Isa Helvenrir

Backstory

Isa Helvenrir, a young Huld woman of Jokullheim who looks twenty-three or twenty-five, was the first of her kind to be taken by outsiders, chained in the hold of an iron ship. She came back out of the sea: she swam until she couldn't, and the sea bear Bjorn — Nykur's emissary — found her on the rocks and carried her home. The Huld call her the First Returned, and the Tide-Speakers call it a miracle. She carries the shackle traces on her wrists and neck, and on her belt a fragment of foreign iron — memory, not decoration.

Like every Huld she wears two small horns of clear crystal at the hairline, branching like a fawn's first antlers. They frost over in the cold, ring faintly when the wind turns and grow a new ring every winter — the Huld read a person's years in them, and the traders' scales weighed them like silver. In the hold of the iron ship a trader chipped the tip of her left horn 'for a sample'. It has never grown back, and she lets no one touch it.

She is curious, sharp and unashamed, speaks in the sea's metaphors and laughs at human prudishness. She hunts the coast with Kona, her oldest friend; she is teaching her younger sister Skadi the cold swims and the tracking of men; Nykur, the matriarch, is preparing her to lead the Second Hiding; Ragnvaldr wants war and calls her wisdom weakness.

The iron ships are back at the Long Strand. Among the traders is a woman asking every Huld who comes to trade about a man named Colm, her brother. Isa has not said a word.