“Anda.” I say her name though it chokes me. My sister…and more. It’s wrong to love her the way I do but what she’s doing is worse.
“I’m sorry, Hoskuld. I have to.”
No. She doesn’t.
Trygg fell in the valleys of Byrnodhan. Then Halms, Aegin, Osli, holding the gate at Fort Ream. Finnr asked us to kill him so we did, three of us in a circle, and he went with a smile on his face and a bloodied club in hand to join our brothers. Eraya lost her arm to an arrow and her life to gangrene two weeks later.
“Anda, don’t do this,” I say.
“They’re gone, all of them. I lie awake and watch them die.” She hasn’t slept in weeks and I see the weariness hanging from her, dark bags under her eyes.
“We’re still a warband. We’ll join them later.”
“I just need to be alone,” she says.
“And die alone? Without your family?” I’m shouting now. The tears sting.
“Maybe I won’t die. I just need time to think. I might come back.” She doesn’t hug me because she knows I’ll never let go. We stand ten paces apart. If I approach she’ll move away.
Yesterday she held me as if all the world depended on it. I was happy when I didn’t understand.
“You can’t leave. If you do they’ll call you a deserter.” That’s a hanging offence.
“But would you report me? Would Ironheart?” she says. Ironheart is our commander. He earned himself a Name at the age of fifteen and took over when Commander Ulrigg passed.
“Never. You know that, Anda.”
“Well then I won’t be a deserter, will I?”
I’m lost for a reply. I hurt too much and it’s as if she’s already gone. She trudges down the road.
Another might call her selfish yet I understand how she feels. I’ve wanted to leave myself but it’s the love of family that keeps me here. And it’s the love of family that took her away. She doesn’t want to see us die.
Our warband gathers at the mouth of that road on a rest-day and pay our respects. We leave her a gift—flint, steel, tinder, a small iron pot. All of it in a sealskin bag buried under the roots of an aspen. We mark the trunk with the rune of family.
I return to find the spot disturbed. The tree is marked with the rune of sorrow. I dig through the mud and there is a compass; I still remember when Anda brought it out of Middar. It was a trinket, nothing more. She never saw the point of a thing that tells you what you already know.
But she’s left it here and I know what she means to say. I wish I didn’t.
She is lost.
On the first day of winter I stand before the aspen with the snow blowing across my face and my nose burning, cold despite my furs. The autumn leaves lie silent beneath a blanket of white. I wonder where Anda lies.
It’s spring and I’m staring at the runes, my warband silent around me. When the sun sinks they drift away. I remain.
Summer comes with flowers and the laughter of children running up and down the road. They skirt around me as they chase each other. The memories of my childhood have faded with time but I recall us playing, Trygg, Halms, Aegin, Osli, Finnr, Eraya…Anda. Twenty years ago it was. When we were happy and love meant comfort, not pain.
I still search beneath the roots once in a while, my hands shaking as I dig. My sister died but my hope survives. One day I find something.
“She’s alive!” I sprint into the barracks short of breath. It’s a long way up the mountain. I wave the parcel.
Inside there are ten stubs of antler with strings tied, each carved with the first rune of our names. I take mine and hold it close, my sight misting over. We find a wooden block with writing and on it: I’m sorry.
Ironheart leaves that summer. We stand silent around his funeral pyre. He wears his pendant.
We exchange gifts through the years, Anda and the rest of us, another mark on the bole every time she visits. Yet she seldom returns and she never writes again. We tell her about our lives in parchment, our greatest victories and funniest tales, things to make her smile. We don’t tell her as the warband dwindles to seven, then six, then five. She doesn’t want to know and we understand.
They’ve merged us with another warband. Two broken halves trying to make a whole. We love each other as cousins but we’re never as close, it’d only hurt more.
I marry at the age of thirty-four, spending the winter at my village. We have a son and I name him Trygg. Trygg for the first of my family to leave, seventeen years old with a heart of fire. I tell Anda in our letters because I know she’ll be happy for me. I hope wherever she is she finds somebody too.
A year passes, then another, until there is only Trelmar and I. We visit the aspen together as has become customary. We sit there to watch the sunrise and sound our warhorn when it sets. A keg of ale comes with us to return empty. We pour a horn for Anda, letting it drain into the soil. We speak a toast for every comrade.
War grinds away at our numbers until even the new warband diminishes. In our letters we still tell her stories but the humorous ones are few and far between. Only victories to speak of now. She leaves wood carvings and random trinkets. Never anything with our names though—she doesn’t know who is left.
Then as abruptly as her gifts began…they stop.
The march of years doesn’t bring her back. I sit on the root with the dirt upheaved and feel my heart cracking. It’s worse the second time round. Trelmar grips my shoulder and he’s trembling too, hot tears, no words.
I wonder where she is, if she had a funeral pyre, whether the crows stole her. We’ll forever be separated if they do. I pray but there’s never a response.
I keep coming back.
The wise-ones tell me to let time heal my wounds. To train more and keep myself occupied. Yet every moment that I train I feel the absence of my warband, all of them gone except for Trelmar, those grinning faces who once trained with us. They’re waiting in the Greathall beyond the clouds. They’re waiting for us and I’m eager to join them.
“Think this through, Hoskuld.” Trelmar clutches me at arm’s length one winter’s morning when I came to him with a wooden club just as Finnr had long ago.
“I have thought this through,” I tell him wearily. Anda’s words return to me: I lie awake and watch them die.
I can’t wait to see her.
His hold tightens. “Trygg turns ten next summer. He’s been waiting all his life to join the Aringuard and see you. He expects you’ll become his commander.”
I look away. “He’s only met me four or five times.”
“You’re his father, Hoskuld! His hero. Brave, strong, infallible. Would you destroy everything he believes in?”
Perhaps once I would have been roused. Now I feel hollow.
“I’ll do it,” says Trelmar, only a whisper now, “but think of him before you go. Think of all your family.” His hands fall away. I look down at my club, then back to him. He slowly draws his sword.
And I do think of Trygg. Little Trygg so excited to join the Aringuard. To join me. Excited like I was when I first sailed into that harbour.
I want him to lose the contests. Better he stay home, marry a girl he loves. Play with his children. Be their hero.
“So you’re decided, brother?” Trelmar’s eyes glisten. I’m leaving him alone here in this empty world. Him and my sons and a wife I barely know.
The club clatters on the flagstones and I hug him, I hug him with all my might. The last of my brothers. I’ll never let go.
She died in the winter of a lost year, the daughter of a wealthy man who would've given all his wealth, and more, to buy her into spring.
