The Fylking: Outpost and The Wolf Lords

by F. T. McKinstry

  With a sniffle and a yawn, Melisande threw aside the covers and swung her feet to the floor. She dragged on her boots beneath a woolen nightshirt and climbed down the ladder into the kitchen. Tilting her head to avoid the clusters of plants drying on the rafters, she lit a fire and put on water for tea.

  The earth’s pulse crept into her feet and up into her hands as she regarded her latest knitting project, which she had left folded on the table late the night before. Bythe, a goatherd who lived within sight of Tower Sif, had requested the tunic in return for a pair of goats. Melisande smiled. Goats were trouble, but she liked them.

  She sat down and absently traced her tingling fingers over the oaken tabletop darkened by a century of use. Steam rose from the water in the kettle. Her hand crept to the stitches of her work, rows and rows of them, nearly finished. She picked up the tunic and studied it. Dark brown as the smoke-stained rafters of the cottage, the stitches formed gaps where the sleeve joined the yoke, much like the cracks between a wall and a roof. Deep in her mind stirred a visceral awareness of interconnection, the wisdom of the natural world, a tapestry of patterns, lines, curves and counts as perfectly cast as a well-stitched swatch.

  Pattern sense, her mother once called it; at least Melisande thought it might have been her, though it could have been her grandmother or one of the old women in the village. Come to think of it, her mother had turned a blank eye on such things.

  Being of a wilder mind, Melisande picked up her needles, hummed softly and wove a neat kitchener stitch over the gaps in the armpits of her work. Then she folded the goatherd’s tunic into her tattered old knitting bag, removed the kettle from the fire and returned to bed.

  She didn’t hear the mice the rest of that night, the night after, or the night after that. Of course, Pisskin might have had something to do with it. Clever hunters, cats. So she told herself as her pattern sense curled quietly as a snake in an ivy patch, to rest with both eyes open.

  ~ * ~

  The day dawned clear and cold as Melisande set out for Odr. She wore a linen shift with a woolen smock over it, her worn leather boots, leggings and a cloak that had belonged to her father. It was covered with horse hair, a welcome addition to the whisky stains he had put on it when her mother got sick. She died young, and shortly thereafter, he died drunk. A sensitive soul, her father never dealt well with the darker side of life.

  Melisande stepped over a fragment of the ruins that lay everywhere in the forest, cracked by roots, cloaked in moss, some of them carved with strange patterns. Melisande’s father had claimed that most of the ruins lay underground, shrouded by centuries. Melisande’s grandfather had discovered a cave on this very spot where the ground collapsed to reveal part of a chamber. Full of roots and tumbled stones, it extended some distance underground through a narrow opening on one side. After emerging quite shaken from a daylong exploration of the underground, he moved rubble over the opening to seal it. Then he built his house on top, providing him with a deep cellar in which to store food and provisions over the long winters.

  On the north side of the cottage, backed up to the forest to shelter it from the wind, stood a three-sided barn her father had built to hold livestock. After her mother died, he sold their horse and pig and told Melisande it would be up to her to travel to the village for food and supplies. This she was happy to do, as it gave her a reason to escape the pall of his drunken moods. Though he had never harmed her, his company became as dark and unnerving as the hidden labyrinths beneath the forest.

  Now her barn provided shelter for Othin’s steed, a heavy brown warhorse bred to the mountain terrain. The village groom, who quite loved the green scarf Melisande knit for him, put hay and grain in the loft above the stall each first-quarter moon prior to Othin’s visit. The mice got more of it than the horse, but Pisskin made sure they didn’t get all of it. The cat also haunted the tumbled-down whisky still farther out in the woods, along with other creatures that had taken up residence there. A better use for it, Melisande decided.

  A village farmhand named Rolf, in return for blankets for his children, now protected from cold and smiling in their dreams, had begun work on the barn to provide shelter for Bythe’s goats. The opening of the new addition faced the inside, protecting the small area from blowing snow. After promising to bring her a cart full of fresh hay, Rolf had eyed Melisande’s garden and suggested in the spring he might return and strengthen the fence. Grinning, she said she would consider that, all the while wondering if pigs or ponies might make more practical companions.

  Pisskin, her one fine companion, sat on the edge of the garden. The cat wore a thin braided collar Melisande had woven to protect him from predators bigger than himself. His glossy black fur shone in the sun as he licked a paw.

  Her garden was not a tidy affair; she liked to let things grow wild. In the spring the village women gave her seedlings in return for tea cozies, placemats and shawls. Nary a puff of steam, drop of ale or chilling draft eluded her stitches, they claimed.

  She slung her knitting bag over her shoulder and bit into a pastry stuffed with smoked goose and hazelnuts, a treat the butcher’s wife had given her on her last visit. The woman never stopped praising the placemats Melisande knit for her, a pattern of woodland herbs reaching to an indigo sky. Swearing the mats made her food taste better, she always sent the knitter home with a basket of something tasty.

  Autumn was a knitter’s busy time. Melisande knit brindled patterns of drops and sky over the summer; wove strands of sky-blue wool into the edge of a belt as the hard gray line of a late frost passed her garden by; pulled threads of weeds from the stitched patterns of the vegetable patch, leaving purple violets to grace the air with Othin’s favorite scent; and braided black yarn with rosemary and periwinkle to protect her cottage when the shadows grew long. Such amusements aside, she always had something to do. Folk from far around prized her work for its weird charm.

  Well, most of them.

  Melisande left the cottage path and entered the cool shadows of the forest. The snowy peaks of the Thorgrim Mountains glinted through the barren trees. She came to a stream running over the path and stepped over the large flat rocks she had muscled there last spring after a flood swept away the bridge and splintered it against an oak tree. The village builder offered to replace the bridge in return for socks for his wife, an Eastlander from Maan Ket. When Melisande went to his house, knitting bag in hand, his woman turned her away, muttering Witch! as she closed the door. Melisande had stood there a moment and then laughed like one of Bythe’s goats bleating at a fenced-in garden. The builder had not said a word to her since.

  Never mind. She had lost one friend but gained another. She returned home that day and had begun to drag the bridge remains to her woodpile when a bird swooped over her. Ashy gray with a black head, throat, wings and tail, a hooded crow landed on the path at her feet with a croak. It hung around her cottage for the next three days, perching in the trees, preening on the roof, raiding the compost pile, teasing the cat. Then, as if summoned, it left her.

  Beyond the mountains folk said that the Vale of Ason Tae was home to the wild, and that witches and warlocks of the Blackthorn Guild trained here amid the wicked spirits of the north from whence the winters came. Mothers told their children scary tales about it, or so Othin claimed. He said things like that to make Melisande laugh. Everyone somewhere feared something somewhere else. In the uncanny north, men like her father drank themselves to death for fear of the dark.

  Melisande knew one votary of Blackthorn, a hedge witch called Yarrow who lived in the Otter River Valley between Odr and Highloc in the southern foothills of the Vale. She kept to herself, tended a mule and made remedies for everything from an upset stomach to a bad dream. She came to Odr occasionally, usually in the spring after the mud dried, walking beside her mule pulling a cart full of baskets, brooms and herbal goods she had spent the winter making. Last spring, Melisande traded Yarrow a shawl the color of snow shadows for a fine basket with a lid and a c
lasp, a bundle of scented rushes and a salve to soften the rough spots on her fingers. The woman took the shawl with a strange smile and a deep nod of her head, as if to acknowledge one of her own kind.

  The sun had climbed above the eaves of Graebrok when she came to a glade scattered with tree stumps and overgrown with bramble, its dark berries long harvested by women and bears. She trudged through the tangle, snatching her skirt from the thorns. Through the trees, the hills of Ason Tae plunged into a green valley carved by the North River, its deep waters glinting.

  Tower Sif stood directly in her path. She veered east of it, heading through the grass to a lonely trail near the wardens’ cot. The villagers of Odr had built the one-room hut many suns ago to give the lonely wanderers a place to warm themselves during the cruel winter moons. For fear of the Fylking, many villages in Dyrregin did the same. Better to maintain a cot than have a seer under their roofs near a gatetower. They had all heard the stories: bairns awakening from nightmares, fire leaping like wolves from the hearth, bread refusing to rise, horses kicking down stalls for no reason. The Fylking were as fickle and unruly as anything of the Otherworld, and while no warden worth a staff would risk letting harm coming to anyone under his or her watch, everyone knew the Fylking were not altogether under the wardens’ control.

  Melisande hopped from the brush onto the path, casting a glance over her shoulder at the cot huddled in the shadows. She had seen many wardens pass through Odr, but only one had ever spoken to her, late last fall. As the gatetower lay directly between her cottage and the village, she had taken to passing closer than many would dare. She never met with trouble, causing her to wonder if the stories were exaggerated or even made up to pass the long winter nights.

  One day, as she had walked along the tower base, the warden emerged from the cot, ran to her in visible distress and stopped her in her path. He was well spoken, had tousled brown hair threaded with blond, bright blue eyes and a worldly manner. He called himself Arcmael. Glancing repeatedly at the tower height, he led her away and warned her about passing so near. She had to admit, his warning was scary enough to heed, but it was not until shortly afterwards that she did so.

  The next day, as Melisande emerged from the baker’s with a warm loaf under her arm, someone pointed her out to Arcmael. Again the blue-eyed warden approached her, only this time he asked her if she might knit him something to warm his legs. As it turned out, she had two pairs of leggings made for which she had not found homes the previous winter. One of them, black with coarse green finger yarn, crackled with pattern sense. When the warden respectfully made his request, Melisande knew the leggings were his.

  She moved along, studying the tower. It stood on the rocks gazing over the valley as it had for well over a millennium, tall and forbidding, a sentinel of mystery. Carved from the land, its stones were gray as winter storms. Thin, slitted windows gazed from beneath a parapet surrounded by otherworldly creatures Arcmael called dragons, ferocious, wily beasts the size of a foothill.

  As many times as Melisande had walked by the gatetower, she imagined standing on top to look over the Vale. She asked Arcmael if he might show her to the parapet in return for his leggings. He blinked, stunned by her request—and then refused, of course, as she knew he would. His expression gentle yet dark, he took her by the hand and sat her on the bottom step to the arched oak door, and then he told her a story.

  The Fylking come from the stars, he began, from a rich world much like Math with vast mountains wrestling above the seas. Dragons live there. Some of the mountains breathe fire and smoke; others lay quiet, black and pale beneath three moons. In the valleys amid raging rivers and deep lakes tower ancient forests in which the Fylking built living cities of trunk, bough and stone.

  Lovers of strife, song and steel, the Fylking are warriors, their empires spanning the heavens beyond their world. Being immortal, they created their civilization by the force of their hearts and minds on the fabric of time and space; eons of methods making light, heat, color, movement and sound, rendering them gods to the eyes of mortals.

  Gods or not, for all their glory the Fylking are subject to the laws of nature. They can die, by the sword or other violent means, though their skills in avoiding such things are beyond human comprehension. In their world they are solid; in Math, they are not. Like light in the dark perceived only by a cat, or sound heard only by a dog, their bodies vibrate beyond mortal senses and can only be perceived by mortals through training.

  War is an art to the Fylking, an exquisite tapestry of plots, logistics, weaponry and landscapes they mold to their design. The dance of good and evil occupies them utterly, one creating the other, the oceans giving birth to blood and then washing it away again. Thus do the long ages of their existence have meaning. And so, through an alignment in the stars that occurs once every twenty-two thousand suns, they arrived in Math, a singular world positioned in the heavens such that it gathered enough power to provide access to several worlds where their war had taken a bad turn. Like rangers setting up camp to study an enemy of the king, the Fylking built the Gate in order to pass to and from their new outpost without having to wait for long alignments, an impractical strategy even to an immortal.

  By virtue of their stature in the dimensions of living beings, the Fylking had the ability to build the Gate using the natural materials of the world; however, their methods would have been terrifying to humans and created unnecessary complications. Though the Dyrregins were at that time greater in number and sophistication, they would not have understood a tower being built by sound or the higher laws of manifestation, let alone ten of them in specific places over the land. And so the Fylking, having the patience of the immortal, befriended humankind by creating the Wardens’ Order.

  The Fylking taught their wardens the arts of interdimensional perception and the properties of light, energy, crystals and architecture. The wardens built the towers, watched over them with human eyes and maintained them over millennia, generations upon generations, gathering the relatively infinite energies of celestial bodies to provide a bridge for their immortal guests. In return the Fylking protected them, and gave them the honor of representing them to humankind. In time, when humans’ natural curiosity and belligerence ran its course through enough skirmishes to make it clear the Fylking had no intention of leaving until they very well pleased, Dyrregin became the odd place that it is.

  Melisande smiled. The storytellers sang this tale, in their way. But Arcmael told it with more passion and detail. It pleased her greatly, and she told him so.

  Afterwards, the warden drew her gently away from the tower and explained that the Fylking were able to affect things with energy. They could contact humans in visions, dreams or a sense of unreality; or they could kill. After putting the fear of the Otherworld into her bones, he taught her how to move her hand into a shape that would protect her if the Fylking ever bothered her in some way. He explained that the Fylking were not truly under thrall by the sigil, but that they had long ago vowed to their human companions to withdraw when asked. The vow was a courtesy, something they did to put humans at ease. He maintained that no Fylking had ever broken it.

  He made Melisande repeat the sigil again and again until she knew it well. Once satisfied, he laughed. “Odrians,” he said, shaking his head. “Breathing distance to the Apex of the Gate, don’t know the sigil, don’t care.” He took her hands and squeezed them gently. “You are true to your roots, Millie. But do take care. The Fylking are real.” With that he left her there, walking in his traveler’s pace in the direction of the mountains, cloak swirling at his feet. He glanced back at her once as if fully expecting her to toss her sigil into a drawer like an unmatched sock.

  The gatetower brooded in the sun as a breeze rose from the north, blowing cold across the field. Melisande quickened her pace.

  Her friend Bythe lived in a fertile glade on the outskirts of Odr, in a small stone house his father had built. His wife Leara was pretty and rarely had three words to say, bu
t she had a singing voice like that of a river goddess. Her husband’s goats avoided her. Eldritch creatures.

  The roof of the goatherd’s house appeared through the trees. Beyond the river nestled the village of Odr, stone walls bright, chimneys smoking in the morning air. Melisande descended quickly over the rugged terrain. Behind her, the tower’s presence grew heavier, like a night terror fed by attention. It stared at her back with its slitted windows and stone-blank dragon eyes. Wondering if the Fylking had heard her earlier thoughts and noticed her at last, she turned around.

  A mounted rider stood near the tower, clad in shining black, a sword at his side and a cloak tearing in the wind. He glimmered like a mirage. From the eye slits of his strange, scaled helmet, he gazed across the distance like the tower itself, alien and condescending. A warrior, to be sure, but he was not of the Dyrregin Guard or the King’s Rangers.

  Where had he come from? Melisande scanned the landscape. He could have come from the other side, from the road the wardens used.

  When she looked again, the rider was gone. A chill clutched her spine like a bony hand. Fylking? She shouldn’t have seen him. She wove her fingers into the sigil, now grateful that Arcmael had taught it to her. She started walking. The force of the tower didn’t recede behind her. She looked over her shoulder.

  The rider had crossed half the distance in her direction, his horse’s hooves striking sparks from the stone. The scales on his helmet took shape as a gatetower dragon. Nothing but a Fylking would wear armor like that.

  Arcmael had warned her that the High Fylking of Tower Sif might ignore a Banishing sigil as easily as not.

  Clutching her knitting bag, Melisande fled like a hare, leaping through brush and over rocks toward the shelter of the trees. Hoofbeats shook the ground; thunder tore the clear blue sky. As she reached the glade, she spotted a thicket of young hemlock trees. She dove into it, branches tearing her face and hair. She curled on the ground and pulled the needles over her head. Then she lay still as a mouse after a boot hits the wall.