Seven Endless Forests - April Genevieve Tucholke

THE WOLVES

ONE

The Gothi nuns will not travel to remote places, so when the snow sickness sweeps through the forgotten mountain hamlet, or the secluded steading, or the lonely, isolated Hall, we burn our own.

We bury our own.

* * *

We thought we were safe, another dark winter behind us. The festival of Ostara had come and gone. Spring had arrived, jade-green buds, emerald-green grass, bright blue skies.

Our steading was in the Middlelands, remote and quiet, far from any sea, far from any major town, far from any jarls with their Great Halls and shifting laws. Here, in the region of Cloven Tell, the soft green Ranger Hills rippled across our horizon, and cold, clear lakes marked our landscape like sparkling jewels.

My sister, Morgunn, and I had spent our childhood running wild and free, without a thought to the world beyond the hills—it was no more real to us than the stories of the Green Women of Elshland or the tales of Frey and the giant Logafell. We were isolated. We were happy.

Aslaug, our cook, used to tell me I had too much happiness in me. She said only witches and Fremish wolf-priests were truly happy, because they cast spells and drank poison, because they made pacts with the gods in pursuit of their own joy.

I’d heard of these magic pacts from the sagas and the songs. I’ve never stolen an infant, or tricked a jarl into marriage, or slain a sleeping Elver, or burned a village. I’ve never taken to the air, floating across the night sky, fingers cupping the stars. I’ve never made all the children of Vorseland scream, as one, in the middle of the night. Yet I’ve been happy. Happy as a witch. Happy as a wolf.

I’d shrugged off Aslaug’s warnings as I’d shrugged off the warnings of Elna, our pretty, apple-cheeked servant, who used to say that the moon was the eye of a great dragon and that one day he would look down and see us and burn our world to ash.

Now Elna was burning to ash, her body on the pile in the east field.

The snow sickness struck a few Middleland villages each winter. It would blow in with a storm and stay as long as the white flakes fell from the sky. It would start with sweating and a fever and end in death. Some people lived, and most people died, and only the gods knew why.

Snow had come in the night and turned the world white again.

At supper, my mother began to shake and sweat until she fell from the bench and lay writhing in pain on the floor beside the hearth fire. The servants began to scream. They knew that only the snow sickness could do this, only the snow sickness could take down such a strong Vorse woman.

I dragged my mother to her bed and awoke at dawn to find her dead in my arms.

The servants died in the night as well. I carried their bodies to the field and set them on fire, gray smoke floating up past the trees.

Gray.

Gray was the color of the winter sky. It was the color of a pair of cooing mourning doves, my father’s beard, and the thick wool tunic my mother used to wear on feast days.

Gray was the color of Viggo’s eyes.

And now gray was the color of death.

I took a half-empty jug of Vite from a table near the main doors of the Hall and drank. I wiped my hand across my mouth and took another sip.

I had two more bodies to see to, and these I would not burn.

I dug two graves by the rowan trees until blisters wept across my palms, stinging, bleeding. I straightened, pressed my hands to my aching lower back and then to my heart.

My heart pushed back. I was alive.

Blood from my palms seeped into the front of my tunic. I wiped my hands on my leather leggings and picked up my shovel. I needed to finish this task before the morning’s sorrow could sear itself so deeply into my mind that it would be the only thing I would ever think about. The only thing I would ever remember.

I returned to the Hall, propped open the main doors with two large stones, and then walked slowly to her chamber. My mother had been six feet tall, sinewy, broad-shouldered, made of muscle and steel. I pulled her body out of the bed, strong limbs woven between furs, fingers in tangled hair. Panting, muscles straining, I carried

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