Curse Of Blood: Gods & Monsters

Chapter XL - Heida

Valdyr — means 'wolf' in Old Norse. (Who's read Lair Of Beasts? You guys know this word!) 😉

Hellir — cave.

Five Years Later... (Last time jump, I promise)

Heida lifted the little boy onto her hip so that he could run his small hands along the calf's, dark silky back. It was time, she supposed, to call the rest of her flock home.

"Sing!" the boy commanded, giggling when she tickled him playfully.

"You are becoming as overbearing as your father," she admonished him good-naturedly. But sing she did.

Finn was still young enough that the kulning beguiled him as much as it did the livestock. As it had once enraptured (Brenna's word, not hers) his father. It had become something of a quotidian, after supper praxis between the two of them, Fin and her, when his aunt would beckon the cattle down from the mountain pastures with her mesmeric arias.

Her voice carried over the rolling downs, the sun's golden fingers slanting across the autumnal verdure as Finn watched her with childish fascination.

Once all the cattle were lowing nearby, he nodded his approval and rested his head on her shoulder, his hair as dark as his father's. Finn lifted the amulet from her breast to brush his little fingers over the runes as he always did.

"Is it whispering to you now?" He meant the amulet; the babel of voices, when they did murmur, were many.

"No," she answered, "they are quiet today."

But maundering or no, she could not understand 'them', whoever the queer interlocutors were that sometimes whispered to her. When the sibilant muttering, as of a hundred, hushed, feminine voices, became too much, she would perforce take the periapt off her neck and silence would, thankfully, prevail once more.

'They' did not always speak to her, in fact they did so but rarely, however, when the chatter ensued ... it was with determined volubility. If only she could understand them.

"It will protect you ... from them," Brynja had said.

"Them?"

"The wolves!"

It was that warning, and the memory of the valkyrie's anxious face, that always induced her to replace it around her neck again. After all, she knew now of what Brynja had spoken then. The Valdyr.

And, what was more, she understood now who her father was. Brenna had told her, and Aila had confirmed it for her shortly thereafter. She was Heida Haraldsdóttir.

The daughter of the Blood Drinker!

Though she had been raised as Aila's own daughter, she was, in truth, the blood sister of Roth and Renic; moreover, she was as cursed as they were. And twice over, for she was anomalous too, albeit to a lesser extent. Although not monstrous exactly, she was, now and always, still in love with her own brother. There were, after all, many ways in which one might be cursed.

"We had better go home," she told Finn, planting a kiss at his brow before setting him down on his feet. Gods, she loved this child as if he were her own. And perhaps more so because he was Roth's — the son she would never give him. Could never give him.

"No," came the child's emphatic answer.

"So you want to be here when the valdyr comes tonight." She widened her eyes in mock horror and purposefully raised stiffened fingers into the air like terrifying claws, poised threateningly above her nephew's head. "He eats little boys like you, Finn."