Sleep in the Temple Wood, if you must. But don’t return. Not even for the tournament.”
“Do you threaten us, archer?” Dystel asked, baffled.
“No.” Hod shook his head. He had to tread carefully, to ward off but not warn. To pressure but not pique. “I seek only to impart the king’s warning. I seek only to . . . protect you.”
The men were hushed as he departed, and he felt their wary eyes as he picked his way across the meadow in the opposite direction from whence he’d come. When Dagmar reached them, he was well out of sight.
24
MOONS
Ghisla was able to creep away to the hillside three times in the following weeks, and each time, Hod heard her waiting and arrived shortly after. Her fear was a constant flogging, her hope a stinging salve, but she could not stay away from him.
He tasted the same, and his very existence filled her mouth, swelled in her chest, and burned in her veins. When he was beside her, that moment was the only thing that mattered, and they volleyed between frantic kisses and desperate words, trying to catch up on all their years apart.
He told her of his adventures in the Northlands, the journey that got him there, and the luck that brought him back.
“I will never be a sailor; I’m useless on the open sea. I have not learned to hear my way across it. I cannot see the sky, the stars do not speak or breathe or live, and beneath them I am truly blind.”
“You can’t sense them.”
“No. I can feel the sun on my face, and when it is bright, I can plot its course across the sky. But when the clouds are thick, and the sun is hidden, time is harder for me to gauge. The tools of a sailor are lost on me.”
“Can you feel the moon?” she asked.
“If I am very still—I can feel its pull.”
“It is full tonight. Fat and slow, and so bright it hurts my eyes to gaze on it too long.” She sang about what she saw, the size, shape, and glow of the orb that rolled across the heavens, a sated circle in a sky of lesser beings . . . until the sun rose and shooed him away.
I am the moon and the moon is me.
I am young and I am old.
I am weak and I am bold.
I am distant. I am cold.
I am the moon and the moon is me.
“I have not heard that one before,” Hod said. “But you are not the moon.”
She laughed, but the sound contained no mirth. “I am just like the moon. Young and old. Weak and bold. Distant and cold. I am a constant contradiction, even to myself.”
“Mayhaps. But you are not distant or cold.”
“I am. It is how I’ve survived. Just like the moon. The less I feel, the easier it is to go on. I have been this way for so long . . . I hardly remember if I was ever someway else.”
“You are not cold, Ghisla. Not to me. You are color. You are sound. You are the song on the wind and the hope in my heart.”
“Oh, Hody,” she whispered, moved. “How can you still hope? Life has given us no reason for such belief.”
“How can you not?” he said. “When we are together . . . how can you not?”
She clasped his hand and pressed it to her lips, moved by his sweetness and reminded of the boy who’d pled with her to never give up. He had changed, her Hod, but in so many ways, he was exactly the same.
“When Odin gave his eye to the well in exchange for the meaning of the runes, he took a chunk of the twenty-fourth moon to make himself another,” Hod murmured. His eyes too could have been carved from the orb. They reflected the white light and gleamed at her softly.
“What have you received in exchange for your eyes?” she asked. “What has the well shown you?”
He grew silent, as if the conversation had turned to ground he didn’t want to tread. They had not talked about Gudrun or the Northmen while on the hillside. They’d avoided Banruud altogether. They’d inhabited a world of lovers, of kisses and caresses and careless whispering, like time would wait until they’d caught up.
“In one week, King Banruud will go back to Berne. I will be going with him,” Hod said.
Ghisla brought their clasped hands to her chest, and he soothed her