He gave me a sip of water. I gestured for more, but he withdrew it after I had barely wetted my lips. He rested his head against one palm and stared at me for a time. Then he said:
‘I think you will die. A fever, most likely.’ He turned away, stirred the fire, then looked back to me once more. ‘I will give you a little food and water. I do not have much and I will not waste it. If you live a week, I will give you more. Do you understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘Do not foul this cave. Call me when the need takes you and I will carry you out.’ He paused. ‘It is a long time since I have shared a place with anyone. I will try to remember. But do not test me.’
Blackness came again – as swiftly as river ice breaking, cold dark water swallowing me. When I woke again, he had not seemed to move.
‘You are an outlaw?’ I said.
‘You think that a free man would choose to live in this place? You are as well, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
He leaned forward, close enough for me to smell the stink of his breath. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he said.
‘I do not know you. Are you from the north?’
He leaned back, seemingly satisfied. ‘Yes. And you have come from the west?’
‘I lived in the south, once. Then in the west.’
‘And now, here.’ He leaned back against the wall of the cave and his eyes followed the dancing flames. ‘My name is Thoris. They call me Kin-slayer.’ He paused. ‘You know me now, I think.’
I had heard the story. ‘You killed your brother,’ I said.
‘Yes. I killed my brother. I wanted to marry his wife.’
He lapsed into silence. There was nothing else to be said. For a man may kill for many reasons. To answer an insult, to take revenge, to avoid shame. For silver or land or power. But our people hold no honour in killing for love.
‘When I found you. Whose blood was on you?’ he asked.
‘A man who hunted me.’
‘An enemy, then.’
‘No. I would not call him that.’
‘You gave him a warrior’s death?’
‘No. I left him maimed in the storm.’ I turned my head away.
‘You need feel no shame,’ he said. ‘Not here. That is the secret men like us know.’
‘What secret?’
‘That there is nothing we will not do. Eat a man, kill a child. I have seen the outlaws do it all, and worse. To survive.’
Exhaustion came over me and I knew that soon I would have to sleep again. I lifted my hands towards the fire – not for the heat, but to look upon them.
The fingers of my right hand were pure white. On the left, they were grey and black at the tips. Both were utterly unfeeling.
He noted them and said, ‘I will help you, when a week has passed.’
‘If I live.’
‘If you live.’ Then, almost shyly, he asked, ‘When will you be able to sing?’
‘Soon,’ I promised.
For the first time I saw a smile dance across his lips. Just for a moment, like a falling star, and then it was gone.
The fever came, as he said it would. Days of waking madness and nightmares in the dark. Despite his instructions, I fouled myself time and time again in the dark. And I remember him screaming at me, striking me about the face, dragging me out to the mouth of the cave, where I used snow and rags of cloth to scrub myself clean. The fever filled me with a feeling like hate, a mad, screaming hatred. But it could not kill me.
I came through it as thin as cattle at the end of winter: hollow-bodied, bones sharp against the skin. I could see Thoris look doubtfully on me. Yet I could feel, deep within me, that it was not my time to die. I have seen men and women die of sickness, and they have always known, sometime before the end, that it was coming. I knew that I wanted to live. I thought of Sigrid and I knew that I would live.
My right hand had returned to life, though the pain of it had been like nothing I had ever known. Even in the depths of the fever, when all else was lost to me, I could feel the burning of those fingers coming back to life. Yet on my left hand, the hand that had held the knife, there was nothing. They grew soft once more, but no feeling returned to them and they gave no motion. They had turned from grey to black.
I did not know how many days it had been since he had found me in the snow. Perhaps it had been a week, perhaps longer. But on that day, when he came back from his morning’s foraging, he gave me a piece of his flatbread. Just a small piece, but always before he had eaten, then left once more, without offering me anything. He had given me food in the evenings alone, leaving only a bucket of snow that would melt to drinking water in the day.
On that day, when the heat of the fever was falling from my skin, I felt a different kind of warmth. There was no fire in the cave and yet beneath me I could feel that the stone was warm to the touch.
‘Is this magic of yours?’ I said.
‘It may be magic. But it is not of my doing. I do not possess the art.’ He leant down and spread his fingers across the stone. ‘Perhaps something sleeps down there. A dragon or some other beast. And while it sleeps, we may live. And if it wakes, we die.’
‘I will speak softly, then, so as not to wake it.’
‘No. You will sing loudly. Let it wake. What does it matter?’ He paused. ‘How long are you outlawed for?’ he said.
‘Three years.’
He turned his head from me. ‘I am glad for you,’ he said. For I had heard that he had been outlawed for the rest of his life.
‘How long have you been out here?’ I said.
He did not reply. I waited, for I had learned that after spending so long alone, he was accustomed to silence. Many were the times I would ask a question, hear nothing from him, only to receive an answer hours or days later.
‘Seven years now.’
‘You did not think to go abroad? Why did you stay?’
‘A woman. The woman I killed my brother for. She came with me, to this place. This was our home.’
I looked around the cave for some trace of her.
‘She died,’ he said. ‘A fever. Three years ago. She was why I have survived longer than any other. I have seen many outlaws come and go. Stronger men than me, better hunters, better thieves. And they all die. For what else is there for a man to do in a place such as this? What else is there to do but die?’
‘They kill themselves?’
‘No. But they grow forgetful. They do not prepare enough for winter. They wander openly in farmlands and the hunters find them.’ He tore another piece of bread and gave it to me. ‘They die, without knowing that they want to die.’
‘Do you still have men hunting you?’
‘They still come. Every summer. My kin, bearing the duty of revenge. They have seen me from afar. I expect they will find me, one day.’
‘I have never heard of an outlaw living as long as you have.’
‘There is pleasure in it. To live, when an island of men all wish you dead.’ He smiled that faint, twitching smile once more. ‘I feel powerful.’
I laughed then, as much as I could, hearing his words and looking on the pair of us: half-starved, ragged and filthy. Worse than beasts, for even a horse or a sheep had more protection under the law than we did, and yet he spoke of power.
‘You will see,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you know it already, but choose not to believe it yet. Now tell me, why did you not run? Perhaps you did not have the silver.’
‘A ship waited for me. A captain to take me away.’
‘So why not take it?’
I did not answer.