Joseph Lewis - Freya the Huntress

Halfdan narrowed his eyes and tilted his head. “The latter, I suppose.”

“Then help me put my sister somewhere safe.” Freya reached back and took hold of Arfast’s shaggy coat. “And then you can take us to your queen and be done with us, and go back to guarding your precious wall.”

Halfdan paused, then grinned and called over his shoulder, “Bar the door! Back to your posts, all but Aenar and Tryggvi. We’re letting them in.”

The other guards sealed the iron door and returned to their posts on the dark wall, and most of them grumbled a few curses on their way. Halfdan took the lead and his two friends took the rear and together they all entered the city of Rekavik. The area just inside the wall looked very much like Hengavik, with the same half-buried homes and turf roofs, though here every chimney was smoking and firelight flickered around the doorway curtains, and voices echoed in every house, talking, laughing, and shouting.

A few old men sat smoking their little bone pipes in the lane, a few young women stood gossiping in the shadows, and a few small children still ran through the roads, shouting and fighting and laughing as their mothers called them in to supper. The smells of baked fish and fried fish and seared fish crept from every home and mingled in the streets, telling tales of the meals about to be eaten. Freya licked her lips and teeth, tasting the salt and oil in the air.

As the road sloped down closer to the sea, the houses stood up taller and taller, until they were no longer buried in the earth at all but free-standing and mortared with all manners of clay and mud, with whale bones and walrus tusks arching over them, wrapped in oiled leather to create bulbous roofs that looked like living beasts beached on the stone houses, their innards glowing with firelight and rippling with the shadows of those who dwelled within.

Ahead Freya saw the castle squatting in the center of the peninsula, two levels high and ringed with a high wall. The highest point of the whole building was the tower in its center, but it looked to only be one or two levels higher than the rest of the structure. A dozen trails of smoke were draining upwards from the castle on all sides, but the voices were lower in this neighborhood. There were no men smoking or children playing here.

Halfdan trudged down to the castle gate and walked straight through the narrow iron door in the castle wall, leading the way into the small courtyard where several more men with swords stood beside an open peat fire. Halfdan waved to them, and they waved back, and the bearded guardsman turned left along the inner wall.

“Here.” He pointed at a dark corner against the outer wall of the castle.

Freya saw another iron door, one older and rusted at the bottom of a short stone stair dug into the earth. She trotted down and opened the door, and saw a dank windowless cell barely large enough for two people to stand side by side. A pair of manacles hung from a chain on the back wall. Freya closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.

It’s only for a day or so. That’s all.

“Erik? Can you bring her down, please?”

A moment later her husband came down into the darkness beside her and laid Katja gently on the floor. There was no room for three bodies, so he went back up the steps while Freya gently closed and locked the manacles around her sister’s wrists and then tried to arrange her sleeping body more comfortably on the cold stone floor.

She brushed the hair back from Katja’s face and saw the plague warring with her sister’s flesh, wrinkling her skin and thrusting out the coarse red fur, deforming her nose into a canine snout, blackening her lips, and sharpening her teeth. Katja’s breathing was quick and shallow. Freya leaned back and looked away to wipe her eyes. And then Katja growled.

The fox-woman lurched up and wrapped her long hairy arms around Freya’s waist, shoving her down to the floor and nearly smashing her skull against the wall. Freya looked down once at the huge golden eyes in the feral head, and then she drove her elbow into the black nose, and another elbow to the eye, and another elbow to the ear, and each time Katja would snarl or whine, her eyes impossibly wide, her long black tongue flopping around her mouth, her long white fangs lunging and snapping at Freya’s bare throat.

The huntress wrapped her arms around Katja’s head, pinning that beastly mouth shut against her own chest, and she rolled violently to her right. The twisting motion pulled the chains taut and Katja yelped and let go. Freya leapt to her feet and jumped for the door over her sister’s sprawled body, but a long crooked claw snatched her leg in midair and yanked her down again.

Freya fell flat on her face with the doorway right in front of her nose. Her chest and legs were ablaze with pain, and her brain was boiling with adrenaline and naked fear. She kicked and kicked as hard as she could, smashing her heels down on anything she could strike, and she felt the hard impacts to her sister’s head jarring both of their bodies to the bone.

Katja let go again with a horrible high-pitched yelp and squeal, and Freya lunged up out of the cell and onto the stairs. She turned to grab the door handle and saw her sister’s monstrous face flying toward her out of the darkness.

Freya froze.

The chains clanged taut and the creature stumbled back into the shadows, and Freya slammed the door. She sat there on the ground a moment, the cold air shooting in and out of her sore lungs, stinging her throat. Her blood pounded in her bruised hands and chest, and tiny white spots fluttered across her vision.

She could feel Erik and the others standing over her. They might have been talking, but she couldn’t focus on them, couldn’t worry about them. She could only stare at the iron door. But after a moment, she stood up and climbed the steps, avoiding Erik’s gaze and Wren’s stare as she turned to the bearded guardsman.

“It’s done,” she said, wiping her hands on her trousers. “Now take me to Skadi.”

Halfdan led them inside past the guards into a small dirty room where dozens of heavy fur coats hung on the walls, and then into a long, smoky dining hall where countless bone stools stood or laid against the walls in small piles and three long fire pits glowed full of embers. A handful of old men sat around the last fire, huddled under their blankets, chewing on roasted seal ribs. They were wrinkled and gray men, hunched and dim-eyed, but the bare swords on their belts were bright enough and sharp enough.

At the end of the hall was a curtained doorway where Halfdan paused to say, “Wait here.” As soon as he spoke, two of the old men stood up from their seats and rested their hands on their swords. They still looked wrinkled and gray, but they stood as straight as their blades and the thick veins on their hands hinted at their strength.

“Wait for what?” Freya kept her eyes on the two older men.

“For me!” Halfdan shook his head as he pushed back the curtain. “I have to tell the queen that you’re here.”

“Can’t we just tell her ourselves?” Wren asked. “It might save time.”

Halfdan stared at her a moment. “No.” And he left.

Freya, Erik, and Wren exchanged confused looks to confirm that they all found the procedure ridiculous, and then settled into gazing dully at the two men-at-arms standing by the fire. The other men went on eating as though nothing at all had happened.

The iron door beyond the cloak room clanged and a sharp pair of boots clacked on the stone floor behind them. “What idiot brought that damn animal into the city?” The voice was high for a male, and a moment later a very young man strode into the dining hall.

Freya guessed he was just a bit older than Wren, maybe twenty winters at most, and he wore his youth proudly. His beardless cheeks were pale, his long black hair shone in the torch light, and his sealskin trousers clung to his slender legs. His short leather jacket had been dyed black and his cotton shirt was bleached bone white. His left hand rested on the silver pommel of the sword on his hip, and his knee-high boots shone with oil as he strode across the hall.