Brune was pouring himself a second mug. “Oh yeah? How did that work out for them?”
“Not well,” replied Timber. The bag of apples was by his side. He reached to claim one and popped it into his mouth. Tam heard a hollow clunk as it landed somewhere inside him. “You passed them on the way in.”
Tam recalled the piles of neatly stacked logs flanking the road outside. “You … killed them?”
Timber thumped the carpet beside him with a barrel-sized fist. “I did! And didn’t so much as snap a twig in doing so! It hardly matters, though. They’d have died out west anyway, along with the rest of those leafless twits. Firewood now or kindling later—dead is dead.”
“You think the Horde will fail?” asked Cura. “They’ve won two battles already. They’re probably marching into Agria by now.”
“Then they’ll die in Agria,” bellowed the treant. “The same as we did. They had their chance at Castia, and they blew it. If Lastleaf had brought down the Republic … Well, he’d have taken all of Endland by now. My kind”—he made a grumbling sound that Tam recognized as a belch, and the scent of apple wafted into the air—“monsters, as you call us, would finally have a place to call our own. A home beyond the Heartwyld. I might have made the journey west myself, were that the case. Put down roots at last, and welcomed winter into my soul.”
Rose was staring into her lap. Her hands were clasped, the muscles in her jaw working as she ground her teeth. She’d rushed to Castia’s defense six years ago, had been trapped in the city for months as Lastleaf’s army gorged themselves on the dead outside the walls.
At least that was the story as Tam had heard it. But stories, she’d come to learn, were different depending on who did the telling. Lastleaf’s name was infamous throughout the five courts. He was a vengeful warlord—the Villain of a Thousand Songs. But to the denizens of the Heartwyld, or the so-called monsters of Grandual, who couldn’t feel safe in their homes for fear of mercenaries kicking down their door, he’d been a saviour.
You didn’t get to be the villain of one story, she supposed, unless you were the hero of another.
“Although I doubt Lastleaf would have stopped there,” ventured Freecloud. He was toying with that coin of his again, thumbing the profile etched onto one side. “I knew him, remember. He was charismatic, ambitious, cunning, and clever. But he’d suffered too much indignity, endured too many concessions to his pride. He was angry and spiteful, driven mad by hatred.” Freecloud’s ears drooped as he spoke. His eyes went the colour of summer plums in the wavering light. “Lastleaf despised humans—as many of my kind do—and would have led his Horde into Grandual eventually.”
Tam shifted uncomfortably. Her coat—the Heathen’s coat—weighed on her like it was made of lead instead of leather. Her whole body tingled, and she suddenly felt as if the spectre of Lastleaf himself sat in her place, looking out from behind her eyes.
Chapter Nineteen
Prints of the Past
Tam slept poorly that night, for several reasons. Timber’s snoring rivalled Brune’s for sheer volume and sounded like two porcupines fighting to the death inside a hollow log. Once, after a fit of harsh coughing, the bard heard what she assumed was a bat come flapping from the treant’s mouth. It winged among the rafters for a bit before escaping through a window.
She lay awake for a long while after that, clutching her blanket as she grappled with what Cura had told her under the bringol’s bridge—that Rose hadn’t been lying when she’d told Sam Roth they were going after the Simurg.
A part of her still didn’t believe it. The Simurg wasn’t a typical monster. It didn’t steal children or terrorize villages. No one claimed to have seen it skulking in the woods at night, or to have glimpsed it soaring over the mountains on a clear day. There were no songs about it. None that Tam knew of, anyway.
But there were stories. Children’s tales, mostly, spawned from half-remembered myths of a time even before the Dominion, when the Heartwyld was called by another name, and Grandual was but a small part of a greater realm.
When she was very young, Tam’s mother used to regale her with tales of knights who rode into battle on the backs of dragons, except the dragons in these stories weren’t evil, or greedy; they didn’t reduce whole towns to cinders like the asshole dragons of this age. They were wise, kind, and colourful, and at the conclusion of each story the knight and her dragon would fly off together into the sunset.
When she was older, Tam heard new endings to the old tales. Darker endings, in which the knights were vanquished and their dragons devoured by an implacable foe who laid waste to their cities and buried them beneath an ocean of ice.
The stories weren’t particularly frightening—they were fairy tales, after all. The priesthood of the Winter Queen claimed the Goddess herself was the one responsible for the Brumal Wastes, and Tam had heard numerous wizards assert (usually while drunk) that the endless expanse of snow and ice was the result of a weather spell gone terribly wrong.
“One minute you’re conjuring clouds,” she’d heard one sorcerer say, “and the next: Whoosh! You’ve ended civilization as you know it!”
And in the unlikely event the stories were true? How many centuries had passed since then? If the Simurg ever had been real, then surely it was long dead now. As dead as the knights and the dragons Tam dreamed of when she finally fell asleep.
She awoke sometime later convinced she could hear the horses screaming, until she remembered they were tied far down the road and realized it was just the wind howling through gaps in the warehouse walls. The treant’s home grew colder as the night stretched on, and the bard was grateful when Cura, tossing restlessly on her own bedroll, pressed her back against Tam’s.
The summoner’s warmth was a welcome comfort.
Her nearness, even more so.
Tam woke up freezing. The warehouse doors were wide open, and although the day had dawned bright, the air was icicle-crisp. She dragged her blanket with her as she rose, and Cura, who was huddled next to her, mumbled disapprovingly.
Everyone else was gone, and so Tam, wearing her blanket like a cloak, shuffled around the treant’s home, inspecting in daylight what she’d only glimpsed in the dark the night before. She scanned the spines on Timber’s bookshelf: The Company of Kings, The End of Empire, Fables of the Greensea. She picked up a volume entitled Birch Without Bark and flipped through it, but there were no words—only page after page of trees whose bark was either peeling or stripped away entirely.
On another shelf was a toy golem, a miniature replica of the runebound constructs Freecloud’s father had employed during the Dominion’s civil war. The figurine was cloaked in dust, and when she tried blowing it off the thing clattered to pieces.
Tam tried in vain to reassemble it, but settled instead for hiding the scattered limbs behind a musty old book. Afterward she abandoned the blanket, slipped into her leather longcoat, and ventured outside.
There was blood on the road, splashes of vivid red across stark winter white. To the west, Rose and Freecloud were standing near to where Tam and the druin had tied up the mounts the night before. The corpse cart had been overturned, two of its wheels smashed beyond repair. One of the ponies lay dead nearby.
Down the road to the east, Brune was kneeling beside the carcass of the other. The animal’s corpse had been savaged. Its ribs were cracked apart, and its entrails strewn across the track like decorations at a zombie’s birthday party. Something—Tam had no idea what—had dragged it a long way from where they’d left it.
The shaman stood, clawing a knot from his tangled hair. He glanced up and grimaced as Tam approached. “Guess we’re walking from here on out,” he said.
Tam went to inspect the dead pony and instantly regretted it. She looked into the forest instead, and saw crows—dozens of them—loitering on the bare branches. They shuffled and cawed and flapped their wings, eager as beggars at a bakery door.
Cura joined them a short while later. She examined the pony’
s corpse, more intrigued than revolted as she surveyed the carnage. “What could have done this?” she asked. “Not wolves.”
“Not wolves,” Brune agreed. “Look.” He pointed to a trail of deep prints in the muddy road that Tam hadn’t even noticed until now. They were huge, spaced so far apart Tam would be hard-pressed to imagine an animal big enough to have made them.
Cura stooped beside one. “An ogre, maybe? A monster of some kind, for sure.”
The shaman shook his head. “An ogre wouldn’t have left a such a mess. And they don’t eat raw meat. It makes them sick, the same as us. They’d have taken the horses and butchered them properly, not slaughtered them. A bear did this,” he said eventually. “A big one.”
Cura hid a yawn behind the back of her hand. “Bears aren’t monsters. No matter how big.”
The shaman sighed and started back toward the mill. “This one is.”
They bid farewell to Timber. The old treant waved distractedly with one branching arm while the other sprinkled raw salt over the bloody slabs he’d cut from Fable’s dead mounts. In return for the horsemeat, the treant had traded them a large canvas tent and furs—cloaks, shawls, hats, and mitts—to keep them warm on their journey north.
Freecloud’s grey was gutted as well, but Rose’s mare had snapped her leash and escaped into the forest. She returned a short while later, and was unfairly rewarded by being relegated to the role of pack mule. She bore most of the band’s gear, as well as Hiraeth in its sealskin case.
Tam carried Duchess strung and hung over one shoulder, and a full quiver on her hip. She’d donned a scratchy wool sweater beneath the rugged red longcoat, and a pair of boiled leather boots lined with fur and laced to her knees.
Rose had added a layer beneath her armour, and fastened a hooded crimson cloak to her battered pauldrons. Cura was wearing something between a robe and a shawl that was part fur, part feathers, and, as usual, all black. Brune bundled himself in furs, while Freecloud wore nothing but his gold-green scale and sky-blue cowl.
Everyone but Cura wore the enchanted warming scarf Elfmin had gifted them outside the Gnarled Staff. When Tam asked the Inkwitch why she refused to do so, Cura eyed the bard’s bright red scarf as though it were a snake coiled around her neck. “Not my colour,” she said.
They left the track behind, following trails marked only by hooves and padded paws. Brune led the way. He used to live in this wood, Tam gleaned, but if he relished the thought of a happy homecoming he was doing a damn fine job of hiding it. The sight of those horses had rattled him. Every snapping twig drew his attention, every scuttling creature compelled his hand toward the twinglaive on his back.
From time to time Brune would stop and listen to some snatch of birdsong, or trace his fingers over scratch marks in the face of a tree, or kneel in the snow and make ridiculous chittering noises at a chipmunk hiding in the underbrush.
“What the fuck are you doing?” asked Cura.
“I’m asking him something,” Brune whispered.
The summoner laughed. “Are you serious? You can’t talk to animals!”
“Shut up, witch, or you’ll scare him. Hey!” he called after the scampering critter. “Hey, wait! Get back here, you cheeky little shit!” Cursing, the shaman stood and dusted snow off his knees. “I can so talk to animals,” he said defensively. “They just don’t always listen.” He tramped off angrily, calling over his shoulder as he went. “Dogs hate you, by the way.”
The summoner scoffed, but her grin dropped away as she started after him. “Wait, that’s not true, is it? Brune? Hey, are you serious?”
As Tam made to follow, a clod of falling snow caught her eye. She glanced up to see an owl perched on a branch above. It was round-faced, its eyes a vibrant green in the forest gloom. There was something odd about its feathers—they had the dull gleam of tarnished coins, and curled at the tips like metal shavings.
They must be frozen, she reasoned.
The owl tracked her as she moved past it, its head swivelling until it faced backward.
Owls do that, Tam told herself, ignoring the prickling chill crawling up her spine. That’s a thing that owls do. Isn’t it?
She heard a whirring hum, the flap of wings, and when she glanced back over her shoulder, the bird was nowhere to be seen.
“You used to live here?” Tam asked the shaman as they walked.
“I did,” said Brune. “There’s a settlement up ahead.”
“Do you have family there?”
A brusque nod. “My dad.”
“Is he like you? A vargyr, I mean.”
“He is. A bear. Those were his footprints we saw this morning.”
“Your dad killed our horses?” Tam asked. “Does Rose know?”
“She does, yeah.”
Tam tried to push a branch from her path and was rewarded with a stinging slap that left a bit of twig in her mouth. “Why did he do it?” she asked, once she’d spit it out.
“Because he knows I’m here. He can smell me, probably, or else one of the others told him. The horses were a warning. A message, actually.”
“What’s the message?”
Brune chuckled, rubbing at his bearded chin. “Hi, son. Welcome home. Now get the fuck out of my forest. Or something to that effect.”
“You two don’t get along, I take it?”
“We used to. We were close, once, back when I was just a boy. He and I used to range all over the forest. He taught me to hunt, and to fish, and to sham. Sometimes—”
“Wait,” Tam cut him short. “Is that where shaman comes from? As in you sham into animals?”
“Obviously. What the hell did you think it meant?”
“I don’t—I mean, I’ve never …” She gave up trying to explain herself. “Forget it. So what happened, then? With your dad?”
Brune’s sigh wreathed his head in white cloud. “The Silverwood vargyr are led by the Clawmaster, who is typically the strongest warrior of the tribe. When I was a kid, that was a man named Berik. He was wise, and kind, and had been Clawmaster for more than twenty years, until one day my father challenged him, killed him, and assumed leadership of the tribe.”
“Wow,” Tam said.
“Wow is right. I couldn’t believe it: My old man was the king! And being the stupid little runt that I was, I was actually proud of him. I didn’t care that he’d killed a better man than he would ever be, or that he challenged anyone he thought might threaten his reign. He and I never went hunting after that. Or fishing. For a while he lost interest in me completely. I begged him to help me find my fain, but—”
“Fain?”
“It means …” Brune frowned, swiping hair from his eyes. “There’s no other word for it, really. Soul mirror? Eh, that sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”
“Pretty stupid, yeah,” Tam agreed.
They came upon the ruins of what looked like an ancient dwelling: a crumbled shelf of flat stones beneath a torn turf roof. Nearby, a tree was marked with the same four slashes Tam had seen elsewhere on trunks and boulders. She’d thought nothing of them earlier—they were in a forest, after all—but now she could guess who’d made those gouges, and could interpret their meaning.
Get the fuck out of my forest …
“Hold up,” yelled Cura behind them. “I need to pee.”
“Same,” said Freecloud. “I’ll go up,” he said, since the trail they’d been following skirted the waist of a wooded hill.
“Such a gentleman,” said Cura, already threading her way down the slope to their right.
Rose looped her horse’s line around a branch before sparking a halfpipe and going to explore the ruins of the old home.
Brune pulled the stopper from his waterskin and drank deep. “Anyway, the fain is our true nature. It allows us to transform into whatever animal we identify with the most. My father wouldn’t teach me to find mine, and when I sought help from the others, he accused me of plotting to overthrow him. He couldn’t challenge me directly—I had no power to speak o
f, and it would have made him appear weak—so he exiled me instead, and promised to kill me if I ever returned.”
“What?” Tam was aghast. “So why are we here?”
“Because I have no idea what I’m doing,” said Brune. He took another pull from his skin and then offered it to Tam. “I never found my fain, or learned how to sham properly. I fled the forest and went east till I hit ocean. One night I drank myself blind before the owner of the tavern found out I had no money. Hell, I didn’t even know what money was. Some goons of his started doing a number on me, and … out came the bear. I was so drunk I don’t even remember it, but some lowlife booker saw it happen, and the next thing I know I’m fighting monsters in a Freeport pit. Brune the Beast, they called me.”
Tam drank from the skin and discovered Brune had topped it up with the treant’s sweet red beer. She stole a second mouthful before handing it back. “And that’s where you met Rose.”
The shaman nodded. There were half a hundred songs about the Battle of Freeport, and every one of them ended the same way: with Rose and her brand-new band burning the pirate fleet to ashes.
“I need my father to show me what I’m doing wrong,” Brune said, watching as Freecloud made a cautious descent from the escarpment above. “Assuming the Widow’s contract is for real … Assuming the Simurg exists and we somehow manage to find it, I can’t afford—” He paused to sniff their air, and was about to say something further when the sudden boom of Cura’s voice rattled the forest and shook the snow from the trees.
“KURAGEN!”
Chapter Twenty
Strange Animals
They found Cura kneeling by an icy stream at the base of the hill. Kuragen loomed over the summoner, salt water sluicing from her scalloped helm. Two of her tentacle limbs held thrashing prisoners—a pair of oversized badgers—and her spear was levelled at a snarling white lynx the size of a small horse.
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