The Fylking: Outpost and The Wolf Lords

by F. T. McKinstry

  When Selene came into the room, she reacted similarly, delivering a terse set of instructions as she and Ana got him back into his bed. Then she pressed a cup of foul smelling tea into his hand.

  “I’m going to turn you into a toad if you don’t let me out of here,” he promised her.

  She snorted. “I think not.”

  Her tone said Leofwine had a better chance of escaping the realm of the red-eyed demons than he had of getting out of here.

  A short time later, she relented and with Ana’s help got him to the garden outside. After restoring a bit of his dignity by giving him a shirt and a pair of breeches, they sat him in the sun with his tea and put a blanket in his lap. Then she called for two guards, seasoned men who, if Leofwine remembered correctly, had a colorful history of dealing with recalcitrant patients.

  He sat there, feeling like a shadow, weak and unworthy of the light. The sun hadn’t moved a finger’s breadth before he fell asleep.

  ~*~

  Leofwine awoke to the sound of voices. His tea had gone cold, and the sun had passed behind the rowan tree growing near the opening to the courtyard. His neck hurt, and the poultices Selene had put on his wounds were cold and damp. Someone had pulled the blanket up over his chest. His guards had departed; evidently, he didn’t pose a threat.

  “We’ll see about that,” said a man whose voice Leofwine recognized.

  “Let’s hope Genfawr is feeling forgiving,” said another.

  Leofwine tried to sit up but was too weak. On the far side of the garden, a man in ranger blue and another in plain gray strode into view. The latter smiled and quickened his pace as he saw Leofwine. Othin. His best friend Bren came behind.

  “By the Raven God,” Othin said, kneeling at Leofwine’s side. The ranger took his hand, his gray gaze sweeping over him. “Are we glad to see you.”

  “Hail, Othin,” Leofwine rasped. He squeezed the ranger’s hand and sensed a recent trauma of some kind.

  Othin stood up. “Is Arvakr still in Fjorgin?”

  “No, I brought him. He’s in a stable up by the inner city graveyard, across from the Dorshank Brewery. I left the stable master with a heavy pouch to look after him.”

  “I’ll fetch him for you. Does the phooka still protect him?”

  Leofwine nodded, feeling faint. The phooka. That seemed so long ago now.

  Bren stepped up, leaned down and lifted a white streak of Leofwine’s hair. He raised his brow, as if impressed. His other arm was in a sling, and the weird scar on his face told Leofwine that he, too, had seen trouble. “Welcome back, Master Klemet.” The Veil shimmered around him as looked over his shoulder. “Someone here you’ll want to see.”

  “Aye,” Othin said. “You were her best kept secret.”

  Prederi appeared by the rowan tree. Leofwine’s heart leapt as his sister grabbed the ranger’s arm, moved past him and ran across the courtyard, her braids flying. She fell at Leofwine’s feet and flung her arms around him. He returned her embrace, holding her tightly, tears welling in his eyes. She smelled like a forest. And horses.

  “Inga,” he breathed. Caressing her arms, her face, he drew her back to look at her. Older. Wiser. And still wounded, so deep inside. “Fenrir Brotherhood,” he said. “Did they harm you?”

  Her eyes clouded over with dark tales. “They tried.”

  Why had Fenrisúlfr spared his life? He had to know. “How did you escape them?”

  “I’m not sure,” she whispered, her breath quickening. “I had this thing on me—” She reached an arm up over her shoulder to touch her back.

  Master of Curses. He had put a demon on her, but it was gone, now. That was a good sign. He nodded, relieved. “Did you see a wolf?”

  Her eyes widened. “How did you know? They had me cornered. I thought they called it—but then it killed two of them. The thing on my back, it left too.”

  Two of them. Leofwine drew a deep breath and put his arms around her again. “Who escaped?”

  “I don’t know. It happened so fast—I couldn’t tell before I fainted.”

  Only two of them. Leofwine’s heart thudded as if something had kicked it.

  Ingifrith looked over her shoulder at the rangers. “Bren and Prederi found me,” she continued. “They brought me back to Prederi’s mother’s house.” She smiled. “I’ve been living there. Anyway, Bren was summoned here to the healer’s hall to help you. He found out I was your sister and came back to the house—I’ve never seen him so upset.” She looked down at her lap. “I didn’t tell them about the sorcerers after me. When Bren found out, I thought he was going to roast me.”

  Leofwine barely heard her. Only two of them. Was that why Fenrisúlfr had left him alive? It didn’t make sense. Unless the wolf was going to take him once it finished with the third sorcerer. And if that was true, it meant the gods still had some use for the bastard. What that might be, Leofwine shuddered to consider.

  Leaning against his chest, Ingifrith whispered, “How is it you’re here, Leo?”

  That is the question, he thought. “I came to find you.” He reached into a pocket in his breeches, pulled out the leather strip and held it up.

  Surprise shot over her features. She took the rune into her hands and turned it over. “How? The sorcerer who followed me, he took it from me at the Seashell when I rode past him.”

  Leofwine nodded again. The sorcerer must have put the demon on her then, too. “You’ve learned to ride?” Then her words registered. “The Seashell? In Milfort?”

  She started to speak and then blushed. She looked over her shoulder. The three rangers stood there, talking quietly. It didn’t take Leofwine long to put this together. He knew these men. He cleared his throat.

  “You bastards took my little sister to a cathouse? With the Brotherhood after her?”

  Othin stepped away from Bren and Prederi and came to Leofwine’s side. “I knew nothing about it whatsoever,” he assured him.

  “We didn’t know Fenrir was after her,” Bren said, rubbing his face. “We were at the Copse. There was trouble. I took her to the Seashell to keep her safe. A dark elf guards it.”

  Ingifrith spun around. “That’s a cartload of pig shit. There’s no elf there.”

  Othin covered his mouth to hide a smile.

  “Copse by the Sea?” Leofwine said. He knew that place, too. It was one of the rangers’ favorite drunken haunts. “Let me guess. Wildcards and a bottle of—”

  “She was hungry!” Prederi blurted. “And she needed riding practice.”

  “And where’d she learn to talk like that?”

  Ingifrith sat down and put her arm around Leofwine’s leg. “It’s all right, Leo. They’re my friends.”

  He leaned down. “I was seneschal to the high constable of the King’s Rangers for five suns. I know what these men do in their spare time.” As the words left his lips, his throat turned dry. He knew far more about these rangers than he knew about his sister. Unfortunately, he had spent so little time with her since they were young, what he didn’t know about her had become more dangerous than what he did.

  “Apparently you’ve never seen her put down a glass of whisky,” Prederi said, driving the point home.

  “I left her on the couch in the Seashell, by the way,” Bren added.

  Ingifrith clicked her tongue. “And then told Finn I was in there.”

  “Finn?” Leofwine coughed. “Second Regiment, Dyrregin Guard Finn?”

  His sister’s blush deepened.

  “We put her on the tab,” Prederi said casually.

  Othin cleared his throat. “Good job, lads. We need another Fenrir sorcerer angry at us.”

  Leofwine rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t a Fenrir sorcerer any more. He didn’t know for sure if he’d retained his powers without Fenrir sanctioning him, even if he had summoned Fenrisúlfr in his moment of defeat; however, in that moment, he had sensed that his training and experience was still part of him, even though the thorny wolf inked into his flesh had fled from his heart. Only tim
e would tell. As weak as he felt now, he wouldn’t be able to call up a flower sprite with a bean of spit in his hand.

  For all that, he had been away from Ingifrith for so long, what business did he have playing the concerned brother now? He lowered his hand and brushed his sister’s cheek with the backs of his fingers. “We need to talk.”

  Othin looked down. “So do we.”

  Prederi sauntered up to them. “C’mon. Let’s take you some place where you can get some proper food and a glass of wine. We’ll leave you two be if you want to be alone.”

  Bren came up beside him. “Owl House is quiet this time of day. We can sit in the back.”

  “They have Cae Lis,” Othin said. “Best wine in the realm.”

  Ingifrith stood up, holding Leofwine’s hand. “Come, Leo. It’ll be good.”

  “I can’t walk,” he informed them. He reached into his shirt, pulled out a poultice, and tossed it aside. He cast a glance toward the healing hall as he groped into his pant leg for another of the healers’ ministrations. “Besides, when Selene finds me gone, she’ll make the Severed Kingdoms look like a night at the Seashell.”

  “Na, don’t worry about her,” Bren said with blithe disregard, providing ample justification for why Selene kept hired guards. He gestured to Prederi. “Let’s get him up.”

  A short time later, the group moved away from the Rangers’ Square, Bren and Prederi holding Leofwine up between them. His body hurt in so many places that his vision swam. Wine began to sound better and better. A lot of it.

  “I’ll lose my rank for good for this,” Othin said casually.

  “Captain is a shit job anyway,” Prederi consoled him.

  Walking next to Prederi, Ingifrith said, “So Leo, you know Finn?”

  Leofwine said nothing. The rangers cast him knowing glances. Some of his nicest memories of Dyrregin involved Finn, the Seashell, aching balls and some nasty hangovers. He cast his gaze to the sky, clear and blue with cloud tufts floating by.

  “Keep your secrets, then,” Ingifrith said in a smart tone.

  Bren leaned forward with a dark glance. “Och! Leave the man be. You told us fuck all about what you were doing in this city and who was after you. And that stunt you pulled in the Seashell nearly got you killed.”

  “If you’d told us they were looking for Leofwine,” Othin added, “we might have been able to help him, too.”

  Good point. A ranger patrol down by the docks or better yet, a word in the ear of the king, would have come in handy.

  “Not to mention what happened at the Copse,” Prederi threw in, just in case Ingifrith wasn’t feeling lousy enough.

  “That wasn’t my fault,” she retorted.

  “Hel, it wasn’t,” Bren said. “If you’d told us about that sorcerer in there, we could’ve stopped the whole thing. Captain Genfawr is furious.”

  Prederi wheezed a laugh. “Aye, he’s threatening to give us back to War God.”

  Othin threw him a surly glance. “You’ll be waiting until Winter Finding.”

  Moving his weak legs as best he could as the rangers talked and shuffled him along, Leofwine scanned the streets for impressions of darkness. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows over the steep roofs. He didn’t sense anything specific, but something had changed. The city felt more exposed than it had when he lived here before. As if something was watching it.

  Leofwine didn’t blame the rangers for chiding Ingifrith, but only he knew why his sister kept her business close. With the help of algiz, she’d learned to hide in the shadow of the Otherworld a long time ago. She’d eluded the Wolf Lords until now, which meant she had not only mastered that skill but had also grown used to dealing with trouble on her own. And while he could scarcely get comfortable with the idea that she would get friendly with Finn, or anyone else for that matter, she had somehow found a place for those needs, too.

  Because her heart was safely locked away.

  Blood will flow with your sister’s tears, the sea witch had said, as if Ingifrith had yet to face the rage in her soul. Which brought Leofwine to the most pressing question of all.

  Only two of them.

  Where was the third?

  One Hundred Herbs

  Tower Sif. The northernmost apex of the Math Gate and the Fylkings’ first line of defense. To mortal eyes, the gatetower was a bleak and unassuming place, seventy feet of stone and hollow space crowned by blind stone dragons. But to the eye of a High Immortal, in a dimension hidden even from seers, the tower was a fortification where the High Fylking lived in strength and comfort: opulent quarters with hearths and rugs and tapestries, a well-stocked room where the magicians practiced their arts, a stable where they kept their horses, and an armory. Despite its small luxuries, the tower was still bleak, every feature designed for war, its walls unassailable by brute force or magic.

  Unless one came prepared.

  Vaethir’s wound ached as he stood behind the armory wall in the Tower’s higher dimension, cleaning the blood from a knife on a cloth. It had taken all his wiles to kill the first three warriors here. The third, his pale blue eyes flashing like fire, had put a nasty cut on his arm. It wouldn’t take the others long to find the body Vaethir had left beneath the shelves in the corner, or to sense the magic he had used to render himself insubstantial. Fooling a High Fylking, many of whom knew magic as well as war, required a great deal of skill.

  He had two to go, and he had to kill them before someone discovered him. He had summoned several small demons, no larger than rats, winged, adept at camouflage and devious as weasels, to move around the tower and create odd diversions: a sword moved one notch over in a rack, a cloak on a hook turned inside out, a loaf of bread missing from the pantry. Odd enough for the observant to notice, but subtle enough as not to raise suspicion until it was too late.

  Below, in a stable yard, the two Fylking spoke together. Earlier, one of Vaethir’s demons had riled up the horses. After discovering nothing in the stable but a skittish mare, both men relaxed, and one now swung a sword casually. The other said something that made him laugh.

  Vaethir held up his arm with a whisper. One of the demons materialized onto his hand, its long tail curling around his wrist. He leaned down and said:

  “Two warriors stand,

  One disappears.

  A sound at the gate

  That only he hears.”

  Its eyes glowing red, the demon vanished. Vaethir slipped from the room, moved down the hall and descended the stairs. At the bottom, he pressed his back against the wall near a door. After a moment, footsteps echoed in the hall outside. Vaethir drew in a long breath.

  The warrior moved past, and then hesitated. Too long. Vaethir flooded out like mist, closed a hand over the warrior’s eyes and opened his throat in one swift move. As the Fylking grasped and shook with death, Vaethir muscled him into the stairwell and shoved his still-twitching body into a storage closet beneath the steps.

  Time to end this. Focusing his mind on the top of the tower, he appeared near the center of the crystal pentacle that spanned the stone floor beneath his feet. The night before, he had dreamed of Alorael. We are ready, his dark elven lover had said as he touched him on the heart.

  Between the height of the sun and its fall, Vaethir replied.

  The vision could have been a deception. He and Alorael had practiced lucid dreaming across dimensions, and while it was a powerful way to convey simple information, it was unreliable. But if the dream was true, and he didn’t open the Gate, his army on the other side would suffer the consequences.

  He drew his sword and held it to the sky. The energy of the sun, beaming through the afternoon clouds, gathered in the blade, passed through his body and streamed down into the crystal circle on the floor at the base of the tower. Vaethir moved into the twilight between seen and unseen and spoke the words he had learned so long ago, an equation that illuminated Dyrregin on the time-space matrix and opened a thread to the Fylking’s homeworld.

  He finished the
invocation. Bright light flooded down into the center of the pentacle and focused into a thin beam. It shot across the land on an oblique angle to connect with the other towers, touching each with subtle awakening.

  They came then, the High Fylking he had left alive and a company besides, alerted by the unauthorized breach. They filled the parapet in a wave of rage, shouts and swords as the Gate opened and the first of Vaethir’s army came through. Sword in hand, he fled across the Veil. With a mighty leap, one Sif warrior followed him. But Vaethir was ready for that. He flipped through the mist, spun and took the warrior across the abdomen, cutting through mail weakened by the mists between the worlds.

  ~*~

  Vaethir stood upon the field beneath Tower Sif with Alorael by his side. Mounted on fine war steeds, shining with weapons, black as crows, the High Vardlokk’s warriors flooded from the tower like a river.

  Vaethir drew forth a small slip of linen stained with the juice of a hundred herbs. His master, Faetros, had not been idle in the short time since the Niflsekt’s last failed attempt on the Gate. The ancient magician had procured a Fylking spell, a beautiful, devastating spell that thinned the Veil like sunlight burning off a morning fog, giving unseen beings the ability to take physical form. If the spell worked as he planned, it would free him from constraints that had bound him for tens of thousands of suns.

  Vaethir lifted the fragrant cloth to his lips and breathed life into the threads. The wails and horns of mortals rose into the sky as his army came into focus in the mortal world, their armor catching the sun and their horses’ hooves rending the ground. A large company of Fylking also appeared. They met the Niflsekt on the plain in a splintering crash of spears, swords and screams. Outnumbered five to one, they were easily consumed.

  “Why reveal us to the mortal world?” Alorael mused. The dark elf’s hair was unbound and shone like a raven’s wing in the setting sun.