“Ha!This is your first reading lesson, then.Your opening words shape the reading.Your stance.Your breath.Every aspect of you and every aspect of those listening calls forth truth—but specific truths.This is the trick of truth, you see?It has as many sides to it as there are people and gods and spirits and creatures.”
My gaze shifted to the eye totem he wore around his neck.The truth worshipping totem.
The king stepped away to pluck a leather pouch off one of the driftwood shelves behind him.He plopped it on the table in front of me.Did it slide with the slightest unnaturalness?Or was I imagining that?
“I have had these made for you.Take them to your least favourite place in the palace and sit with them.Lay them out.Feel them.I would like you to develop a relationship with them before you learn the runes and their meanings.”
I set my fingers on the pouch, hating it, but also determined to make quick work of it for the sake of Loric’s gold.I first thought to take the stones to the place where Erland had died, but that place had been softened by his funeral and all that had come after.Besides, it was open to the sky, and it was far too cold for me to enjoy being out of doors.I went instead to the gilded door—the one I was forbidden to enter.If given the vault’s sting, it would make a perfect protective surface.For this reason, it annoyed me—mildly taunted me is perhaps a better way to say it.But it was also a part of the palace that was always empty.The Norsern avoided that hall and that door.
I wanted to be alone with my task.
Twenty
Days passed.Drunken days.Stumbling over words days.Days of hiding from the bitter cold that clawed into my bones if I stepped out of arm’s reach of a brazier.Days of watching Jorn’s sad expression as King Arik translated the soothsayer’s oversimplified explanations of runes.
“This one is like the feeling of dropping a coin.”
“This one is like a soft breeze coming from the window.”
“This one is like seeing a squirrel steal a nut from another’s tree.”
I suspected King Arik of wanting me to learn Norsern specifically for the purposes of teaching me to read stones.Looking back, I’m sure this was his motive from the start.The names for the stones, their meanings—would make no sense to someone without a grasp of the language.This one wasbear, yes, but bearish and bear-like were words that had a myriad of meanings in Norsern.
Right side up was wet-bear.
Upside down was dry-bear.
The ratio of wet to dry mattered in the reading.
Brother.Bread.Baby.Breath.Boat.
These were the names of the runes that marked each stone.
Birch.Broken.Bold.Blood.Bone.
And then I was left alone with them.
Beloved.Banter.Butterfly.Balance.Bane.
“They to you speak different than to me, than to another, understand?Listen to only you.Only stones.Listen to no one else.”Jorn was brilliant at simplifying his Norsern sentences so I could understand him.And maybe that was because he had come to the North as I had; he’d been thrown into a world with throaty, gurgling sounds and nightly brawls.
Birth.Bridge.Bird.Beneath.Bait.
It was King Arik’s lesson on the subject that truly taught me, though.“Gentlewoman, pretend this is a song.These are the only words you can hear in the song: Baby.Bird.Broken.Tell me what the song is about.”
King Arik was many things, and one of them was a brilliant teacher.The day he explained it like this to me, I scooped up the stones on the table and mixed them in the pouch before shaking a few out again.
They giggled.
I said, “This song is about an elk—it’s white, the colour of bone.It has blood on it.Handprints.It has won.”
King Arik stood so still that I felt for a moment he hadn’t heard me.His eyes were as sharp as arrows as he walked to the door and shouted into the hall.“Fetch Jorn!”
Jorn came quickly.
“Tell him what you told me.Try in Norsern words.”
“Elk-wet,” I said.“White elk-wet.Umm.Blood… with hand-blood-wet.Winning feeling… dry?”I didn’t know ifwinningwas a wet word or a dry one.
