WHEN BLOODSONG reached the forest, she set the Hel-horse saddle beside an ice-encrusted pine, then sat on the snow, her back against the tree, and removed her left boot. Her ankle was inflamed and swollen. She touched the fevered flesh and felt agony shoot up her leg. She did not think it was broken, but it didn’t matter if it was. She had to keep going. “Garm’s Blood!” she cursed.
Beneath the darkness of her cloak, she opened the spell pouch and found a small, stoppered earthenware jar containing a pain-numbing salve. Her nose wrinkled at the pungent odor. She considered not using the salve, suspicious of all of Hel’s magics. Yet she needed to keep moving, and she could walk faster if fighting less pain. She smoothed on the ointment.
The pain eased slightly. She stoppered the jar, replaced it in the spell pouch, then began the painful job of getting her boot back over the swollen flesh. Many curses later, she succeeded.
She got back to her feet, lifted the Hel-horse saddle onto her shoulder, and resumed her trek through the closely packed trees.
Several miles later, she noticed wolves pacing her, closing in from all sides.
She set down the saddle, opened the spell pouch beneath her cloak, and found the Hel-charm she wanted. She reclosed the pouch and examined the talisman.
Its harmless appearance was anything but comforting to a warrior new to the ways of Witchcraft. It was only a piece of bone to which several tiny scraps of fur had been tied.
She frowned suspiciously at the unconvincing talisman then at the wolves. She drew her sword.
The wolves’ bright eyes gleamed with anticipation. She wondered at their brazen behavior. It was not usually their way to openly stalk a human. But perhaps they sensed her pain and knew she was injured. Or, could Nidhug be in some way responsible?
Hunger or sorcery or both, the reason didn’t matter. She had no intention of becoming the wolves’ next meal.
She transferred her sword to her left hand and held the talisman in her right. Hail killed the Horse by the Lake! Remember! she recited in her thoughts, as Hel had taught her, to spark implanted memories, then sifted through Hel’s Witch-lore. An incantation arose to activate the talisman’s power.
She pointed the Hel-charm toward the nearest wolf. “In the name of Hel, by all the powers of Hel, and in the name of the Fenris Wolf, Hel’s brother, I command you, harm not this servant of Hel!”
The nearest wolf growled low in his throat and edged closer.
Bloodsong cursed, not too surprised, and then tried again. Still the wolves came nearer. She recited the spell a third time. The nearest wolf began his run.
She dropped the talisman and gripped her sword with both hands. The wolf leapt snarling, going for her throat. She met his leap with the blade, splitting his skull, splattering the snow with blood and brains. The beast twitched at her feet, then was still.
“So be it!” she yelled at the remaining wolves. “Witchcraft be damned! Come meet your deaths!”
The silver skull set in the ring on her left hand gleamed, catching her eye.
Another rule of Witchcraft, she suddenly recalled, was that the left hand was the hand of power. That was why Hel had placed the Hel-ring on Bloodsong’s left hand.
She quickly scooped the talisman out of the snow, held it in her left hand, pointed it at the nearest wolf.
Once more, she repeated the incantation. The Hel-ring flickered with purple light. The wolves turned and ran, whining in terror, their tails between their legs.
* * *
The last few miles to the crossroad on the frontier were the worst as, eyes on the rapidly setting sun, Bloodsong Freyadis Guthrun’s Daughter pushed herself to the limits of her endurance, determined to reach her goal in time to conjure another Hel-horse.
Her face streamed sweat in spite of the cold. Her swollen ankle burned with agony. Each breath was a gasp of pain. Yet she moved faster until she nearly ran.
Mere moments before sunset, she stumbled out of the dense forest into the crossroad. Startled ravens roosting in a nearby tree took flight, squawking angrily at being disturbed. A half-eaten corpse hung by a rope around its neck from the vacated tree.
Bloodsong dropped the saddle, knelt in the center of the crossroad, dug in the spell pouch, found the three splinters of bone from the Hel-horse’s skull, and placed them on the snow in front of her. She made sure the bones were in shadow to prevent any damage from the remaining sunlight. She extracted a small ritual dagger from the pouch. A grinning silver skull on the dagger’s black handle gleamed in the weakening sunlight as she drew the rune-blade from its sheath.
Hail killed the Horse by the Lake! Remember! she mentally recited and found the implanted Witch-lore she needed.
Holding the dagger in her left hand, she used the point to draw a large ring in the snow around the shards of bone. She quickly cut Runes in the snow around the rim of the circle, ending with an Ehwaz Rune in the circle’s center.
Focusing all her concentration upon the complex ritual she now had to perform before the sun finished sinking below the horizon, she stood and began the conjuration with a Runic chant to raise the powers of Hel to her aid.
* * *
Hidden in the trees lining the intersection of the narrow forest trails that formed the crossroad, two watchers silently studied the tall, black-clad woman. Her presence chilled them and made the very air seem to grow colder. Her warrior’s weapons dismayed them. Both were glad that the shadowy hood of her shaggy black fur cloak covered her head, and both felt an irrational fear that she might throw back the hood and reveal her face.
Their terror of the strange woman grew as she stood with her back to them, arms outstretched, fists clenched, intoning strange chants. But still the two watchers stood their ground, certain that at long last, after days and nights of fruitless watching and waiting, they had finally found a Witch.
* * *
Bloodsong turned slowly through a circle, nearly finished with the conjuration. Spirits of the west and south winds had been called upon. The spirits of east and north remained. A scream rang out. She dropped into a crouch and drew her sword. Nothing stirred in the twilight gloom. But from nearby, within the deeper shadows of the trees, came a frightened whimpering, as if of children.
Bloodsong waited, ready to fight.
The whimpering continued.
“Are there children there? Come out if there are. I won’t hurt you.”
The whimpering faltered an instant, then began again, louder.
“If this is a trick, a trap, spring it, curse you! Come into the crossroad!” Bloodsong glanced uneasily on all sides. Then it hit her. After all her effort and pain to reach the crossroad in time, her conjuration of the Hel-horse had been ruined and could not be repeated until the next sunset. Without a Hel-horse, she might well be doomed and her daughter with her.
“Garm’s Blood!” she cursed. “Whoever or whatever is there, show yourself, or I will—”
Whimpering with terror, two small shapes moved forward out of the shadows a few steps.
“Closer,” Bloodsong ordered, not trusting appearances.
The two advanced a few more steps, weeping.
Bloodsong saw that the boy and girl, if that is what they truly were, wore filthy, tattered furs. She judged the boy near Guthrun’s age, six or seven years, and the girl older, nine or ten. They were undoubtedly brother and sister from the similarities in their features and mops of white-blond hair.
“One of you screamed. Which one? And why? You interrupted something very important.”
The girl slowly raised a trembling hand. “Punish me.”
“No,” the boy whispered. He pointed at himself. “Punish me.”
“No, Mani. I screamed. Punish me.”
“Sol’s wrong,” Mani responded. “We both screamed.”
Bloodsong scanned the forest around her again, still suspicious, half expecting the children’s forms to become something monstrous and deadly.
“But I screamed first, Mani continued, “so,” his voice broke, “punish me.”
“If you really are children, I’ll not be punishing anyone. But why scream at all? If you’d just been silent a few moments more—”
“Your skull-face.” Mani sobbed. He buried his face in his hands.
“My what?”
“In your hood.” Sol whimpered. “It was glowing.”
“I don’t understand.” Bloodsong pushed back the drooping hood of her cloak.
The children gaped at her. “But,” Sol said, “there was a skull! I saw it!”
Bloodsong felt sick. Something had happened while she was doing Hel’s Witchcraft. The magical half of Hel’s face, the dead half, must replace her own when she used Witch-powers. She had not been warned about that. What other effects of Hel’s Witchcraft had been kept secret from her? Hel laughs last, she remembered again.
Bloodsong decided there was no trap. She sheathed her sword. “Go home, children.” She turned and limped back to the Rune-circle in the snow. She knelt, picked up the three shards of bone. She replaced them in the spell pouch then looked around. The children had not moved.
“Go on,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Your mother and father must be worried. It’s getting dark.”
“There’s no one at home.” Mani scuffed the snow with the toe of his boot.
“Our father died a year ago,” Sol explained. “Plague. And now, our mother—” Sol’s voice trailed away.
“But you are a Witch?” Mani asked.
“Of sorts.”
“Our mother told us Witches worked magic at crossroads,” Sol said. “So we waited.”
“And you came!” Mani added.
“How long since you have eaten?” Bloodsong asked. “I don’t have much, but—”
“We are used to hunger,” Sol shrugged and put an arm around Mani’s shoulders.
“Just help our mother!” Mani pleaded.
“Is she sick? Has she had an accident?”
“Our mother told us a story once, about a Witch who knew how to wake the dead.”
Bloodsong felt uneasy. “Go on.”
“Soldiers came to our hut a week ago,” Mani said. “They wanted children to put in their slave cage.”
“Mother hid us and wouldn’t tell them where we were,” Sol added. “Not even when they made her cry.”
“They made her cry to death!” Mani wiped at his eyes. “But now she can wake up!”
“Please?” Sol begged. “We would have asked Norda Greycloak, but the soldiers took her away.”
“Norda Greycloak?”
“The Witch who lives to the south,” Mani said.
“You’re our only hope!” Sol insisted.
Bloodsong looked from one to the other. Only a God or Goddess could do what the children wanted. “Where is your mother?” Bloodsong quietly asked, already guessing the answer.
Mani pointed to the corpse hanging from the tree.