Page 56 of Sky in the Deep
“I want you to take it off,” Fiske said. “The collar.” He spoke to the blacksmith, saying something I couldn’t hear over my thoughts.
The blacksmith shrugged. “Alright.”
I held onto the saddle, my fingers white.
“Come on, then.” He tossed the hammer onto the table.
I slid down off the horse as he picked up a long-handled tool with a hook on it. “Here.”
I stepped into the tent and he grabbed hold of the collar,lowering me down to hook one side of it onto an iron bar driven into the trunk of a thick tree.
“Stay still,” he grunted.
He secured the tool into the other side of the collar and took a deep breath before he leaned back, pulling against it with his weight. The collar widened slowly and I stayed still, trying to keep it from touching the burns. When he stood and leaned back to pull again, I pinched my eyes closed and it scraped against me.
He slipped the ring from around my neck and dropped it to the ground in front of me, a broken black circle sunken into the snow.
My fingers ran over the skin on my neck, freed from the weight and the cold of the collar. “Why did you do that?”
“If you’re going home, it won’t be as adýr.” He uncrossed his arms, going back to the horse. The blacksmith went back to his work and the pounding of iron on the forge rang out around us.
“You don’t owe me anything.” I could hear the Riki down the path starting to move. “You saved my life. More than once. We’re even.”
He glanced down at the ground and I waited for the words building behind his lips.
“We’ll never be even.”
THIRTY-ONE
We rode in a long line through the forest, andIfinally understood what Fiske meant when he told me that I’d never find my way off the mountain alone. There was no clear path in the snow. We cut left and right down buried trails and around cliff faces in erratic patterns that made no sense. It took me half the day to realize that we were avoiding the overhanging slopes of the mountain that were packed with a threatening avalanche.
Every movement was specific. They kept their pace slow, staying quiet when we were out from under the cover of the trees. Far ahead of us, Vidr led the group, looking up around us as we moved, studying the rise of the mountain.
The Riki ignored my presence and that was better than noticing me. Many of them had been the ones to watch me pluck the eye from the Herja. I shuddered, remembering the hot, soft thing clutched in my shaking hand. Maybe theyknew I’d saved the Tala. Maybe I’d earned their trust, like she said. But none of it mattered to me now. I wanted off the mountain. I just needed to get home.
We travelled well into the night and I sat up straight, trying to stretch my back and my tender shoulder. It was still sore and stinging where it was trying to heal, but I kept reinjuring it. I lifted the arm up slowly, gently stretching the muscles, and glanced back at Fiske, where he’d fallen back to ride behind me. The winter moon rose early in the sky, huge and misshapen. It hung over the forest like a buoy floating in the water and the cold hardened around us as the sun went down. With every turn in the path, the dread buried beneath every thought grew heavier, my imagination running wild with what waited for me in the fjord.
A whistle sounded ahead, long and low, and the horses slowed to a stop. Fiske’s boots hit the ground and he waited for me to dismount and tie my horse beside his.
“We’ll sleep a few hours and start again.” He pulled the saddles from the horses and slipped the bearskins from under them.
“Sleep out here?” There was nothing but deep snow.
He pointed to the rock face behind me, where the Riki were disappearing. I hoisted my saddlebag over my good shoulder and we headed in the same direction. Slipping into a wide crack running up the rock from the ground, I recoiled, feeling the need to take my knife into my hand.
The strike of fire-steel lit the cave as someone started a fire,and then another lit behind us. They popped up one by one until I could see the inside of the cavern, aglow with the orange light. It was huge, with a ceiling reaching down in points of dripping stone, like fingers coming to snatch us up and pull us into the belly of the mountain. And it was quiet. So quiet that I could hear the scrape of every boot on the dirt below us.
Fiske moved us toward the fire at the back of the cave and I stepped around the Riki already settling down for sleep. I leaned into the wall, sliding until I was sitting on the ground, and looked around me. The Riki gathered around the other fires, leaving Fiske and me on the edge of the group. It was still strange to see them this way—tired and weak. Heartbroken. The spirit in them was sleeping somewhere deep inside, but it was there. It was like the stillness of the air before an angry storm. And I didn’t like the idea of sleeping in the middle of it.
A head of bright red hair stopped my gaze and I flinched, recognizing Thorpe. He sat beside a fire across the cave, pulling a wool blanket up over his chest. His face was cut and bruised, his eye swollen.
Fiske wedged a dry log underneath the fire to build it up. His hands were still scabbed at the knuckles from where they’d inflicted Thorpe’s wounds only a few days before. When he saw me staring, he looked down at his hands and then to Thorpe.
“Will he want revenge for what you did?” I asked quietly.
“He won’t touch you again.”
I looked back up to Thorpe. I’d seen him at the burning of the Riki bodies, too, and he hadn’t even looked at me.
