Shieldmaiden of the Wolf-Dragons

“Runa!” I could barely hear Airik over the wind whipping around us. Through the blinding snow that separated us like a gulf, though it was by mere feet, I could just see him gesturing. I reached my fur-clad arm out to grasp his hand. He surprised me with how tightly he gripped my hand through the thickness of our wool mittens as he pulled me with him. The evidence of his grip was only in the sudden tug on my arm, though, as my fingers themselves could hardly feel a thing. My eyes watered and stung against the cold and whipping ice and snow, and I was grateful for the anchor to keep me from getting lost, or simply sinking down into the snow, never to be recovered until the spring thaw. Any other day of the year, I would avoid touching him. Looking at him, if I could help it. It’s not that he was unpleasant to look at—quite the contrary, in fact. He was the best-looking man of our village, though strangely seemed unaware of it. Among his many (many!) faults I could categorize, vanity was at least not one. But those handsome features, with the piercing blue eyes that seemed to gaze past his chiseled cheekbones to my soul, framed by his shaggy blonde hair and beard that somehow always seemed unkempt despite the standard braids, and yet never looked bad—those features, unfortunately, were the face that hid a cruel man. Since I’d become a shieldmaiden two years earlier, he had been harder on me than any other warrior of our tribe, insisting on giving me the worst jobs, berating me for the slightest errors and sometimes even for things that weren’t wrong at all, and humiliating me in front of all. Sometimes I wondered if it was because I looked so different. All our tribe had blonde hair and blue eyes, but my mother had been from a foreign land, and though I did not remember her and my father rarely spoke of her, I knew I favored her. There was no other explanation for my dark auburn hair, emerald green eyes, and freckle-sprayed complexion. Now was not the time to worry about that, though. Our one-day mid-winter patrol in search of winter game to hunt while verifying the safety of the perimeter around the village’s longhouse had taken a horrible turn when an unexpected storm rolled in. We could not tell what direction we were headed, and our third party member, Ragnar, had vanished into the storm. Our attempts to discover him only got us even more lost as the wind and snow became impossibly more blinding, leading to our current predicament, lost and about to become buried in the wrath of the gods. Now, he clutched my hand like keeping me with him was as much his own lifeline as mine. Before I could even wonder what he was doing, though, he’d pulled me to him, half-lifting me and half-dragging me through the knee-deep snow toward what appeared to be a solid wall of rocky mountainside. Though unsure where we were going or why he seemed suddenly so sure of himself, I followed his lead between two stones, and suddenly everything changed. The wind did not strike my face anymore. The biting bits of icy snow no longer blinded me, though the darkness that engulfed us managed the job even better. That very darkness seemed to muffle all the sounds of the storm. Another moment, the sound of flint striking steel, and I saw a torch flare to life in front of me, illuminating a spacious yet cozy enough cave. The addition of light smoke blended with the damp, earthy scent that was natural to the cave, and it oddly lent the whole place a rather homey touch. “How did you see this?” I asked, breathless and scarcely able to force the words out. Even my whisper seemed to echo a bit, though. “Training,” he replied curtly, and I could feel his disapproval emanating from him. I huffed. I’d been trained too, whether he wanted to admit it or not. He might have become the leader of the warriors of our tribe this past year, when the old leader was lost in a skirmish against a neighboring tribe, but he wasn’t better than me. Glancing around at the small cavern he’d somehow been able to see even through that blizzard outside, I had to concede, at least inwardly, that he might be better than I was at some things. “We’ll warm up here until the storm passes,” he said, his tone icier than the snow outside, even as he found a c***k to wedge the torch into to keep it upright. As though I were too stupid to realize that we needed to stay in shelter until the storm passed. “Of course,” I responded, trying to keep my tone neutral so the two-word answer could as easily mean “yes sir” as “yes, obviously.” It wouldn’t do to anger him further, but I couldn’t keep myself from responding. We had no time to make further plans than this, though. The very next moment, the world behind us seemed to roar with the fury of Ragnarok. I swung around, looking at the space we’d just entered. The wind-whipped and whistling snow was replaced by a solid wall of falling white, one that fell in chunks ranging from the size of apples to the size of boulders. And then it stopped. And all was silent.