“So it’s all about you, Signy.” His voice is hollow; he leans away from me.
My guts go cold and I shove the hot chocolate away from me. “That’s not—not what I mean. Only that it’s connected. The Tree, Baldur, trolls, the riddle. Knotted together in Fate’s weave.”
He stands, hands pressed to the table, to loom over me. “You like thinking that. You like to believe it all has meaning, some grand meaning, so there’s what? A good reason they died? If they were meant to die, you didn’t do anything wrong! You just did what you were fated to do.”
I don’t know how to respond, and so I only stare at him. The silence between us turns stuffy.
Rathi’s shoulders slump. “I shouldn’t attack you. They loved you. I love you. It’s just, they always followed your news, wanted to hear from you, but you never wrote or called. You were a skit daughter, Sig, and they didn’t care. Last year, after you left me, my dad said, ‘Signy’s too big for us, son.’ And I hated you because I wanted them to think I was big enough to match you.”
My skin crawls with regret and I hug myself, knowing there’s only one way to make this feeling go away. “I swear to you, Rathi Summerling, I won’t let their sacrifice be in vain.”
“That’s something Odinists are good for.”
Because Rathi doesn’t want to look at me at the moment, I grab my bag and tell him to use the tower. It’ll make a good base of operations for the Freyan rebuilding process, and I certainly won’t be returning. He runs a hand through his hair, leaving furrows in the gel, and pulls his face down, but doesn’t argue.
I trek back to town to get the truck, throw my hiking bag into the passenger seat, and take off.
I begin hunting at the meadow where the Mad Eagles found us, where they cut through so many trolls and the mother escaped. All the broken pieces of stone have been collected, sent off to some lab for study or smuggled into a black market or put on display in a roadside museum. I walk the length of it, hand sweating on the pommel of Unferth’s sword as I remember the shudder of wind and roaring and sticky sweet smell of their breath.
In the west, I find sign of a single troll shoving through the tree line. And a chunk of iron with a hole bored through: a piece of her great bone-and-iron collar.
The troll mother fled this way, alone by the looks of it.
I drive to high ground over access roads that are mostly mud and slush. With binoculars I study the shadowy pattern of broken trees, tracing her path for a half kilometer before she came out again onto stony moor and I can’t see obvious sign. This island is over a hundred thousand square kilometers. Pocked with giant lakes, mountains, and moors, it could take years to explore on foot, and the roads barely cover ten percent of it. I’ve set myself an impossible task.
But I won’t give up so fast. The Mad Eagles searched with heliplanes; they couldn’t see the smaller signs from the air, like mismatched lichen patterns or smoke stains, that I’ll be able to find if I’m methodical and on the ground.
So the tedious driving begins. The truck crawls down the coastal road and I peer carefully to either side, every half kilometer getting out to walk the edges and go into the stunted pines a little bit. The caribou haven’t come back to this northern finger of the island yet—whether from the cold or the recent trolls and military heliplanes, I couldn’t say. I don’t know much about the non-troll fauna of Vinland except that there are arctic hares and foxes, lemmings, squirrels, and little brown bats, but no snakes. And that I need to be on the lookout for wolf scat. Rome told me some of the wild dogs out here were descended from dire wolves within two or three generations.
Birds flit everywhere during the day, and much of the grass is pushing up new shoots. The evergreens leak sap, and the creeks run hard with snowmelt. There are ponds and lakes everywhere, winking in the sun, a few with ice still staining the edges. If my heart wasn’t so sore this would be lovely. If I wasn’t so alone.
At night I sleep in the truck, curled in blankets and trying desperately not to think of Unferth. He mutters in my head sometimes, rules for troll hunting, reminders not to neglect to look up high or take into account rockslides. I whisper back to him poetry and riddles I make up on the spot. I want to ask him what she meant when she said Your heart back to me, as if she’d been looking for me, too. But most of all I walk long and hard; I don’t let myself rest, so when the sun falls I’m exhausted.
It doesn’t stop the dreams. The troll mother hunts me as I hunt her. She moves gracefully even in the daylight, circling me like a shadow, near enough so at nightfall she can creep closer to watch me sleep. Her moon-bright face stares at me all night, and she sinks into the earth itself when the sun rises. I wake repeatedly, scanning the forest in terror, and take to parking in open spaces. It feels as though the entire world hangs from the tension between us.
The second day, and again on the fifth, I do find sign of her: an ashy clawed handprint smeared down the side of a cliff near Plum Point. It’s the nearest place to Canadia, and a ferry runs twice daily over the summer. The town has about fifty permanent residents, none of whom have seen her. There are no additional prints on the muddy gray beach, though I scour it for hours. I wonder if she stood there at the base of the rocks considering a return to Canadia, if I’m going to have to buy a ticket on the next ferry. But there right along the highway, I find a row of baby pines has been bent clear in half as if she turned inland again. Why?
Three times at the end of my first week I see sign of lesser trolls, which makes no sense, as they’ve never been on Vinland before. Cat wights and iron eaters tend to follow human populations, and Vinland has never had much of one. But the bright orange scat of the iron eaters is unmistakable, and cat wights mark their territory with an acrid scent as well as by braiding tiny fences in the grass.
Eight days into my hunt, I stop abruptly an hour before sunset, because there’s another car on the road. A small SUV, shiny and new under a layer of Vinland mud. New Scotland plates and nothing else to distinguish it other than being out on this gritty access road halfway down the western coast of a nearly uninhabited island. Frowning, I unsheathe Unferth’s sword and approach on foot.
Before I get to the SUV, a shrill scream darts from the valley to my left, like a jaguar or panther in the movies. It’s returned by another, and then more and more, pitching up like monkeys worked into a frenzy. Lesser trolls.
I hesitate for the briefest second before diving between the trees.
Needles and twigs whip my face and I ignore them, sword at the ready, boots skidding over fallen pinecones and the wet ground. The screaming draws me to a surprising grove of aspen, glowing like bones in the late evening light. A huge crack shatters the air as a man breaks off a thick tree branch. He swings it like a bat at a cluster of furry, dark cat wights, roaring loudly.
At least thirty wights harry him, three on his back, cackling gleefully as he swats at their cousins. Claws rip his shirt, tear at his short dark hair, and he opens his mouth to rage. He kicks and spins, catches them with his aspen-tree club. One splats against another tree; there’s the slick pop of breaking bones, screams, and more wild laughing. They die fast, but more come, all huge eyes and tiny claws, matted fur and fangs and curling cat tails.