A couple of minutes later we reached the ruin of the cardinal’s procession. The road lay like the floor of a charnel house, spare pieces of men that the unborn hadn’t the time to incorporate decorated a hundred yard stretch of the cobbles. Snorri closed his fist about the orichalcum and hid the worse of it from us.
“Wait.” I drew up as we reached the shattered remains of Cardinal Gertrude’s sedan. “I need a moment.” I swung out of the saddle and remembered how all of me hurt. Careful placement of each foot brought me to the wreckage without stepping in anything that used to be a person. I turned over several of the larger pieces, picking up a number of splinters before finding what I was looking for. I wiped the corpse blood from my hands and hauled the cardinal’s luggage over to the others.
“You’re still hoping to find the seal?” Kara asked.
“It was the bait. The prince would have kept it to use again if this ruse failed. But he wouldn’t have wanted it on him or any of his dead.”
“He killed them all just to trap you?” Hennan asked, looking awkward perched on Murder’s flanks.
“Probably enjoyed doing it. Good cover too for heading north, stand the dead men back up and walk the high road. Who’s going to stop a cardinal? And the unborn know I need something like . . . this!” I pulled out the seal from a tight-bundled bag of purple vestments. “If I’m hoping to survive an encounter with my sister.” I turned it over in my hand, a cubic inch of silver ornately wrought on four sides, formed into a ring on the fifth and carved into a seal on the sixth and opposite side. Stamped into a blob of cooling wax such a seal could authorize the burning of a heretic, found a monastery, or recommend a sinner for sainthood. I tried it on each finger, managing to work it past the knuckle of the ring finger on my left hand. Fortunately Cardinal Gertrude had been a woman of some girth and pudgy digits. “And of course the cherry on the top of this little plan was that the threat of a Papal Inquisitor, with their famously low view of heathens, was likely to mean I presented myself alone.”
I stood, discarding the bag, having found no other symbols of the cardinal’s office. I might have looted the golden crucifixes if I’d been alone, or perhaps even before an audience of non-believers, but heading toward Osheim didn’t seem like a good time to rile the Almighty.
“This fine fellow saved me.” I slapped Murder’s neck. “Well, and you Snorri, and Baraqel.”
Kara coughed into her hand.
“And Kara. Hennan too probably. And the other horses.” I stared at her to see if she was satisfied. “Anyway. If Murder hadn’t been quite so good at running away the hero of the Aral Pass may have met a sticky end right here.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Charland reminded me of the Thurtans. Which is never a good thing. The peasants were muddier and rougher than one might encounter in more civilized southern climes but at least we weren’t so far north that we’d slipped out of Christendom. By and large your Christian peasant knows his place better than the heathen, being more likely to tug the forelock and respect the God-given authority of a nobleman. In the north few jarls are more than two generations away from the bloody-handed reaver who carved out the miserable clutch of rocks they currently claim to rule.
Fortunately, apart from being dank and overburdened with streams, lakes, ponds, rivers, bogs, marshes, fens, and mires, Charland had been blessed with ten years of unbroken peace. This meant that with coin in one’s pocket one could cross large distances in short order on well-maintained roads, and find half-decent accommodation each evening.
The closeness that had grown between Snorri and Kara, and between Snorri and the boy, on our journey south, started to grow again. There’s a magnetism about the Viking that draws people in, and something in the man needed to be a father. Some women grow broody for a babe at breast; perhaps some men need a son to raise. At best I had served Hennan in the role of disreputable uncle, but Snorri took on a broader responsibility, teaching the boy without ever seeming to be a teacher, everything from tying knots to throwing knives, reading the lie of the land to reading the runes of the north scratched into the dirt.
Watching the three of them, I’ll own to pangs of jealousy, but mixed with caution. In some ways it was like envying a man on a high cliff edge the view, whilst being thankful no such urge steered my own feet to any such precipice. Snorri loved too easily: that capacity for love, for unselfish giving of himself, drew people to him but at the same time opened him to the possibility of grave hurt. With axe in hand Snorri had proved himself nigh unstoppable, needing to fear nothing. And yet here he was handing the world a stick to beat him with. In Osheim a man has a hard enough time hanging on to his own skin. Taking a child in was bad. Taking a son in was like holding a knife to your throat and asking the world to cut you.
Only as the border with Osheim grew closer did the air of prosperity and good cheer start to wane. Villages grew fewer and farther between, fewer people kept to the roads, fields looked poorly tended and swathes of forest grew unchecked, their interiors dark and worrisome.
Hundreds of miles behind us, deep in hostile territory, my grandmother and the flower of Red March’s army would be fighting a desperate battle to hold on to Blujen and maintain the siege of Lady Blue’s tower. Little time could remain to them, and not much more remained to everyone else according to the oft-repeated prophecies of doom. And yet with each mile that passed beneath Murder’s hooves I wanted to slow down, to drag the journey out, to do anything but step once more into Osheim and let the Wheel draw me down into the horrors at its midst.
“The world is changing.” Kara rode alongside me as we forded a stream that cut across our trail through the ill-named Bright Forest. She had that tone she used when being profound—I think she copied it from Skilfar.
“It is?” I’d really rather it wasn’t. Then we could go home. “Can’t you feel it?” She nodded up at the bright line where the trees failed to meet across our path. The sky had a brittleness to it. As if a sufficiently loud noise might shatter it and set the pieces tumbling down. “Everything is growing thin. Magic is spilling through the cracks.”
“That spell of yours, trapping the unborn in the hedgerow, worked well.”
“Better than it should. Better than I’ve seen outside the Wheel.”
That night we camped in the woods, a cold, black night in which the whole forest seemed to move around outside the thin walls of the tent.
Somewhere on along the course of the next day, following old and overgrown lumber trails through a nameless expanse of woodland, we passed into the kingdom of Osheim close to the point where it meets with both Charland and Maladon. Already we were north of Os City where King Halaric cowered on the edge of his own domain as if scared to venture any farther into it.
After another day the trees also appeared to lose courage and their advance gave way to a miserable and blighted heathland where the only things to slow the wind were frequent heavy downpours, sometimes laced with wet snow.
In the distance a shadow loomed, a bruise on the sky, letting us know the Wheel waited, letting Hennan know he was coming home. That night I felt the pull of the Wheel for the first time in nearly a year, though it seemed then as if it had always been there, ever since it first sunk its hook as we fled the Red Vikings. I slept fitfully, a poor meal of dried meat and hardtack roiling around in my stomach, and in every moment I knew the Wheel sat out there in the distance, I knew exactly the direction, and I knew that my legs, restless with the need to take me there, would not let me spend long asleep.
The sunrise found us already up and about, readying ourselves for travel.
“It’s stronger this time.” Snorri crouched over a little fire, heating oats and water in a small, blackened cauldron.