Page 2 of Sky in the Deep
“Eelyn!” She called my name just as I slammed into another body, and wide arms wrapped around me, squeezing so hard that the sword slipped from my fingers. I grunted, trying to kick free, but he was too strong. I bit into the flesh of the arm until I tasted blood and the hands shoved me to the ground. I hit hard, gasping for breath as I rolled onto my back and reached for my axe. But the Riki’s sword was already coming down on me. I rolled again, finding the knife at my belt with my fingers as I came back up onto my feet and faced him, the breath puffing out before me in white gusts.
Behind me, Mýra was fighting in the fog. “Eelyn!”
He lunged for me, swinging his sword up, and I fell backagain. It cut through my sleeve and into the thick muscle of my arm. I threw the knife, handle over blade, and he dropped his head to the side. It narrowly missed him, grazing his ear, and when he looked back at me his eyes were on fire.
I scrambled backward, trying to get to my feet as he picked up his sword. My eyes fell to the spilled Aska blood covering his chest and arms as he stalked toward me. Behind him, my sword and my axe lay on the ground.
“Mýra!” I shouted, but she was completely out of sight now.
I looked around us, something churning up inside of me that I rarely felt in a fight—panic. I was nowhere near a weapon and there was no way I could take him down with my bare hands. He closed in, gritting his teeth, as he moved like a bear over the grass.
I thought of my father. His soil-stained hands. His deep, booming voice. And my home. The fire flickering in the dark. The frost on the glade in the mornings.
I stood, pressing my fingers into the hot wound at my arm and saying Sigr’s name under my breath, asking him to accept me. To welcome me. To watch over my father.“Vegr yfir fjor,”I whispered.
He slowed, watching my lips move.
The furs beneath his armor vest blew in the damp breeze, pushing up around his angled jaw. He blinked, pressing his mouth into a straight line as he took the last steps toward me and I didn’t run. I wasn’t going to be brought down by a blade in my back.
The steel gleamed as he pulled the sword up over his head, ready to bring it back down, and I closed my eyes. I breathed. I could see the reflection of the gray sky on the fjord. The willow bloomed on the hillside. The wind wove through my hair. I listened to the sound of my clansmen raging. Fighting in the distance.
“Fiske!” A deep, strangled voice pierced through the fog, finding me, and my eyes popped open.
The Riki before me froze, his eyes darting to the side where the voice was coming toward us.
Fast.
“No!” A tangle of wild, fair hair barreled into him, knocking his sword to the ground. “Fiske, don’t.” He took hold of the man’s armor vest, holding him in place.“Don’t.”
Something twisted in my mind, the blood in my veins slowing, my heart stopping.
“What are you doing?” The Riki wrenched free, picking his sword back up off the ground and driving past him, coming for me.
The man turned, throwing his arms around the Riki and swinging him back.
And that’s when I saw it—his face.
And I was frozen. I was the ice on the river. The snow clinging onto the mountainside.
“Iri.” It was the ghost of a word on my breath.
They stopped struggling, both looking up at me with wide eyes, and it dove deeper within me. What I was seeing.WhoI was seeing.
“Iri?” My shaking hand clutched at my armor vest, tears coming up into my eyes. The storm in my stomach churned at the center of the chaos surrounding us.
The man with the sword looked at me, his eyes running over my face, working hard to put something together. But my eyes were on Iri. On the curve of his jaw. His hair—like straw in the sun. The blood smeared across his neck. Hands like my father’s.
“What is this, Iri?” The Riki’s grip tightened around the hilt of his sword, my blood still thick on its blade.
I could barely hear him. I could barely think, everything washed out in the flood of the vision before me.
Iri stepped toward me slowly, his eyes jumping back and forth on mine. I stopped breathing as his hands came up to my face and he leaned in so close that I could feel his breath on my forehead.
“Run, Eelyn.”
He let me go, and my lungs writhed and pulled, begging for air. I turned, looking for Mýra in the mist, opening my mouth to call out for my father. But my breath wouldn’t come.
He was gone, devoured by the fog, the Riki disappearing with him.
