“Things are tight,” Aslaug explained, contemplating the less-than-lavish feast that they’d prepared for their visitor.
“Which is why I’m doing this,” Freya replied, trying not to let her exasperation spill over into discourtesy.
“But no one believes they’ll stay that way,” Britt added. “We’ve always come through the quiet times in the past.”
“There were less of us in the past. And what if the quiet times are growing longer?” Freya was beginning to wish she’d taken this more somber line with the whole gathering.
But it showed no sign of working on her present audience. “Everything’s cyclic,” Hetty declared confidently. “Can you name one thing in nature that goes just one way?”
Freya said, “If one example would be enough to kill us, why would I expect to be able to do that?”
Everyone around the table smiled, trying without success to conceal their amusement. Her words were empty sophistry. Her intentions might be noble, her purpose sincere, but nothing she’d said had been the least bit persuasive.
Freya lay awake between the blankets on the floor of Britt’s guest room. She was close enough to the window that she could see the bright edge of Tvíburi, protruding past the gutter that ran along the side of the roof above her. It was hard to sleep with her brothers fighting, wrestling with each other, mewling and hissing.
When Freya had been a child, she’d been sure that she knew all three as individuals—not by tracking their locations from moment to moment, but by recognizing their idiosyncratic temperaments. But now she was far less confident that this told her anything. If one of the erstwhile subjugated pair succeeded in upending the hierarchy, would she be able to tell the difference, or would the result be indistinguishable to her? She wasn’t even sure that the brothers themselves had any sense of their identity that ran deeper than their awareness of their own current status. If a jealous pretender finally usurped the previous proud-but-wary ruler, would he know or feel anything that his predecessor hadn’t known or felt?
Britt said, “Are you awake?”
Freya rolled over and peered toward the doorway, where her host appeared in silhouette against the gray of the hall behind her. “Yes. What is it?”
“We’re too inbred in this place,” Britt replied.
For a moment Freya thought she was apologizing for her fellow villagers’ lack of foresight, but then a low howl and a palpable thump against the inside of her abdomen reminded her that the fighting had probably not gone unnoticed outside the confines of her body.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked.
“We can’t all stop having children until the geysers return.”
Freya laughed wearily. “No, we can’t.”
“We don’t have a lot of visitors from as far away as you’ve come,” Britt explained. “I tried to get pregnant when I did my Great Walk, but I must have had bad luck.” She shifted tentatively in the doorway.
Freya said, “If you’re resolved to try again now, you’re welcome.” Anything to quieten these idiots down.
Britt approached and knelt down on the edge of the blankets. “I haven’t done this for a while,” Freya confessed.
“Were there any children from the other times?”
“No. But I was young, and I think my brothers were so evenly matched then that they got in each other’s way.”
The two of them worked in silence for a while, trying to get into position, while whoever had won the fight in Freya’s belly moaned impatiently. Britt’s own brothers were quiet, recognizing the nature of the situation, but Freya remained wary; she’d heard stories about women surprised by an unexpected reversal.
Freya closed her eyes and felt the dominant brother begin protruding. She forced herself to relax and let him emerge unhindered. It was uncomfortable at first, from sheer lack of practice, but she’d be unwise to flinch now if she ever wanted to face childbirth.
When something close to half of the brother’s body was inside her, Britt began to sigh. Freya held the woman’s shoulders, bemused as ever by this intimacy in which she was almost, but not quite, a participant. At least there were no embarrassing mutinous tussles to complicate the exchange; whatever their long-term aspirations, the losing pair from the night’s ruckus seemed to have accepted their place, for now.
When it was over, Britt rested her face on Freya’s shoulder while Freya’s brother withdrew, then the two women parted and lay side by side on the blanket.
“Do you know if your own brothers have had children?” Freya asked.
Britt said, “I think so, but I’m not sure. That’s part of what went wrong on my Great Walk—they had to have it their way.”
“That must have been annoying.”
Britt took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted here.”
Freya said, “Well, at least I’ve made one of my brothers happy. If only there were some favor he could do in return.”
Britt snickered. “Plow a field? Help with the harvest?”
“I’m sure there’s a children’s story where someone was in trouble—injured out on the ice… or maybe captured by their enemies?—and they sent their brother crawling off for help.”
She was joking, but Britt didn’t reply. Freya pulled her hand free and turned to face the window. Maybe it was time for some new stories, where Tvíburi wasn’t Tvíbura’s twin, but the mother of her brother’s child.
She closed her eyes. There had to be words that would work, that would make it happen—or at least make it possible. But she hadn’t found them yet.
3
When Freya saw that the fair was in town, she almost turned around and walked back onto the ice. No one would be interested in hearing her talk about the death of their crops when there were far more cheerful diversions to be had.
But the wind was relentless, and she hadn’t eaten for days. Even with the fair competing for the villagers’ time and generosity, they would never refuse food and shelter to a traveler.
The wind whipped gray sand around her feet, stinging her through the cloth of her trousers, and as she reached the first paved street she realized that the dusty barrage was coming from the village itself, not blowing in across the ice. She’d seen this kind of thing a few times before, when the soil that had supported a whole swathe of farmland suddenly lost its ability to cohere. The ring of roads and buildings that encircled the farms was usually enough to act as both a barrier against the wind and a trap for drifting soil, to the point where at least the bulk of it could be contained and brought back to the fields. But there seemed to be some threshold where the over-cropped soil became so loose and light that nothing could be done to hold on to it.
The fair had set up its tents at the western edge of the village, and as Freya trudged around the ring road, the sound of people talking and laughing rose and fell with the wind. Normally, a villager would have stopped to greet her by now and ask where she’d come from, but there was no one in sight. Everyone was at the fair.
She approached the cluster of tents reluctantly. She was tired, and even if she’d been in the mood to spend time gazing at the exhibits she had nothing to offer in payment. All she could do was try to find a corner out of the wind and hope that an observant local would realize that she had no connection to the fair. Freya had never been too proud to accept the kind of hospitality that she’d offer any traveler who came to her own village, but it would be humiliating if she had to explain herself in order to make her situation clear.