Joanne Harris - Runemarks

“Never mind. Just watch it, Maddy. Just look out for anything strange. That Horse is only half asleep, and if it wakes up-”

“I wish I could wake it,” said Maddy. “Don’t you?”

One-Eye smiled and shook his head. It was a strange smile, at the same time cynical and rather sad. He pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I do. That’s not a road I’d care to tread, not for all of Otter’s Ransom. Though there may come a time when I have no choice.”

“But the treasure?” she said. “You could be rich-”

“Maddy,” he sighed. “I could be dead.”

“But surely-”

“There are far worse things than goblins down there, and treasures rarely sleep alone.”

“So?” she said. “I’m not afraid.”

“I daresay you’re not,” said One-Eye in a dry voice. “But listen, Maddy. You’re seven years old. The Hill-and whatever lies underneath it-has been waiting for a long time. I’m sure it can wait a little longer.”

“How much longer?”

One-Eye laughed.

“Next year?”

“We’ll see. Learn your lessons, watch the Hill, and look out for me by Harvestmonth.”

“Swear you’ll be back?”

“On Odin’s name.”

“And on yours?”

He nodded. “Aye, girl. That too.”

After that, the Outlander had returned to Malbry once a year-never before Beltane or later than Maddy’s birthday at the end of Harvestmonth-trading fabrics, salt, skins, sugar, salves, and news. His arrival was the high point of Maddy’s year; his departure, the beginning of a long darkness.

Every time he asked her the same question.

“What’s new in Malbry?”

And every time she gave him the same accounts of the goblins and their mischief-making: of larders raided, cellars emptied, sheep stolen, milk soured. And every time he said: “Nothing more?” and when Maddy assured him that was all, he seemed to relax, as if some great burden had been lifted temporarily from his shoulders.

And, of course, at each visit he taught her new skills.

First she learned to read and write. She learned poems and songs and foreign tongues; medicines and plant lore and kennings and stories. She learned histories and folktales and sayings and legends; she studied maps and rivers, mountains and valleys, stones and clouds, and charts of the sky.

Most importantly, she learned the runes. Their names, their values, their fingerings. How to carve them into fortune stones, to be scattered and read for a glimpse of the future, or bind them like stalks into a corn dolly; how to fashion them into an ash stick; how to whisper their verses into a cantrip, to skim them like jump stones, throw them like firecrackers, or cast their shadows with her fingers.

She learned to use Ár, to ensure a good harvest-

– and Týr, to make a hunting spear find its mark-

– and Logr, to find water underground.

By the time she was ten years old, she knew all sixteen runes of the Elder Script, various bastard runes from foreign parts, and several hundred assorted kennings and cantrips. She knew that One-Eye traveled under the sign of Raedo, the Journeyman-though his rune was reversed and therefore unlucky, which meant that he had undergone many trials and misfortunes along the way.

Maddy’s own runemark was neither broken nor reversed. But according to One-Eye, it was a bastard rune, not a rune of the Elder Script, which made it unpredictable. Bastard runes were tricky, he said. Some worked, but not well. Some worked not at all. And some tended to slip out of alignment, to tipple themselves in small, sly ways, to warp, like arrows that have been left in the rain and will rarely, if ever, hit straight.

Still, he said, to have any runemark at all was a gift. A rune of the Elder Script, unreversed and unbroken, would be too much for anyone to hope for. The gods had wielded such powers once. Now folk did what they could with what was left; that was all.

But bastard or not, Maddy’s runemark was strong. She quickly surpassed her old friend, for his glam was weak and soon exhausted. Her aim was as good as his, if not better. And she was a fast learner. She learned hug-rúnar, mindrunes, and rísta-rúnar, carven runes, and sig-rúnar, runes of victory. She learned runes that One-Eye himself could not work, new runes and bastard runes with no names and no verses, and still, he found, she wanted more.

So he told her tales from under the Hill and of the serpent that lives at Yggdrasil’s Root, eating away at the foundations of the world. He told her tales of standing stones, and of lost skerries, and of enchanted circles, of the Underworld and Netherworld and the lands of Dream and Chaos beyond. He told her tales of Half-Born Hel, and of Jormungand, the World Serpent, and of Surt the Destroyer, the Lord of Chaos, and of the Ice People and of the Tunnel Folk and of the Vanir and of Mimir the Wise.

But her favorite tales were those of the Æsir and the Vanir. She never tired of hearing these, and in the long, lonely months between One-Eye’s visits, the heroes of those stories became Maddy’s friends. Thor the Thunderer with his magic hammer; Idun the Healer and her apples of youth; Odin, the Allfather; Balder the Fair; Týr the Warrior; falcon-cloaked Freyja; Heimdall Hawk-Eye; Skadi the Huntress; Njörd the Man of the Sea; and Loki the Trickster, who on different occasions had brought about both the deliverance and the dissolution of the old gods. She applauded their victories, wept for their defeat, and, unnatural though it might be, felt more kinship with those long-vanished Seer-folk than she had ever felt for Jed Smith or Mae. And as the years passed, she longed ever more for the company of her own kind.

“There must be more of us somewhere, ” she said. “People like us, Fieries”- family, she thought-“if only we could find them, then maybe, perhaps…”

In that, however, she was disappointed. In seven years she had never so much as glimpsed another of their kind. There were goblins, of course, and the occasional cat or rabbit born with a ruinmark and quickly dispatched.

But as for people like themselves…They were rare, he told her when she asked, and most of them had no real powers to speak of anyway. A glimmer, if they were lucky. Enough to earn them a dangerous living.

And if they were unlucky? In World’s End, where Order had reigned for a hundred years, a runemark, even a broken one, usually led to an arrest-and after that an Examination, and then, more often than not, a hanging (or Cleansing, as they preferred to call them in those parts).

Best not to think of it, One-Eye said, and reluctantly Maddy took his advice, learning her lessons, retelling her tales, waiting patiently for his yearly visits, and trying hard not to dream of what could never be.

This year, for the first time, he was late. Maddy’s fourteenth birthday was two weeks gone, the Harvest Moon had worn to a sliver, and she had begun to feel anxious that perhaps this time her old friend would not make it back.

The previous year she had seen changes in One-Eye: a new restlessness, a new impatience. He had grown leaner over that past twelvemonth, drank more than was good for him, and for the first time she’d seen that his dark gray hair was touched with white. His yearly journeys to World’s End were taking their toll, and after seven such reckless pilgrimages, who knew when the net might fall?

The runes had given her little by way of reassurance.