Page 60 of The Girl the Sea Gave Back
“Then stay alive to find a new one.”
His fingers closed over the talisman until it was hidden in his fist and he walked to the edge of the forest, where his horse was tied to the trunk of a wide tree. He ran a hand up its snout before he lifted my bow from the riggings and untied the quiver.
I smiled as he held them out to me, but he only stared at the ground between us as the shadow of the nighthawkswept overhead again. Its wail rang out above us as I dropped the bow over my head.
“Thank you.” I reached back to feel the feather fletching over my shoulder as I secured it.
Without a word, he turned, giving me his back as he walked away. I watched him grow smaller in the low light and I held my breath as he disappeared between the tents, the lump in my throat winding tighter. I hoped it was the last time I’d ever see him. I hoped his blood wouldn’t pay the debt for what I’d done.
The nighthawk cried again and I looked up, watching him tip his wings and turn to break the circle. He flew out over the forest, headed east, and I knew. The same way I knew the sound of the woman’s voice in the broken memory. The Spinners had answered my prayer. They were leading me. And now it was time to follow.
I didn’t look back, walking straight into the trees toward Hylli until the camp disappeared behind me, glancing up every few steps to keep an eye on the All Seer above. He flickered in and out of view, vanishing behind thick branches and then appearing again against the lambent, cloud-covered sky.
The moon’s path curved overhead as the hours passed and I was swallowed up by the belly of the bottomlands, feeling alone for the first time since the Svell Tala found me on that beach. No Jorrund whispering in my ear or eyes trailing over my Kyrr-marked skin.
He would know as soon as he woke that I was gone.He’d be frantic, afraid. And though I didn’t want to care or worry for him, a very small part of me still did. He was a fragile soul, even if he didn’t know it, built on the power he’d stumbled upon the day he found me. But that power was now slipping through his fingers with each breath, leaving only the man who’d lied to keep from losing his tight grip on everything around him.
I’d been a fool to believe that I belonged with Jorrund. I knew that. In fact, I’d always known. But I’d never had anywhere else to go. He’d come looking, but he wouldn’t find me.
This time, I was really gone.
I walked. I walked until I couldn’t feel anything. My skin numbed in the icy rain, my hair and clothes soaked through. The forest was so quiet, my footsteps pulsing in an echo against the trees as each one hit the ground. I walked until the bones of my feet ached inside my boots. Until my arms were weak from carrying the weight of my skirts. Until my eyes were so heavy that the All Seer’s shape was a blur against the dark night sky. Halvard’s face was the pull that swept me through the forest, coming in and out of focus in my mind. He was the one I owed something to now. The only fate that mattered.
Vigdis was right. I should have died out on the empty sea, but the Spinners had bound my fate to the young Nadhir from the glade. They’d wound our paths together for some purpose I couldn’t understand. It was carved into the Tree of Urðr. Written on my soul. And it was the one thing I wasgoing to do right. It was the one thing I was going to do on my own.
And with that single thought, I suddenly wanted to see him. I wanted to be near him, like I was beneath the gate in Utan. The whispers seemed to flutter back to life in the back of my mind, the sound of them melting into the wind and the sway of the trees.
A crack of light split the darkness ahead and I stopped, hugging my skirts tighter to my chest. The scent of the sea met me, the churn of water and the slip of cold rocks breaking the empty silence. I came through the edge of the forest, into a gust of cool, salty air. It hit my face with the moonlight and before me, the black, sleeping fjord unfurled. It foamed white on the shore, my boots at the edge of a cliff that dropped straight down to a rocky beach below. The sound of it swelled and spilled over, washing out everything else until I could feel the hiss of whispers on my skin. The click of tongues on teeth.
And I knew before I looked up that he’d be there. I knew it the way I knew the weight of the stones around my neck.
I blinked, my gaze following the edge to the feet that stood down the cliff, the moonlight on his white tunic a faint glow. It pulled around him in the wind, his hair blowing across his forehead. And when I looked up into his face, Halvard’s eyes were on me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HALVARD
I could feel her. Like the creep of silent fog winding through the trees.
The Truthtongue stood like a ghost against the night, her skin white as frost beneath her black dress. She looked down to the water below, dropping her skirts from where they were bundled in her hands, and they blew back behind her like unfolded raven’s wings.
I blinked, expecting her to disappear the way she had that night in the forest. The way she had before the altar fire, the vision of her vanishing like smoke. But she didn’t. She stilled before she looked up, her hands tucked against her chest as her eyes met mine. And the same feeling that had come over me in Utan returned, like needles moving over my skin. It was something I’d never felt before the day I’d seen her in the glade, but now, it was becoming familiar. It was becoming something I recognized.
I looked past her, to the trees, as I pulled the knife from my belt. “Are you alone?” My voice was lost in the wind shooting up the cliff.
She stood frozen, as if she expected me to disappear, too. “Yes,” she said, stepping back from the cliff’s edge.
Her eyes fell to the knife in my hand. The braids that fell over her shoulder were almost completely unraveled, the pieces falling into her face and dripping with rain. I tried not to watch the way it ran in rivulets over her skin.
The length of her dress snapped in the wind, her fingers twisting into the ends of her hair at her waist. I lifted a hand between us slowly and her lips parted on a breath as I caught her wrist and pulled her toward me. And she was real. Not like the spirit I’d seen in the forest. The back of her hand was cut through the middle of the mark of the yarrow inked there and her skin was ice cold, but she was flesh and bone before me. And still, there was something haunting about her. Something more shadow than light.
“You’re really here,” I said, letting go of her.
She closed her hand into a fist, covering the mark where I’d touched her with her fingers as she took a step back.
“What are you doing here?” I said, moving forward to close the space she’d put between us.
“I came to tell you…” But she didn’t finish, her feet shifting nervously as she tucked the unwoven hair behind her ear. She pulled my axe from her belt and held it out to me. Its blade was almost completely covered in mud.
