“A babe?” Arwin asked, befuddled. “There is no babe! She is but a child.”
“No, Master. No . . . she is grown, remember? Tell me what you see, not what you remember.”
“She is slim . . . but not tall. I see the swell of breasts . . . but not the swell of a child. Her hair is woven into a golden crown. Her eyes are lifted to the sky. They are blue. So blue. She wears the robe of a keeper. She wears the robe of a keeper!” Arwin’s voice became agitated. “All the daughters wear the robes. Yet my Hod has been rejected.”
“Arwin,” Hod warned, trying to refocus his teacher, but it was too late. Arwin’s hands fell from his eyes and flopped onto the bed beside him.
“There are daughters in the temple . . . and none in Saylok. And my Hod has been rejected.”
In late spring, on a day which promised more sunshine than rain, Arwin asked, quite lucidly, to visit the grave of Bronwyn of Berne for a while and eat some berries from the bushes nearby. Arwin wearied about halfway, and Hod carried him the final distance, settling him on the big stone where his mother was laid to rest.
“This is where I buried her,” Arwin said.
“Yes, I know.”
“She was a good mother to you.”
“I hardly remember.”
“Bronwyn. Bronwyn of Berne. The fates gave her time . . . but not enough.”
Hod rose and began collecting berries from the bushes nearby.
“You were so small. And she did not want to leave you.”
He’d heard this before, but it meant little to him.
“She called you Baldr.”
Hod’s hands stilled. He had no faces in his head. But he had voices. Baldr the Beloved. Baldr the Brave. Baldr the Good. Baldr the Wise. You are all those things.
He remembered a voice saying those things. Saying that name. Sweet. Patient.
“She called me Baldr,” he mused. “I had forgotten. It doesn’t seem . . . real. It is more like a story someone once told me.”
“The Highest Keeper told her you were not Baldr. You were Hod. So that is what I’ve called you.”
Baldr the Beloved or Hod the Blind. Hod vastly preferred the first and wished the Highest Keeper had left well enough alone.
“One day the Highest Keeper will summon you. He will realize his mistake, and he will summon you,” Arwin said, and Hod kept gathering, his hands moving swiftly over the leaves, avoiding the thorns and plucking the berries.
“Hod is the most misunderstood of all the gods,” Arwin said.
“Do you speak of me . . . or Odin’s son?” he said, because Arwin often spoke as if he were the blind god.
“I believe Hod knew what he was doing when he shot Baldr. He was not tricked. One cannot trick a blind god, a god who hears every heartbeat and knows every voice.”
Hod was hardly listening. Arwin liked to ramble on. “If he was not tricked, why did he do it?”
“It was his destiny.”
“His destiny?”
“Yes. He knew that his brother’s death would bring about his own destruction. But he did it anyway. In many ways . . . it was a selfless act.”
“A selfless act?” This was new.
“Baldr’s death was necessary. It marked a new beginning . . . the death of the gods and the rise of man. The rise of . . . woman.”
Hod returned to his teacher’s side and put the berries beside him. The sun felt good on his face, and he tipped his chin upward, letting the rays rest on him. Arwin smacked his lips, eating the berries in happy silence.
“You cannot stay here, Hod. When I am gone . . . you must go too. You must save Saylok.”
“How will I do that, Master? Where will I go?” Hod asked, humoring his old mentor. It did no good to argue.
“You are Hod. The brother of Baldr. If Saylok is to free itself and rise again, Baldr must die.”
“And who is Baldr, Master? How shall I slay him?”
“Do you not know?” Arwin stopped eating.
“You said my mother called me Baldr. Must I kill myself?”
Arwin slapped at him and pulled his hair, knowing that his sticky fingers would irritate Hod more than anything else. Hod grimaced and stood, making his way to the place where a small spring trickled between the rocks.
After he’d been sent from the temple, he’d begun to grow his hair. The hair had bothered him until it grew long enough to slick it down. He kept the sides of his head shaved smooth—he couldn’t stand the whisper around his ears or the way it altered sound—but the hair on top remained; if he could not be a keeper, he did not want to look like one.
“You look like a skunk,” Arwin had complained, but Hod had just tugged on his teacher’s braided beard and patted his bald head, reminding him that he had no room to criticize.
He splashed water over his face, up his arms, and down his tight center braid, removing the residue of the berries and filling up his flask so he could clean Arwin’s hands as well.
When he returned to the rock, Arwin had risen and was ready to leave. Hod helped him wash and hoisted him up on his back. It wasn’t until they were almost to the cave that Arwin spoke again, his voice sleepy, his beard tickling Hod’s cheek.
“Baldr is the Temple Boy, Hod. Bayr. Bayr is Baldr.”
Hod had never shared the things Ghisla had told him with Arwin. In the beginning it was because his knowledge would have had to be explained. Now it was simply . . . useless. The temple was closed to him, Ghisla lost to him, and Arwin would not remember tomorrow what Hod said today.
“Bayr is not the son of Odin, Master. He is the son of a lying, murderous king. And I would never harm him.”
Arwin grew lax against his back, and Hod doubted he heard.
He had intended to hunt, but when he settled in a thicket, waiting for the wind to shift so he could approach his prey undetected, he’d fallen asleep. He awoke with a start sometime later, and immediately knew something was amiss. He cast his senses wide, sifting, searching. He’d been so tired and slept so deeply that he had no sense of how much time had passed. Though the wind pressed cold fingers into his sides and pinched at his cheeks, he didn’t think night had fallen; the sounds were different in the darkness—the creatures that woke and those that slept were not the same—and the temperature had not yet dropped. The air wasn’t balmy, but it wasn’t cold.
He couldn’t hear Arwin. But that did not alarm him. He was a ways from the cave and the rock walls muffled the sound from inside, especially deeper within.
The crashing of the surf was a sound that became almost invisible after living in the cave all these years. Like the sound of his own breath or his ongoing, never-ending stream of consciousness that never quieted, even when he was asleep.
The waves still broke and billowed over the rocks and sand, but there was another sound . . . like water against a hull. There were boats in the bay. Longships, like those of the Northmen. He listened again and, once satisfied that his immediate surroundings were clear, rose, secured his bow, and made his way out of the thicket and down the mountain path toward the cave.
Every few feet he stopped, listened, and began again.
He could hear the men now, though water, wind, and distance made it impossible to tell how many. More than a dozen—maybe two—and their heartbeats hugged the shore, indicating they’d disembarked. They must have caught a perfect tide, and those were rare. The inlet near the cave was not conducive to visits by travelers. The sea beyond the mouth usually carried vessels east toward Adyar or west to the tip of Leok. The area in between was a churning eddy above a sandbar that made natural access difficult and kept the bay beyond it mostly unexplored. In the time he’d lived in these cliffs, the sea had only washed up a single traveler: Ghisla.