Her anger now was directed at herself. There was nowhere else for it to go so it cycled around in her own head—stupid, stupid, stupid. The dark seedling inside of her grew, stretching its branches into her limbs, making her blood run cold. It had been her mistake, and she would be the one to fix it. Without waking the others, she slipped on her weapons belts and cloak as quickly as she could. She had to go before the snow melted and his tracks disappeared.
Outside, she ignored the way the wet snow seeped beneath the lining of her boots, and how the cold wind nipped at her exposed nose. She had to get to Ydurgat and she had to stop Evenon. Tola had been wrong. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else but murderous revenge.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Sibba
Ydurgat was a sprawling coastal town—larger even than Ottar—that reached its fingers into the marshlands and all the way back into the surrounding fields that pressed up against the edge of the draugnvithr. The outlying farmlands had been harmless enough, but as she reached the city proper, the walls loomed ahead of her, casting long shadows over the crowd of merchants and travelers that she had joined quite by accident. As in Endar, the guards patrolling the gate weren’t stopping anyone. They were there for crowd control, to keep people in line. And as a show of force. No one would dare launch an attack on Chief Grimsson here, not beneath the watchful eye of her Maiden Army. Girls trained not to weave or farm, but to fight.
Passing beneath the gate, she kept her eyes down to avoid being noticed. She doubted that a girl like her would draw much attention in a place like this, but better safe than sorry. Once past the guards, she searched the faces of people she passed, looking for spiraling tattoos or a scarred face, or the tip of a bow over a shoulder, though those seemed to be pretty common here. She had lost Evenon's trail back at a crossroads when the backwoods path they'd been following had met the main road leading into Ydurgat, but she was sure he had come this way.
Beyond the entry courtyard, the flow of the crowd divided. The docks were straight ahead. In the distance, masts bobbed peacefully above sparkling water. She surged ahead with the others, ignoring the merchants and vendors lining the streets, the servants dumping waste buckets into the gutters, and especially the guards, resplendent in their leather and chain-link armor. The crowd was thick and immovable, and Sibba got stuck for a time behind a guard negotiating with an herb vendor over the price of mint. When she passed at last, she found herself veering left with the masses, though the harbor was still straight ahead. Any attempts she made to change course were met with curses and shoves and once, an elbow in her eye. There was no way for her to cross, so she would have to circle back around.
Giving up on her quest to go right, she turned and stumbled into what could only be described as chaos. She had expected more of the same—merchants and guards and servants—but instead, the road opened up into a massive stone-lined courtyard. On the far end, a sutvithr tree larger than any she had seen before loomed up before a towering longhouse. Between Sibba and the longhouse, though, were Grimsson’s infamous fighting pits.
In Ottar, trials and holmgangs were held in trial circles. There was something noble about being a part of one—lending strength and willpower to the combatants. But throwing them into an actual pit was something on an entirely different level. There were three that she could see, increasing in size as they neared the longhouse. Deep pits dug out of the courtyard with walls at least twice as tall as Sibba, each surrounded by a row of stone steps that some were using as seats from which to observe the proceedings. Others were leaning against the wooden railings that marked the edge of the pits, cheering and jeering.
She moved closer, drawn by the sounds of clashing metal and grunts. Sibba was too big to sneak her way to the front, so she hung back, waiting for an opening that didn't come. When the fight ended, the spectators became a mob, pushing their way toward a woman who stood on the outskirts with a leather purse on one hip and a guard beside her. The guard—a tall, towheaded woman—saw Sibba looking and cocked an eyebrow, but was quickly distracted by the onslaught of what could only be gamblers vying for their winnings.
She approached the barrier carefully, afraid of what she might find. In the pit below, a man knelt on the dirt floor, a bloody sword in his hand, his head bowed over a body. Neither the man nor the body wore any armor or adornments, just threadbare clothing and grim expressions. They looked evenly matched, equal in strength and age and size. And they were both men.
Sibba looked back at the gamblers, able to pick out a few men, but was surprised to see that they were mostly women. Her gaze flitted back to the two in the ring. The victor had put a hand on the dead man's chest and was crying, his shoulders shaking with sobs she couldn't hear. This was where Tola had grown up. In a place where death wasn’t about honor but about sport. No wonder the vala had been upset by Sibba’s violence toward Evenon.
“Friends of yours?” A voice startled Sibba back from the edge and she turned to find the guard a foot or so from her, her chain-link armor dull beneath the snow clouds. Her yellow hair was done in a long braid that wrapped over her shoulder and fell nearly to her waist, where the hilt of a massive sword protruded. The other half of her head was shaved bald, the skin beneath scarred and puckered as if burned.
“No, it's just that—” Sibba stopped. She had to be careful here. “I've never seen the pits before.”
The woman grunted, and then leaned over the pit, her hands on the barricade. “Oye! You there! Start cleaning up your mess!” The mourning man cast a look of hatred at the guard but stood, leaving the sword and the blood on the dirt floor and instead grabbing the dead man by the wrist. In a few tugs, he had the man over his shoulders, and he came to stand below them. The guard dropped down a rope ladder and the man began to climb, a fantastic feat with the body as an extra burden.
“Who is he?” Sibba asked.
The guard laughed. “He's a man.”
“That's all?” Sibba watched him climb and when he was nearly to the top, reached down to help, but her efforts were stopped by her companion’s hand around her wrist, pulling her back. The grip was too tight and Sibba jerked away.
“I'll forgive you because you're new here,” the woman said, “but that's not how we do things.”
“You don't help people?”
“We don't help them.”
The body flopped over the edge with a sickening thud, followed by the man who collapsed beside it.
“On your feet,” she commanded. “Take him to the pyre.”
After he had gone, two more men squeezed between Sibba and the guard. Both of them were tall and lanky, moving with confidence. The first one leered at Sibba and she sneered back, baring her teeth and making him laugh. The second one looked at her and seemed to see into her soul with his dark eyes. There was something there she recognized, a dangerous storm brewing. They both hopped down over the barricade and the crowd, pockets either lined with gold or empty after the last fight, began to murmur in excitement.