“And the daughter of the temple was burned at the hearth.”
“Yes. That’s true. I suppose it was a fine year after all.”
He’d listened for Ghisla too, but he’d lost her heartbeat in the clearing, and he’d not drawn close enough to find it again. Too much distance and too many stone walls separated them now. But the villagers’ talk of the daughter of the temple had him rising to his feet.
He’d heard comments all day that he had no context for, but not like this.
He walked toward the group, careful not to approach too quickly or startle them as he stepped out from the trees.
“Pardon me,” he said, keeping his distance. “I could not help but overhear. What happened to the daughter of the temple?”
Their hearts skipped and settled, and one man swayed and stumbled to the left.
“Hey . . . it’s Blind Hod!” the belching man chortled, and the others paused, processed, and then burst into raucous laughter.
“Son of Odin,” the middle fellow mocked, wheezing.
“Son of the king!” the woman added, and their guffaws grew.
He didn’t understand their mirth, but he doubted they knew his name. They were talking about Hod, the blind god, and they found themselves hilarious.
“What happened to the daughter of the temple,” he insisted, his voice louder, his hands tightening on his staff.
“The king did not like her running away,” the belching man said.
“Go on now, Blind Hod. Your father is calling.”
More laughter.
One of the men tossed a coin at his feet like he was a beggar, and the group began to move away, dismissing him.
“What did he do?” he shouted, and they halted, huffing in offense at his perceived belligerence.
“Shut up! For Odin’s sake. Yer makin’ my noggin pound,” moaned the man who’d complained about seventeen blows to his head.
The belching man took a swing at him that he heard and smelled a mile away. The man who’d tossed the coin tried to pick it up again, while another made a grab for the purse that hung from Hod’s belt. Hod jabbed his staff into the thief’s belly, swung it around to the side of his neck, and leveled the five other men in similar fashion. They helped, by tripping over themselves and each other in their attempts to run away.
It was not a fair fight . . . not at all. They were drunk and he was not. But he’d not started it. The woman was the meanest of them all, and he hadn’t wanted to strike her. He swung his stick beneath her feet and buckled her elbow with the end of his staff every time she tried to rise. On the third attempt, she bounced her forehead off the ground, and he left them all in a groaning pile and headed for the mount.
He heard Ghisla’s heartbeat halfway to the top, and as he neared the gates, he found Arwin too.
Arwin’s gait was altered, and his breathing labored, and he wept when Hod called his name. Hod slung the old man across his back and carried him to the bottom.
“I thought you dead. I thought you dead,” Arwin wailed, but when Hod tried to get answers as to what had occurred, Arwin stopped talking altogether.
They slept at the spot where he’d waited at the fork, but by the next morning, Arwin was weak with fever, and Hod bought a cart and a horse from a farmer in order to get his master home.
“It is healing quickly,” Ghost marveled a week later when she changed the bandages on Ghisla’s hand. “Does it hurt very much?”
“It does not hurt at all,” Ghisla replied, regretful. The pain of her hand had shrouded other hurts, and as it healed, her despair grew.
Her rune was gone.
The star-shaped scar and the fibrous web of healing skin obscured it completely. Ghisla couldn’t trace the lines in blood; there were no lines. She’d bathed her hand in tears and blood and sang until she was hoarse, but Hod did not answer.
Yet she had not lost her ability—if an ability was what it was—to hear the thoughts of others while she sang. She’d tested it while Elayne sat at her bedside, clasping her left hand. Ghisla had warbled but a single verse, and Elayne’s thoughts had poured into her head like water over the falls. Whatever the rune had once unlocked—if the rune was indeed the source—still remained, embedded beneath her new scar.
She thought that when her hand had more time to heal she might be able to re-create the lines of the soul rune; she’d traced it often enough. But it was much harder to carve with her left hand than she anticipated, and the pain to her healing palm was intense.
The cuts she made became infected, and she suffered for a week before Ivo asked to see it. The oozing mess had him cursing the Norns and the king, but he drew his runes and mumbled his words, and her hand began to heal once more.
She practiced the soul rune when she was alone, drawing the character in the dust, but though she remembered the angle and shape of the mark, she didn’t know which line to draw first; a rune could not be crafted any which way, and the soul rune was forbidden. She could not ask for instruction.
She worried Hod would think her affection had waned, then she worried that something had befallen him, and that fear was worst of all. She missed her menses two months in a row, but on the third month, her bleeding was so heavy it soaked her bed coverings and woke her. She cried then, though she did not cry in relief or even despair.
She simply cried for yet another love that would not be, for yet another life that had been denied her. The king, as fate would have it, sent for her that night, and when her songs were done and he lay sleeping, she left a puddle of blood in the middle of his bedroom floor where she’d stood for an hour, humming to soothe his splitting head.
Not long after that, Master Ivo summoned her to the sanctum, and when she stood before him, her hands folded demurely, he made a surprising confession.
“I realized some time ago that I am a fool,” he said.
She raised her brows in question but did not argue with his assessment.
“All this time—all those years—you were communing with a blind boy . . . not a blind god.”
She blinked at him, neither confirming nor denying it.
“I admit. I have laughed about your cleverness these last months . . . when my heart did not ache for you.”
“Why would your heart ache, Master?” she whispered.
“Do you think me so unfeeling?”
He had sent Hod from the temple with nary a second thought. I will rest better when he is gone.
“The cave keeper . . . Arwin . . . told me many things when I sought his release from the stocks. He was quite adamant that you are a witch.”
“I never said I wasn’t.”
Ivo chortled.
“He said you have addled all our brains, though he is hardly one to talk. He is quite mad himself. He did not thank me for the mercy I showed him, though I blame him, in part, for your hand.”
“He was not terribly injured?”
“I watched him walk through the gates myself. I am confident he left the mount and rejoined his apprentice.”
She had worried about Arwin finding Hod and was grateful for that meager bit of news.
“Arwin said you washed up from the sea and beguiled young Hod. He said it was he who took you to Lothgar,” Ivo added, his tone careful.
She nodded once, and Ivo grew pensive with her admission.