The Axe and the Throne (Bounds of Redemption Book 1)

by Ireman, M. D.

  Tallos’s chest felt as though it were collapsing, overwhelmed by the mistake of having wished to be attacked. He bent at the knees and tried to will himself to invisibility. Lia was by his side, as always, poised to protect him against whatever threat may appear.

  The noises grew louder. How something could make so much racket walking through dried leaves and not yet be visible, Tallos could not understand. Bears were not like to be out this season, and he could think of nothing else that would advance with so little worry of attracting attention. And then he saw it.

  The solitary figure that approached them was a sickly old man. His white hair bounced with his ungainly steps as he trudged through terrain unkind to his spindly legs. It seemed a wonder his frail frame could endure the punishment of those steps without breaking as the man continued forth with no regard for his own wellbeing.

  The figure neared, and familiarity gave way to recognition. It was Greyson. He looked as though he was wont to commit murder, but in fairness that was his usual expression. He must have formed a party of reinforcements to save face with the villagers, becoming separated at some point during the trek. It was all too easy to lose sight of others among the trees and elevation changes, and without a strong sense of hearing, one could find himself lost even after stepping away to piss.

  Greyson continued onward, moving toward them without words but with purpose—purpose and pure hatred burning in his eyes.

  TITON

  Years Ago

  “Get your wooden axes, and come with me.” Titon son of Small Gryn barked the order at his two sons.

  It had not been a particularly pleasant day for him. Another raid sent south by his clansmen, led by Keethro, had been unable to find any inhabited Dogmen villages prior to the need to turn back. That news alone had been enough to put Titon in an unfriendly mood, but far worse was what Keethro had told him about the men. “They grumble and complain that you are not there to lead them,” Keethro had said. “When I fail in finding a village it is you they wrongfully blame. And I must admit, they are not alone in their desire to see you lead them once again. I am not able to push them far enough. They will not follow me beyond the point at which return is impossible without success.” Titon was not pleased by his friend’s confession, and the two men had not parted on the best of terms.

  “But we just started eating,” Decker moaned.

  His boys were tall with pride, having returned from their first hunting trip that was both unsupervised and successful. Animals in these parts were skittish and scarce, and that little Titon had managed to skewer a tree rat with an arrow was indeed an accomplishment. The boys had made a meal of it by combining the skinned animal with tinder berries, boiling it to oblivion, and had just begun to enjoy their first tastes of the tangy mush spooned up with bits of hard bread.

  “Then finish it quickly and get your axes.”

  Titon waited outside while his sons shoveled down their meal, recalling his own such moment of triumph. He and Keethro had snuck out at a younger age, and Keethro took the head off a rabbit with a throwing axe. Finding that the rabbit was tied to a tree, kept alive by a neighbor for a later date, had not discouraged them enough to keep from roasting it and savoring every morsel.

  Moments later, the boys trudged out of the house, mouths stained fuchsia and looking sick. The three made their way to the usual spot in the woods, well out of earshot of their mother, not that she was like to hear them.

  “Let’s see if you weaklings remembered anything from our last attempt at this,” Titon taunted. “Ten paces apart.”

  His two sons could not have been any more dissimilar in appearance. Whereas small-framed Titon’s dark, handsome features took after neither parent, Decker was a brute, pale eyed like his mother and red and freckled like his father. There was no mistaking which son had been born on the waning moon and which on the waxing. To make matters worse for his eldest, little Titon had been born during the worst winter their clan had ever endured. So dire was the famine that all their goats had to be killed and eaten, and when the meat was gone, the family chewed on the remaining leather until their gums bled. Elise’s breast went dry, but she did not allow their son to perish. She kept him alive by the sustenance of her tears, as they were all that was plentiful.

  The boys faced each other, neither wishing to begin, just making feints as if about to throw or charge in for a swing. Their axes were made of a lightweight wood and suitable for both throwing and swinging, though not particularly great for either. Being struck was nonetheless quite painful.

  “Come on! Fight already,” Titon yelled.

  Decker was the first to action. He ran forward a few steps as if to charge, then lobbed his axe at Titon. Titon easily avoided the tumbling weapon, closed the distance, and swung at Decker’s neck, not making any contact of consequence.

  “Is there something wrong with your arm?” Titon asked his elder son with muffled rage. It seemed there was an unspoken agreement between the two not to strike with full force, which was detrimental to their learning proper technique.

  “The point is mine, Father. He has lost his axe, and I struck his neck,” Titon replied, irresolute.

  “You don’t fight for points. This is not some southern game. You are training to protect your family. Now hit him! How else will he learn?” How have I raised these boys to be so feeble? They will die on their first Dogman raid if they do not learn to swing with some fecking force.

  Titon struck Decker with a partial-strength blow to the shoulder.

  “By the Mountain’s tits! That was pathetic,” Titon cried at them. “Try again, let’s go… Hurry up.”

  The boys squared off again, and again it was Decker who acted first, charging at his brother. Decker already outweighed Titon by a small margin, but Titon’s extra experience and dexterity more than made up the difference. Titon ducked the attack and jabbed at Decker’s stomach. The force of the blow was multiplied by Decker’s forward momentum, causing him to double over and reel in pain. Shortly thereafter, he emptied the contents of his stomach onto the snow. The result was a pile of blood-red, half-chewed meat and berries.

  Little Titon was wide eyed and staring at the mess, which truth be told looked not much different than a pile of entrails. All the efforts of their first hunt, the fun of which had already been stolen by the interruption of training and their father’s mood, now lay on the ground, wasted. It is a small price for them to pay, Titon told himself, stemming his own guilty frustration.

  “I am sorry,” Titon said to his brother, prompting a growl from his father.

  “The Dogmen will not be sorry when they spill your brother’s guts, and that is what is like to happen if you two keep fighting like southern princesses. My father would have made me eat the food you just wasted, Decker, but you two are far too prissy for that. Pick up your axes, and fight right this time before I get angry.”

  Decker had tears in his eyes and a face twisted with rage. This time Decker charged his brother with an added war cry. Titon stepped to the side, and Decker went past. The only good strike open was to the back of the head, and Titon took it, but carefully. His cautious attack was too slow and only grazed his brother. While Titon was realizing his mistake, Decker turned and threw his axe, smashing his brother in the face. Some blood started to trickle from Titon’s now-swelling upper lip.

  That’s more like it, Decker.

  “Not fair,” said little Titon with a slight lisp, his lip causing him trouble.

  “Not fair? What kind of Dogmen bitches did I raise? You swing like a girl, and you get killed like a girl. Decker won that. Now go again.”

  Decker retrieved his axe and the boys walked to their positions, both visibly angry.

  “Maybe this time, Titon, you can pretend you are fighting to defend someone you care about since your family’s safety means so little to you. Perhaps you can fight for Keethro’s little slut, Red.” That ought to get him.

  And it did. This time when Decker threw his axe, Tit
on parried it, closed distance, and clobbered him on the skull. It was not enough to break the skin, but a swollen lump formed on Decker’s head as he writhed around in pain, crying in spite of his efforts.

  “I guess that is what it takes to finally get you to fight like a man,” said the son of Small Gryn.

  Little Titon’s face was ashen as he stared at his squirming brother. The sound of his brother screaming, the blood-red splotch in the snow, the insult to Red, and the shame of being goaded into hurting his younger brother must have all been too much. He screamed and flung his axe at his father with force. Titon did not react quite in time, and the axe struck his arm first, continuing its rotation to smash him in the eye.

  “You little shit!” he yelled as he tried to chase after his defiant son, but he could not see well enough to do so effectively. Titon ran off and had weaved out of sight amongst the trees within moments. If events occurred the same as they had in the past, little Titon would spend the night in the cold and come back later the next day as if nothing had happened, and neither would speak of it.

  Titon rubbed his throbbing eye and sat in the snow for a bit to regain his bearings. Then he picked up the training axes, gave Decker, who was no longer crying, a pat on the back and began to walk him home.

  On their way back, a satisfied smile formed on Titon’s face. The boy can throw an axe.

  LEONA

  Leona plucked a leaf from the mint plant on the windowsill, popped it in her mouth, and sprinted to the bedroom. Standing at her clothes chest, she began to brush her hair, her face feeling flushed as memories surfaced of the countless times she’d similarly prepared to meet with Tallos as a young girl.

  Her life with her parents had consisted each day of toiling to eek out a meager existence and battling the never-relenting foes of thirst, hunger, and the cold—a thing made evermore difficult by her father’s love of mead. Leona had resigned herself, as per her mother’s instruction, to be content with what little they had, to take refuge in the fact that Northmen had not yet come to kill them, and to find a husband, preferably an old and established dog breeder or distiller who would better support her. Then Tallos had come, upending all her mother’s best-laid plans.

  Tallos, it seemed, knew no fear. He traveled to areas that no other men dared and more often than not came back with skins, meat, and stories of vistas of great beauty. What other boys bragged of planning, Tallos was busy doing, and doing far from poorly. The cozy home in which she and Tallos now lived was built by his hands and hers. He had shown her they could accomplish through will, trial, and his endless pool of resourcefulness, whatever it was they sought.

  Leona looked at her reflection in the palm-sized square of silvered glass, the only such piece they owned, and traced the lines on her face with a finger. Damn you for making me smile so deeply, she cursed her husband, sending an unpleasant twinge up her back at the thought that the gods may have heard her and mistaken her intent.

  She had taken his gods, the Mighty Three. Tallos did not know his father, but he knew the man did not follow the Faith, the predominant religion of the Fourpaw villagers. Tallos’s mother had told him of his father’s gods: the River, the Mountain, and the Dawnstar. Knowing little more than their names, Tallos worshipped them in his own way. Leona believed that his worship was not out of true belief but rather in reverence to his father, who was—by his mother’s account, at least—a good man, and Leona was happy to worship them in kind.

  Prosperous though they were in their own way, Leona’s thoughts slipped to years past, during an unrelenting string of harsh winters. Many villagers had succumbed to starvation or cold. Tallos had been faced with the burden of not only supporting their own family of three bodies and eight legs but that of helping his friend Erik and his wife and new son. All of them grew gaunt, but none so much as Tallos. She’d begged him to save more for himself, but he insisted that she and Lia remain as well fed as he could manage. Erik, Megan, and their child were taken in by Megan’s parents in a neighboring village, dog breeders with plenty of wealth and provisions saved for such times. Leona did not know whether Tallos would have survived otherwise. Toward the end, he and Lia grew scarily thin, and with Tallos fearing for Lia’s safety he had begun to make her, with great difficulty, remain home when he went to hunt. During one such outing, Lia escaped while Leona had fought gusts of wind at the door. She cried as she confessed to Tallos upon his return how her stupidity had cost Lia her life. “Lia is wild in her heart, and with so little to eat she was like to leave at some point,” Tallos had said. “Though it is cold, she may be better off on her own. Do not fear for her. She will find food and shelter,” he promised.

  Two days later Lia returned to them, skinny as ever, with a well and dead fox in her mouth. She dropped the fox on the floor, wagged her tail and licked at their faces. It was the only time Leona had seen Tallos cry. He wept quietly and embraced his companion. They made a stew of the fox, bones and all, of which Lia received the wolf’s share. Tallos never again went hunting without Lia and often gave her the freedom to roam distant and catch extra game on his longer trips.

  Leona abandoned her brush and silvered glass, less interested now with the state of her appearance and more anxious about the state of her husband. She ran out her bedroom and through the front door. Beaming with energy, she scanned the faces of the men who’d just crested the nearest hill, eager to find her husband’s.

  Numbness consumed her arms and legs. Her vision blurred and doubled as she lost the ability to focus. Sound was replaced with a gentle ringing, which bled into a blanket of silence. The fact that the faces of the tall men approaching were those of strangers was less concerning to her than the reality that Tallos was not among them. A faraway voice from another time spoke to her, reminding her of what she knew to do in such an instance. They had planned for it together when building their home, she and Tallos. “If a raiding party should crest the ridge, or even a group of men you simply do not recognize, regardless of their dress, weaponry, or potential intentions, regardless of whether I am among them, you are to run. Run into the house as if to hide, then straight out of the rear door which we have built for this purpose and bar it from the outside. Do not hesitate, do not think, just run. Run south beyond the point at which we met Lia. Run and do not stop until you can no longer lift a foot. Follow the river as far as you can travel. I will find you.”

  She tried to twirl the ring on her finger, but the motion was impossible without the feeling in her limbs. She was paralyzed, unable to move except at perhaps an implausibly slow rate of speed as if in a nightmare. He is dead.

  TALLOS

  It was not the first time Tallos had seen his friend gravely wounded. Erik had no knack for climbing, but with Tallos as his only friend, he had no options but to follow or be left behind. When they were young, Erik had fallen when a loose root chosen as a handhold gave way. Sliced to ribbons, blood streaming down his face, and with a broken leg, Erik would have died where he lay had Tallos not dragged him miles back to their village. But the thick blood now spurting from the hole in Erik’s neck upended Tallos’s usual composure.

  Still carrying the remains of his eldest son, Erik had been unable to avoid the attack that came. Greyson had approached the encumbered giant, looking hateful as he always did, and with unforeseen rage, he plunged a knife to the hilt into Erik’s neck.

  As Erik collapsed to the ground, Tallos’s own body felt weightless. The tall pines around him began to spin, surrounding him in an ever-shrinking prison. His disembodied feeling of drifting, as if to sleep, was blanketed by a grim reality: Erik’s wound was fatal.

  The barking of dogs and shouting of men came from all directions. Greyson was the only one who seemed to be screaming anything of any sense, though the most Tallos could make out was “You fools!” and “Hope they kill every one of you!”

  Tallos dropped the body of Erik’s other boy and ran to help. Lia remained close to her master’s side, her tail stiff, anxiously awaiting instr
uction on how to help.

  “Put it down,” Tallos shouted at Greyson, much in the way he would to Lia when she grabbed something she should not. Greyson did not seem to hear his words, continuing to charge toward the next closest man in a clear effort to end their lives. There was no demented mirth in his actions; Greyson slashed at each target with every ounce of his desperate spite.

  Tallos glanced at Erik. Lying on his back, blood pulsing between his fingers at his neck, Erik gasped for air like a dying fish. His eyes were wide with panic when they found Tallos’s and pleaded for help, but there was nothing Tallos could do to comfort his friend until Greyson was no longer a threat.

  A handful of the young men in their company had begun to circle Greyson, but most had scattered to a safer distance. Some had bows in hand, but none had weapons at the ready. Had this been a coordinated attack by Northmen, we would all be dead.

  “Put down the—”

  Tallos’s second request was cut short as an object flew end over end out of the nearby trees, lodging itself in the back of Greyson’s skull. The impact pushed his frail frame forward, where he toppled headfirst onto the stony ground and lay motionless.

  Knowing they should have been able to subdue the old man without the need for more bloodshed, Tallos breathed deeply to shout at whichever fool had thrown the object, Jegson he guessed. But before he could, a guttural war cry filled the air—a deep, fearsome noise. None of the men in his party could have made such a sound. Northmen.

  Tallos had never considered himself a coward. In fact, he had resolved to never again take the path of caution over that of action after what it had so recently cost him, but with Erik moments from death, his other men so sprawled and ineffectual, and faced with the prospect of his own mortality, Tallos’s instincts screamed for him to run. Later he could dwell on whether running was indeed a path of action, and later he could hash out the hypocrisy of wishing for a valiant fight with Northmen only to flee when they appeared, but he had no time for rationalizations. He would run, hopefully faster than all the fools who had followed him and Erik to what would be an early death.