The Fire Stallion

The Fire Stallion Stacy Gregg An enchanting and empowering standalone story from the author of The Princess and the Foal.Twelve-year-old Hilly has landed her dream job, riding on the set of Brunhilda, an epic film based on the fearless warrior of Icelandic legend. Norse fire ritual tells that on mid-summer’s day, animals and humans can shape-shift and one night Hilly finds herself connected to the young warrior and her fire stallion. As the two girls’ lives intertwine, Hilly soon realises that they’ll both have to risk everything for the love of their horses…Inspired by real-life historical events, The Fire Stallion is an epic tale… First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018 Published in this ebook edition in 2018 HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) Text copyright © Stacy Gregg 2018 Cover design © HarperCollins Children’s Books 2018 Cover images and decorative illustrations © Shutterstock Stacy Gregg asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008261412 Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008261436 Version: 2018-07-24 For Nicky Pellegrino and the Sea Breeze Caf? Contents Cover (#ud2dd05cd-f34a-5ef6-be3c-0cc080a0b43d) Title Page (#u73bd0d27-3368-5ee6-8ae2-a422602aac38) Copyright (#u4675883e-7867-5ec2-9a93-54c82ea1507a) Dedication (#u54c3f443-34b0-58c3-aa80-dbe1a70fee69) Chapter 1: Eternal Dawn Chapter 2: Horses in the Woods Chapter 3: Transmogrification Chapter 4: The All-Thing Chapter 5: Bru and Me Chapter 6: The Hammer of Thor Chapter 7: The Island Chapter 8: True Love’s Kiss Chapter 9: Prince Sigard Chapter 10: The Fire Ring Chapter 11: Loki’s Trick Chapter 12: The Bidding Chapter 13: Fire Stallion Chapter 14: Long Shadows Chapter 15: Casting the Runes Chapter 16: Valkyrie Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo) Other books by Stacy Gregg About the Publisher (#u0601c84a-2698-5d26-ac1a-7704b4f3ebed) When I was little, I was terrified of the dark. I was totally convinced that night-time brought the monsters to life. I never thought that one day I would miss it. That I would be here now, lying in bed wide awake at midnight, longing for the peaceful inky blackness of a true night sky. When I push apart the blackout curtains in our log cabin it’s as bright as day outside. Lilac clouds sweep in drifts across the sky, their edges rimmed with fiery shades of pink. At the horizon the sky deepens into blood red until the point where it strikes the sea and becomes molten gold. Nobody mentioned the constant daylight to me before we arrived in Iceland. Mum had told me it was going to be freezing here, even though it’s the middle of summer, but she never said that in summer there’s virtually no night. It’s because we’re so close to the North Pole. The sun pretty much never sets. You would think that continual daytime would be cool – like staying up as late as you want. But it’s not like that. Eventually, you want to sleep whatever, and then you find that you can’t because, even with the blackout curtains, those rays find a way of creeping in. Just knowing that the sun is blazing outside while you’re in bed trying to sleep is enough to keep you wide awake. No wonder this place is messing with my head. Ever since that night with the fire ritual, I swear that I’m not always me any more. I shift back and forth, my shape becoming one and the same as hers. If I focus hard now, I can hear her voice. More than that, I can feel her thoughts and instincts. They’re mingled with mine. Brunhilda’s Viking blood is coursing through my veins. I’m a thousand years old and thirteen all at the same time. Yesterday, as I walked across the fields towards the horses with Anders I saw this patch of brilliant red berries growing right there on the moss beside the track. Without thinking, I picked some and put them straight in my mouth. Anders was horrified. “Are you crazy? They could be poisonous!” I laughed. “They’re delicious,” I insisted, holding them out to him. “Try some!” I would have been in big trouble if Katherine had caught me. Feeding potentially poisonous wild berries to her lead actor? She would have hit the roof. I’m not even a proper crew member on this movie, I’m only here because of Mum. Anders hesitated for longer than I expected. “How do you know, Hilly? If they’re poisonous, they could kill us,” he said. “I’ve got no intention of dying,” I replied, smiling. My hand was still outstretched, daring him to take them. “Nobody intends to die,” Anders said, plucking the entire handful from my palm and then munching them down. “Yummy,” he agreed. I double-checked the berries on the internet when I was back at the cabin later that day. Lingonberries, it said. They turn scarlet when ripe for the picking. Perfectly safe. A staple of the ancient Icelandic diet. But then I had known that when I had picked them. It’s because of Brunhilda. I know everything that she knows. All about the natural world around me here. Like I can tell you which are the tastiest of the mosses and lichens growing on the volcanic rocks. I’m an expert too on gathering seaweed, picking through the salty strands washed up on the shoreline, divining which kinds are suited for eating raw and which would be better for stewing in the cooking pot. The other day, walking along the beach, I found a dead Greenland shark that had washed up in the storm and, without even acknowledging what I was doing, I found myself digging a hole in the pebbles at the top of the tideline, where I knew it would stay dry, and burying the body. I dug the hole shallow, but deep enough so that the heavy stones I piled up on top will press down and squeeze the shark, making the deadly toxins leach out as it rots. It will need about a month like that before I can go back and dig it up again and eat it. By then its noxious juices will have disappeared completely and the meat will be safe to consume. I mean, come on! How did I know that? Since when is the process of fermenting a Greenland shark something a kid from New Zealand knows how to do? My connection to Iceland becomes more powerful every day. There’s a magnetic pull that anchors me here. I can hear the land humming with energy, can feel its volcanic vibrations beneath my feet and in the air. I don’t tell Mum any of this stuff. She’s fed up with what she calls all the “mystical mumbo jumbo” that’s been happening to me since we arrived. Mum’s very practical and hasn’t got much patience for hippy-drippy nonsense. As the head of the costume design team, she spends all day dealing with highly strung actors and actresses banging on about their spirituality, and it has made her intolerant. That’s why Mum can’t stand Gudrun. I know a lot of the crew totally agree with Mum and think that the cultural consultant is either a schemer or simply nuts. Behind her back they call her “the Icelandic witch” because she swans about in these floaty dresses, burning bunches of sage and chanting Norse poetry. Nobody can do anything about Gudrun, though, because Katherine, the film director, is the one who brought her along. Gudrun’s a professor of Icelandic saga, and knows everything about the real-life Brunhildaof the film. “‘Cultural consultant’ is a fancy term for getting in the way and holding up the rest of us who have real jobs to do,” Mum complained after that first day of filming, when Gudrun made everyone run late by insisting that the whole crew formed a circle round her while she chanted and “blessed” the set. Mum says that Gudrun is crazy, or just very good at acting crazy to keep her job. Either way, Mum really doesn’t like me hanging out with her. But she’s wrong about Gudrun. I know her rituals are annoying, but she’s not faking it. Gudrun is one hundred per cent serious. She truly believes in everything she’s doing. I remember when we got off the plane at Keflavik airport and Gudrun sidled up to me. She put her pale arm round my shoulder, pulling me close to her so that no one else could listen when she whispered, “Hilly, do you hear the land crying out to you? Iceland knows that the Norse heir to the throne has returned to her. You are home. You are home.” And it’s true – I am home. I belong here. Or perhaps that’s the sleep deprivation talking. It’s 2 a.m. and I still can’t sleep. I get out of bed and pull on jeans and Ugg boots, along with my thickest woollen pullover and a North Face puffer jacket. Then I head out of the cabin and down the woodland path that takes me between the crew’s cabins, all the way to the fields beyond. It’s midsummer and yet it’s so cold my breath makes puffs of steam in the air as I walk. I have to shove my hands deep in my pockets to stop my fingers from going numb. At the edge of the cabins there’s a stile I clamber over and I keep on going, the gravel of the path crunching lightly beneath my feet. The moss on either side of the path is a washed-out sage green. If you step on it, your foot leaves an imprint then slowly springs back up. Halfway to the fields the moss clears and now the soil turns black. There’s steam rising up from hot pools that are deep enough to climb into at the end of a hard day’s filming. Beyond the black steaming rocks, more moss grows, and then rust-coloured heather and tussock grass form little islands in among the marshlands. This is where Mj?lnir lives. When Mj?lnir arrived, the crew all had trouble pronouncing his name – for the record you say it “Meel-nir”. Anyway, no one could get it right so we called him Hammer, because that’s what Mj?lnir is: he’s the hammer of the gods – the weapon that once belonged to the mighty Thor. At the edge of the marshlands I stand with my hands cupped at my mouth and call his name. “Hammer! Hammer!” Nothing. He could be sleeping, I guess. He doesn’t have the same sort of insomnia as I have. He was born here and he thinks it’s perfectly normal to sleep in daylight. “Hammer!” I try again and this time, in response to my call, a clarion cry thunders through the air, echoing across the fields. And then I see him. He flits between the trees of the woods like a black shadow. His mane is flying wild, like brilliant scarlet silk ribbons in the wind, and his tail flashes behind him as if it’s on fire. Gudrun says she threw the runes and asked the gods to bring her the perfect horse. She believes that all of this was fated to happen – me and her and Hammer too. Looking back, she was preparing Hammer to be with me right from the start, just as she was readying me for the rituals of Jonsmessa, preparing me to make the Cross-Over when the time came. I only wish I had known that back then, but I guess if Gudrun had told me the truth about Jonsmessa I would have thought she was crazy, too. You’re going to think I’m mad myself, unless I backtrack and start at the beginning … unless I tell you how I ended up in this remote land of volcanoes and ice at the furthest end of the world. It’s no coincidence that I’m here. Gudrun is right about that. She read in the runes that I would come and I have. I am here in Iceland to do what needs to be done for the saga. To make things right at last, not for me but for her. I will fight this battle to redeem Brunhilda and bring glory to the one true queen. Her saga has been told before, but this time there’s a twist. This time we’re in it together. (#u0601c84a-2698-5d26-ac1a-7704b4f3ebed) Looking back, I can see that Gudrun had been preparing me before we’d even got to Iceland. It began the moment I met her, that first night in London. This was the first time that Mum had taken me on one of her film jobs and I was nervous about tagging along to dinner that night. Katherine Kara, the director of Brunhilda, had decided to throw a get-together for the crew at a Japanese restaurant in Soho before we departed for Reykjavik. Mum and I had only just arrived that morning on the long-haul flight from New Zealand. I was so jetlagged my brain was swimming and I could barely talk. “We can go back to the hotel and get room service instead if you’re tired?” Mum said, looking worried. “I’ll be fine,” I promised. I knew that Mum felt unprofessional having her daughter along. It had never been the plan to bring me and it would never have happened if things hadn’t turned out like they did with Piper. It had been the start of the eventing season. I’d been doing loads of fitness work on Piper, riding her on the beach each day, doing timed gallops along stretches of hard sand and then cooling her legs by walking her home in the salt water. We’d finished the season at the top of the one-metre class rankings at the end of last year and were about to step up to the big league. Taking on the Open class fences at a metre ten was like going pro, but we were ready for it. Nothing was going to stop us. Until it did. It’s an odd thing because I don’t usually check on Piper at night, but that evening something made me go to her paddock. As soon as I saw her lying down like that, I knew. She was in this weird position, her neck craned uncomfortably, and she was sniffing at her belly, as though she was about to have a foal, except she couldn’t be – she wasn’t pregnant. I climbed over the gate and ran across to her, and when I reached her I could hear her making these groans, and then she nickered to me with this pitiful cry as if she was saying, “Oh, thank goodness you’re here – I’m in such pain!” I pulled at her neck rug and got her to stand up, but almost straight away she dropped back to her knees and was lying down again. Then she kicked out at her stomach, really hard, so that she actually struck it with her right hind leg and then she collapsed back to the ground with an agonised groan. “Piper!” I dropped to the ground, undoing her rug, seeing how soaked in sweat she was beneath it. I needed help. “I’ll be back,” I promised her. I remember running to the house, stumbling in the dark, feeling like I was going to throw up, and then I couldn’t find Mum or Dad anywhere and I was yelling for them and finally Mum came into the kitchen and found me sobbing. “Hilly? What’s going on?” “It’s Piper!” I couldn’t breathe to get the words out. “She’s got colic.” Mum looked at me, her face ashen. “You go back to her,” she said. “I’ll call the vet.” Piper was still on the ground when I got to her again. It took me, Mum and Dad to get her up on her feet. Then, for the next hour and a half while we waited for the vet to come, I had to keep her up. A horse with colic doesn’t realise what’s wrong. All they know is that their gut hurts, and so they can injure themselves really badly by trying to kick their own stomachs and you have to keep them walking to stop them from harming themselves. And so I walked her, in circles, around and around the yard, waiting for the vet to arrive. When it was almost midnight Mum had offered to take a turn, but I said no. Piper was my horse and she trusted me, I had to stay with her. Besides, I was so sick with fear I needed to keep doing something. I had been so relieved when I’d seen the headlights of the vet’s truck snaking their way down the bush road that led to our farm. It turned straight towards the stables and when she got out of the truck she immediately began grabbing vials and needles out of her supply kit, gathering everything she needed before she ran to join us. “Sorry it’s taken me so long,” she said. “I was delivering a foal on the other side of the gorge and there are no other vets on call tonight.” She took out her stethoscope and began to listen to Piper’s heartbeat. I stayed silent, letting her concentrate. “How long has she been like this?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I found her at around seven thirty, so at least since then.” The vet filled a syringe and injected Piper in the neck. “What’s that?” Mum asked. “Muscle relaxant,” she said. “You were right. It’s colic. Hopefully, if the relaxant works, then the contractions should subside.” “And if it doesn’t work?” I asked. The vet didn’t look at me and she didn’t answer my question. “I need you to keep her walking,” she said. “Check in with me by dawn and tell me how she’s doing.” Dad went back to bed after that and so did my sister, Sarah-Kate, so it was just me and Mum after that. She made us toasted sandwiches and cups of tea and I walked Piper. I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. I stayed up all night walking her in circles, and the kicking subsided. Mum just about had me convinced that we were over the worst of it, and we should go to bed too, when it all started up again. Worse, this time. She was thrashing on the ground, kicking and kicking. This time the vet got to us in under an hour. As she examined Piper she looked much more serious than she had last night. “I think we need to go to surgery,” she said. “What does that mean? What’ll you do to her?” I asked. “We’ll put her under an anaesthetic and get her up on the operating table, and then make a cut along her underside on the belly from chest to tail so we can take the blockage out of her gut.” I tried not to think about Piper with her guts inside out. “How much will it cost?” Mum asked. I knew what she was thinking – Piper wasn’t insured. “Including box rest afterwards? You won’t get any change from $10,000. And it’s major surgery. You need to factor in at least three months for the wound to heal on box rest.” “Will she compete again?” Mum asked. “Depends,” the vet sighed. “Some horses heal perfectly and they’re back out there doing what they love. Others never come fully right. I can’t give you guarantees. I’m sorry, surgery is still a risk.” “Is there another option?” Mum asked. “At this stage?” the vet said. “If you want to keep her alive, there’s no other option.” Mum looked at my face and she didn’t hesitate. “Get Piper in the float, Hilly. We’re taking her to surgery.” It’s funny how quickly priorities change. Twenty-four hours ago, the most important thing in my world had been competing at the Open. Now, all that mattered was keeping Piper alive. I remember sitting in the darkness as we drove that night, crying, and I felt Mum reach out to clutch my hand. “I promise, Hilly, everything is going to be OK,” she said. And when I didn’t stop crying, that was when she said, “Maybe, instead of eventing this season, you should come with me to Iceland?” Now, sitting in a Japanese restauarant on the other side of the world, that all seemed like a lifetime ago. Dinner had been booked by Katherine’s personal assistant, Lizzie, for twelve people. By the time that we turned up, most of the others had already arrived. I knew Jimmy, the assistant director – he was English but he’d worked in New Zealand a lot with Katherine. And Chris, the lighting guy, and Lizzie – they were old friends of Mum’s from film school. So there were ten of us already seated and waiting by the time Katherine arrived. Katherine wasn’t one of those superstar directors who looked all Hollywood – she was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans. It was the woman beside her who was dressed as though she was famous. She had a really dramatic look about her with this flame-red Rapunzel hair. She wore this brilliant, floor-length purple patterned dress which looked incredible against her pale skin. Her eyes, a startling emerald green, seemed magnified behind her gigantic spectacles rimmed with red glitter frames. “Everybody, I want to introduce you to Doctor Gudrun Gudmansdottir, professor of Norse mythology and Icelandic saga at Harvard University,” Katherine had said. “I’m thrilled to have someone of her stature on board to ensure the integrity of this movie and help us to bring the real Princess Brunhilda to life.” Gudrun raised her hands in this spectral way, as if she were about to perform a s?ance or something, and then she reached out and picked up a champagne glass off the table and raised it to the light. “I have cast the runes and they tell me that the Norse gods will smile upon this production,” she said theatrically. “Now join me in paying thanks to mighty Odin by raising your glasses and drinking deep in his honour!” I could hear Mum mutter under her breath beside me as she reluctantly raised her glass. I caught her rolling her eyes at Jimmy as if to say, “Who is this nutter?” “To mighty Odin!” Gudrun’s toast was so loud the whole restaurant suddenly stopped talking. Draining her glass in one go, she put it back down, and then, rather than taking the empty seat beside Katherine, she walked the length of the table and made a beeline for me. “I’ll sit here. Bring me a chair …” She waved a hand airily at the waiter. Then she positioned herself in between me and Mum and locked me into the tractor beam of her powerful green eyes. She put her hand out to shake mine. I’d been expecting her skin to feel cold it was so white, but it was almost like touching fire. “I’m Gudrun,” she said. “Hilly,” I replied. “Hilly Harrison.” “Of course you are,” Gudrun said, as if she knew this already. “You’ve travelled a long way, Hilly. Are you prepared for Iceland?” “Oh, no!” I thought she had the wrong idea. “I mean, yes, I’m coming, but I’m not working as part of the crew or anything. I’m here with Mum.” Gudrun narrowed her eyes at me. “Do not underestimate yourself, Hilly. You have a role of your own to play. And a very important one it will be too.” She leaned close to me and whispered conspiratorially: “I threw the runes this morning and the gods told me everything. The future holds great adventure for us, Hilly. Ready yourself …” “Excuse me—” It was the waiter. “What would you like to order, madam?” Gudrun didn’t open her menu, she just smiled up at him. “Do you have any puffin?” The waiter looked horrified. “No, madam!” Gudrun sighed with genuine disappointment. She turned to me. “It’s so difficult to find puffin on the menu outside of Iceland. They’re delicious roasted. The Icelanders catch them in butterfly nets.” Instead, Gudrun ordered the Atlantic salmon. I had the teriyaki chicken. As we ate, she asked me all about my life in Wellington and seemed genuinely excited when I told her that I rode. “It must have been hard to leave your horse at home, to be away for so long?” Gudrun said. I said nothing. I didn’t want to talk about Piper. “You’ll find the Icelandic horses very different to the ones back home,” Gudrun continued. “They’re bred to be highly spirited and hot under saddle and they have five gaits.” I didn’t understand. “Five gaits?” “Most horses have just four gaits – they can walk, trot, canter and gallop,” Gudrun replied. “An Icelandic horse has no gallop – instead they pace, and they have a fifth gait, the t?lt, which is super fast – it’s like a trot except it’s so smooth you do not need to rise out of the saddle. When you ride a t?lting horse, it feels like you’re flying. You can sit on their backs quite comfortably like this for great distances.” “Have you ridden at a t?lt?” I asked. Gudrun smiled. “Of course. As a girl I grew up riding every day. Everyone rides in Iceland. There are only three hundred thousand people, and there are a hundred thousand horses. The Icelandic has the purest blood of any horse in the world. Their breeding hasn’t changed for a thousand years. They are the horses of the Vikings.” “So do you live in Reykjavik?” I asked. Gudrun shook her head. “I grew up there, but New York’s my home now. When Katherine asked me to work on this project, I knew I had to come back, though. Brunhilda is very important to me.” I had taken a look at the Brunhilda script when Mum was reading it on the plane. “So it’s about the princess from Sleeping Beauty, right?” Gudrun’s face darkened. “Sleeping Beauty is a nonsense story! Brunhilda is not some fairy-tale princess. She was a real girl. This is precisely why I am here – so that this movie won’t become some ridiculous recounting of her history, a helpless fawn waiting for a prince’s kiss to awaken her. The true Brunhilda was the fiercest, the noblest of warriors, willing to fight to the ends of the earth for what she believed in. I have worked all my life to serve her truth.” Gudrun looked at me hard, her green eyes searching mine. “But why are you here, Hilly?” I gulped down my sushi roll and thought about telling her everything about me and Piper and the worst time of my life, but in the end all I said was the truth. “I didn’t want to be home.” The flight to Iceland took us into Keflavik airport, an hour from the capital Reykjavik. We were picked up by three minivans and got on board with our bags before driving off in convoy. The landscape out of the window was like looking at Mars – plateaus of bare, rugged black rock patchworked with lichen, moss and snowdrifts with strange curls of smoke coming out of the ground. “Steam not smoke,” Mum corrected me when I pointed it out to her. “There are a hundred and thirty volcanoes here. Thirty of them are still active and even in summer there’s snow. They call it the land of fire and ice.” We turned off the motorway not far from Keflavik because Lizzie thought it would be fun to stop for lunch at Blue Lagoon, a vast natural hot water lake. “It’s just so touristy,” Gudrun said as we got out of the vans. “There’s hot water everywhere in Iceland but this place is a little too crowded for me.” It smelled like the hot pools back home in Rotorua with a rotten tang of sulphur in the air. The hot water lake was huge and the water was an ice-cloudy blue. Mum and I changed into our swimming costumes along with the crew and got in, sitting up to our armpits. Gudrun was off having an intense conversation with Katherine and didn’t join us. “Slip this on,” Lizzie said, giving me a wristband. “What’s it for?” I asked. “Anything you want!” She winked at me. It was the coolest thing ever. All I had to do was wave my digital wristband at the kiosks and I was given whatever I wanted. Soft drinks, chips and hotdogs – well, Icelandic hotdogs, which were kind of like American ones but with this weird creamy mustard sauce. I asked for tomato sauce instead but even that was a little strange and tasted like sweet cheese. We soaked in the pools until my skin wrinkled. It felt chalky and dried-out when we got back out and dressed in the cold air. Then we piled back into the vans, all toasty from the hot water. Most tourists go to Reykjavik and stay there but we drove straight through. It wasn’t a big city so it didn’t take long and pretty soon it was like we were driving across a moonscape, all spooky and barren with scattered patches of snow despite the summer. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the snow vanished and we were driving through tussocky plains, bare and desolate. It looked prehistoric here, almost as though humans had never existed. We passed a roadside diner that looked closed except for the flashing lights that insisted it was open. By now it must have been late, but it was still eerily light. I looked at the time on the clock on the dashboard of the van: 11 p.m. “There’s the hotel.” Mum nudged me and pointed off the main road to the right. In the far-off distance, I could see a long, low wooden lodge that looked like something the Vikings would have lived in except it was much bigger. It stood alone, in front of a massive forest of grey-green fir trees. “So, that’s our base for the next two months,” Mum said. The sign outside the hotel said ISBJ?RN. It translated as “ice bear” – polar bear, I guess it meant, since there was a giant stuffed polar bear standing on its hind legs in the foyer. Isbj?rn had twelve rooms inside the lodge and another twenty-three cabins. The whole place had been rented out so that we were the only ones here. Katherine and the actors were going to be in the main lodge. The rest of us were allocated cabins around the grounds. Lizzie was methodically doing the rounds of the vans with a clipboard as everyone clamoured around her to find out where they were sleeping. “Jillian, I’ve put you in the woods – total Hansel and Gretel job, little footpath into nowhere, but, trust me, it’s very pretty …” Lizzie handed Mum our key on a wooden tag and a map of the hotel grounds. “Which way?” Mum asked. “Go through the hotel foyer,” Lizzie called back without looking round. “Out the other side you’ll see the path into the forest. Follow the middle track. On the map I gave you your cabin is marked with a red cross.” “You navigate, Hilly,” Mum said, passing it to me. I took the map and started reading. “We go this way,” I said, pointing at the walk-through pavilion that divided the two main wings of the hotel. The path was there. It split three ways and each artery was signposted for cabins three, four and five. “That’s us, cabin five.” I led the way. Mum was already on her phone, talking to Nicky, her assistant, who was arriving tomorrow with the costumes. Some of the cast were on Nicky’s flight but the main actors and actresses weren’t due to arrive for two more weeks. Mum had already done fittings for all of them, but there were still details to go through and more clothes to source. She wanted to have everything on hand to do final fittings before shooting began. I could hear Nicky’s voice on the other end of the phone, all shrill and panicky. She was saying there were problems getting the suits of armour through UK customs. The customs officer thought the shoulder pads with the spikes should be classified as weapons. Mum was so calm as she advised her what to do – it made me realise how good she was at her job. The other night at dinner, when Katherine had introduced everyone to Gudrun, she had referred to Mum as the “Oscar-award-winning costume designer Jillian Harrison”. Mum didn’t care about her Oscar – she was currently using it to prop open the cat flap at home – but it made me feel proud. “No bars. I need to backtrack,” she said suddenly, holding her phone up above her head, searching for a signal. “I have to clear this up now. You keep on going, Hilly. I’ll catch you up at the cabin.” It was like something out of a movie in that forest. The trees around me were so damp they dripped water. Bright green moss grew on the trunks on the dark side where no light could reach it. I walked slowly at first, thinking Mum might catch me up, but then I got cold and my fingers were numb so I sped up again, and then I saw the little red toadstool on the ground. Not natural but manmade with a sign beside it, an arrow made out of wood with the number five on it that pointed in the direction of our cabin. When I look back on what happened next, I still can’t figure out how she did it. I remember we were all waiting by the minivans when Lizzie gave us our keys and allocated our rooms. Mum and I had set off down the path to our cabin straight away after that. I hadn’t seen anybody else come this way. So how was it that Gudrun was already on the doorstep of the cabin, sitting on a rocking chair and waiting for me? She jumped straight up, an air of impatience about her, as if she’d been there for hours. “Throw your bags inside quickly, Hilly,” she said. “We need to hurry.” “But …” I was confused. “Mum’s still back there. She’s on the phone.” But Gudrun ignored me. As I put the key in the lock, she turned the handle for me, then helped me to put my bags in the room. I only just had time to look around and see the shadowy shapes of deer antlers hanging on the walls before she had bustled me back out again and we were walking on the path that took us deeper into the forest. Gudrun walked so fast I was panting with the effort as I skipped to catch up with her. We walked like this, saying nothing for a little way. Just when I was about to summon up the courage to ask her where we were going, the woods cleared in front of us and we were obviously in the place she wanted me to see. Years ago when I was little we’d taken a family holiday to Rome and visited the Colosseum. I remember standing at the side and staring down into the depths of it and imagining all those fights to the death on the sand between the gladiators with their swords and tridents, and the wild tigers and lions being let loose to eat the Christians. This place we were in now was like a miniature version of that, a circular structure of stone steps sinking down into the earth to create an enclosed arena. Not big enough for the colosseum, but still pretty big. I couldn’t figure out whether it was natural or man-made – the stone steps were covered in grass. Gudrun began to vault down them towards the arena. She was carrying a tote bag across her back and it bounced as she leapt, making a clattering noise like it had bells inside. I clambered after her, tentatively taking the first step in an ungainly fashion, before figuring out that the best way to get down was to do what Gudrun was doing and leap and land then leap again. Finally I reached the bottom too – not sand like the real Colosseum but dry tussock grass. Gudrun strode out until she was standing right in the middle of the arena and began pulling items out of her bag, including a garden trowel. “Here!” she called to me. “Come and help me to dig.” I did as she asked and dug, chipping away at the hard crust beneath the grassy surface. It was tough at first but, once I’d broken through, it crumbled away more easily and soon I’d made a decent hole, with a mound of earth beside it. “That will do,” Gudrun said. She was still fossicking in her bag. “Gudrun?” I finally summoned up the nerve. “What are we doing?” “We’re preparing,” she replied, pulling out a cow’s horn from her bag and laying it down next to the hole. “Soon it will be the Jonsmessa – the apex of midsummer,” Gudrun said. “In ancient Iceland this was considered a most magical time. And so, to honour the ancients, we prepare for the ritual. We will bury this horn now and then, when the time is right, we will return.” Gudrun produced a bundle of purple herbs and some yellow flowers, shoving half of them into the cow’s horn before turning to me. “May I have your necklace please?” There was a silver chain around my neck that Mum had given me for my birthday. I hesitated. “My necklace? Why?” Gudrun sighed. “The ritual requires something that has touched your flesh.” I frowned. “Will I get it back again?” “Yes, of course,” Gudrun said, as if she’d made this obvious already. “We will return for it.” I took the necklace off and I was about to hand it to her but she shrank back. “No,” she instructed. “Not to me. You must put it in the horn.” So I slipped the necklace inside, on top of the purple herbs, and then Gudrun took some more yellow flowers and pushed them into the horn too. Then she laid the horn carefully on its side in the hole I’d dug before patting the soil flat back over it. She beckoned for me to stand up again. She stood beside me, her eyes closed and her hands raised above her head, and chanted a verse in a language I didn’t recognise. When she opened her eyes again she was smiling at me. “All done,” she said brightly. “You can go home now, Hilly. Your mother will be wondering where you are.” It was true. Mum was already waiting for me when I got back. When she asked where I had been, I knew it would wind her up if I mentioned Gudrun. Mum clearly found her annoying already. So I just said I’d gone for a look around while she finished her call. In our cabin that night, I slept really well because I was so jetlagged. I didn’t notice that the night sky was as bright as day. When I woke up, the clock said it was morning, although time seemed meaningless by then. For a moment, I couldn’t work out how I’d even ended up here, and when I thought back to the whole episode in the Colosseum with Gudrun, it felt so surreal I could have sworn I’d imagined it. But then I put my hand to my neck and realised, with a shiver, that my silver chain was gone. (#u0601c84a-2698-5d26-ac1a-7704b4f3ebed) We were having breakfast in the hotel restaurant the next morning when Gudrun swept in, red curls flying out behind her in a fiery blaze. “I’ve just read the new script.” She flung the thick wodge of paper down in front of me and it hit the table with a dull thud. “Is it any good?” I asked. “Aargh.” Gudrun pulled a face. “If you like fairy tales, it’s excellent. But I’m not interested in fairy tales. It’s the truth that I want to see. The real Brunhilda, a ferocious warrior who takes the throne after her father and leads her tribe to be Queen of Iceland.” I must have looked doubtful because Gudrun picked up on my hesitation. “Isn’t this what you want too, Hilly?” “Yes, I guess,” I said, “if that’s the truth, but what I want doesn’t necessarily count around here.” Gudrun’s eyes narrowed. “But what do you think?” I sat there for a moment, gathering my thoughts so that I would say this right. “Why is it that in all the movies I see the Vikings are men? I’ve never seen a girl Viking. Maybe the girls really did just cook and clean and the boys were the only ones who got to do all the cool stuff like swordfights and horse riding.” “You see history as it’s told by men,” Gudrun said. “And these men know nothing because they weren’t there.” “I guess so,” I replied, “but you weren’t there either. The only person who really knows what happened to her is Brunhilda.” I thought Gudrun would be cross with me for saying this. But she looked delighted and threw her arms around me. “Exactly! Oh, I knew I was right to choose you!” She gave me a kiss on the forehead. I wasn’t sure exactly what she was going on about, but I smiled anyway. “Two weeks from tonight, Jonsmessa will be here at last,” she went on. “Then, Hilly, we’ll find out everything we need to know.” There was even more bounce than usual to her step as she headed back out the door, dashing past Mum, who was heading to our table from the breakfast buffet with a plate of bacon and eggs for us both. “What’s up with Gudrun?” she asked. “What do you mean?” My heart was racing. “She came in and left again without eating anything.” Mum shook her head. “That woman is very peculiar.” “Yes,” I agreed, “she most certainly is.” In the weeks of pre-production that followed, Gudrun didn’t mention Jonsmessa again to me. She was still pretty friendly, but her focus seemed to be on Katherine and the script and getting it right. They would frequently sit at a table in the dining room locked in heated discussions. Sometimes I would see Gudrun by herself at the same table late into the evenings as she cast her runes and chanted. One morning at breakfast, before we ate she’d insisted the room needed “cleansing” and we had to wait to eat until she could perform her ritual: waving a burning bunch of sage. Considering the frequent strangeness of her behaviour, being dragged along to bury a cow’s horn didn’t seem so out of the ordinary when I thought about it now. In fact, it had pretty much become a distant memory. Also, I had something else to distract me from the cultural consultant’s enchantments. I had somehow landed myself a job. It had happened the same morning that Gudrun had cleansed the room at breakfast. Mum was sorting out the room in the hotel that she’d been allocated for costume storage. Mum’s assistant had gone back to London for more items and was due to return that afternoon, and they were on the phone to each other talking about how many racks they needed when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a woman with sandy blonde hair tied back in a messy plait. She was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots. “I’m Niamh,” she said. “I’m from the equine department. I’m afraid we have a problem.” “What kind of a problem?” Mum asked. Niamh pulled a face. “It’s easier if I show you … Let’s go to the stables.” The stables turned out to be a low block of buildings, just a short walk from the hotel, down by the river. I was shocked at the enormity of the scale of them. There were so many rows of loose boxes! And there was an indoor training m?nage with a round pen and a sawdust schooling arena too. “It’s so lucky they had these facilities here for your horses,” I said as Niamh slid back the barn doors. “Oh no,” she laughed. “None of this existed before. They custom-built it for us so that it was ready when we got here. The weather was so cold and wet when we arrived. It was the middle of winter – minus fifteen degrees and pitch black outside most days. We were getting up in the dark and working all day in the dark – our lives had almost no daylight for months really. The weather back home in Ireland isn’t great but at least there’s sun! So naturally under those conditions we were really looking forward to summer. We didn’t think about the major problem it would cause.” “What problem?” Mum asked. “I’ll show you,” Niamh said. We walked up the central corridor of the stable block and Niamh went up to the loose box that was labelled in gold with the name OLAFUR. “This is Olafur, but we call him Ollie.” Niamh opened the top half of the Dutch door. There was a horse inside, standing in the middle of the loose box. He had the look of a prize fighter, stocky and burly, yet he was no more than fifteen hands high. His eyes, which were half-closed as if he had been dozing, were almost completely covered by an enormous bushy forelock. It looked like he had a massive fringe, this giant explosion of sunburnt brown hair that sprang out from between his ears and then crested his powerful neck. His tail was bushy and enormous too, and had the same bedraggled sunburnt colour against his coat, which was quite sleek and almost black. “What breed is he?” I asked. “He’s an Icelandic,” Niamh said. “They all are. Connor, that’s my brother, he and I wanted to bring our own stunt horses with us from Ireland, but the rules are strict and it’s impossible to bring any horses in.” “Why?” “It’s been the law for centuries now.” Niamh shook her head in wonder. “They’re really serious about keeping the bloodlines of their horses pure. And if you take an Icelandic horse out of the country, even for a single day to compete or for work, that’s the end of it. They’re not allowed to return again. Ever.” “Really?” “Banished for life,” Niamh confirmed. “So, because of this law, you couldn’t bring any of your own trained horses here, then?” Mum said. “Nope.” Niamh sighed. “Which put us on the back foot. We’ve had to train all of these new horses since we arrived in winter. And the whole time we were sending photos back to the production team of the horses we’d bought for schooling and Katherine was so excited. She loved the way they appeared so rugged with their coats all long and sun-bleached and shaggy.” Niamh seemed like she was about to burst into tears. “And then, just before filming started, summer arrived, and now look!” She waved a dismissive hand at Ollie, standing sleek and black before her. “It’s a nightmare! They’re all like this!” “So they’ve moulted to their summer coats and lost their shaggy winter fur?” Mum grasped the situation. “And what do you want me to do?” “I want,” Niamh said, “I want you to make it winter again.” Mum didn’t bat an eye at the craziness of Niamh’s request. She stared hard at Ollie for a moment and then she dialled her phone. “Nicky? It’s me. Where are you? The airport? You’ve finally arrived? Good. OK, I’m going to give you the number of a contact in Reykjavik. I need you to go pick up some goat hair.” A few hours later, Nicky was at the hotel with a minivan filled with six commercial bales of coarse-strand goat hair. This was how Mum made the horse suits. Handfuls of the goat hair were dyed just the right shade of brown and then the ends were bleached to look like they’d been out in the sun. The hair was hand-stitched onto sheer black mesh which had been sewn with a zip that went from jaw to tail beneath the belly of the horse, in much the same way that a human might wear a onesie. A Velcro attachment hooked up onto the bridle to hold the suit in place at one end and tail clips fixed it at the other so that once it was done up there was no way to tell it was there and the goat hair looked exactly like the horse’s own natural long, shaggy winter coat. Fashioning the horse-onesie was tricky work. The costumes had to be fitted perfectly to each individual horse. And that was where I came in. It was a two-man job to take precise measurements, involving one person making notes and the other lying down on the ground with a tape measure to chart the dimensions of their belly and combine this with their length all the way from their head to beneath the dock of their tail. Mum and Nicky’s domain was the sewing room, where they had their team cutting and stitching the suits, and I stayed at the stables helping Niamh. We did forty horses together. I would spend hours lying on my back beneath the bellies of the stallions with Niamh bent down beside me writing down the measurements that I gave her. By the time we were done I knew everything about her. She was eighteen, so only five years older than me, and had left school as soon as she could to go to work for her brother Connor who ran Equus Films. “Horses are in the blood,” Niamh had said. “Mum and Dad breed point-to-point racers. Connor and I were both in the Irish National team for Pony Club Mounted Games. We’re both daredevils – the stunts we do now started out as things we did at home, like teaching our ponies to bow and rear, or swinging onto their backs off ropes and galloping them bareback.” Mark, the third member of the team, was Irish too, a friend of Connor’s from Pony Club days. “He and Connor started the company together before I joined, so that makes them the bosses,” Niamh explained. “Connor does most of the ridden work. He’s been training the two lead stallions, Troy and Ollie. Ollie is going to be the horse that the prince rides. He needs to be able to do all the usual stunts – you know, drop to one knee and rear on cue, and he also has to jump through fire to do the rescue at the end of the film. Troy has to do stunts too, but he’s also got to act because there are lots of scenes with him and Brunhilda together, so we need a horse that has presence, you know? Like a movie star.” Considering he was supposed to be a movie star, Troy was not at all what I’d been expecting. He was handsome enough – a deep russet chestnut with a flaxen mane – and he was beautiful, almost feminine for a stallion. I guess he was the right horse for a princess, but he wasn’t quite what I’d pictured when Gudrun had talked about Jotun, Brunhilda’s famous stallion. If Brunhilda really was this ferocious warrior, then Troy seemed a bit tame for her. Not that I said this to Niamh, of course, who was totally in love with Troy. “Don’t you think Jam is going to look amazing on him?” she said as she groomed his thick, shaggy blond mane. “Jam?” Niamh looked at me as if I were from another planet. “Jamisen O’Brien. She’s playing Brunhilda. You must know her! She was in that Hollywood blockbuster last summer – the musical one set in Greece.” “Oh,” I said, slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t clicked immediately when Niamh called her Jam. “Yeah, of course I know her. I used to love her TV show.” “Jamisen’s an amazing horsewoman,” Niamh continued. “She’ll be riding all her own stunts. The costume department have this enormous long blonde wig that she wears under her Viking helmet and it will look incredible blowing in the wind next to Troy’s flaxen mane.” “It must be weird,” I said, “to be not that much older than me and be the star of an entire movie.” “She’s used to it, I guess,” Niamh said. “What is she now? Sixteen? She’s been famous almost her whole life.” The arrival of Jamisen O’Brien and Anders Mortenson had everyone talking at dinner. The two stars of the film had finally turned up on a private jet with their entourages in tow, ready to start work the next day. “Jam’s brought six assistants with her,” Niamh told me as we piled up our plates at the buffet. My mum had worked on a lot of films and she’d told me some stories but I swear I’d never heard of any celebrity who had that many assistants before. “What do they all do?” I asked. “One of them is her personal trainer, one of them is her hairdresser, one of them is her personal assistant …” Niamh rattled them off, counting on her fingers. “Don’t know what the others do.” Anders Mortenson, on the other hand, had just his personal assistant with him. He’d been famous since he was ten years old when he played a spoilt rich kid in the TV comedy Cody and Toby and now, at the age of fifteen, this was the first time he’d play the hero. He was Prince Sigard, who would fight by Brunhilda’s side as her power grew and eventually marry his queen. “They get here today and then it’s a week of training with us and the stunt co-ordinators,” Niamh explained, “and then filming will finally begin …” The sudden hush that fell over the dining room at that moment made me think that maybe Jam and Anders had just walked in. But it was only Gudrun. She stood out from the rest of us in our North Face puffer jackets at the best of times, but today she was particularly wildly dressed in red trousers and a violet cape. She made a beeline for our table and flung herself down beside me. “Hilly, we need to talk.” I saw Niamh tense up in her presence. She couldn’t stand Gudrun; she’d admitted that to me when we’d been working on the goat-hair suits together. “Don’t you think it’s weird how she always talks to you?” Niamh had said to me once when she was going on about Gudrun’s odd behaviour. It was true and, yes, I did think it was a bit strange. I was the least important person here and yet Gudrun treated me like someone who really mattered. It made me uneasy but I kind of liked talking to her too. Niamh stood up to leave. “I have to go. Hilly, let’s meet up at the stables in half an hour, OK?” “Sure,” I said. Gudrun waited in silence until Niamh was out of earshot. Her green eyes were even wilder and brighter than usual. “Do you know what night it is, Hilly?” “Sunday?” I offered. “Yes,” Gudrun conceded. “Sunday, the 24th of June. The Jonsmessa is here at last. It’s time.” Then she leaned closer so that she could whisper to me: “I’ll come for you just before midnight. We must finish what we’ve started. It’s time to meet Brunhilda.” That night I sat up on my bed, fully dressed, waiting for Gudrun. She said the ritual needed to take place at midnight but by 11.30 p.m. she still wasn’t here. Finally at around 11.45 p.m. I gave up on her and closed the blackout curtains in my room. I had only just started to get ready for bed when I heard this scratching on the glass of the sliding door. Then another sound, a thin, melancholic whimper. I sat bolt upright and listened. More whimpering, louder this time. I got up, and moved cautiously over to the window and flung the curtains apart. In front of me, right on the other side of the glass door, stood two enormous grey wolves. They were standing there, side by side, like two statues, eyes blazing intently, tongues lolling from their massive open jaws. We were separated by the glass, so they couldn’t get to me, but that didn’t make them any less terrifying. I put my hand up to the pane and one of the wolves edged closer. His breath steamed the glass and I could see saliva dripping from his white fangs. The other one cocked his head and moved forward too. They were massive, powerful creatures, and I was sure at that moment that if they’d wanted to they could have broken down the glass to get to me. But they didn’t try. They didn’t even growl. They both stared intently at me. Then, as if they’d heard someone calling them, they turned on their heels and bounded away, into the forest. A moment later, another shape emerged from the shadows of the trees. It was Gudrun! I slid the door open for her. “Quick!” I hissed. “Get inside! There are wolves out there.” Gudrun was perfectly calm. “There are no wolves in Iceland,” she said. “I know what I saw,” I insisted. I wanted her to come in so I could shut the door, but she beckoned me outside instead. “Seriously, Hilly,” she said. “There’s nothing there. Come on. It’s time. We need to go.” I didn’t want to stay there arguing and risk waking Mum and so I stepped outside and slid the door shut behind me. We walked to the Colosseum, Gudrun leading the way. The sky up above was cloudless, and the colour of rose petals. “Quick, Hilly!” Gudrun leapt ahead of me, taking the stone steps two at a time to reach the grassy expanse of the arena. She grasped my hand and shoved the trowel into it. “Dig up the horn while I prepare.” The dirt mound from our burial had become overgrown with grass, which surprised me as it seemed like such a short time ago we had done the ritual. Gudrun must have marked the spot somehow because she was quite certain where I should dig. A few feet away she had placed a fire brazier stacked with logs. “The Vikings always used mountain ash, from the boughs of the rowan tree, for the midsummer ritual,” she said as she rearranged the wood inside the bowl of the rusty brazier and set it alight with a taper. “They believed that rowan has magical properties to ward off evil.” The wood caught fire almost instantly with a fairy dust sprinkling of orange sparks at first and then a deep, emerald-green flame as the rowan began to burn and crackle to embers. There was something very hypnotic about watching the fire, almost trance-like. “Hilly!” Gudrun said. “Please, keep digging – it’s time!” I plunged the trowel back into the earth and heard a thunk as it struck bone. “I’ve got it!” I said, using my fingers to prise the horn out of the soil, wiping it clean. I expected the herbs inside to have rotted away but the flowers were still brilliant yellow and the leaves were still green. I was about to reach in and get my necklace out when Gudrun stopped me. “Be very careful with it. You must not disturb its contents as you bring it to me.” I held the horn as if it were a baby in my arms and walked to Gudrun, who was stoking the wood with an iron so that the green flames leapt up as tall as me. It was strange, but there was no warmth emanating from the fire. It was as cold as ice. Gudrun stood and took the horn from me. “You kneel,” she said. I dropped to my knees next to the brazier. Gudrun lowered her hands into the green flames and rested the horn on top of the logs. All at once the fire changed colour, first to brilliant pink, then to gold. “Look into it,” Gudrun said to me. “Tell me what you see.” I stared at the flames. Suddenly, in their flicker, shapes emerged. I was getting really weirded-out now, but the fire held me steady, entranced in its flames. “I see the two wolves,” I said to Gudrun, “the same ones who came to me earlier. But they are with a man this time. He’s very tall and very old.” “And his face?” Gudrun asked me. I looked hard at his face and I saw that on one side there was a black pit where an eye had once been. “He’s got one eye,” I said. “And a long beard and there are these birds; big, black crows. They sit on his shoulders.” “They are ravens, not crows,” Gudrun said. “Hugin and Munin – Thought and Memory. And his wolves, the ones you saw earlier, are Geri and Freki. They are his constant companions. I knew you were special, Hilly, the first moment I met you.” “Who is he?” I asked. “Odin,” she replied, as if this were obvious. “The All-Father. Greatest of all the Norse gods. Odin, who decides which warriors are honourable enough to lift up after death to sit at his side at the feasting table in his heaven, Valhalla. He is here with us now. This is a good sign. We can begin the ritual.” And with that she produced a bunch of sage from her robes, lit the tips of it in the fire and began to move around me in a circle, chanting. The flames were mesmerising, licking up and then falling away to low-burning embers. The vision of Odin, his wolves and his ravens had disappeared and I looked up and saw blue eyes staring back at me from the fire, a girl no older than me, with blonde hair in tight braids. She reached out a hand to me and my pulse quickened as Gudrun stepped forward to the brazier. Putting her hands directly into the embers, she pulled out the horn. The flames had turned it white, and now there were carvings in the bone surface – intricate patterns and symbols like the runes that Gudrun kept in her velvet bag. She reached inside the horn and pulled out my silver chain and beckoned me to her so that she could clasp it back around my neck. Even though it had been in the heat of the fire just a moment before, the filigree felt like ice at my throat. “From ancient times, we bring you forth, Brunhilda. Let the exchange be complete so that we may know your truth!” Gudrun tossed the bundle of burning sage into the flames and it exploded in a burst of golden sparks. “Springa!” she cried out as the fire leapt once more. And even though she was speaking ancient Norse, this time I knew somehow that the word meant Jump! Inside me, my spirit soared and left my body and suddenly I was in the flames, the fire so brilliant all around that it blinded me. Later, when Gudrun explained to me how the Cross-Over had happened, how she had “transmogrified me into Brunhilda” as she transported me back through the fire, I would understand more deeply what had happened. At that moment though, as I felt myself shift shapes, I had no idea about transmogrification and no way to explain it. All I knew was that somehow I wasn’t Hilly Harrison any more. And when I opened my eyes, the stone steps of the Colosseum were no longer empty – they were filled with people and horses. Two stallions, one pale grey, the other a chestnut. Both had their ears flattened back in anger, squealing and threatening each other with teeth bared. The men who held them tried to avoid being hurt as the horses reared up and lashed out with their hooves. The men were struggling to restrain them as they fastened the ropes to bind the horses together. At last they had tied the final knot and the horses, now bound to each other, were let loose. As soon as the horses realised they were free from the men’s grasp, they turned their attention on each other. They rose up on their hind legs, hooves thrashing the air, and then, with a battle scream, the grey horse lunged to attack. As he bit into the neck of the chestnut, there were cheers from the crowd. It was a horse fight! I couldn’t watch. I turned from the arena and ran. I was sobbing so hard I could barely breathe and the tears blurred my vision so that I couldn’t really see where I was going and then with a hard thud I was stopped in my tracks. I had run right into something. No. I’d run into someone. A giant of a man was standing before me. His head was shaved right up the sides but he still sported a thick, full red beard. On his head where the hair had been shaved off he was tattooed with the symbols of the runes. He wore ragged clothes, but the golden bracelets that decorated his bulging arms showed that he was a man of power and influence, a chief, a king. With a massive hand on each of my slight shoulders he grasped me and held me out from him as if to examine me, before he pulled me hard to crush me against his chest, embracing me in a hug. He held me so tight he choked the breath out of me as he said my name: “Brunhilda.” I smiled as I gazed up at him. I had never seen him before in my life and yet I knew exactly who he was. “Hello, Father.” (#ulink_e561d886-8336-5e36-871f-b3b12b4f5c04) My father holds me by the shoulders and lifts me off the ground. “Where are you running off to then, little one?” he asks. “The entertainments are in the other direction.” I squirm, trying to relocate my feet back on the earth once more, feeling ridiculous dangling there from his gigantic paws. In the pit behind me I hear the horses as they clash, their squeals mingling with the cries of excitement from the men gathered round them. “I feel sick,” I tell him. I don’t say why. He would never understand my revulsion at this theatre of brutality. His life is all about bloodshed. How many thousands of men has he killed in his long boat raids? Their lives mean nothing to him, so how can I possibly explain my floods of tears, my distress over the death of a horse? My father raises me up even further off the ground, holding me fast so that I’m looking him square in the eyes. “You’re hungry, I think,” he says as if his proclamation settles the problem. “Never mind. The feast will be soon enough. Until then you will stay with me.” He puts me back on the ground but he doesn’t remove his hands from my shoulders. He turns me round and shuffles me off to walk ahead of him. When we reach the arena, he puts his arm protectively round me from behind as we push through the throng, back the way I’ve just come, creating a pathway through the crowd-stink of sweat and beer, into the arena seats, where the noise of the people shouting all around is deafening. An almighty roar rises up as the chestnut stallion, exhausted and lame with open wounds on his shoulder and neck, suddenly summons up the strength to land a glancing blow with his near fore. The grey reacts like a snake, twisting his neck to wrap it round the chestnut’s and bite him back. The chestnut falls back, trying to get away from the grey, and once again he finds himself restrained by the ropes that bind them together, unable to escape. I’m trapped here too. A prisoner, with my own father as jailer. All I can do to get through it is close my eyes and bite my tongue and wait for this “entertainment” to end. “Where is your brother?” my father asks. “I don’t know,” I say. I haven’t seen Steen all day. I’m new to having a brother, but instinctively I know that I do not like him. I’m thinking about last night, and I know it can’t be my memory; it must be Brunhilda’s I suppose. It involves Steen and the dinner feast we had at Thing-Vellir. One of our tribe had just got married and so the bride and groom were guests of honour and there was much celebrating at the main table, and Steen leant across to me and whispered: “That will be you next, sister.” He’s so cruel! I don’t want to marry at all but there’s a queue of boys in my tribe lining up in anticipation of standing on the sacred rock and having their hand roped to mine. Not for love, but because of the power it would bring them. My father is the strongest of the chieftains, King of Iceland. Marrying me, Brunhilda, his daughter, gives you a direct line to the throne. All the same, Steen would be wise not to mock me. “Be careful what you wish for, brother,” I replied. “If I do marry, then my husband could be the next king instead of you.” I swear he had not even considered this. He turned very pale when I said it. Honestly, my brother is like Thor. Full of power and fury, always ready to swing a hammer, but never once using his brain. He never thinks before he acts, and that is why he should not be king. The roar of the crowd is growing louder as the horses, entangled in the ropes, stagger about like punch-drunk fighters, weaving and striking. The chestnut stumbles forward and falls to his knees. I think I’m going to throw up. “Brunhilda, go now and find him for me,” my father says. “I want him at the feast tonight when I address the chieftains at the Law Rock.” “Yes, Father!” I don’t wait to be told twice – I move fast, pushing my way out through the crowd. Oh, thank the great, wise Odin! I’m so relieved to have an excuse to leave. I can feel my heart pounding but I try to stay calm as I work my way between the stinking bodies of the men who are shouting at the top of their lungs. Being small has its uses and I weave through the gaps in the throng until I’ve left the noise and the stench behind me and I’m heading down the broad path that leads between the high rock cliffs towards the far end of Thing-Vellir. I know where Steen likes to hang out and, sure enough, I find him in one of the little clearings, a rocky cul-de-sac where the waterfalls tumble down the cliff face. He’s there with a few boys and girls from our tribe. He has his sword in his hand and he’s fighting with Kari, his best friend. They play with blunted blades, dulled on purpose for sparring so they will not cut, although you can get a nasty bruise through your chain mail if you’re hit hard enough with one. Steen and Kari are trading blows back and forth in a very choreographed way while the others sit above them on the rocks and watch. I think, as I watch him grunting and thrusting, blocking Kari with his shield and then grinning as he swoops around with his sword to hack at his shoulder, how Steen fights like a poor imitation of our father, his arms windmilling and his chest jutting forward. He is built like my father too, only smaller in height. He’s sixteen, two years older than me, and his beard is not yet grown and is still just a tuft of ginger fluff on his chin. When he sees me he doesn’t pause, he keeps clashing his sword against Kari’s. “Why are you here, Bru?” “Father wanted me to find you,” I tell him. “The feast is soon. He wants to make sure you’ll be there.” “Of course he does.” Steen thrusts his sword hard at Kari and even though they are just playing he only narrowly misses striking him in the guts. Kari looks nervous. “Hey! Watch it!” “He’s going to announce it tonight,” Steen says. “Wait and see.” “Announce what?” I ask. “His successor,” Steen says. “He’s an old man now. Time to move aside and let a young man take over.” “You better not let him hear you say he’s old,” I say, “or the sword he uses on you will be a real one. Anyway, even if he’s announcing his successor, what makes you so certain it will be you?” Steen stops fighting suddenly and lets his sword drop. He raises a hand to Kari as if to say, “Hold fast and halt a moment?” Then he turns his back on Kari and he glares at me. “My father is the king,” he says to me. “And his father before him was king.” I smile at the arrogance of him. “My father is also the king,” I point out. “And where is it written that a woman cannot rule? The strongest warrior is the one who takes charge of our tribe. Father is not handing down the crown to the first boy who happened to be born.” “The warrior is always a boy,” Steen counters. I laugh. “I can hunt better than you and ride better than you. I’m smarter than you too.” From the rocks above us there’s giggling. Steen looks up to see his friends smirking at him being bested in words by his little sister. “Is that so?” He’s not laughing. He walks over to Kari. “Let me have your sword,” he says. Kari hesitates and Steen loses his temper, shouting at him: “Your sword, Kari! Let me have it now!” Kari shifts his hand down the hilt and offers it out so that Steen can take it from him. Steen now has a sword in each hand as he walks to me. “And can you fight as well as I can?” he asks. He offers me Kari’s sword. “Because if you can beat me right now, then I will go to Father and tell him it should be you and not me who is to take over when he steps aside as king.” “I will need chain mail or the fight is not fair,” I point out. “Kari?” My brother treats his friends as if they are servants the way he speaks to them, which is another reason why he should never be king. I stand and wait as Kari wriggles out of his chain mail and hands it to me too. He’s much bigger than me and when I pull it on over my clothes it sags off my shoulders. I put out my hand to take Kari’s sword from Steen and as I do so I note the slenderness of my own wrist. I am like a sparrow! My bones are so narrow and tiny beside Steen’s heavy hands. When I feel the heft of the sword as I take it from him, my arm starts trembling and I have to hook my elbow in to my hip for support and pretend that I’m holding it naturally so that he doesn’t see this. I step back from him and deliberately let the sword fall down so that the point is lowered to rest on the ground. And then, taking a deep breath, I square off and step my feet into position, my posture erect, and with renewed strength I raise the sword up so that it’s squared to the centre of my body, sticking out directly in front of me. On my left side my shield is so heavy I feel my muscles quivering. Let the fight begin soon please, because my arms already cannot last any longer. “Let’s do this,” I say. When we were little, Steen and I would sometimes spend the day together trapping birds beneath a basket using a string and a dowel. Steen would only wait until the birds were barely underneath the basket and eating the breadcrumbs, and then he’d give this warlike roar and throw himself at it to push it down over them. Of course they would hear him coming and be gone long before he could reach the basket. He was always astonished when he looked through the wicker and saw it was empty. He will be the same today in the fight – impatient and half-witted. To win, all I have to do is use these traits against him. And so I stand back and let him make the first move and, sure enough, with a growl he lunges right at me, front foot first, hacking and waving his sword theatrically above his head, all bluster and forewarning so that I see him coming in plenty of time – and all it takes is for me to sidestep and I’m clear. I slash crossways and take the first strike against him, whacking my brother hard in the ribs. “Oww!” Steen is furious as he staggers to one side. He’s still trying to regain his balance when I come at him again, acting fast, my sword in front of me, shield raised to protect my vulnerable neck and shoulder. Hack-hack-hack. I swing and this time I land three successive blows onto his left shoulder until finally he gets his shield up to block me and fights back with a cross-cut which I deftly block with my own weapon and then push his sword out and away from my body with my blade. I twist myself in a knot to slip inside of him, throwing the weight of my shield into his and pushing hard. Caught off-balance, Steen is tipped over on his back like a turtle and, before he knows what’s happening, I’m on top of him and my blade tip is in the soft groove where his throat meets his neck. I can see his pulse in that groove, the beat of his heart pounding, throbbing through his skin. There’s sweat on his upper lip. All it would take from me now is one thrust, even with a sword as blunt as this, and there would be no question of succession. I would end his life. Our eyes lock and I give him a knowing raise of my eyebrow. I stay there, sitting on his chest, and wait a heartbeat longer before I lower my sword. I put it back in its sheath and as soon as I do this Steen gives a furious roar and pushes me off him. I fall back on the grass laughing. “You can stop gloating!” he shouts at me. “You got lucky is all!” “Well done, Bru!” I look up and see my friends Astrid and Hannecke. They’re cheering for me from the rocks above. Even the boys, who should be on Steen’s side, are hooting out in glee. But Steen isn’t laughing. He lies on his back in a sulk, refusing my hand when I offer it to help him up. Finally he takes it, but then as soon as he’s on his feet he snatches my sword and throws it up to Kari. “This changes nothing,” he mutters darkly. “You know that, don’t you?” I look at him and shake my head with pity. I knew he wouldn’t keep the deal. “See you tonight at dinner,” I say. And then I turn and walk away. Our journey to reach Thing-Vellir for the great meeting of the tribes has not been long. My father is chieftain in the south, not far from here, and we followed the river, travelling for a day. The men of our tribe and many families have come too, almost a hundred of us, all on horseback. The six other tribes who join us have come from across the country and for many their journey has taken weeks. They all travel by horse as we do, men, women and children riding astride. It’s the only way here because the few tracks that cross the lands are too bumpy and rutted for a carriage to be of any use. So as well as thousands of people, there are thousands of horses too at the All-Thing, the great conference of all the tribes of Iceland. There has been much trading and selling of stallions, mares and foals between us since we arrived and my father has been asked many times since we got here about my horse, Jotun. Jotun is the handsomest stallion in the whole of Iceland. I’m not saying this just because he’s mine. It’s the truth. It wasn’t always the case. As a small foal, Jotun wasn’t good-looking at all. His legs were too long and he had a big head, so that when I chose him my father asked me if I was sure and whether I wouldn’t rather choose another colt with more attractive looks and better conformation. “He is the one I want,” I had said firmly. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/stacy-gregg/the-fire-stallion/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.