Seven Endless Forests - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,4

lay together in his bed, still shaking with love. “You need to travel, to roam, to see new things, new people. It’s in your blood, in your breath, in your bones. You can’t stay here with me forever.” He looked at me for a long moment, his hands moving across the small of my back. “I’m happy here in these hills. I’m content. But you need to pursue something larger than yourself. I can smell it on you—you smell of risk and adventure. You smell of dark forests, of gloomy caves, of exotic spices, of danger, of battle, of sacrifice, of hard-won victory.”

I wove my fingers into his. “You can’t possibly smell all of this on me, Viggo.”

He kissed my forehead and smiled. “I do. Your skin smells of the open road.” He paused. “You have buried a part of yourself, perhaps from fear, and perhaps from love, but it’s there. You hunger for something more. You’re starving for want of it. And if you refuse to seek it out, it will come to you instead. There’s no hiding from life, just as there is no hiding from death.”

I pushed back the furs and moved into a sitting position. “As a child, I used to say I wanted to be a witch when I grew up, or a warrior like Frey, or a jarl like the Thirteen Crones. Aslaug would laugh and stroke my hair, but my mother would shake her head and tell me I was destined to marry one of the Tather boys.”

I raised my gaze to Viggo’s. “She believes that my sister, Morgunn, has the capacity for greatness, that she has the courage and determination that I lack. Morgunn is a natural leader and true Vorse, and the only thing I’m good for is marrying.”

Viggo put his palm to my cheek and stroked my face with his thumb. “She is wrong, Torvi.”

“She is not a woman who is often wrong,” I said softly. “I am lazy and pleasure-loving. I enjoy peace and quiet and safety. I dislike killing animals. Morgunn has always been more daring, more reckless, more bold. She was killing chickens nearly as soon as she could walk. My mother had a little ax made just for her to cut their necks.”

“You respond to peace and simplicity, Torvi, like all wise, thoughtful people. But this is not all of who you are. You have steel in your blood. Your mother can’t sense it. She can’t smell the glory on you as I can. She is wrong.”

I’ve thought about that night and what Viggo said time and time again since I buried the shepherd back by the rowan trees.

I let my mind drift then to simpler memories, to the way Viggo’s hut felt after a summer thunderstorm—clean, fresh, and cool—to the smell of his sun-warmed skin, to the taste of Vite on his tongue—

“Are you thinking about the shepherd?”

Morgunn was watching me. I realized suddenly that I was smiling. I stopped.

My sister had caught me sneaking out one night last autumn and demanded to know where I was going. I told her, and she kept my secret. I think she enjoyed the recklessness of it.

Thunder roared outside, ripping open the night sky. I felt it pulse inside my chest, echoing my heartbeat.

Morgunn tilted her head back and laughed—thunder always put her in a good mood. She had a cheery laugh, and I often felt the sound of it alone could see me through a lot of darkness.

“Thunder needs mead,” she said a moment later. “Let’s open the last cask in the storeroom, Torvi, and drink until the rain stops.”

Morgunn had inherited our father’s taste for honey-wine and other spirits. One summer’s night a few years past, I’d gone to fetch my sister for supper and spent the next hour searching the Hall and the hills and the barn. I finally found her in the winter storeroom, stumbling drunk in the dark—she’d unearthed a dusty jug of long-forgotten Vite. I took the half-empty jug and put Morgunn to bed, hoping a pounding head the next morning would serve as her punishment. But my sister was lively and hale the next morning, and since then, her thirst seemed to have grown by the day.

“No, Morgunn.” She’d been on me about that cask for some time. “It’s all the mead we have left until I visit Trow.”

Morgunn rubbed the end of her button nose with her palm and sighed. “Something inside me wants the mead, Torvi. All the time.