‘To kill her?’
‘To save her,’ he said. ‘She was fated to die and she knew it. Better quickly, at her daughter’s hand, than after the torments of the Danes. She chose the instrument of her death — you, who she loved. You are no more to blame than if she had used the knife herself.’
‘I wish I could believe it.’
‘Do you think your mother would have wanted this grief for you?’
‘No.’
‘What would she have wanted?’
Adisla looked up into the shining whorls of the night sky. ‘For me to get on with my life, to meet a good man and bear fine sons,’ she said.
Feileg smiled. ‘Then make that your aim,’ he said.
Feileg, she could see, was not a wolf. The shaman had not taken his humanity with his chants and brews. Feileg was a man, plain and simple, someone who had been raised to savagery but who had reclaimed himself from it. He would make a good husband, she was sure, and she would have been proud to be his wife, had the fates put them together before.
The days were short as they travelled through the mountain passes, but when the moon was bright, Feileg pressed on.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asked him.
‘The south,’ he said. ‘The mountains there are like a fold from this sea to the Troll Wall. We will follow the coast as best we can and then use them to steer us to where we want to go.’
Adisla was left breathless by the beauty of the northern winter, of the bleak hills and the blinding plains, though she found the country barren and threatening compared to the softer features of her coastal home. The journey was rough and bumpy, though the sled was warm beneath the furs and she even managed to doze.
They had been travelling for weeks and the snow was thick when the land in the distance seemed to buckle into ridges of black. As they got nearer they saw them, the Troll Peaks, rising up in crests like the gigantic waves of a solid sea. They appeared daunting, though the way to them was easy — the ground frozen solid, rivers turned into roads. Occasionally they came upon a family hut. There were signs of life — or rather lives that had been. No one came to greet them; no dog barked; no child called out. Clothes left in the sun to dry had bleached and rotted before they froze.
Adisla looked at Feileg and shrugged as if to say, ‘What happened here?’
He shrugged back. ‘These hills leak nightmares,’ he said, ‘they always have. Perhaps it all got too much.’
As they moved through the country at the back of the Troll Wall it seemed the leak had become a flood. Everything was abandoned, everything in ruins; not a house was inhabited.
They followed the hills inland, skirting them before climbing up through a narrow valley. In the heavy light of evening wolves howled invisibly from the ridges.
Adisla, who could walk well by now, looked at Feileg in alarm, but the wolfman was calm.
‘They are my brothers,’ he said, ‘and they are welcoming me home.’
He returned their call and Adisla saw them. What she had taken for rocks were animals, now moving down the slope. Feileg smiled and cut the fretting reindeer free of the sled.
‘The animal has served us well,’ said Adisla.
‘They would have him, tied to the sled or free,’ said Feileg. ‘This way he dies free. It is what he was meant to do.’
There was no way out for the reindeer — wolves ahead and behind. It turned one way and then the other, a pattering run forward, a pattering run back. And then it stopped. In a moment the pack was on it.
‘It didn’t even try to run,’ said Adisla.
‘It knew there was no point. Why die exhausted? It’s bad enough to die without being made to work for it.’
‘What are we doing?’ said Adisla.
‘Working for it,’ said Feileg.
‘You sound like Bragi.’
‘Thank you.’ He hadn’t told her the old man was dead. She had enough to contend with.
The wolves fed, and when they had finished Feileg shouldered the tent and they walked on up the pass. The pack followed behind. The mountain in front of them had seemed big from a distance. Close up it was immense, bigger than anything Adisla had ever imagined, an enormous barren sweep of grey and white rising out of the valley floor and disappearing into cloud at the top.
‘If I saw the world tree,’ said Adisla, holding Feileg’s hand and looking up at it, ‘this is how I think it would look.’
‘We are going into it,’ said Feileg.
‘How?’
‘We need to find a wolf trap,’ said Feileg.
Adisla thought of Vali, transformed and starving in that horrible cave. She let go of Feileg’s hand and said no more.
Feileg led the way up the mountain and Adisla’s wound began to pain her. Feileg saw her limping.
‘I can go on my own. It might be better like that.’
‘I’ll stay with you,’ said Adisla. ‘I am linked to you now. I’ll die in this wilderness without you.’
Feileg longed to hold her, to tell her how he felt about her, but he saw the resolution with which she drove herself on, her dedication to the prince, and he concentrated on picking a safe route for the climb.
The lower reaches were easy enough, snowy but not deadly cold as long as you kept moving or had fire. There was even a track winding across the mountain. Adisla had always imagined mountains as unrelenting climbs but this one had frequent breaks in the slope. They scrambled up scree or through fields of boulders, then along ridges where they seemed to go sideways rather than up. As they ascended, the path cut across slopes so steep that Adisla had to dig the butt end of the spear into the snow field to prevent herself sliding off the mountain. The light was bleak and drained of colour. Feileg stopped where the path gave out on a broad area of barren scree, a shoulder in a ridge that went up into ice. In the snowless lee of a big rock there were several pots on the ground, along with two or three bottles.
Feileg picked up a pot and sniffed it. ‘Butter,’ he said, ‘but licked clean by my brothers.’ He took up a bottle and removed the wooden bung.
‘Mead,’ he said. ‘This is as far as normal men can go without being certain of madness. It’s where offerings are left, but no one has collected them. Look!’
He pointed to the side of the track behind them. Adisla saw a dark area.
‘That was a wolf pit, to protect the offerings,’ said Feileg. ‘Men fear the witches, wolves do not. I snapped its spikes.’
‘How do they ever get anything before the wolves?’
‘They have servants, and they take it quickly,’ said Feileg.
Silently, a wolf had come to his shoulder. It nosed the ground before glancing at Feileg and going on. The animal had almost looked as if it was asking for instructions.
They went on, up, up and then down to a valley, up again and down into another valley. Here the land was barren and rocky. A river plunged almost as a waterfall off one side of the hill, tumbling into a wide pool before leading away down the mountain. The wolf with Feileg streaked across towards the pool. Just in front of it he stopped and picked something up in his mouth. Adisla and Feileg followed. The wolf had a human hand, a child’s, in its mouth.
Feileg breathed in. ‘It is near here,’ he said, ‘very near.’
They searched for two days but found nothing. There was little dry wood for the fire, food was running low and Feileg didn’t have time to catch anything — he was scouring the mountain, directing the wolves back and forth like a shepherd with his dogs. Adisla sat in the tent and tried to keep warm, resting her aching leg.