The commander of the High Fylking of Tower Sor appeared by his side, draped in glistening robes. The pommels of two swords shone above his shoulders, and his hood was drawn. Strands of pale, silvery hair hung around his face as he gazed down at the crystal. It is too late for this, he said.
“I must know.” Arcmael sat back on his heels. In each tower, the center crystal rested on top of a space with very specific dimensions, something to do with the strength of energies between two planes. Skadi used to illustrate this to her wardens by having them imagine light between their hands and then feeling the resistance between them. Only the High Fylking were able to adjust the tower crystals. No warden knew how it was done, even the original builders.
Arcmael was not here to tinker or theorize. He untied the straps of his bundle and flipped aside the covering. He rifled through the tools and picked up an iron bar with a curved end filed to an edge.
What are you doing? the Fylking demanded, his alarm rippling over Arcmael’s mind.
“I wasn’t expecting cooperation from you lot, was I?” He put the curved end of his bar into the crack between the crystal and the floor. A pointless exercise. He tossed the crowbar aside and grabbed a paring knife.
Did they teach you nothing in Faersc? No warden, warlock or draugr has the power to open a tower crystal.
Arcmael stood up, his patience stripped for the second time that day. “With the help of your enemy, Faersc is in smoking ruins at the hands of said mortals and fiends; all the teachers, builders and wardens are dead, and I only escaped by casting an Exile sigil on you lot. Hasn’t it occurred to you the Niflsekt opened the crystals?”
That is not possible, the Fylking said, but the tremble in his voice said otherwise.
“If he was good enough to get through your Gate, stay hidden here for twenty suns and trick the wardens into banishing their Guardians, I think he could figure this one out.”
For a moment he thought the Fylking wouldn’t help him. Then the immortal warrior drew one of his swords, flipped it straight down and touched the center of the crystal with a word. The floor shuddered and the circle bent in on itself in a dozen shards, flipping up and sliding down with a high-pitched grating sound.
A foul, musty smell emerged from the opening. Arcmael knelt and leaned forward. There, sure enough, lay a man shriveled around his bones, draped in a warden’s cloak and clutching a broken staff. A cracked slit marred the center of his skull between his eyes.
“Edros.” He looked up at the Fylking. “You have the ability to remove these bodies from the tower crystals. You could use sound to lift them, or disintegrate them or—”
It is too late, now, the warrior repeated. He looked up at the tower ceiling as the wind ripped at the parapet.
“Why do you keep saying that? You could—”
You don’t understand. He vanished.
“Bastard,” Arcmael muttered, staring into the hole. The Fylking had not even bothered to close the crystal.
Someone pounded on the door.
Arcmael rose. Leaving his tools and bones, he ran across the floor and heaved open the heavy portal. Wind ripped it from his hands and hurled it against the wall. Bren stood outside, drenched by rain, his cloak rippling in the gale. His face was wild with fear.
Arcmael moved past him, sweeping the landscape below. Guardsmen fled in all directions, their voices lost; horses, sheep and dogs bolted over the plain; droves of shrieking birds filled the sky. All of them, every mortal thing, fled south—all except a group of Fylking, riding into the maelstrom, their cloaks shining on the wind.
Sickly light ripped from the heavens, a bolt straight as an arrow and wide as a plain. Corrupted by blood and spinning at a frequency visible to mortals, it roared over the earth and struck the tower, one point on the Gate, and then passed beyond, out of sight. The ground shook, causing Arcmael and Bren to lose their footing and fall. They clutched at the steps to avoid being pitched over the edge.
Bren cried out. A shape filled the northeastern sky, bristling with malevolence, the screams of a thousand armies on its breath. It rose above the horizon of the Gate, a beast clawing through a cage door, its eyes burning with fire and its teeth flashing swords.
Seek you a woman with a broken heart.
“Millie,” Arcmael breathed, tears filling his eyes. Only love had made her power shine. In innocence, love was an easy thing to destroy.
The demon opened its jaws with a roar that shook the world.
As the Crow Sees
Melisande knelt beside the pile of brush she had gathered in the woods behind the tower. She held out a tingling hand, paused and then picked up a dark branch forked like the ears of a hare. She turned and gazed across her work, a crisscrossed pattern of sticks, stalks, boughs, bark and sprays of blooms dried by frost, ends on top and below the next, a tapestry of autumn spread upon the field beneath the tower’s thrall. The snow had mostly melted, leaving the ground dark, damp and rich with shades of brown, red, gold and evergreen.
A short distance away, Pisskin sat very still, hunting birds flitting in and out of the fallen field. The evening Melisande had returned from her foray in the gatetower, the cat shot out from the woods and yowled at the door. Like her, the animal knew where he belonged.
The sun passed behind a bank of iron clouds. Stepping over the patterned brush, Melisande moved this way and that until she reached a spot in need of adjustment. She set her branch down and wove it into a lupine stalk.
Satisfied for the moment, she straightened her back with a stretch, retrieved her pack which she had left leaning against the tower and headed down to the village. A mounted watcher on the edge of the Fylking’s pale nodded warily as she passed.
She would buy bread, apples, candles and tea with the copper stars a guardsman gave her in return for repairing a large rip in his cloak. Melisande offered to do the work for nothing. But firmly, and not a little pale, the soldier had claimed he didn’t want to take time from her work on the king’s commission. That was nonsense; she fixed the cloak in the time it took to peel a potato. But no one would risk asking her for favors after she had walked into Tower Sif without harm.
Wood smoke hung low over Odr. It had become a somber place, thick with men at arms, riders, messengers and scouts. Townsfolk hurried about, tending to war and winter. Rumor had it the warlock’s ghouls had been driven from Ason Tae, but now Fjorginans marched from the west and soon more soldiers would enter the Vale to defend it. With so many men to feed, food had become scarce and war had made supply deliveries few and far between. Lieutenant Haldor had sent riders east into the desolate Eldrim Mountains, but no one expected help to come from there soon, not with winter looming.
Melisande wove traps to capture small game and fashioned a fishing pole and a net to catch fish. Damjan wouldn’t approve of her hunting north of the cot beyond the watchers’ patrols. But it kept her from having to come into the village to wait in line. Gone were the days when she traded her wares for the things she needed in the privacy of the villagers’ personal spaces. They had barely gotten past blaming her for the storm and the death of Yarrow, news of which had reached Odr quickly. Now they had fresh fodder, as word of her entering the gatetower went around.
As Melisande crossed the North River Bridge, she pulled her hood down over her face. Avoiding the smoky windows of the Sword and Staff, she walked to a side street that curved around a millpond. Pale sheets of ice floated beneath the dark water. On the other side, past the millhouse and through an old oak copse on the edge of the main street, Melisande noticed something strange.
A group of people had gathered around a rider on a heavy black steed. Someone lifted a hand and touched his cloak. As his smile flashed beneath the shadow of his hood, Melisande’s blood ran cold. She glanced up the lane at the candlemaker’s shop…then back at the street and the river beyond.
She was imagining things. She continued past the pond, then stopped and turned around. The rider was no one, not a ranger, not anyone she
knew. Returning the way she had come, she crossed the lane and hugged the stone wall of a brewery. Just short of the end, behind a stone tethering post, she pressed her back against the wall and peered around.
The man passed the lane and rode up the street. He wore dark shades of leather fighting gear, gray leggings, black boots, armguards and a hauberk under a plain tunic. He was fully armed and his bearing and the wear in his clothes spoke of battle. Melisande didn’t recognize his horse, black as ravens with one white fetlock.
He stopped in front of the Jarnstrom forge, dismounted and tethered his steed and then spoke to the guardsmen by the door. One of them smiled and clasped his arm; the other opened the door and called inside. After a moment Damjan appeared, red faced and wearing his leather apron. The rider pushed back his hood, revealing long black hair tied into a tail. Damjan’s expression of surprise spread into a grand smile. The two men embraced like long-lost brothers.
As they went inside, Melisande leaned her head against the wall, her heart racing like a spring-thawed stream. Othin. It had to be. Spooked to her bones, she hurried across the street and back to the river, no longer caring about food or candles or tea or anything but getting away from this place.
Foolish! It was not him. He would not be on the road out of his ranger’s gear. And that was not his horse.
She reached the warden’s cot in a whirl, out of breath and more frightened than any ghoul, warlock, witch or immortal had ever made her. She slammed the door, paced around the room and sat down, fighting tears. For the second time, she eyed her yarn and thought of using pattern sense to salve her heart. But it was no use. The Trickster had gone, taken a wife and left her to crows, gods and wool. Nothing had changed, for all her fine hard fortresses. This still hurt and she could do nothing but knit for warriors, her hands moving to the rhythm of the earth. They would be safe and their women wouldn’t grieve as she did. As her mother used to say, No one comforts the comforter.
Melisande gathered herself and went to the stove. Her stomach growling with hunger, she rekindled the coals, added wood and poured water into an old pan that had survived the cottage fire. She ate some stale bread. Then she went to the back door, where she had left two small fishes she caught that morning in a deep stream pool that had not yet frozen. She grabbed her knife, went outside and began to clean them.
Crows clamored in the distance. As she worked, her mind numb as if from shock, the birds alit in the trees around her. She left the remains of the fishes on a rock for them. Then she scrubbed her hands with snow and returned inside.
Dark clouds filled the sky as the sun set behind the mountains. Having eaten his fill of fish, Pisskin sat by the stove, cleaning himself. Melisande sat in her uncomfortable old chair by the light of her last two candles and knit row upon row of winter-gray stitches until the length looked right. She stretched out a red braided string she had used one day on a discomforted guardsman to measure his inside leg. Nodding, she set the work aside. Then she took up a new set of needles, pulled a long strand and began to cast stitches for the second leg.
Later, in the deep silence of the night, Melisande crawled into her bed and gazed at the fire flickering in the stove grate. She had stopped imagining a knock on the door hours ago, after cleaning her body with a rag, the last of the goat-milk soap Bythe’s wife gave her and the rest of the water in her pot. An awkward endeavor. Even if Othin were in town, he wouldn’t come to see her, not with a wife waiting at home. She closed her eyes and listened to the sleet tapping on the stovepipe. Maybe the crow warrior would comfort her tonight.
Crows with hoods and swords flapped their wings against the windows. Horsemen rode in circles around the cot, their dark hair flying on the wind. Wolves jumped up the walls and onto the roof. Melisande grasped the end of a stitch and pulled, gathering a snaky pile until the beasts fell to the ground.
The door opened. Outside lay a valley painted emerald green and cradled by plunging peaks of white and gray. She took to the air and glided down along a swift, deep river. A path disappeared into the forest on the water’s edge. Clad in pearl white, she drifted beneath the mighty trees until she reached a pool. There, at the base of a wooded rise cloaked in roots, loomed a black hole, tall as a man and twisting strangely. A warrior in silver armor and a dark cloak stood there, his long white hair shining and his expression sad.
Love gives life, he said. Others began to appear, ancient warriors in fine clothes, with fine weapons; men and women strong as steel, gazing from fair-colored eyes. She knew them. They protected her.
Terror seized her heart. She turned and ran.
Melisande awoke at the sound of scratching. Pisskin stood on his hind legs at the door, digging his claws into the frame. Outside the window, morning painted the forest gray.
Later, the rising sun cast diffused light through the shrouded sky above the Eldrim Mountains as Melisande made her way to the gatetower, crunching over a thin blanket of sleet. The air was still. She reached the edge of her patterned brush and walked around it, looking for anything out of place. She slowed and stopped, facing the tower. Several paces ahead, the weave had come undone, like a dropped stitch. She went to her pile, shook off the ice and picked out a beech branch with the leaves still clinging.
She had carefully placed the branch when hoofbeats shook the ground, disturbing the silence. She cast a glance behind her, thinking to see a watcher. Then she froze.
All the details rushed in on her, scattering her, making her forget too many things and remember others. The way he sat in his saddle, the set of his shoulders, his hands on the reins—he looked like a dream on the edge of the field, a fountain of tears. He might as well have been the Niflsekt for all her heart could make of it.
She had the Fylking now. The crow warrior. She had pattern sense and her cat and her knife and a vow from Damjan to leave her alone. What did she need with a Trickster? Why was he here? He rode back and forth, testing the Fylkings’ boundary like a fox trusting its tail to the ice. Maybe he thought to take her as a mistress. The idea bled on her mind like a fresh wound.
Her cheeks hot, Melisande went back to her brush pile. She knelt before it, her fingers cold and empty of the earth’s breath. The brush looked ugly now, a heap of dead things, rotting.
“Millie!” Othin called out. He rode around between her and the cot, and slid off his horse.
Melisande moved away from the patterns and walked north, toward the tower. It stood silent, brooding as always. A murder of crows circled the heights. She reached a large outcropping and sat down, out of reach, out of mind.
“Millie, talk to me,” Othin pressed, pacing, his cloak swirling around his feet.
Melisande huddled on the rock without a word to say. She wanted him to leave but only because she had never been so glad to see him. She hated him, she loved him, and it didn’t matter.
Slowly, he began to walk toward her, his face set and his gaze on the tower. Her heart flipped over as he walked past where the watchers dared to go…and kept walking. Had the High Fylking abandoned her? She jumped up and ran toward the tower. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered.
Light flashed in the air behind her, putting her hair on end. She whirled around. Othin had halted his advance, his hands up in surrender. He drew his sword, and for a moment Melisande thought he meant to fight the High Fylking of Tower Sif like some damned idiot. Then he held out the blade on both palms, knelt and laid it on the ground as Damjan had done. He said something. The light dimmed, and the crackle in the air withdrew.
Othin got up and sheathed his blade. “I will leave if you ask it, Millie,” he said across the space. “But this isn’t what you think. Please hear me out.”
Now on her own, Melisande stayed where she was. Surely, she was stronger than this. The Trickster walked slowly up the hill. As he drew near, he stopped. He had a bandage on his arm. Tall and weathered by war, he had a knife in his boot, another on his belt and two swords strapped over his chest. His hair had fallen from its tie and hung i
n rough strands around his face.
He reached into his tunic and drew something forth. “Not a day passed that I didn’t touch this and know how I felt,” he said, holding the hooded crow she had knit for him. He caressed the stitches with his fingers. “News of war came to Merhafr, and I became trapped in a net of deceit that tore apart my every plan. On my honor, Millie, I never gave my heart to anyone but you.” He held out the crow to her.
Like a feral cat snatching a treat, Melisande took the flaxen stitches, letting the torn neckband hang in the air. The hooded crow blurred into weird angles as tears filled her eyes. She knew nothing when she had knit this. But the crow knew everything. The gods were both cruel and wise.
She approached the ranger, sank into his arms and burst into tears.
~ * ~
Melisande’s knitting lay in the chair in a forgotten heap as she and Othin entered the cot. Removing his cloak and unbuckling his sheaths, the ranger went to the stove and put wood in it. Melisande threw her cloak on a hook and began unlacing the sides of her smock. Her body ached from his lips and his arms around her. Nervous and shaky as a leaf she asked, “Why are you not wearing your ranger’s colors?”
He pulled off his tunic and hauberk and tossed them on top of his weapons. “I’m not a ranger anymore.” He sat on the bed and began to remove his boots.
“What are you then?” She pulled off her smock and unwound the woolens on her legs, letting the strips fall to the floor.
He came to her, bare to the waist, his leggings unlaced on his crotch. “An outlaw, I suppose.” Her breath caught as he lifted her up and brought her to the bed. He dragged her shift up her thighs as he brought her down and lowered himself on top of her. “It cost me, fleeing the altar with war coming on.”
“Plenty of men doing that,” she said, her blood racing as he moved his hands and lips over her.
The Fylking: Outpost and The Wolf Lords Page 36