Free Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan Page B

answer. At the end of the world Odin will fight with the wolf and die. You must bring the wolf to earth as Odin is on earth. Make the spirit of the wolf come to flesh in a man as the god has come to flesh. This is your rune and your guide. It will kill a god. Take it from one who knows.’

    A thought sprang into the witch’s mind: ‘Show me my enemy.’ But then the steam of the venom obscured her sight, the acrid smell choked her and she dropped the bowl. Darkness descended. For the first time in nine days she cried out, and the boys threw down a loop of rope to pull her from the stream.

    The witch hacked and coughed out the water from her lungs as she was hauled from the sink hole. The boys moved back and the sisters came to her. They didn’t bring food, fire, blankets or medicine but the scrap of belt and the brooch pin. The witch looked down at her fingers. They were swollen and blackened. Despite her pain, she took up the brooch and carved a rune into the leather, then she threw it to the floor and collapsed onto her hands and knees, panting and retching.

    The circle of sisters looked down at the rune and felt a muttering thought of disquiet pass among them. Half of them saw this.

    It was not one of the twenty-four runes given by Odin that they had expected to see. It was a new rune, something that hadn’t been given to a witch queen for eight generations.

    These witches knew it was something special, though they struggled to grasp its importance.

    To some the resonance of the symbol was only slightly clearer than their existing forewarning of momentous change, which had come to them in the idea of a storm. It signified a thunderbolt. They took the feeling of the rune into their minds and turned it over. Then one saw the mouth of a river between two hills. Another saw a church on a hill and knew something important was inside it: two boys, each in his way important to them. A long magic was needed, taking years to make but lasting years too. What were the boys? One was the subject of the spell, the other something else. What? They couldn’t see. A helper? No. A sacrifice? No. Something different. The other boy was like the extinguished candle, like the bowl of rainwater, like a hundred other things the witches used to work their magic. A medium for something? Not quite. Then they saw it. He was an ingredient.

    Others saw a different meaning in the rune, one that it would bear down the centuries until one day someone gave it a name. Wolfsangel. This was not a word the sisters would have recognised, though its sense was clear to them - wolf trap. They saw themselves flying beneath a heavy moon as a smudge of starlings to settle at midnight on the roof of King Authun’s hall, to call to the sleeping king and tell him that his wife would never give him a boy and that, if he needed counsel, then the witches would receive him. They saw the further future too. A girl on a hillside. She had bright blonde hair. She was important too, they could tell but none of them could see how.

    Some of the witches who huddled around the rune saw the symbol on its side.

    These sisters felt a chill, as ordinary people do when they hear wolves in the hills. The rune’s resonance went through their minds like a hungry howl. It said ‘werewolf’.

    That was the point of the magic, what the two brothers were for: so that the wolf god could take form inside a man.

    The witch queen was at the point of blacking out, unable to connect to her sisters in her normal way. Exhausted, her consciousness balled in on itself like a child left alone in the dark.

    She tapped at the rune and, her voice cracking, she spoke.

    ‘Protector,’ she said.

7 What Was Lost

    The beauty of the summer seemed to fill him to bursting, the fjord sparkling with a light that was almost painful to look at, the meadow flowers among the green grass like flames beneath the sun. Away over the hillside a man was calling.

    ‘Vali! Vali! Where are you? You