The Song of the Ash Tree 03 - Already Comes Darkness

by T L Greylock

“The time for such thoughts is long past, Fengar. You shamed them the moment you stood above the rest in the Great-Belly’s hall, the moment you let a few lords name you king without the consent of the warriors.”

  Fengar dropped his gaze, but when he raised it again, Raef saw a measure of acceptance in his face and then the lord of Solheim began to climb from the depths of the ravine.

  When he reached the top, taking Raef’s arm to haul himself over the edge, Fengar stripped the fat silver ring from his finger, stroked the band once with his thumb, then placed it with care in Raef’s palm.

  “Bryndis was waiting to the south,” Raef said. “Where she went when the fire started I could not say.”

  “Then I will go west first,” Fengar began, but Raef shook his head to silence him.

  “Do not tell me where you mean to go. I do not wish to know.”

  Fengar nodded and then, without another word, he pulled up his hood and turned his back on Raef, who watched him weave through the flame-licked tree trunks until Fengar was out of sight.

  “Why did you let him go?” Cilla had watched in silence and her gaze rested on the ring that rested still in Raef’s open palm. He closed his fingers over it and dropped his hand to his side before answering.

  “Fengar was ambitious and it pleased him to be named king, but his ambitions were a gentle spring rain compared to the torrential flood that drives some men. Fengar’s fault lay in his lack of will and his inability to rely upon himself, and for that he deserves some of the blame for this war that has ravaged so much of the world. But far greater blame rests on the shoulders of two men, for the war was of their making and Fengar was never more than a tool, wielded as it pleased them.”

  Cilla frowned and Raef could see that his answer did not satisfy her.

  “Would you have wanted me to kill him?”

  Cilla shrugged. “He wanted to die. You could have let him.”

  “Yes, I could have. But I have done him no great favor. The winter has been long and cold and the wilderness is ever hungry to claim the lives of those who cannot face it. He is alone and I doubt he carries more than a scrap of dried meat, if that. Food will be difficult for him to come by.”

  “You said you did not want him to starve.”

  “And that is true. But if that is his fate, better that he face it head on than wait for it to find him while he cowers in the dark and grieves for what he has lost,” Raef said. Cilla nodded, though Raef was not certain she understood.

  It was not hard to find a corpse that could pass as Fengar. What was left of the hair was the right shade of brown, the height and weight of the dead man were accurate, and the singed beard needed only a rough trim under Raef’s knife before it was short enough. The man’s face was badly burned, making it impossible to determine his eye color or even the shape of his nose. Raef pushed Fengar’s ring onto the dead man’s finger, working it over a thick knuckle, and wondered if Bryngolf Brightshield was laughing in Valhalla.

  Raef shouldered the corpse and set off in the direction of the river. When he and Cilla emerged from the burned forest, the sun was glowing in the east, but the cold morning light was not all that had arrived on the opposite bank of the river.

  Bryndis was there, dressed for battle, a naked sword in her grip, and surrounded by grim-faced warriors. She had fresh charcoal around her eyes and new ink that traced the outside of her ears and down the length of her jaw. From across the river, she was all bright blade and fierce eyes.

  Eiger was waiting with the warriors Raef had found. He had not gone to join the lady of Narvik, Raef noted.

  But it was Siv who caught Raef’s eye as he set the corpse in a muddy patch of snow. She was apart from the rest of Bryndis’s company, and though her face brightened at sight of Raef, he could see that concern for her sister weighed heavy on her.

  Bryndis’s gaze fell to the body at Raef’s feet, the unasked question blazing from those eyes lined with midnight.

  “The last king, lady,” Raef called out.

  Bryndis called for a horse and soon splashed across the river. She dismounted and prodded at the body with the toe of her boot.

  “You are certain?”

  Raef knelt down and grabbed the dead man’s wrist, holding up the hand that bore Bryngolf Brightshield’s ring.

  Bryndis came close and bent over the finger and the fine silver. She kept her hands away from the burned flesh and Raef could see her nostrils flare slightly as she caught the scent of death.

  “The heirloom of the lords of Solheim, lady.”

  Bryndis straightened and nodded. Her gaze fell to Cilla. “The hostages?”

  “I have found one.” Raef placed an arm across Cilla’s shoulders.

  Bryndis nodded again and now looked to the trees behind Raef, who sensed she would rather not look at the devastation. “What caused it?”

  Raef dared not answer and he let the question linger and then vanish between them.

  “We will search for the rest,” Bryndis said. She called out across the river, shouting directions to her uncle, who led across a large group of warriors, perhaps forty in number. They spread out and entered the trees in a thin line, each man close enough to stay in sight and hearing distance of the man on either side of him. To Raef’s surprise, Siv had hesitated on the far bank. Raef mounted his horse and urged it into the water once more. The icy water gripped at him and he grit his teeth against the cold, though this time he entered the river where Bryndis had exited and was glad to find the crossing easier, the current less fierce, the sandy bottom within reach of his horse’s hooves. Siv did not take her eyes from the still-smoking trees as he dismounted at her side.

  “Was it Vakre?” Her voice was tight and lined with pain.

  “I do not know.” Raef took a deep breath and found he had nothing else to say.

  “If he has killed her,” Siv paused, her voice shaking, “if Vakre’s fury has killed my sister, he will answer for it.” A tear slipped out of the corner of her eye and Siv brushed it away with a hurried swipe of her hand. Raef caught that hand and took it between his, and at last Siv turned her head and looked at him. A ragged gasp burst from her and she thumped Raef’s chest with a balled fist. “I love him as a brother.” The tears came freely now and she did not fight them. Raef pulled her close to him, longing to chase away her pain, but he knew his arms could not release her heart from its grief.

  “She may yet be alive,” Raef murmured. Siv nodded against him, then pulled back and wiped at her reddened eyes. Raef leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “Tell me how I might know her, and I will go search until she is found.”

  “No,” Siv said, shaking her head. “I will go.”

  They crossed the river together, then Raef splashed water on his face, refilled the skin at his belt, and took a few bites of hard cheese. His stomach pleaded for more and an ache spreading from behind his ears up to his temples told him he needed to rest and breathe air that wasn’t filled with smoke, but he would not leave Siv alone.

  Cilla would not be left, either. She followed them without a word and Raef did not have the will to argue with her. Siv asked the girl where she had been when the fire started, and if the other hostages had been with her. Cilla said they were grouped together, though no longer bound like the links of a chain, but when the fire sprung up behind them and bore down on their backs, they had fled, separating. She had seen none, alive or dead, since.

  Raef struck off in a more northern direction than the one he had taken on his first foray into the trees. The route would take them directly toward the fire’s point of origin, though much of their path traced the curving edge of the burned swath of land and they walked a line between blackened trees with crumbling bark and untouched birches, stark white, solemn sentinels standing watch over their burned kin. They walked in silence and the forest was quiet around them, the birds and rabbits and squirrels chased away by the smoke. The stillness began to wear on Raef’s nerves and the sound of his own footsteps grew irritating to
his ears in the absence of bird song and the chatter of territorial squirrels.

  Their path dipped here and there, but always climbed higher than before, and soon they found themselves high above the devastation. The air was fresher and Raef stopped to breath it in for a moment, closing his eyes as a shaft of sunlight glanced across his cheek. Cilla wandered ahead as Siv paused to adjust the quiver of arrows that hung from her belt.

  “Fengar is not dead,” Raef said.

  “You let him go.”

  “Yes.” Raef breathed in, letting the cold air sink to the bottom of his lungs. “For all his faults, the war was not of his making. The blame for that rests with Hauk of Ruderk, Stefnir of Gornhald, and Torrulf Palesword.”

  “And Einarr of Vannheim.” The voice seemed to claw at Raef’s ears and he spun, reaching for his axe and scanning for the owner of the voice among the trees as Siv nocked an arrow on the string of her bow with one swift motion.

  Hauk Orleson, lord of Ruderk, stood twenty paces away, half in shadow, half in sunlight. He held a knife, the blade bright in the sun, and its edge rested against Cilla’s neck. His left arm was wrapped across her collarbone but the flesh of his forearm had been seared, the hair burnt away, and a bloody gash, half cauterized, ran from his elbow to his wrist. Whatever he had worn to fend off the cold had been discarded when it caught fire, but Hauk seemed impervious to the winter air. He stared at Raef, unblinking, his eyes blazing with desperation, and yet his face was strangely calm, his hold on Cilla strong but easy.

  “Let her go.” Raef ran his thumb across the worn shaft of his axe, felt the weight of it in his palm, and wondered if he could bury it in Hauk’s forehead before the knife cut deep enough to guarantee Cilla’s death.

  “Have you heard me, Skallagrim?”

  “I hear a liar’s tongue, nothing more.” Raef kept his voice steady but he was sure Siv, standing off his shoulder and ahead of him, could hear his thundering heart. He did not break his gaze from Hauk’s but the world around him was sharp and vivid. He could see the sweat-darkened hair at the base of Siv’s neck. He could see the grime beneath Cilla’s fingernails. He could see the pulse thrumming at Hauk’s temple.

  “Would you like to know your father’s darkest secret?”

  “My father would never have manipulated Fengar as you have, he would never have relished this war.”

  “Oh, it is not of this war that I speak, or Fengar, or even of the promises your father broke in the days before the gathering in the Great-Belly’s hall. This is a far deeper secret, one he harbored since before you were born.”

  Raef felt himself shake his head. “I will not hear you.”

  “You will. Because you do not wish to watch her die.” Hauk tightened his grip on Cilla. The girl’s eyes flared but she did not cry out, did not even flinch. Siv released some of the tension on her bowstring and lowered it so that the arrow was no longer aimed at Hauk’s head. When Raef made no move to protest, Hauk urged Cilla forward until they halved the distance to Raef, but he was careful to keep the greater part of his body angled behind a tree. “Do you know how your uncle died, Skallagrim?”

  The question was so unexpected that for a moment Raef let go of his anger. “My uncle?”

  “Your father’s brother. Older brother. His name was Dainn, was it not?”

  “It was.”

  “Yes. It was. And do you know how Dainn died?”

  “He drowned,” Raef said.

  “A truthful answer, but not the entire truth.”

  “I grow weary of this game, Orleson.”

  “Then you better discover your patience, Skallagrim.” Hauk shifted his weight, his face twisting in a grimace of pain as he moved. “The deep waters of the Vannheim fjord filled your uncle’s lungs, this you know. But you do not know that your father watched him die and did nothing to save him.” Raef wanted to close his eyes, to stopper his ears against the vile words Hauk spoke, but he could not look away. “I was there, Raef. I saw it all. I saw them quarrel, I saw the oar raised in your father’s fist. I saw him swing, saw your uncle’s neck snap back so far and so fast I was sure it had broken. I saw Dainn fall overboard, but he was alive yet, and he struggled. He fought the pull of the deep, fought to keep his head above water, but the blow to his head had sapped all strength from his limbs. I saw him sink and I saw his last breath bubble to the surface.”

  Raef wanted to rip Hauk’s tongue from his throat but his own limbs were as worthless as Dainn’s must have been.

  “I do not believe you.” The small, shattered voice was his own.

  “Your father begged me to keep his secret. He vowed he would pay for my silence, whatever I might demand. I could have asked for gold, silver, a horde of treasure to put the mighty Fafnir’s to shame, a sword from that bladesmith of yours, a ship, even, and Einarr would have seen it done. But I asked for none of this. I told him one day I would need something from him, and we would consider the debt paid. That day came last spring when the snow first grew soft and the ice began to wither. The king was old. He was dying, you see. Did your father not tell you?” Hauk’s voice remained level, betraying little, but his eyes grew bright and Raef knew he was laughing at Raef’s ignorance. “Do you know how many men have called themselves king since first our ancestors knelt to one man?” Hauk waited for Raef to answer and then continued as though he had spoken. “I learned their names as a boy, and I learned the stories of their lives and deaths. Think, Skallagrim, of the destruction they have wrought, all to be king. Battle after battle, year after year, ravaging our families and our lands. Think of the blood spilled in their names, think of the drain upon the future of Midgard.” Something earnest had crept into Hauk’s voice and his gaze grew unfocused, but his grip on Cilla never wavered.

  “You speak as though we have always been at war,” Siv said. “It has not all been steel song and bloodshed since Kyrrbjorn Wolfbane hunted down his rivals and our ancestors knelt.”

  Hauk brushed Siv’s words aside but Raef spoke before he could. “Why do you talk of Kyrrbjorn Wolfbane and all the men and women who have sought power? Speak plainly.”

  “We need peace, Skallagrim. We need a peace that will last so that our sons and daughters and their children can live without the shadow of war.”

  “You started a war, Hauk,” Raef said, his voice ripping forth, low and angry. “How dare you speak of peace.”

  “Could I have done what needed to be done without spilling blood, I would have. But we are crude beings, we warriors, and we consume violence as the gods do mead.”

  “What did you hope to accomplish?”

  Something shifted in Hauk’s face. The hard lines of his cheeks softened and his eyes lost their sharpness as he spoke of his ambition. “Deliverance. No more gatherings. No more kings.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Do not be so quick to make that assumption, Skallagrim.”

  And Raef knew the pull of Hauk’s words, knew there was a grain of truth in what he said. Raef remembered Sverren of Bergoss, who had refused to ally with Raef, whose messenger had said Bergoss would stand with no king. He remembered his own pride in Vannheim’s resistance of Kyrrbjorn Wolfbane so many generations before. He thought of little-known lords who made their homes in the farthest reaches of the wild, lords who paid no mind to the greater world outside their hidden valleys and high vales, whose people had never seen a fortress made of stone and lived and died without leaving the small village that birthed them, and he wondered if they would not rather be free of any king.

  “There will always be men who seek to rise above the rest, who believe others should kneel,” Raef said. “And there will always be men like you, men who try to write the fates of others, who would hide behind an honest face and a hope.”

  “Then you think there is hope?” Hauk’s eyes were lined with scorn, but his voice, eager and hurried, betrayed desperation.

  “I think you have betrayed all the codes of gods and men. But what does this have to do with my father?” Rae
f dreaded the question and the answer he might receive, but he asked it without hesitation.

  “And so we come to it at last. For twenty-eight years I waited, holding onto the debt your father owed me. In the spring, when the king was ailing, I met your father in secret on the border between Vannheim and Bergoss and I demanded what I was owed.”

  “Twenty-eight years is a long time, Hauk,” Siv said. “Long enough that the lord of Vannheim might no longer fear retribution for his brother’s death. Who would punish him? He was well-loved by his people.”

  “It seems, lady, that Einarr of Vannheim did not rest so easily as you believe. Or at least he was willing to honor the promise he had made to me as a young man.” Hauk looked from Siv to Raef. “He agreed to support me and the path toward our liberation.”

  That his father would have harbored such a secret, that he would have thrown himself behind Hauk’s scheme, seemed like madness to Raef.

  “Then why kill him? More likely he spurned you and you had to silence him for fear of discovery.”

  “By the time we gathered in Balmoran, your father had weakened. The wisdom that had shown him the virtue of my plan had abandoned him. He clung to the illusion of the gathering and would not be reasoned with.”

  “And for that you had him butchered like a beast of the forest.” There was anger in Raef’s voice, and fury burned in his belly, but for all Raef tried, he could not summon the sight of his father’s corpse, could not see Einarr stretched out in the tall grass, eyes staring, sword in hand, wound gaping. Instead he saw a fjord, dark and beautiful, but deadly, and he saw a face much like his father’s slip beneath the surface, saw his uncle thrashing, striving to live, and succumbing instead to death. He could not bring himself to speak, nor move, and at last Siv broke the silence.

  “What do you want, Hauk?” Siv’s eyes had been full of concern as she looked at Raef, but now she fixed the lord of Ruderk with a cold gaze and raised her bow once more, aiming at a point between his eyes.

  “My work is unfinished. Peace can be attained. But there can be no gathering. Join me,” Hauk said, shifting his gaze from Siv to Raef. Raef felt that stare like a knife in his chest. His breath caught in his throat, though his heart pounded between his ribs. “Join me, Skallagrim, as your father should have. We can return Midgard to the greatness we knew before we kneeled. Fengar may be dead, but I am not without friends. There are those who have kept their spears unbloodied, who have watched the three kings break each other. We can release all the lands from the burden of kings.”