Free The Tempering of Men by Elizabeth Bear

know.”
    â€œShe?” Isolfr asked, almost unwillingly.
    â€œFreya,” Freyvithr said. “It’s how I came into her service, who was Othinn’s man when I went viking and fought for a jarl.”
    â€œYou were a man-at-arms?”
    â€œI killed for my meat and ale,” the godsman said. “Not so differently from you.”
    Vehulf picked at soft moss on the nursery log he’d leaned his butt against, and waited. It was hard.
    Isolfr raised his hands in a placating gesture, pressing his back against the trunk. “I meant no insult, godsman. I was a jarl’s son, once. I was just … surprised, I guess.”
    â€œThat Freya would speak to a warrior?” Freyvithr’s mouth twisted. He kicked one foot, dislodging a shower of moss fragments. “Half the war-dead are hers, when it comes down to it. She has an interest. And you cannot be more surprised than I was, I tell you truth.”
    â€œWill you tell us?” Vethulf asked softly.
    â€œThere’s little point in bringing it up if I won’t,” Freyvithr said, smiling. “I thought at first—I was far from home, in a land where the trees were wrong and the deer were wrong and the water was wrong, and the women we captured would do nothing but weep and starve themselves to death, and I thought at first it was only that I missed my wife.”
    â€œYou were married?” Isolfr said, and then blushed scarlet. Vethulf glanced away, pretending distraction as a dull brown bird darted between summer-green boughs.
    â€œI am married,” Freyvithr corrected. “My wife entered Freya’s service with me, and prays in Hergilsberg now for my safe return.” When Vethulf glanced back, Freyvithr was still grinning at Isolfr’s mortification. “I renounced bloodlust, not the other kind. For indeed, Freya is not a goddess to be pleased by celibacy. But you distract me from my point. I was dreaming of a woman, at whose throat glittered a necklace more beautiful than anything I had ever seen, and who held apples in her hands. I never saw her face clearly, only the necklace and her hands and her breasts. She stood on a green hill beneath a great green tree, and the air was right and the tree was right, and I knew that I was home. And then the captive women began dying, and each night in my dream I would see the woman who had died that day kneeling at the feet of the woman with the necklace. And the dead woman would look at me and say, ‘I cannot come to her, because of you.’ And then another woman would appear—I could never tell where she came from, though after the third or fourth time I had the dream I watched for her—a woman who I could not see at all, all shadows and flint, and she would take the dead woman away. And the woman with the necklace would weep and drop one of the apples she was holding so that it rolled to me. But when I picked it up, it turned to ashes in my hand.”
    He took a deep breath, running one hand over the lower part of his face. “And then, one day, we burned a village on our jarl’s command. We left no one alive, on our jarl’s command. And that night, the woman with the necklace had no apples in her hands. The tree was dead above her, the grass was dead beneath her, and the burned bodies of the villagers were all around her, stacked like firewood. And she wept until I wanted to gouge her eyes from their sockets so that they could not weep, and keened until I wanted to rip her tongue from her mouth. But I could not reach her, no more than I had ever been able to, and finally I said, ‘Lady, tell me what I can do for you.’ And she said, ‘These are not warriors you slaughter. There is no glory for you in these deeds. Go home and kill no more.’ And I woke in a cold horrible sweat and I saw—I swear to you I saw—the cold woman, the woman of shadow and flint, standing over me. She was one side white as chalk,