In that moment, Eyvind sounded less like a jarl’s son, desperate to win his father’s affection, and more like a true leader. Despite the sting of his betrayal, pride shimmered in Hekla’s chest. Eyvind had taken a stand for what he knew was right, and because of it, hundreds of lives would be saved.
The voices quickly grew fainter, and Hekla was able to breathe a little easier. Everything was proceeding just as it should.
“What of my kin!” Loftur had fallen to his knees before the raging bonfire. “What of your promise, mist?”
“Come, All Wise!” shouted Konal. “We’ve performed the rites. There is nothing else to be done.”
“But mykin,Konal!”
“You cannot help them if you are dead, Loftur. Gather your wits, and let us get to the wagons.”
The mist was now sliding through gaps in the stockade wall. Hekla felt it hesitate. A tendril slid forward, and she drove it back with a slash of her torch. The mist hissed in anger, but she felt the moment it decided she was not worth it.
The mist parted and surged forth, surrounding her on all sides. Heart hammering, Hekla looked up to the small section of star-spattered skies overhead for reassurance. The mist eddied around her and rushed into Istré’s streets like a raging river, and she sent a silent prayer that Eyvind’s evacuation had been swift and efficient.
Hekla counted her rapid heartbeats to remain calm and hoped Sigrún and Eyvind’s men could do the same. Gradually, the mist thinned, and as the last of it churned into the town, Hekla felt as though she could finally breathe.
She shifted the torches to her metal hand, then lifted the trembling fingers of her left to her lips, letting out two sharp whistles.
Hekla leapt down from the wall, knees nearly buckling as they absorbed her weight. Without missing a beat, she broke into a jog, trailing a safe distance behind the mist. Four trills whistled in reply to her signal, then a fifth, but not a sixth. Hekla frowned, worry twisting in her gut.
But she could not allow herself to dwell on it. As the V-shaped pillars marking Istré’s town square came into view, Hekla imagined Gunnar touching his torch to the pine resin they’d drizzled along the ground. In her mind’s eye, she saw flames bursting skyward, racing along the trail of pitch and creating a fiery barrier between the mist and those wagons.
As if on cue, the mist’s rage rattled the air. Had it reached its blistering fence? Found itself trapped?
Hekla jogged down Istré’s main road, stopping before the wall of flames. Beyond it, the mist looked like a boiling storm cloud, trapped in a seamless prison of flames as high as a man is tall. She allowed herself this moment of victory, but the mist seemed to sense her presence and turned to her.
With a screech, it surged forward. But as it met the line of fire, the mist jerked back.
Hekla ignored it, pulling out the longbow she’d stashed behind a water barrel. Movement in her periphery signaled Sigrún’s arrival.
During their planning session, Sigrún had been steadfast in herassurances that she could complete this part of the task. But as Hekla watched her feet falter—saw the pure, unbridled fear in Sigrún’s eyes—doubt crept in. The glossy scarring along Sigrún’s neck and scalp glowed orange in the firelight, vanishing under her collar, and emerging from the cuff of her left sleeve where it covered the whole of her hand. In all their years together, Sigrún had never spoken of her scars. But her reaction to the flames affirmed Hekla’s long-held suspicion—they had been wrought by fire.
“Can you do it?” Hekla asked, inwardly cursing herself. But with her prosthetic hand, Hekla had never been able to grip the bow properly, and Gunnar, well, Rey had once deemed his archery skills to be “worse than a drunken child’s.”
Sigrún swallowed. Turning, she met Hekla’s gaze, eyes hard with determination. Sigrún nodded, taking the bow and quiver of arrows from Hekla.
“We’ve five minutes or less,” growled Gunnar, rushing from the shadows with four of Eyvind’s men on his heels. He placed a bucket at Sigrún’s feet filled with thick, glossy, and highly flammable pitch.
“The other barrels?” asked Hekla.
“Hidden amongst the pillars,” replied Gunnar.
Her gaze fell upon the V-shaped pillars rising from torrents of flame and smoke. Ten barrels of flammable pine pitch were nestled within the ring of fire where the mist was now trapped. A single well-placed arrow, and the entire square would go up in flames.
“Good,” she said.
But Hekla felt the air’s sudden shift, the heartbeat growing deeper as though burrowing under the soil. An ominous prickle rushed down her spine. The mist was still trapped within its fiery prison, but she felt certain that something had just happened.
“We might have less than five minutes,” said Hekla, left hand finding the hilt of her sword.
Sigrún dipped an arrow into the pitch, then edged cautiously toward the wall of flames to light it. The mist swelled and rippledaround the square, testing its confinement with relentless focus. The moment a gap formed in the flames, the mist would sense it.
Sigrún shuffled another inch forward, but it was impossible not to notice the tremble of her hand. The air was thick with smoke and dust, with the pungent char of burnt oxen meat. Hekla threw an elbow over her mouth, in part to stifle the smell, in part to restrain herself from shouting at Sigrún to hurry.
A low, deep growl came from just beyond the stockade walls, and suddenly, Hekla understood what that strange shift had been: The mist had called upon the undead. She held her breath as Sigrún nocked the arrow and aimed it at the dais. The bowstring twanged, the flaming arrow arcing through the air. But Hekla cursed under her breath as she saw it would land just wide of the dais.
The mist rattled in what Hekla perceived as an unsettling laugh, but a snarl from her left had her whirling.
