Compass Dream



A boy with candy lips held her and called her No One. A bald man sneered, his eyes red from crying. A Ranger knelt in the wet grass by a sparkling lake, brandishing a glittering blade. A man with a gleaming, boyish grin presented her with a hawk egg, his hair still stuck with twigs and needles, tangled bits of spruce from which he’d plucked it from its nest.

Dreams returned the past to Haneth imperfectly. They were not scenes, but glimpses, like partners in a dance. She was passed from one to the other for only heartbeats, then she was on to the next, round and round. She caught a whiff here, a touch there, and then they were gone. Not one of them lingered. They mimicked life that way.

When one troubled her, she did not shout. She did not burst from sleep, upright and panting. She’d trained herself to shed nightmares as she might let blood drop from a downturned blade—patiently. She let herself float to the surface of sleep, peeling away the layers of dream-feeling, and shook the dread like rain off a wool sleeve.

Whatever woke her started slipping away soon as she’d opened her eyes. She did what she always did and stared into the darkness until her mind was clear again and she could lie back down and return to peace. 

Tonight, though, someone stared back. 

Haneth slept on the floor by the fire, poorly practiced at mattresses. She slept in short spurts naturally, so it did not inconvenience her to roll over after a couple hours’ rest and poke the coals, throw a sturdy log on that the fire would burn slowly as it gnawed at the meat of the thing. As she looked at the wide bed where her beloved and children slept, she knew without reading the silhouette which of them was watching her.

Haneth pulled back her quilt and patted her bedroll, then watched with some amusement and much pride as the figure climbed out of the bundle of bodies without so much as stirring a sibling’s nightshift. 

Thorvi could join a troupe of acrobats, Haneth wondered idly as she watched her daughter lift to her tiptoes and navigate the obstacles of limbs and torsos. That or be a flet runner, if she was ever taken in by elves. 

The girl finally reached the edge of the bed and with long legs climbed down to the floor. She was graceful as she tiptoed nearer the fire and finally sank and folded her legs under her on the stuffed wool bedding on their packed-earth floor. Haneth pulled the blanket over them both.

“I had a dream,” the girl said in a tone that had been honed over many nights like this, knowing how loud she had to be to be taken seriously and how soft not to wake the household.

“Oh?” Haneth asked, draping an arm around her middle child’s shoulders. Thorvi was maybe thirteen, but she was already taller than her older sister, which meant much taller than Haneth herself, and there was still time to grow. She didn’t know if Thorvall’s lordly blood had contributed to that height, or someone else’s, but she knew it wouldn’t be long before suitors came calling. Every day she was more a woman.

Thorvi leaned against Haneth’s shoulder, practiced at finding a way to prop her elbow against the ground and bend so she could almost seem smaller than her peasant-born mother. 

“I heard baying…” the girl explained as she watched the hearth. She liked the embers best when the fire was low. She could imagine many shapes in the writhing coals—scenes playing out, portents like tea leaves. “It came from the North. The baying of hounds, only it was...like a song. It had rhythm and focus…” Her tone drifted as she inched her naked toes towards the fire. Haneth had to draw the quilt across her feet to stop her.

“Did you see anything?” Haneth asked. Haneth heard nothing in her dreams. If there was sound at all, it was like hearing muttering through walls or the underwater protests of a drowning man.

“I saw…I saw some spatter of blood on snow, but only briefly. He said something about a...theatre? The man on horseback. He had one bright eye...”

Haneth stiffened and regretted it instantly. In the same moment she felt her daughter curl up, become smaller, as if she willed herself to be a child again that Haneth could hold and carry. 

Glimpses, like partners in a dance. Now they were filtered to her through kindred. Portents. Haneth looked into the fire and saw in the shifting ember-patterns only rolling heads.

She was proud and heartbroken for the way the girl swallowed the fear in her voice. 

“You’re going North, aren’t you?” Thorvi asked.

Haneth closed her eyes. She pulled the girl closer to her and tried to wrap the quilt around them both. Her arms were not long enough to do it easily, but she’d managed. She cocooned them in woven wool lined with sheepskin. Thorvi sank lower against her shoulder. 

“I am,” Haneth confessed.

She had known, she realized, even before Thorvi’s dream forced them to both face it. Something was coming—not a storm or a strong force, but something more like a basket bobbing among the river reeds. Whatever it was, she knew, would change everything. 

Thorvi nodded. She knew better than to ask why. 

“Can I come with?” The girl looked up at her mother, whose features were shallow from below, her freckles a sort of camouflage in the barely light. 

Haneth watched the embers roll and recoil, but none of the faces she recognized. 

“I’m unhappy,” Thorvi confessed. Haneth’s gaze was drawn. A gentle shift of her shoulders encouraged her daughter to speak as much or as little as she wished. 

“I have no place,” the young Lady whispered. “Not in grandfather’s court, except to make myself the best I can to be married, and I do not want to be married. Why should I have to be married?” She picked at the stitching in the quilt, but Haneth didn’t chasten her. Thorvi had made the quilt, after all. “I am not a scholar, and I am not a warrior, and I cannot make my place in the Mearc, and what’s more I do not want to.” She snuggled up more to her mother. “I want to see the North, and I want to see it with you.” 

Haneth stroked her daughter’s hair. She was young, but no younger than Haneth had been when she’d first crossed the mountains, fateful years ago. 

“It will be hard,” Haneth promised.

“I hope so…” Thorvi muttered and shifted so she could lie in Haneth’s lap. Haneth bunched the quilt around her, building a nest to keep her warm to her toes. She stroked her hair back from her daughter’s ear. No freckles. It was odd how none of her children looked like her, the one constant. The male variables were not many, but still... 

Haneth hummed. She smoothed Thorvi’s hair. Reaching a tangle, she untied it thread by thread, loosening the strands like a knot in fishing line. 

“Alright,” she whispered as she leaned over her daughter’s ear. “Alright. We’ll go North. You’ll see where it all started, where we all were made into who we are.” She pressed a kiss against her temple. Thorvi was too young for lines to flare out from her eyes, but there they were. She was not only too tall for her age. She was already too worried...and maybe too wise. 

She watched as the girl’s eyelids closed. Her breathing, asleep, was wider and deeper, but Haneth didn’t have to observe that to know how much Thorvi kept tightly packed under her chest. 

“At least...I’ll get to be with you,” she muttered, her tone so low she might as well have thought it. “I’ll get to see you make yourself into who you’ll be.” 

She sat there, hours more, unwilling to stir Thorvi from her lap. She knew there would be nights she’d have to rouse the girl from the deepest sleep to abandon camp. She’d have to show her how to rest comfortably in travelling garb, still in her boots. She’d show her how to pad her socks to cushion the blisters, and she’d teach her how to read the signs in villagers’ faces that warned them when to skip town.

For now, she let her sleep, stroking her fingers through her hair, careful not to snag a broken nail on a well-brushed lock. She looked over at the bed where her other children slept. She couldn’t stay for them. She’d never learned how. She’d be back, as she always was, but now...now was Thorvi’s time. Now was the time to head North.