The Fylking: Outpost and The Wolf Lords

by F. T. McKinstry

  Melisande quickened her pace, snapping the lead rope to bring the beast along. The wind rose, smelling of rain and dampening her heart with foreboding. Not liking the weight of the dark, she stopped, felt around in one of the baskets on Thor’s back and pulled out a torch. Then she lowered her pack and rummaged through its contents—a linen sack of dried chamomile flowers, her father’s old empty whisky flask, several vials containing oils and resins for Yarrow, a small corked jug of honey, a bag of goose livers for Pisskin, a broken knitting needle, a bruised apple, a cluster of leaves she had forgotten the name of and her knife, of course—until her hand closed around the cold metal of her tinderbox.

  The wind had grown more insistent and now howled like wolves in the rift of the valley. It blew out Melisande’s spark twice before she could shelter the flint and steel enough to catch a spark in the wax on the torch’s end. Golden flames sent shadows fleeing into the forest around.

  All but one.

  Thor screamed, reared back and thundered into the trees. The baskets on his back crashed into trunks, exploding their contents onto the ground. Melisande whirled around.

  The torchlight flowed like a river into the starless sky of the dragon warrior’s presence as he stood, closer than she had ever seen him, even in dreams. His breastplate, scaled mail, ridged leggings, greaves, straps and blades glinted like a raven’s cloak. He wore no helmet. His face, immortally fair and pale as a white stag, was framed by jagged lengths of dark hair threaded with rain. Storms surrounded him.

  Her knees weak, Melisande reached into her pocket and pulled out her swatch. Fearing to lower her torch, she switched hands and wrapped the swatch around the shaft, gripping them together. Her hands tingled with pattern sense for the first time since she had thrown her knitting bag into the corner.

  The knotted string holding the stitches together hung in the air, stirred by wind.

  As he settled his gaze upon her work, the Fylking’s eyes caught the light just so, turning them to two stars shining from the shadow of his brow. He stepped forward with flawless male confidence, his gaze not leaving the woolen strand.

  Melisande lifted her aching fingers and looped them into the end. “Stop or I’ll undo you.”

  She had no idea if he knew what she meant; nor did she know if unraveling the swatch would affect him. All she had were sketchy clues and assumptions based on talk, limited experience and dreams in which the black-clad warrior kept his distance, unnerving her with glimpses and soft whispers that made her long for Othin with fresh anguish.

  The Fylking warrior stopped. His expression, softened by a strange smile, betrayed more fascination than concern. If I meant you harm, I could have killed you with a thought, he informed her. What does your threat mean to me, when you did not pull your threads after making them?

  Melisande swallowed hard. He made a good point. She could have undone him at any time. But doubt always haunted her, a specter of insignificance telling her she had no power over things that threatened her solitary existence. Her mother had once said, Don’t go thinking you’re as big as the sky, or the gods will cast you down to the earth. The one time Melisande used pattern sense to feel the depths of her pain—as if it were of such cosmic importance that she had been jilted by a ranger, one woman of many who knew that—she had kindled the wrath of her kind and lost her house and hearth.

  She lowered her hand from the thread. “What do you want? It can’t be good or you’d not be stalking me in the night like a wolf.”

  The Fylking stepped closer, wind, rain and unrest settling around him. He seemed to absorb the torchlight, and his steps made no sound. I have been watching after you.

  Melisande laughed. “Liar. I didn’t need looking after before you showed up.”

  He tilted his head slightly, his expression thoughtful. War is coming.

  “I’ve heard no talk of war.”

  Not yet.

  Before she could respond to that, he lifted a pale hand to her cheek and brushed his fingers along the curve. It tingled and made her heart flutter. She stepped away from him and lifted her chin with new resolve. “I’m not a warden. I want no traffic with the Fylking, and I don’t need your protection.”

  His gaze touched her hand gripping the swatch. Her palm felt sweaty around it. It would appear not. And yet, what has your knitting brought you?

  “The folk of Odr are fools,” she snapped, considering her friends amid those who had been influenced by Gunda and her tongue-wagging. Her cheeks warmed. She didn’t need this Fylking pointing out the cost of her broken heart.

  Fear brings out people’s true sides, he said, as it brought out yours. But power takes no sides. It can turn on you as easily as not. He spiraled a finger around the thread hanging from the swatch as if to study it. Perhaps you should rely on yourself.

  Melisande glowered, chafing at his fatherly tone. The same conclusion had prompted her to throw her knitting bag into the corner. But she was not going to tell him that. “Why do I need you then?”

  I am a useful ally. He caressed the woolen thread between his fingers, his gaze moving to hers like a smoldering coal. Among other things.

  Melisande’s pulse quickened as he took her other hand, drawing her close. His lips neared hers without touching. His flesh was strong and smooth as marble, and he smelled like trees, a rough, earthy scent that crept into her mind and body like wine feeding the roots, softening her, strengthening her and making her head light as a breeze on a summer’s day.

  In the distance, a man shouted her name. Melisande started and dropped her torch. She leaned down, picked it up and turned.

  The Fylking had vanished.

  Torchlight flickered in the trees. Voices. Yarrow called out. Flushed and unnerved, Melisande called back.

  Thor had returned and stood just inside the light amid the wreckage of her broken baskets. At least that had happened. She was not sure about the dragon warrior.

  The swatch. It had fallen from her hand. She held up her torch and scanned the ground. Only her tracks matted the ferns where she and the Fylking had stood. She stomped around in the fallen leaves and spruce saplings, imagining the patch of black, white and green wool stitches. She shook her cloak around and searched her pockets. She knelt over the singed spot where her torch had dropped, moving her hand over the sodden earth. The stitches were nowhere in sight.

  Bastard. The Fylking must have feared the swatch more than he had let on.

  Heavy footsteps cracked and crunched over the ground as someone approached. “Millie!” the man boomed again. He came out of the trees, tall and clad in an earth-brown cloak of her own making. “Ah. Here you are.”

  Melisande jumped up, dropped her torch and ran into his arms. “Damjan!” she breathed against his chest as he tightened his arms around her. He smelled of wood smoke and horses. She withdrew, touching the black edges of his cloak and the long braid of his hair. “Wherever have you been?”

  Yarrow came up behind, swathed in gray and clutching a torch made from a crooked stick. “I’ll ask you the same,” the witch growled. “I told you to be back by nightfall. These woods don’t suffer fools.” She moved to the spot where the Fylking had stood and began sniffing around like a dog.

  “What happened here?” Damjan said in a gentler tone, lifting his chin toward the mule’s work scattered in the brush.

  “Nothing,” Melisande said quickly. She retrieved her torch, checking once more for a glimpse of the swatch. “Thor spooked at the wind and lost his baskets.”

  Yarrow snorted.

  Less in the mood for the witch’s obscure, incisive banter than usual, Melisande ignored her and walked toward the mule. “When did you get back?” she asked Damjan over her shoulder.

  “Four days ago,” he replied, following her. “Anselm told me what happened.”

  Melisande jammed her torch into the crook of a tree. She pulled one of the broken baskets from the ground, set it aside and began picking up her market wares. Damjan helped her. She had nothing to a
dd to what his son would have told him; nor did she bother to defend herself, her conscience notwithstanding. Damjan knew her well enough. What she wanted most of all was news of Othin, despite all the bad news she had already received. She wanted to know if Damjan had seen him. Talked to him. Anything. But asking that would only bring attention to her broken heart and the source of all her trouble.

  Damjan moved about quietly and with palpable heaviness on his heart. Yarrow worked nearby, muttering to Thor. She had procured some rope and lashed the baskets together so they would hold, tying them over the beast’s back. In the distance, wolves clamored beneath the winds.

  Ravaged by questions, Melisande glanced repeatedly at Damjan moving around in the trees. If only she could get him away from here, in the sunlight, beyond the cobwebs of spells and admonitions. If she could just see him smile the way he used to do, she could ask him the questions to which she feared the answers. Finally, she said, “We feared for your return. Did anyone return with you?”

  Damjan shook his head, his expression holding a dark tale. “The Lords of Merhafr have more things on their mind than trouble in the north. I was questioned only briefly and escorted from the city.” A long pause. “I was caught by the storm south of the mountains. It delayed my passage.”

  Melisande gulped. South of the mountains. Had her tears reached as far as that? Wanting to apologize but not wanting to sound ridiculous, she blurted, “Is the realm at war?”

  Damjan straightened his back with a warlord stare that made Melisande’s blood run cold. Even Yarrow stopped what she was doing. The swordsmith said, “Why do you ask that?”

  Why, indeed? A vision of the dragon warrior rode roughshod over her thoughts. War is coming. “I thought few other things would occupy the rangers’ command more than the death of one of their own.”

  Damjan regarded her a moment longer and then picked up a pile of things and brought it to the mule. He didn’t answer her question. When the three of them had finished loading the baskets, they headed into the woods. The witch finally broke the silence.

  “What happened to your Fylking friend?” she asked with a crafty sidelong glance.

  Melisande’s heart tripped. She never told Yarrow about the dragon warrior. Either the witch spotted her talking to the Fylking earlier, or Damjan told her about him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play innocent with me,” the witch said. “I know these woods.”

  Annoyed by the witch’s smart tone, Melisande said, “You’re mad.”

  The crone moved along, her white hair catching the torchlight like a web. “Not so mad that I would consort with a Fylking that shows himself to an ordinary mortal. You’ve no second sight and you’re no warden.”

  Damjan walked a short distance ahead with a tense set to his shoulders. He knew the truth of this, at least what Melisande had told him the night the rangers attacked her, but he wasn’t telling. Melisande then recalled something Bythe had said that night, about Yarrow: She once had a warden lover. He told her the Fylking have the ability to show themselves to mortals if they wish it. Said it’s bad magic to them, uncomfortable, and that most of them won’t do it.

  Melisande scowled. That didn’t fit the dragon warrior’s way. He didn’t seem the slightest bit uncomfortable in his body. Quite the contrary. She said, “How do you know he’s Fylking, then?”

  The crone turned to her with a shrewd stare that stripped her pluck like leaves from a ragweed stalk. “I don’t believe he is.”

  The comment had the tone of a springing trap. Melisande’s earlier encounter with the dragon warrior rose into her mind again, as real as the night carrying her doubts and fears upon an icy wind. If not Fylking, then what? He could have been many things. He might have been Otherworld, an elf or some kind of spirit able to take any form. Why was Yarrow acting so strange?

  Inflamed at the witch for stirring up her fears, Melisande snapped, “What do you know about it?” Then she blanched under her own accusation. As much as she wanted to put the witch in her place by claiming she knew nothing about the Fylking, Melisande knew that wasn’t true. A warden lover. Nothing Melisande knew would compare to the easy talk of a man in the comfort of a bed on a winter’s night. Yarrow knew as much about this as anyone, maybe more.

  As if to hammer the finishing touch on a sword, the witch said, “You can’t close your heart to power and not expect consequences. The gods take note of such things.”

  Melisande said nothing as her mother’s words returned to her. Don’t go thinking you’re as big as the sky, or the gods will cast you down to the earth. She was cursed if she used pattern sense—and, according to Yarrow, cursed if she did not. She ground her teeth, unmoved. The witch could talk. But pattern sense was more destructive than throwing her knitting bag in the corner. Dragon warrior or not, she would leave it there.

  ~ * ~

  The wind increased during Melisande’s journey back to the cottage with Yarrow and Damjan. Thor spooked several times, requiring the witch to speak to him in a weird tongue that calmed him enough to plod on. Damjan said little. Melisande knew he hadn’t told her all about his journey to Merhafr, and his silence sent her imagination to flight like a colony of bats exploding into the night. As they finally reached the cottage, she half expected to find a company of men there waiting to take her away. But only the wind whispered in the trees.

  Later, Melisande huddled in her straw bed in the barn. She had not had the energy or desire to set up her new bed in the cottage or to take supper. She helped unload Thor’s baskets and then fled with the mule on a pretense of duty, avoiding Damjan’s telling glance as she left the house. He knew trouble when he saw it, and in a private moment on their return trip, he made a point to say so. Melisande didn’t deny it. Though Yarrow had taken her in and shown her kindness as she might a stray cat, something had changed.

  She gazed down through the rafters at the animals in their stalls. She missed Punch already. Wind ruffled the thatch and clattered in the trees outside. The damp, the night, the moods of a witch, the loss of a goat and above all the attentions of a roguish Fylking left her in uneasy isolation, even in the light of Damjan’s presence.

  Pisskin lay by her side, his body warm and soft beneath her hand. Her stomach growled with hunger. Earlier, concerned by her anxious departure from the cottage, Damjan came out to talk. Then he returned inside to get her some food, assuring her that when he came back, he would sleep below in the stall with his horse—which he had not bothered to unpack when he arrived—and which would be carrying the two of them back to Odr in the morning, so he informed her.

  Melisande didn’t know what had made her think Damjan would return from his journey to Merhafr and simply settle back into his smithy knowing the villagers had run her out of town. Under the shadow of worrying for his return, she had not thought about it. But the Master of House Jarnstrom had the force of swords and ancestry behind him, and this he reminded the villagers of Odr in no uncertain terms.

  War was coming, he told Melisande, hence his startled reaction to her having asked that question in seeming innocence after the Fylking had told her the same. Damjan learned it from Captain Ageton of the North Branch, whom he met on the road. After returning to Odr from what Melisande was beginning to sense was a long and troubled trip, he was in no mood to be diplomatic. He had told the villagers, probably wearing that red face and rough voice he took on when quite upset, that he would see every man jack of them enlisted and hauled off to Merhafr to serve the king’s army unless they got up to Graebrok with their draft horses, saws, thatch and tools and rebuilt Melisande’s house for her.

  Melisande laughed at this—for a moment. Traditionally, in times of war, the folk of Dyrregin were given a choice to serve in whatever way their skills allowed and were not asked to leave their homes, save those who delivered goods or joined the army to fight. Most, having descended from generations of families at war, did this willingly. Others, criminals, troublemakers, or sons too long at home, were s
ent to the city to fill the ranks and do what was required of them. Being a worthy man in the eyes of the Lords of Merhafr, Damjan was well within his authority to threaten the villagers of Odr unless they complied with his demands. As he told her this, Melisande had no trouble imagining him putting dissenters to the sword.

  As well-meaning as her friend was, Melisande wanted nothing to do with the villagers rebuilding her grandfather’s house after what they did, especially under force. But Damjan reminded her that not all of them had participated, and many who had been swept up in the madness now felt remorse and wanted to make amends. Melisande wanted to soften to Damjan’s reassurances, but she still balked at the thought of returning to Odr. She would be an outcast now, in some way or another. And she no longer wanted to knit for them even if they would have her work.

  Unfortunately, staying here with Yarrow sat less well in her heart. The witch had gone sour as old milk.

  The wind outside grew more insistent, finding every crack. Sleet blew in great sheets against the barn. What was taking Damjan so long? Perhaps Yarrow was in a better mood and had decided to put together something besides stale bread and cold soup for a meal.

  When her thoughts grew more fluid under the weight of a long day, Melisande began to drowse. In some ethereal distance, a woman laughed. Or a child. It was not Yarrow. Melisande drew her wool blanket close and lay down. Pisskin slept peacefully by her side. Whether the cat didn’t hear the laughter or chose to ignore it, his silence comforted her.

  Perhaps Constable Fagel would keep his old promise to give her a wolfhound pup in return for his daughter’s cloak. A hound might provide more comfort on dark nights than a cat, a creature friendly with the Otherworld. Unfortunately, Melisande had left a scar of added stitches in the heart of the cloak’s prettiest rose. It was an unfair trade.