Page 15 of Vow of the Undead
And if we couldn’t cook, we’d rely on hard meat and cheese. There wasn’t enough of that to last us one day oftravel, much less an entire week to Mara. Salves and bandages were forgotten too.
Dawn light stretched from the open side of the stables. The sun almost warmed my cheek but another gust of icy wind sliced over my skin. The direction of the wind angled just right to sweep through the stable from the back to where I’d left the door propped open.
I’d come straight to the stables expecting to see my father and his men preparing the horses to mount, but I’d beat him here and spent the last few minutes scanning the packs.
The sound of gravel crunching underfoot came from behind me and I didn’t have to look up to feel his looming presence.
“Do you want us to die before we arrive?” I shot my father a sharp look over my shoulder.
He stood at the threshold of the stables, staring down his thin nose at me. The pale morning sun washed him out and his skin looked clammy, unlike the tanned skin of farmers and the rest of the villagers. As the Vyl, he’d spent most of his time indoors. Though I’d heard Torsholt and Stormdal’s leaders worked out in the fields with their farmers. They hunted with those trapping wild game to supplement villager diets.
But my father did none of that.
He’d been a Vyl my entire life so I didn’t know the side of him my mother claimed he once had. Strong, resilient, a legendary trapper. According to her stories, he’d trained falcons to hunt rabbits, ducks, and other smaller birds, but I’d never so much as seen him speak with the other falconers in Skaldir.
His slim lips twisted into a grimace before he spoke. “I’m as frustrated as you. I expected them to work faster.”
His gaze trailed behind me to where Bjorn tethered a horse to a post. The lanky man ran his fire-scarred hand over the animal’s back to calm it. He’d run it over my bare ass plenty of times too, but it’d been months since we foundourselves in one another’s beds. While it was pleasurable for our bodies, it did nothing to keep us attached. He was just a friend, and unfortunately, he’d wanted to stop our nightly visits when he thought my father might discover us.
It wasn’t that my father would care beyond the fact that as one of the Vyl’s men, Bjorn was supposed to tell my father everything. He wasn’t allowed to have anything hidden, no secrets, and this just wasn’t something Bjorn was comfortable sharing with him.
After a moment of speaking softly, Bjorn brushed his palm down the horse’s leg, and she allowed him to lift her hoof. Of course Bjorn was the one doing the work while my father watched.
“Perhaps your men expected you to help with preparations.” I wanted to bite the words back, but they’d already slipped from my lips. Though I’d challenged him plenty of times before, now wasn’t the time. Not when he was already on edge after I’d ran from the king.
I busied myself by standing and grabbing a brush to run over the hindquarters of the horse who stood alone in the stable. The older horse didn’t even need to be tethered. She enjoyed the feel of the bristles running soothing circles over her back. Just the sight of Bjorn taking out the brush had had her trotting toward the stables, ready for her turn.
My father sighed. “Perhaps one of my men shouldn’t have been so weak and pathetic as to abandon us. If we had Rolf helping, we’d be ready to leave.”
“Rolf?” I said as I searched his face. Ragna’s husband had been a type of right-hand man for my father while Ragna ran the household, raised their children, and tended to their farm. “What do you mean he abandoned us?”
He scoffed. “He refuses to go to the king. We have an opportunity for King Drakkar to invite us into Mara’s Keep, to sit and counsel with him so that we may speak up and bring Skaldir and the northern villages to his attention.” The kinghad just traveled here. Wasn’t he already aware of us? But I didn’t have time to ask what he intended by the comment as he continued. “We need trade to get us through the winter. We need defenses against bears and wolves. Which means we need representatives to stand before him, as many of us men as we can spare, to tell King Drakkar that we will starve without spears and axes for hunting.”
“I’ve been saying we need weapons for years?—”
“Yes. To defend against…” his voice trailed off as he shook his head, his frown more twisted than ever. He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He never could bring himself to acknowledge the shadows that I believed were monsters from ancient days—monsters from the sagas.
My mother said most of them died out when humans scarred Midgard with the wasteland, our ancestors' battles causing so much blood to spill that it poisoned the very ground we walked on. But she knew they existed, while my father denied it.
And perhaps he was right, since Astrid and Sten, who had seemed all monster to me, ended up being nothing but mere humans.
They had to be, because the only other alternative was to accept that monsters were following me. That the red eyes I’d witnessed in the shadows my whole life were powerful creatures coming to devour me, not people who could be tried and punished for their crimes.
Of course, if Astrid and Sten were human that didn’t explain why their skin had boiled at the touch of my blood and a simple pendant.
That was magic from the Gods. It had to be.
I'd been grasping for explanations lately, trying to convince myself of these things so that I could make sense of the world around me. None of it had really made sense since I lost my mother.
And even before that, when I lost control of myself.
“I’m well aware of your foolishness,” his curt voice cut through my thoughts. “You and Rolf both. Witches are creatures in a saga that odd humans claim kinship to in order to explain their oddities.”
Bitterness stained my tongue and I recoiled. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard him deny my existence aloud. He knew I had visions but had refused to accept them as anything more than the ramblings of a foolish woman.
“So Rolf wanted to stay here with Ragna?” I asked, though I spoke it more like a statement. As loyal as Rolf was to my father, he practically worshiped his wife. If Ragna needed him to stay in Skaldir, it wouldn’t be a second thought.
“Ragna is gone.”
