Page 6 of Heart of the Mountain King

"But those are impossible!"

"Sten ask bergsrå's help with vættir. Did Sten expect easy?" Rask asked, watching the man gnaw his lower lip as he considered Rask's offer.

Rask wanted to tell him to stop it. That he would damage those lips. That the way it made them redden was strange and unnatural. Unseemly. They were ugly, tuskless, thin enough things as it was.

Rask didn't know why he cared.

Sten blew out a breath, looking down the mountain. "Alright then, I’ll do it. Just tell me how."

But Rask could only shake his shaggy head, the beads in his hair clinking. "Rask cannot help. Sten must do task alone."

"But — "

Rask held up his hand to forestall the little human's rebuttal. "That what makes it price, not gift. This how things must be."

For a gift from a bergsrå to a human would create a bond Rask couldn't imagine the man standing before him would want.

Sten seemed to have enough sense to recognize the dangerous ground he'd strayed into as well. He gave a sharp nod, his eyebrows drawn low as he grunted a simple, "Alright then. Give me a day."

"Sten take all days. All nights, too." Rask shrugged, before whistling at Scar-Hip to lead the rest of the herd into the mouth of the cave. "Rask be here."

There was an anticipation humming around them, like an expectant pause in a song just before the chorus comes crashing in. For a moment, Rask thought Sten was about to say something more.

He did not. Instead, Sten drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders, before setting out down the hill. His pace should take him back to his village by nightfall, provided he didn't run into any problems.

Watching the retreating form, Rask pursed his lips. With a sigh, he reached for the Song, weaving notes of Permitted and Protected into its harmonies. It wouldn’t save the errant human if he did something truly foolish, of course. But it would be enough to make even the hungriest creature on Rask’s mountain think twice before attacking something the bergsrå had marked as his, and that would have to serve.

White-Foot tried to follow after the man, providing yet another entry in her long history of poor judgment. Breaking away from the milling herd, she headed for the tree line until Rask caught her by the horn. She bleated at him as he turned her once more towards his cave and the comforts of the goat pen that awaited her inside, clearly unimpressed.

Only once did he look down the mountain, back in the direction the strange little human had gone. But it was too late, of course, and Sten was long out of sight.

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Chapter 3

A Perplexity

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Rask couldn't explain it.

There was no reason at all for him to have woken up earlier than usual that morning. Just as there was no reason that he'd quickened his pace setting out for the nearby stream, or checked the weirs and eel pots with an uncharacteristic efficiency, before heading swiftly back home.

And there was no cause — no cause at all — for the low boil of disappointment simmering away inside his chest. Nor for the small pang as Rask returned to find the little clearing around the mouth of his cave just as empty as it ever was.

He scooped up Broken-Horn one-handed from where the errant goat was chewing enthusiastically on a pine bough that'd somehow managed to survive this long at goat-height, returning him to his pen with the others.

Absolutely not glancing over his shoulder the whole while, Rask strung up the three eels he'd collected from the weir in the smokehouse. He didn’t glance down the mountain when putting his creel away either, nor when going to check on the elk hides stretched on their frames. Then there were the goats to milk, the still to see to, the hives to harvest, the garden to weed, and all the other hundred things that kept him so very busy.

Only when all the chores that filled the bergsrå's day were completed did Rask allow himself a single glance down the mountain.

The valley lying below was, as ever, irritatingly peaceful and green.

Rask huffed at himself, heading inside to make his breakfast.

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"Rask?" came Sten’s voice loudly from the other side of the clearing.