C. Dale Brittain

by Voima

  He was not sure how much the lords of voima truly wanted this force destroyed, and how much this was a test to see if he was strong enough and able enough to serve them. After what had seemed weeks, even months of practicing, he felt eager to serve the lords of voima, to be found not wanting. He put a tree between himself and the sunset and fell asleep.

  When he awoke someone was bending over him, someone massive but with a face strangely blurred so that he could not quite see it.

  He sat up fast, the singing sword already in his fist, but the being stepped back, showing him empty palms. “Greetings, Valmar Hadros’s son!” he said. “Welcome to our home! You need not lie on the ground out here when we can entertain you within!”

  Valmar rose slowly to his feet. For just one second, the foot in the grass next to him looked as though it was cloven, but then its outline too became blurred. “Why should I trust you when I cannot see you?” he asked cautiously. This must be one of those he had come to fight, but by greeting him in so friendly a manner this being had kept him from immediate attack.

  “Your friend trusts us,” said the other, slightly less blurred now. Whoever he was, he looked human within the misty outlines. “Roric No-man’s son. He is our friend too and eats in our hall.”

  “Roric?” asked Valmar, startled but not yet lowering his sword. “But Roric is back under the sun. We heard raven-messages that he was coming.”

  “Of course he is under the sun,” said the other cheerfully, “our sun. Or do you mortals call that something else?” This he seemed to find hilarious. He turned his back then on Valmar, apparently quite unafraid of him, and started walking into the woods. “Come, if you want a more comfortable bed and better food and ale.”

  Valmar slowly slid his sword halfway into the sheath, then picked up his pack and saddle and took his stallion by the reins, preparing to follow. Could Roric have returned here in the time he was gone?

  His sword was still singing, quietly now. The other stopped and turned back sharply. “Do you mind making your sword stop that infernal singing?”

  “I’m sorry, I like its song,” Valmar started to say, then stopped. “No. I will not bother you with the voice of my sword, given to me by the Wanderers, nor will I come to your hall with you. I am your enemy, and I shall not eat your bread. I am sworn to serve the lords of voima.”

  “So are we, so are we,” said the other hastily. “Why do you want to be our enemy? Roric isn’t. Come to our hall, and you can meet him.”

  “If Roric is there,” said Valmar, not moving, “then tell him to come out and greet me. Then I will consider your offer.” The other started deeper into the woods, looking back over his shoulder several times, but Valmar did not follow. Whoever this was, he appeared to have a back.

  Valmar sat down again, and his stallion resumed grazing. He had pictured himself coming on a war band of horrifying creatures, of sitting his horse with his singing sword upraised, defying them. He had been going to tell them to trouble the lords of voima no more or else to taste his steel. So far it was not as he had imagined.

  But there was still much he could do as long as he did not make the mistake of accepting the invitation of food and a bed. He saddled his horse slowly, carefully checking all the straps and buckles, then smiled at himself. He was moving very deliberately as though waiting to see if Roric might come out to meet him after all.

  He mounted then and settled his shield on his arm. Even if these creatures of the third force were not a war band he could still defy them.

  The stallion started forward, first at a walk, then, when kicked, at a trot and then a gallop. The sword sang louder and louder as he raced along a needle-littered track through the dark pine woods and up the slope beyond.

  A slim mailed figure, curly black hair escaping from under her horned helmet, leaped out in front of the white stallion.

  3

  The mountains had been growing closer for several days, but with agonizing slowness in spite of the speed of their horses. “Gizor and Hadros may be on the king’s warship, paralleling our route by sea,” said Roric. Goldmane and the spotted mare trotted side by side along a grass-grown path. “A fast ship can do a hundred miles a day if the wind is right; even Goldmane can’t do that day after day.”

  “You keep assuming they know where we’re going,” said Karin with a smile that was almost indulgent. “Gizor must have waited to come after us until King Hadros returned home. If the king sent out the arrow of war to the royal manors to raise an army before following, he may be over a week behind us.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” he answered, not wanting to quarrel with her and making himself answer carefully to avoid doing so. “I’ve never been this far north, but Hadros sometimes speaks of this area. The war in which he fought when he was Valmar’s age involved two kingdoms up here. Before we reach the mountains we shall have to cross an arm of the ocean that nearly cuts the peninsula in two. If Gizor is ahead of us, that is where he’ll be.”

  That took some of the complacency from Karin’s face. “Then we will have fled all this way for nothing? And we won’t reach the Hot-River Mountains and Valmar?”

  “That is exactly what I mean,” said Roric, feeling darkly glad as he spoke to be able to change her mood. But then he immediately was sorry: far better to have her singing as they rode than giving him that look of supplication and despair.

  She had seemed remarkably cheerful ever since they left the isolated manor, Roric thought. She had dismissed his concerns over how the woman had known his name, saying that she herself must have let it slip, but he did not think so. There was a satisfied look around Karin’s mouth that should not be there when they were running for their lives, leaving honor behind with every stride.

  Though she had lain rigid next to him the first nights after they had left the faeys, the last few evenings she had fallen asleep in his arms with a faint smile on her lips, heedless of the dark clouds racing across the dark sky, the pattering amidst the leaves of tiny creatures, and the more distant creaks and calls that could have been anything from wolves to trolls. Roric often lay long awake, listening to the noises and sometimes seeing, after midnight, flashes of light rippling across the northern sky. But if Karin worried about whether they were outcasts, or whether she was behaving as a future queen should, it did not disturb her sleep.

  When they rounded a hill and saw a little lake, shining like a jewel in the sunshine, and a house with a dock beside it, she said, “A Mirror-seer!” with delight. They found the door standing ajar, but she did not seem bothered. “I’m sure even Seers go places sometimes,” she said.

  Roric however went inside. The house was empty except for some old clothes and, in the back, the Seer’s mirrors. When he held them out of curiosity to the light from the window, one mirror was empty, showing not even his own reflection, but in the other glass he saw a seated figure.

  He was so startled he almost dropped the mirror, then looked unsuccessfully out the window for the source of that figure and back into the glass again. Deep in the mirror, incredibly thin, with a cat curled up on his knees, sat the Seer. He motioned Roric to silence, then seemed again to draw into himself. Roric set the mirror down carefully and, when he found Karin lying on the dock trailing her hands in the water, told her only that the house was empty.

  Even the second manor they reached had not appeared to disturb her as much as it disturbed him. Like the first manor, this one was perched on a hill, but they had seen no smoke rising from the hall, and neither dogs nor housecarls came to meet them.

  Roric approached cautiously, coming up behind the burial mound that stood part way down the hill. It was late afternoon, and the mound’s long shadow lay across the buildings. They needed more food, having eaten everything the woman had given them three days earlier, yet the silent structures could have concealed an ambush. But the buildings all stood uninhabited, their doors open, their contents in confusion as though the people who lived here had fled something unexpected a
nd unimaginable.

  “They must have been driven out by some of the raiders that woman mentioned,” Karin commented, but Roric did not think so. Raiders would have smashed everything they could not carry, and probably fired the hall as they left. The open buildings to him signaled panic but not looting. The wind whispered around the eaves, pushing the doors slowly back and forth with faint creaks. Karin, unconcerned, whistled as she found some rather stale bread and cheese although deciding that the milk in the dairy had gone too sour.

  In the hall she tidily folded up the disordered blankets on the beds. Roric had to pull her away or she might have suggested they spend the night there. The sun had slipped over the horizon by the time they were mounted again, riding out past the burial mound—and, just for a second, a form flickered on the top of the mound, seeming to raise a hand in salute or in warning. Roric shouted to Goldmane and urged him forward, knowing that Karin would take it as a challenge to race, and not daring to look back.

  While day-dreaming that spring, a short time ago—although it seemed like years—of the fortune he would make to be worthy of Karin’s love, Roric had always assumed he would return to offer her what he had won, not have her riding beside him on the voyage to find it. Now, while trying to plan for the unknown dangers that lay ahead, he repeatedly found himself irritated by her presence—and the constant check it made on what he might dare. But if she had not been with him he would have stood and fought Gizor to the death, and he felt fairly sure whose death it would have been.

  “The powers of voima are with us now,” Karin now said with sudden cheerfulness, giving him a smile. “We’ll find Valmar—if your stallion can keep up!” She kicked her mare and was off, galloping ahead of him down the grassy track, her braids whipping out behind her. Goldmane sprang in pursuit. For a second, just a second, Roric thought he saw a huge dark shaggy shape, the size of the bear he had killed in the Wanderers’ realm, rising from behind a boulder a quarter mile ahead. He reached for his sword, but when he looked again there was nothing there at all.

  They reached at the end of a long day’s riding the rift where the peninsula was nearly cut in two by a narrow arm of the ocean, cutting far inland. Roric pulled Goldmane up at the crest of the hill, looking across the valley before them. The peninsula here narrowed to ten miles wide or less. Off to the east were high, barren, virtually impassable cliffs, facing on the ocean on their far side. From those cliffs on this side cascaded a river that became salt as it ran toward the ocean away to the west. His fingers found his little bone charm, and he turned it over absently. So far, he thought, fate had been with them, but their stories might end abruptly in this valley.

  The track before them dropped rapidly, then followed a zigzag path through barren grasslands and scrub, dodging boulders the size of Hadros’s hall, until over a mile away it reached the salt river. Before them, according to the stories he remembered the king telling years ago, was the only easy away across the river.

  The mountains they had seen for days on the horizon ahead of them rose at last on the far side of the river, their upper reaches streaked with snow. It was as though here the earth had cracked open and the ocean had rushed into the breach. The river itself was spotted with islands made of single enormous rocks, the odd tree growing from their summits.

  In the distance came a high shrill whistle, a signal or else a sea bird. “A hundred men could hide among those boulders, and you’d never see them until it was too late,” Roric muttered. The only sign of humanity was a wide blackened area of burnt wood and tumbled stones, open to the sun, which might once have been a castle.

  “Did that castle guard the crossing?” Karin asked, pulling her mare up beside him. The wind blew the fine hair escaping from her braids across her eyes, and she pushed it back.

  “It used to. Hadros said that it was fired in the last war, and if it was rebuilt it’s been fired again.”

  Roric considered the ruin in silence a minute longer. “This must be,” he said then, “the kingdom of that king you were telling me about, outlawed at the All-Gemot. If so, those deserted hills we’ve just come through would have been where his tenants once lived. The ford is the only way to go from the southern to the northern part of the peninsula without taking ship. I expect too many kings—those on the sea, those to the north, and those to the south—fear control of the crossing for anyone ever to have held the castle successfully for long.”

  “No use us trying to make this into our kingdom, then,” Karin said, and he could not tell if she was mocking.

  There was at any rate no sign now of anyone trying to guard the crossing. “I had better go ahead,” he said, “to find out if there really might be someone behind those rocks. You wait here. I don’t see a ship in the river, but Gizor would know better than to leave the ship in plain sight.”

  He did not add that a salt river like this might well mark the end of the powers of voima that had been riding with them.

  “I’m coming with you,” said Karin determinedly. “It’s you Gizor is trying to kill, not me.”

  “And I may need you and your knife to back me up again,” he answered with a sudden grin. “Come on, then.”

  He took the lead, allowing his stallion to pick his own way down the slope while gazing around intently. There were distant, plaintive cries from shore birds—that is, he was fairly sure they were all birds—and the murmur and rustle of the wind, but no other sounds. Even the salt river was still too distant to hear.

  “I don’t think they will have brought horses,” Roric said over his shoulder. “So if try to jump us, we’ll outrun them—give that spotted mare of yours a chance to prove she really is a horse of voima.” Nothing stirred behind the boulders littering the flat area before them; when a bird rose abruptly almost under Goldmane’s feet he was almost as startled as the stallion.

  “Hadros always said that there were strange creatures here in the northern lands,” Roric added once Goldmane had all four feet on the ground again, forcing his voice to stay calm. “But when I was little he would never tell me what they were, and when I was older I never asked. How about a sea-troll, as much bigger and fiercer than the troll we met at the manor as the sea is bigger than a stream?” He pulled his lips back from his teeth, enjoying the thought. “If there’s a sea-troll here, we may not have to worry about Gizor after all.”

  “You know,” commented Karin, “considering that you and Hadros are enemies, you are very much alike sometimes.”

  He looked back at her in surprise, but only for a second because he needed his attention for the narrow track. “But I am Gizor’s enemy, not Hadros’s,” he told himself, except that he was Hadros’s also. But would it be so bad to be like the king? He shook his head to dismiss such useless thoughts. He needed to act, not to worry. He turned his attention fully to watching for ambush.

  The shadows from the huge boulders were dark and crooked, and half an army could have hidden in the scrubby brush. He squinted at the rocks, trying to decide if some of the darkness at their feet might be the ashes of camp fires—or even puddles of dried blood—rather than merely shadow, but it was impossible to tell. As they proceeded slowly downhill, Roric kept his back straight, trying not to feel a tickle between his shoulder blades. To look back, as though fearing an archer behind him, would only distract him from the much more likely dangers ahead.

  They went slowly between the boulders until they reached the ruins of the castle, its tumbled, fire-scorched stones not yet overgrown with creepers. His fist squeezed tight on his sword hilt, and it felt as though the air itself vibrated with tension. They went quietly, cautiously, the only sounds the creak of saddles and the chink of horseshoes on stone.

  “Look!” said Karin sharply. He swiveled his head, following her pointing hand. Off to the west, coming up the salt river from the direction of the sea, was a red sail.

  No time for caution now. “Come on!” he shouted. “They must have reached the river before us and spotted us when we came over the crest o
f the hill. But we’ll beat them to the crossing!” He kicked Goldmane forward, and they galloped down the stony track, past more huge boulders. The ship was coming upriver against the current, further from the ford than they were, and even with all its oars out it—

  But someone else was also watching the ship, someone pressed into a chink in the outer wall of the ruined castle, his back to Roric and Karin. He heard them and spun around, yelling as he raised his sword.

  More armed men boiled out from behind the boulders. Roric reined in Goldmane so hard the stallion reared straight up, but the men were also behind them. He had led Karin straight into ambush.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1

  These were not Hadros’s men. Karin had never seen any of them before. They bore dented helmets and cracked shields, but their glittering blades were sharp and their war cries ferocious.

  Their only advantage was that all the attackers were on foot. Roric bellowed and whirled his sword, and his stallion lashed out with his hooves, felling two men. Roric’s first strokes bounced off helmets, and his third struck a shield so hard the man staggered.

  The attackers drew back for a second, and Goldmane sprang forward past them. Roric’s laugh rang out over their shouts, and he grinned as if he could have asked nothing more of life than to die fighting for it.

  Karin, on the contrary, felt wash over her all the fear she had not felt for two weeks, as though the powers that had protected and guided them reached no further than the edge of this wide rift. She kicked the spotted mare, staying so close behind Roric that she was almost on the stallion’s heels.

  But armed men almost immediately blocked the horses’ path again. The men were more numerous before them than behind them, and more and more sprang out from behind boulders, shouting to each other. The way to the ford seemed jammed with beards, helmets, and steel blades. She looked back over her shoulder to what she hoped was safety, calling to Roric to retreat, but more warriors darted around behind them, and Roric could not hear her over his own yells.