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His mother is a good Christian woman and proud of the fact that she’s managed to maintain her faith despite her hardships, so maybe Sihtric shouldn’t be surprised when she crosses herself and leans forward to repeat the gesture over his body, too. “Mama,” he protests, wrinkling his nose. “Christ hasn’t protected us so far, maybe Odin can help.” She rolls her eyes and crosses him again, emphatically touching his forehead, chest, and shoulders.
“Odin is a false god. Have I taught you nothing?”
“Rhona says it was the favor of Thor that saved you after I was born.”
“Ask Rhona, then, but I will have no more talk of this.” She sighs and pulls the kerchief from her head, then loosens the braids that hold her long, dark hair tight to her scalp. “Too young for such talk,” she mutters under her breath. “Raised among pagans, I suppose there’s nothing for it.” Her brown eyes pin her pouting son beneath a forceful gaze. “I can teach you herbs,” she offers. “Much more useful than curses.”
He finally decides to smile at her. She hates to deny him anything, but she cannot teach him what he wants. She refuses to send his soul to hell.”Herbs are a woman’s knowledge, Mama.”
She pretends to be offended, falling back against the cold stone wall as if he’s struck her. “They’re useful.”
“For what?” He’s genuinely curious, but tries to hide it by picking at the dirt beneath his fingernails.
“Healing,” she offers.
“Women’s work,” he insists, though he smiles good-naturedly. “But all women’s work is useful. Dunholm would crumble without it.”
“So you will learn herbs?”
“No. I will drive the cattle.”
She reaches over to ruffle his black hair fondly. There is no reasoning with a boy, sometimes, even one as sweet-tempered as her Sihtric. She refuses to tell him herbs can be used for killing, too. She is afraid of the things he would do with that knowledge, and she will not send his soul to hell.
…
As soon as the cattle are back in their barn, he makes his way to the kitchens and peers cautiously within. His mother isn’t there, he notes with some relief. Sihtric steals over to the stooped back at the edge of a cooking fire, stirring something within a large, blackened pot. “Rhona, will you teach me to throw curses?” He takes a moment to breathe in the smell rising from the pot, and ignores the way his stomach growls.
The woman jumps at the sound of his voice, but she’s quick to recover. “No. There is not enough anger in you to throw curses.” She ignores his offended look and continues to stir the thick stew. She hits her spoon against the edge of the pot and watches the gravy drip back into it. “What does a boy like you want to throw curses for?” She cannot help the curiosity, when he’s never shown any such interest before. She teaches the young girls, sometimes, it gives them a measure of hope they otherwise would not have. But Sihtric is different--he was born to slavery, not taken into it, and so he does not know the taste of free air on his tongue. There is no malice in him, no bitterness, nothing to give a curse the bite it needs to live.
“I want to protect my mother,” he tells her. His voice is nearly lost in the bustle of the kitchens, but there’s defiance in the set of his skinny shoulders, a fire in his eyes that Rhona only glimpsed the day he stepped between his mother and Kjartan’s stone-heavy fists.
She sighs, considering, before shaking her head slowly. “A curse can’t be born of love, child.” She hates to deny him this, to deny him anything that may feel like power. The gods know such a child could use it.
But he doesn’t press her further.
…
When anger and hopelessness rise in Sihtric like a storm from the depths of the sea, he crashes into the kitchen like a wave breaking on the shore. Rhona is the only one who doesn’t flinch. She’s been waiting for him to confront her. “Teach me to throw curses.” He’s shaking, hands clenched into fists at his sides, a newly motherless boy whose sweat reeks of ale and who’s still too drunk to stop the tears from spilling from his eyes.
“Meet me by the spring outside the gate when the moon rises.”
He blinks blearily at her, plainly shocked that she’s agreed so easily. “Alright,” he agrees, after a moment, and stumbles away. The anger lives in him now, twisting his poison fingers about his entrails, squeezing his heart in its iron grip. He has the will now to throw a curse to take a bite from a man’s life.
He is already waiting for her beside the well when she opens the gate, and she can tell by the way he carries himself that he’s sober for the first time in three days. She wants to chastise him, to ask what his mother would think that this is what he’s become, but she cannot bring herself to do it. She can give him hope the only way she knows how.
Hours later, his eyes burn with fury and blood glistens black on his cheeks in the moonlight. Rhona shivers, and it isn’t from the coldness of the night. Sihtric’s mother may have failed to poison Kjartan with her herbs, but her son has the power to throw a curse now.
At the root of a tree, a woman grabs a thread that is somehow the deep crimson of fresh blood and the purple-black of hatred all at once. One of her sisters nods in approval, the other points to the place the thread should go. She weaves it into the tapestry before her, and smiles.