Late

“You are late, Rikke.”

She opened her eyes. Candle flames in the darkness. Hundreds of flames, like stars prickling a night sky. Or were they the ghosts where candles once burned, long ago?

“You might be too late.”

A face swam at her. Lank grey hair, and shadows in the deep lines, and candlelight glimmering on the golden wire.

“There is no time left.”

Strong fingers pressed at Rikke’s face, pressed at the sore flesh around her burning left eye, and she grunted, squirmed, but she was too weak to move.

“There must be a price.”

A hand lifted her head, the rim of a cup pressed to her mouth. She coughed on something bitter, shuddered as she swallowed.

“You have to choose, Rikke.”

She felt afraid. Terrified. She tried to twist away but strong hands held her down, held her tight.

“Which will it be?”

The woman reached for her. Something glittered in her hand. A cold needle.

“No,” whispered Rikke, closing her eyes. “This hasn’t happened yet.”

Shivers held her hand. Held so tight it hurt.

“Can’t lose you, Rikke.” The grey stubble on his grey cheek shifted as he clenched his jaw. “Can’t do it.”

“Not planning to be lost.” Her tongue felt all thick and clumsy, she could hardly make the words. “But if I am you’ll get through it. Lost your eye, didn’t you, and you were a good deal closer to that.”

“I’ve got another eye. There’s just one o’ you.”

It was dawn, she thought. Slap and suck of water on shingle. Cold light on rocks streaked with damp. A cobweb fluttered in the breeze, glittering dewdrops dancing.

“You don’t know what I was.” Shivers fussed at that ring with the red stone he wore on his little finger. “I cared for nothing. Hated everything. Came to serve your father ’cause of all the men I hated, he was the one I hated least. I walked in a nightmare.” He shut his eyes. Or the one that could see. The other showed a slit of gleaming metal still.

“You were so sick, then. No one thought you’d last another winter. Your mother dead and your father grieving. So sick, but so full of hope. You trusted me. Me, with nothing in him to trust. You sucked goat’s milk from a cloth, in my arms. Your father said I was the least likely nursemaid he ever saw. Said I brought you back from the brink.” He looked at her then, and a tear streaked from his good eye. “But it was you brought me back.”

“You soft fool,” she croaked through her cracked lips. “You can’t cry. Not you.”

“When I was a boy, my brother called me pig fat, I cried so easy. Then I forgot how. All I wanted was to be feared. But you never feared me.”

“Well, you’re not so scary as they all make out.” Rikke tried to shift, but nothing was comfortable. She felt her eyes drifting closed, and Shivers squeezed her hand so hard it made her gasp.

“Hold on, Rikke. She’s coming.”

“No,” she said, tears stinging her lids. “This hasn’t happened yet.”

Two great stones loomed into the evening, black fingers against the pink sky. Ancient, they were, splattered with moss and lichen, carved with symbols that time had pitted and smudged all meaning from. There was a hint of drizzle in the air and the hair was stuck to Rikke’s face and everything had a watery sheen.

A pair of guards stood by the stones, holding crude spears, so still Rikke took them for statues. As Shivers carried her closer, she saw there was something wrong about them. Misshapen.

“By the dead,” croaked Rikke. “They’re flatheads.”

“That they are,” said Scenn. The hillman stood grinning next to one of the Shanka and it narrowed its already narrow eyes at him while it used a splinter of bone to pick at one huge tooth. “They guard the witch. She can speak to ’em. Sings to ’em, some say. They’re tame. Long as we behave.”

“I always behave,” said Isern, frowning at those two flatheads with her grip tight on the dark haft of her spear. Far as Shanka have expressions beyond just a lot of teeth, these ones seemed to frown back. “Let’s go, then.”

Scenn shook his head. “I go no further.”

“I know you to be many things, Scenn, and most of ’em bad, but I never took you for a coward.”

“Take me for whatever you like, sister, but I know where I belong, and it’s on this side of the stones. My task was to bring you and my task is done. I don’t pretend to be—”

“Shit on you, then, you hill of blubber,” and Isern elbowed him out of their way and strode on.

“Just the three of us.” Shivers grunted as he shifted Rikke higher up his shoulders. Made her feel like a child again, being carried like this, his hands around her ankles. On between the stones and down a steep path through trees. Old, old trees with whispers in their high, high branches and their jealous roots delving deep, deep, knotted like misers’ fingers.

Around a bend and Rikke saw the shore. Grey shingle stretching down to grey water, blurred reflections of the tall trees prickled by rain-ripples. A few strides out, all was lost in a mist, and beyond that Rikke could see nothing, and somewhere a lonely owl hooted at the sunset.

“The forbidden lake,” said Isern. “Not far to go now.”

“Always has to be a mist, doesn’t there?” grunted Shivers.

Isern set off, her boots crunching in the shingle. “I guess nothing looks so magical, d’you see, as what can’t be seen at all.”

“No,” whispered Rikke, closing her eyes. “This hasn’t happened yet.”

Night, and firelight danced on the gathered faces. Withered old faces and fresh young ones. Faces pricked with the swirling tattoos of the hillmen. Faces that weren’t there yet, maybe, or had been there long ago. Rikke could hardly tell today from yesterday from tomorrow any longer. Meat spat and sizzled. The cold, crisp air of the hills on the back of Rikke’s head but the warmth of the fire on her face and she grinned at the simple pleasure of it, snuggled into a smelly old fur.

“I don’t like it,” said Scenn, shaking his great fat head.

“You’ve confused me with someone who’d spare a turd on what you like or don’t,” said Isern.

Two siblings could hardly have been less alike. Isern, spear-hard and dagger-faced with her crow-black hair in a long tangle. Scenn, huge as a house with hands like hams and a face like a pudding, hair shaved back to a red fuzz on his creased scalp.

“Don’t like going up there,” he said, frowning northwards, between the firelit hovels to the archway of crooked branches. “It’s forbidden for a reason.”

“I need you to take us, not voice your opinions. They’re as bloated with wind as you are.”

“You need not be so harsh about it,” said Scenn, kneading at his belly and looking a touch hurt. He frowned over at Shivers. “She’s harsh as a whipping, ain’t she?”

Shivers raised his brows. Or the one he had, anyway. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“She has to go up there and that’s all there is to it,” snapped Isern, harshly. “This girl matters, Scenn. She’s beloved of the moon. I’ve always known it.”

“You’ve confused me with someone who’d spare a turd on what you know or don’t,” said Scenn. “I’m not taking her just ’cause you say so.”

“No, you’re taking her because she has to go.”

“Because she has the Long Eye?”

“Because she has the Long Eye so strong it’s killing her.”

Scenn looked over at Rikke, then. Small, dark eyes he had, but she saw the sharpness in them. Beware of clever men, her father told her once. But beware most of clever men who look like fools. “What do you say, girl?” And he spat a bit of gristle into the fire and pointed at her with the stripped-bare bone. “If you can see the future, tell me mine.”

Rikke leaned forward then, the fur slipping from her shoulders, and she turned her burning left eye on him and opened it wide. He flinched back as she raised her left hand, pointing with her forefinger towards the glittering stars, and spoke in ringing tones her prophecy.

“I… see… you’re going to get fatter!”

Laughter around the fire at that. An old woman with just one tooth laughed so hard she nearly fell over, and a young one had to slap her on the back till she coughed up a shred of meat.

Shivers tapped his ale cup against hers and Rikke took a swig and settled back into her fur. There weren’t a lot of things would bring someone to Slorfa, but they made good ale, the hillmen, her head was dizzy with it. Or maybe that was the sickness of the Long Eye. Hard to tell the difference. Scenn frowned, settling his bulk cross-legged.

“She has a sense of humour, then. She’ll need that, up in the High Places. There are few laughs at the forbidden lake.” He frowned towards Isern again. “Do you really think this little shred of gristle, this little snot with the ring through her nose, is beloved of the moon?”

Isern spat ale in the fire and made it hiss. “What would you know about it, Scenn-i-Phail, who carries our father’s hammer?”

Scenn stuck his beard out at her. “I’d know as much as you, Isern-i-Phail, who carries our father’s spear. Just because he loved you best, don’t think you learned the most from him.”

“You’re joking, you sheep-fucker! Our father hated me.”

“He did. He loathed the guts and face and arse of you, head to toe.” Scenn paused a moment. “And you were his favourite.”

And the two of them burst out laughing together. They might not have looked much alike but their laughter was the same. Mad, cackling peels that sounded halfway to wolves howling while overhead the full moon hung fat and round, and they smashed their cups together and sent up a fountain of ale and drained what was left and carried on laughing.

Shivers watched them, face in shadow. “This’ll be a long month, I reckon.”

“No,” said Rikke, snuggling into that smelly fur and shutting her eyes. “This hasn’t happened yet.”

“Always upwards,” gasped Rikke, shading her eyes against the sun and squinting uphill.

“That’s going into the hills for you.” Isern wasn’t even out of breath. Nothing ever tired her.

“Where are we headed, exactly?” asked Shivers, his boots crunching on the dirt path.

“To the forbidden lake.”

“That much I know. I’m asking where it is.”

“If they told everyone where it was, it wouldn’t be very forbidden, would it?”

Shivers rolled his eyes. Or eye, at least. “Do you have any straight answers, woman?”

“What use are straight answers in a crooked world?”

Shivers gave Rikke a glance, but she was too out of breath to do much more than shrug. “How… do we get there… then?” she asked between her wheezes.

“My brother Scenn knows the way. He is a turd in the shape of a man, but he’ll help. We’ll head to his village first, which is a turd in the shape of a village. Slorfa, they call it, at the head of the valley four valleys on.”

“Sounds… a long way,” muttered Rikke.

“One foot in front of the other will get it done with time.”

“How many brothers do you have?” asked Shivers.

“Eleven of the bastards, and each more like a dog’s arse than the last.”

Rikke raised her brows. “You don’t… talk about ’em much.”

“We all had different mothers,” said Isern, as though that explained the whole business. “My upbringing was less than happy. An ordeal, d’you see? Living through it once was bad enough but had to be done. Remembering it is a thing I aim to avoid.”

Isern stopped on a heap of rocks, and pulled out a flask, and splashed water over her head and some more in her mouth and offered it to Rikke.

By the dead, she was weary. She stood, swallowed water, wiped sweat from her forehead. It was springing out about as fast as she could drink it. Her vest was soaked through. She reeked like a haystack after the rains. The air was cool, but her eye, her eye was always hot. Burning in her head. There’d been a time, she was sure, when she could run and run and never stop. Now a few paces had her panting, and her head pounding, and her sight swimming, ghosts haunting the edges of her vision.

She looked back the way they’d come, out of the hills over the crinkling valleys towards the lowlands. Back down the long miles walked towards Uffrith. Into the past.

“Let’s make some footprints,” grunted Isern, turning back to the steeply climbing trail. “The forbidden lake won’t be coming to us, will it?”

Rikke blew out so hard she made her lips flap and wiped a fresh sheen of sweat from her forehead.

“Need to ride on my shoulders?” asked Shivers. Most folk couldn’t even have told he was smiling. But she knew how to tell.

“Never, you old bastard,” she growled, setting off. “More likely I’ll be carrying you.”

“That I’d like to see,” Isern threw over her shoulder, and stones scattered from the heel of her scuffed boot and down the bald track.

“No,” muttered Rikke, closing her eyes. “This hasn’t happened yet.”

“Found you!” shouted Leo in that piping voice with the strange accent, catching hold of Rikke’s foot and dragging her out of the hay.

She’d soon realised they’d be man and woman grown by the time he found her if she’d stayed in her first hiding place, up among the rafters where the pigeons nested. She’d enjoyed looking down on him hunting around the barn, but when he wandered off to look elsewhere she got bored and dropped down, burrowed into the hay and left one boot sticking out where he could see it. Games are only fun if they’re close, after all.

“Took you long enough,” she said.

He was pretty, Rikke thought, even if he wasn’t the cleverest. And he had an odd manner and talked strange. But being brought up in the Union would do that to a boy, maybe, and for pretty you could forgive a lot.

She was glad he was here, anyway. Nice to have someone her age to play with. She liked to pretend she was happiest on her own, but no one is, really. Her da was always busy having the long talks with the grey-bearded bastards where everyone frowned and shook their heads a lot.

Shivers would tell her stories sometimes, about his travels around the Circle of the World and all the different styles o’ strange folk he’d killed there, but she felt there was something odd about a friendship between a little girl and one o’ the most feared warriors in the North. He said he didn’t mind but she didn’t want to push it.

There weren’t many children in Uffrith and those there were thought she was cursed and wouldn’t come near her on account of the fits. Leo didn’t seem worried about the fits. Maybe he would be once he saw her having one. Specially if she shat herself during, which was more often than not, sadly. But there wasn’t much she could do about that. About the fits or the shits.

Rikke had sworn an oath not to worry about the things she couldn’t change, and she took an oath very seriously. Her father always said there was nothing more important than your word, usually while frowning and shaking his head. It was a shame he frowned so much, ’cause when he smiled it lit the world up.

“My turn to hide!” shouted Leo, and he dashed off, slipped and fell, rolled in a shower of hay dust, then scrambled up and disappeared through the barn door. Made Rikke sad, for some reason, to see him go. So sad.

“No,” she said to herself, closing her eyes. “This happened long ago.”