Tara Runeweaver's Arc

Chapter 5 of 19

By dawn the snow outside the hall held a new shape. Erik had planted an iron spear in the drift, a frostbitten cloth knotted at its shaft. Beside it sat a bear's head on a pike, jaws open toward Bjorn's door. Past them, a tent of pale hide bloomed with red handprints. Tara counted the prints. She counted the men around it. She felt the shape of the threat before anyone spoke it. She found Bjorn inside, seated in the carved chair piled with white fur. His hand rested on the arm of it. He did not look at her at once. She timed it. Three breaths. Then his eyes came up and stayed. "He wants me to ride out and answer," Bjorn said. "Or send you to his tent." His knuckles went pale on the wood. "My men are split. Half say blood. Half say give him the sorceress and keep the valley whole." Tara stepped close to the chair. She did not touch him. She set the stone ring he had given her on the fur by his hand, where every man entering would see it. "Then make it neither," she said. "Ride out. I ride beside you. Not behind. Not given." She kept her voice low and even. "Let him see whose standard I stand under." Bjorn looked at the ring. He looked at her wrists, at the cuffs there. Then he stood and lifted her hand and held it open at his side, the way a man holds a blade he means to use. The hall saw it. The split closed in a single breath. Outside, the red-handed tent still waited, and the spear, and the bear's mouth open to the wind. But the choice Erik had built was already broken. They would ride out together by dusk, and whatever came next would come to them as one shape, not two.