The towering granite shoulders of the mountain god braced against the blue heavens above. Eero’s eyes remained closed beneath his glacial mask, his body swathed in a cloak of green trees. Halfway up the mountain’s body, jutting out of a gray cliff, stretched his wide, verdigrised hands. Between them, glimmering in the dawn, lay a line of white fire—the Bridge of Novices.

“All who wish to become a Voice of Eero must cross the bridge,” the master of novices called, pointing up. “It is the final stage of your novitiate, and the passage to becoming a master.”

His lined face was calm, his eyes serene. “What was it like when you crossed?” Sennu called softly from the back of the assembled novices. She rarely spoke, so the other novices turned to regard her with surprise.

A frown crinkled his eyelids, but his expression didn’t otherwise alter. “It is different for each person,” the master replied slowly. “What you bring to the mountain will inextricably bind itself to the challenges you face. My journey is not yours. And I still progress along my journey every day.”

As answers went, Sennu did not believe that this answered anything at all. She’d encountered so much double-talk and sophistry among the Voices of Eero that some days, she despaired of ever achieving her goal.

Weary in her soul, Sennu listened to her fellow novices as they went about their days—from ablutions to meditation, from tilling the gardens to tending the alchemy stills, and from writing in the scriptorium to singing in chorale before rest.

“It’s a leap of faith,” Asa whispered in the scriptorium. “To cross the bridge is to put your life in the hands of Eero. You have to have faith, Sennu. In something beyond yourself.”

Sennu regarded her companion stolidly across the scraped expanse of a palimpsest. Not for her, the creamy vellum that the monks had entrusted to Asa—Sennu had never written in southern runes before arriving at the monastery. “Do you mean to chide me?” she asked the younger woman, pushing strands of lightly-silvered dark hair out of her own face. Among her own people, a youngster like Asa would never have dared to question an elder as this girl had just done.

Asa flushed, ducking her head so that her long blond hair covered her features. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I didn’t mean to sound rude. I just—it’s what I think the test is.” Her eyes filled with a kind of adoration as she stared out the wide casements that let so much light flood into the scriptorium—casements made of rich, clear glass, not horn. The windows gave the scribes a spectacular view of the mountain, and of Eero’s sleeping face beneath his snows. “To give yourself utterly to something. Without hesitation or reservation. To trust.”

Sennu exhaled and picked up a goose-feather quill to resume her laborious copying of a recipe for a chest-salve for ague.

The monks would never come out and say what the final tests were. They’d only repeat, over and over: “Everyone’s journey is their own. We cannot teach you what cannot be taught. You must find your own way to Eero, out of your own experiences, out of your own learning. Our way may not be your way.”

Sometimes Sennu wondered if the whole thing was a sham. An elaborate façade, concealing the fact that there was no god here. That Eero, if he’d ever existed, had died long ago. Just as the gods of her people had died. Along with all her people, when the sickness rose from beneath the melting tundra, leaving only Sennu behind to inter the bodies, one by one, in the loose scree overlooking a fjord.

Her people held that there were two souls in every human—a free-soul, immortal and true. And a body-soul, bound to the earth. She’d hoped—oh, how she’d hoped—that the free-souls would find their way into the afterlife, where there was no more pain or grief. And that the body-souls that remained behind would at least have a good view of the gleaming ocean for all eternity.

Now, memories welled up in spite of her taut control. Memories of how intolerably loose her mother Ibbá’s arms had been as Sennu had wrapped her in a colorful blanket to drag her along the cliff path to join the others. How she’d had to stop and rewind the blanket two, three times, as the fabric refused to stay woven tight around the corpse. How she’d had to look at her mother’s face every time.

Of how small her son Lávrrohas’ fingers had been, as he clutched at his wooden reindeer in the throes of the fever . . . of how light his little body had seemed, as if the fever had burned all the substance out of his body.

Of how her dear Veaiku had fought just to stand up, to help her with the sick, before her strong husband, too, had died—Veaiku, who could track caribou all day in deep snow, who could carry a deer home on his shoulders, and still have energy to lift Lávrrohas into the air to watch the boy laugh in glee as he raised his little hands to the sky . . . all of them, gone . . . and only her left at the edge of the cliffs to scream and scream and scream to the uncaring waves and the startled sea-birds—

“Sennu?” Asa’s light voice broke through her reverie. “Are you all right?”

Sennu looked down and realized that she’d snapped the goose-feather quill in her clenched fist, spattering ink everywhere over the recipe. A recipe I gave these monks, recited dully out loud from memory. It didn’t help the fever. It didn’t help the chills. It didn’t prevent the dying. But still they want it recorded in their runes. “I suppose this means I’m starting over again,” Sennu replied blankly, and went to fetch sand to dry the ink, and a bronze razor to scrape away her mess.

The palimpsest, rough and now clean of ink, mocked her. Just as the tumbled rocks of the cliff-edge had. If you didn’t know what the scree hid, you couldn’t have seen that the rocks covered eighteen of her closest kin.

The bodies, like her failed runes, might as well never have been there.

Asa gave her a hapless look and a gentle pat on the shoulder. “You know, if you ever want to talk, I’m told I’m a good listener,” she offered.

Sennu accorded her a restrained nod, and went back to her work. Asa didn’t listen. Asa already believed that she had all the answers.

The young usually thought that they did.

And Sennu didn’t believe that any of the people in the monastery held the answers she sought. Asa believed that the key to the trials was faith, but . . . hadn’t Sennu and her tribe had faith in their gods? The gods didn’t answer our prayers, though we’d always known that they help those who help themselves. But we worked. We stayed up all night, bathing the ill. Giving them medicines. Holding their hands as they died. Didn’t we do enough? Why did all my people die? Why was I spared? Did our gods die with us? Were they already dead? Or did they just not care?

The rage in her couldn’t be quenched. Couldn’t be soothed by any amount of meditation. The only thing that quieted it, even for a moment, was the thought of meeting Eero. He might not be one of her gods—he wasn’t accountable for what had happened to her people. But he was a god. He might have answers for her. An answer for the terrible whys that burned in her heart and soul.

The only way to conceal her grief, her rage, her guilt, her despair, was not to speak of it. She was fairly sure that the monks wouldn’t let someone with so much turmoil in her heart ascend the mountain, so she remained silent, and buried her feelings as she had buried the bodies. Under rocks, in her mind, gray on one side, green with moss on the other. Stone after stone. A cairn as high as the mountain above, but infinitely more slippery and dangerous.

Every day, it threatened to collapse in her mind and bury her, as well.

Months passed, and the seasons flowed into summer. In the gardens, she toiled in the sun beside Kjell. He was an older acolyte than Asa, with the wide arms of a warrior of these southerners. His hands bore callouses from iron swords and ash spears, and he sometimes spoke of days in the long-ships, guarding merchants and their cargo as they plied waterways far to the east.

Sennu didn’t mind Kjell’s company. His stories set mortar to the slippery cairn stones in her mind. She didn’t have to work so hard not to think of her own past, when she had someone else’s to hear. So she knelt among the furrows, tugging at stubborn weeds and feeling the thorns bite into her flesh, and finally asked, “What do you think the final test really is?” She glanced up, her eyes catching on the thin span of white fire spread between the mountain’s hands.

Kjell followed her gaze and paused in his work, leaning on a hoe. “It’s a metaphor,” he replied gruffly. “The bridge was made by men in ages past. It’s no thing of magic. The hands are cast bronze, fastened by long nails into the naked rock. The bridge itself? Seven span of glass, suspended between the hands. You have to hike the trail up to the bridge, and then cross something that looks as if it will break if a butterfly lands on it, without losing nerve.” He shrugged.

This sounded far more concrete and real than Asa’s talk of faith and belief. And yet, if the bridge and its test were solely a thing of men and craft, then where was the god in all this? Sennu frowned, and continued rooting in the fresh-turned earth, inhaling its clean-musty smell.

“Why are you here?” Kjell asked, returning to his work, loosening the soil so that a third acolyte could bring a clay jar of water and dampen the soil around each seedling. “Your people have their own gods, don’t they?”

Aye. But they’re dead. Sennu’s teeth clamped tight on the words as she felt the cairn inside her mind teeter. Then she managed a quick, false smile and replied, “I might ask you the same thing, man of the sea! Why turn your back on sail and sword for some mountain god?”

Kjell turned and stared up at Eero’s sleeping face. She could see scars on his cheeks, faint and white, in the sunlight shining down from above. “Comes a time when you’re older and slower than the rest of the men on the boats,” he finally replied, his words slow and subdued. “I might have more experience, and I can out-guile most of the young’uns still, but I got to wondering if there was something more that I might be meant for.”

Sennu couldn’t think of any reply. Her own experience held no boats, no swords, no thoughts of being meant for something else. There had just been her people and the daily struggle for survival. They’d followed reindeer herds into the lands of white nights in summer, returning only when endless day turned to the unending night of winter.

And looking at the mountain god’s face, Sennu didn’t think either Asa or Kjell had the right of it. The test had to be more than mere belief—what god would find that an adequate sacrifice? Hers hadn’t. She and her people had believed, and her kin had all died. And the test couldn’t just be overcoming something that men had made. How could men know the measure of a god?

You have to earn worthiness, Sennu thought one night, her head spinning with exhaustion. There has to be sacrifice, yes, but you also have to prove yourself. You can’t do that by simple blind trust, or overcoming the works of men. You have to defeat the mountain. You have to defeat the god himself on his own terms.

And having realized that, she knew what she needed to do.

So while continuing her lessons in reading and writing, recording in southern runes the lore of her northern people, she also trained her body. Her arms were already tough from holding taut reindeer sleigh reins; her legs already powerful from long days on skis, following herds of caribou with Veaiku, spear in hand. But now she taught her fingers to find creases in stone, her toes to find furrows in cliff faces.

It couldn’t be harder to climb a mountain than to keep the cairn stones in her head from toppling, could it?

Her fellow novices thought her mad. “Sennu, you must place your trust in something beyond yourself,” Asa warned. “Else Eero will never accept you.”

But the master of novices and the other monks didn’t warn or give lessons. They learned what each novice had to offer, writing down Kjell’s tales of merchants and raids to the east. Asa’s stories of life in an eorl’s court. Sennu’s halting words of following the herds, hunting, and healing. And they taught in turn—but their lessons were in how to do things. How to clear a mind and meditate. How to write the runes that recorded the stories. How to prepare and distill herbs in alembics.

Never did the monks actually speak of Eero. Of what the god expected or wanted from his would-be acolytes.

Are we supposed to discover all of it for ourselves? Seenu wondered half-resentfully as she continued in her secret quest to shape her body, to prepare herself for the climb. It doesn’t matter. If it kills me, so be it. But I’ll have a god to call on. To demand answers of, if there are any to be had.

On morning of the autumn equinox, the master of novices gave them white robes and told them they could take one item with them to the mountain. “Choose carefully,” he said, his eyes distant and placid. “What you bring with you says much about you. And may determine the path of your trials.”

Asa took a book of prayers. Sennu had expected nothing less of the eorl’s daughter, with her wide eyes and peaceful smile.

Kjell, after some hesitation, armed himself with a long knife. “I’d rather a spear, if there are honey-drinkers up there,” he grumbled. “But there are no other weapons than this seax.” His expression suggested that the knife looked wholly inadequate to him.

“Trust in Eero!” Asa reminded him cheerfully. “The god will surely not send a bear to be your test.”

Sennu glanced at the master of the novices. What we choose to bring with us will determine the path of our trials? What if that isn’t a metaphor? What if bringing a weapon determines that a bear really will attack you?

In her mind, the cairn of stones teetered, threatening to reveal some beloved face or another. Intolerably decayed by now, of course. Worse yet, the thought that some fox or bear had dug up the cairn and devoured the bodies there. Lávrrohas’ little fingers—how she’d paused before covering them with the last rock. Staring at them. Hoping that they’d move. That he’d call out from under the stones, “No, Mama, no, don’t cover me, I was just sleeping—”

She fought the memory down, breathing hard. Which was when a final terrible thought hit her: What if it is a metaphor? And what we bring with us isn’t anything physical, but all the burdens we carry? Our memories, our thoughts, our dreams, our hopes?

She exhaled, staring up at the mountain. All right, Eero, you bastard, she thought tiredly. It’s too late to back out. Either you’ll find me worthy, or you won’t. But I won’t take the easy path. Or else I won’t find myself worthy, either.

She took a rope.

Her fellow novices began the long hike up the trail ahead of her, Asa laughing in the warm sun, Kjell watching the sides of the trail for bears. She watched them start up the path, pale gold where the rough dirt cut between the trees. It would circle and circle, ascending higher with each turn around the god’s body. The monks had murmured something about the ascent being meditative, when done properly.

Sennu couldn’t grasp that for the life of her. But she also knew that the path looked like a trap. Walk your own road, she thought, and began to climb, eschewing the open trail before her. She set toes to stone and hands to roots, and all her practice, honing body and muscles, paid off. And to be safe, she tied herself off here and there before swinging to another ledge, another boulder. At first, it almost felt easy.

At noon, halfway up the cliff that was the god’s belly, she heard a scream—high-pitched and female. Sennu flinched and pressed herself to the rock, trying to protect herself as tiny rocks clattered down, hailing on her head and shoulders.

And watched as a dark, flailing shape fell from above.

Watched it plummet past her, with a sound like a bird’s wings tearing at the air.

She locked eyes with Asa as the girl fell past. No fear left in Asa’s eyes. Only a kind of peace.

Sennu tore her eyes away, hating herself for not being able to bear witness for the girl, who’d seemed kind, if heedless. To be with Asa if only in spirit, as she died.

In her mind, the cairn creaked, and rocks toppled from its sides as she pressed her face against Eero’s stony flank. Inhale. Exhale. Feeling her muscles quiver in exhaustion. Feeling the sun beating against her back. Still alive. Her fall didn’t take you with it. Damn it, look down. Stand vigil to her life, to her death!

When Sennu managed to berate herself into looking down, no broken body littered the rocks below. But a white dove rose into the air, soaring away. Sennu’s eyes widened, and her breath caught hard under her ribs.

The ascent came harder after that. She watched the glass bridge grow larger as she climbed; set it as her goal. Pulled parallel with the great bronze hands, larger than she was—larger than Veaiku had been. How Lávrrohas would have loved to have seen this, she thought, clinging to the rock, her eyes wide as she stared at the glass span suspended between the hands. There, the end of the dirt trail, a hint of golden dust spilling onto the glass. The glass itself? Two feet thick. It shimmered like ice, but it had caught all the glory of the sunset in its heart, blazing with golden light so bright, she could barely look on it.

And for once, her heart didn’t entirely ache as she thought of her son. How wide his dark eyes would have been as he looked on this impossible treasure, this immeasurable wealth, held securely in the hands of the mountain god. A testament to human faith, to human ingenuity? Yes—she could see the metal staples that held the hands to the rockface.

And yet, because it was a thing made by human hands—no matter how glorious or beautiful—she shied away from the thought of touching it. Of crossing it. This is not my path, Sennu thought dizzily, and continued to climb. The monks said that my path might not be their path. Let it be so. Let my path be my own, of my own choosing . . . .

As she reached a ledge some twenty feet above the bridge, another scream. This one the more terrible for being male—and distorted. Strange. Feral.

Sennu twisted around, toes cramping dangerously, and looked down to see a bear racing across the glass.

A bear as blond as Kjell had been.

It paused at the edge of the glass bridge, looking up at her. Sniffing. She could see scars on its wide cheeks, white against its blond fur.

And then it dropped to all fours and lumbered down the trail, and off into the green cloak of trees that covered Eero’s shoulders.

Why? Sennu thought, a fresh wave of despair churning through her. Her belly was empty. Her hands shook. Why was Kjell found wanting? He was a good man!

She put her face against the cold stone, feeling grit stick to her face with her sweat. “Another question I’ll have for you, when I finish this ascent, mountain god,” Sennu said out loud.

Her defiance sounded thin and feeble against the face of the coming night.

So she climbed on. Muscles knotting. Flesh sweating. Fingers bleeding.

Somehow, the very act of climbing became meditation. Became prayer. Her bleeding fingers found new purchase. Her mind became clearer, more in the moment. Nothing left but the next handhold, and the next.

And somehow, she could always see the next handhold. Even though night had swept in to replace twilight, she always knew where to shift her weight, and when to lunge for the next ledge. Somewhere behind her, her rope swung in the breeze, knotted to a ledge, but abandoned.

When her hands reached ice, and not stone, Sennu wept, her tears freezing to her face in the icy wind. She couldn’t feel her fingers anymore, and she knew rationally that between the cuts in her gloves that exposed her skin, and the blood that had slicked them, that she must be in danger of frostbite, or worse.

And yet, how could she stop now? She’d ascended so far that to retreat now was just as dangerous as continuing to climb.

And so she continued, inch by perilous inch. Whispering under her ragged breath, “This is my sacrifice. My body. My blood. My effort. My skill. All of me.” She hauled herself over the final edge and lay atop the ice, panting. “Take what you want, god of the mountains. And give what you will, in return.”

She managed to stand, her legs unsteady, the wind tearing at her. It would be smarter to take a knee, to tuck her body into a tight knot against the forceful hands of the wind, but Sennu refused.

Before her, as the dawn’s first light stained the eastern horizon with salmon and gold, lay the wide, white face of the glacier that masked Eero’s face. She knew how dangerous glaciers were. Knew that wind-drifted snow might conceal crevasses into which an unwary step could plunge her. Knew that the wind that moaned over the empty expanse before her could shove her into such a crack, and that even if the fall didn’t kill her, she wouldn’t have the strength to climb back out of the abyss once more.

“Is this it?” Sennu asked out loud. “Is this all there is?” She turned her back to the mountain, staring at the green world of the valley far below. “Why did I climb all this way, if there’s nothing here!”

“That’s a good question,” a voice replied from behind her.

Sennu spun, and the wind caught her off-balance. Shoved her towards the edge. She reached out a hand, flailing—

—and found her hand clasped firmly. Drawn on, pulled to stand before a man who surely hadn’t been there a moment before, his form a dark shadow against the blaze of dawn behind him.

Her first dazed impression was that he was tall. Impossibly so. He bulked even larger, wrapped as he was in bearskins. But his face was weathered, with ice and snow caught in his bushy eyebrows and bristling beard. But she recognized his face, having seen it through the casements of the monastery every day for months—though the god’s eyes were open now as Eero peered at her. “So. You made it.”

As pronouncements went, it lacked grandeur. He sounded gruff, but she heard a certain sympathy in his tone. And for a moment, Sennu couldn’t respond at all, her breath taken from her in a mix of awe and terror.

But after that moment passed, all her guilt and rage returned. Demanded expression. Became a lash for him, who’d saved her. “My friends. Asa and Kjell.” Sennu began in a whisper, her voice growing louder with each word. “They believed. Why didn’t you help them?”

“Were they your friends?” The god sounded detached. “You didn’t walk beside them.”

The world around her closed in, the periphery of her vision going gray. His tone didn’t condemn her. But she condemned herself. “They said . . . to walk our own paths . . . .” Sennu’s throat constricted. “Could I have saved them, if I’d walked with them?”

Eero released her hand, and gestured for her to walk with him. His strides were so long, she had to scramble to keep up, but where his feet fell, there were no cracks in the ice. “No. You could not have saved them. Any more than you could have saved your kin. Their paths were their own. But you could have shared them.”

“So they were fated to fall?” Her heart pounded. And my people were fated to die?

“No. Their choices along the path led to their falls.”

“But they believed—”

“Yes, they believed.” He paused. “But what they believed most in, they found.”

Sennu closed her eyes in realization. “Kjell believed in the real. In the dangers of the world, his own strength.” As I have believed in my own strength and skill. “He looked for bears.”

“And became what he most believed in.” The god’s voice held compassion.

“And Asa?”

“She believed that faith would transform her. It did. She did not die from her fall.”

“You gave her wings.”

“She gave herself wings.” A pause. “What do you believe in, Sennu?”

She opened her eyes. Confronted with him, her answer sounded facile, her voice thin as a thread. “Myself.”

“As well you should. I cannot make more of you, than you have yourself.” Eero paused. “Is that all you believe in?” His voice shifted, becoming oddly sad.

Behind her eyes, she saw Veaiku’s face, stained gold by firelight as he worked warm wax onto sleigh runners. Smiling, because he’d just looked down at Lávrrohas, who’d been hiding under the upturned sleigh, and now peeked out at his father, laughing. I’m a bear, grrr!

And for once, the cairn stones piled high in her mind didn’t shift. Didn’t threaten her with the sight of them, cold and still against the earth.

“I used to believe in them,” Sennu whispered. “They were my life.”

“And so you came to ask if there was a reason they were taken from you.” Eero stopped in his long strides. The god turned to face her, placing a hand on her shoulder. Warmth radiated from that touch. “I don’t have an answer for you. That’s why the journey is yours, the path is yours. There are no answers but the ones we find for ourselves.”

Sennu looked down. “I really couldn’t have saved them any more than I could have stopped Asa from falling?”

“You misunderstand. You could’ve saved Asa from falling—once, twice perhaps. But her faith was such that she would take no sensible precautions. Her choices determined her steps. If she didn’t fall on my slopes, she would’ve fallen another time, another way. Because that was who she was, and who she chose to be.”

Sennu’s eyes rose again. “So my people . . . were condemned to death because of our choices? Because we were who we were, and went where we had always gone?” It’s not fair, she thought, feeling like a child. It’s not right!

“There is no condemnation,” Eero replied softly, his warmth still spreading through her. “There are just consequences. And sometimes there is chance—yes, chance, not fate.”

She lowered her head. “What do I do now?” She felt bereft, her anger draining from her like fluids from a lanced wound. The poison of it lingered a little, but it no longer sustained her. She’d come looking for answers, ready to demand them, but there were none. At least, not easy ones.

Eero shrugged. “That, like every other step along the path, is your decision to make.” He raised his free hand, and she followed his gesture with her gaze . . . only to realize that there was a crumpled form on the ice behind her. Long, dark hair, silvered throughout. A thin robe covered pale skin—foolish, not to have worn the bright-dyed, thick wool and leathers of her people when ascending to the snowline . . . .

And then the jolt of recognition. “Am I dying, or am I already dead?”

And if I’m dead, can my free-soul finally go to Veaiku and Lávrrohas?

“Is that what you’ve been seeking, young one?” Eero’s voice neither condemned nor approved. He merely questioned her unspoken thoughts. “Have you sought me as a means to your own end?”

Sennu swayed in place. “No,” she finally answered, her voice thick. “I don’t wish to die. I love them. I want them to live once more.”

“I cannot make them live. Nor can you.” He paused. “But you can decide to live. Transform your heart, and let the pain go. It will always be a part of you, of course. As they will always be part of you. But you can decide to live. And how.”

She exhaled. Strange, that her free-soul could still breathe the thin, flinty mountain air. Could still smell the tang of snow in the air. “Decide how to live?”

Eero smiled faintly. “Certainly. You could return. Force yourself into that cold, broken body, and descend the mountain as my Voice. You could walk the plains. Teach others what you already knew. That the gods help those who help themselves. And perhaps, in time, other truths that you’ll learn for yourself.” He looked away, toward the horizon, his face distant and his eyes sad.

“Have many chosen to become your Voice?” She thought of the monks in the monastery below.

“The monks below are those who cross the bridge, but go no further. They might think of themselves as my Voices, but none have made the full ascent and returned since the bridge was built, hundreds of years ago.”

She thought of all her people, dead of plague, because their gods hadn’t been strong enough. Because they hadn’t the knowledge to help themselves. Because chance existed. “What’s the alternative?”

She thought a hint of a smile crossed his face, but his eyes remained sorrowful. As if he already knew her decision. “You open yourself to possibility. Walk with me. And become what I am.” He swept his hand encompassingly, gesturing to the granite crags of his body, the trees that cloaked his form, the snows that masked his face. “But no matter which you choose, choose it with a heart that has the capacity to heal. With a soul that can forgive itself for the sin of survival.”

She looked down at the mountain, and for the first time, realized how strange it was, that there were no others in the vicinity. No great ranges, nothing else larger than a hill. “How many have come so far?” she asked softly,

“Two,” he replied, sounding melancholy. “Two in all the thousands of years your kind have walked these lands.”

She stepped closer. “And how many have gone back, leaving you alone here?”

“All of them,” Eero replied, his voice like frost dissolving under the sun’s first light.

Sennu closed her eyes, and took his hand once more. “I choose you,” she whispered. “I cannot bid my family to live again. I don’t wish to join them—not yet, anyway. But I do not wish to be alone. Nor should you be.”

The mountain god looked at her with wide, startled eyes, and smiled.

And when the sun set on the monastery that day, two mountains stood, one on either side of the valley. One eternally masked in ice, stern and forbidding and weathered. The other? A little less tall, perhaps, more subtly rounded.

But on her flanks, wildflowers grew, with the promise that winter inevitably yields to spring.