Obsidian Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Sea Paths: Book I of the Book of Bera Trilogy

  To my life support team:

  Richard, Maud, Teddy and Raine

  ‘I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snow fields, but across the storm-white sea… I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three…’

  — Ernest Shackleton

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Supporters

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Hands are close to her face; the rust of blood. There is no pain like this. The known world convulses and a dark tunnel presses her in an agony of spasms. She is suffocating. The earth tilts; shifts. There is only a woman’s face preventing her passing through the gateway to Hel. She can already smell it, close. Brymstone and blood. The woman’s hands. Not safe at all.

  ‘Breathe,’ says the woman.

  ‘Can’t…’

  ‘Yes, you can. Come on. For me.’

  That voice. That’s something to hold on to. But who? No time to remember. There is something dark here, something wrong. Life blurs as the ground rocks. This new, bad pain makes her pant, turns her inside out. Lights flash; a sequence of sparks that mark the places where the earth’s crust is tearing apart, that feel like the start of a megrim.

  ‘I’m dying!’

  Her death throes ripple out over the land, under the sea and sky, making ruin the—

  A scream tears her head wide.

  ‘Push!’

  Bones crack. Her hips yawn wide as the Skraken’s jaw. The echoes are making the mountains ring, quickening in her body that is the earth. Far beneath her, fire rages, cracking the ice cap on the tallest and blowing a cloud of ash up, up towards the pitiless stars. Now liquid fire swarms downwards, coiling like a serpent; white-hot metal. A terrible beauty…

  ‘Push, Bera!’

  ‘Like a blacksmith pouring…’

  ‘Shush, sweetheart, here’s the head! Gently now.’

  Bera pushes out in a long, gaping wail. She is all mouth, like Hel herself. Lightning flickers, light, dark; death, life. Liquid fire, travelling fast. Past or future? Bad now but—

  ‘Worse is to come.’ Poison. Blackness. ‘I must protect them.’

  Gently does it. Her skern is swaddling her tight as a shroud. His lips are fire.

  ‘I’m dying!’

  The earth thrashes, whipping the floor like a serpent’s tail. It sends the woman – is it Sigrid? – staggering, swearing. That’s real enough. Then a flaming gush, a rush, and the world dissolves in a choking billow of ash, with flying sparks and blazing blocks of red-hot stone spewing up into the air before raining blackly down. The red sun is hidden and a curtain of fire spans the whole horizon and up beyond sight, making the dark weave of time crackle with terrible knowledge.

  This is their future.

  ‘We will all die.’

  Her skern is cleaving to her, as they had been in the womb: twin souls floating in space and time before the agony of birthing. Ash is falling, swirling like squid ink in buttermilk, coating grass and leaves. Everything turning black and sticky, withering, and starving cattle will become dry bones for the wind to whistle into oblivion.

  ‘Are we dead already?’

  No, dear one. Look!

  In the corner of her eye is a small skern.

  Sleep now. Your baby girl is here, safe and sound.

  1

  Dusk is a strange time: a blankness when light is removed but nothing takes its place. It is an absence, a robbing of the senses of what they use to navigate through the world. Sight is dimmed and smell betrays. Bera planted her feet on the earth, trying to get a sense of it but it was like iron; she was welded to the soil by ice. Here she stood in an empty landscape, made untrustworthy by a vision. It had no history. No ancestors. No answers. And dusk came early here.

  Bera forced herself to walk into the ruins of an earlier homestead, facing her fear. Perhaps they should have mended these huts and stayed here over winter but the stones held a creeping sadness, like the slow breath of the coned mountain that dominated the valley. She was changed – by the land and by the baby. Her thoughts were brittle, her skill at scrying gone. Her own body had betrayed her.

  ‘Was I right to bring them to Ice Island?’

  No answer from her skern. Bera longed for the reassurance of his voice, absent in this unreadable land. Was the baby inside her keeping him away? She dared not think he had gone for good.

  Back home, their dreaming mountains, carved by the gods, were eternal. Here, the tallest peaks were tricksters, vanishing in a moment and seeming to be closer when they returned. Everything shifted: the very ground she stood on was trembling like an anxious deer and the fires in her vision were always before her eyes. The birthing, mixed with the land’s terrible upheaval, were ahead. She feared she would not be strong enough when the time came.

  There was a sharp pain and then dull aches rolled around her hips. Bera put her hands over the swell of the baby. The pains came and went as mysteriously as the earth’s trembling. Perhaps the child wanted to be born in the next instant, although sometimes she was so quiet that Bera feared she was dead. She refused to ask Sigrid what the pains might be. She didn’t need her skern to tell her she was afraid of the answer. She feared for her baby’s life – but at the same time feared the birth of another Valla, perhaps with greater powers than her mother. Was this why the vision frightened her so much?

  Time to get home, if that was what the makeshift buildings could be called, as patched and ragged as a pedlar’s clothes. Was that one, now?

  A figure stood on a rise above the ruins, a darker greyness in the gloom. Watching her.

  She was a Valla, like her mother and grandmother and all the long line of Vallas through the ages, like beads on the necklace that was their emblem and gift. But the next, about to be born, was already stealing Bera’s courage.

  She ran for home.

  Dellingr had started to roof the new covered way, so she slipped round the other way to avoid him, running past the back of the new byre and latrine. When she came round the corner, puffing, he was there, sorting stones.

  ‘You should be resting,’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘When did you last work like a smith?’

  ‘When I last had iron.’

  ‘You have tools to sharpen.’

  She was goading him into – what? Once she would have liked watching his tidy strength and respected a smith’s old magic. Together they were strong. But that was before. Without iron, he was less the man.

  As she was less the Valla. She t
hought about the lone figure watching her.

  ‘Have you seen anyone?’ she asked.

  ‘Other settlers? Up past the forge there’s only the big farmstead. I’ve only seen the smoke, mind. Other smoke trails sometimes.’

  ‘There are too many hollows,’ Bera said. ‘Places are hidden. I like knowing what’s around us. How do we know who might be watching us?’

  ‘We don’t, not being in the open, down here.’ He spat on his hands and rubbed them to get the dust off.

  ‘Someone was up there today, above the ruins.’

  ‘Pedlar, maybe? They’ll come with the melt. I said we should have built a longhouse in the ruins. Better protection.’

  Bera started to talk about marshland but he held up a hand.

  ‘You said all that to the others, with winter coming too fast to waste time arguing. Now it’s just you and me and we understand the old ways. Folk have lost faith in you, Bera, but I’m listening. Tell me what you really think.’

  He meant feel, not think, and her body felt the sadness of the ruins.

  ‘Wasn’t it your grandfather who said that stones can soak up things?’

  He nodded. ‘Smiths’ lore: “Stone soaks up Happening to warn the Future.” He always said that and I believe him.’

  ‘That’s it – and that is what is there. Something bad happened – and I was warned. I didn’t want to put our folk in danger.’

  Dellingr touched a stone with his foot. ‘Trouble is, these are the same stones. Have you brought the danger here with them?’

  Her visit to the ruins had not provided an answer.

  Pains woke her. They echoed deep in her hips, like waves rolling round a sea cave. She pulled up her shift and watched the waves rolling over her belly as the baby moved. Sigrid came into the billet to sweep, so Bera stayed hunched over to collect her outer clothes and managed to escape without showing she was hurting.

  ‘I need clean air,’ she called out.

  Sigrid gave her loud, put-upon sniff that declared Bera was avoiding chores.

  Every day when she first went outside on Ice Island its energy came as a shock. There was something in the air here that made the tiny hairs on her neck thrill, especially in the early morning.

  Beyond the yard, two lads were passing with nets.

  ‘Going fishing?’ she asked.

  ‘You coming?’

  She shook her head. Too much pain to go fishing. ‘Heggi might, if you wait.’

  They didn’t stop. Bera wondered why her son found it hard to make friends with other boys. A small bundle of blond fur came rampaging into the yard, tumbled over, saw Bera and scampered across to seize the laces of her boot and tug. She laughed and swept the puppy up for a kiss. They studied each other. The pup’s bright blue eyes were full of mischief and filled her own head with its carefree joy. The pains were gone.

  ‘You’re like thistledown.’ Bera pushed her nose into the fluff of fur. ‘Who’s a sweet baby poppet?’

  The pup seized her plait in needle-sharp teeth, not like thistledown at all, and pulled it across Bera’s eyes.

  ‘You’ve got your hands full there,’ said a woman unhelpfully.

  She freed herself in time to see the woman’s flickering sneer. It was the farmer’s wife, Drifa, with her two cronies.

  ‘You’ll be due any day now, the size of you,’ one of the women said.

  Drifa nodded. ‘You know what they say, “One out, one in.” I wonder which of us will die when the bairn’s born?’

  Bera was angry. ‘The fishwives never took pleasure in it, Drifa!’

  They jabbed the midden pigs with sticks to make them squeal, and went off laughing. Their pleasure in cruelty sickened Bera.

  Heggi strolled out of the byre. ‘She’s teething.’

  ‘I can feel that. Ouch! She’s your pup, Heggi, do something.’

  He scuffed at the straw. ‘Sigrid says it’s too much work, what with all the building.’

  ‘I didn’t mean fetch Sigrid.’

  The small creature clasped her face with tiny claws and licked her.

  Heggi took her. ‘Sigrid told me not to let her near my face.’

  ‘The pup’s hardly weaned. She smells like… warm hay and honey.’

  ‘Toasted flatbread and milk.’

  ‘Skyr and biscuit.’

  He gently put the puppy down and she tucked her bottom in and hurled herself round the yard, leaping up to bite anything that dangled. One piece of tarred rope was a prize and she made off with it, then flumped down to triumphantly chew it. One ear always stood up, while the other, with darker fur, stayed flopped over one eye.

  ‘Her ears are too big for her,’ Heggi said, smiling fondly.

  ‘She’ll grow into them,’ Bera said. ‘I think she’s the spit of her father. Where is Rakki?’

  He waved vaguely towards the forge huts. ‘Farmer’s wife is cross.’

  ‘Drifa?’ Perhaps that was why she made the pigs suffer.

  ‘She says it’s given her too much work when we’re all trying to settle and too much to be done and most of it by her and if there were thralls it would all be better.’ He mocked Drifa’s sneering voice, making Bera laugh.

  Sigrid thought Drifa had bedded a farmer to make sure she could get a passage on Hefnir’s boat. Farmer had blood-lines all over his cheeks and nose and deserved her. Bera winced with a sudden pain.

  ‘Is that the baby?’ Heggi whispered.

  He was frightened Bera would die, like her mother. Like his mother, too. They both had reason to be afraid, and she kissed away his frown.

  ‘Does Drifa know…’

  ‘It was Rakki? She ought to. The other pups all look like the farm bitch. I told her it was most probably a dog from the big farmstead.’

  ‘Drifa won’t like being reminded there’s a farm bigger than theirs.’

  ‘That’s why I said it.’

  ‘Drifa could count their toes and come after us for the brood debt.’

  ‘Paws don’t prove they’re Rakki’s pups. The farmer might have a puffin hound too.’

  ‘They might not have puffin hounds on Ice Island.’

  He shrugged. ‘They soon will, if Rakki keeps this up. He’s gone off again.’

  They laughed and went back inside, with the pup chasing them.

  Bera poured some skyr. ‘Have you been up there then? The big farm?’ She tried to sound breezy.

  The pup lunged for the drink and Heggi pushed his beaker away.

  ‘Too much snow up there. There’s a frozen lake near it and I was skating once and met a man on a horse.’

  ‘Had you seen him before?’ Bera was careful not to let her dart of fear make the man sound exciting.

  Heggi waved his hand. ‘He most probably lives up there. I’ve seen him in the distance. He waves and smiles and he’s got a lovely horse and wears a funny big hat. I fell over laughing.’

  It would be good to have a friendly neighbour, with spring coming. Perhaps one who could help if the Serpent King’s vow to hunt them down became real.

  ‘Was the horse in the hat?’ she teased.

  Heggi grinned. Bera loved him so much that her jaw ached from wanting to bite him.

  He stroked his pup’s ears. ‘I’m going to call her Tikki.’

  ‘That’s a good name.’

  ‘I’m good at naming. I chose Rakki.’

  ‘Some of the boys have gone fishing. Are you going?’

  He studied his skyr. ‘I told them where to go. They’ll have to crack the ice. It’s where we go skating, up past the forge.’ He blushed.

  ‘With Ginna?’ Dellingr’s daughter.

  He blanked the question somehow, like his father always used to.

  ‘This man in the funny hat… You don’t go on other people’s land?’

  ‘Water belongs to no one, you always say.’

  Her father was the one for sayings. She hoped Heggi would pay more attention to them than she ever did.

  There were none of Hefnir’s ancestors
to pour venom into her ears as she passed the threshold but Sigrid made up for it. She turned her back on Bera and clanked pails and rattled spoons, smarting about something, that was clear. Bera followed her into the pantry, rootled about in one of the barrels and came up with two wizened apples.

  ‘Want one?’

  When Sigrid made no move she cut the black bits from the less wrinkled of the two and ate the pulp, meady with age, and threw the core outside for the midden pigs.

  ‘Is it the pup?’ she asked. ‘Heggi says you don’t like her.’

  Sigrid gave her a look and then got back to work, brewing the complaint. Bera sat on the long worktop, swung her legs and waited to hear what she had done wrong. A few folk passed through, everyone busy. A woman put down her toddler with his toy and went over to the rough loom they had made of scavenged wood and stones from the beach. She was one of Sigrid’s small band who had boarded the Raven to get stores ashore. They would have starved without quick, brave Sigrid and these women. Her dear friend. She was in her usual layers of wool and fur, as small and round as a felt ball.

  Bera went over to hug her but a rancid smell made her gag.

  ‘What have you got under there, Sigrid? A dead fox?’

  ‘It’s winter, isn’t it?’

  ‘I smelled spring coming, before your stink.’ Bera pinched her nostrils.

  ‘There’s draughts all over. I’ve had a cough, or didn’t you notice that either?’

  ‘And I have no plants to help – as you well know. I put a medicine stick in your bed roll. So what’s the smell?’

  ‘Grease.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘All over my chest. Asa says her mother swore by it.’

  ‘It’s a wonder her mother managed to get herself with Asa if she smelled like you.’

  ‘Well.’

  There was a silence. Bera pulled the last shrivelled apple from her apron pocket and held it out to Sigrid, who made a face.

  ‘Come on, Sigrid, why are you in a huff?’ she coaxed.

  Sigrid bristled. ‘I’m not to be told anything anymore, am I? Wait till you’re at death’s door and then come running!’

  ‘If you were ever here and not up with Asa!’ Bera took some deep breaths. ‘Sorry.’