The High King of Montival: A Novel of the Change - By S. M. Stirling Page 0,64

and a boy gaping openmouthed as he stood with the basket of potatoes he’d been fetching forgotten.

“Well, I could always find work as a woodcutter, I suppose, if this High King job doesn’t work out well.”

Mathilda snorted laughter. “Let’s see what’s for dinner. It’s growing dark and getting cold.”

“Let me guess,” he said. “Roast pork. Blood sausage. And red cabbage and potatoes, and rye-and-barley bread and butter. The savor and the delight of it! To tell you the truth, I’m getting a little tired of that menu.”

She looked at him and made her eyes go wide, putting on the Norrheimer accent that swallowed the “r” and elongated the “a.”

“Ti-aahed of food?”

Ten days later Artos stood in a muddy field and spoke his farewells.

Not least to you, my lady, he thought as he bowed his head to the Norrheimer seeress.

“A very wise man told me, Lady Heidhveig, that if I sought to do the will of the Gods and help men upward through the cycles—by which I think he meant what your folk would call achieving the strength that lay within them—it would arouse a legion of enemies against me. But that I would also find friends and wisdom in unexpected places,” Artos said.

Heidhveig smiled. “You are not the first wanderer to find it so.”

He laid his hand upon the Sword. “This and much else you helped me to, Lady. My thanks, and the thanks of my House and blood for as long as either shall endure.”

“My child, you have returned the blessing,” the wisewoman replied. “Your deeds here are part of our saga now; our people won a great victory through your warning and your help. And now there is a true King in Norrheim.”

Her eyes went blank for an instant with an inwardness he recognized.

The Sight, he thought. Mother has that look sometimes. When she spoke there was a distant note to her voice for a moment.

“And that has laid a fate in the Well of Wyrd that will govern the story of the true folk for many lives of men, and in lands that now seem very distant. Yes, one that will touch the very Gods . . . and I think that a certain One had his hand in that. I will pray to my God to keep an Eye on you, though He scarcely needs encouragement from me!”

Her lips quirked in a rueful grin. “And give my greetings to your mother—from one survivor to another—when you reach home at last.”

“That I will!” he said, smiling in turn, thinking of how her eyes would light. “Forebye the thought of her happiness when she hears that you still live, and of what you’ve built here, is another reason to hurry home.”

He bowed his head as she reached up to him, and twitched as he felt runes being drawn on his brow.

“Raidho . . . and Elhaz . . . to ward your journeying. Sowilo, that you may follow the sun-road to victory . . . Ansuz for Odin’s blessing, and at the end of it, Wunjo for joy . . .”

The syllables vibrated through him, expanding in layers of meaning as they were amplified by the Sword. Then her dry lips brushed his forehead in the kiss he had been half-expecting, and the power she had invoked settled into a hum of protection.

She stepped away, and he saw on her furrowed cheeks the shine of tears.

“Farewell. We shall not meet again in this life.”

Well, and weren’t his own eyes smarting too? Then he heard Edain calling him. He turned, and when he looked back, Heidhveig had gone.

Spring had arrived in the way it apparently always did here—grudgingly, with little of the lush sweet sense of dreamy unfolding he’d grown up with. The temperature was above freezing while the sun was up; there had been rain only a little mixed with sleet several times. Ahead of them the fields stretched in a mottled pattern of old off-white snow and emerging brown mud showing the fall plowing’s clods, a chill silty smell giving notice that Ostara was past and Beltane only a month or so away. Most of the Norrheimers here were the band accompanying their King; they’d made their good-byes earlier. Harberga had done so with a smiling calm, the farewell horn of mead she handed her man steady, but her eyes had been red. A few were here now for a last word, including a girl with hero worship in her doelike eyes who gave Ulfhild a rather