by K. Eason
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Kathryn F. Eason
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
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Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503934498
ISBN-10: 1503934497
Cover design by M. S. Corley
To Tan and Loren, who were there when it all began
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
PART TWO
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PART THREE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Smoke collected on the belly of the storm. It rose up in slim fingers above the tree line, coiled into a fist when it cleared the ridge. Hung there and spread against the underbelly of the clouds like oil across water.
If a man stood just so, facing into the wind, he might imagine that it was the forest burning. Except this was the wrong season for natural fires. Too cold, too wet, snow underfoot and more waiting overhead. It was the wrong smell, too, for burning trees. The wind brought a firepit stink, flesh and charcoal and dung. Village smells, which most days meant sure shelter, with a storm on the way.
Then that man would peer skyward and consider the clouds, and give thanks to his ancestors that the village was so near and that he had a sackful of tradables to buy his welcome. Snowhare skins, soft and white. A fine rack of antlers he’d taken off a bull elk that had broken through the snow-crust upslope a day ago, weak and furious and an easy mark for arrows.
Good fortune, Veiko had thought then. Meat and hide, horn and hooves. Worth the extra day spent above the trees while the storm gathered. Worth the weight on the hike down. A stranger did not walk into an Alvir village unchallenged, from the forest, looking like Veiko did. A stranger came by the road, with goods and hands on clear display, his axe on his hip and bow slung on his back.
Except on that road now, there was a column of soldiers jogging toward the crease in the hills, and the smoke, and the village. Their collective breath streamed out behind them like steam off a boiling pot. The standard-bearer’s flag clung sullenly to its pole, wrapped tight against the gusts. Illhari legion, armed and armored and moving fast.
Now Veiko wondered if he’d caught the elk’s unluck. Failed to appease its spirit. Because that was not village smoke collecting there above the trees. Nor was that the smell of village cookfires.
Charred meat. Charred wood. The smell of raiding.
Had Veiko not found that elk, he might have been in the village when the raiders came, and it might be his meat stinking on the wind. He shivered. Perhaps it was not unluck the elk had given him. Perhaps its spirit had repaid him in kind: saved him from a trap and slow death in return for relief from the same.
Beside him, Helgi heaved a deep-chested whine. Protest. Query. Distress, maybe, at the smoke-reek and the movement on the road. Veiko dropped a quick hand to the dog’s head. Glanced sidelong and found Logi halfway out of his crouch, ears up and curious. Logi knew roads meant villages, people, new things, and warm sleeping.
But not that village, not now. Even if he might find walls still standing, or some shelter, the legion wouldn’t welcome him. Tall, pale foreigner, with village houses burned and people dead, no, they would—what was the Dvergiri word for it?—detain him. And likely shoot his dogs. Maybe throw him in chains after and sell him in the city. He’d heard his elders’ tales about Illhari justice. Best he get as far from the road as he could, as soon as he could. There were other villages. Let the raiders come for him, if they felt brave. Let them try to find him at all.
He took a handful of Logi’s scruff. “No.” He winced. Days since he’d used his voice. “Wait.”
Logi sighed and dropped his chin onto his paws. Helgi chuffed and settled back to his belly. And the three of them waited, part of the snowscape, until the last trooper bobbed out of sight.
Snowdenaelikk had just rolled the last of her jenja, lit it, and blown the first smoke that didn’t stink like destruction, when Briel’s sending came. A cascade of jumbled impressions crowded into her skull. A svartjagr’s vantage, above the tree line and moving fast: dizzy twist of tree and ground, a flash of
two legs
color, the hollow-gut swerve and there, a
clutch
trio of troopers, marching ragged up the path above Davni. One trailed
wounded/prey
behind the others, who
pecked
kept heads together. Two male, one female. And because Briel remembered her training: an eyeblink’s focus on the weapons. Plain legion blades, still sheathed. Short javelins in a sling on the larger man’s back. Crossbow on the woman’s. The night-and-blood diamond pattern on the tunics. They were from Cardik’s garrison, that was no surprise. But to arrive at this toadshit village already, this fast—Laughing God, that was.
The sending ended, and the blindness came. Price of a svartjagr’s sending, yeah, count it out in heartbeats. No need for panic. Listen to the sizzle where her jenja had landed, smell the sweet and spice. She thought about trying to find it, pat-pat in the snow. Salvage something of it. Swore instead and crouched, her hands flat to the wall of the ruined temple. Cold stone, slick moss, a dead Alvir god’s face roughing her palms. She waited for the sunrise stages of vision, black to grey to, well, more grey, in the shadowless pre-blizzard twilight. This wasn’t so different than the cave-dark of Below, without witchfire.
Overhead, a whisper of wings and tail. A thump as Briel found a perch in what remained of the temple’s rafters. Soot sifted down from the impact, fresh stinging insult to offended eyes.
Snow blinked tears and blur as her vision crept back. “Fuck, Briel. Kill me someday, won’t you, if you send when I need to see.”
Briel hissed. One of her three primary utterances. Big talker, Briel.
Snow squinted up, scanned the rafters. Stone building, this one, the corpse of a temple gutted during the Purge. The walls still stood, moss-grown on the north sides, the tough mountain spine-vines on the rest. Most of the roof had spilled down between them. The thatch had gone first, collapsed and left a rib cage of crossbeams. Briel’s hide matched the wood’s greasy black. Invisible until she dipped her long neck and stared down at Snow. In the twilight, the svartjagr’s eyes glowed like embers. Like the village had when the last of the fires sputtered to ash. She and Drasan had picked through the wreckage, expecting the odd bit of surviving silver and coin. Instead, they’d found all the wealth you’d expect in an Alvir village on a caravan route, wealth no raiders would have left behind.
So
this had not been a raid, then. Something else. Big damn fire, yeah, fires and corpses and ashes. And now there was a motherless patrol coming upslope, and she didn’t want to be here when they arrived. Grey skies, no shadows to weave and wear, no light to push and bend. The storm might conceal
a retreat
an escape, except it’d stalled out to flakes and cold spit, while soldiers clustered in the village and sent scouts to search buildings and—
“Briel.”
“Chrrip?” Another of Briel’s utterances, the one that covered everything sssss wouldn’t. This version meant now what?
“Go,” Snow told her. Waved a hand at the sky through the crossbeams. “Find us a safe place, yeah? Scout and come back. No sending! I need my own eyes.”
“Chrrip.” The svartjagr took a running scrabble along the beam. Launched a handspan from the end, arrowed into wind. Her wings caught currents and angled, and then she was up, gliding black against the brooding steel sky. She circled the temple once, then flapped and dipped and vanished behind trees.
Snowdenaelikk doubled back through the ruined temple. Squeezed through the gap in the wall beside the shattered archway and dashed into the courtyard. Old stone paths fought for territory with weeds, made for treacherous footing under the snow. She lightstepped a path across it, scuff and scrape. Drasan hadn’t been so elegant, had gouged out a trail for any fool to follow. Careless, stupid, no surprise: Drasan was green, not even twenty. Needed seasoning. Tsabrak’s special orders to her—
Teach him something, Snow, will you?
—when he’d sent them out. Because Drasan, the idiot, had cut the wrong purse in Cardik, and the wrong throat to go with it. Governor’s consort, yeah, real smart. So it was a run into the Wild to meet Tsabrak’s new courier in the hills above Davni village. Take the long way, Tsabrak said, waste time.
In winter. Funny man, Tsabrak, sending her out here with a sullen half-taught teenaged godsworn initiate and the unappealing promise of one of Davni’s two taverns as reward.
Only Davni wasn’t anymore, and the troops from Cardik had gotten here before coals were cool. Two unexpected events in as many days. Blame Taliri raiders for the first. Blame a dog-loyal Cardik commander for the second. A man from the Sixth with something to prove. A woman would’ve waited for the storm to pass, reckoning the raid long over and the village past any help. The detachment here now must’ve been running patrol, saw the smoke, diverted, and fucking sprinted to get here this fast.
Snow managed her own dash. More effort than she remembered, running. The seax banged bruises into her hip. Had to strap it down better. Adjust the motherless belt. It wasn’t rigged for running. Neither was she. Her lungs seized on the cold air, coughed a cloud of protest.
Bad habit, jenja.
The tent sulked at the uphill edge of the temple grounds, between a cluster of young evergreens and a tumbled wall of fieldstones. Ragged stones ringed a center of burned wood and stripped bones. Last night’s unlucky rabbit—thank you, Briel. A scene not unlike the village, down to the iron pan still resting in ashes. Drasan’s turn to clean up, which she’d expected to do anyway, which no one would do now. She paused long enough to grab the pan’s handle, used it to push the tent flap aside.
Drasan didn’t even turn to look. He was busy sorting loot from the village, coins and chits divided into piles, and most of his own belongings scattered around him. “Did you enjoy your poison weed?”
She considered the back of his skull, imagined a cast-iron impact. “It’s not poison, and no.” She sucked another lungful of air. Blinked away spots. “We have to go. Now.”
“The fuck?” Drasan looked at her now. Frowned. “The courier’s not here yet. Tsabrak said wait.”
As if she hadn’t been in the room, getting the same orders.
Wait for the courier in the old temple in Davni, yeah? She’ll find you.
No idea what the message would be, or if there was merchandise to go with it, or what the courier looked like. Probably nothing more than a package of uncut rasi, delivered by a scruffy Alvir bandit. Running rasi was dangerous work. The last courier had gotten herself caught by the Cardik garrison right before solstice, trying to sneak into the gates after dark. Tsabrak had been hunting a new courier since. He wouldn’t be happy if she missed the meeting. Rasi was habit forming. Lots of people in Cardik who wanted a fix, yeah, and if Tsabrak couldn’t deliver, some other cartel might. But she could come back once the legion was gone. No courier would come here with the legion camped out and swarming.
“Bigger problems. Briel saw troopers.”
Attitude settled into Drasan’s jaw. “Not likely. It’s too soon for troopers. Your vermin is mistaken.”
Vermin. Right. Briel wasn’t the problem. Fucking stubborn male pride was, godsworn arrogance that didn’t like direction from a woman, any woman, even a half-blood ally half again his age. Made her wonder sometimes if the foremothers hadn’t been right after all, and the Reforms a soft-minded mistake.
She loosed a wrap of her patience. “I saw them, idiot. They’re on the toadfucking trail to the temple, and you left a lot of marks. Now be quiet and move.”
“Shit.” Drasan forgot any pretense at authority. Listening to her now, moving fast. Random grabs at clothing, supplies, that would probably miss something vital. Busy scooping coins into pouches, too, clink and rattle.
She hissed a fair imitation of Briel—
“Leave that toadshit.”
—and scooped her pack off its perch on the tent pole. Quick reconnaissance of the contents, a quicker scan of the surroundings. She jammed the iron pan in. More weight than she wanted, but more use than Drasan’s priorities. It might stop an arrow loosed at her back. She settled the pack across her shoulder. Circled the tent, once and twice, on her way back for a third pass and a peek out the flap.
And knew. Premonition, certainty, too many years dodging armed and armored authority.
Clink. Rattle. Hiss.
Armor had its own resonance. The legionnaire’s sword, its own whispers. And the troopers themselves, oh Laughing God, their own breed of arrogance that came with both armor and sword.
It was the woman’s voice outside, command-solid and only a little breathless. “You. In the tent. Out now, and slowly.”
As if Snow had any intention. She crossed stares with Drasan. Traded tiny slit smiles. The boy was a fool about some things, but he knew close-quarter fighting. And better than that, he knew when to run.
Like now.
Someone had been smoking jenja by the fallen wall. Kenjak smelled it before he saw the pale spiral rising out of a pile of dead leaves and twigs. He stopped beside it, under pretense of investigation, and caught his breath instead. Long, cold chestfuls of sweet smoke that didn’t cut the memory of what he’d passed through. The village stench lingered in his throat. On his tongue. Cooked meat that had been people, in the streets and the houses and the shops.
Fast death, Ollu had muttered, and made a sign against ill luck that would’ve earned lashes if First Spear Rurik had seen it.
The villagers hadn’t tried to run. Hadn’t had time. And that wasn’t like raiders.
Which made Kenjak shiver for reasons that had nothing to do with iced mud in his boot, or the blisters, or the jenja, which meant there was someone up here. Sudden death wasn’t Taliri raiders, and sudden death might not answer to swords or spears. Might come back, and they’d never know it and die like the villagers had—
The Rurik that lived in his head looked down his long nose and sneered coward. And worse, superstitious.
The faces of abandoned gods peered out of the old temple’s brickwork. Crude carvings, Alviri work. Kenjak felt a small surge of pride that the Dvergiri had never produced something so ugly. Since the Purge, the Illhari Republic relied on the wits of its people, not on superstition. He felt a twinge of something colder, too: there were snubbed candles pressed against the brickwork, and a smear of ash. Someone still prayed here, or had, until the raiders c
ame.
But whoever had lit the jenja, whoever hid in a temple to dead Alviri gods—that person couldn’t be responsible for what’d happened in Davni.
“Kenjak, you toadfucker.” Ollu came around the wall, hand on his sword and scowling. “Why’re you holding back? There’s tracks. Fresh. Motherless toadshits are here.”
“But—”
“Don’t need to hear it. Salis went up, wouldn’t wait, said I should get you.” This while trading his sword hilt for a fistful of Kenjak’s tunic through the gap in the armor, rough haul half around and half over the remains of the stone.
“Jenja—”
“Who cares what they smoke? They’re here, rabbit brain. And we’re going to get them.”
Ollu let go and brought both hands down hard on Kenjak’s shoulders, like he meant to drive him into the earth. “Listen. First time, scared’s normal, yeah?”
The knot in Kenjak’s belly didn’t feel at all like fear. “Ollu, these can’t be the ones who burned Davni. There’s not enough of them.”
“Maybe they’re conjurors.”
“And maybe we’ve got wings. No way there’s a conjuror out here. It’s too Wild.”
Different light in Ollu’s eyes now, different shape to the smile. Kenjak thought of the barracks cat, when it cornered something helpless. “We marched all the way out here and up here, yeah? Got to have something for it, or Rurik’ll skin us. Come on.”
Kenjak clipped off his protest. Nerves, that was all. Ollu was right.
At least Ollu didn’t insist that they run the rest of the way. Kenjak followed the older man through the temple’s ruined guts, dodged fallen timber and scuffed through the ash. There were indeed tracks stitched through the snow, by someone who didn’t care who saw them. Kenjak was more and more certain the person who’d made those tracks hadn’t a thing to do with the burning. Equally certain Ollu wouldn’t listen. Kenjak’s opinion didn’t change when he saw the tent, either. Faded thing, ragged. Couldn’t hold more than two people. Not a raiding party.
Salis had her crossbow cocked and leveled at the flap. Saw them coming and jerked her chin, as if there was any uncertainty of her destination or intent.
