“I suppose that’s wise.” Oddny wondered if Eirik knew that Gunnhild’s reason for learning the law was to help him rule, but the fact that he wasn’t stopping her meant he either didn’t know or didn’t care. Oddny suspected the latter.
But at least Gunnhild was keeping busy. Despite Oddny’s best efforts to keep herself occupied as well, her sister was never far from her mind, and her anticipation for winter’s end and the voyage to Birka grew with each passing day. Gunnhild felt the same, and did her best to distract both Oddny and herself by frequenting the loft with oatcakes and honey she’d cajoled from Hrafnhild in between her morning law lessons and afternoon witching work. Oddny wasn’t used to having anything so sweet and rich, let alone having it between meals. But despite how much more she’d been eating since she left Halogaland, her body remained as thin and wiry as it had always been.
The opposite was true for Gunnhild, who told her one day at supper in the main hall, “It’s a good thing you sewed these dresses a bit bigger, Oddny. Hrafnhild is quite a cook.”
“I did it because I figured now that you’re married, you’d be with child sooner or later,” Oddny replied.
A strange look crossed Gunnhild’s face. “I appreciate that, but I’m not trying to conceive until I know there’s one less witch in the Nine Worlds who wants to kill me.”
Oddny lowered her voice. “If you’re brewing a contraceptive, you shouldn’t be taking it every day. It could stop your blood from coming at all if you use it too frequently.”
Gunnhild replied in kind. “I’m not. I’ve used a spell instead. I stuffed it in the mattress on my side of the bed.” She cast a brief look at Eirik, and when she turned back to Oddny, her eyes were hard. “I’m not bringing a child into this world while Thorbjorg still walks it. I’m not giving myself one more thing to worry about.”
Oddny couldn’t fault her for that. She wondered if her friend was still having bad dreams, or if the horror of her near drowning had finally worn off. A week later, she got her answer.
On that day, Gunnhild deemed the weather too cold to make it to the grove, so she went to the loft to sit with Oddny, armed with her witching bag, which was filled with flat sticks she’d made from branches in the woods. She sat there carving on them and whispering to herself for some time, with Oddny grinding herbs with her mortar and pestle in silence on the other side. It was, despite her friend’s muttering and the faint sounds of the men sparring outside, strangely peaceful.
Forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t alone, Oddny began to sing under her breath, as she often did while she was at work.
A furrow appeared in Gunnhild’s brow as her head snapped up. “Is that—？”
“Oh, it’s—it’s your chant from the storm,” Oddny said, flushing. “The one you used to dispel it. I thought it was pretty.”
Gunnhild sat back on her haunches and tilted her head. “You were a little mimic when we were children, weren’t you? Always repeating things. Signy said once that you should be a Lawspeaker.”
“I have a good memory,” Oddny said with a shrug of her shoulder.
They went back to work on their respective tasks.
“Do you think you’d ever want to learn magic?” Gunnhild asked a short while later, with thinly veiled interest.
“Me?” Oddny didn’t look up. “No.”
“Why not? You can see the threads. That means you’ve got a touch of something in you. You don’t want to cultivate it?”
Oddny shook her head. “I’d rather use it to do exactly what I’m doing now, if anything. Sorcery isn’t for me.” The pestle stilled in her hand. “But what is it like, to travel? To be a bird or—wherever you go when you go—down?”
“I can’t fully explain it,” Gunnhild said. “Part of it is instinctive. I’ve heard there are some witches whose minds can take more than one shape, but mine came out as a swallow, and I’m content with it.” She gave Oddny a sideways look. “I wonder what form yours would take.”
Oddny couldn’t hope to speculate on that, so she went on. “And when you go down, how do the spirits speak through you? You didn’t say anything when you were in trance at Winternights, but something must’ve been happening down there.”
Gunnhild offered no clue as to what that something was, but answered her question: “There are two ways to do it. One is that you speak with them, and come back and tell people what was said. The other is that they come up and touch your thread, travel up it, and speak through your mouth as you wait below. You can hear what they’re saying.” Gunnhild looked down at her stick. “Heid preferred to do things that way in her old age. Said she couldn’t remember what they told her, so it’s best to let them say it themselves—like what she did at my father’s, except she interrupted the spirit giving the prophecy about us.”
Oddny shuddered. “But couldn’t they—possess you? And couldn’t witches possess each other that way?”
“That was my first question, too, but Heid told me it can’t happen,” Gunnhild said. “Your thread is your tether to your body, and it’s not easily broken. If another witch wanted to possess you, they’d have to sever both your threads and then bind theirs to your body, which is impossible, because the moment they sever their own thread, they’ve doomed themselves. And as for spirits, who have no thread—this is why the warding songs are so important, Oddny. They don’t just summon the spirits; they also keep out the ones that would hurt you. If a spirit did mean to possess you, the songs wouldn’t let it anywhere near.”
Oddny mulled this over. “You told me once that Thorbjorg had some kind of mind magic that Heid never taught you—hence the bindrune—but are there other things you might have never learned? Things she might have . . . kept from you?”
Gunnhild looked up sharply. “Are you sure you’re not interested in becoming a witch?”
Oddny shook her head.
“Suit yourself,” said Gunnhild with finality, and got back to work. Each time she completed a rune stick, she tucked it into her belt pocket, ran her knife across the back of her hand, swore at the sight of the resulting blood, extracted the stick, and threw it into a growing pile.
“Gunna,” Oddny said after she’d watched this happen at least a dozen times out of the corner of her eye, “what exactly are you doing?”
“Trying to create a protection charm,” Gunnhild responded. She heaved a ragged sigh and tossed her latest failed rune stick aside, slumping against the wall. “But it’s slow going.”
“A protection charm? But the bindrune—”
“Is to protect the mind. Now I need one to protect the body. But that’s more—complicated,” Gunnhild said. “If they were easy to make, whole armies would have them, wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know about that. I think even if it were easy, no one would use them. We’ve spent our whole lives hearing warriors talk about Valhalla—you’d think some of them wanted to die. A glorious death is more appealing to them than growing old,” Oddny said. “And I doubt that cheating to stay alive in battle would be seen as honorable, even if it granted your side victory.”