The second storm that summer was worse than the first. It swept down from the headwaters at night, breaking trees and driving walls of water along the river, and until morning Kres listened through the dugout walls to the rapids roaring beyond the distant rise.
In the morning the river gave back what it had taken.
Planks drifted along the reach below the rapids. Pale, smooth, overlapping: no dugout boat, no raft. No one in the Forest worked timber like that. Kres walked along the water, hooking the wreckage out with a boat hook, and at the third snag he saw her.
A woman hung caught on the snag, face upwards. Young, her hair loose, dressed in foreign clothes of dyed wool. Her left palm was burnt. Lashed by a strap to her right wrist was a length of charred iron chain, ten links or so: an anchor chain, heavy enough that not every man could lift it. She seemed not to be breathing. Then she drew breath, faint and rasping, once every ten beats of the heart.
He pulled her out, warmed her by the stove and poured a decoction into her. By evening she was feverish, and for three days she raved in a language like the harsh cry of a bird of prey: hard words, with a single name repeated between them again and again, Ari. Kres sat beside her, changed the wet cloths on her brow and thought that the spirits of the mire were playing tricks again. The clan had sent him here to die alone, and now there were two of them on the mire, both alive.
Milava came on the fourth day. Vyun had told her, of course: Vyun could keep secrets from anyone but those who fed him. The herb-woman came in secret, through the rain so no one on the river would see her. She brought dried St John's wort, honey in a birchbark tub and her eternal stubbornness. She looked the sick woman over and clicked her tongue.
"A Northwoman," said Milava. "One of those who burn hamlets. So you are nursing her back to health."
"One of those drowned by their own," Kres answered. "The river broke their longship and washed her ashore. It is not for me to decide who lives."
Milava ground the herbs, dosed the sick woman and left before dawn. That night the Northwoman opened her eyes properly for the first time, free of the fever. Kres slept by the stove. She watched him for a long while, then silently, using only her fingers, drew his short knife from beneath the bed platform. She had marked it through her lashes earlier that day. She hid it under the hide, beneath her right hand.
Kres was not asleep. He saw. And did not move.
"Let her sleep with the knife," he thought. "She feels safer that way."
She recovered slowly. Milava came twice more, changing the dressings on her burnt palm, making her drink bitter brews and grumbling that the mire was damp and that the smith and the half-drowned woman were equally stubborn. Jorunn listened to the foreign speech and watched the herb-woman warily. On the third visit, she held out her burnt hand to Milava of her own accord: bind it.
Kres taught her to say "axe". She pronounced it hard and strangely, as though chopping the word in half. Jorunn listened to his attempts at her name with her lip caught between her teeth, and on the fifth try she could bear no more and laughed. Her laughter was unexpectedly bright. "Jorunn," she repeated, one syllable at a time. "Jo-runn." "That is what I am saying," Kres objected. It was nothing like what he was saying, but he made no effort to learn it anew.
A week later Jorunn could sit up, but they still had almost no language in common. They pointed with their fingers, drew in charcoal on birchbark and laughed at each other's mistakes. She saw Kres's first nails and staples on the shelf, turned a nail between her fingers and frowned. She asked for charcoal with a gesture and drew a longship on the birchbark, with rows of overlapping planks and dots along every row.
Then she saw what his father had found, lying in his box: the twisted rivet marked with a bird's wing. And went still.
She held the rivet carefully, like a precious thing. Then she pointed to the dots in her drawing, to the rivet and to her own breast. And spoke three words, slowly, so that he might understand at least one:
"Ari. My father."
Ari. The name from her ravings. The master whose mark had lain in his father's cache, a thousand versts from the northern sea.
Her name was Jorunn. He learnt that the same evening. A day later she took a piece of birchbark and scratched several runes into it, harsh as the tracks of crows' feet. Then she crossed out the last rune with two slanting cuts, bearing down so hard that the birchbark split.
He could not read runes. But he could read hatred.
"Gunnvald?" he guessed, remembering the name from Torop's talk.
Jorunn raised her eyes to him, and for a moment he felt cold.
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