He wouldn’t remember much more than flashes of the next few moments. It was all white splashes of water, horizontal snow, and more scrapes and bruises than he could count.
Scrabbling through mud. Fighting for any kind of desperate handhold.
Feeling plants uproot under his weight, then tumbling . . . sliding . . . falling back into open space.
He hit hard, his breath hammered from him. Rolled through more light brush. It was a good thing there were no large trees or heavy rock outcroppings, because Kern certainly would have broken bones or caved his head in against one. He managed to turn the barrel roll into a slide, with cold, clammy muck raking up the back side of his kilt. This lasted only seconds before another short fall spun him around hard again. And again.
And again.
15
THERE WEREN’T MANY things more dangerous than being lost, alone, in a Cimmerian blizzard. Even if it should have been several weeks—a month—into springtime.
Wet from a trip down the splashing creek. No food. No blanket. Just a threadbare, half-soaked winter cloak and a tattered leather poncho. Kern’s chances didn’t look good.
He finally slid into a patch of brambles, the thorns catching him by cloak, kilt, and skin. At least it stopped his sliding fall before something larger, like a tree, halted it more abruptly. Detangling himself occupied several long and painful moments while the ends of his fingers turned numb from the wet and cold. His teeth chattered, which for him was a huge worry. He had to get moving quickly, to work off the chill.
After a few false starts, Kern realized that any attempt at an uphill climb—snow-blind, in the dark— was futile. At best, he’d end up rolling right back down into the brambles.
He tried to gauge his bearings. Failed. The dry snow stung his eyes, and the wind drew away any possible shouts for rescue, or hearing any rescuers. He remembered Daol talking to him about bearing for a protected vale, and figured he had to be farther down than the hunter had thought. Heading north, then, might catch him up with the others. Or it might get him hopelessly lost.
What happened in a wolf pack, he wondered, when the leader didn’t come back? Did the pack go looking? Or did it move on?
Survival first. He had to assume the others would find a safe place to bed down and wait out the storm. They’d look for him as soon as they could. He worried about his exposed position. Down inside the narrow cleft he had some shelter from the wind, but not much. Brig knew about where Kern had gone over the bluff slope, but the Gaudic warrior was far from Kern’s strongest supporter and, even if he did make the effort, there was no guarantee he’d be able to find his way back to the trail and back to the right spot with help.
No good praying. Crom had already done more than his share in making the Cimmerians a strong and hardy race. No matter what Kern suspected about his parentage, that was what he believed. And when left to one’s own strengths, one did not sit around debating it.
Fall down seven times. Get up eight.
North, then. Struggling along for the best footing he could find. Over the next while, he crawled switchback up an easier slope than the one he’d fallen down, then half slid down the back side.
The feel of the land, the way the ravine wall twisted back, Kern thought he might be turned more east than he’d like. Forging on, he planned a more circuitous route that would bend him back around toward Cruaidh and his warrior band. The whiteout conditions robbed him of any certainty, but at least he was moving. Without shelter, movement was the next best aid to staying alive. Kept him warm—or less cold anyway. And each step was one pace closer to help.
Pulling his fur-lined cloak up around his head, Kern used a dry edge to guard most of his face as he’d seen Nahud’r do with the woolen scarf. Arms tucked in next to his body, fingers curled on the inside of the makeshift cover. The best he could do to protect against frostbite.
The rest was simple exertion. One foot after another. Never slowing down so much the sweat began to freeze against his skin.
That was how Kern spent his first night. Stumbling through the blizzard.
Near morning, hoping to find a clear path and hoping more that he still worked his way northwest, Kern stumbled up against a sheer cliff face with no easy way around it. He did find a granite outcropping, though, forming a small hole where the snow had yet to do much more than brush dry flakes over the ground inside. Kern shook the ice and snow from his winter cloak of gray wolf fur, then hunched down and pulled it over him like the smallest tent. Curling into a tight ball, rocking forward, he wedged himself under the rocky protrusion.
The wind screamed at Kern, a frustrated howl of rage that he had managed to escape its grasp. Sharp edges dug into his back, his side, and soon his muscles ached with cramps. But he warmed. The deep, teeth-chattering cold he’d fought and wrestled with the entire night withdrew. It settled back into the familiar chill he’d lived with his entire life, which meant—he hoped—that he had a chance once more to survive.
Finally, he slept.
Day and night was the difference of a howling, wind-raging darkness and a blinding, snow-chocked gloom. It felt as if winter, being pressed once again by spring, had lashed back with a vengeance, refusing to release its death grip. Suffering under the chokehold of Vanir raiders wasn’t enough, apparently. The weather wanted to remake Cimmeria into an image of the Nordheim wastelands.
Kern peeked out from under his cloak when he woke the first time, then bundled the garment back over his face and drifted off again. His body knew enough to resist going back out into the storm now that he had decent shelter.
The second time, a cramping bladder forced him out momentarily. He could not roll back into his cloak fast enough, but by then he was fully awake and so took further stock in his situation.
Every joint ached with the cold and his tight, cramped position. When he tried shifting around, his bones protested with brittle pain. His refuge smelled of urine and the drying muck caked about his body from the sliding fall of the previous night. His mouth was parched. He dry-swallowed, and his throat scratched as if he were trying to force down wooden thorns.
A handful of snow melting in his mouth helped some. Hunger pangs would go unanswered, however.
Every scrap of food he’d carried had been tied down in his pack.
Kern spent the day coiled up in his stone nest, like a rock viper waiting for prey. He slept when he could. Counted heartbeats when he could not. And he stayed alive.
The wind tried to trick him out into its clutches, at times howling in his ears like attacking Vanir, at others bringing him choppy gusts that hinted at the shouts of his friends. Daol. Reave. Hydallan and even young Ehmish.
Maybe not Desa or Wallach. They were quiet with him.
Certainly not Brig Tall-Wood.
Kern thought quite a bit about Cul’s man, in fact. He remembered the strange looks—the desperation and the cunning, both—and the way Brig had acted once the two found themselves alone on the trail, cloaked by the snowstorm. Kern hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now had nothing but lonely, dark hours in which to think. Brig was not outcast. He had been sent by Cul to see Maev home. Hadn’t he? If so, why hadn’t he gone back to Gaud with her? Why exile himself from clan and kin, to chase after Kern and the others?
Unless he wasn’t finished with whatever else he’d been sent to do.
Like take vengeance for Cul against Kern Wolf-Eye?
An unsettling thought to sleep on, but sleep Kern did. And he woke somewhere before morning as the storm finally blew itself out. He listened. Head muffled beneath his cloak. Breathing through the long hairs of the ragged wolf pelt pressed into his face. He heard the dying gusts, sharper than the storm winds and still cutting with mountain chill, but losing the blizzard’s primal rage.
Now, Kern decided. He had to get moving again while he could still rub life into his tired muscles and frozen joints. Peeking out at the thick, new carpet of snow that tapered into his hiding hole, he stared into the dar
k for another hour at least, still yelling at himself to get up, get moving, and to survive.
Always, to survive.
Kern crawled out with lethargic reluctance, then collapsed into the snow with severe muscle cramps. Kneading life back into the rock-hard flesh, he watched his breath frost before his eyes and decided to accept that as a positive sign he still lived. Cimmeria would not claim him yet.
Though it might if he did not find food or better shelter. Soon. And not easy tasks, either one.
Scaling the cliff face strained Kern’s cramping muscles, but there was not a hillside or mountain scarp yet made that a Cimmerian could not master. Gaining the summit, however, he saw he had little to look forward to other than more of the same. Kern had lost himself inside a wrinkled fold of land that was more cleft and cliff than the usual hills and vales of Conall Valley. Badlands. Hard on the traveler, and what Daol had tried to help the band avoid by swinging them along the bluff Kern had fallen off. He’d wandered farther to the east than he’d thought in that first night.
Now he had to crawl his way back.
A frosted mist hung over the morning, making it impossible to find the sun except in the most vague sense of “east.” Enough, he hoped, to keep him on a fair track north and west. Again, north and west. Kern watched for any sign of his friends, his warriors. Any sign of a trail toward Clan Cruaidh. The sparse blanket of snow made trail-hunting difficult, though he did find some evidence of life in marmot tracks and fox. And then the farther spread of prints belonging to a lone wolf.
“By Crom, not possible,” he whispered aloud. Coincidence. Had to be.
He believed that, mostly, until shouldering his way past some reaching branches of basket cedar, finding himself staring across a bloody kill at the dire wolf he’d fought at the very start of his misadventure. The silver-furred animal had the same dark band around its yellow eyes. The same snow-white paw. It looked healthier, stronger. Well fed, with new flesh filling out beneath its thick, coarse pelt.
Its muzzle was red with fresh blood, and when it growled at him, he could see flesh caught in between its canines.
The wolf had dug out a marmot, by the looks of the clearing. Disturbed snow and broken earth lay scattered about in clumps and sprays. The wolf had already chewed out the stocky rodent’s soft belly, going for the warm guts first. Now it was in the middle of ripping off large hunks of hide and flesh.
Kern let the branch he was holding snap back behind him, and the savage animal jumped back as if suspecting a trap. It left the eviscerated rodent on the ground between them, though closer to it than to Kern. When it made to sneak forward and grab its kill, Kern took a few steps and shouted at the beast.
It dodged away, but only a few more paces, then sank its front quarters low against the ground as it snarled a warning.
“I took you down once,” Kern reminded it, as if the animal understood him clearly. “I’ll do it again.” He jumped forward, thrusting his head at the wolf. Never flinching, which would have brought the animal at him that much faster.
The wolf skipped back again, still eager to reclaim its kill but not about to charge. Not yet. The feral gleam in its yellow eyes reminded Kern very much of the Ymirish he had seen, and fought. Maybe he had a kind of kinship with both, maybe with neither.
“If it were my choice, I’d rather it be with you,” he admitted, keeping his voice level and never breaking eye contact. It didn’t matter what he said, really, just how he said it. His own lupine gaze remained hard and steady. “Now I’m going to pick up that marmot, and you are going to let me.”
He stooped quickly, reaching out without looking as he kept his amber gaze locked on the wolf. The animal bounced back to a safer distance. It began to circle Kern, who now had its prey in his large hands. Hands it might still remember. It stopped snapping and snarling, but it did not leave him.
Kern turned with it, watching for any wild rush. He brought out his knife and cut through the fur around the marmot’s neck. Gripping the fur in one hand and digging into the rodent’s breastbone with the other, he jerked once, violently, and shed the pelt. He tossed the hide out toward the dire wolf, though not directly at it. It watched with suspicion, then edged in and caught up the mess of fur and fat, carried it a short distance away before ripping at it with tooth and claw to rend it into swallow-sized chunks.
“What are you doing way up here?” Kern asked. He stripped away tiny slivers of meat and chewed them slowly before swallowing. They tasted salty from the blood. Better than horseflesh. Not as good as venison. “What are you searching for?”
It wasn’t hard, really, to imagine what had pulled the wolf along his trail. Not once he thought it out. Kern had overpowered the animal, forcing it into submission. Wolves were territorial, true, but they were also conditioned to be subservient to the stronger male. When the leader of the pack moved, the entire pack moved. And if there was any doubt about the wolf’s choice, certainly that had been forgotten once Kern led it to the first Vanir slaughter pit. He pictured the dire wolf licking up blood from the snow and muddied earth, finding the strips of hide and flesh he had missed. All along Kern’s trail thereafter it had found more slaughter and fresh Vanir bodies that would be easy to tear into for a meal.
Survival. That was also the wolf’s main concern. Follow the food.
“Still strange,” he said, slicing the last flesh and fat he could from the carcass, then tossing the bones and gristle out into the snow. Not quite far enough. The wolf hesitated. Kern backed off a few paces, and gave it room to come for what was left of the marmot. “Any raider corpse left out would have fed you and the crows for a week.”
The animal stared at him as if it expected something more. Something profound, perhaps. Like a long, lonely howl.
“Bah! Go on!” Kern stomped toward it, waving his arms. Running it off with the marmot carcass gripped in its jaws. “Got enough problems of my own,” he muttered.
But from the top of the next hill, he looked back along his path with a touch of regret. “Thanks,” he said. And meant it.
The wolf gave him several glimpses of itself throughout the day, always at the edge of Kern’s sight, ghosting through the frosted mist like a shadow stalking his path. Occasionally Kern rounded some brush or came over a slight rise to see the animal much closer, though never again as close as when they had stared at each other over the fresh kill.
Somewhere in the late morning he quit being surprised at these glimpses. By midday he would call out a greeting to the wolf when he saw it. He named it Frostpaw, for the one white patch on its left front foot. And when he had a choice of turning south or north around a particularly steep bluff, spotting Frostpaw’s tracks heading south was usually enough to convince him. As good a way to decide as any. Until finally Kern came upon a long, uphill slope where he saw the wolf pacing back and forth just short of its crest. It danced and lowered itself, then skipped to one side or the other again. Looking nervous. Trapped.
Kern came at the animal slowly, knowing better than to treat it as anything but a wild and dangerous creature. The dire wolf trotted away from him, toward the crest. Stopped. Reversed itself and paced in between Kern and its path. As Kern advanced, he pressed the wolf forward reluctantly. Then suddenly it broke away, bounding over the crest in four loping strides, leaving Kern behind. Wary, Kern followed, and soon saw what had bothered the wild creature so.
Cruaidh.
Or what was left of it.
16
CRUAIDH HAD BEEN the largest settlement in Conall’s Valley, spread throughout a wide vale that opened up on the western side toward the Pass of Blood. The pass allowed for the only way into the Broken Leg Lands without traveling far to the south, around the Teeth and the massive rise of Ben Morgh. Because of this, Cruaidh controlled all trade through the valley and most of what went east toward the lake country as well. Merchants passed that way automatically. Nemedian craftsmen and Gunderland trappers. Aquilonian ambassadors. Soldiers.
Raiders.
Kern had never seen the settlement, but it had been described by enough summer travelers that he recognized what was left of it even through the lingering mists. A gentle river cut through the vale, passed over in several places by rough planks set between piles of stone that might have once formed sturdy bridges.
Cruaidh’s tall palisade had been pulled down along one side, burned on two others. Not a complete loss, but close enough. One watchtower had been toppled by chopping a supporting leg out from beneath it. Swinging from the crossbeams of another tower hung several ropes. Kern could easily imagine the bodies that had been left dangling, turning and swaying in the mountain winds. He counted dozens of ruined sheds, and torched homes once large enough to house two families, at least by the standards he knew in Gaud.
A wide field of disturbed earth on the northeast edge of the vale told Kern where the funeral fields had been dug. It looked large enough to plant every man, woman, and child of Gaud three times over. And there were still half a dozen open gravesites. One with mourners gathered around it. Two more with bodies lying nearby, sewn into blankets, waiting their turn.
It made him remember Burok Bear-slayer. He wondered if Cul ever got Bear-slayer north, to the Field of the Chiefs.
Frostpaw had paused a third of the way down the far side of the slope, pacing along the hillside as if held back by an invisible fence. He clearly was not going any farther. When Kern started down, the skittish wolf circled back and behind him, standing a silent vigil, watching the shadows of men and women drift about below.
Dozens, Kern guessed. Maybe a hundred. Not even half the number he expected from the valley’s largest clan holding. He saw tents strung up against the palisade’s remaining side and more staked over the frozen ground near the stream. Enough to house the numbers he could see, barely, until homes could be rebuilt.
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