the open space around their steading and slipping beneath the trees. It was dark as pitch, but Orka knew the way. A fox’s trail wound its way upward through the trees, and she reached a high ridge as the sun clawed its way over the edge of the world, a glow gilding over the treetops of a valley that fell away before her a molten red.
She made her way down the ridge, using her spear butt as a staff, and as the ground began to level the sun had reared over the hills. The murmur of a river grew louder. Usually when she reached this point, she felt a change deep inside her, like the relief that comes with a long-held exhalation, but not now. Instead the tendrils of dread that had faded last night were back, twisting and coiling in her veins.
The trees about her thinned, fractured beams of light breaking through, and then she was stepping out into a meadow, a river running through it. Before the meadow was a gentle hillock, and upon it an ash tree.
Orka stumbled to a stop, just stood and stared, mouth open, her spear hanging limp in her hand.
The Ash Tree had been destroyed. A hacked, blackened stump stood on the hillock, the trunk of the tree lying splintered across the ground.
“No,” Orka whispered. She broke into a run, eyes scanning the meadow. “Froa,” she called, though she knew it was useless. Froa was the spirit of the Ash Tree, a creature of wood and bark and sap, and her life was bound to the ash tree she was born from and guarded. Then she saw her: a shape on the slope of the hillock, lying beside the fallen trunk. Orka ran to her, skidded to a standstill and looked down at a figure in the grass: a tall woman like a statue carved from wood, taller than Orka, of indeterminable age, hair coiling around her body as long as her waist, thick with leaves and twigs. Her eyes were wide and bulging, arms stretched out towards the fallen trunk, mouth open and fixed in a scream of agony.