C. Dale Brittain

by Voima

  His boots slid on the loose gravel near the edge, but he found his balance and parried another blow. If I am a king’s son, he thought, then no one can say I am not worthy of Karin. He grinned and tossed back his hair. “And why do you have no sons, Gizor?” he shouted from a distance of ten feet. “Did the serving-maids always put them out for the wolves rather than raise your get?”

  Gizor rushed him, and again he parried the thrust and spun out of the way. So far he was fighting defensively, waiting for the other to tire himself out in fighting a younger man. But he himself was still exhausted from last evening’s fight against the raiders who had sprung from among the rocks—the men who now had Karin.

  He swung his sword into position to block another blow just in time, almost distracting himself by the thought that he was not just fighting for his own honor, but because he had to be free of Gizor to rescue her.

  That is, he had to survive this fight, but King Hadros might still prevent him from rescuing Karin. Son or no son, Hadros could outlaw him for killing the king’s sworn men and for running away with Karin, and as an outlaw he could be struck down by any man.

  In the meantime, he had to win this fight against a man fighting as though berserk.

  If he could get Gizor really angry, he thought, break down that icy efficiency of fighting, he would stand a chance. “Where did you lose your right hand, Gizor?” he yelled. “You always said you lost it fighting beside Hadros in the northern kingdoms, but did some serving-girl cut it off for you when you fell asleep drunk after refusing to pay her?”

  He dodged and ducked the old warrior’s rush, but as he spun away again he thought for a second he saw a face peeking over the edge of the island.

  He barely got his sword up in time to block Gizor’s next blow. Was this one of the ambushers back again?

  “Gizor!” he shouted. “Someone’s there!”

  The old warrior answered for the first time, never moving his eyes from Roric. “Think I’d fall for a trick I taught you myself?” he asked grimly.

  Their swords rang again. Both were bleeding now, and sweat ran down Roric’s forehead into his eyes. “No trick!” he yelled. He dodged so that Gizor had to turn, had to look where he himself had looked a moment before.

  And Gizor’s eyes went past him, and for a second his attention wavered. Roric pressed the advantage, raining down blows, pushing him back. Gizor recovered almost immediately, but he was forced to take another step backwards, then another, until he was almost teetering on the edge—

  “Yield!” Roric shouted, his sword still ready. “Yield to me so I need not kill another of Hadros’s men! Yield so we can both face—”

  He never had a chance to finish. Gizor gave a wordless yell and made to plunge forward.

  But as he sprang the gravel spun under his feet. He lost his balance and fell hard on his stomach, trying to hold his sword away from him. His feet went over the edge, and he scrambled with his arms for a purchase. Roric rushed forward, but it was too late.

  Gizor slid, faster and faster, and with a final yell disappeared backwards over the edge. There was a silence for two seconds, then a hard, shattering smack, then a splash.

  Roric whirled around to see who was coming up behind him and saw King Kardan. No time to worry why he was here. “Help me get him out of the river,” shouted Roric, already scrambling down the way they had climbed up. “He may still be alive, and no one will say I stood and watched him drown.”

  “No one will say that, of a certainty,” said Kardan darkly. Full sunlight came over the eastern cliffs as they reached the base of the island. There was blood on a jumble of sharp stones just above the water line, and the water itself was running red—no difficulty in finding the body. As Roric reached under the surface and took hold of a handful of tunic, he agreed silently with Kardan—it was quite clear that Gizor had not drowned.

  And now he had the blood-guilt of three of Hadros’s men on him and no way to pay it.

  They carried Gizor’s body back to camp between them. “One more for the burial mound,” Roric commented grimly. “And the best songs will be sung of him.”

  Gizor might not have been his father, but he was the man who had taught him most of the warfare he knew. He had been bound by honor to kill him, but what honor could there be in killing a man, even a ferocious and ruthless man, who was his own king’s—and maybe father’s—sworn man?

  Roric kept expecting King Kardan to say something, to accuse him of being responsible for his daughter’s capture, of challenging him to immediate single combat himself without even giving him a chance to recover his breath. But all the king said was, “Now that it’s light, those bandits can’t hide from us.”

  When they reached the camp site, the warriors had donned their armor and Hadros, face purple, was giving orders to those who would stay behind to guard the ship. Kardan stepped up to the other king at once, even before he had a chance to react to the sight of Gizor’s battered body. “Gizor gave the challenge,” he said, “and they reached the outcome in single combat. I was witness, and I will swear on steel and rowan that Roric killed him honorably and indeed gave him the opportunity to yield.”

  So he must have been watching the whole time, thought Roric. He lowered Gizor to the ground beside the other dead warriors—the worst of the wounded had also died in the night. Everyone else stepped back to leave a broad empty space around him. No one would want to associate with a man carrying that much blood-guilt.

  And then, completely unexpectedly, a young woman stepped up beside him. Roric looked at her wildly, his first thought that she must be a wight or creature of voima, for no elegantly-dressed woman, wearing golden bracelets and a jeweled pendant on her forehead, should be here among the warriors.

  But the others glanced at her as though they too could see her and her presence was perfectly explicable. Had she been here last night? His memories of last night, once Karin had been seized and Gizor struck him, were at best confused.

  She stood for a moment considering him, head cocked, as though she found him fascinating. No one else was near. “It’s hard to see for certain,” she said almost under her breath, “through the grime and blood, but yes, there are certain indications there . . .” She smiled then at his expression. “You don’t know who I am.” He saw now that she was not nearly as young as he had first supposed, in spite of her curling chestnut hair and slim figure. “I am Queen Arane.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, trying to be polite. Since he could not think how to put his question diplomatically, to demand what in the name of the Wanderers she was doing here, he did not ask. “Karin has mentioned you to me.”

  “But I know who you are. You are Roric, called No-man’s son. And the Princess Karin loves you.”

  “Not No-man’s son,” he said between stiff lips. If it was true, he should start claiming his real name now. “I think— I think I am King Hadros’s son.”

  For a second she looked very distressed. “He said this to you?”

  “No,” shaking his head. “He does not know—not yet—that I have guessed.”

  The queen laughed, a small laugh that was almost sad. “I am very sorry to have to disappoint you. But do not say anything to the king of this. For I know him, and I can tell you quite decidedly that you are not his son.”

  Roric closed and opened his eyes. It would not have made much difference anyway. “But I am still Karin’s lover.” He looked up toward the mountains, the sharp stones and cliffs bathed in morning light. Hadros’s warriors were ready to start, the hounds leashed now and sniffing excitedly at the ground. “If she is still alive.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

  Mist lay over the midnight mountainside. The moon had already set, and burning torches on either side only made the landscape darker. Karin tried to pick out landmarks or at least determine which way was south, back toward the river and her father, but it was impossible.

  The door through which they had emerged was at the end of a long tun
nel cut into the rock, and the transition out into the cold night air—Eirik peering around carefully before motioning to the torchbearers behind him to follow—had come like a slap after the smoky hall. They seemed now to be near the bottom of a deep dish-shaped depression. A pool lay before them, steaming and reeking with sulfur.

  “Some say that Hel lies at the bottom of this pool,” said Eirik, holding her arm more firmly than ever. She could picture rather than see the mocking sneer of his scarred lip. “Do you believe it, Princess?”

  Behind them, the rest of the warriors emerged from the tunnel, some supported by their comrades as they reeled from ale, followed by the women, and last of all six men carrying the naked bodies of the slain.

  They arranged the bodies, feet together, on a relatively level surface of stone near the steaming pool. Eirik released Karin then, but the tall green-eyed woman immediately took hold of her arm, and her grip was even stronger.

  The outlaw king took first a basket of barley from one of the other women and sprinkled it liberally on the bodies. Next he took an ale horn and slopped some ale on each of their faces. There had been total silence at first among the warriors, but at this several of them chuckled, and one said, “That’s right, he always did like his drink.”

  But when someone handed Eirik his lyre everyone again fell silent. I have as long to live as it takes to sing the warriors’ praises, thought Karin. Her heart was pounding so hard that the woman must surely feel it through her arm.

  He plucked the strings for a moment, a dark shape under a clouded midnight sky, then began to sing. His voice resonated over the mountains until it seemed the stones themselves vibrated.

  “In fearsome fighting six have fallen,

  “Overcoming foes when dread death found them.

  “Brave in battle, honored by brothers,

  “Enemies in Hel will grovel before them.

  “Ferocious their war cries, swift their swords,

  “Yet fate ended their stories as it ends all men’s.

  “Welcome them, Death! Welcome our brothers,

  “Make room for them in Hel’s dusty hall.

  “Gone from the sunlands, yet not from our songs,

  “Remembered wherever the fighting is fiercest.”

  When he ended his song, there was a moment of stillness in which a few low voices could have been the sound of the wind. Then, at a gesture from the king, the men holding the torches took them to the steaming pool and plunged them beneath the surface. There was a great hissing, a cascade of sparks, and then the mountainside was almost completely dark.

  The woman beside Karin spoke into the silence, so unexpectedly that she jumped involuntarily. “We call on the lords of death,” the woman said in a deep voice. “We call on those who take whomever fate strikes down. Come, powers beyond voima! Come, nameless ones of the night!”

  “We call. We call. We call on them,” went voices up and down the hollow.

  “We call the lords of death,” cried the woman, “to take our brothers, to strike down those who struck them down, and to drink and eat what is offered!”

  Karin stood immobile, not sure if she could have moved even if the woman had released her arm. Her heart was bitterly cold within her as she waited for what must surely happen next.

  And then there came a soft blurping noise, something very familiar although she could not at once identify it, a sound like— It was the sound a stewpot made when on a low boil. The steaming, sulfurous pond at the bottom of the hollow was beginning to bubble.

  She strained wildly to see and thought she could glimpse through the starless darkness the pond rising, a wave breaking up out of it, slithering up onto the surface of the stone as though alive— Someone yelled and jumped, brushed by boiling water, but the rest shushed him instantly.

  The wave fell back into the pond, but the splash itself gave a dull boom, a sound that could have been a voice, a voice saying, “We come.”

  “No man escapes you,” called the tall woman, her voice ringing and echoing off the encircling mountains. “No woman evades you. Dark death below, we make offering to honor you!”

  This must be it at last, thought Karin, closing her eyes, the moment when they slit her throat.

  But instead she heard again the blurping of the boiling pond, then a lapping of waves. Images flashed across the inside of her eyelids as though she was seeing into someone else’s dream: bones, dried blood, skulls with nothing left but the hair. Against her will she opened her eyes to see a little stream of water, running uphill against nature, moving slowly toward the dead men. And then the mist became thicker, and even the stream was hidden. For several minutes there was no sound but a constant lapping of waves. A final belch, then, and the pond went still, though its rising steam continued to thicken the mists of night.

  No one moved or spoke. The scent of fear was strong in the hollow, and the only sound was the wind and the faintest creaks as the warriors shifted then again went motionless. Then someone, Karin thought Eirik, broke away from the rest and opened the door back into the castle. Light from a torch within laid a path of brightness across the stony hollow to the pool. The bodies were gone, leaving only a single arm band lying at the edge.

  Though everyone pushed each other in desperate haste at the narrow doorway, still no one spoke. The green-eyed woman held Karin back until all the others had passed through. When the door slammed behind them at last, several of the warriors let out their breaths loudly, and the woman released Karin’s arm.

  As they all stumbled back toward the firelit hall, she found the outlaw king beside her. “So, how did you like your first meeting with the lords of death?” he said mockingly, though none of the rest of his men had yet spoken. “I realize now that something I may have said could have made you think you were about to be killed yourself! I must apologize, Princess, if our rough ways caused you any distress.”

  She whirled in the narrow passage, furious and nearly in tears, and slapped him hard across the face. “How dare you!” she cried. “How dare you terrify me like that and then come to me with these false apologies, when it was all deliberate!”

  He grabbed her by the wrist and twisted her arm until she cried out. “Mountain cat, my men called you,” he said between his teeth. “Good term. But maybe I can make it up to you!” He jerked her to him and kissed her hard, though she tried to turn her head aside. “Wouldn’t you rather have a king for your lover than some young warrior?”

  She drove a knee toward his midsection, but he twisted out of the way. “I can see this one will take a little taming!” he said with a laugh, twisting her arm again.

  She took a deep, sobbing breath and went limp. Queen Arane was right. It was no use trying to use strength against a strong man—especially when it only excited him.

  Her sudden slump surprised him. “Please, I need to go to the women’s loft,” she said through entirely unfeigned tears. “I am with child, and I fear this has— I need the women to help me now.”

  He let go of her at once and squinted at her suspiciously, then took her arm again, much more gently this time. “Come on, then.” The green-eyed woman was waiting at the end of the passage. She gave the king a very bitter look as he handed Karin to her, mumbling something about women’s troubles. She then marched Karin off before her, down more narrow stone passages, deep into the castle.

  The room into which they emerged was a little warmer than most of the castle, for a brisk fire burned in the center. High up in the wall tiny windows opened onto black night. Here were the castle’s other women, though they drew back as she entered.

  At least I am safe from Eirik for tonight, Karin thought, falling exhaustedly into the straw the green-eyed woman ungraciously offered her. The woman had asked her nothing about her supposed troubles—and she was too tired to wonder if she really might be with child. If she continued to try to resist Eirik, at best she would have her arm broken, but if she tried to pretend affection for him this woman with the green eyes would kill her
without compunction.

  A castle that had frequent contact with the lords of death, she thought as sleep claimed her, would not care very much about the death of one young woman.

  She awoke before dawn, to find the fire burned down to coals and the windows high above her slightly lighter squares in a gray wall, through which a chilling wind blew. Fate had not meant then for her to die this night. As she leaned on her elbows, rubbing her forehead with her knuckles, she heard the straw rustle at the far side of the room and saw Eirik’s tall woman sitting up to glare at her. Around them, the rest of the castle’s women were sound asleep.

  The woman rose and motioned to her. Not knowing what this meant but not daring to disobey, Karin rose too and followed her out into the passage outside the room.

  Here it was even colder. She shivered, hugging herself with her arms and trying to avoid the desperate, closed-in feeling she had—usually—been able to overcome in the faeys’ tunnels.

  There was just enough light for Karin to see the woman combing straw out of her stringy hair with her fingers. “What do you want of us? Why did you really come here to Eirik’s castle?” she demanded in a fierce whisper.

  “I already told you,” Karin said resignedly. She too kept her voice low. “My lover and I were fleeing the king he used to serve. We did not even know all of you were here.” When the woman kept silent, as though to suggest that she did not believe her, Karin added a little more firmly, “Are you afraid then that I came here to steal Eirik from you, an outlaw and a murderer who feels he has a right to every woman he sees? Did you think a princess would be interested in that?”

  The woman took a sharp breath. “Maybe not,” she said after a brief pause, “but a princess and her lover would not choose the northern end of the Fifty Kingdoms if all they were seeking was safety. They would take a ship and go south, down to where the summers are warm and the booty is rich and unprotected, and no dragons lurk in the mountains.”