The Stone of Sorrow Read online

  “Give it.” He wiggles his fingers.

  I sigh and pull a rune from my pouch. It is Nauð, the rune for need. I hold it out. “But if you touch it…” I say, hesitating.

  “Give it,” he says again.

  I place the wooden piece in his palm, noting how cold and clammy his skin is.

  “Are you going to tell me—?” But I have no time to finish, for he drops my rune into the green hole.

  “Hey!” I shout. “I need that.”

  “No, runecaster,” he says. “We will make more. Another,” he says, holding his hand out again.

  “No,” I protest. “I came here to get time stones to make more runes, not lose the ones I have.”

  “Yes, yes,” the marbendill says. “You say this each time. You need more runes, time stones, time stones. You need to trust Kálfur.”

  “Trust you? You want me to give you my runes so you can dump them in this hole?”

  He stares at me. “Yes,” he says.

  Looking into his deep green eyes, I know I am not going to be able to reason with him. I don’t know what he means when he says we’ve done this before, and I’m certain he is confused. Still, I remove my pouch from around my neck and dump the remaining runes into my hand.

  “Thank you,” I whisper to them. “I’m sorry, but I believe this is what I have to do.”

  Shaking, I hand them over to the marbendill.

  He takes them, nods at me, and tosses them all into the hole.

  “The time stones live in here,” he says, pointing at the green hole. “They demand a trade. You want a stone, you offer a stone. You want a rune, you offer a rune.”

  I nod. Finally he’s explaining something. “How do they work?” I ask.

  Kálfur shrugs. “Ancient brown water stone holds within it water from the deepest ocean. The first waters. From the time of creation.”

  “The first waters?” I ask. Amma never told me about this.

  Kálfur looks at me. “You call them back now.”

  “Call them? My runes?”

  He nods. “Hurry,” he says. “Before they forget.”

  “Okay.” I clear my throat. I close my eyes and call out the name of my runes. “Fé, Úr, Þurs, Óss, Reið, Kaun, Hagall, Nauð, Ís, Ár, Sól, Týr, Bjarkan, Maðr, Lögr, Ýr.”

  The green hole emits a bubbling noise and then small brown pebbles start popping out onto the smooth cave floor between us.

  The marbendill motions for me to pick them up.

  I gather them. They look like simple stones and nothing more.

  “These are the runes?” I ask.

  “Speak to them,” he says. “They are listening.”

  I touch the stones one by one, and as I do, I notice a faint glow as the water within them shimmers. “I call upon you,” I say. “I need your help on my journey.”

  The stones begin to rattle in my palm, and the design of each rune appears in glowing relief before fading to look again like common stones.

  “A disguise,” I say, delighted.

  The marbendill looks at me and grunts. “New runes have memory like water. Hold time like water. Change like water. And they are constant like stone. Strong like stone. You must be both. You must yield and never break. You must move forward and stay here.” The marbendill’s voice seems to grow farther away.

  My vision blurs, and the white of the cave becomes a swirl of confusion and fog. No. I thought I was growing beyond these fits. I can’t get lost here. I have to get out to find Sýr. Sýr!

  I feel a hand grasp my shoulder, and I spin to see Sýr standing behind me. Her face appears as if underwater, like there is another face floating on top of it. I see a faint smirk flash across her mouth and then disappear again.

  “Sýr,” I call. “I’m coming.”

  She reaches toward me with her hand, so close we could touch, and as I feel her fingers graze mine, I feel another sensation—a hard blow—across my back.

  “Oof!” I grunt, stumbling forward, almost falling face first into the green hole of the cave. When I roll over, the fog has cleared, Sýr is gone, and the marbendill is standing over me, brandishing the blunt end of his spear.

  “Are you crazy?” I shriek. “I was trying to get to my sister.” “No,” he says. “Not your sister. The witch. She wants your stones.”

  I look down and see that I’ve dropped my new runes. I gather them and put them into my pouch. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I won’t drop you again.”

  Sitting here in the marbendill’s cave, clutching my runes, I am struck by the eerie sensation that I have been here before. I have done this before. But the icy walls seem as foreign as any place I’ve been.

  “I have been here before, as you say.” My voice comes out in a whisper.

  “Many times, yes,” he says.

  “For the same reason?” I ask. How can this be happening?

  “Yes,” he says.

  “But I failed?” I ask, afraid of the answer.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Why?” I am not sure I want to know.

  “You did not trust yourself,” he says.

  How am I any different now than I was before? None of this makes sense.

  “In my heart I know I will fail again,” I whisper.

  “Then I will see you in another turn of the universe,” he says.

  I am crying now. “I’m tired,” I say, wiping at my face.

  “You fight yourself,” he says. “Very hard to make your journey with a binding spell on your spirit.”

  “What? What do you mean?” I ask. What binding spell? How can he see my spirit?

  “There is spell keeps you here,” he says. “It keeps you now.”

  Stay with me. Stay here. Stay now. Sýr’s voice in my mind. The sleeping spell she would say to me every night. But why would Sýr bind me? She was trying to help me expand my abilities, not limit them. Wasn’t she?

  “Take it off,” I say. “The binding spell. Can you?”

  “I cannot. I am no runecaster,” he says. “The one who can take it off is the one who placed it there.”

  If it was Sýr, then I will never get it off unless I find her.

  “I need to find my sister. I need you to tell me what I should do,” I plead.

  “You must let me in,” he says.

  “In? Where?” I ask.

  “Into your mind. I will see what has not happened yet.”

  I hesitate. He has helped me with the stones. But can I really trust him? I must. I have to know. “Fine,” I say. “But when I want you to go, you go.”

  His eyes grow darker. The pupils dilate, and a thin, filmlike third eyelid retracts so that his eyes protrude from his face.

  I recoil from the intensity radiating from his eyes. I have a crawling feeling, like a cold hand is reaching under my skin and grabbing hold of my guts. I can feel the marbendill’s mental grip on me and am powerless to stop the invasion.

  “Why me?” I ask. I hear my own voice as if from far away. “I’m not special.”

  “No, you’re not,” says the marbendill. “But you have the burning heart of a seeker. That is all you need.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Yes, yes,” he says. His voice is soothing. “Don’t be afraid. Everything will work out as it should.”

  “Tell me,” I plead. “Tell me how I can save my sister.”

  “The answer is always the same. Use the time stones. Enter moonwater. Cast them in the circle. Draw the witch out. Entice her. Her desire for power will be her undoing.”

  The marbendill releases my mind, and I am left with a feeling like someone left a door open in my head. It takes me a moment to compose myself.

  The marbendill leans closer to me, a grave expression on his face. “If you choose to go through time, you may risk your immortality.”

  “What do you mean, go through time?” I ask. “How is that possible?”

  “Your soul,” he says, not answering my question. “You might lose it.”r />
  “How?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “It is a risk you take. When you live more lives than you have been given. Same warning I always give.”

  Now more than ever I feel like I am not going to come back from this journey alive. But it doesn’t matter. Sýr matters, and the mission. They are more important. I cannot let her die.

  “Why are you helping me?” I ask.

  “Because you helped me once, a long time ago,” he says.

  “I wish I remember,” I say.

  “No, you don’t,” he says, turning his back on me.

  I thank him, but he does not speak to me again. It’s as if I have ceased to exist.

  I leave him, crawl back through the tunnel, and regard the hole that leads to the icy water. I take a big breath and slip through, the cold penetrating me to the core. The huge green shark is still patrolling the waters, and I swim away from it as fast as I can. I reach the edge of the ice floe, use my spear to climb out of the water, and land on the ice like a sputtering, pale fish.

  “Runa!” I hear Einar shout. I watch him make his way to me. Suddenly he’s there, draping me in his own cloak. It smells like honey and sweat—and Einar. I shiver and turn back to look at the water. The sharp tip of the green shark’s fin disappears back into the depths.

  Einar lifts me up and helps me back across the tipping ice floes to the shore, where he deposits me on solid ground, safe but half-frozen.

  “We thought you’d been eaten,” says Oski cheerfully.

  “No we didn’t,” Einar says, rubbing my arms through the cloak.

  I look at him, my teeth chattering so hard I fear they will crack. “You weren’t worried?”

  “I didn’t say that. But I knew you hadn’t been eaten,” he says, continuing to rub the life back into my frozen limbs.

  “How?” I ask, leaning into the warmth of him.

  “Because I could still feel you,” he says.

  “Feel me,” I say. “Is that an elf thing?”

  “No,” he says. “It’s a Runa and Einar thing.” He grabs a corner of the cloak and rubs my soaking hair with it. “Now stop talking. You need a fire. And soup. And tea.”

  “We have weird tales to tell you, runecaster,” says Oski.

  “You have no idea,” I say.

  Einar prepares me soup and tea, and both he and Oski cuddle next to me to give me as much warmth as possible. Next to them and the fire, I grow sleepy, but we have so much to tell each other.

  “I have the time stones,” I say between sips of soup. “My new runes.” I hold up my pouch, and the runes emit a soft glow, tinkling together like soft music.

  “Já,” says Oski. “Now you are a proper runecaster.”

  “I knew you’d get them,” Einar whispers.

  “Now I have to figure out how to use them,” I say.

  Oski laughs.

  “You think I’m joking, but I’m not.”

  We sit in silence for a bit, until I feel warmer. I lean back to look at the sky and feel a jolt of surprise when I see that the red moon is close to the sun.

  “How long have I been gone?” I ask, panic rising in my throat.

  I start gathering my things in a frantic rush.

  “Runa, calm down,” Einar says, trying to help me.

  “How long?” I demand.

  “Days,” says Oski. “Many days.”

  I pause. Days. “How can that be?” I glance at Einar and see that he looks very tired and drawn, as if he hasn’t slept or eaten in a long time.

  “So long that the elf starved me,” Oski complains.

  Einar packs our things in silence, ignoring Oski.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, remembering the large portion of soup Einar forced into me after I got out of the water.

  “He saved it all for you,” Oski says, picking up their sword and marching off.

  I turn to Einar. “Is that true?”

  He shrugs, back to his shy way of communicating without words.

  “You must be starving,” I exclaim, scrambling to find any scraps of food in our pots or in my pack that I can give him. I find a tiny pinch of fish in the pot.

  “Runa,” Einar says. “I’m fine.”

  “No,” I say. “I need to do a spell, find a way to make this into more.”

  “We don’t have time,” Einar says. “We had to make sure you were warm and fed, but now we must go. We’ve heard stirrings in the trees. Katla is watching us. There are signs. Scorched earth, carcasses, bits of yellow dust everywhere. Screams in the night, Runa. Terrible screams. She knows you have the stones.”

  I nod. “Yes. I saw her when the marbendill forged the runes for me.”

  “The what?” Einar asks, shocked. “You saw a marbendill?”

  “It’s a story for another time,” I say. “But Katla was there—in my vision, at least. She tried to get my stones. She wants them.”

  “Of course,” Einar says, pacing. “Of course she would want them. They’d be almost as valuable as the moonstone itself.”

  “What is our plan?” Oski calls, walking back to us. They are carrying a dead bird on the end of their sword. Not game for us to eat, but a dried-out husk, yellowed and stinking, more evidence that something came through here and left death in its wake.

  “We must continue,” I say. “Onward to moonwater.”

  “But which way?” Einar asks.

  “My new runes will help us find the way. But I need to do one final thing to get ready. I need to charge them. Now that the red moon is constant in the sky, and full, it should be even more powerful than a regular moon charge. At least, I hope so.”

  “Red moons, regular moons, what’s next?” Oski says. “Perhaps the moon will vanish one day. And all of us with it!” They laugh their bellowing laugh. “Ah, that would be a delight.”

  Einar shakes his head at them. “What do you need?” he asks me.

  “Well,” I say, “according to the spellbook’s instructions, the ritual involves laying my new runes onto the bare earth with their steads pointing in all the directions of the compass. I need dirt.”

  Einar sets to work, clearing rocks from the ground to uncover the dark, rich soil of the island. There is a lot of volcanic ash here, being so close to the sea and the fissures beyond the shore, and I remember Amma telling me that this type of dirt is excellent for growing things. I hope it helps my runes grow in power.

  Carefully I spill the newborn runes out onto the cleared area and arrange them with their symbols facing every point of the earth. I place a cup before me to hold the elements of the ritual and add a pinch of dirt inside it.

  “I will need you both to place your hands on me,” I say. Einar and Oski stand behind me as I kneel in the dirt. Their hands are a comforting presence on my shoulders. “Don’t be afraid if you feel…something.”

  “What?” asks Einar.

  “You are not going to set me on fire again, are you, runecaster?” Oski asks.

  I shake my head. “Shush. Be quiet for once, and whatever happens, don’t move.”

  I hear Oski mutter to Einar, “Do you have a bad feeling about this?”

  I want these runes to be as powerful and as connected to me as possible. I am going to be drawing the energy of the red moon into them, as well as the power of a Valkyrie and an elf. But I need more. If I could stand to sacrifice a part of my body, that would ensure the connection, but I worry that too much violence would corrupt my runes. I want them to remain pure. I don’t wish to use them for evil. Sýr warned me long ago to never use the runes for nefarious deeds, for once corrupted, they will steal my soul. A power-hungry runecaster is a dangerous force. I’d be no better than Katla.

  “Knife,” I say to Einar. He gives it to me without hesitation.

  I saw off a chunk of my hair and place it in the cup.

  “Humph,” Oski grumbles. “I have none, and you cut yours off willingly. Ah, what I would do for that wild mane.”

  “Oski,” Einar hisses. “You must be qui
et.”

  Blood is essential when charging runes. I pierce the tip of my left little finger with Einar’s blade and squeeze several drops into the cup. To this I add some spit and a piece of chewed-off fingernail. I pull free a few eyelashes from each eye and drop them in as well.

  Now for a tear. This is the easiest to produce, because all I have to do is think of my amma giving me the vegvisir clasp, and of my beloved Sýr lulling me to sleep each night. How I miss them, their faces, their smells, their comforting presence. Once I start crying, it’s difficult to stop, and I feel both Oski and Einar give me gentle squeezes with their hands. I wonder if they can feel what I feel.

  “Flame,” I say. “Einar, do you have a fire-rock?”

  He pulls a well-used one from his cloak, and I strike the flinty rock with his knife, showering the cup with sparks until the hair singes and the blood sizzles.

  I blow the smoke over my runes, pledging myself to them.

  “I am yours, and you are mine,” I intone. “My will is yours, and yours is mine.” I touch each rune, then bring them all to my heart and hold them there as I gaze at the moon. “By the light of the red moon we are bound through time. Even death will not break this bond of mine.”

  When I finish saying the words, it’s as if the world falls away under my feet. Oski and Einar’s hands disappear, and I spin around to find them gone. I am alone in a barren land, and I do not recognize it. I spin in circles, seeing nothing but desolation and a gray sky with no sun and no moon. I gather my runes from the ground and place them back in my pouch.

  “Sýr!” I call out, hoping she will hear me.

  “Yessss,” I hear a voice hiss in the distance.

  When I turn to look, I see a figure approaching. Katla.

  Her yellow cloak floats behind her as she advances on me, wielding her dripping daggers in each hand like a pair of fangs.

  I won’t let her strike me again. “Do your worst, witch,” I challenge. “For I am not the child you met before.”

  Katla cackles, throwing her head back. As she does, a serpent’s head appears in its place, snapping and hissing at me. She is Grabak. I know it.

  “Vile creature!” I shout. I clasp my runes. “DIE!” I project the image of Kaun, the rune of death, in my mind’s eye.