As Anam recovered, my usual afternoon walks with him became rides, which then––like everything else in my life––became practice. Eilith had two bows and a couple quivers of arrows hanging on the cluttered walls of the cottage that she never used anymore, and she told me to borrow them wheneverI pleased. So I tested them both and chose the larger one. It was stiffer, harder to pull, but delivered a much heavier blow.
I made targets and arranged them in a nearby meadow. My father had taught me to use a bow, and I had brought down deer before while hunting with him. My technique was sound, if simple, and I could shoot accurately while standing still. I began gradually increasing the distance of the targets from me, learning to adjust my stance and aim with the length of the shot.
Next, I began to shoot while running. Well, I tried running, at least. After some failed shots that resulted in lost arrows launched haphazardly into the meadow, I changed my pace to walking. Very slow walking. But it came, over days. I added ducks, rolls, sidesteps, springing out of hiding and firing quickly. Finally, I added riding.
I shot from the saddle at a standstill for weeks, simply working on aiming in all directions, especially shooting directly behind me. I added a slow walk, approaching targets at a steady pace, or walking away from them.
As the ice began to melt, we increased our speed to a gallop, with disastrous results. At first I couldn’t even stay in the saddle without holding the reins. I would pull up my bow just to lose the grip of my legs and slide off, thumping into the snow again and again. When I finally gained enough leg and core strength to stay on and loose an arrow, I somehow lost arrows faster than I could shoot them, as if they leaped from my quiver at the sight of my atrocious skills. I’d need to buy more, or learn to make them. Or simply get good enough to stop losing them.
Despite the frustration of learning, I loved my hours of practice. As days grew longer, our rides stretched later and later into the evening. Sometimes I would miss dinner entirely, not even feeling the hunger of it through my focus on each shot, each step. I’d return to the cottage with my cheeks red and windburned, my hair a wild tangle. Eilith would laugh and tellme I looked like a veritable dryad, or even a banshee on the particularly exhausting days.
“What is this wild creature in my house?” she’d chuckle, ruffling my tangles affectionately as I scavenged about the kitchen for dinner.
As spring came, I ventured further and further, seeking ever more challenging terrain. We galloped through thickets, up and down hills, across ridges. I could sink arrows into a series of targets with Anam at an all-out sprint, although my accuracy still left something to be desired. I grew stronger, and the muscles of my arms and shoulders were visibly toned from pulling the heavy bowstring.
I had never felt so free. Nobody looked over my shoulder. Nobody told me where to be, or when to be there. Nobody judged my every move, lashed out at me with anger and shame. There was no tension to navigate, no father to appease, no family expectations to meet. No falsehoods, no lies. My confidence grew each day I pushed myself, each time I achieved a shot I hadn’t managed yet. I felt myself growing, expanding, thriving in ways I had never before.
I thought of Sigurd less and less, and shed no more tears over him. I still thought of my mother and Noirin, and I missed them, missed the home I’d had. But there was no home for me there now. Nothing left to go back to. It was all tainted, corrupted with the lie I had lived under.
My home was here. This steading, these woods, this river. I needed nothing else.
CHAPTER SIX
We prepared the beehives for summer as the snow melted. I followed Eilith through a stretch of forest beyond the fenced fields to a small meadow where three rows of shapes covered in waxed canvas stood, still capped with a layer of ice the consistency of corn kernels. We brushed away the snow and pulled off the covers one by one to reveal conical woven baskets with domed tops standing upside down on small, raised wooden platforms. A little hole near the bottom served as the bee’s doorway, although the inhabitants were all quiet now.
More signs of spring followed the revival of the bees. Rose, Eilith’s big wolfdog, had been growing larger in the belly for weeks. She waddled about when she followed us, and never strayed too far from the steading. Her pups were born on a rainy night, tucked away in the safe corner of the stable; I heard their light whimpers and yips when I came to milk the goats in the morning. Rose panted up at me with a proud smile as I surveyed them. Three heather-gray like Rose, two stark white, and one deep black. Healthy, rotund, and adorable.
The snow cleared. The road was a muddy mess, but passable, so Eilith and I loaded up her small cart, harnessed it to her Fjord horse, and headed into town to the market in the darkness of an early morning.
Skeioholm was much larger than the village I grew up near. The central market square was not really central to the city atall, but near the harbor. Seagulls wheeled overhead, screeching in harsh staccato into the morning air above us as we walked through muddy streets toward the ocean.
The harbor was bigger than I’d expected. Several long docks stretched away into a deep, sheltered port, tucked behind a point which formed a natural breakwater. Vessels of various sizes were moored at the docks, some busy loading or unloading. Most of the ships were long and sleek, built in the narrow northern style, with figureheads depicting snarling wyrms or naked maidens with ample breasts. Some of the boats were wider, with deeper hulls designed to transport heavy cargo over long distances.
Flags of all colors and symbols flew from masts tall and short. I recognized the deep blue with a white spiral that represented Seonaid, and some with a red rose, the symbol of the country of Elvik, which absorbed Seonaid long before I was born. It smelled of fresh salt, not-so-fresh fish, wet wood, and low tide.
The streets were busy, and the city itself showed all the marks of a community sustained by successful trade. The market was no exception. Rows of vendors had already set up for the day, all organized around a central wooden platform and an old stone well carved with ornate runes. We found our place in the square, and Eilith showed me how to unfold the cart into its market stall form. The sides folded down into tables, revealing the shelves inside stocked with tinctures, dried herbs, powders, and potions. On the fold out tables she arranged an assortment of the same, and we unrolled an awning from the top that stretched out over the goods, supported with two poles that I twisted into the freshly thawed ground. I tied the little Fjord horse behind the cart and we surveyed our work.
“Ah, very nice. That will do!” Eilith said, then regarded the rest of the market with her hands on her hips. Other vendorswere setting up, and shoppers were already wandering about, browsing stalls and haggling over prices.
“You go on.” She shooed me away with her hands. “Go look around, get yourself something.”
I wandered aimlessly between stalls and carts, adjusting to the busyness of the market after so many days half feral in the woods. I caught sight of a tall, broad-shouldered, familiar figure. Byrgir, in his same heavy wool coat, was talking to a middle-aged dark haired woman who stood behind a table displaying an array of jewelry. He saw me and smiled, waving me over with a tattooed hand.
He had trimmed his beard shorter, although it was still full and thick and reached nearly to where his collarbones met beneath his throat. His dark, silky hair looked like it had just been cut as well, sheared to his skin along the sides and halfway up the back while the top remained longer, sweeping back over his head loosely; it looked long enough to be tied back or braided in the traditional Seonaid warrior style. With no hat covering his head now, I could see a tattoo twisting up the left side of his neck and the side of his skull, wrapping forward over one ear. A raven, beak agape and wings flared, one clawed foot reaching past his ear, lost in the upper reach of his beard.
I approached the table, and the dark haired woman’s face lifted into a smile along shallow wrinkles.
“Halja!” Byrgir said cheerfully. “Good to see you out of the old hermit’s hut. Halja, this is my mother, Rubarae.”
“Ruby, for short.” She extended her hand to me, and I shook it. She showed no surprise nor disdain for my fae-touched eyes as I met her gaze.
“Halja has been apprenticing under Eilith,” Byrgir explained.
“Have you, now?” Ruby raised her eyebrows and looked at me with increased curiosity.
“Thanks to Byrgir here, yes. He picked me up when I was injured on the road and brought me to her.”
Byrgir added, “She was passed out in the snow with a head injury and near dead from the cold.”