Page 21 of Heart of the Mountain King

And then he'd stayed back, like a coward. Hiding in their cave and telling himself Hjarta was being the unreasonable one, Rask ignored the small knot growing in his chest as he watched his mate go.

He could still recall with perfect clarity that last sight of his mate; Hjarta striding so bold and strong and gloriously stubborn into the Mist. Could remember mumbling about wasted heroics and rock-headed fools as he'd set about making their dinner. He’d hung the pot to the side of the fire, keeping it warm where it wouldn't get burnt up by the time Hjarta finally returned home.

And as Rask fell asleep in his chair by their hearth, lulled by the warmth of the fire into dreams of a passel of tiny bergsrår playing around his feet? Hjarta had fought the thurs, brave and determined.

And to Rask's shame; so very, terribly, alone.

The fire had gone out in the hearth by the time Rask woke; their soup bubbled away to a thick sludge. Hjarta must have been caught out by the daylight, Rask had told their empty home. That he was sleeping like a stone on one of the meadow’d slopes, and Rask only need wait for night to fall until his mate would return to tell the tale.

As soon as dark had fallen and the storm cleared, Rask had gone out into the Mist. Round and round the mountain he'd looked, his search becoming increasingly frantic as day bullied its way across the sky.

And there, in a small scar torn into the mountain's low slope, Rask finally found his missing mate — Hjarta's body tangled with the broken thurs.

Their mingled blood darkened a little pocket of previously covered stone, glowing and pale under the light of the triple moons. Rask used some of that very same stone to mark the place he'd buried Hjarta; a meadow on the southern slope his mate had liked to take the goats to graze in during the summer.

He'd return each morning with long strings of flowers; a rainbow of colors Hjarta would loop over Rask's shoulders with a laugh, before pulling him in for a kiss. Rask didn't know how to make the loops. He hoped being where the flowers grew would be good enough.

The body of the thurs, Rask left for the humans to deal with, whenever they emerged like hibernating rabbits from their Mistide shelter. As industrious as ants happening upon a corpse, in no time at all the little human cut a quarry deep into the stone Hjarta's death had revealed. Those first few years, Rask had watched in dulled disbelief as both the scar and village had expanded; quarrymen singing, children laughing, their community growing — bursting at the seams.

Until one day, Rask could take no more. Leaving it to the humans, he'd stopped going to that side of his mountain at all.

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Chapter 9

A Proposition

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"Oh," Sten said softly into the resulting silence once Rask had finished his story. "You still love him, don't you?"

"Hjarta Rask's mate," Rask replied, confused. "Rask always love Hjarta."

"Do bergsrår mate for life, then?"

"No? Hjarta died many years ago. Still Rask's mate, still part of Song, but… Rask not dead. Should have much time left. Maybe take new mate someday, if find right… person."

He glanced over at Sten to see how he might react to that, but the human was staring at his own hands, clenched tightly together in his lap.

"You know, my granddad used to talk about a skull of some enormous misthing that was found when he was a boy. A pair of friends stumbled across it one spring, dragging it back to the village to show everyone," Sten said quietly, before wrenching his eyes up to meet Rask's. "We never knew what'd happened to it. Or about Hjarta, about the fight. About any of it, actually. In our legends and songs about the Bless'd Refugees, or Baldor's Great Arc through which they fled… the stories all go very differently than yours. Even conflict with each other, sometimes."

Rask nodded. "Rack think humans like conflict."

Sten barked a laugh, mangled and sour.

"Does seem that way, doesn't it? Even between those two friends from granddad's story," Sten said. "Apparently they got to arguing over who should get credit for discovering it so much that the entire village just about turned the both of them out. The thaneskassör had to step in, declare it village property on behalf of his lord. Now you walk through the skull and jaws on your way into the pub. The two families still don't speak to each other either, even though the friends themselves passed away long before I was born. Has to be the same one Hjarta fought though, right?"

"Yes," Rask confirmed. "Only one in all Rask's time."

"Must've been a big, ugly thing," Sten mused as Rask leaned forward to sing the volcanic stones to warmth again, heating the cooling sauna back up. "I always found it terrifying as a kid. Gave me nightmares, thinking about how it must've meant Misthings even attacked each other; flying around out there beyond the warded Jarl's Halls where we all have to hide. What would we have done if the remains of one had come crashing through the roof? Kept me up loads of nights, worrying about it."

"Thurs attacking thurs very common," Rask explained once the stones had gotten the message, sitting back. "Territory, anger, maybe in heat. But quick — loser submits, leaves. Thurs no need fight, not to death. Enough food for all."

"But most humans are tucked away safe behind the wards of their Jarl's Halls, aren't they?"

Rask looked at him curiously, wondering at the note in Sten's voice, as if he'd never heard any of this before. "Humans only snack. Thurs eat fear. Jarl's Halls make for tasty smorgasbord of fearful humans. Thurs enjoy big feast, come back next year, find humans more terrified than last."

"They won't hurt Messy though, right, or the Mist?" Sten asked worriedly. "All the stories say they leave animals like her alone."