I sniffed back the tears, piecing my face back together as my father nodded in approval. It was what he had taught me—to be strong. To steel myself. He turned back to the field, getting to work, and I followed with Myra, trying to smooth my ragged breath. To hush the waves crashing in my head. We walked toward our camp, collecting the weapons of fallen Aska warriors along the way. I watched my father from the corner of my eye, still unable to shake Iri’s face from my mind.
My feet stopped at the edge of a puddle and I looked at my reflection. Dirt spattered across my angled face and neck. Blood dried in long, golden braids. Eyes a frozen blue, like Iri’s. I sucked in a breath, looking up to the thin white clouds brushed across the sky to keep another tear from falling.
“Here,” Myra called to me from where she was crouched over an Aska woman. She was lying on her side, eyes open and arms extended like she was reaching for us.
I carefully unbuckled her belt and scabbard, piling them with the others before I started on the armor vest. “Did you know her?”
“A little.” Myra reached down to close the woman’s eyes with her fingertips. She gently brushed the hair back from her face before she began, the words coming softly. “Aska, you have reached your journey’s end.”
In the next breath, I joined with her, saying the ritual words we knew by heart. “We ask Sigr to accept your soul into Sólbj?rg, where the long line of our people hold torches on the shadowed path.”
My voice faded, letting Myra speak first. “Take my love to my father and my sister. Ask them to keep watch for me. Tell them my soul follows behind you.”
I closed my eyes as the prayer found a familiar place on my tongue. “Take my love to my mother and my brother. Ask them to keep watch for me. Tell them my soul follows behind you.”
I swallowed down the lump in my throat before I opened my eyes and looked down into the woman’s peaceful face one more time. I hadn’t been able to say the words over Iri’s body the way I had when my mother died, but Sigr had taken him anyway.
“Have you ever seen something like that before?” I whispered. “Something that wasn’t real?”
Myra blinked. “It was real. Iri’s soul is real.”
“But he was older—a man. He spoke to me. He touched me, Myra.”
She stood, shifting an armful of axes up onto her shoulder. “I was there that day, Eelyn. Iri died. I saw it with my own eyes. That was real.” It was the same battle that took Myra’s sister. We’d been friends before that day, but we hadn’t really needed each other until then.
I remembered it so clearly—the picture of him like a reflection on ice. Iri’s lifeless body at the bottom of the trench. Lying across the perfect white snow, blood seeping out around him in a melted pool. I could still see his blond hair fanned out around his head, his empty eyes wide open and staring into nothing.
“I know.”
Myra reached up, squeezing my shoulder. “Then you know it wasn’t Iri—not his flesh.”
I nodded, swallowing hard. I prayed for Iri’s soul every day. If Sigr had sent him to protect me, he really was in Sólbj?rg—our people’s final sunset. “I knew he would make it.” I breathed through the tightness in my throat.
“We all did.” A small smile lifted on her lips.
I looked back down to the woman lying between us. We would leave her as she was—as she died—with honor. Like we did with all our fallen warriors.
Like we’d left Iri.
“Was he as handsome as he was before?” Myra’s smile turned wry as her eyes flickered back up to meet mine.
“He was beautiful,” I whispered.
THREE
I bit down on the thick leather strap of my scabbard as the healer worked, sewing the gash in my arm closed. It was deeper than I wanted to admit.
Whatever Kalda was thinking, her face didn’t betray it. “I can still fight,” I said. It wasn’t a question. And she had treated me after battle enough times to know it.
Myra sighed beside me, though it looked as if she was enjoying it a little. I shot my eyes to her before she could say a word.
“That’s your decision.” Kalda looked up at me through her dark eyelashes.
It wasn’t the first time she had stitched me up and it wouldn’t be the last. But the only time she’d ever told me I couldn’t fight was when I broke two ribs. I’d waited five years to avenge Iri in my second fighting season and I spent a month of it sitting in the camp, cleaning weapons and seething with anger while my father and Myra went out into battle without me.
“It won’t stay closed if you’re using your axe.” Kalda dropped the needle into the bowl beside her before wiping her hands on her bloodstained apron.
I stared back at her. “I have to use my axe.”
“Use a shield in that hand.” Myra glowered, flinging a hand toward me.
“I don’t use a shield,” I bit back at her. “I use a sword in my right and an axe in my left. You know that.” Changing the way I fought would only get me killed.
Kalda sighed. “Then when you tear it open again you’ll have to come back and let me restitch it.”
“Fine.” I stood, pulling my sleeve back down over my swollen arm and trying not to let the wince show on my face.
The Aska man waiting behind us sat down on the stool and Kalda got to work on the cut carved into his cheek. “I heard Sigr honored you today.” He was a friend of my father’s. Everyone was.
“He did,” Myra said through a traitorous smile. She loved to see me embarrassed.
I didn’t know what to say.
He reached up with his fist, tapping me on my good shoulder with his big knuckles as I reached for his shoulder and did the same.
We ducked out of the foul smell of the tent and walked through camp as the sky grew warm with the setting sun and my stomach growled at the smell of supper cooking over flames. My father was waiting for me in front of our fire.
“See you in the morning.” Myra squeezed my hand before she broke off from me.
“Maybe,” I said, watching her walk to her tent. I wasn’t convinced the Riki wouldn’t be back before the sun rose.
My father stood with his arms folded over his chest, staring down into the fire. He had washed his hands and face, but I could still see the blood and dirt clinging to the rest of him.
“Taken care of?” His bushy eyebrows lifted up.
I nodded, raising my scabbard over my head. He unbuckled the axe sheath on my back and took my arm into his hands, inspecting it.
“It’s fine,” I said. He didn’t worry about me often, but I could see it when he did.
He pushed the unruly hair back from my face. I was an Aska warrior, but I was still his daughter. “You look more like your mother every day. Are you ready?”
I gave him a tired smile. If my father believed Sigr sent Iri’s soul to me, I could believe it too. I was too afraid of any other truth that lingered in the back of my thoughts. “Ready.”
We walked side by side to the other end of the camp. I could feel the eyes on me, but my father paid our clansmen no attention, putting me at ease. The meeting tent that served as our ritual house sat at the end of our encampment with white smoke trailing up into the evening sky from its center. Espen stood like an enormous statue beneath its frame, the Tala beside him. Our clan’s leader was the greatest of our warriors, the oldest Aska leader in three generations. He lifted his chin, his fingers pulling at his long beard.
“Aghi.” He called to my father from where he stood.
My father pulled three coins from his vest and handed them to me. He walked toward them, grasping Espen’s shoulder in greeting, and Espen did the same before he spoke. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but his eyes found me over my father’s shoulder, making me feel suddenly unsteady.
“Eelyn.”
I jolted. Hemming was waiting at the gate of the pen.
I pressed the coins into his open hand and he dropped them into the heavy purse hanging from his belt.
He smiled up at me, one tooth missing from the front of his mouth where he was kicked by a horse two winters ago. “I heard what happened.” He stepped over the wall of the pen and grabbed a pale gray goat by the horns. “This one okay?”
I crouched down, inspecting the animal carefully. “Turn him around.” Hemming shifted, pulling the goat toward him, and I shook my head. “What about him?” I pointed to a large white goat in the corner.