ALSO BY JONATHAN FRENCH
THE AUTUMN’S FALL SAGA
The Exiled Heir
The Errantry of Bantam Flyn
Text copyright © 2014 Jonathan French
All Rights Reserved
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental and unintentional.
ISBN 978-0-9882845-2-4 (trade paperback)
Autumn’s Fall is a registered trademark of Jonathan French
Forge Born is a registered trademark of Jonathan French
Cover Art/Logo Designs by Ivan Zanchetta
www.exiledheir.com
DEDICATION
To my Dad, who taught me twelve laws of modern chivalry and a knightly oath which begins: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty…”
Woe to the dwarrow,
Our dead rest not,
In earth, in stone,
Nor under waves.
Neither flame, nor rot,
Our cold flesh touches,
Nor worm, nor crow,
Dine within our tombs.
We are food for one,
Wind's ancient mother,
Called to her gullet,
We march on blackened feet.
All are risen,
All go forward,
In death enslaved,
A feast of corpses.
Till the end of days,
She will glut upon us,
So that she may live,
Last upon the earth.
To see her slain,
A blade must be wrought,
Three must be gathered
And the eater sought.
Her bane to be forged,
Tempered and cooled,
Eight times in the hearts
Of beloved issue.
One you must find,
Among her lost children,
To wield this doom,
And see mother slain.
Of the two others,
A man there shall be,
Mortal and shunned,
Friend to folk Fae,
Though weak he seems,
Ever on his shoulder,
Winged and deathless,
A watcher will sit.
A great champion,
To complete the three,
Guided by lust,
For glories new.
Though strong of limb,
A mile-tamer gone,
Deep in the horns,
All foes to the ground.
These hunters bound,
Together in purpose,
Shall seek with blind eyes,
The eater of corpses.
Upon frosty bough,
And rime ridden root,
And there decided,
The fate of our race.
Follow you this skein,
To seek such an end,
To set these links fast,
And make you this chain.
Heavy is the burden,
Long will be the search,
Many paths unwoven,
Many lives undone.
-The Rune Caster’s Augury
CONTENTS
The Rune Caster’s Augury
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
Four of the men huddled together in a tight circle, cradling their bowls.
“There's horse-meat in here,” Stig heard one of them whisper.
Even in his carefully hushed tones, the delight in the man's voice was obvious. A childish, pathetic joy. Stig, standing well apart with his own bowl, scowled in the darkness. Their guards had not wanted to risk a fire. The thin broth was cold. Cold like the wind that tore through Stig's old tunic, cold like the snow that covered his feet to the ankles. Give a thrall a bowl of stewed horse-meat and he plays the groveling wretch. All around, the sounds of slurping filled the frozen night as the men supped greedily. Stig continued to stare at the shadowy form of the man who spoke. Debasing them all with his sniveling gratitude, he made them lower than slaves.
Stig wanted to kill him.
It would not be difficult. Stig could throttle the fool even with his frost-numbed fingers. The other thralls would only watch and the warriors would merely laugh, maybe place bets. Murder had landed Stig in bondage, he saw no reason not to repeat the offense now. No reason save he would spill his own stew.
Stig slurped at the broth, glancing around the night-shrouded depression where the warriors had ordered them to halt. The moon infused the snow with a blue, frigid light, the men growing from it as shapeless, black stalks. Around the cold stew pot, the half dozen remaining warriors stood watch, their hot breath emerging from their beards in steamy torrents. Stig and the other thralls outnumbered them at least five to one, but the guards leaned lazily on their spears, unconcerned with the possibility of escape or revolt. Fear kept the thralls obedient. Fear of night on the tundra, fear of the berserkers who had split away from their group not an hour ago, fear of Crow Shoulders.
Stig risked a glance at the man.
He sat astride his horse at the top edge of the depression, his cape of feathers twitching in the wind as if quivering with the remembrance of flight. Stig stared up at the dread form, glad the warlord's own gaze was turned away, across the hoary fields where his sons had gone. For what purpose Crow Shoulders had sent the berserkers out, Stig did not know, but he guessed it was bloody business. They had taken the majority of the warriors with them, nearly three-score men. Such a force could produce a good many fresh corpses come the dawn, if the bundle of tools near the stew pot held any importance.
They were wrapped tightly in a large hide and dragged on a sled by several of the hardier thralls, the wooden hafts peeking out from the end of the covering. Shovels and picks, no doubt. Crow Shoulders must expect to put a pile of enemies in the ground on this raid. Why else bring thirty odd thralls on a forced march through the night and feed them horse meat? Some blistering labor was ahead, for certain. That was fine by Stig. He could dig a grave as well as any man, and the work would keep him warm.
The pot was not yet empty and some of the thralls were brazen enough to approach the guards for more broth. They ladled it out freely, so Stig quickly took a place in line for a second serving. Why not? The warriors were sure as shit not going to eat this swill, and an empty pot was less weight to carry back. Only one man separated Stig from the stew pot when a bellow came down from the ridge. Crow Shoulders waved an arm, then turned his horse and rode out of sight over the lip of the depression.
T
he warriors slammed the lid down over the pot and started growling at the thralls to get moving. Stig swallowed a curse and tossed his bowl into the snow. To add to his luck, he found himself picked to help haul the sled and soon he was straining up the icy incline, leather straps cutting into his swollen hands as he pulled the heavy load of tools. The going was easier once they left the depression.
A white expanse of harsh tundra lay before them under the moon. Stig's feeble shoes crunched through the crust as he struggled across the plain, huffing in time with the man pulling next to him. He kept his eyes downcast, watching his stinging feet. Sweat began to form on his flesh, mating with the cold air and causing him to shiver. No one offered to spell him, just as he had not offered aid to the miserable curs forced to pull the damn sled earlier in the night. He stumbled hard, knees, wrists and chin scrubbed raw by the hard packed snow.
“Fuck,” Stig hissed.
The thrall beside him groaned as their progress was arrested, but was too winded himself to voice much complaint. As Stig struggled back to his feet, his eyes fell upon something large and black on the horizon. It rose above the plain, at this distance nothing but a dense shadow, blotting out the stars. Stig continued trudging forward, his eyes now fixed on the dark mass ahead, each step chiseling at the distance until details began to form.
It was a hill, alone on the plain and oddly devoid of snow. Even from a distance Stig could tell it was no natural child of the landscape. The slope was too regular, the summit too flat. Atop the hill stood a great tree, its branches reaching high and wide. Between the boughs, the stars seemed to flicker, winking in and out of existence, an illusion caused by the leaves still crowning the tree despite the unforgiving grip of Winter that had reigned in Middangeard for thousands of years.
They were still a goodly distance from the hill when the bodies began appearing. They were scattered across the plain, limp and unmoving save for where the wind plucked idly at their cloaks. Stig was glad to see they were all Crow Shoulders' men. He would not need to break his back chipping holes in the frozen earth for their graves. They would get a pyre as befit a warrior and the flames could do the work. Each looked to have been felled by arrows, the shafts now sprouting from their corpses where shield and mail failed to protect flesh. Stig wondered how many men Crow Shoulders had lost to this charge and he counted at least a score before he lost track, the slain growing more numerous as they crossed the final distance.
Mutters and murmuring rose from the thralls as the hill and its tree drew near. As a group, their steps slowed and the guards began barking at them to keep moving, punctuating their words with blows from their spear shafts. Thralls they may be, broken by debt or misdeed, but none among them were from foreign shores. They were men of Middangeard all and taught from boyhood to avoid such hills with their single, deathless tree.
The glow of torches bathed the snow at the base of the mound, illuminating the mounted bulk of Crow Shoulders and his surviving warriors. Stig reckoned that near thirty still drew breath, but it was the berserkers he counted carefully. They stood apart from the others, receiving praise and horns of drink from their father. All twelve had survived, Stig noted sourly, allowing the common warriors to shield them during the charge. Their thickly muscled bodies were limned in steam and clothed in the skins of bear and wolf, the hides of the predators unable to contain the savagery of the men beneath. Not slaked with mere blood, they breathed heavily and drank deeply, the mead splashing down their shaggy cheeks to mix with the gore at their feet.
Short, stocky corpses lay all about the base of the hill and upon its slopes. The large, well-used weapons of the berserkers had butchered them well, severing every head, but Stig still knew the slain defenders for what they were.
Svartálfar.
Dwarrow.
Guardians of the Warden Trees.
One of the warriors was entertaining his comrades, holding his torch towards the hacked form of a dwarf and watching as the flame dwindled the closer it came to the corpse. The torch guttered and nearly died within an inch of the dead flesh, but the warrior snatched it away at the last moment and the flame sprang back to life. The spectacle drew laughter from the men nearby and several spat on the fallen, headless dwarfs.
Stig was shoved roughly from behind and he turned to find one of the guards glowering at him.
“Get these passed out!” the man ordered, waving an aggravated arm at the sled.
The other thralls were being bullied towards the sled as Stig bent to untie the ropes. His numb fingers were clumsy, but he soon had the rough, cold cords loose, shoving the hide aside. The tools clattered as they rolled free of the bundle, wood clunking against wood, metal scraping against metal. Stig bent and snatched one up, handing it to the closest man. Then another and another. They were not spades, nor picks. Axes. They were all axes.
Dread settled between Stig's shoulder blades, quickly capering down his spine, quivering through his ribs and squeezing his bowels. Soon, all the thralls had axes, every last man, but though their hands gripped weapons, their faces held nothing but fear.
Stig looked down at the sled, at the single remaining axe. His hands yet remained empty. How many times had he yearned for the means to fight back, to spill the blood of those who held him in thrall, to liberate himself? Now, the very tool that would offer that chance lay within his reach and he had as much desire to seize it as he would a glowing coal.
“Get them up the hill.”
It was Crow Shoulders who spoke, his voice calm and cruel. The warriors pushed at the thralls with their spears, but not one step was taken. The men stood rooted, their jaws slack beneath wide eyes fixated on the tree above. The warriors showered them with cuffs and curses, shoving the thralls forward with such force that many fell to the snow, but none took one step willingly towards the hill. One thrall, an old, skinny greybeard looked sternly at Crow Shoulders and tossed his axe down into the snow.
The warlord's horse stamped and shuffled a bit, but the man astride did not move. Rough, wet laughter spilled out of the berserkers and they strode forward, pushing through the crowd of thralls, heedless of the axes. The twelve of them surrounded the greybeard, still laughing. Stig caught one last look at the old thrall's face, the glimmer of brave defiance frightened off by the man's own wails. The fists of the berserkers rose and fell, then, a moment later, their feet. Stig heard bones snapping over the high-pitched screams. One of the berserkers bent down and the screams increased to something no longer human. The smells of blood and shit settled heavily in the cold air. One of the thralls next to Stig vomited, the stew he had so recently consumed spewed violently onto the snow.
When the berserkers stepped back, the old thrall lay upon the ground, his chilblained legs broken at sickening angles, the pale tubes of his entrails lolling out of the red ruin of his belly. The greybeard was no longer screaming, but he was still breathing. The berserkers had tied a rope about his neck and one of them went running up the hill, dragging the dying man behind him. When he reached the summit, the berserker tossed the rope over one of the tree's stout branches and hauled the thrall into the air. His legs shattered, the man could not kick. He could only hang and strangle, his guts dangling in coils.
“Up the hill,” Crow Shoulders commanded.
Stig snatched up the last axe with a quavering hand and followed his fellow thralls slowly up the hillside. The thought of fighting back came to his mind, no doubt came to all their minds, but someone would need to be first. It was not Stig. Nor any of the others.
The Warden Tree loomed even larger once they reached the summit. A dozen grown men, arms outstretched, hands joined, could not have encircled the trunk. Stig could hear the choking sounds of the hanged thrall coming from above, but he did not look up. From below, Crow Shoulders' voice drifted up on the blustering wind.
“Bring it down.”
Stig licked his chapped lips, flexed his blistered fingers around the axe haft. All around, the thralls milled uncertainly around the t
ree. All twelve berserkers were on the hilltop now, bolstered by as many warriors.
“Fell it! Bring it down!”
Stig craned his neck upwards. The branches seemed to bend down towards him, creaking with menace, the leaves hissing. A cornered animal issuing a warning.
A thrall fled. Bolting away from the tree with a desperate squeal, the man dropped his axe and dashed for the edge of the hill. He made it less than ten steps before two spears struck him in the back, their flight almost lazy. The thrall stumbled a few more paces then pitched forward on his face, his last breath rattling in his pierced lungs.
There was nothing for it. Stig swallowed hard and swung.
The axe bit deep into the wood and the sting of the impact shot through Stig's cold fingers. Dull thuds began to fill his ears as other thralls set upon the tree. Stig swung again, sending a chunk tumbling from the tree and a pain up his arms. The tree was shaking with the force of the repeated blows. Stig could feel the chopping pulse through his feet, his heart. But there was another sound, lower, yet usurping the chorus of the falling axes. A groaning, coming from the stricken wood.
Stig had felled many a tree. He knew the aches, the cramps, and the soreness that came from such labor. The pain that lingered in his limbs after each swing was different, deeper, unnatural. He had worked a notch out of the trunk the size of a man's head and continued to send his blade into the ever-widening wound, but with each bite of the axe, his own pain grew. His muscles did not burn with exertion, they froze, began to harden. Sweat did not rise on his flesh, no, each swing leeched the heat from his body.
Cries and moans floated up around him as the other thralls suffered. They chopped and hacked, their movements growing sluggish. Next to Stig, a man fell, pitching forward as he swung. His axe sank into the wood, but there it remained, the man having slumped down onto the roots, his face pressed into the bark. Stig looked down to see the man wretch a thick gob of inky fluid, pushed with a grey tongue between blue lips. The fallen thrall inhaled deeply, then moved no more, his eyes staring sightlessly, weeping black.
A whine of fear escaping his throat, Stig threw himself behind his axe, chopping with desperation. All around him, men began to die. He could feel his joints swelling, trying to burst, his breath crackling in his chest. A pitiless cold gripped his heart, compressed his crystal-filled lungs, but still he swung, trying to kill the tree before it killed him. Only a few axes could be heard now, popping irregularly into the trunk, but Stig worked at the wood, sending chips flying. The head of his axe squeaked as he pulled it free, only to slam it home once more, deepening the cut as he choked on the turbid muck of his insides.
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