The second rule Leofwine broke was not clearing his heart of despair before doing the summoning. After escaping an arrest for high treason and losing himself in unfamiliar country, Leofwine hadn’t been thinking like a sorcerer. He was an outlaw and a spy on a mission to discover the truth, clear his name and avoid execution on either side of the Njorth Sea. Only Othin of Cae Forres—a master of the wilds who didn’t want to be found and had never trusted Leofwine—could help him do that. Leofwine would have summoned Loki himself to track the ranger down.
The third rule he broke was agreeing to the phooka’s demand before asking what it was. Once he had finally ridden far enough from Merhafr to find a silent place sheltered from the road, Leofwine threw down a circle with less care than he should have, forgetting all his training on the wiles and deceptions of the Otherworld. When the phooka appeared, tall and grim, its presence emanating power like the sea brooding a storm and its goat face pinched into an oddly amused sneer, Leofwine foolishly thought the gods were favoring him.
How the Old Gods must have laughed that day. They had favored many things during the Second Gate War, but Leofwine wasn’t one of them. In return for its services, the phooka demanded the only thing Leofwine had left in the world besides his own life.
Ingifrith, his little sister.
Younger than Leofwine by ten suns, Ingifrith was slight, wiry as a cat, smart as a raven and mad as a hare. She had their mother’s skill in magic, their father’s proclivity for trickery and secrets, and a god’s sense of humor, which was none until someone got hurt. Ironically, Ingifrith knew the paths to and from the Otherworld, and Leofwine had never known her to fear anything she encountered there. But he didn’t think that included a phooka.
Why the phooka wanted Ingifrith surpassed even Leofwine’s imagination. For that matter, he had no authority whatsoever to give another mortal to anyone, let alone to a being in the Otherworld. That was the province of evil; few Adepts would risk the consequences of crossing that line, and Leofwine was no exception.
It was an impossible request; not even a phooka had the power to force an evil deed. For this reason, as the phooka left him standing there on the edge of his circle in the cold and snow that night, Leofwine made a decision. The phooka had tricked him, forced him to make an invalid trade. As the Rule of Exchange applied to Others as well as to mortals, Leofwine played the game and worked a trick of his own—he made sure Ingifrith was long gone by the time the phooka demanded payment.
Leofwine warned her to hide.
One thing Ingifrith excelled at was the art of remaining unseen. She had learned how to evade the eyes of mortals much the way a black cat vanishes in the woods. Leofwine never knew what had precipitated this skill; whether by some event or a personal inclination, Ingifrith had reached womanhood and then slipped into the Veil, as if she couldn’t bear being seen. Their mother knew something about it, of course. She had known many things. But she wouldn’t tell, leaving Leofwine to suffer his sister’s dark looks, the origin of which he never understood, even as he set about to appeal to her nature.
Leofwine didn’t send just any messenger to Fjorgin to warn his sister; he sent a water nymph, a lithe, pale-eyed naiad with hair the color of shells. Running water was one power most Others could not cross, including the phooka. Leofwine had paid her with a small silver flute he had bought in a market in Earticael when he lived there. He had planned to learn to play it one day. Instead, he gave it to the naiad to deliver a life-saving message to his little sister.
Hide. From a phooka.
It was the best he could do until he found a way out of this.
Since the phooka continued to torment him, he had to assume his plan had succeeded and Ingifrith was safe.
Leofwine had avoided returning to Ýr, home of the Fenrir Brotherhood, where he was trained. The Masters of Ýr would take him to task for making a deal with a phooka, even though he had been desperate and vulnerable to trickery. They had all the warmth of mother snakes, that lot; they gave birth to sorcerers and then left them to the world to fend for themselves. This approach made for strong magicians, not desperate spies accused of high treason by erstwhile lovers.
Unfortunately, the Masters of Ýr were the only ones who had to power to help him, and unless he wanted to keep fending off nightmares, plastering his blood and spit over protection spells and witnessing mysterious deaths, he had to go to them, in person, and make his plea.
Ýr stood fifteen leagues north of Poes, overlooking the Wythe Strait from a hundred-foot crag. A wide plain surrounded it, stark against the hills and forests to the west. The whole area looked like the remains of a battlefield, gaunt and exposed to the restless wind. It was a hard five-day ride southeast. On the plain, he’d have to drop all his protection spells, else risk the Masters taking note.
It would be them or the phooka.
Leofwine rode through the wood, his thoughts crowding around him like the heavy mist. At some point, he realized he didn’t know where he was. He took a deep breath and surveyed the surroundings.
Wood smoke.
He reined Arvakr to a halt, his nostrils flared. The fog had thickened to a pall, swirling around and obscuring the landscape. There were no villages or homesteads in this part of Alfr; that was the reason Leofwine had come this way. What was burning?
Chilled, he drew the horse around. The sounds of birds, which filled the forest when he departed Nosthrod, had fallen silent. Darkness closed in on him as he pressed his heels into the horse’s flanks and headed back in the direction he had come. Arvakr sidestepped with a snort, resenting the decision. Leofwine kept going, his foreboding rising like a tide.
The fog had an unnatural air, like a whisper in another tongue. Leofwine took a deep breath, spit into his hand and clenched his fist. Holding it to the forest eaves, he uttered three words in Old Fylking, the essence of wind, brisk and dry, hollow as an old husk blowing on a clear, pale sky. He opened his palm. A moment passed; then the fog began to sink into the shadows, as if to flee. The stark and tangled contours of the wood emerged, silent beneath an unseen breeze.
Leofwine lowered his hand and wiped his palm on his thigh. His mother’s disgusting habit was useful for some things. He maneuvered his horse through a raspberry thicket and up onto a rise that offered a view around.
He reached the crest, gazing in the one direction he feared to see. Sure enough, in the distance, dark gray and billowing with wrath, a plume of smoke towered into the evening sky. His blood turned cold.
Nosthrod was burning.
Worse Things to Fear
Leofwine dug his heels into Arvakr’s flanks, ripped through the raspberry thorns and clattered down the rocks into the trees, landing into a thumping gait. Branches slapped at his chest and face as he rode through the smoke now drifting through the trees, whispering and laughing with malice.
Laguz. The sorcerer felt a shift, like a river breaking a dam. He reached down and snatched a knife from the sheath in his boot. Spit wouldn’t appease the spirits of storms. Gripping the knife between the reins, he drew his other palm across the blade, gritting his teeth as a thin, silvery pain spread into his nerves. Then he closed his fingers over the cut and raised his fist again. Blood dripping down his wrist, he uttered words of gathering, the deep, silent depths of lakes and pools and the brooding of heavy skies. A sharp wind laden with the smell of the sea swept through the forest as rain clouds fought the spell.
As he neared the grounds of Nosthrod, the landscape grew familiar. An orange glow burned the dingy clouds and screams rent the air. Hoofbeats shook the ground as horses and other farm animals ran wild through the trees, freed from their pens in the small village surrounding the fortress. Two men ran by, heedless of his presence. A woman led a group of crying children away to the west.
No rain came.
Leofwine slowed, breathing curses as he searched his mind for spells, runes, words—anything to stop this. Nothing came into focus, as if something had thrown a heavy cloak over him. F
lames reached for the sky, burning roofs, beams, fences and trees. The walls of the keep were enshrouded in smoke. Arvakr tossed his head, his eyes lolling white. His heart racing, Leofwine reined him back. Then the hackles on his neck rose.
Amid the beasts, trees and smoke, a tall figure moved, its bare chest and the black pelt of its legs flowing with the eldritch strength of the Otherworld. A clawed hand caressed a tree; long horns glinted in the firelight. The beast slowed with cruel disregard, its green eyes shining in triumph.
“There he is!” someone shouted.
Leofwine started as a small throng came through the smoky woods in his direction. Some walked, some rode horses: soldiers of the Nosthrod Guard, villagers and nobles from the keep. When they saw Leofwine, their faces changed into something worse than suffering.
There are worse things to fear than fools, his mother chided.
Not today.
The phooka paced through the trees like a warlord.
Leofwine backed up, pulling his cloak around him despite the heat. “What has happened?” he called out.
“Murderer!” cried a man. He carried an axe. Two of the guardsmen drew swords. One of them had a shock of pale blond hair that stirred a distant memory.
“Wait,” a woman said. Leofwine blanched, torn between fear and relief as Idalisa, daughter of Lord Nosthrod, rode forward, clutching the reins of her horse. Her dark brown hair had fallen from its braids and lay in a tangle over her shoulders, and her pale face was dirty and streaked with tears. “You,” she growled, her eyes flashing. “You dare be seen here.” She whipped an arrow from the quiver on her back and brought around a bow. Leofwine moved his bloody hand, readying a deflection spell. “Snake! Got bored with him, did you?” Her breath caught. “So you set the stables ablaze? Coward!”
What?
“Idalisa,” Leofwine choked. “I did no such thing. Why would I—”
She loosed an arrow, which nearly missed his head as it hissed into the woods. Idalisa had never liked him. Her brother Sigbjorn had been prepared to marry, produce an heir and ready himself to assume lordship of Nosthrod—until Leofwine came. Only Leofwine knew his lover never wanted any of that.
Neither did Idalisa. Commander of the Nosthrod Guard, she had more love for horses, bows and swords than for motherhood or affairs of state. If Sigbjorn stood down, it would be left to her to take their father’s place.
Leofwine maneuvered to keep Arvakr calm as the horse began to prance. “Idalisa, I left the stables intact.”
“Why did you leave?” a woman demanded, clutching her skirt. It was covered in mud.
“Aye, you were supposed to protect us!” said another.
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“You were seen using magic,” accused one of the nobles, a young fosterling from Earticael.
Seen only by Leofwine, the phooka pranced out of the trees in the sorcerer’s own image, cloaked and hooded in black, its hair unbound and its eyes gazing out from a smiling face. Shapeshifter.
Bastard.
“Child of Hel!” another cried, choking out the word like something foul.
Idalisa lost her calm. A sob ripped from her throat as she came forward, her horse stepping nervously about under her. “You killed him! My brother—he’s dead because of you!”
Leofwine’s heart nearly stopped as the blood left his limbs. He looked between the others, their faces hard in the sickly light. “Is this true?”
No one said anything. The blond soldier lifted his chin, his gray eyes cold and knowing too many things. Suddenly, Leofwine recognized him. Grimar. From his childhood. The one who led them, the boys with swords, the boys who left Leofwine bloody in the hollows and fens until that day he rode east to pledge his heart to Loki.
The phooka’s laughter rumbled through his mind.
Impossible—what was this brute doing here? Old memories flooded him, mingling with his grief like blood stomped into the mud by a thousand angry warriors. Last Leofwine knew—for he had kept track—Grimar ran a sheep farm somewhere north of Earticael. But a phooka, a creature of the threshold, could whisper into the heart of an evil man and spin his fate like a Norn. Somehow, through some twisted series of events, Grimar ended up in Nosthrod employed as a soldier. Had he been living here this entire time, right under Leofwine’s nose?
As he watched the flames and smoke rising beyond the steely gaze of his nemesis, Leofwine realized his fourth mistake in summoning the phooka was failing to consider how utterly devious and cruel the fiend would be in the acquisition of its desires.
Idalisa moved her horse around, her chest heaving, so upset she was no longer paying attention to anything. She dragged a bloody sleeve across her nose. “You used him,” she accused. “Filled his mind with sorcery and lies and turned him against us!”
Sigbjorn. A lover of trees, he had wanted to become a steward of the forest. Now the trees burned, and he was dead.
“Sigbjorn wasn’t against you,” Leofwine returned, his eyes burning. “And I loved him.”
“Liar!” Idalisa screamed, leaning forward in her saddle. “Fucking liar!” She swung around to the guardsmen, flinging her arm out to point in Leofwine’s direction. “Bring me his head. Now!” With that, she wheeled her horse around and thundered back toward the smoldering remains of her ancestral home.
Leofwine, stunned beyond reason, sat on his warhorse facing an angry mob, his enemy of three decades, and the phooka, who rose up behind them like a god, its goat face dark and still as a midnight curse.
Sigbjorn!
The sorcerer twisted aside too late as an arrow struck his shoulder, knocking him from the horse. Arvakr bolted. Leofwine wasn’t Arvakr’s master; the phooka was. One tactical error too many, assuming otherwise.
As the guardsmen closed in on him, Leofwine gritted his teeth and pulled the arrow from his flesh, stifling a cry. It had gone wide, and not deep, but deep enough. Shocked by pain, he didn’t have the chance to rally his powers before a boot struck him in the ribs.
Suddenly, he was a boy once more, small, weak, and powerless against the brutes of the world.
There are worse things to fear than fools.
“I hoped it would come to this,” Grimar said to the other soldiers with a laugh. After sending the crowd along, they gathered around him. Five of them. Grimar kicked his quarry again. Leofwine choked as his ribs gave way under the blow. “Looks like the gods are favoring me today.”
Another soldier came down and hit Leofwine in the face before he got his arms up to block it. What gods would come to his aid? Loki was probably pissing himself with a belly laugh right now. Or pleasuring himself. Father of Shit. What did he care?
Grimar planted a fist in his gut, causing him to double into a fetal position. Then he tore the rune pouch from Leofwine’s belt, opened it and emptied it over him. The bones clattered and bounced over his body and tumbled to the ground. “Ah...” Grimar crooned, rolling his eyes in an expression of mock concentration. “What do they foretell?”
One of the runes had landed near Leofwine’s face. Thurisaz. Misfortune, demons, opposition, persecution. His throat closed up with a sick laugh that caught and died as Grimar hauled him up and slammed him against a tree. “What do your runes say, sorcerer?” He hissed the word like a curse.
Thurisaz. Breathing heavily, gazing from an eye half swollen shut, Leofwine said, “They say I should’ve hunted you down and killed you long ago.”
Grimar punched him in the stomach again. Leofwine choked, his vision going dark as he doubled over.
“Wrong.” Grimar drew his sword, wrenched Leofwine upright and pressed the blade to his throat. “They say, today you’ll lose your head.”
One of the soldiers snorted a laugh. “Get on with it.”
In the boughs of a nearby willow tree, the phooka hung down, its expression wild with hope. A drop of rain hit the ground; then another.
Grimar put his face close. His breath stank. “Ah, you smell nice. Almost as nice as she did.�
� The soldier cast a glance at the others. “His sister, she’s a pretty thing. A bit skinny.”
Ingifrith. How did this fiend know about her? Leofwine forgot the phooka as memories flooded down, his sister’s dark looks, her reticence and hatred of being seen. Why so elusive, and why had their mother protected her with Hel’s silence? Darkness moved beneath the noise of pain, shock and sorrow, the darkness of predators and plague.
Thurisaz. The torment of women.
“What do you know of her?” Leofwine said, now fully focused.
Grimar withdrew slightly, as if surprised. “She didn’t tell you?” He made a face. “Little witch. I’m insulted.”
Shifting on their feet, the other soldiers exchanged nervous glances. One of their horses shied on its lead, broke away and ran into the woods.
“She was soft and sweet as a little flower,” Grimar said, his eyes glinting with steel. “And ah, so tight—” He grabbed his crotch, grinning.
There are worse things to fear than fools.
Two more horses fled, eliciting shouts from the men.
Leofwine breathed a foul string of words, the blood on his body and the void of his lover’s death giving them form, the culmination of spit, roots, hate and tears, eyes that never closed, hunger that was never sated. A sudden gale rose up from the north and whipped the trees into a frenzy. With a snarl that rumbled the ground, a wolf tore through the Veil. The soul of Loki’s most fearsome progeny, the essence of a sorcerer’s wrath, it was the size of a draft horse, with crow-black fur glinting with ice.
Fenrisúlfr.
One of the soldiers cried out; Grimar, his smile fading to pointless irritation, stepped away from his prey and turned. With spectral precision the beast hit him, rending flesh, linen, mail and leather to shreds. His sword fell to the ground and stuck there as his body blew apart, splattering clumps of gore over the forest. Flesh, pieces of bone, entrails and sinews plastered the ground, dripped down the trunks of trees, stained rocks and hung in the brush like gruesome offerings. The only discernable thing was a piece of scalp with a patch of pale blond hair.
The Fylking: Outpost and The Wolf Lords Page 43
