THE FYLKING
Outpost
The Wolf Lords
F.T. McKinstry
Copyright © 2018 F.T. McKinstry
Omnibus Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.
Edited by Leslie Karen Lutz
Cover Art by F.T. McKinstry
Table of Contents
Map
Glossary
Book One: OUTPOST
Prologue
The Heir of House Halstaeg
The Knitter
Ranger of the North Branch
The Bargain
The Pink Rose
Black Yarn
The Exile Sigil
An Unkind Patrol
A Dropped Stitch
Silence Beyond Boundaries
As the Crow Flies
As Big as the Sky
The Trickster
The Shade
The Bear’s End
The Crow Warrior
The Faersc Conservatory
A Seer in the Rat Hole
The High Fylking of Tower Sif
When the Gods Turn Away
The Last Warden
As the Crow Sees
Across the Worlds
Book Two: THE WOLF LORDS
Destroyer of the Math Gate
Captain of the North Branch
The Borderland
An Adept of Fenrir
Worse Things to Fear
A Hedge Witch’s Daughter
High Commander of the Third Sun
The Lady’s Own
The Wolf’s Den
Ghosts and Foxes
The Sorcerer’s Operative
The Sea Witch
Wolf Blood
Eyes and Ears
Witches and Wreckage
The Welcoming Party
In the Company of Rangers
Cat and Mouse
A New Recruit
The Law of Sanctuary
The Accursed
One Wolf for Another
One Hundred Herbs
The Winged Scout
Reflections in the Veil
The Third Sorcerer
The Wounded Raven
The Dark Elf
A Useful Weapon
The Hooded Crow
The Allfather’s Temple
An Unkindness of Ravens
News
Brave One
Freya’s Charm
The Spider Web
Master of Crows
Glossary
Thank You
About the Author
Other Titles by F.T. McKinstry
Connect with F.T. McKinstry
Book One: OUTPOST
Prologue
Edros stepped up to the standing stone that marked the boundary of the Fylking’s domain. Smooth and unadorned, the ancient monolith offered no clues as to its purpose. But it had tales to tell.
The city of Merhafr, a dense, lively port clustered around the King’s Citadel, spread out behind him like shells cast over the rocky hills plunging into the Njorth Sea. Edros planted his staff with a breath and started up the path toward Tower Sor, perched on the distant crags rising from the plain. The tower’s presence, normally as rough and volatile as the ocean winds, lay cloaked in silence. Gulls wheeled and cried around the height.
A shepherd appeared over a rise, driving a small flock of sheep. When he saw Edros with his warden’s cloak and staff, he quickly directed the animals into the brush and stood with his head bowed. The warden murmured a greeting as he passed.
The calm that cloaked the sea at dawn had given way to the unruly rifts and white of heavy weather. Wind carried the scent of brine, heather and wild roses. The warden’s Guardian Fylking, who took the shapes of watery places, began to withdraw as they usually did in the presence of the High Fylking, who ruled the towers. Unseen by all but their wardens, the immortal warriors kept their oaths and vigils by the sword. One by one, a whisper in his ear, water lapping on a shore, a cold spot in a lake, fell into quiescence.
Sor was one of ten towers that defined the realm of Dyrregin. Five inner towers, each 50 leagues apart and 35 leagues from the center of the realm, stood on the intersections of lines between five outer towers. The resulting boundary formed the Gate, a pentacle with a diameter of 213 leagues. In the nine thousand suns since the Gate was built by the original wardens under the direction of the Fylking, the sea engulfed the granite shoals around one of the outer points, Tower Sef, isolating it from land and giving all sailors except wardens something to avoid as they might a siren’s song. War took Tower Sie, a second outer point which stood in the realm of Fjorgin across the Njorth Sea. Politics, bloodshed and treaties aside, no one interfered with the wardens in their business there unless they wanted to risk being destroyed by their Fylking. Being relatively new to the Order, Edros had not yet journeyed to Fjorgin. But he had heard the stories.
Being deployed on the rugged coast for thousands of suns had given the High Fylking of Tower Sor sullen, moody dispositions. Like the sea, the warriors were rarely silent. Today, however, Edros felt only the storm. He gazed ahead, rallying his inner senses around the tower with unease. The last time he had felt such quiet up here was after he banished the Fylking for frightening a ranger so badly he had lost his footing and fallen to his death on the rocks below. Such things happened around the gatetowers sometimes. Not everyone believed the tales, and fools abounded regardless. But it was the wardens’ charge to protect the citizens as much as they could—or so the high constable of the King’s Rangers had needlessly reminded him.
It was said the ranger’s spirit wandered the cliffs beneath the tower, cursing the Fylking. That was nonsense. The Fylking would never stand for such a thing, even if they could cross the boundaries of their dimensions and those of the mortal dead.
Silence. Nothing but the sea, crying gulls and wind in the brush. The tower gazed down with a discomfiting stare. On a parapet crowning the top crouched the shapes of dragons—so the Fylking called them—reptilian creatures with scales, long snouts and large bat wings folded against sinuous bodies. The creatures’ snaky tails twined down into the stones. Their eyes were empty.
A subtle prickle touched the warden’s navel as he began his ascent up the winding steps. The ground fell away, the sea grew vast and the wind quickened. Dark clouds streaked the sky like an infection. He reached the door, a tall arch of weathered oak with iron hinges shaped like talons. Rain pelted him. As he entered, a screech echoed from the stones, followed by a rush of warm air carrying the scent of wood smoke. His mind went blank as the smell filled his lungs. An impossible smell, in this place.
Edros slipped through and closed the door. He had never entered a gatetower to anything but cold and damp—except for that time the High Fylking had greeted him with the smell of roast partridge, a jest aimed at the late King Farcas, who died last winter with a wing bone lodged in his throat. They had never liked him.
“Hail!” Edros called out, stepping from the shadow of the thick stone wall.
The interior of the gatetower was as large as a warlord’s feasting hall, a cylindrical well rising seventy feet to a ceiling glinting with quartz crystal. Narrow, steep steps spiraled up the walls to a hatch that accessed the top. Thin openings placed here and there in the heights aligned the light of the sun, stars and moon. The Fylking jokingly referred to these as arrow slits, though as far as Edros knew, the inaccessible windows had never been used for tha
t.
His heart skipped a beat as he saw the source of the smoke. In the center of the floor, directly on top of the crystal circle that focused the light of the heavens for the Fylking, burned a fire. Heather and broom had been ripped from the roots, tossed into a pile and lit as if by lightning. An old man stood there warming his hands.
Stunned by this flagrant transgression of the Fylkings’ domain, Edros strode forward and yanked his hood from his face. “Are you mad?” he said, none too kindly. “What means this?”
Where were the High Fylking? They would turn a man to dust for building a fire in here! Chilled to the bone despite the heat, the warden opened his senses to the subtle murk of the rising storm. Wind whistled through the arrow slits, as cold and strange as a nightmare lost to memory.
The old man said nothing.
“How did you get in here?” Edros asked in a quieter voice. He and the man were not alone. He sensed the stormy presence of a Fylking filling the tower vaults. Immense and unfriendly, this Fylking had no care for humanity, even hidden by the lofty ascendancy of the unseen. His antipathy was tangible.
The warden moved his hand into a Banishing sigil, his fingers curling one after the other into a fist, like a many-legged sea creature withdrawing into a shell. It had no effect.
“Don’t trouble yourself with that,” the old man said. “The Sor Fylking are dead and your Guardians scattered to the wind.” He straightened his back and shrugged his tattered cloak to the floor. He was fully armed and clad in shades of brown and green stitched with branches, marking him as a votary of the Blackthorn Guild. Once a noble order of magicians created by King Magnfred, the first ruler to claim Dyrregin’s throne after the Gate War, the Guild had been stripped of its thorns over the centuries and now comprised a harmless assortment of hedge witches and warlocks that served the Old Gods and studied the forces of nature, mapping the heavens, concocting potions for common ailments, talking to crows.
Edros had never heard of a Blackthorn warlock wielding arms or associating with the Fylking. Aside from hair the color of ashes, he was not as old as he initially seemed. He had smooth flesh and eyes like winter twilight, pale gray and ice cold. Something about him stirred the warden’s memory.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
The warlock gazed back, his expression inscrutable but for a sliver of scorn.
Blackthorn, indeed. Edros struck the floor with his staff and raised his voice to the stormy presence enveloping the tower. “Show yourself! What Fylking would disregard a sigil cast by a Warden of Dyrregin? You are bound to an ancient oath.”
The wind howled and thunder shook the earth, driving rain and snow into the tower, the spiraling frozen tears of fallen warriors, five of them, beautiful and lying on the floor like felled trees in broken armor made of stars, long hair tangled in blood, and fair eyes staring at nothing.
Dead? He had not believed the claim.
Edros broke from his trance as the warlock moved. Before the warden understood the way of this, the intruder pulled a knife from his belt and hefted it by the blade. By his side stood the shimmering form of a tall warrior clad in black steel, wearing a helmet in the shape of the spike-crested, fanged creatures on the parapet.
Niflsekt.
It was the warden’s last thought as the knife struck him between the eyes.
The Heir of House Halstaeg
The scent of baking bread followed Arcmael as he stepped from the woodsman’s cottage where he had slept last night, uneasily, his gut in a snarl with the specters of domestic strife. He took a deep breath of the predawn chill, damp and smelling of the sea fifty leagues west. A storm was coming, his hosts had warned. Perhaps he would like to stay another day. Warden’s staff in hand, pack and bow on his back, he closed the door and strode through the weeds. He would have better company in the gatetower, cold notwithstanding.
Tall trees with thick trunks crowded around the cottage, cloaking it in shadows. Birdsong filled the boughs. A stream whispered at the bottom of a ravine that dropped off beyond a tired garden nearly done for the season. Heading in that direction, Arcmael passed a barn alive with the restless movements of animals. A covered well near the garden shimmered on his mind as a water sprite slipped into the depths. She watched over the well, but like most Otherworld beings, she would not risk getting the attention of a warden and his Guardian Fylking.
Arcmael reached the edge of the ravine and hopped a low wall. He would follow the stream and skirt around Larfen, a township south of Tower Sol, one of the five inner towers framing the center of the Gate. He had lost his mood for people.
A shout broke him from his thoughts. A dog yelped and bounded out of the barn. Its master followed, a tall, thin man with a gravelly voice and a red cap. He carried a heavy stick.
“Get back here you ill-bred mutt!”
The dog vanished into the woods.
“Fylking take you!” As the woodsman noticed Arcmael standing by the wall, his temper fled. “Warden,” he said graciously, a nervous smile fleeing across his face. “Done run off, he has.”
Feeling the chill of the unseen, Arcmael gave the man an offhand nod and continued into the trees. The woodsman’s hand twisted into a Banishing sigil as he lumbered back to the barn, but he didn’t do it correctly. A gray, four-legged shadow slipped through the brambles on the edge of the foundation.
Wolf. Among other things, the Fylking were consummate shapeshifters and took many forms: trees, rivers, animals, elements or, rarely, the warriors they were. The Guardian Fylking appeared to their wardens in certain forms so the wardens would know them. For some reason he preferred not to contemplate, Arcmael perceived his Guardians as tricksters and predators.
We won’t take the hound, Wolf whispered close to his ear. We might take the man. He’s a brute. What say you?
Ever on the hunt, Wolf. Arcmael ignored him. The one and only time he had encouraged his unseen warriors, he had watched a tavern mistress slip in the mud and crack her skull on a stone trough. The woman wouldn’t likely have thrown the rock she held, mad as she was at Arcmael’s having shared her daughter’s bed the night before. But his Guardians didn’t give her the chance; nor did they heed the flawless sigil she made with her other hand—she didn’t know that a warden’s authority took precedence. Arcmael would never forget the silence that fell across the onlookers as the woman lay there in the street, her fingers loosening around the rock with a twitch, her dingy apron splattered with mud and her graying hair oozing blood. A cruel awakening for a warden not two suns on the road with his staff.
Arcmael had to assume other wardens had similar experiences with their Fylking, though to his private misery, he hadn’t heard of it. Tempting the Fylking was strongly forbidden. Even so, the folk of Dyrregin generally treated wardens with caution. For fear of the Fylking, they wouldn’t refuse a warden the hospitality of their homes or the benefits of their skills. But every warden soon learned—as Arcmael had—not to invite trouble. A Blackthorn warlock could whisper to a farmer’s horse, show his wife how to make a salve or wink at his daughter and not face repercussions—but not a warden capable of unleashing the Fylking for the asking.
You do know how to choose them, purred a crafty voice. Fox never missed a chance at a well-aimed observation. We told you to warm your bones in the weaver’s cottage over the river. A kinder woman there never was. His tone was chiding to the point of dry.
She leaves me offerings, Raven put in with a croaking laugh.
Arcmael rolled his eyes. Devious and opportunistic as he was, Raven didn’t give a stiff rat for offerings—even if they included a stiff rat.
“Her daughter is looking for a man,” Arcmael said. “I needed sleep, not a family.”
Idgit! Fox barked amid rumbles of laughter. Arcmael let them have their fun. He took his needs to cathouses now. Night women had a refreshing disregard for the perils of his station. He was happy to pay them from the stipend he got in Faersc every three moons.
A quiet voice as smooth
as a maiden’s breast crept over his scalp. And how well did you sleep under the woodsman’s roof?
Cat was even better than Fox at making a point.
After a good fuck you’d have slept like a wee bairn, Wolf noted. Their laughter clamored in the seer’s head like the sounds of a wartime forge. Wolf continued, Heir of House Halstaeg. No stomach for blood. Now you see cruelty in all you meet. When will you let us teach you the sword?
“When the stars explode and fall from the sky,” Arcmael said, moving his fingers into the elegant shape of a Banishing sigil. The unseen predators vanished, leaving him in the silence of the forest.
Mist cloaked the stream. The air smelled of wood smoke and leaf mold. Arcmael headed upstream using a crude path cut into the side of the hill. Twelve leagues to the gatetower—a long day in a storm, with no fire awaiting him but that of the unseen.
The woodsman’s temper clung to his mind like a runny nose. No wonder the dog ran off. Arcmael had no sigils for cruelty. Only walking.
Mistress Skadi, his grizzled mentor, was fond of advising him not to rely on his familiarity with humankind. You will change, she would rasp, one finger lifted, one cloudy eye unmoving. They will change you. Eight suns studying the warden’s arts had not convinced Arcmael of this, even after the mountain winters froze the veils of his mortal senses to dust. It was not until he returned with his ghosts to the place of his birth, the port city of Merhafr, that he learned Skadi’s words were true. Knowing he had not yet accepted his new role as a seer, the crone first dispatched him to Tower Sor on the pale cliffs outside the city. No one knew him. No one cared. Just another warden with his staff, muttering to himself.
They will change you. To the day, Arcmael didn’t know if Skadi had referred to the Fylking or to people. Both had changed him; the former by association, and the latter by ostracism.
The sun rose, turning birch and aspen leaves gold amid the green of early fall. Arcmael moved along at an agile pace, focused on the trail at his feet. The Fylking’s banter unsettled him. Whether by connection to his mind or by some godlike omniscience, they were never wrong. Perceiving this realm through the veils of their dimension, they wielded their observations like a sword in the grip of a blademaster who, with well-meaning yet devastating precision, pointed out his every weakness.
The Fylking: Outpost and The Wolf Lords Page 1