Vanja Goes North

The Torbjaer Mountains
8 Winter 217

In the early days of Winter, Vanja finds herself drawn North. Past the Torbjaer Mountains and toward Jorung. She had been there, on the third day of the season, with some of her new comrades, and it had been like breathing clean air after a life by a smoking hearth. She had filled her lungs to bursting, then, and wanted nothing more than to test this feeling. To fight. Instead, she had listened to the others. Left Jorung. Returned to the city.

Aric had asked her if she was safe, in the city, and Vanja wanted it to be true. For his sake. For the sake of the lie they all had told. For the sacrifice their mother had made.

It had been one thing when Vanja had assumed the worst. Her face had been on wanted posters, and even without a name to match it meant someone had described her. The accusation of ‘treachery in Linjør’ in the voice of the Town Cryer, and printed neatly on the Dustown message board. A reward for information. Patrols of Swan soldiers heading South. And reports, more every week it seemed, of people accused of runemaking. Executed as witches for using the runes to guide their prayers, to protect their homes and their families. And the voices of her new allies. Telling her that there was nothing to be done. That if Linjør had been destroyed, if the people had been imprisoned or conscripted or hanged as witches, there was nothing that Vanja could do, because it would have already happened.

She had told herself that knowing wasn’t important. She had tried to push it from her mind and it had burrowed instead through her heart and deep into her stomach, stealing her appetite and making her sick.

But it hadn’t been true.

Linjør was much as it always had been. The family Skau was gone, but such a thing happened. People moved, settled elsewhere. To the city or to the warmth of the south, better for farming, with grass throughout the year. Her older brothers’ wives would support one another. They would raise their children as siblings more than cousins, as young widows sometimes did. But they would not be widows.

Because Vanja’s brothers were alive.

In hiding now, yes, but alive. Breathing the cold air that blows down from the mountains. Hunting game through the woodlands. Hale and well and strong. Fled alongside Olev Hafdvarg the old armorer, whose plan to send Vanja away had worked well. Who had sold a lie on his own word, and on Sigruid’s skills as a healer, and saved Vanja’s life. He had lied this time to protect Vanja’s brothers, when Aric - fearsick but blisterkere and with the recklessness of youth - had struck at the Swan soldiers who tried to take the goats. Sasha and Mikael had rounded on the Swans, then, too, fighting with sword and pole-axe, and, closer, with fists and elbows and the blunt crack of a shield’s edge.

Aric had told Vanja that he hadn’t hadn’t killed those men, the Swans who came to Linjør. But they were dead.

And so Olev had spun another story, and spoken another lie into truth. The brothers Skau had rebelled, turned villain out of the grief of their mother’s death, and they had turned that rage on innocent soldiers of the barony, who had only been in Linjør to keep the peace. The village had risen up to expel this threat of these brothers, but the men had fled to the woodlands, along with the town drunk. That the good citizens of Linjør offered a reward to bring them all to justice. To ensure they paid for their crimes against Isendel.

Aric had told Vanja these things, and Vanja had listened. She knew it was a story of true things, and that it pained Aric to tell it. Grief and embarrassment had slowed his speech. Made the story difficult to tell.

Aric had told her she was important. That Olev had said this. In the moment, Vanja had argued that this was untrue - that no one was more important than another, but she knew it was a lie.

Vanja knows now that she is important. Not because of her magic, the riverlight that flows through her hands, with its power to heal and kill, but because her brothers are alive, and she is their sister. Because as much as they four could talk of the equality of community, of all being equal in importance, of these traditions and rituals passed to them by their parents, these supposed Jorungun ideals from a land none of them have seen, it is not really true.

They are simply more important to one another. They are the same. Connected by the prayers their mother taught them, the stories their father told them, the scars and breaks they gave each other, the love they have for one another, so strong that when Vanja saw Aric, tall and well, his voice deeper, his arm stronger, the sheer love for him ripped through the pit in Vanja’s stomach and burned through her brighter than riverlight to where she thought she would die of joy. They four - these children of Linjør - are Blood of the North.

And so now, Vanja is keeping her word. She is part of this rebellion. She will support the others, as she told Aric to support his new community. She will fight alongside them to expel the Swans from Northgate, to pull them from across the mountains, where they’ve invaded independent Jorung, to somehow stop this inquisition. In this, Vanja knows she is never fully safe, but things have changed now. Before seeing Aric, she thought she was truly alone, cut away from her life before, that she had left her town only for it to be burned to ash. Then, her grief had made her reckless. With no one left to care if she died, she had been careless with her life.

Now when she leaves the Majestic, it is a careful thing - the hood of her cloak pulled up, seeming a different girl each day. And as the days pass, and the autumn dies, Vanja no longer sees a face that looks like hers even on the message boards. Her poster, once a decent likeness, is covered over by announcements and advertisements and the faces of those who are newer and more pressing threats.

She has retired from fighting at Pin’s, for now at least, not for worry of injury but for lack of anonymity. Before, it hadn’t mattered if she was discovered or captured, but it is no longer a risk worth taking. Her fights only ever benefited herself, to give her a way to spend her energy, and now she is directing it elsewhere. Walking the city, through the Jorungun neighborhoods, where she feels echoes of her own home. The runes her mother taught her carved into doorframes and hung as talismans in windows. Words of Dwarvish spoken in low tones, and mixed with the common tongue of Isendel from sentence to sentence, and occasionally a word of warning. Of fear. A mention of the Yeti of Jorung.

Vanja ranges further, too. To the edge of the city, where the valley gradually tilts upward into the mountains. For a few days now, she had been trying to find Bax. Vanja had been in Jorung last with others, but for a hunt, and one this size, she wanted Bax along. She hadn’t seen him in a turn, though. More than 30 days, and he hadn’t responded to her coded message. She had asked some of the street kids about him, describing him without using his name, but they had taken her coin and said nothing useful. She hadn’t expected them to, really - they knew Bax, and Ethan, not her. Vanja briefly considered asking Ethan, too, but she knew he wouldn’t tell her a safehouse location for another person, even if he knew, and so it wouldn’t be worth the asking. She tells Lovelace of her plans, and Deren. She says she’s visiting family, to the North, and it seems like it could be true. She’ll be back in some weeks, maybe.

And so Vanja has started to move into Jorung on her own. Making her way through the mountains where the trees stop and only stone remains, praying in low Dwarvish, and occasionally, carefully, channeling the riverlight to heal. Her magic feels more powerful here, in Jorung, and even only a few days along the edge of the Torbjaers, the River seems brighter, reflecting off the snow at night, making the entire world green and gold. She imagines she can feel it flow through her, cleansing the light inside of her, filling her with peace and strength. Here, in Jorung, the light marks Vanja as a true runemaker, and that is a rare and special thing.

The line between day and night is blurred this far North, and there are fewer people than Vanja expected. Once out of sight of the Painted Swan encampments - never so close she could even hear, there is no one. And so Vanja moves carefully. Aware that she is truly alone.

And somewhere close, there is a Yeti.

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Vanja Goes North