The Second Blind Son by Amy Harmon

17

BLOWS

Master Ivo drew runes to ease Ghisla’s pain and promote healing, but it was not the burn on her hand that made her frantic. Her palm was a deep, weeping wound, but there were other wounds he could do nothing about.

He did not seek explanation for her absence; it was as if he already knew everything. When Ghisla asked if he would look after the keeper Arwin’s welfare, he had simply nodded and promised he would. But his hands trembled when he drew the runes, and though the lines to see the keepers grew outside the temple, he barred anyone from entry and set guards at every door.

“There will be no more blessings or favors today. The keepers and the daughters will remain in the temple until the tournament has ended and the mount has emptied.”

It was Ghost and the temple daughters who pled for explanations. Elayne had discovered her gone and alerted the entire temple. They held their questions as her wound was attended to, Ghost washing her feet and face and Bashti brushing her hair. But when she climbed the stairs, donned a clean nightdress, and climbed into her bed, they all followed.

“Who took you, Liis?” Dalys asked, running a small hand over her brow.

“Did you run away?” Juliah asked.

“I have run away before—but I always come back,” Bashti confessed.

“It is not running away if you never leave the mount, Bashti,” Juliah snapped.

“Was it the blind archer, Liis? I saw him in the square. You looked as though you would faint when you saw him the first day of the tournament,” Elayne said softly.

Elayne was far too perceptive, and her observation made Ghisla’s stomach churn and her pulse race. If she had noticed, others might have noticed too. Her fear for Hod grew, and it was all she could do to simply breathe.

“A blind archer?” Juliah gasped. “Is he any good? Why have I not heard of him?”

“He sought supplication in the temple. With his teacher,” Ghost said, studying Ghisla with her rain-soaked gaze. “He was sent away.”

“He is an archer . . . and he is blind?” Juliah stammered. “And he was sent away? Why? Could we not have at least seen him shoot?”

“Juliah,” Elayne sighed. “This is not about archery.”

“He was sent away because there are no male supplicants being taken into the temple. This must remain a sanctuary for daughters. Ivo says more will be coming,” Ghost murmured.

“Where did you go, Liis?” Elayne asked.

“I wanted to be alone,” Ghisla whispered. She rolled over in her bed and closed her eyes.

Her sisters grew quiet, but they did not leave, and when she woke in the night, her hand throbbing in agony, it was Ghost who drew the runes to soothe, and Bashti who sang them all Songr lullabies.

The king sent for her three nights later, but Master Ivo turned his sentry away. She could hear the uproar echoing through the corridors.

“She is unwell,” Ivo said.

The sentry came back, frantic, telling the Highest Keeper the king was threatening to send a hundred men to retrieve the girl if she was not immediately dispatched.

“He is in terrible pain, Highest Keeper. Since the tournament. His head is what ails him.”

“She is in terrible pain. Tell the king her hand is what ails her.”

Ghisla rose from her bed and dressed. It would serve no purpose to refuse him. He would only cause misery to those who could not help him.

“Do not go, Liis,” Juliah said from the darkness.

“He is a bad man,” Dalys whispered.

Ghisla said nothing. She simply pulled on her purple robe and left the room.

“Why does she do it?” she heard Bashti wail as she started down the corridor.

“Because she loves us,” Juliah answered.

Ghisla drew up short for a moment, surprised. Juliah always acted as though she didn’t understand Ghisla at all. She turned back to the room, back to her four sisters who deserved more than her silence.

They stared up at her, surprised by her return. Their eyes were bruised with worry and their hair—each hue and texture so different—hung around their shoulders like the new robes they’d been so excited to wear. They had so little to look forward to, and because of her, they’d missed out on the melee and the tournament feast, the one day of events they actually got to attend.

“I do . . . love you,” she said. Then she turned and descended the stairs to attend to a king she did not love at all.

Hod waited at the fork, where the roads to Leok and Adyar diverged, all day and late into the evening, listening to the rattle of carts and the clopping of hooves as the mount emptied and clansmen and villagers headed for home.

Some chattered and some stumbled, too drunk to do anything but put one foot in front of the other. He listened to their tired conversations and kept his ears attuned for Arwin. He feared he would have to return to the mount and find him, despite Dagmar’s threat.

The warriors from Adyar had won the melee—the young chieftain’s first victory—and the citizens of Adyar were the last to leave and the most inebriated. A group of seven—six men and a woman—talked loudly all the way down the hill and past the spot where he waited, tucked from view.

“It’s about time he won. He’s been chieftain since he was seventeen.”

“Seventeen cheers for Aidan of Adyar!”

“I had seventeen drinks for Adyar,” a farmer belched, and the stench caught the wind, making Hod wince in his spot beneath a tree. He guessed the man had also partaken in pickled pig and lamb chops at the feast.

“Feels like seventeen blows to my head,” another grumbled. “You should have tied me down and lashed me for drinking those last five pints.”

“I thought we’d see a lashing,” the woman mourned. “It’s not a tournament without a good lashing.”

“Or a public hanging. Last year we saw a dozen.”

“The king and the Highest Keeper almost came to blows.”

“And the daughter of the temple was burned at the hearth.”

“Yes. That’s true. I suppose it was a fine year after all.”

He’d listened for Ghisla too, but he’d lost her heartbeat in the clearing, and he’d not drawn close enough to find it again. Too much distance and too many stone walls separated them now. But the villagers’ talk of the daughter of the temple had him rising to his feet.

He’d heard comments all day that he had no context for, but not like this.

He walked toward the group, careful not to approach too quickly or startle them as he stepped out from the trees.

“Pardon me,” he said, keeping his distance. “I could not help but overhear. What happened to the daughter of the temple?”

Their hearts skipped and settled, and one man swayed and stumbled to the left.

“Hey . . . it’s Blind Hod!” the belching man chortled, and the others paused, processed, and then burst into raucous laughter.

“Son of Odin,” the middle fellow mocked, wheezing.

“Son of the king!” the woman added, and their guffaws grew.

He didn’t understand their mirth, but he doubted they knew his name. They were talking about Hod, the blind god, and they found themselves hilarious.

“What happened to the daughter of the temple,” he insisted, his voice louder, his hands tightening on his staff.

“The king did not like her running away,” the belching man said.

“Go on now, Blind Hod. Your father is calling.”

More laughter.

One of the men tossed a coin at his feet like he was a beggar, and the group began to move away, dismissing him.

“What did he do?” he shouted, and they halted, huffing in offense at his perceived belligerence.

“Shut up! For Odin’s sake. Yer makin’ my noggin pound,” moaned the man who’d complained about seventeen blows to his head.

The belching man took a swing at him that he heard and smelled a mile away. The man who’d tossed the coin tried to pick it up again, while another made a grab for the purse that hung from Hod’s belt. Hod jabbed his staff into the thief’s belly, swung it around to the side of his neck, and leveled the five other men in similar fashion. They helped, by tripping over themselves and each other in their attempts to run away.

It was not a fair fight . . . not at all. They were drunk and he was not. But he’d not started it. The woman was the meanest of them all, and he hadn’t wanted to strike her. He swung his stick beneath her feet and buckled her elbow with the end of his staff every time she tried to rise. On the third attempt, she bounced her forehead off the ground, and he left them all in a groaning pile and headed for the mount.

He heard Ghisla’s heartbeat halfway to the top, and as he neared the gates, he found Arwin too.

Arwin’s gait was altered, and his breathing labored, and he wept when Hod called his name. Hod slung the old man across his back and carried him to the bottom.

“I thought you dead. I thought you dead,” Arwin wailed, but when Hod tried to get answers as to what had occurred, Arwin stopped talking altogether.

They slept at the spot where he’d waited at the fork, but by the next morning, Arwin was weak with fever, and Hod bought a cart and a horse from a farmer in order to get his master home.

“It is healing quickly,” Ghost marveled a week later when she changed the bandages on Ghisla’s hand. “Does it hurt very much?”

“It does not hurt at all,” Ghisla replied, regretful. The pain of her hand had shrouded other hurts, and as it healed, her despair grew.

Her rune was gone.

The star-shaped scar and the fibrous web of healing skin obscured it completely. Ghisla couldn’t trace the lines in blood; there were no lines. She’d bathed her hand in tears and blood and sang until she was hoarse, but Hod did not answer.

Yet she had not lost her ability—if an ability was what it was—to hear the thoughts of others while she sang. She’d tested it while Elayne sat at her bedside, clasping her left hand. Ghisla had warbled but a single verse, and Elayne’s thoughts had poured into her head like water over the falls. Whatever the rune had once unlocked—if the rune was indeed the source—still remained, embedded beneath her new scar.

She thought that when her hand had more time to heal she might be able to re-create the lines of the soul rune; she’d traced it often enough. But it was much harder to carve with her left hand than she anticipated, and the pain to her healing palm was intense.

The cuts she made became infected, and she suffered for a week before Ivo asked to see it. The oozing mess had him cursing the Norns and the king, but he drew his runes and mumbled his words, and her hand began to heal once more.

She practiced the soul rune when she was alone, drawing the character in the dust, but though she remembered the angle and shape of the mark, she didn’t know which line to draw first; a rune could not be crafted any which way, and the soul rune was forbidden. She could not ask for instruction.

She worried Hod would think her affection had waned, then she worried that something had befallen him, and that fear was worst of all. She missed her menses two months in a row, but on the third month, her bleeding was so heavy it soaked her bed coverings and woke her. She cried then, though she did not cry in relief or even despair.

She simply cried for yet another love that would not be, for yet another life that had been denied her. The king, as fate would have it, sent for her that night, and when her songs were done and he lay sleeping, she left a puddle of blood in the middle of his bedroom floor where she’d stood for an hour, humming to soothe his splitting head.

Not long after that, Master Ivo summoned her to the sanctum, and when she stood before him, her hands folded demurely, he made a surprising confession.

“I realized some time ago that I am a fool,” he said.

She raised her brows in question but did not argue with his assessment.

“All this time—all those years—you were communing with a blind boy . . . not a blind god.”

She blinked at him, neither confirming nor denying it.

“I admit. I have laughed about your cleverness these last months . . . when my heart did not ache for you.”

“Why would your heart ache, Master?” she whispered.

“Do you think me so unfeeling?”

He had sent Hod from the temple with nary a second thought. I will rest better when he is gone.

“The cave keeper . . . Arwin . . . told me many things when I sought his release from the stocks. He was quite adamant that you are a witch.”

“I never said I wasn’t.”

Ivo chortled.

“He said you have addled all our brains, though he is hardly one to talk. He is quite mad himself. He did not thank me for the mercy I showed him, though I blame him, in part, for your hand.”

“He was not terribly injured?”

“I watched him walk through the gates myself. I am confident he left the mount and rejoined his apprentice.”

She had worried about Arwin finding Hod and was grateful for that meager bit of news.

“Arwin said you washed up from the sea and beguiled young Hod. He said it was he who took you to Lothgar,” Ivo added, his tone careful.

She nodded once, and Ivo grew pensive with her admission.

“Is it your song? Is that how you talk to him?” he asked, grave. She didn’t ask to whom he referred. She knew.

“I don’t know. He does not . . . talk to me anymore.”

“You do not know . . . or you do not want to tell me?”

“I do not know,” she insisted.

“I want to believe you, but you have fooled me before.”

She considered her secret for a moment; it seemed pointless to protect it now.

“Before I left Leok, he carved a rune on my hand. A soul rune. It matched the rune on his. When I sang he could hear me,” she said quietly.

She had shocked the Highest Keeper, and his mouth fell open, giving him the look of a baby bird awaiting a worm. “He used a soul rune?”

“Yes.”

“That is forbidden. It is . . . forbidden. How . . . how did he . . . That is forbidden!” Ivo stammered. He pounded his staff, but his pronouncement mattered little now.

“Show me,” he hissed.

She stepped toward his throne and uncurled her scarred fingers, letting him study her palm. The star-shaped imprint of the king’s amulet made him wince, but it didn’t hurt anymore. It just made her angry.

“I can’t show you. It is gone. I have only this ugly star, and my dearest friend is gone.”

“You cannot trust him.” He banged his staff against the stones once more.

“But I do,” she said. “And I miss him terribly.”

To admit it loosened something in her chest, and the pang of release was sharp . . . but sweet.

Ivo steepled his hands and closed his eyes, and for a moment she thought she was being dismissed.

“Do you know the story of Hod?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“He was a son of Odin. A brother of Baldr the Beloved. And he was blind.”

“Yes. What else?”

“Loki tricked him into slaying Baldr.”

“It is believed that he was tricked into killing his brother. But I’m not certain that is so. Hod knew what he was doing.”

Ghisla waited for him to expound. Master Ivo always spoke slowly, as if giving his pupils a chance to formulate their own theories in the space he provided. But she was too rattled to do anything but wait.

With a flick of his nail, Ivo drew a bead of blood on the pad of his finger. “Give me your hand, Daughter.”

She extended it, palm down, and Ivo began to paint on her skin.

“It is not enough to know the shape of a rune, Daughter. You must know how it is drawn, and you must not deviate from that order. The power comes not just from the hand that wields it, but from following the rules of each rune with exactness. The rune of the blind god is formed from top to bottom, left to right.”

Ivo drew two half circles, back to back, on the back of her hand. One circle opened to the left and one opened to the right. An arrow bisected the first crescent, and its shaft penetrated the second through the back, the tip extending like it had skewered them both.

“That is the rune of Hod.”

She raised her eyes to the Highest Keeper. She wanted to clutch his hand and sing so she could see his thoughts. He spoke in riddles and innuendo, and she didn’t dare respond, even to admit she knew it well.

“Tell me what you see when you look at it,” Ivo insisted, directing her eyes back to the figure he’d drawn in blood.

She stared, trying to gather her thoughts and tamp down her trepidation. She could not help but remember the conversation she’d had with Hod about this very rune.

“The partial circles look like two bodies,” she ventured. “Two bodies, bowed in pain . . . back to back . . . pierced through by the same arrow.”

“Yes,” he breathed. He drew another rune. Again two crescents, back to back, but this time one sat atop the other. One crescent was a mount, the other a valley, and the arrow that connected them was vertical, the rounded tip creating a head, the shaft, a body.

“What do you see now?” Ivo pressed.

“It looks like a spider with only four legs . . . or mayhaps a man, his arms raised, his stance wide.”

“Yes. That is Baldr’s rune. The god of war.”

“Baldr is the god of war?” she asked, frowning in disbelief.

“Yes.”

“But . . . he was beloved.”

“He was both.”

That made little sense to her.

“Tell me what you see now, Daughter.”

The Highest Keeper pushed her hand back toward her chest, bending her arm at the elbow, changing the angle with which she gazed down at the two runes he’d drawn on her skin. And she saw what he intended her to see.

“The runes are the same,” she said. “One is just turned on its side.”

“Yes. The same rune for both gods. For both brothers. One is upright, one is toppled. They appear different, and they tell different stories. But it is the very same rune.”

“Why are you telling me this, Master Ivo?”

“So you will understand my . . . fear. For you and for the temple. For Saylok. I cannot ignore the signs. Especially when there are many. Especially when the cave keeper is convinced Hod is the son of Banruud.”

It was the one thing she hadn’t been certain he knew. Ivo was not present in the square when Arwin had pled with the king in Hod’s behalf.

“You said yourself . . . he is addled,” she whispered. She could not believe it was true. Hod would have told her. Hod would have said. She would have seen it.

“I did not say it was true. I did not say I believed it.” He frowned and clacked his nails together, ten tiny blades engaged in battle.

Desdemona had proclaimed Bayr to be Banruud’s only son. But that was not something Ghisla was supposed to know, and it was not something Ivo seemed willing to divulge. She wondered if he and Dagmar had discussed Arwin’s ramblings. She thought not. Instead they stewed, interpreting signs and keeping their secrets. She was weary of it all.

“Hod is not a god. He is just a man,” she said. “And he is gone.”

“And you mourn him.”

“I mourn many things.”

He glowered at her, but his chin trembled, like he couldn’t decide whether to scold her or sympathize with her.

“I will draw a rune to help you forget him.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to forget him.”

He sighed and threw up his hands.

“I am afraid for him. I have not known how he fares since that day. And he will not understand why I have not called out to him.” She turned her hand again so he could see her awful scar.

“It is better this way, Daughter,” he warned.

“Better for whom, Master?”

“Better for Saylok!”

“I want only to know that he is well. And then . . . I will do my best to forget him.” For now. “Can you help me, Highest Keeper?”

He grumbled and sighed again.

“Sit down and close your eyes,” he ordered. “And hold out your hands.”

She obeyed, sensing he was going to help her.

She heard him rise from his throne, and a moment later felt the wet of his blood against the flesh of her palms. He was drawing runes and he did not want her to see.

“Press the runes to your eyes, Daughter,” he instructed. “Then ask the Norns to show you what—or who—you seek. Each rune drawn in blood will only work once—if it works at all. The fates decide.”

She hesitated, half-euphoric, half-afraid.

“Do not let them dry, and do not pull away. The moment you do, it is done,” Ivo barked.

She raised her palms to her eyes and pressed them against her lids.

“Show me Hody,” she said.

There was a sense of falling, as though she’d thrown herself from a cliff, but the landing never came. Instead, she became formless, and the sanctum around her was no more. She resisted the urge to withdraw her hands—she still felt them there—to catch herself, just as Ivo had instructed.

His back was bare, and he stood in the water up to his waist, his arms to his sides, palms touching the waves as they rolled past him. She despaired that she could not see his face, only to find herself looking at him from a new direction. His shoulders and chest were muscled and his abdomen notched from top to bottom, but his ribs and collar bones were too pronounced, and he’d let his hair grow. It bristled from his head and jaw like he’d just emerged from months of hibernation. She saw it then, a resemblance to Banruud, and she almost lowered her hands.

He shuddered, his back stiffening like he’d caught a chill. He cocked his chin, the way he did when he was listening, and his pale eyes were striped with shadows like they’d been that night on the hillside.

“Ghisla?”

“I am here,” she said, but her voice had not made the journey with her, and the runes were played out. The sanctum settled back around her and the sound of the sea and the scent of the brine was replaced by incense and old men.

The blood on her hands was smeared, and the Highest Keeper stood over her, his hands folded on his scepter.

“He could not hear me.”

“No.”

“But he looked well,” she whispered. She would not cry in front of Master Ivo.

“It is better this way,” he said again, almost pleading with her, and she wiped the blood from her hands and face. But it was not better for her.

Later that night, when she was alone and the temple was slumbering, she returned to the sanctum. She had a ceremony of her own to perform and didn’t want to do it huddled in the cellar or creeping through filthy tunnels. She had sharpened her small knife so it would not require too much skill or pressure to break the skin. Carefully, her lip tucked beneath her teeth, she drew the rune Master Ivo just taught her—the rune of the blind god—into her left palm. From left to right and top to bottom, one crescent, and then the other, with the arrow piercing them both through. Blood beaded in the wake of her blade, but she was pleased with the result. Neat, exact, and centered, just like Hod himself.

She set down her blade and with a deep breath, she said his name.

She hadn’t known what to expect or if she should expect anything at all. But if she had to wear the king’s mark on one hand, she would wear Hod’s mark on the other.

The world went black—the darkness sudden and absolute—and she gasped, both elated and afraid.

“Hod?” she whispered. The rune was working.

She waited, sightless, resisting the need to catch herself. But she wasn’t falling. The smell of incense still warmed the air around her, and the stone bench was firm beneath her thighs. She wasn’t falling or flying; she was blind.

She closed her fist around her bleeding left hand and patted the area around her with her right. She was still in the sanctum. She blinked, trying to restore her vision, but the inky darkness was complete. She had given her eyes to the blind god.

“Hody. Hody. Help me,” she moaned. But Hod was far away. Her hand was wet with her blood, and she blotted it frantically, trying to wipe away the effects of the rune, but it wasn’t just a mark made in blood. It was a mark carved into her skin.

She stood and felt her way forward with searching feet and one hand. At the altar, her knuckles grazed the side of the bowl where the Highest Keeper washed his hands. The bowl rocked and water sloshed, splashing her feet and dousing her hands. She steadied it with her right hand and carefully immersed her left, washing the blood from her shallow cuts, but it wasn’t enough.

She stepped back so her movements would not upend the bowl or brush against anything else and awkwardly loosened the sash at her waist. She wrapped the fabric around her hand, making a bandage from the cloth and pulling it tight. She needed the blood to stop.

She waited for an hour, hovering in the sanctum, listening to every groan and creak of the floors, to every whisper of the wind against the colored panes high on the stone walls. If the candles kept vigil beside her, she did not know, though the incense remained.

It was only when her tears came, the darkness and her fear breaking her down, that the idea came too. She unwrapped her hand and held it to her face. The salt of her tears stung her wounded flesh, but she began to sing, holding it there.

Cry, cry, dear one, cry,

Let the pain out through your eyes.

Tears will wash it all away,

Cry until the bruises fade.

Her tears came harder, and the sting intensified briefly, but then, with her song, the rune began to close and the darkness began to lift.

When she crept into bed just before dawn, her eyesight completely restored and her new rune scabbed over, she vowed to never tempt or test the runes again. The blind god had finally answered her.