irminar-vihwl

The ninth winter of Oswin’s life came on hard frost and clear nights.

The fields lay white each morning, the grass stiff with ice, the ruts of wagon wheels turned to pale ridges in the frozen earth. Smoke rose straight from the roofs of the Harthmar steadings, for the air was so still that even the wind seemed to sleep. In such weather folk kept near their hearths. Bread, broth, and quiet talk were meant to be enough until the sun found its strength again.

But Oswin had never been good at staying where he was meant to.

The bucket knocked softly against his knee as he walked the path down the hill. It was an old thing, bound with metal hoops that creaked when the wood shrank in winter cold. The rope handle had frayed where many hands had gripped it before his.

Fetch water before the sun touches the spring. It was not a hard chore, only a dull one. The spring lay in the hollow below the field, where the ground stayed wet even in deep frost. The path to it bent past a crooked willow that marked the edge of the lower field.

Oswin took the long way, as he always did.

Krume went with him, because Krume went everywhere. She came nosing out from under the bench the moment his hand touched the door, and now she ranged ahead and behind and underfoot all at once, her breath steaming, her tail going, stopping to push her nose into every frozen thing as though the cold had hidden something worth finding.

He kicked at a crust of frost and watched it shatter into pale shards.

“Hold the line,” he told her, low, the way he had heard the elders speak of warbands. “They come from the wold.”

Krume did not hold the line. She found a clot of ice and bit it.

Oswin took up his stride again all the same. The frozen ruts of the wagon track were a river he was crossing, the water black and quick under the crust, and a man who set a foot wrong would be carried off and never found. He stepped from ridge to ridge of frost and did not fall in. The pasture beyond was no pasture now but a country no man had walked before him, white and waiting, and he the first to come into it.

A crow flapped across the sky above the field and settled on the stone wall, black against the morning light. It tilted its head as he passed.

Oswin slowed and looked at it the way he thought a traveller ought to look at the folk of a strange land; gravely, and without fear.

“Well met,” he told the crow. “I’ve come a long road. What’s the name of this place, and who holds it?”

The crow said nothing. It shifted along the wall and watched him with one eye.

“You’ll not say. That’s fair. A wise folk keeps its names.” He gave it a small nod, as though they had struck some understanding, and went on; and the crow stayed where it was, neither following nor flying, which seemed to him exactly what the first creature of a new country ought to do.

Muttering under his breath, the words came half-shaped. He had stood at the edge of his father’s work often enough to catch the weight of it, the slow fall of it, without ever being let near the meaning. So what he murmured to ward off the thing in the field had the cadence of a true blôt and none of its sense; oath-sounds, god-sounds, strung together by a boy who had heard the music through a wall.

“By stone and by root,” he told the cold. “By the dark that watches. Hold, and be still, and trouble me not.”

It sounded right. It sounded like something. For a breath he half-believed it, and the field went very large and very serious around him, and he was not a Ritespeaker’s son fetching water but something else, walking out alone into a country no one had warded before him.

Krume sneezed and broke the spell.

He grinned in spite of himself and went on.

When he reached the willow he slowed.

The tree stood apart from the others, its trunk twisted and hollowed with age. Even in summer its branches drooped low, but in winter they hung bare and thin, scratching faint lines across the sky. The frost at the base of the tree had not yet been broken by footprints. Moss clung to the roots in soft green clumps, bright against the pale ground.

 Erla had once sworn there was an eye in its bark.

Oswin searched the trunk until he found it.

A knot in the wood, long and oval, with a ridge above it that looked almost like a brow. The shape was so plain that once seen it could not be unseen.

The eye watched the path.

He stepped closer. Then he looked back to Krume, who had stopped several paces back, low to the ground, her tail gone still. A sound came out of her that Oswin had never heard from her before; not a bark, not the play-growl she gave the hens, but something thin and steady, pulled up from somewhere deep. Her lip was off her teeth. She was looking at the tree.

“It’s only the willow,” Oswin said.

Krume did not move, and did not stop the sound.

Oswin set the bucket down and reached out, pressing his thumb against the knot.

The bark was colder than the air.

He thought the grain shifted beneath his touch, tightening like muscle under skin. He pulled his hand back and waited.

Nothing happened.

A small breath of wind stirred the branches overhead, making them whisper together. Oswin let out the breath he had been holding and laughed softly to himself.

“Just a tree,” he said.

Something rustled at the base of the trunk.

Oswin looked down.

A lump of moss and twigs shifted slightly, as though something beneath the leaves had shifted in its sleep. Two faint glimmers caught the light, dark and wet like river stones.

The shape held still.

Then it collapsed into itself and scattered across the frost.

Only leaves remained.

Oswin stared at the ground for a long moment.

The barren field lay quiet behind him. The homestead fence stood crooked in the distance, its rails dripping with ice. Nothing moved.

He rubbed his hands together and picked up the bucket again. “Just the wind,” he muttered….

read the rest when it’s published