What She Held

The wind came down off the high trails that morning smelling of a stranger, and the wolf Yrsa Ardal had buried inside herself the same week she buried her husband came awake, three winters late, and began — against every single thing she wanted — to want.

The wind found her on her knees in the grave-field with a dead woman's cairn in her hands, decently occupied with somebody else's grief. That was where it found her most mornings. This was not going to be most mornings.

The frost had lifted Thyra Vange's cairn a hand's width out of true over the winter, and Yrsa had been down in the wet grit since first light putting it back.

That was the work. People thought the work was the burying. The burying took a morning and everybody came and afterwards there was meat and somebody cried and somebody drank and by the next snow the whole pack had gone back to the business of being alive. The cairns went on. Ice got under them and shrugged them sideways. Rain took the packing out from between the stones a grain at a time until a wall that had stood for years leaned like a drunk, and then one spring a granddaughter came up the hill with her children to show them where their grandmother was and found a heap of rubble with a rowan growing out of it.

Yrsa Ardal had been keeping the Karrow grave-field for nine years and no woman had ever come up this hill and found that.

She got both hands under the lifted stone, set her boots, and took the weight on her thighs rather than her back. It came up. Forty pounds of grey hill-rock, cold enough to burn, the underside furred with the pale moss that only grows where light has not been for a decade. She held it against her chest while her free hand raked the frost-loosened chippings back into the gap, packed them down with the heel of her palm, and then she lowered the stone into its bed and rocked it twice to hear whether it had decided to sit.

It sat. The sound a seated stone makes is a small dead click and there is no other sound like it.

Behind her, six people watched her do it and said nothing, which was the other half of the work.

They had come up for Sigga's mother — a fresh cairn was going in at the low end of the field in four days, and Sigga had wanted to see the ground first, the way some of them did. Yrsa had let her stand there as long as she liked. She had learned young that the thing to do with a grieving woman was not to talk to her. It was to be busy, competently, ten feet away, so that the grief had a shape to stand next to and did not have to fill the whole sky by itself.

"Will it hold now?" Sigga said. Her voice had the raw scrape in it of a woman who had not slept.

"It'll hold." Yrsa sat back on her heels and wiped her palms down her thighs. "It'll want looking at again in three years. They all do. I look at them."

Sigga made a small sound and nodded and went on looking at the bare rectangle of turf at the low end where her mother would go, and her brother put a hand between her shoulder blades, and the wind came over the shoulder of the fell and went through all of them equally, and that was a morning in the grave-field above the Karrow longhouse.

It was the life Yrsa had built and she would not have swapped it for any other life in the valley.

She could see the whole of that life from where she knelt. Below, the longhouse with its turf roof and its smoke going sideways; the stock pens; the weaving shed where Brynja would be bent into the loom with her hands red to the wrist. Up here, four hundred cairns in eleven crooked rows, every one of them known to her by name and by weather. The old ones at the top, sunk and green. Eirik's in the third row, second from the wall, because he had wanted the wall and she had given it to him, and because on the day they carried him up she had not been able to make her mouth work well enough to argue about it with anybody.

Her hand went to her throat.

She did not notice it going. She never did. Two fingers, flat, high under the left side of her jaw where the skin was a shade paler than the rest of her — dark brown gone silvery there, a seam not much wider than a stalk of grass, the place where Eirik Sten had put his teeth in her more than half a lifetime ago while she laughed at the pain of it. Three winters dead and the mark still legible. It was faint now. It was faint the way old writing is faint, which is not the same as gone.

She had cut her hair off the week after the burial — the black twists still stopping short and flat well above her collar, shorter than any woman in the pack wore it — so that nothing would ever hang down and cover that seam. Let them see it. Let them all see it, every day, and then nobody would ever have to ask her a question about it.

She took her fingers off her throat. She picked up the packing-hammer.

And then her wolf stood up.

There was no reason for it. Nothing had happened. The wind had turned a quarter point, that was all — come round off the high ground with the smell of old snow and wet stone in it and, underneath that, thin as a thread, the smell of a man who had been living above the treeline since the first frost. Smoke. Hide. The cold clean nothing of altitude. And under that, under all of it, something that had no business existing in the world at all.

Yrsa's heart hit once, so hard it hurt her ribs.

She was on her feet without deciding to stand. The hammer was in her hand and she did not remember picking it up or why she had it. Every hair on her forearms was up. Her mouth had gone wet.

Her wolf was up.

Her wolf, which had lain down in the ashes three winters ago and had not so much as lifted its head since. Which had not wanted. Which had not hunted. Which she had believed to be as dead as the man in the third row by the wall. Up on all four feet inside her, ears forward, absolutely silent, staring.

Twenty feet off, on the trail that came down out of the fell into the top corner of the grave-field, Orvar Skarn had stopped walking.

She had known him all her life and could not remember one conversation with him. The tracker. The one who was never under a roof. He came into the longhouse twice a year, ate fast at the far end, said nothing to anybody, and was gone before the fire was banked, and the pack had been calling that pride for twenty years. He was carrying a bow-stave and a wire coil and half a season's worth of gear on a frame on his back and none of it was moving, because none of him was moving. Tall. Narrow as a fence rail through the chest, long-shinned, the weight of him all in the hands and the wrists and the great slab of muscle behind his neck. Dark brown skin with the wind's weather laid across both cheekbones. No beard.

He had gone still the way a struck bell goes still. Which is not still at all.

He breathed in. She watched him do it. She watched a man take a lungful of cold air at twenty feet and she watched what it did to him — the long jolt that went down through his whole frame and set the wire coil swinging against the pack frame, and his hands opening slowly, one finger at a time, like something had told them to let go of everything they were carrying. He did not come forward. That was the part she would think about later, at the wall. He did not come one single step forward.

His eyes found her across the stones and there was nothing civilised in them.

Something went through Yrsa then that she had no name for and would not have said out loud under torture. It was not grief. It was not shock. It came up through the soles of her boots and it went out to the ends of her fingers and it was warm, and it was greedy, and it was glad — glad, standing on her husband's cairn with a hammer in her fist — and her wolf leaned towards that man on the trail with its whole body the way a dog leans on a door.

Nobody said anything.

That was the worst of it. Not what happened, but that it happened in daylight, on open ground, with six of her own pack standing behind her and every one of them with a nose. Sigga's brother made a small noise, quickly swallowed. The girl who had carried the water up turned her head from Yrsa to Orvar and back again with her mouth open. Kelda Ness, who had buried two mates and knew exactly what she was smelling, went very quiet in a way that was worse than talking.

Six witnesses. It might as well have been the whole valley by supper. It would be the whole valley by supper.

Yrsa turned her back on him.

She bent and set the packing-hammer down beside Thyra Vange's mended cairn because her hand was not steady enough to be trusted with a tool, and she said, "Four days, then," to Sigga in a voice that came out flat and ordinary and did not belong to her, and she walked down the field the way she had walked down it ten thousand times, between the rows, not fast.

She did not look back. She would rather have been opened up with a knife.

And the whole way down her wolf howled.

Not aloud. Inside, where it lived, where nobody could hear it and she could hear nothing else: a long rising note with no words in it and no grief in it either, pouring up out of some place in her she had bricked over three winters ago, calling and calling back up the hill to a man she had never spoken to. She got past the last of the cairns with her chin level. She got through the field gate. She got round the end of the drystone wall into the lee of it, out of the wind, out of the sight of every living soul in the world.

Then her legs went.

She did not fall. She got both hands flat on the wall instead, arms locked, head down between them, and stood there like a woman being sick. The stone was running wet with frost-melt and so cold it made her palms ache and she pressed them harder into it because the ache was something to hold on to. Her breath was coming in fast and shallow and loud and she could not make it stop. Her whole body was shaking — not her hands, her whole body, thighs and belly and jaw, shuddering like a horse. There was wet on her face. She did not know when that had started.

Nineteen years she had been mated to Eirik Sten and three years she had held his mark on her throat every single day, and she had been on her knees in the dirt of that cairn-field at dawn on the anniversary of his death and not made a sound, and now she was folded over a wall in the mud with her chest heaving because a man on a trail had breathed in.

"No," she said to the stone, out loud, furious. "No."

Her hand was at her throat again. She looked down and found it there, two fingers under her jaw, pressing on the seam like a woman pressing on a cut to stop it, and she hated it — hated her own arm, her own blood, the warm greedy animal thing turning over and over in her chest with no more shame than a fed dog.

She kept the hand there anyway.

She stood in the lee of the wall with her palms flat on the cold and made herself count her breaths until they came out even, the way she made grieving women do it, ten feet away, competently. Four counts in. Six counts out. Again. It took a long time. Above her on the hill the wind went on coming down off the high trails, and it went on smelling of him, and she kept her face turned out of it until her hands were steady enough to be seen.

Then she went down to the longhouse, because there was nowhere else to go, and because she was going to have to be looked at.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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