“The sea,” I said.It was the wind that was calling me.Out on the roiling sea.
“It will be too cold for you.”
I pushed him, but there was no true strength in my arms.
His voice pushed back so gently.“There is a storm.”
Ivar came to my side.“I must listen to her,” he said to Fell with no apology in his voice.He supported me as I walked, as I crawled through the increasing crowd of casters in the hallway.Outside to where the ground bit my fingers with cold, and the wind froze the sweat coating my body, pushing me along with its force.
I’m coming, I told the wind with my thoughts.
The wind did end my suffering, but not gently.The child came moments after I stepped onto the nearest ship, tucked into a cave for winter, the sea frozen around it, the whole world outside a flurry of stormy white.My mind was stretched like the sky by the sensation of it, the pain and surrender and violent depth of it.
I heard the child’s cry, and I cried.“It’s over,” I whispered in Islish to the wind.“Thank you.”
The wind caressed my tear-stained cheeks.The boards beneath my shaking knees groaned.You are welcome.
I knew the wind’s name without needing to be told.
It was Hyrold who had spoken to me.
By obeying, I had given myself to him, opened myself to him.I’d chosen Hyrold in the same way he’d chosen me.
Not the story you were expecting, was it?A young woman in the throes of labour, feeling the threat of death, crying out and being answered by a foreign deity.A young woman rescued by a god, becoming a faithful servant.A woman who is called in the annals by the name Mira the Godless.How funny those annals are.
“A healthy boy.”
Ivar set the gooey, screaming thing inside my dress against my chest and wrapped me in fur after fur until I must have looked like a mountain of fur with a head on top.
The child screeched.
I cried.And laughed.And cried more.
Perfection.
A deep love for all the world, for each and every thing that led me to meeting this child.Life made more sense to me than it ever had before.Then it ever would again.
Halvar,the wind told me.
“Halvar,” I said.
“Halvar?”Fell repeated.
I hadn’t noticed Fell for quite some time.He was drenched in sweat, his eyes wild and manic, his shoulders rising with heavy breaths.Tears he didn’t seem to notice dripped from his lashes.
Ivar gave the child his second name, which parents were not allowed to do in the north, indeed most people there have only one name.He said, “HalvarFervjnd.”
It meant: Halvar from the Storm.
Yes.
ThatHalvar.
I’ll wager that’s not written anywhere in your annals.Halvar from the Storm, the one who stole the ships at The Wide Way Fjord, the one who ransacked Rouen.He is the child of Fell Heartsong and Mira the Godless.He’s three-quarters Islish.Go now, spread your gossip.I know how you love it.
Thirty-Eight
When I stopped bleeding and all the globs of afterbirth had come, we returned to the palace.
