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  "Yes, Wilhelm, tell us the story."

  "Again?"

  "I’ve forgotten. And Rasmus doesn’t know."

  "Well, in that case..."

  Wilhelm cleared his throat. When he spoke again, it was in the lulling baritone he used when he read to them from his Bible on the Lord’s day, or told them one of his bloody Bavarian fairy stories.

  "Lucia was a Christian girl who lived during the reign of emperor Diocletian, when his great persecution of the faithful made the streets of Rome run red with martyr’s blood. She brought food and water to Christians hiding in the catacombs beneath the city and wore a wreath just like this one to light her way. When she refused the hand of a wealthy pagan man, having pledged her virginity to Christ alone, he reported her to the emperor. Cruel Diocletian put her through many torments, but she never wavered in her faith. When they tried to burn her alive, she continued to preach as the flames rose around her. And when they gouged her eyes out, her sight was miraculously restored. She did not give up her life until she had received her last rites from a priest, and only then could the body be laid to rest."

  Jakko smacked his lips as though he had tasted something foul.

  "Why are saint’s lives always so grisly?

  "Everything good in this life takes bleeding for," Gerda said. "Everything beautiful is born of darkness, and of struggle, and the fertile soil of death."

  Wilhelm raised his eyebrows at her. "Who taught you an idea so lofty? A man of the cloth, no doubt."

  "No," Gerda said, taking his hand as he helped her step down onto the earth. Her crown of evergreen boughs blazed with light. "She was a witch."

  In the days leading up to Christ’s mass, Gerda continued to bless the camp with her presence, drifting from day to day like a will-o-the-wisp and disappearing as soon as anyone pressed her for details about her family or the city from which she hailed. Helvig would make up stories about her to pass the time as she helped her father count out silver pieces.

  She was a princess, just like Helvig, but of a small war-torn country where it was no longer safe for her to live in the public eye. She was a disgraced society lady who had been turned out of her father's home after an affair with someone of low standing. Or maybe she really was a witch, one of the last living daughters of a dark line that had been all but obliterated by the hunts decades prior.

  In every tale the thief told herself, Gerda was running, because that's all Helvig was sure of. There was a skittishness in her eyes that Helvig recognized. She had seen it in the eyes of every poor cretin that came crawling to her father after killing someone they shouldn't have talked back to, or stealing something they should have never even have looked at. The dead person could have been an innocent or a scoundrel, and the quarry could have been crown jewels or another man's wife, but the story always ended the same. With legs pumping and lungs burning and a town they could never return to shrinking in the distance behind them.

  Gerda’s previous life remained in shadow until Christmas Eve, when she and Helvig sat hip-to-hip on a fallen pine tree, warming themselves by Wilhelm's fire.

  Helvig had presented Gerda with her new boots earlier that day, in a private moment when they were dressing back-to-back in Helvig’s tent. Despite her lack of modesty in every other area of her life, Helvig had insisted on this procedure, because the thought of Gerda’s naked body was enough to make her feel panicked and overheated. She wasn’t sure how she would handle all that hair and bare skin if it was presented before her.

  When Gerda had turned around, still lacing her dress, Helvig felt more like she was handing over her still-beating heart than holding out a pair of reindeer boots. But Gerda had given her a wide smile and put them on right away.

  Now Gerda sat with her boots tucked up under her skirt, her tattered moccasins discarded and forgotten.

  The boys were in good spirits, having rummaged up spiced wine and dried figs to go with their usual veal and hardtack. Helvig suspected that Wilhelm had been hoarding them since the summer months, waiting for some celebratory moment. As much as she teased him about his useless piety, she was always happy to be included in his small celebrations. Rasmus was happy so long as his belly was full, and even Jakko had been conducting himself with something close to manners at their meager Christmas meal.

  Their roaring fire was perfumed with pine and cedar, and Wilhelm was telling one of his chilling morality tales, for once appropriate to the occasion.

  "…So the demons crafted an awful mirror, a mirror which showed the world as barren and ugly, and the people within it as twisted and vile. They flew from town to town laughing at the horrible images that showed in the mirror, and frightening townspeople with their own reflections. But these crafty imps became arrogant of their own power, and they flew higher and higher into the sky, hoping to frighten the very angels in heaven! God in his might struck them down for their hubris. The higher they flew, the colder it became, until the mirror became slick with dew and ice. And then, right as they reached the gates of heaven, it slipped from their claws and tumbled down to earth, and shattered into a hundred pieces. The pieces were so small they were caught up by the wind and they blew through the whole world, sticking in people’s eyes and hearts."

  Gerda gave a little shudder of delight. She had a taste for Wilhelm's grim parables.

  "How terrible."

  "More terrible still is what the shards did to them. The unlucky ones who got a piece lodged in their eye see the whole world as an awful, wicked, ugly place. They cannot even see the beauty in a rose, or a cathedral, or a child’s smile. But it’s worse for the ones struck in the heart. This miserable lot sees themselves as just as vile as the world around them, and they cannot let any love into their hearts for anything or anyone. The more they disdain themselves, the uglier the world around them becomes, and on and on and so it goes forever."

  "How do you break the curse?" Helvig asked. Her eyes kept flickering over to Gerda.

  Wilhelm had to think about this for a moment, stroking his short beard. He had always had a touch of the philosopher about him, and Helvig thought that if he had been given more opportunities in his youth, he may have made a fine scholastic monk, or a professor of the law.

  "The only antidote would be to see oneself rightly, perhaps. As beloved. As beautiful in the eye of another who beholds."

  "Thank goodness," Jakko said, gnawing on a piece of deer jerky. "I thought you were going to say the only cure was confession and a decade of hail Marys."

  Wilhelm scoffed at him, but it was good-natured. Where he got his patience from, Helvig never knew.

  "It would take more than that to scrub your grimy soul clean."

  Jakko gave him a greasy smile.

  "Awful kind of you to say, Wilhelm." He wiped his hands on his breeches and turned his attention to Gerda. "Come on Miss Witch, it’s your turn. Give us a story to feed the Yule fire with."

  Gerda’s eyebrows rose.

  "Which one? I've got more stories than there are days to tell them in. Stories of how I knit men back together after boars gored them on the hunt, or how I cropped my hair and apprenticed as a blacksmith's boy in Halsingborg. Or how I spent a summer warming a princess' bed."

  "You're making those up," Jakko scoffed, at the same moment Rasmus perked up and exclaimed,

  "That one, I choose that one!"

  Typical Rasmus. The slightest whisper of impropriety and you had his undivided attention. Helvig rolled her eyes, but Gerda only laughed.

  "Well...she was a minor princess, and I left once the leaves started to turn, but she was dear as life to me. You really don’t want to hear this silly story, though, do you?"

  She addressed them all, but her eyes were fixed on Helvig. The thief took a sip of her mulled wine, never breaking eye contact, and nodded.

  "Why not? It sounds like something new, for a change. And I'll never refuse a bit of your past," she added, softly.

  "Was the princess beautiful?" Rasmus piped up. "Dark hair or fair?
"

  "Very beautiful. And she had hair as fiery as autumn leaves."

  Helvig’s hand drifted up to tug at one of the small braids she wore threaded through her tangle of curls. She had never considered the color of her hair too seriously, but now it seemed a rather dull shade of unremarkable brown.

  "Go on, then," Jakko said impatiently. He looked very dubious about this whole topic of conversation, and was whittling a piece of wood to a toothy point.

  "I had been travelling through her city, looking for gainful employment that would replenish my purse, and I heard that the princess had a bleeding sickness that no doctor had been able to cure. She had been bled by the physicians and prescribed bedrest, but still she suffered. I had seen her kind of sickness before, among young women who came to the witch for help with their monthly cycles. I knew that the pain was excruciating, but that herbs and exercises could help. So, I offered up my services."

  "You just walked up to a fine lady's home and asked her to hire you?" Jakko scoffed.

  "Well, I said I would only collect payment if I was able to help her. That got me through the front door."

  Helvig stared at Gerda. At first, she thought the witch had been joking, just spinning a bawdy tale for the fire that would rile up the boys. But there was no deception here, only the simple relegation of facts.

  Helvig was as delighted to finally see Gerda open up as she was furious that she was blossoming like this in front of Rasmus and the rest, and not in private for Helvig alone.

  "I sat at her bedside for days, nursing her though the worst of the pain, and I told her stories of my travels to cheer her. She was so taken by me that when she recovered, she invited me to stay with her as one of her handmaids. She dressed me in finery, taught me courtly embroidery and house husbandry and how curtsy like a lady. I loved her."

  The word went through Helvig like a knife.

  Love.

  So Gerda was capable of it, underneath all that placidity. And someone else had tasted her heart first.

  Don't be stupid, Helvig chided herself. You have your own history. How unkind would you be to hold hers against her?

  "But not all things are made to last," Gerda said breezily. "She became betrothed that autumn, to a kind man who could give her children and elevate her status, and we knew we had come to a parting of the ways. But she gave me Svíčka before I left, the cleverest of her tame birds. She wanted me to able to carry a piece of her with me."

  "Yes," Rasmus said, leaning forward on one knee. "But what's this about bedwarming? Get to the good part."

  "Some women prefer to keep their own company," Gerda said, a playful sparkle in her eyes. "And I kept hers well, soldier, I assure you."

  Helvig could not believe how freely she said such things, how little shame she seemed to feel about her own proclivities. Jealousy sprawled in her chest, not just for Gerda’s old bedmate, but for the way Gerda seemed so comfortable inside of her own skin.

  Rasmus clutched his heart through his shirt as though struck by lightning. One of his favorite overblown gestures.

  "God in heaven, girl! You're torturing me, some details please! Just...paint the picture for us a little."

  Helvig wanted to die, and Wilhelm, who shirked anything remotely salacious, looked like he had one foot in the grave already.

  Jakko, too shameless for propriety and too young yet to be titillated by its absence, just looked bored.

  "What do I care about what girls do together? This is a stupid story. Don’t you have a better one, Gerda? One without princesses in it?"

  There was an earnestness in his voice that Helvig didn’t often hear, and when she looked over and saw the way his eyes shined clear in the firelight, she finally saw in him what Gerda had all along. An overgrown child, scab-palmed and tough-talking. Alone in the world and all the more vulnerable for the cruelty life had taught him.

  "And what kind of story would you like?" Gerda asked indulgently. Rasmus had the look of a man who had just been seated at a royal feast before being promptly escorted off the premises without a single bite passing his lips. That soothed Helvig’s vindictive streak, and made her feel a little better about the whole thing.

  Jakko shrugged.

  "It’s Christ's mass isn’t it? The night the dead walk abroad, and trolls play tricks on mortal families? Let’s have a ghost story then, something properly frightening."

  "I know the one about the ghost dogs who guard Akershus Fortress," Wilhelm proposed, looking eager to steer conversation into more orthodox waters.

  Jakko pulled a face.

  "That one’s for babies! Come on, think of something better. What about the story of that girl in the south who disappeared? The one with the storm in it? That’s a blood-chiller."

  The atmosphere shifted. Something heavy settled over Helvig’s shoulders, icy despite the crackling fire, and every muscle in her body tensed.

  Rasmus’ eyes slid over to her, wary in the firelight, and he ran his tongue across his parched lips.

  "Come on, Jakko, that one’s no good," Rasmus said.

  "Is too! And I haven’t heard it in ages. Do you have a better idea?"

  "Well, I…"

  He tried to catch Helvig’s eye, but she was doing a very good job avoiding his gaze, or anyone’s for that matter. She just stared into the fire, willing the moment to pass her by.

  "I think Helvig knows it better than I," Rasmus finished. "It’s hers to tell, if she wants to."

  That last bit was said softly, and Helvig would have appreciated his decency if she wasn’t feeling so trapped. Gerda’s blue eyes glided over her curiously, and Jakko gave her an impatient look.

  "Go on then, Helvig," he said. "Do your best to spook us."

  Gerda settled into her seat, folding her hands primly. She was giving over her undivided attention.

  Helvig put away the last draught of her wine and cleared her throat.

  "Well. There’s not much to tell, it’s just a townie legend. There was a girl who lived in a small village outside of Stockholm. It was before you came to live with us, Jakko. Rasmus had only just arrived and we were, what? Fifteen?"

  "Thereabouts, yes."

  "We were camped near the city that summer, my father and me and some of the men. We had managed to stay out of too much trouble with the authorities and some of the local children would sneak out of town to come play with me and visit Bae. It was a good season. Full of cherries and apples and laughter."

  She remembered the way ripe fruit had tasted on her fingers, and on the cheeks of her playmates. It had been a heady, wild summer. The rivers themselves had seemed to bubble over with possibility and promise. Helvig had never paid much attention to her body before them but as the leaves on the trees unfurled in green brilliance, she had begun to notice the swell of new hips and breasts beneath her leathers. She had gotten her first taste of the warm excitement that overtook her when a handsome shepherd or pretty girl at the flower stall smiled at her, and she felt sure that the world was ready to open up for her and pour out delights unimaginable.

  She had met Astrid that summer, when the girl's cheeks still glowed with sunlight and her honey-colored hair sat up around her ears in a braided crown. Astrid worked on the corner by the butcher's shop, selling tinderboxes and shoehorns and other small household items from her parents' shop. Helvig delighted in flashing open her little purse to show Astrid the gold she had hidden away inside.

  She had stolen a silver filigree ring for Astrid, and a wooden pan pipe, and all manner of hot sugared honey hearts and cardamom buns. Sometimes, when her father wasn’t paying very close attention, Helvig would sneak into the city and steal in through her companion’s bedroom window by night. She could still feel the warmth of Astrid settling beside her, the hot touch of skin sticky from the summer air, the nervous brush of their lips against one another.

  "There was a girl in the town, by all accounts clever and kind. She was young, in the first flush of her womanhood." Helvig stabbed at the fire wit
h a stick. "But then her parents caught her carrying on with someone from out of town, a criminal. And so, to save her soul and their own reputation, they married her off to a man twelve years her senior, a butcher with a mewling infant his first wife had died giving birth to."

  Jakko scrubbed at his runny nose.

  "Is this another romance? You said it was a scary one."

  "Shut up and let the lady finish," Rasmus snapped. It may have been the only time in Helvig’s memory that Rasmus had afforded her the honors due her sex, and while that would have generally irritated her, now she was grateful. It somehow dignified her pain. After all, he had heard this story before. He had been there when everything had fallen to pieces, and he knew better than anyone how it had torn her apart.

  "She was married on All Hallows night, a proper church marriage in front of a priest, and she immediately assumed her wifely duties in his household. By day she cooked his meals and soothed his crying child, and by night she lay down for him in the way women do for men." Helvig’s stabbing of the fire increased in intensity, but she kept going. "That December, there was a storm. No, not a storm. A…terror. A wall of wind and ice that swallowed up the town. No one could leave their homes for days, and the elders said it was an ill omen of old magic, the wrath of gods long thought dead. When it was finally over, the girl's family trekked through snow up to their hips to get to her husband's house. What they found inside was terrible. Everything inside was covered in ice, from the chairs to the walls to the herbs hanging above the stove. They say that even the flames in the fireplace froze solid, but I think that's a bit of tale-stretching. But what's certain is that they found the husband's corpse on the floor, and beyond that in the couple's bedroom, the child frozen to death in her cradle."

  "And the girl?" Jakko asked, eyes gleaming. This was the sort of Christmas story he had been angling for.

  "Gone," Helvig said. Her voice was rough. "Fled or dead. No one knows."