Preview: Gull Stormbarn: The Stormblade
Preview the third story in Tales from Stolki's Hall
I was fortunate to be the editor on K.V. Johansen’s Blackdog, the first book in the Gods of the Caravan Road five-book fantasy series. Johansen’s world is every bit as lush as Tolkien’s (not a claim I make often, or really ever) but travels further east for its inspirations. I probably worked on close to one hundred and fifty novels in my fifteen years in SF&F publishing, and Blackdog is one of my favorites, possibly my favorite fantasy novel from that time. I cannot recommend it, or her, enough. For today’s preview of Tales from Stolki’s Hall, we look at the opening of her story, “Gull Stormbarn: The Stormblade.” Incidentally, the story hints at things going on in the neighboring country of Araland that will play out in adventures I’m working on for 2024 and beyond. But without further ado…
When I saw the stranger, I was halfway down the cliff, toes dug into a crack in the rock, angry gulls mewling and sliding through the air about me. I was leaning just a little too far to take an egg from a last nest, and she was climbing up the path from the bit of gravel we called the beach. Climbing was the right word, because that path was narrow and crumbling and nearly steep as a ladder. Even the goats thought twice.
Not only a stranger, but a ship, slid silently in to rest in the shallows. A crew of five; the sail furled now, only two pairs of oars. I didn’t recognize it; not a Norrønian vessel at all. It hadn’t been there when I’d started my climb down, barefoot, the better to cling to every crack in the cliff-face, and with a grass-lined basket on my back for the precious eggs. It hadn’t even been nosing in from the open water; I would have seen. I had taken a good look down below at the stony beach and the waves churning white over the hidden rocks of a fallen sea stack called Jötunnsoppr, the Giant’s Toadstool. There had been a seal hanging about the day before. Ari and Tora had seen it when they took our boat out, hoping for capelin, but the great spawning schools of silver fish that usually filled the cove had not yet come this stormy spring, and the seal had taken too great an interest in them, which I didn’t like to hear. They’d had the sense to get themselves back ashore and up the cliff, rather than venturing out to open water.
We had become wary of taking the boat out beyond the cove; for years now there had been rumors of a ghost ship haunting the coast, but sightings had become more common this spring, especially in these waters west of Nilmgard. Watching from the cliff-top at dusk, the day’s work done, dreaming of—it doesn’t matter what, I couldn’t run and leave Ari to cope with his father alone—I had seen it myself, more than once, ragged dark sail limned in eerie corpse-light, ragged figures leaning to the oars.
Bright sunlight, nearly noon, and the ship below was fine and trim; the men who crewed her no draugar returned from the dead. That did not mean they were friendly.
I had a loop of walrus-hide rope about my shoulder, made fast to the lonely boulder sitting on the clifftop above, and the stranger was well below, so I abandoned my reach for just one more egg and went scrambling up. I was waiting by the top of the cliff-path when the stranger reached it, where one good blow could have sent her right back down again by the shortest route, if it seemed necessary. I had seen she wore a sword and glimpsed the vest of good scale armor beneath her dark cloak.
“Gods be with you,” she said. She spoke Norrønian like a native, but the scarf about her neck was worked with what looked like Aralish embroidery to me, all thorny sprays of roses, and a sheen to it like nothing I’d ever seen. I thought it must be silk. “This is Yngi’s Cove?”
“It is, mistress,” I said. “The farm of Eirik Olavson. I’m called Gull Stormbarn.”
I waited for the questions. The answers are: Gull, because I was found at the bottom of that very cliff one morning after a storm nineteen springs before, a child of maybe two years lashed to a raft of broken oars and planks with the gulls shrieking and diving about me, probably working up to pecking out my eyes; Storm, for the obvious reason; and -barn, well, I made it clear I was having none of this -son or -dóttir nonsense when I was still quite small, and Vanna, the bride of young Eirik Olavsson, said I might be a foundling and a thrall, but I had a right to the shape of my own life in that much at least.
I waited for the questions, but there weren’t any.
“The farm of Eirik Olavson,” she said. “Olav the Shield is gone to plough the fields of Neth, then?”
“Four winters back,” I said. I was surprised she knew of Olav. He had been a hero, yes, but his was a small tale in the end, and I doubted the songs had ever been carried far from Nilmgard. But then, she’d come seeking Yngi’s Cove by name.
“So,” she said, as if that settled something, or confirmed it. The stranger looked me over again. “Call me Finola,” she said. “Finola the Traveler.” She was tall, almost as tall as me, and dark-eyed, with a weathered complexion and hair of a muddy red-brown color, all loose and wind-tangled, hiding half her face, but she pushed it back when she smiled. Good teeth, she had, and good cheekbones, too. Very fine and foreign she looked, with her silk scarf and her armor and a bit of gilding on her sword’s hilt, a noblewoman herself, or someone high in the service of one.
“I would have words with the master of the farm, Gull Stormbarn,” she said. “Will you take me to him?”
We walked together along the grassy track up the valley. Finola the Traveler stopped where the path bent around the mound of boulders we called the Huldra’s Tumble, though I’d never heard why, and she got a good look. I was a bit embarrassed, though it was no fault of mine the place was so run-down. It had been prosperous once, before Olav Yngason was blinded, fighting at his jarl’s side against a Svartálfar raid. Some vial of burning poison flung down from a bat on high; he saw it coming, the last thing he ever did see, and raised his shield over his jarl’s head to spare him. Took the full splash of it across his own face, they said. That wasn’t our Jarl Ranundr the Red, but another jarl, who went adventuring in foreign lands in his youth and was, they say, the lover of a Queen of Araland, but things like that are always told of those who go traveling, aren’t they? Anyway, it wasn’t Olav the Shield’s blinding that brought the farm to ruin, but the grief and shame that came later, which broke his heart and his health and made him an old man before his time.
“What ill-luck’s come to the place?” Finola asked, not of me but speaking to herself, forgetting even that I was there. I wondered if perhaps she might be older, and have been wandering longer, than her looks said. Maybe she’d known Olav the Shield. She’d never come our way before in my lifetime. I’d have remembered.
I looked at the farm, and saw it as if for the first time, all ramshackle and ill-kept. Rotting thatch sprouted weeds, even sapling birches; the palisade enclosing the yard was leaning, pushed over from the windward side by winter’s drifts; the fields that should have been green with the first growth of peas and rye were patchy and thin, struck by late frosts and washed out by heavy downpours where ditches hadn’t been kept clear for years. The húsvættr who had lived in the goatshed even when I was a child had fled and taken the blessing of the farm with it. Most strangers expected the stony, wind-ravaged lands about Nilmgard, clinging between the mountains and the sea, to be poor, but this woman was shocked, as if she knew that our green hanging valley over the sea, half a day’s walk westerly from the town, had once been one of the most prosperous farms on all this coast. True, it had been a bad winter and a worse spring, with storm after storm falling upon us out of the west like hammer-blows, but I felt I had to make excuses.
“The family’s not had bountiful Gaesa’s favour these past years,” I said.
“How so?” Finola asked.
“It’s a long story.”
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Aha! I didn't realize Krista had a story in this!