•It’s been a year now when I first met the most lovely people from the local nature museum, and we’ve talked about the coowork🌱.
Due to the complicated pandemic situation here we’ve decided to shift the dates of the show, so in 2022 there will be a zoological solo exhibition of mine✨!
I am thrilled, although the event is far from the nearest future right now. But I enjoy waiting for the hopeful prospects 🐸.
She had the little book propped up on one side of the table and a spattering of other papers pinned beneath cups and rocks and bits of everything that she could find. Sometimes being able to see all the notes at once was helpful.
There would be six other clans there, brought together to discuss the evil witch that had just bound to their landvaettir. Seven if you included the hodgepodge of outsiders Josie would inevitably bring with her. They would be arranged together.
So she made a note for Solstice. A note for the Dawn. Then a note for the Grimaskr. They were already allies. Solstice had given their Jarl's son their hospitality and returned him as soon as they found out who he was. She knew they cared for the wood, and the landvaettir was the spirit of that place, so they would not just be relying on gratitude to win them over. She was fairly confident that Tarja would follow through.
Bear Stone, however, she had her reservations about. Of course, they were getting something out of their arrangement as well. A supplement of fish. Spring thaw was upon them but the thorns had feasted largely upon the wildlife. There was not much game left to be had and it would take time to heal itself.
She paused to make another note. The wildlife situation. It would probably be best to leave them alone until the population stabilized for logistical reasons but she knew she wasn't going to be able to get the other clans to agree to that. They still had to feed themselves and not all of them were prone to fishing.
The ones they hadn't made contact with. The Endrthaga, Forelda, Underthing and Kadall.
She didn't have high hopes for Kadall. They had high walls and trade arrangements with a lot of places outside of the Runewood. There wasn't much they could leverage with and little they could offer. They still had to try.
According to Kvigr and Adamar the underground was largely safe from the briarhusks. And those had cleared out, which was going to make this entire thing look like less of an obvious problem. Underthing was safe but that would not stop them from starving.
Jarl Osmond of Underthing wasn't going to want to work with his father. Ironic that what she had to offer Bear Stone was the same that she had to offer him. ...he wasn't going to want to work with Volken, either. But he'd taught her the lute. She had fond memories of sitting with him when she'd been fourteen and he'd been seventeen, back before he'd cut his eye out as an offering. She remembered thinking him handsome, then. Perhaps he would remember that they had been friends, once.
The Endrthaga were silent warriors. They maimed their tongues to prevent themselves from crying out on the field of battle. An Endrthaga always dies in silence. It was difficult to treat with someone who could not answer you, and their faces rarely gave away more than their voices did. She had hope for Forelda, though. Everyone here honored their ancestors, but Forelda found magic in doing so. Called on ancient vrykul arts to call them spiritually to their sides.
Spirits were good at seeing all that bigger picture stuff.
...so she could count on Grimaskr. She could count on Bear Stone. She could almost count on the fact that Kadall would not want to get involved. So it was the other three that they were vying for, then. And she had the highest hopes for Forelda and for Underthing...if they could manage to court their attention without riling the bears.
All of these notes, she compiled and bound together to send to Josephine. She would need to know. For preparation.
"Last night I dreamt of words from a tongue stained blue, and in my long sleep it seemed exactly what it was supposed to be. What does that mean, Godspeaker?"
She sat with him when the dust settled, when she had counted heads and no one had come up missing. He'd spent most of the night balking, of course, because that was simply what Ylvar did. Water is wet, fire is hot, Ylvar is unpleasant.
His head snapped to her as she sat down and only once she'd done it did she realize she was on his blindside. She reached out to take his hand; a season ago she would have moved. Now?...well now that was growing in difficulty with the child she was carrying; difficult enough that she wasn't going to be arsed into it.
"You have been sitting here since it happened, little brother," she said. It was the same kind patience she used with the rest of their siblings. For everyone else it had been hard earned, but for her brothers and her sister, it came easily.
There were bandages wound around that side of his head. They'd bled through where his eye had been taken. When Synna had been missing a piece, it was a piece of her essence. For Ylvar, it was a piece of his body. He was still trying to navigate what the world would be for him, now, without it.
For Synna, it meant she did not heal as quickly. She sat in the quiet and waited for him to tell her what it meant for her.
"And you have been sitting here since before it happened," he said, turning his face away from her with a scowl. "I don't need platitudes from someone who wasn't even in the battle."
Silence, then. Her eyes fixed to him, then. She made that quiet a blanket so heavy that he had no choice but to look back at her with the one eye that was left to him.
"You are wounded," she said. "That is not a reason to lash out at me, I was not the one who did this to you. If you do not wish to speak then I can go, but I will not be spoken to like that."
She started to her feet. He gripped her wrist, suddenly, his fingers tense with an almost childlike suddenness. She saw the panic in that one eye, lowered herself back to the log and put an arm around his shoulders.
Had there been anyone else around, she knew he wouldn't have taken it. But there, just the two of them, he buried his face in her shoulder and took what comfort Synna offered.
"Tell me," she said.
The others would make light of it and Ylvar had never handled that well. Any scrap of weakness and they would pounce on that in a heartbeat. Try to beat it out of him. Perhaps that was part of the reason Astrid had to go, as well. Because there were some problems that required gentleness and that was not something that Volken and Kvigr had it in them to offer.
Perhaps Tyrsten. Perhaps their father. But Eldr had never been with his sons the way he was with his daughters, and whatever other problems they all had amongst themselves, none of them ever wanted to worry their mother.
"I tried to pick up my axe and I missed," he mumbled into her shoulder. He wasn't crying. He would open up to her to a degree because he knew they were alone and Synna would not hold it against him, but there were limits. "It was farther away than I thought it was and my hand struck the wood. It is a small thing. Just a matter of getting used to it. But when Volken went back out he did not call me with him and..."
His sudden silence said everything Ylvar would not. And he was afraid that he was broken, now.
"And you were wounded," Synna said. "For this one, part of the healing process is going to be learning how the world looks from this vantage. Kvigr was right. If you were going to take a wound this bad, the eye was an auspicious one. I know that Odyn will guide your path and no thing worth doing was ever done easy."
"Shooting is going to be a nightmare," he grumbled.
"Perhaps it will, for a time," Synna said. "You will relearn how to do it. I will teach you over again if that is what it takes. You cannot go back to what was, little brother, but you can always move forward. If you cannot make it what it was, then make something better."
"How can I make something better with less of me?" Ylvar snapped.
"The same way that Kvigr did," she said, running fingers through his strawberry blond hair. "When he lost his leg. The same way that Astrid did, when she lost her peace of mind. The same way that I did, when I lost my capacity to heal. The same way that Volken did, when he lost his grip."
"And what way is that?"
"One step at a time," Synna said. "By giving yourself the patience you deserve. By giving yourself the kindness--"
She was going to say, 'the kindness you would give someone else', but she knew that Ylvar would not. And he seemed to register that at the same time she did, because he let out a harsh bark of a laugh. She was relieved to find it wasn't ironic or angry, but actual mirth.
"Yes," he said. "I will move forward. I will move forward and I will take my pick of that witch's eyes. I will take them both and her tongue, too, the way the berserker do at Bear Stone."
The witch stood in the fading light, backed by the bloody sunset. She stood with her arms folded loosely, looking on as if she had never seen it, and Synna’s concerns were held at a distance if only for a moment.
“He brought you back here.”
Runa turned to face her. She wasn’t a cat, and she stood in the daylight, and those seemed to be the only differences. The wound on her chest had faded to a fresh pink scar, bisecting the handprint that seemed to have sunk down into her flesh. She was a picture of dirt and grime, clad in nothing but her long stringy dark hair. She eyed Synna through the curtain of it. Through bottleglass green eyes.
“He did that months ago,” Runa said. “Only now I will not return from whence I came.”
“How likely is that to bring trouble to our door?” Synna asked. She used a level tone, soothed the edge from it. It was the voice her father taught her over years of serving as his Hirdskald. More edge, and it would have been an attack. Less, and it would have been spineless. As it stood, it was a request for information and one even a seiðkonur would be hard pressed to deny.
“My former clan does not start conflicts,” Runa said. “They do not participate in them. They do not hold grudges. They took me in because the one that I was born to was gone, and now I have another. I do not belong to them anymore, and they will not chase me.”
“They are not the ones I’m concerned about,” Synna said, joining her on the stone. The drop off was a long one, sixty feet down to the waters below.
“Urd would have come for me whether I had the protection of the Godspeakers or not,” Runa said, “as would she have come for all of you. She seeks to see things which were meant only for the eyes of wolves and to walk a road which only wolves were meant to tread.”
No longer one of them, and yet she still spoke in riddles. Synna felt the heat of anger blistering against her ribs but she breathed in the coolness of the air to force it back down. Riddles mean something, always.
“She has something against Solstice,” Synna said.
“She has something to gain from Solstice,” Runa said. “But if the wolves fall, so does the wood. You brought more than your village and your people here with you when you left Northrend.”
“Then who are your people loyal to, if not the wood herself?” Synna asked, her brows knitting together.
“They are no longer mine,” Runa said, “nor I theirs. And they are loyal to the wyrd alone. The wyrd is by turns cruel and kind. It is all things. All that is, was--”
“--and will be,” Synna said. “I know. What does Urd want with Solstice?”
Runa cocked her head like a bird inspecting something that glitters.
“You are one with this wood in a way that she is not,” Runa said. “In a way that neither of us could ever be on our own. It is as it must be, Daughter of Fenryr, and that is so far as I can say. Not because I do not wish to, but because I do not know.”
“And you were Urd’s at one point, as well,” Synna said, and it was not a question.
“Several lifetimes ago,” Runa said. “But I know her. Her machinations are writ within my soul.”
She tapped her chest with a knuckle.
“Now tell me,” Runa said. “For what is it that you come to speak to Runa? Will you warn me off? Will you tell me to tread carefully?”
“I will ask you,” Synna said, “what you intend with my brother.”
“Only what any woman intends with a man,” Runa said. “He has had a hand on my heart and he held it without damaging it. This is a rare thing. Even the honorable ones often don’t understand how to do that.”
Honorable wasn’t the word Synna would use for Volken . So much of the time he was a rampaging wall of meat.
More beast than man, the words echoed in her mind. Úlfhéðnar.
“I belong to the wild differently than you do,” Runa said, “but I still belong to it. Understand, Daughter of Fenryr...there is a shadow that looms on the horizon. I can see that vague shape in the distance, looming and growing closer. It was clear to me, once...but it had to be this way. They do not take sides. I had to be at liberty to give him everything. Loyalty must flow both ways or it is not loyalty at all.”
There it was. That, above all else, was the statement that made Synna ease down by inches. Because her concern had been that the witch had simply snared him. That she meant to bleed Volken dry, to have him dance on her strings as her puppet.
But it seemed as though what she asked of him, she was willing to return. And though Synna could say with honesty that she would still be watching--because set at ease or not a seiðkonur is a seiðkonur and she had been taught from childhood to be wary of them--it no longer felt like the impending disaster that it had.
...besides. She had expected him to accept Adam.
And Runa was right. Loyalty must flow both ways or it is not loyalty at all.
It had been a busy couple of months. Mithra had been taken from them by the coven of witches in the wood, for one, and the night before Volken had returned with her. There hadn't been time to ask a lot of questions. There was a tear in the side of the girl's throat with all the signs of having been made by a set of human teeth, and as fast as their wolves could heal, she wasn't speaking yet.
Whatever had happened, though, it was almost certainly some shade of traumatic. Synna couldn't be sure if she'd be speaking even if she were physically capable of it just at the moment.
Synna was sitting alongside one of the three fires when she caught sight of the stray Adam had brought home approaching Mithra by the fire.
They were of an age, both around fourteen or fifteen. Mithra was the kind of lean muscle most of their blooded tended to be, tattoos all over her arms, chest and back. Her dark hair was pulled back out of her face as if she wanted the healing wound where her throat had been bitten on display. Synna understood the impulse; they'd all done it before. Look what I've survived.
Grace was blond and southern with her hair cut short and a pirate tan. Adam had promised to supply her for wherever it was she wanted to go from here, but she'd yet to name a place and had just been staying on her boat at the docks with some of their own ships. She came up on Mithra's left and sat beside her, watching the blooded girl sharpen a few sticks.
Mithra made an inhuman sound at Grace's approach.
"Easy, I wasn't trying anything," Grace said, in her own southern tongue. Synna knew damn well that Mithra didn't understand her.
It would have been a simple enough matter to walk over there and play translator for the pair of them, but Synna was cleaning and gutting fish from today's catch and wanted to see where this went on its own.
A few more exchanged nothing words, and Grace reached out and picked up one of the sticks and a knife from the pile. She watched Mithra's long movements, the bits of wood curling on the ground beside them, and started to mimic them with steady hands.
Mithra managed to look annoyed for exactly one minute before she smiled, set her crude javelin aside and put her hands on Grace's to show her what she was doing wrong.
Over the course of the day, it was like that. Synna saw the girls several times, never out of one another's company. More than once, she caught them laughing.
She was sure the water that fell on Ylvar's head on his way out of the longhouse a little bit later had nothing at all to do with it.
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