The Fylking: Outpost and The Wolf Lords

by F. T. McKinstry

  At this, Othin stirred in his seat. “No. But she—”

  “She has a way,” Arcmael said, finishing his thought. “The Fylking noticed it.”

  Othin sat there in silence for a moment, his expression pale. Then he reached into his tunic and pulled something out, a small scrap of black and gray.

  “What’s that?” Arcmael said, leaning forward.

  Othin held out his hand. “Millie gave it to me.”

  As Arcmael took the fine little thing, his breath caught. A hooded crow made of tiny knit stitches. He closed his eyes and saw the creature sitting on a branch outside his cell in the goblins’ palace. Trickster. This could not be a coincidence.

  “Let me see,” Leofwine said.

  Arcmael handed the charm to the sorcerer. Leofwine studied it intently, his face drawn. After a moment he said, “This is old magic. Very old.”

  “A friend told me as much,” Othin said. “But I’ve never seen it do anything.”

  Leofwine turned the stitches in his hand. “This is bigger than that. Feels like the gods.”

  “Connected to everything,” Othin said softly. “That’s what she said.” He took the charm from Leofwine’s hand, then rose and started to pace.

  Connected to everything. Arcmael closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Spider. Why hadn’t he taken her more seriously? The wisewoman’s cryptic words were spreading out before him like a nearly finished tapestry. “Power does not go unnoticed in the Otherworld. The Fylking are aware of Millie. Vargn may be, too.”

  Othin stopped pacing and stared at him. “What are you saying?”

  “We have to find her before he does.”

  The Crow Warrior

  Folk do not tend to ask questions when a witch dies under mysterious circumstances.

  Since returning to Odr, Melisande saw questions in every face she met. They greeted Damjan and watched her. They averted their eyes and noticed the silence. And they wondered why she had returned with her cat and her knitting bag and nothing to say. Once Damjan went back to his forge, they would talk.

  No one knew she and Damjan had left Yarrow’s body for the crows. A grave, Damjan maintained, would speak of death by natural or perhaps wicked circumstances. It had to be answered for. But black candles, smelly herbs, a fallen tree and the barn door ripped half off its hinges spoke of witchcraft, which everyone knew came with a price. He said that witches and warlocks who broke the rules were claimed by the Otherworld when they died. Melisande didn’t argue with him as she gathered her things and left the witch’s body in the snow. She knew the prices people paid for power.

  Her dreams asked questions. Yarrow’s severed head lay on the edge of the ivy patch, its dark eyes open. Foolish girl! the witch said. Tampering with things you don’t understand. Sometimes Melisande dreamed of someone banging on the door. When she opened it, an army of Fylking in full complement pointed at her with their swords. Where is the Niflsekt? they demanded. An eagle circled in the sky above them. We know he is here.

  Sometimes the wicked rangers stood there, blood creeping from their noses and ears. I think our brother Othin isn’t aware his woman is a spy and a whore.

  Again and again, Melisande experienced the Niflsekt appear and sweep Yarrow’s head from her shoulders. Considering he had ridden Melisande down in a field, set her up for violation and accusation by rangers and villagers and seduced the swatch from her hand, she had to assume Yarrow’s murder would be laid at her feet as well. But though each day brought fear that someone would come demanding an explanation, Melisande didn’t think they would. Yarrow’s death was different from the rest of the Niflsekt’s work. Before that, he operated in the shadows, always leaving Melisande doubting his involvement. He had never taken a direct hand in anything until Yarrow called him out.

  By the glory of the Wooded World, the witch had chanted; By the Source of the Fylking; By the Apex of the Gate; I summon—

  And that was the end of that. Yarrow was mad as a rat, but she knew what he was, and when she tried to summon something or someone to deal with him, he killed her. He didn’t do that to protect Melisande. She didn’t need his protection. The hooded crow protected her that night, and the new swatch she had knit from the dregs of her knitting bag was the reason the Niflsekt had not appeared to her since.

  It was no use telling anyone a Niflsekt had come through the Gate. No one would believe that, and Melisande had no proof. Before her death, Yarrow claimed to have sent word to Faersc to warn them. If she had, and Melisande had no reason to believe she had not, then it was out of her hands. All she could do was keep her knowledge close and wait for a warden to return to the Vale.

  Not of a mind to live amid the specters of her fears and shortcomings, Melisande took up residence in the warden’s cot like a squirrel finding shelter in the onset of winter. Damjan protested, of course. He suggested she live in his house by the smithy, where he could look after her. But Mistress Olja, his wife, would have none of that. A woman jilted by her lover is best left to her own, or so the reasoning went. No doubt the sort of reasoning Othin’s new wife used to convince him to change his ways.

  Some of the villagers, driven by Damjan’s threats, had continued to work on Melisande’s old cottage. They didn’t use the path near the gatetower or the one Melisande’s father built. They drove their steeds all the way around, taking the path to the west, the route Melisande had used to escape them when they burned the place. When news of war reached the Vale, the villagers had abandoned the cottage and turned to the needs of the gray-cloaked soldiers riding paths in the snow between every farm, inn and village. Damjan didn’t have time to press the issue. His three forges burned in service to the king.

  Melisande hid her feelings beneath a comfortable cloak of group concern. Like a cat lurking in the brush, she kept out of sight. She didn’t ask about the cottage. Aside from the cot being so badly maintained that any warden would be justified in bringing the Fylking down on the village for cruel negligence, she rather liked the place. It had an old stove that had been pulled from a burned-down mill, built in shelves and cabinets and a sturdy bed that had once belonged to Fagel. A serviceable well stood out back. Bythe, Vinso and Anselm brought her firewood, an old chair from the room above Damjan’s smithy, things they had salvaged from her cottage, including food she had stashed away in the cellar, and a mattress donated by a feather dresser in Birch, a friend who had always liked Melisande despite talk of her having nearly destroyed the Vale by knitting tears.

  The weird whistle Damjan used to call his horse from the woods on the night of their departure from Otter River had also brought Thor, Yarrow’s sensitive mule. Oddly enough, the creature followed them back to Odr without complaint. Damjan sold him to a farmer in a nearby village and gave Melisande the coin. With that and the few things given to her by whoever dared to offer them, she settled into her new home. Pisskin, whom she had found twenty feet up in a tree behind Yarrow’s barn, lived on the mice that ruled the cot when Melisande ran out of scraps to feed him.

  What coin remained from Thor’s sale would be spent by the winter solstice. Soon she would have to find work—something other than knitting—baking bread, spinning wool or tending geese. In spring and summer she would gather herbs and mushrooms from the woods and fields and sell them in the market. She would return to her old cottage and tend the garden there, an old garden with established perennials prized by many.

  And she would forget Othin.

  One evening, as the Frost Moon rose through the trees, her plans changed.

  She had just returned from Odr, where she bought a loaf of bread, potatoes and some rushes from the daughter of a farmer named Morten. A smart girl with a shy smile, she informed Melisande that guardsmen had earlier arrived at the Sword and Staff looking for a certain knitter. There were many knitters in Odr. But war has the ears of wolves.

  Melisande added wood to her stove and began to cut vegetables for soup. She saw the soldiers through the window, two of them, before they knoc
ked on the door. She still jumped at the sound. She wiped her hands and went to open it.

  One of them touched his forehead in greeting. “Are you Millie?” he asked. They had not shaved in days, their guardsmen’s trappings were dirty and stained with blood, and their eyes were tired. The second man had tousled blond hair and dressings around his arm.

  “I am,” she said, hoping their business was brief so she didn’t have to invite them inside.

  “We’re told you have a deft hand for knitting.”

  “I know the craft.”

  The second man limped to a horse harnessed to a sled. He untied a covering and hefted two large bales of spun wool in shades of brown, white and gray.

  “We’re commissioning you to knit for the king’s army,” said the first man.

  Melisande’s heart began to pound. Damjan had recently told her the Fjorginans were crossing the sea and had already made landfall. “What kind of wares do you need?” She stepped out of the way and let the blond man bring the wool inside. After a moment he emerged and returned to the sled.

  The first man reached into his tunic and pulled forth a small piece of linen soiled with dirt. Melisande took it and read a list scrawled in a warrior’s hurried hand. Socks, gloves, hats, undershirts, leggings. From the corner of her eye she watched the other man bring two more bales inside. She wondered where they got it from, but it didn’t matter. She was relieved they hadn’t asked her to obtain it.

  She looked up. “Sir, winter is upon us.”

  A shadow crossed his face as he reached for a purse. He emptied out three silver coins and put them in her hand. “Work swiftly.”

  Melisande backed inside as the soldiers departed. She shut the door and turned around, coins clasped to her breast. Wool filled an entire corner of the cot.

  Her hands tingling with pattern sense, she returned to her soup.

  ~ * ~

  As the shadows grew long and the days shorter, Melisande’s art emerged like sunbeams breaking through swiftly moving clouds. Neat stacks grew in the corners of her cottage until the soldiers came to carry them off in carts filled with the villagers’ offerings—including young men fit for battle. Every few days or more they came, their horses thumping up the path, breaking Melisande from the needles’ rhythm. She gave them her wares, her fingers rough and sore and her heart knowing the fear of every wife and maid with a swordsman’s favor.

  Soldiers rode the length and breadth of the Vale, bringing news. Fjorginans had overrun the Wolftooth Pass, forcing merchants and tradesmen to use the western roads. Everyone slept ill at night for fear of the enemy flooding over the hills. Melisande took great care to close every seam, gusset and neckband to protect the warriors of Dyrregin from cold and harm.

  She worked in white and considered another long winter without the warmth of a man in her bed. A long-lost notion. Casting an extra stitch onto a row with an odd count, she drifted into reveries of Othin riding up the path, his gray eyes shining, his ranger’s trappings dulled by trouble and his raven hair bound on his back.

  His wife would be with child by now. On their second visit, the soldiers had asked, while nervously looking around at anything but Melisande, if she might knit a pocket in the crotches of their leggings that they might take care of their business more easily. She did apologize for not having thought of that.

  All knitting had closure in a bound-off row. The trouble with binding off too tightly was that the ribbing wouldn’t give. On more than one item, her fingers tingling, she had unraveled the stitches above the bind to end it differently.

  The dreams that haunted her sleep began to change. Dead mouths closed at the sound of bootsteps on the stones; fiends at the door looked over their shoulders in fear at the approach of horsemen with shining helmets and spears; Fylking warriors sheathed their swords and bowed their heads; and hooded crows covered the trees.

  One night, Melisande felt a nonhuman touch that awakened her lust from the ashy ground where she had abandoned it. He came from the mists on his many-legged horse, his crow’s wings spread and his beak glinting in the waning moon. Shadows fled before him. He circled the cot like a scout, talking to the trees. He flew through a window and perched on the wool bales, one black eye shining. Then he rose on the legs of a warrior, strong, clad in silvery mail and weapons sharp and fine, white hair moving on a mountain breeze and the hard line of his jaw beneath his hood asking what warriors asked, the essence of fire, the wake of battle and the clear sky of wisdom.

  Melisande held out her hand.

  She awoke the next morning feeling as Othin used to leave her, warm, relaxed, aching sore with the ghosts of a man’s touch on her body. During the day she had visions of the crow warrior’s marble flesh as he had made love to her. As usual, she questioned his origins. Burning with the passion of immortality, he could have been Otherworld, Fylking or Niflsekt. He could have been nothing; only the night, only the need. But she didn’t push him away.

  He had said one thing to her, as he withdrew into the dawn, a breath into her ear: Pattern a beast as the crow sees.

  The next night, from the oblivion of dreamless sleep, Melisande awoke to the sound of hoofbeats. Pisskin jumped from the bed and slunk behind the woodstove. Thinking she might be dreaming again, Melisande rubbed her eyes. The fire in the stove grate reflected from the window, obscuring it. She lay there, her heart thumping. Wind rustled in the stovepipe.

  She got up and crept to the stove, grabbed a thick glove Damjan had given her to protect her hands and closed the grate. Darkness fell. She moved to the window. The moon cast a faint glow through thickening clouds. Two mounted figures moved in the trees. A third rode out of sight, as if he were going around to the back of the cot.

  Pisskin yowled. Melisande shushed him.

  She went across the room and pressed herself against the wall by the hearth. A small window in the back door looked out at the spruce trees behind the cot. Something rustled the branches, disturbing a dusting of snow. Melisande jerked out of sight and slid to the floor, blood draining from her limbs. Not again.

  Gulping, she got up, took her knife from the mantle and unsheathed it. Since their return from Otter River, Damjan had been training her how to fight. Each evening she went to the smithy and took up her wooden arms for a lesson, with his sons looking on. Sometimes she would spar with Vinso, who was remarkably patient.

  All was still. Gripping the knife, she returned to the front window. The shadows took shape as a man on a horse. He dismounted and paced back and forth in front of the door, then stopped. Melisande shrank down, peering over the edge of the windowsill. He didn’t look like the Niflsekt; he was not as imposing and wore different gear.

  He raised his arms to the sky. Melisande jumped as the cot began to shake. She dropped her knife. Fumbling about, she snatched it up. Behind her, something fell from a shelf and clattered to the floor. Pisskin yowled again. The cot continued to shiver as pale shapes wriggled from the ground outside and burst into the air on wings of pale green. They looked like insects. For a moment they hovered around the house, humming. Then they raced toward it.

  Melisande shrieked and bolted across the room to the stove. The cot howled and shook. This felt like Yarrow’s work, and as the witch had so smugly pointed out, Melisande had no practical defense against it. She flung open the stove grate, grabbed a stick from her woodbin and plunged it into the coals. Once it caught fire, she spun around, torch in one hand and knife in the other, expecting the worst.

  The cot stilled. Nothing burst through the doors or windows. She eyed the stovepipe clicking with heat.

  Several moments passed. A trick? She put her flaming stick into the stove and closed the grate. Then she crept again to the window.

  A cloud of snow billowed through the trees. Light flickered in the mist. Sheathing his blade, a tall warrior turned and touched Melisande’s gaze. Black wings enveloped him.

  Pattern a beast as the crow sees.

  Melisande padded to the door and opened it. Soft
wind stirred the snow at her feet. Swallowing, she closed the door and returned to bed. She didn’t sleep. She lay in the dark and listened for horses until at last the faint light of dawn emanated through the house.

  She got up and dressed warmly. She fed Pisskin and cleaned the box she kept for his business in the corner by the back door. She ate some bread. Her knife on her belt and her swatch in her pocket, she went outside.

  The first thing she found was hoofprints. Men, not Others. The prints circled around the cot, not once but three times in widening arcs, like a spiral. The snow before the door was trampled as were the woods around the path. Several men were here. The tracks led out of the trees, along the woods’ edge and across the field toward the gatetower.

  A dark thought touched Melisande’s heart. She turned and stomped toward the rising sun, keeping a sharp lookout for tracks as she reached the path her father had made to avoid the tower. She threaded through the woods like a fox in the predawn twilight. After a time she left the path and climbed to the top of a rise that overlooked the plain. The tower rose up to the level of the treetops, its slitted windows dark, awaiting the sun.

  At its base, hidden from view of the village and the cot, stood two men. They appeared to be on watch. Melisande studied the tower heights, chilled. For fear of the Fylking, the Dyrregin Guard had not posted men up here. She recalled something Arcmael once said: Wardens excepted, the High Fylking don’t have to honor a Banishing sigil in close proximity to a tower. The High Fylking of Tower Sif certainly will not. Don’t tempt them.

  And yet, guardsmen or not, there stood two men in pissing distance from the wall.

  Melisande returned to the path, more careful now. No birds or squirrels chirruped in the trees. She reached the edge of a gully. On the far side, away and up the hill, hoof and boot tracks covered the snow. Melisande ducked down and climbed higher, taking care not to rustle or snap anything. She stopped with a breath as she spotted a man standing watch amid the boughs of a wild apple tree Melisande had planted as a child to mark a turn in the path. He wore a gray cloak and the livery of the Dyrregin Guard. Melisande released a long breath. Fylking aside, maybe these men were supposed to be up here.