The people moved about as if sleepwalking, at least until they noticed him. His white-blond hair drew immediate attention. The wolf sitting on the hill above him drew more. The hairs on the back of Kern’s neck stood up alertly as dark mutterings caught up from behind him. He glanced from side to side, watching carefully for any sign of violence. His amber eyes set people back for a moment, but strength of numbers was on their side.
Before crossing the first plank bridge, he had picked up a small following of angry faces. Hands were on sword hilts and daggers.
Kern hurried on.
His feet thudded across a set of planks, rattling them together. The makeshift bridge bent a bit in the middle, but not so bad that he worried about another icy plunge. The scent of damp ash finally found him as he passed by the stone foundations of ruined homes. Kern did not dare pause, but his eyes missed no detail in passing. The charred edge to the beams looked sharp, no weathering, as if the fire had only recently burned out. But he had seen no smoke, and smelled no heat of flames in the air.
It had to have happened during the blizzard, then. Kern glanced into the surrounding hills. Had the people fled into the storm, to die of exposure? Or had they all stayed and died fighting?
Whatever the answer, there were still plenty of warm bodies left. Those not on burial detail scavenged through ruined homes and dug down into the bottom of cellar pits, searching for scraps of food. A few took stock of the ruined palisade, cutting out charred timbers and shaping new trees to replace them. Many people wore makeshift bandages, ripped from blankets, or showed raw, open wounds that had barely scabbed over with reddish brown crusts.
Waves of suspicion and fear washed over Kern as he pressed forward. A tangible presence. The crowd drew in closer behind him. Ahead, a line of clansfolk barred his way. Several stood with blades naked in their hands. His instincts told him to run, flee! Or draw a blade to protect himself. But a hunting knife would hardly be enough against the twenty or more bodies that surrounded him, penned him in like a sheep being corralled for slaughter. Their bloodshot eyes and drawn, haggard faces. They were a people at the end of their rope, but lacking the initial push to set upon him.
“What happened here?” Kern asked, finding his voice and glad to hear that it didn’t break too badly from lack of good drinking water.
No one answered. A woman spit at him. Her eyes were dark and sunken, and the tips of her ears were white with frostbite.
Kern licked swollen, chapped lips. His gaze traveled from one nearby face to the next, searching for any sign of leadership among these people. “Was it during the storm?” He waited. “Was it the Vanir?”
A large hand fell on his shoulder, clamping down, half-turning him around.
“And then some,” Reave said, a grim smile tucked away inside his brushy beard. He had twisted his dark hair into fine braids down both sides of his face. He also wore a second gold hoop in his left ear. A new trophy.
Ossian stood behind the large Gaud, his hair growing in as dark stubble. Both men had white, waxy patches of frostbite on their cheeks and the ends of their noses, but the damaged areas were well slathered with either oil or raw fat and looked like they’d heal fine.
Kern wanted to sag with relief, but he wouldn’t turn an unguarded back on the crowd. “You’re safe,” he said.
“Safe.” Ossian tested the word. Nodded. “Cold, tired, and shriveled—my balls might climb back out before summer’s end—but safe, yea.”
“Nay need for them anyways,” Desagrena chided him, hauling Ehmish with her through the nearby crowd. And Ashul. And Wallach Graybeard.
The Cruaidhi shuffled uncertainly.
“Mogh lost the tips of two fingers,” Ossian told him. Mogh was one of the Taurin. A dour-faced man who had yet to say more than a dozen words to Kern. “Frostbite. Poor fool never changed his grip on his sword.”
Wallach nodded. “Spent hours on that bluff face, trying to reach you. With two raiders giving us trouble. Took some time, but Reave an’ Daol wouldn’t let go of the idea until the storm turned for the worse and we had to squat it out. Worked ourselves a bit closer the next day, during a few soft spots in the blizzard. You must ha’ circled wider. We never tripped over you, and we’ve been here since late morn.”
“All of you?” Kern asked.
He didn’t have Reave’s impressive height, but he could see far enough into the gathered Cruaidhi to find Daol and Brig working their way toward him. There was Hydallan, who waved forward Garret and Mogh as well. And Nahud’r, with his dark skin, Kern picked out the man while still a stone’s throw away.
His band of warriors nearly matched the assembled Cruaidhi clansfolk now. They backed up a pace, then another, under Reave’s glacial stare. They finally gave way completely as a trio of larger warriors carrying war swords, and a large man with a pike and tall shield shoved their way up from the rear.
“This the one?” the larger warrior asked. His cheeks were shaven to a blue-steel closeness. He had flinty gray eyes that did not seem ever to blink, and wore a fox’s tail swinging from his wide leather belt.
“A little worse for wear and rough around the edges,” Hydallan said. “But yea, that’s the pup.”
“They say you hunt the Vanir and the Ymirish,” the Cruaidhi warrior said. “Though you’ve got the look of one yourself. Grimnir’s touch.”
“Grimnir?” Kern asked. He saw several nearby clansfolk make a sign against evil, even though Cimmerians were not, by nature, a superstitious lot. Those who did not still shuddered. A few suddenly found business elsewhere. “Was it him did this?” Kern asked Daol. The hunter would have all the latest rumors by then. “The Vanir warleader?”
“Weren’t no warleader,” one of the nearby Cruaidhi said. “Weren’t no man, anyway.” There was some grumbling agreement with that.
“A demon,” said another man with a hunted, haunted cast in his eyes. “I saw him. During the blizzard. The face of a beast and eyes of golden fire. Like all Ymirish. Like his!”
He thrust the accusation at Kern with a wild jab, pointing his eyes out to the crowd. They swayed, ready to surge forward, held off only by the sudden forest of steel blades that surrounded Kern, protecting him. Nahud’r swept in between Kern and the three able-bodied warriors, wielding the flanged scimitar Kern had last seen in the hands of the Vanir on the mountainside. Brig was there, too, holding his own broadsword as well as Kern’s arming sword and shield in his off-hand.
But when the Gaudic warrior tried to pass Kern the weapons he’d recovered off the mountainside, the large Cruaidhi swept his pike up in a strong arc to bat aside Nahud’r and thrust the shaft’s blue-iron tip right at Kern’s heart.
Kern barely had the time to feel surprised. He did feel the lance’s tip poking through his leather poncho, just enough to break the skin. A trickle of warm blood dripped down his chest.
“Tell them to stand down,” the Cruaidhi told Kern. He held the pike in strong hands, ready to thrust it home.
“Do it,” the man promised, “or your blood spills first.”
DESPITE THE COLD, Brig Tall-Wood felt warm. His face flushed. A trickle of sweat itched along his scalp, then burned down the side of his face in a slow-moving track, every muscle tightening for sudden violence when Gard Foehammer shoved his spear-tipped pike forward and all but impaled Kern Wolf-Eye on it.
Everyone else had met the large Cruaidhi earlier, before Wolf-Eye’s arrival. Gard was the ranking warrior—the settlement’s chief protector just now—and had seemed a fair-minded man as he shared a drink of heavy ale with Reave and Daol and Brig. Reminding Brig of Cul Chieftain, in a way. Strong. A leader of men. He was one of few Cruaidhi not dazed into a stupor by the late-season blizzard and Grimnir’s savage assault. If anything, he seemed eager to take the fight right back to the Vanir war leader, and restless that he had been left with temporary care of the ruined settlement.
Gard had also listened with great interest as Daol and a few of the others recounted the tales of thei
r adventure. Brig had felt a moment of unease, listening to the truth about Wolf-Eye’s banishment and the way he had come back to lend his sword. Saw the Cruaidhi’s opinion for Kern—for them all—rise a notch.
So he never suspected that Gard would turn on them so quickly.
It startled Brig, the pike flashing up and around, thrusting past his face close enough to feel the breeze of its passing. If he hadn’t been half-turned toward the outcast leader to hand him back his sword and shield, in a position to see that Wolf-Eye still lived, Brig might have cut around with his broadsword out of reflex, and certainly Gard would have run his pike through Kern’s chest, which would have pleased Cul most strongly, as Wolf-Eye would likely have been killed on the spot.
And Brig could have gone home.
Instead, Brig hesitated. His embarrassed flush came as much for his feeling of failure as it did the tension sweeping over the entire group. He had taken his eyes off a threat. Everything his grandfather and his da—even his brother and Cul, in their more generous moods—had taught him over twenty-one summers. All forgotten in a moment’s distraction.
It could be him right then, impaled on the large warrior’s pike; its tip of razor-sharp blue iron pierced through his back and sprouting out of his chest.
As it stood, he could not say for certain that having Kern held under the sharpened tip of the pike was any better. Brig could still force the situation. Swing on the other man, and count on Reave or Wallach backing him up in the confusion of violence. But it would be harder. Requiring a deliberate effort, embracing the very act he’d put off for so many days.
Also, Cul had commanded that Brig kill Kern Wolf-Eye himself.
Brig damned Cul Chieftain and damned Wolf-Eye as well! And damned himself, for that matter, for losing his nerve. He’d had the perfect chance during the battle for Taur. A stray arrow was all it would have taken. But it hadn’t been in him, he discovered, to kill a man so cold-bloodedly, in the back while he defended others against Vanir warriors.
Then Hydallan went and helped save Brig’s life, and the old man obviously thought well of Wolf-Eye despite the winter-tainted blood.
And Wolf-Eye had shown leadership. Compassion. Courage. Brig had to allow the outcast that much at least. Even in this situation, he had barely flinched when the long pike swept up to snag him right above the heart. His amber eyes stayed level and even, still the predator even when under the tip of the spear. He made no move away. Nothing aggressive.
He simply said, “Drop your blades.” As if asking them to bring in wood or get the campfires started.
And damned if every Gaudic warrior and Taurin didn’t obey.
Including him!
Brig turned where he could see both Wolf-Eye and Gard Foehammer. He pointed his broadsword at the ground, but kept a ready grip on it. Feeling a prickling sensation crawling out from the back of his neck as Wolf-Eye casually sheathed his own sword and slung his shield within the crook of his elbow.
“Whatever you are looking to do,” he said to Foehammer, “decide and do it now.”
Kern might as well have been talking to Brig. Decide! Either Brig believed in Cul Chieftain’s order, or he did not. His brother had agreed. Why was it he hesitated?
And why did Gard Foehammer?
Kern licked a dry tongue over his cracked lips. With his cold-ravaged face, his amber, lupine gaze, he looked like a creature out of the blizzard. Like a wolf. Savage and strong.
“To answer your question,” he said. “Yea. I hunt the Vanir. And the Ymirish. And they might well be my father’s people.” Brig saw how the admission hurt. A quick flash of pain behind those yellow, unblinking eyes. “But my mother was Cimmerian, by Crom, and so am I.”
Brig never saw Gard relax, not for the span of a heartbeat. But Wolf-Eye must have read something in the other man’s face. He reached up and pushed aside the spearpoint with a casual wave.
“Now. What is it you are wanting from me?” he asked.
Brig couldn’t say, not for Gard or for himself. All he knew for certain, it was too late, again, for him to decide. To act.
And he wondered what it would cost him in the days ahead.
17
“THE FIRST ATTACK came just before light,” Gard told Kern, pointing out the fire-ruined walls of the palisade. Walking a slow tour about the compound, Kern listened and studied everything the other man had to tell him. Nahud’r and Daol walked with them. Reave and a handful of the others trailing behind.
“Vanir. Don’t know how many for sure, maybe a hundred. Enough to overrun our watch posts at the entrance to the pass, and keep word from getting back. They splashed burning pitch onto the timbers there, and there. Then they spread out into the settlement, slashing and burning.”
“Those timbers look treated.” They did, with a black, sticky substance that smelled of tar and should not have caught fire easily.
“Put flame to any wood long enough, it burns.” Gard glowered. “We had our hands full with the raiders. Sent two hundred men outside the walls, pushing the raiders back toward Cottonmouth Creek there.”
Two hundred men! Kern tried to imagine, failed. Two hundred was an army. Two hundred should have been able to handle so many raiders.
He said so aloud. Reave frowned, the expression building on his forehead like a pending avalanche, then slowly falling down over his entire face. Daol merely shook his head. They had both heard the tale already. The others listened silently. For some, it was their first time.
Ehmish glanced about nervously, as if recounting it might summon back the Vanir horde.
“Maybe we could have held them. Thrown them off. But that’s when the second attack came at us. From the north. More raiders, and a dozen or more of these Ymirish who have been showing their faces over the last year.” He glanced at Kern, no doubt noting again the similarities in face, in features. “We’ve seen their like several times. Put a few of their heads on the walls, in fact. But these ones were larger, even. Stronger. And had a sorcerer among them.”
Gard turned the small group away from the ruined palisade and the first few homes, leading them along a trampled path to the northeast edge of town. But here Kern stopped.
“A sorcerer?”
Another Cruaidhi, one of Gard’s men, nodded. “He made the snow come alive. Saw it myself, I did.” He had a nervous way of jumping his gaze around, as if never quite sure whom to look at. “A long hump, rising out of the powder. Coiling around. Then it lifted up a head like a serpent, with diamond-bright eyes and fangs of icicles.”
Everyone looked down into the trampled snow, as if expecting such a demon to live again. Kern did see a slick of blood and snow, refrozen into a pinkish sheet of ice. So many dead.
“I didn’t see it rise,” Gard said, “but I saw it die. Not before it killed seven of our finest warriors, though, including Alaric, the chieftain’s son. Alaric put a javelin through its head, which slowed it down. But it got him in its coils and squeezed the life right out of him before it simply fell apart.”
Raiders and Ymirish. Grimnir the undefeatable. And now a sorcerer’s demon. Kern exhaled sharply his frustration. How was Cimmeria supposed to stand against this?
“By this time,” Gard continued, pushing the group ahead of him, “the fortress palisade was burning, and we were in complete disarray. The settlement came alive, and many men and women rushed out to help. But already I was losing men to the storm. Some lost. A few run off and hiding. The wind picked up, and the snow cut at our eyes like blades.
“That was when he came.”
Grimnir the invincible. The immortal. Champion of the northern gods. A terrifying man, he had to be—the rumors could hardly keep up. He grew larger every time Kern heard of him, and the wounds he’d taken and survived were legion.
Ehmish had heard many of them by now as well. “I hear you have to cut off his head,” the youth said, his voice breaking with the changes of age. “With a silver blade.”
“Twelve foot tall and shoots fire
from his eyes,” Hydallan groused, making fun of the young man’s gullibility. “Eats young Cimmerians for breakfast and lunch, I’ll wager.”
“Why not dinner?” Ehmish asked. Looking abashed, he tried to stand up for himself by taking a bite back at Hydallan. He should have known better.
“Not enough meat on their bones,” the old man said, not completely unkindly. Reaching out, he pinched the youth’s arm.
Ehmish had good, lean muscle on him, but Hydallan managed to make it seem like skin and bones. Ossian and Aodh laughed. Their barks invited others to join in, though no one did.
Gard frowned, shaking his head.
“You don’t believe the tales?” Kern asked.
“After seeing Cruaidh taken apart like this,” the clansman said, “I don’t know what to believe. I never got a good look at him myself. Most men I’d trust to tell me, who got close enough during the storm, are dead. Some sliced in half. Some crushed. A few had savage claw marks ripping out their throats. I came upon a good friend out in the darkness. His chest had been caved in. All he could say to me was, ‘Monster. Monster.’ And then he died.”
The rest was short and severe. The burning fort. The destroyed homes. Men dying by handfuls and no clear leadership. The Cruaidhi war host broke and ran, grabbing their families if they could find them, and their thickest blankets, heading out into the storm. Gard and Sláine Longtooth, the chieftain, rallied a short line of defenders, but that broke under a Vanir push, and so the call went out to run. Run and hide, and live for the next day. They hoped.
“About half came back,” Gard said, as they approached the burial grounds still being dug, filled, and covered. “The rest were lost to raiders or to the storm. We’ll be finding bodies deep into summer, if summer ever comes.”
“Raiding for food. Raiding for spoils. That I understand.” Kern looked around again at the total wreckage visited on Cruaidh. “This, this is madness. You can shear a sheep many times. You can only slaughter it once. Why do this?”
“Punishment. It’s the only thing Sláine Chieftain and I could think of. We’ve been pushing warriors up through the pass all winter, trying to open the Break-neck to the Broken Leg Lands. Cruaidh needs trade. It can’t survive without it. Too big. But the summer trade and autumn’s were choked off with Vanir controlling the pass. We saw no blue iron coming down from Clans Conarch or Morgach. None of the late-winter grains they are able to grow on the other side of the Teeth. We need these things to survive the winter. So we tried to reopen the pass.
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