The warrior’s jaw flexed. “I’m a ranger. North Branch.” He jammed the torch handle into the snow on the edge of the road and turned to his horse. The phooka had vanished.
“You aren’t dressed as one,” Arcmael observed.
Othin pulled another cloak from a roll of things on his saddle and put it on. He had a blood-stained bandage around his thigh. “Nor do you carry your staff,” he said casually. At Arcmael’s startled expression he added, “I believe our paths have crossed in Ason Tae. I didn’t recognize you at first. You’ve gone thin.”
“I ran into trouble.”
Othin reached into a saddlebag and handed Arcmael something wrapped in soft leaves. “Last one I’m afraid. You’re welcome to it.”
Arcmael opened the leaves and found a salted herring. Nodding his gratitude, he consumed it in two bites. Then he gestured to the opaque sky. “Tell me,” he said with his mouth full. “What moon rises?”
“Near first quarter before the Frost Moon.”
Frost Moon. As Arcmael had thought, he was in the Otherworld over an entire cycle. “And the sun?”
“Return of the Fylking, 1245.” The ranger stepped close, his gaze intent. “Are you fey?”
Only a moon, then. War with Fjorgin. Draugr overrunning the realm. And a ranger on the road out of habit. A long moon, at that. “I lost track.”
They gazed at each other, secrets between them. Othin said, “It’s a bad time to be on the road. I’m headed for the Bear’s End. I’d say you could use a fire and a proper meal.”
“Else death will find me.”
Othin nodded. “Perhaps we can help each other.” He doused the torch in the snow. Darkness slammed down like the lid of a tomb. He went to his horse and mounted.
Shivering and weak with hunger, Arcmael felt around in the dark until he grasped the warrior’s arm. He got up behind him and tried to get comfortable. “I have no coin, if that’s the kind of help you need.”
Othin gathered the reins and pressed his mount into a jostling trot. In the black woods along the road drifted the tall, sinister specter of the phooka. “I have coin. I need you to get me in.”
Arcmael leaned forward. “What?”
“I have a price on my head.” He made a clicking noise, causing the horse to jump ahead into the night.
~ * ~
The Bear’s End was originally built three hundred suns past by a warlord who came to Dyrregin intending to carve himself a swath of land from which to rule. They called him the Bear, as he was reputed to have been large, muscular and covered with black hair. He came from Catskoll with an army of one thousand and was driven north by the Dyrregin Guard, whom he defeated in the Wolftooth Pass. For fifty suns the Bear and his Catskoll army controlled Thorgrim. He cut trees, dug into the earth, hauled river stones and Gate War ruins from the forest and built himself a hall. The Catskolls stole women from the woodland villages and had children by them. Thus they made their home in the cold shadows of war.
History told that the king’s army eventually descended on the hall and slaughtered the Catskolls, leaving their bodies in the woods for predators and time. Some said many escaped and hid, eventually blending with the people of Dyrregin. Witches, warlocks and seers told a different tale. They said the Bear employed a sorcerer who prevented the Others of Wyrvith Forest from interfering with his business. When the magician died, the Others took terrible vengeance for the Catskoll’s general disregard for the spirits of the land—driven wild with wrath over falling trees shaking the earth, stones ripped from their ancient beds, wildlife thinned to desperation. The Others scattered them, hunting down and devouring the invaders with mist and shadow, leaving no survivors.
During the Bear’s reign, only wardens traveling to Ason Tae were allowed to pass through his territory. The Bear made this concession grudgingly, after losing a fair number of his men to the wardens’ Guardian Fylking. If that had not convinced him that the realm of Dyrregin held mysteries best left unconquered, he tried his might again upon the Faersc Conservatory, some mere ten leagues northeast. Better to claim that fine hall than to endure the winters building his own—or so he thought. The Fylking destroyed a dozen raiding parties before the Bear finally gave up and left the mountain keep and its seers alone. The people of Ason Tae, on the other hand, whom the Bear didn’t have the resources to claim, were cut off from their supply routes through the mountains and forced to get supplies from the coastal realms using the western roads, some of which were built during the Catskolls’ reign.
The Bear’s hall was never finished. It sprawled amid the trees like veins, stone, wood and roots, forming empty spaces now claimed by ponds, ferns and brambles. A lone tower, now crumbled in on itself, was home to an unkindness of ravens whose feathered ancestors had claimed the place after the Bear died a grisly death defending it. Underground passages riddled the ground below the tower, where his men had dug down and broken through to the ruins of underground chambers built before the Gate War. Some they used for storage; others they used as dungeons. One popular story told they had used the passages to escape.
For decades after the Bear’s fall, the hall was used by guardsmen as an outpost in the event anyone attempted to claim the mountains again. Over time, when nothing happened and duty called them south and west, they abandoned the broken hall to its ghosts and curses. After that, trappers and hunters came and rebuilt what remained intact into a serviceable inn. So it stood to this day, a sizeable establishment surrounded by mossy, overgrown ruins, crumbling walls and dangerous passages rumored to have devoured more than one curious patron or outlaw in hiding.
By the time Arcmael and Othin reached the inn, the snow had stopped and stars twinkled in the sky. It was bitterly cold. Othin crossed the Thor River Bridge, his horse’s hooves crunching through the ice. On the far side of the bridge, he turned his mount and sank into the shallow drifts. In the distance, the inn glowed like a torch. As they skirted it, music and voices touched the frosty air.
The ranger dismounted; Arcmael followed. His legs nearly collapsed beneath him as he touched the ground.
“I’m being tracked by bounty hunters,” Othin informed him. “I killed three of them on the road just before I found you. No one passed us, so I think word won’t have reached here yet. But it won’t be long. The inn will be infested with guardsmen, watchers and spies as it is, but when word of my escape gets here, they’ll turn the place inside out.”
Arcmael’s throat turned dry as the ranger began to remove his sword. “What is it you want me to do, exactly?”
“Are you known by the mistress here?”
Arcmael nodded. He had been friends with Ingarth, the late innkeeper. Ingarth had once trained ravens for the King’s Rangers, earning him the local name of ravenmaster. He would go out into the ruins each day and feed the tower birds kitchen scraps. Several suns past, he died in a fall while climbing a rock face in search of eggs. His widow, the present innkeeper, was a Blackthorn witch by the name of Selaen. Some said she turned dark after her husband died, took to fooling with things best left hidden. It was also said that she kept order in her inn with the help of the Otherworld. Arcmael dismissed all that as the sort of bilge people spun in the wake of tragedy. Selaen had always been kind to him.
“It’s been a while,” he said. “When I last used the Wolftooth to get into the Vale, I didn’t stop here. Besides,” he rubbed his beard, “I never had this.”
Othin handed Arcmael the sword, sheathed, straps dangling. “This might disguise you as something more than mad.” He unfastened a crossbow and reached for his quiver.
Clenching his jaw under the irony of this, Arcmael removed his cloak and put on the sword with practiced efficiency. He fought a twinge of anguish as he thought of Wolf and his broken vow. “Why does it matter if she recognizes me?” he said, cinching the strap over his chest. “It might get us a room. At wartime, on a night like this, the inn will be full. But few innkeepers would turn a warden away.” He saw no point in mentioning he
had given up his warden’s status.
For a dog.
“It would bring attention to us.” The ranger lowered his weapons and gazed at Arcmael in the dark. “Have you not heard? No one has seen a Warden of Dyrregin this last long moon. The messengers to Faersc never return.”
For the briefest moment, an old reflex struck Arcmael’s heart. Wolf? Only the night and the faint noise from the inn answered him. Saying nothing, he nodded as if the news was known to him. He took and donned the rest of the weapons, cloaked himself and pulled down his hood. Othin held out a purse, which Arcmael took. It held enough coin to buy many things, including a room in a full inn.
Othin flipped the reins over the horse’s neck. “We’ll have to bring Arvakr into the stable in secret.”
“Your horse is known so well?”
“This is my captain’s horse. They’ll be looking for him.” Without explaining that, he continued, “Pay to stable him. I’ll circle around and bring him in when I see you coming.”
Arcmael nodded, feeling sick. Aside from the obvious assumption that any mercenary worth his bounty would know all these tricks, he now had a new weight on his heart. His hands and feet burning with cold, he stomped in the direction of the light.
As often as Arcmael had brushed aside Skadi’s warnings of this or that, he never regretted it as he did now. Her admonitions against casting an Exile sigil were vague and the consequences not particularly dire unless one had no defense against the Otherworld, skills any Blackthorn apprentice mastered with ease. But the Exile sigil involved greater forces than his connection to the Fylking. Somehow it had gone into his heart like roots creeping into the cracks of a stone foundation to let the water in. This was not about Dog anymore. Now it involved House Halstaeg, the Blackthorn Guild, Faersc, goblins, crows and gods. That one elegant movement of his hand had stolen a full moon of his life on the steps of a war.
He trudged toward the warm yellow glow of the inn, angrily throwing aside a snowy branch as it hit him in the face.
In his grief for Dog, fed like worms by an intricate web of bitterness, he had not stopped to consider Vargn’s machinations, missing wardens or bad dreams. He had shoved it all away for the sake of honor and small company. Now he faced consequences so dire the Allfather himself had seen fit to intervene. The god certainly had not done that for Arcmael’s sake.
Staying deep in the trees, he found an opening offering a view of the inn. He knelt. The main entrance stood across a yard filled with standing stones. Behind it, to the north and east, rose stacks of windowed rooms and stone chimneys wafting pale smoke into the air. Wide, thick steps led to a set of oak doors carved with flying ravens, Ingarth’s masterwork. A huge cresset hung over the steps on a curved iron crossbeam.
Horses stood in the snow at the hitching posts. Two travelers stood on the bottom step of the entrance clad in woolens, snowshoes and packs. One of them wore a sword. A guardsman appeared to be questioning them to determine if they were Fjorginans or worse, draugr.
Guardsmen stood everywhere, their faces grim, hands on their weapons. Every corner, passage, path and roof had a soldier guarding it. Othin was either mad or exhausted beyond sense to think they would gain entry here. This was not a blockade; it was an encampment, and finding Othin was the least of these men’s concerns. The Dyrregin Guard wouldn’t bother setting up an operation like this to hunt down a ranger.
As Arcmael hunkered in the cold deciding what to do, a chill lifted on his scalp.
“Get up,” said a voice. It sounded like a woman. Arcmael lifted his hands, stood and turned, his gaze fixed on the sword at his throat. Nearly his height, she was clad in the shades of a wintry wood, nearly invisible in the night. Eastern Thorgrim. Mountaineers and trackers, these people had a long history of serving the king in times of war. She had probably heard Arcmael storming through the woods a league off. “Step out into the light.”
Arcmael moved in the direction of the inn. The guardsmen on watch in the courtyard turned in their direction. The tracker came around, flipped the hood from his face with the tip of her sword and gazed into his eyes with witchlike intent. She reminded him of Cat.
One of the soldiers came down the steps and approached. “What’s this?” he asked.
“Found him in the woods,” the tracker said. “He’s human.”
“Name and purpose,” the soldier said, his tired gaze settling on Arcmael like snow.
“Arclin of Wyrvith,” Arcmael said. “I’m headed for Linscar to see my kin, and I lost time in the weather. I stopped here for shelter.”
“Remove your cloak.”
As Arcmael hesitated, the woman reached out and with deft precision unbuckled his cloak at his throat and swept it off him. He didn’t bother to protest. He was hoping they would think him fey, as Othin had, to be out here on a night like this with no woolens or supplies.
The guardsman held out his hand. “Weapons.”
So much for fey. Arcmael took off the sword, bow and quiver Othin had given him and handed them over. The watcher gestured to the purse at his hip. He unfastened it and held it out, only then seeing the black pentacle stitched on it. The soldier’s expression hardened as he took it.
“Take him below,” he said. He returned to his post with Othin’s belongings in hand.
The woman pointed her blade toward the woods on the far side of the yard. A worn path snaked north. Arcmael knew where it went. On a better day he might have attempted an escape. But this was not a better day. While he knew these woods better than any guardsman did, he wouldn’t outsmart an East Thorgrim tracker.
He stumbled before her into the woods, away from the light, warmth and sustenance beyond the ravenmaster’s doors.
~ * ~
The hollow, silent chill of underground felt like Arcmael’s empty stomach.
While familiar with the entrance to the Bear’s dungeons, Arcmael had never been down here, nor heard of this place being used for such things since it became an inn. But war had a way of dragging out unpleasantries best left buried. The gaoler, a well-built brute with a deadpan stare, was unfamiliar to him. The witch-eyed tracker had hustled him down here without a word and placed him under the man’s charge with unflinching confidence.
They put him in a small chamber with a dirt floor. He had a reed mat to sit on and a jug of water that tasted like the river. Just before the gaoler departed with his torch, Arcmael noted ruin symbols carved into the walls. The room appeared to be one end of a corridor, the deeper recesses of which were blocked by a wooden barricade. A subtle, nerve-stirring draft blew through the cracks.
Despite the stories he had heard about this place, Arcmael feared nothing down here aside from death by hunger and cold. After a time, however, his physical discomfort made way to otherworldly disquiet. Something watched him through the slats of the makeshift wall. It bent and stretched his senses like a rack. His hair stood on end, he trembled inside and he couldn’t relax. It hated him. Now and then, he thought it whispered.
He missed Wolf. It was the first time he had admitted it to himself. But there it was. He huddled there and thought of all the things that would have been different had he not cast the Exile sigil—starting with his being caught walking around in the cold with nothing but stolen weapons and a ranger’s purse.
Torchlight flashed through the cell door grate. Arcmael had no idea what to tell these men. He straightened his back and rubbed a chill from the side of his head. He would stick to his original story. Lost. Fey. Dying of starvation like an abandoned dog.
The gaoler’s face flashed in the grate. Someone by his side said something. The bar lifted, and the door opened.
A man entered, small of build and clad in layers of black and gray. A deep cowl hid most of his face, and he wore a silver ring on his left hand. He stopped and gazed intently at the barricade, his nostrils flared like an animal catching a scent. After a moment, the man’s mood shifted. He turned with a quick smile. “Arcmael of House Halstaeg,” he said quietly, as if
in wonder. “Imagine that.” He spoke with a faint Fjorginan accent.
Arcmael circled the impossible. In eighteen suns, no one had ever used that title to address him. “Who are you?”
“A friend. Come.” He held out his hand toward the door.
A friend with a nose for the unseen, Arcmael thought as he rose on shaky legs and left the cell.
Still inside, the newcomer faced the barricade again. He said something indecipherable, and then emerged on a sinister draft. “Follow me.” He ascended the steps, leaving behind the scent of juniper oil. Below, the gaoler slammed the bar over the cell door, muttered an oath and disappeared into the shadows.
They went higher into the inn, passing stables, barns full of animals, kitchens and storerooms. The people who saw them, mostly staff, were too busy to pay them any mind. Arcmael kept his hood drawn and his eyes down. They climbed a narrow stairwell and emerged into a corridor with guest rooms on one side and a balcony on the other overlooking a great common room crammed with people, all of them moving, laughing, talking, eating and drinking over the rise and fall of fiddle music. Nearly buckling at the smell of food, Arcmael hugged the wall and focused on the passage ahead.
His guide rounded a corner and descended a small flight of steps into a narrower passage with low beams and sconces on the walls, candles flickering. Two soldiers in gray cloaks passed and nodded respectfully. Voices emerged from one of the rooms.
Arcmael stepped up aside the strange man. “You knew what it was, didn’t you? The presence in the cell.”
The man turned his head as if startled. “I forgot you’re a seer.” He nodded. “It’s a watcher. A sorcerer put it there a long time ago to keep people from wandering the ruins.”
“Only another sorcerer would know that,” Arcmael observed.
After a pause, the man said, “I am of the Fenrir Brotherhood.”
Arcmael raised his brow. Servants of a malevolent god named Loki, Fenrir sorcerers were reputed to work their arts using forces no Blackthorn warlock would dream of—Vargn notwithstanding. What was this man doing here? Arcmael suddenly wondered if he might have been better off in the cell. Still curious, he ventured, “What did you say to it?”
The Fylking: Outpost and The Wolf Lords Page 26
