Wolf Winter (9 page)

“Back home we had the village,” her husband said, and she knew he was looking at her.

“A village,” the nobleman said.

He said it slowly.

“We were safe,” Paavo said.

“Perhaps we do need to come together,” the nobleman said. “If we lived in a village, we’d have each other to rely on. Just as long as we didn’t bring the trouble with us in our midst.”

The nobleman creased his forehead and nodded to himself.
He’s thinking of someone in particular,
Maija thought.
Someone he doesn’t want to live close to.

“Let’s think about this,” Nils said. “I’ll talk to the others about it too.”

He nodded curtly and left.

Frederika was by her side. Maija didn’t know how long she had been there. Her daughter waited one breath to see if she would be told anything more, then sauntered off.

Paavo juggled the sharpening stone in his hand a couple of times.

“Don’t tell me,” Maija said.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

“Paavo …”

“Things in the forest? I don’t like it.”

Oh Paavo,
she thought. She put her hand on his sleeve. “The other day she—the widow—asked me to look at Eriksson’s body …”

The muscles in his arm tensed. He stared at her, his nose wrinkled, mouth open.

“Together with the priest,” she added.

“You looked at the body?”

“Yes.”

“But why would you do such a thing, Maija? Why?”

“It wasn’t bear or wolf that killed Eriksson.”

“That’s not what he suggested either.” He indicated with his head the direction of Nils’s leaving.

“I can assure you that Eriksson was not killed by sorcery or by evil either,” Maija continued. “He was killed by a man, by flesh and blood.”

Her husband shook his head. “Leave this,” he warned. It sounded like a growl.

“Paavo, listen to me. People like Nils don’t care about people like us. For some reason he wanted to tell us about Blackåsen’s past. And he said that some people oughtn’t to be welcome in any village, if it was to be built. Could you hear that? Don’t you see what that ought to remind us of?”

“I know exactly what this reminds me of. Leave it. Think of your children.”

Maija laughed, but it didn’t come out like one.

“As if that were the reason,” she said, before she could stop herself.

There was a pause, then, “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“No, say it. For once, say it out loud.” Her husband’s voice rose. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re thinking?”

“Paavo.”

But she spoke too late. He was walking away.

The ground in the glade was yellow. Autumn had begun to blanket the top of Blackåsen Mountain without letting anybody else know. The sun was out, small and white, like one in winter. Maija stood over the brown patches left by Eriksson’s body. Death worn down and forgotten. Nature not impressed. She squatted and pulled her fingers through the grass, felt the spongy ground beneath.

The watching eyes of a village. Villages were good things, but not if built on the wrong grounds. Those eyes could fast turn from watching what was outside to inside, and then there was no saying where they might take things.

We must find out what happened before this gets out of hand,
she thought.
Never again will our family stand by while fear spreads.

She glanced at Jutta. They were done talking about it. Many people had something like that in their past. A grief, a time when they had fallen short. But Jutta didn’t meet her gaze.

Maija got down on her knees. Inch by inch she crawled the glade, studied the ground, fingers prodding. Nothing out of the ordinary. No trace of the strange herbs either. The sun leaned on her shoulders. Her knees ached. She sat back on her heels. Who brings a rapier to the forest? Someone who always carries it or someone who, this time, has brought it with a purpose.

She looked around. The glade wasn’t close to anything in particular; it was on the way. On the way from the valley to the river or the other way around. Passing from one side of the mountain to the other.

She got to her feet. So: Eriksson had been lying with his head south and his feet north. He hadn’t defended himself. The man who killed him—for the length of that wound would have had to be done by a man—must have been standing … she took two long steps.
Somewhere here,
she thought. In the middle of the glade—same blue
above him, same sun. Her eyes followed the tree trunks all the way to the sky. They waved and waved as if it didn’t concern them.

She turned around. Whoever killed Eriksson might have come from this direction. She walked into the forest and in a loop around the glade: passed the trail down to the river, then the one leading to the valley through the pass. There was a whirl of birdsong coming from the glade, bells and trills. Bluethroat. Maija stretched her neck to see. She stilled. Right here there was a scarcity of branches on the low larch beside her. One step forward and she had a view over the whole glade. Underneath the lowest branches something gleamed blue. She bent down. A piece of blue glass, with color, like the windows in church, its edges round. Now they told her. The larch said, yes, there had been an infringement. The crowns of the pine trees whispered that the view from there was almost as good as their own. Yes, someone had stood here.

Someone might have stood here just before, during, or after the kill.

Henrik’s derelict yard lay empty. A damp cough came from inside the house. Leaning against the porch railing, beside a shovel and an old meat grinder, its rusty crank pointing straight up to the sky, there was a broken fishing rod. Maija followed the trail in the grass toward the river.

A blond head moved among the reeds. As she came closer, she saw Henrik and the knife in his hand. He shot forward, stabbed into the water, scooped the knife up, and swung it.

The pike slapped to the ground in front of her, flailing, soil sullying its green fins, its large mouth with the underbite snapping. Maija grabbed a rock and struck the fish on its head. It shook and stilled. She rose, threw the rock away.

He waded toward her, his hand raised: “Sorry.”

He squatted by the fish, laid it on its back on the grass, and gutted it with one slit of his knife. He threw the guts into the water. Then
he leaned back on his heels, one hand covering his eyes against the sun. “What brings you here?”

“Someone called Nils came to see us.”

Henrik stroked the sides of his knife against the grass. He stood up, walked to the water, and washed the inside of the fish with his fingers. A glimpse of sallow red.

“He’s a nobleman?” she asked.

Henrik nodded. He rose, the fish hanging from one hand, his fingers in its gills.

“They are settlers?”

Henrik nodded again.

“I am surprised,” she said. “Nobles are no settlers.”

Henrik chuckled. “That family can fend for themselves,” he said. “I’ll tell you a story. When Kristina and Nils first arrived here, one of the merchants saw his chance. He sold them rat meat, called it pheasant. Someone told on him, and it’s said that when this same merchant arrived back to the coast after a long journey and unpacked, he found his cases full of the vermin. Under the cover of night someone had replaced all his furs with dead rats.”

That would have done it,
she thought. Nils was certain never to have been bothered again.

“I went back to see where Eriksson was killed,” she said. “I found this.”

She took out the piece of glass from her dress pocket. In her hand it looked dull.

He took the piece from her. “In the glade?”

“At its edge.”

“Where?”

“Underneath some bushes. South, toward the pass.”

He turned it around in his hand, then handed it back to her and shook his head. He began to walk and she followed him.

“It wasn’t wolf that killed Eriksson,” she said to his back.

“No,” he agreed.

“Then why did Gustav say it was?” she asked, meaning,
Why did you?

“Henrik?” A woman’s voice, calling from the yard. “Henrik?”

Henrik lengthened his steps.

There was a thin woman in a long white dress on the porch. “I told you not to go far. The children are out, and I am all alone.” She began to cough and supported herself with her hand against the doorframe. Then she noticed Maija.

“And who are you?”

The air in the cottage smelled of wood fire and fever.

“We don’t get many visitors.” The woman had introduced herself as Lisbet. She had long dark hair and blue eyes framed by bowed eyebrows. Her skin was pale and fine over her bones. Maija removed her own arms from the table where she had crossed them, freckled and rough-skinned.

“I forget my manners.” Lisbet put her hands on the table to rise.

“Don’t,” Maija said, as Henrik stepped forward to wrap his arm around the waist of the woman. Lisbet coughed and coughed until her thin frame hung as a coating on Henrik’s. When he lowered her, the skin around her mouth looked green.

“Have you been sick for long?” Maija asked.

“A long time. Poor Henrik. He takes such good care of me.”

Henrik took the pike and put it in a bucket of water. He didn’t look at his wife.

It was hard to see the two of them together. There was nothing unexpected about finding a man like Henrik on Blackåsen, but Maija could imagine Lisbet younger, dancing in a frilly dress, chatting. She must have been beautiful, and at some point Henrik must have doubted his luck. Now his wife was marked.
Not by one of the obvious diseases,
Maija thought.
Crayfish, perhaps.
Crayfish was like hatred. It ate away at a person from the inside, and nothing was seen until they crumbled.

“I am sorry,” Maija said.

Lisbet shook her head.

“Where are you from?” Maija asked.

“We’ve been here so long now,” Henrik said. “This is home.”

“Twenty years,” Lisbet said. “We were among the first to arrive.”

She sounded proud. Maija thought about the cluttered yard. To think that people could live somewhere for such a long time without getting better organized. But Lisbet was sick. Not so easy to manage, then.

“What about the others?” Maija asked.

Henrik raised his brows to her.

“It’s just interesting,” Maija said. “All of you from such different backgrounds.”

Lisbet counted on her fingers. “Daniel and Eriksson were born here,” she said. “Nils and Kristina arrived some years ago from Stockholm.” She smiled and small dimples appeared by her nose, a reminder of the beauty she’d once had. “They had so much luggage, you wouldn’t have believed it.”

“Why would they come here?”

Lisbet shrugged. She didn’t seem to find it strange.

“And Gustav? He was in the army?” Maija asked.

“Gustav doesn’t get involved with the rest of us,” Henrik said. “He keeps to himself.”

“Oh, I heard Eriksson saying he was a soldier—he would have known,” Lisbet said.

“What was he like—Eriksson?” Maija asked.

Lisbet giggled. “Unafraid. He knew Blackåsen inside out, and he made living here seem so easy. He was gallant, pleasant …” She interrupted herself and looked to her husband. “I don’t want to be left alone,” she said, remembering her earlier grievance. “People disappear here.”

“Nils told us,” Maija said.

Lisbet was still looking at her husband. “And now she’s killed Eriksson too.”

“She?” Maija shook her head.

Lisbet’s eyes fixed on Maija. “Elin,” she said.

“His wife … why?”

“She’s a sorceress.”

“She was under investigation for sorcery a long time ago, but she was declared innocent,” Henrik said, correcting his wife.

But the trials had all stopped. Oh what was wrong with people? Maija was glad she hadn’t told anyone about the seeds she had found on Eriksson’s clothes. Everyone used herbs for medical purposes, but some people were quick to point out that sages had faculties beyond the simple restoration of health.