‘Hetwoman?’ Hepsus prompted her for a response. ‘Do you wish to meet with them?’
She leaned back and, allowing her most imperious expression to drift idly across her face, nodded her agreement. ‘I think so, Hepsus. Make the arrangements. I will speak with this – what did you say his name was?’
‘Deron.’
‘Yes. Deron. Invite him to accept the hospitality of the Schwarzvolf. We will discuss how we can... work together.’
‘This seems... eminently sensible.’ To Valkia’s irritation, Hepsus was outwardly surprised at her competence. It did little to quench the flame of anger she felt towards the other warrior. She knew, deep down, that it was to be expected. He had not openly challenged her position when he had been given the chance, but he was certainly not missing any chances now. She would prove her worth to them all in time but Hepsus was a unique challenge.
He would make the perfect new Warspeaker as well, but Valkia would not grant him the satisfaction of acknowledging it. Not yet.
‘I will meet with him and a deputation in four days. They are to leave their weapons with a warrior of your choosing. We will give them a feast of both food and words. They will understand that we are not like Eraich and his men.’
‘As you command.’ The red-haired warrior got to his feet and moved to the entrance of the yurt. She stopped him with a quiet whisper of his name. He turned and looked at her, his eyes glittering in the firelight and giving away nothing.
‘Hepsus.’
‘Hetwoman?’
‘Do not seek to belittle me in this venture. My father may have been a forgiving, weak fool, but I am not. Play this game on my side and the rewards will be considerable. Try to push against me and the consequences will be on your own head. Do we understand one another?’
‘Clearly.’ A smile flickered across his face and it was filled with genuine humour.
She nodded in grim satisfaction and the warrior left her alone. After she was sure he had gone, she picked up one of the cushions and flung it the length of the yurt. She should have known that she would face this kind of problem before she started. Indeed, perhaps she had known and merely pushed the thought of how she would handle it to the back of her mind.
Valkia’s tantrum did not last long and she composed herself within a few short seconds. She ran her finger across her dark hair and stared into the flames. Let this Deron make whatever he would of her gender. She would show him that the Schwarzvolf were not going to submit to the will of an invading tribe. She would roll over and beg for mercy from no man.
She sat alone for several minutes and then got to her feet. There was another matter that demanded immediate attention; that of the deteriorating mental well-being of Kata. In the days since Merroc’s demise, the chieftain’s widow had become increasingly detached. Valkia had already made the arrangements to have her two half-sisters cared for by other members of the tribe, but Kata had refused to give Edan up to anybody’s care.
Valkia ducked out of the tent. Twilight had spread through the sky and the temperatures had dropped considerably. To the north, the dancing lights of the far-distant aurora could be seen as they revealed themselves to the night. A pang of long-ago memory touched Valkia momentarily as she recalled sitting atop the shoulders of a man she had once adored.
A faint flapping sound caught her attention and she turned to see what it was. The corpse of Radek, nailed to a wooden pole and placed at the edge of the camp, had already suffered badly from the unkind and merciless caress of the elements and the carrion birds that had gathered when the bodies had been mounted. What remained of his clothing fluttered in the light, chill breeze giving the body a faintly unnatural animation.
Seeing Radek there steeled Valkia’s resolve and memories of her father were banished. Moving with her shoulders pulled back and her head held high, she headed for the tent where Kata had barricaded herself against the outside world.
As she approached, she sensed that something was not quite right simply from the smell that struck her. Despite the cold, which could slow down the process of death quite considerably, there was an unmistakable stench of death in the air. Her nostrils flared slightly and her pace quickened. Yes – without doubt – there was the bitter tang of blood on the wind. An almost unbearable desire to turn her back on the camp and go out in the woods to hunt swept over her, but the young woman fought it back with considerable self-control.
The entrance to the tent had been stitched together from the inside. Kata’s stitches were tight but uneven; it had been an urgent act that her stepmother had performed. Scowling slightly, Valkia stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips.
‘Kata.’
She began with a soft voice, but received no reply. Her voice rose in volume until tiring of her efforts, she merely took her dagger from her hip and tore a new entrance in the thick hide of the dwelling.
The interior heat of the tent washed over her in a wave of unpleasant odour and stale air. It did not surprise her one bit to see the scene that lay before her. Kata was dead and there was no way that Valkia could start to guess how long that had been the case. She didn’t know if Kata had died swiftly or had lingered for days. She was lying on the floor of the tent, her eyes open and staring upwards. Her fingers had locked around a wooden cup and Valkia prised it free. She sniffed the contents and coughed. It was one of the more potent herbs that her people used, usually to quicken the death of a warrior who had suffered a mortal wound in battle. From the number of crushed leaves still clinging to the side of the cup, Kata had taken enough to fell a mountain lion.
As if to aid the process, or perhaps simply in her madness, she had also carved gashes in each forearm and the corpse was grey. The woman was drained of all blood.
She stood up and looked around. Edan was still alive, but weak. He had no strength to cry and he lay on the ground at his dead mother’s side, his eyes flowing with silent tears. He was covered in her sticky blood.
Without emotion, Valkia stared at the corpse of a woman who had always been her friend, but who had, in the end, been too weak. She felt no sorrow at this second familial bereavement, merely a faint sense of annoyance.
A choking sob pulled her attention towards the boy. Edan was almost a year old and had not yet quite mastered the art of walking unaided. The hetwoman considered the infant without words for a time. It would be the easiest thing in the world to suffocate him now. Nobody would ever know.
In the years that followed, Valkia never truly knew what it was that caused her to spare the child’s life that night. It was not sympathy, she knew that. It was more that she was suddenly compelled by a notion that if he lived, he would surely be of use to her in time.
She stooped and plucked the starving child up and balanced him on her hip. He clung to her, his little monkey arms around her neck and buried his face in her shoulder. Casting a final, scornful look at her dead stepmother, Valkia carried Edan from the tent and ordered it burned to the ground. In the eyes of the Schwarzvolf, Kata had committed one of the most unforgivable sins. Suicide was no way for a noble tribesman or woman to die and was never condoned.
In a short period of time, the balance of power and the very dynamic of the tribe altered. The chieftain and his wife were dead; the betrayal of a Warspeaker still haunted the conversations around camp and a woman – barely more than a girl – was taking their lives into her untried hands.
Nobody said a word as Valkia walked from Kata’s tent, merely scurried to obey her commands. There was something in her manner that suggested non-compliance would not be conducive to continued good health. She pushed the traumatised Edan onto a young woman of Eraich’s tribe who took the little boy gladly. Behind her, flames licked into the darkening night as the last trace of her upbringing was rendered to ash.
FIVE
The Blood God
The meeting with the Bloody Hand ran as Valkia had expected it to. The arrival of Deron and his companions had caused a certain ripple of terror amongs
t the farming folk who recognised those who had slaughtered their friends and family. They were dressed not unlike the Schwarzvolf in a mixture of treated leather and furs, but there the similarities ended. The Bloody Hand were of a different stock to Valkia’s people: bigger, stronger and, as she found out over the course of the discussions, bordering on the insane.
The deputation had refused outright to be parted with their weapons, but had actually offered a com-promise that was acceptable. Their weapons were bound tightly into their scabbards making any attempts to unsheathe them difficult and time-consuming. It was a unique solution to a long-standing problem and Valkia had taken mental note of it.
Deron was a young man of around twenty-five years old, huge and powerfully muscled, with green eyes that looked to Valkia as though they flickered between sanity and madness constantly. She found him exotic and that in itself made him strangely attractive.
Kata had spoken once of the need to bear children and it was something that Valkia had always ignored or shrugged off. She was not the maternal type, but she knew that it would fall to her at some point to bear a strong heir – male or female – to follow her. Whenever she looked at this big, powerful man with his dark hair and mad eyes, she hungered for him in a way she had never felt before. Even Radek, who she had loved in her way, had never stirred her passion in the way that Deron did.
She let none of this show during the course of their discussions however, maintaining an air of cultivated indifference to the Bloody Hand. She learned that they were small in number and that they had come down from higher in the hills several years before. They had never encountered the Schwarzvolf in that time.
They addressed every single sentence to Hepsus until Valkia finally grew annoyed.
‘Speak to me,’ she said. ‘I am Valkia, hetwoman of the Schwarzvolf. You will show respect, man of the Bloody Hand, or you will answer to the tip of my spear.’
Her anger showed as two pink spots high on her cheek and Deron had studied her thoughtfully for a few moments. When he spoke, his voice was a low rumbling bass that did nothing to dispel the sense of attraction she felt for him. His accent was strange and the awkwardness of his pronunciation suggested that they either spoke very little or simply had their own language.
‘Your Warspeaker tells us a woman leads the Schwarzvolf. We do not believe this to be true.’
‘Do you think women weak?’ Deron laughed at this.
‘No,’ he said, simply. ‘Far from weak. We have all witnessed the pain of childbirth. My father says that no man could ever bear that. But until now, I had not met a tribe with a woman in such a position of great power.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you imbued with the unnatural?’ When she looked puzzled at his words, he corrected himself. ‘Do you practise magic?’
‘I am a warrior,’ she retorted, affronted at such a suggestion. She took up her spear. ‘I fight at the heart of every battle and I am afraid of no man.’ Deron tipped his head to one side and considered the spear.
‘Is that an invitation to fight?’
It was phrased as a question and Valkia instinctively understood its meaning. Deron was suggesting a challenge. Not to her position, but merely to gauge her strength. It would weaken her position considerably if she were to refuse. A smile came over her face.
‘An invitation to fight? An interesting notion.’ She laughed. ‘Yes. We shall fight, Deron of the Bloody Hand.’
She was rewarded with a smile that exposed all of Deron’s jagged, vicious-looking teeth. A handsome face? Yes, very handsome. But there was something more in that look than simple mutual attraction. There was a lust for blood. Her blood. And like everything else in her life, Valkia was not going to give it up easily.
The Circle of Blood, as it was known, was little more than a cleared area of dirt on the west side of the camp with a thick post hammered rigidly into the ground that marked its centre. The arena was a churned, pockmarked landscape of mud and slush, crusted with ice and spotted with sticky, crimson pools revealing its heavy and frequent usage. The Schwarzvolf took the training of their young warriors very seriously and did not use practise weapons. A training session with the Warspeaker rarely ended in death, but it was not completely unknown.
Flakes of snow were drifting lazily down from the grey sky and Valkia raised her eyes to the heavens as she stepped into the circle, blinking away the flakes. Within days, these light flurries would turn to the endless snows of winter.
News of this trial of arms against the representative of an unknown tribe had spread throughout the camp like wildfire and a relatively large crowd had gathered. The fighting area itself was an open space but the Schwarzvolf remained at a practised distance. A length of heavy, braided rope was threaded through a hole in the central post and lay in two ends that were equidistant. The baying audience stood a few paces back from the ends of rope.
Valkia had stripped back to nothing more protective than a leather vest and a pair of heavy deerskin trousers. Her arms were bare and exposed to the cold of the day, the flesh was dimpled and the hairs raised. She did not shiver, however, either from the temperature or from fear.
Despite the chill in the air, Deron had stripped off his heavy leathers and furs and was going to fight bare-chested. Valkia chewed on her lower lip at the sight of his physique. He was just as big beneath the clothing as he had been with it over his shoulders. His powerful arms and his broad back rippled with sinewy muscle and Valkia’s eye was drawn to the curious brand in the centre of his chest. It appeared to be a strange, angular representation of a skull, and the sight of it stirred old childhood memories of a battle long past. She set them aside with easy detachment. There would be time enough to think on the discovery later.
By mutual agreement, they had decided on a knife fight and already Valkia was sizing up her opponent, working out opportunities to bring him down. She had thought that he would be big and strong, but seeing him like this, suspected that there might be a swiftness to his movements as well. Their left hands were bound with the free ends of the marker rope, creating an unbroken bond between them that must not be severed until the battle was decided. It could also be used, if so desired, to lethal effect by a canny warrior. More than one unlucky soul had met their end choked to death by its unyielding coils.
‘To first blood, Valkia of the Schwarzvolf?’ Deron asked the question across the arena and she confirmed her acceptance of the terms in a loud, clear and strong voice.
‘To first blood. Deron of the Bloody Hand.’ She readied herself, drawing the wicked, double-edged knife from the sheath on her thigh. It was a well balanced blade and one which she had used for many years. It had been her father’s before hers and despite its age, the edge had never dulled. Some whispered that there was untamed magic deep at its heart. It was an unusually bright blade, not like the heavy iron that made up most of their weapons. It flashed in her hand.
The two combatants prowled around the arena, each weighing up the other and tugging at the rope experimentally. Valkia raked in the sight of the man opposite her and approved silently of his cat-like grace. These men were strong, fine warriors – that much she could tell – and that hint of madness she had seen in his eyes suggested that they were fierce.
For a time it was obvious that neither wanted to make the first move and then Valkia, perhaps tiring of the game, darted like a silverfish, quick and fast, feinting to Deron’s right side and coming to a halt behind him. The move was lightning quick, but the big man spun on his heel and hunkered low in a defensive stance, the knife held out before him.
Several of Valkia’s people made noises of approval as the two warriors in the arena came together. Valkia’s slim, lithe body merged into the shadow of Deron’s bigger one as they pressed against one another, assessing each other’s strength.
‘You are strong,’ grunted Deron. ‘Fast, too.’ Another of those sharp-toothed smiles and he added the sting. ‘For a woman.’ He broke away from her in a movement that made her stumble slightly as the r
ope snapped taut. She did not fall but regained her balance quickly and dropped, rolling head-over-heels away from the downwards slash that he aimed at her arm. She got back up to a crouch and pounced, a dark-haired wildcat, towards his leg. The blade of the silvery dagger flashed in the weak winter sunlight and Deron jerked his body forward sending up a spray of mud. She missed his calf by a fraction of an inch.
She swore loudly and leaped back to her feet, only to be caught by a blow from his fist. She felt it crack across her cheekbone and her world exploded in pain. Her head whipped to the side and she turned back to glower at him in fury. There was a mad grin on his face.
‘You wanted to fight, so we fight,’ he said, simply. ‘To first blood, yes? As we agreed? Blood for the Blood God.’
The words he spoke meant nothing to Valkia at all and yet they still stirred something deep inside her. All she knew was that this unfamiliar man who was a potential enemy of her people was taunting her and she would not let the insult go.
With a low bellow of rage, she hurled herself at the big man, not caring about form or style. She would claw out his eyes if she had to. His laughter did little to force back the anger.
‘Fight!’
He said the word again as he moved easily from her attack. Her face was growing scarlet with rage. He was embarrassing her in front of her people. The thought that they were all watching this public humiliation woke something feral in her. A ululating scream left her throat and she leaped at Deron’s back, winding the rope easily around his exposed neck. He was still laughing. And that made her even angrier.
She raised the knife, ready to plunge it into the arterial vein in his neck. She would give him blood for his Blood God, whatever that even meant. But no matter how angry she was, Deron was still bigger and stronger than she was and he threw her free quickly. She hit the ground hard and lay there for a moment, winded. The low sounds of approval from her people had swollen to cheers as she’d launched herself at Deron, but now a silence descended.
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