The mountain shrank to a pebble at her back, and the skjaldmær’s tears dried to her cheeks.
Before her stretched the vastness of a world that seemed every bit as bleak and desolate as her heart. But there was a fierceness to the way the tundra conquered the elements, and a softness hidden beneath the hard-frozen soil. Only a few years ago this place had been razed to ash; there’d been nothing growing or crawling as far as her dark eyes could see. Now blades of grass poked tenaciously up from early-winter drifts of snow, and Valka’s passage sent a hare darting for its hole. Life won from death. New purpose built from nothing. She sidestepped to avoid treading on a small yellow flower, feeling her throat burn at the memories it evoked. Beauty found in the unlikeliest of places. Happiness found far from her home.
Valka did not weep for that home, though her heart ached with the knowledge that she would never see the Himinbjorg again. She would miss the mountain: the jagged spines and spires that twisted heavenward. The brisk taste of its air, the soft dirge of the wind. But she didn’t belong there anymore — a truth it had taken all three of her children to drive home. Falda’s steady temper, quiet confidence, and gift for arbitration had helped to pave the Yakut's way forward. Kesja’s courage and discipline won her the title of queen. Even the amiable Solvarr fell more easily into the structured pattern of their world. With his thirst for knowledge and his talent at storytelling, the boy would make a worthy seiðr.
There’d been no such place for Valka. Her people had welcomed her back both warmly and gratefully, but there was a subtle distance between them that no amount of time or trying could breach. Because the tribes were as unchanging (unyielding) as the stone of their sacred mountain, and the chestnut woman… was not. Love had rebuilt the foundation or her neat and ordered world. Love had softened the hard clay of her heart into a place where things might grow. And love, as the skjaldmær knew, was the death of the duty that defined their way of life.
She no longer belonged with her own kind because her heart lay somewhere (with someone) else.
But there were two pieces of it that she’d left behind her. Pieces that Valka knew she’d never reclaim. As she probed the hole where these fragments had once been, she thought of the ones who held them. The soft, kind boy with his golden crown. The storm-gray girl with her fierce, dark eyes. Her children, grown and gone to take their places in the world — save the single one who had chosen her side. Glancing over one shoulder, the stout mare was comforted by the deep brown of her youngest daughter’s coat. Though she grieved for Solvarr and Kesja — and ached for the end of this journey — at least she wasn’t facing it alone.
At least Falda would be with her when she finally arrived home.
Their parting on the beach was brief but tearful. Valka stood long after the silhouette of her daughter was swallowed by the forest, shivering as the cold of wind and water settled into her bones. Only then did she begin to drift inland, her salt-crusted fur drying together in irregular tufts. But the stab of irritation that the skjaldmær felt was a dim echo of what it’d once been; buried beneath the overwhelming gratitude that swelled in her chest. The Crossing was not quite home, but it still held a fond and familiar place in her heart. She still belonged here in a way that she hadn’t belonged anywhere else.
Snow had not yet found its way to this island, but there was a distant promise of it in the bare limbs of the trees and the hard ground beneath her hooves. Tinuvel would already be white and cold and breathtaking beneath an icy-blue sky. Leaning forward into the wind, Valka closed her eyes and imagined how it would feel to race along the Bay’s southern border, her small figure skimming lightly atop the snow’s hard crust. She imagined standing in the mountain’s shadow when she rested, her gaze tracing the jagged scar it formed against the sky. And she imagined the way the air would taste when she inhaled deeply to call out to—
Valka’s joy evaporated like frost beneath the sun’s gaze, and her short ears flicked back with uncertainty. In her seasons away, she’d forgotten the conflict and confusion that warred within her heart — and now, suddenly, it all came crashing back. Solomon, the King whose strength and wisdom had called to her fierce, indomitable spirit. Bacardi, the Hersir who’d smoothed the sharpest of her edges with gentleness and warmth. Two halves of herself pulled two different ways; the fear that she might lose herself in that unremitting tide. Or worse, that she would lose them. Solomon had already been distant when she’d left, and Bacardi— her Hersir had been drifting away like a pebble borne by the sea.
She’d returned to the islands so she could be whole again — but standing in the midst of the frost-kissed meadow, Valka suddenly felt more broken and alone than she had as an outcast among her own kind.