by Scott Oden
“Let her go!” Óspak bellowed, clawing at Hrothmund’s ankles. His cry turned to a gurgle as Hrothmund’s club connected with his temple; the bronze studs ripped the skin even as the impact crushed Óspak’s skull like an eggshell.
Étaín screamed and twisted in the possessed man’s grasp; spitting, she tried to kick him in the groin, plucking at his clenched fingers to no avail. “You bastard!”
“Where is your ‘Hooded One,’ witch? Where is your Grímr?” Hrothmund dragged her back toward the center of the transept, where she might have a good look at the crucifix above them. Here, too, the worst of the fires blazed, fed by long-dry ceiling beams and curls of desiccated bitumen meant to seal the now-vanished clerestory from the elements. “Let him come! He will see me shatter your limbs and hurl you broken on the pyre ere he joins you in Hell! Call to him! Summon your would-be savior! Do it, witch—”
A sudden and absolute silence gave Hrothmund pause. The air around them grew heavy, dense, like the humid warmth that presaged a summer storm. Étaín felt it, too. She stopped struggling. The chanting of spirit voices had ceased, though she could still feel their presence. They watched. They waited.
And then, over the sharp crackle of burning wood, she heard a familiar sound: a low and deadly chuckle.
“Now I see what the Old One meant.”
22
Hrothmund spun around, his back to the chancel, and hauled Étaín to his breast. He looped his left arm around her throat. Beyond the fire, Grimnir crouched atop a pile of rubble near the middle of the ruined nave. His eyes shone like embers through the smoky haze. He gestured with the naked blade of his seax. “She’s not yours, oathbreaker, so take your filthy hands off her!”
Étaín felt Hrothmund stiffen; she felt a small tremor of fear vibrate down his spine. But when he spoke, his dissonant voice dripped scorn. “Oh, such gallantry from a son of Bálegyr! How touching!”
“Gallantry? Faugh! She’s mine, you miserable laggard. I stole her, fair and square. And I’ll take her back, now!”
“Only if I allow it, orcnéas.” Hrothmund seized Étaín by the scruff and kicked her legs out from under her, forcing her onto her knees. He raised his club, holding it poised to strike. “And I am not feeling magnanimous.”
Grimnir uncoiled like a spring and bounded down the face of the rubble. Daylight as thin and gray as an elder’s beard seeped in through ragged holes in the cathedral roof, creating pools of light and shadow. “So high-and-mighty, willow-man?” A smile curled Grimnir’s lips, humorless and mean. “So cocksure and lofty, eh? We’ll see.”
“Kneel, you wretch! Kneel and beg Christ’s forgiveness! Ask the Lord for mercy and you may yet save your black soul from the torments of Hell!”
Grimnir’s face darkened. The flames of wrath kindled in those narrowed eyes, and he drew himself up to his full height. Shadows thickened around him as he stalked closer, skirting the fire; Étaín heard the invisible spirits jabber in terror. “Little fool. I promise you this: before we are quits, you will be on your knees begging my mercy.”
Hrothmund backpedaled, dragging Étaín with him. “Come no closer, wretch! Not if you value her life!”
“I said take your filthy hands—”
It was the crunch of stone that warned Grimnir. Instinctively, he twisted and sprang aside as Æthelstan exploded from the smoky gloom to his left. Wild-eyed, the Saxon captain cleaved the air with a sword blow that would have split a man from crown to crotch, had it connected. But it was no man he fought. With a grace that belied his savage frame, Grimnir slithered away from Æthelstan’s blow—presenting his back to Hrothmund as he did so.
The lord of Badon, realizing his foe’s mistake, slung the girl from him and leapt into the fray. Catching herself, scuttling to safety on her hands and knees, Étaín watched in horror as Grimnir allowed his enemies to outflank him …
Or did he?
Injured in the collapse of the cathedral’s roof, Æthelstan was breathing in ragged gasps. His lips set in a grim, pale line, the Saxon captain lunged; Grimnir danced aside. Seizing Æthelstan’s wrist, he jerked him off balance and propelled him toward Hrothmund. The two men collided, and Badon’s lord missed skewering himself on Æthelstan’s blade by a hair’s breadth. Hrothmund rocked back on his heels, while the red-bearded captain crashed to the ground, cursing as he clutched at his ribs.
Grimnir gave them no time to recover.
Whirling, he launched himself at Hrothmund. Grimnir came on like a tempest, raining blows with his seax that the lord of Badon was hard-pressed to parry. Chips flew from Hrothmund’s club; its bronze studs spanged off into the gloom. Grimnir taxed the sorcery that knit his foe’s muscle and sinew to the limit; though Hrothmund could not tire, he also could not answer his enemy’s relentless onslaught.
The end came with the sharp crack of wood against cold iron. Hrothmund’s club snapped. Before he could draw breath, Grimnir’s blade hacked through the dead flesh and bone of Hrothmund’s wrist, sending the wreckage of his club and the hand that wielded it spinning away.
The willow spirit cursed and recoiled. He staggered back until his spine crashed into a waist-high chunk of debris—a portion of the stone and wood clerestory. Grimnir heard a hiss behind him. Æthelstan had gained his feet. The Saxon captain pushed himself erect; his sword tip scraped stone as he brought the weapon back to the ready. “Cynewulf!” he cried, taking a staggering step. “This is for Cynewulf, you son of a—”
Grimnir pivoted at the hip and slung his seax. Point-blank, the weapon flashed through the gloom like a javelin. It took Æthelstan high, in the hollow of the throat. The man’s eyes goggled; blood spewed from his lips as the Saxon captain reeled and fell, clutching at the seax hilt. His own sword spun and clattered away, coming to rest among the shards of stone and wood littering the floor between Hrothmund and his foe.
Grimnir glanced down at it, then gazed sidelong at Hrothmund.
The lord of Badon snarled. His eyes judged the distance between the fingers of his good hand and the leather-wrapped hilt; he measured his speed against that of his foe. Hrothmund looked back to Grimnir.
Slowly, the skrælingr smiled.
He backed away. One step. Two. On the third step, he inclined his head toward the sword. The message was clear.
I dare you.
The willow spirit shifted and flickered; Hrothmund licked his lips.
I dare you.
In the twinkling of an eye, the lord of Badon was in motion. No human could have matched the grace of that leap, or the speed. He should have snatched Æthelstan’s fallen sword from the ground and faced Grimnir bearing a bright length of honed steel. But, for all Hrothmund’s alacrity, for all his economy of movement, the son of Bálegyr was faster still.
Grimnir caught him midstride; he rammed his shoulder into Hrothmund’s abdomen, lifting him off his feet as he bore him back. They struck the ruin of the collapsed clerestory with a sickening crunch. Hrothmund’s vertebrae snapped under the impact. He tried to hold himself up, his legs suddenly useless. Hrothmund scrabbled and clawed at the debris with his uninjured hand but to no avail. He slid to the ground. For good measure, Grimnir caught Hrothmund’s head in his hands and, with a savage twist, snapped his neck.
Exhaling, Grimnir took a step back and surveyed his handiwork. A man would be dead, or screaming for death, crippled and in agony, but the willow spirit felt no pain. Simply the dead weight of a useless body. The sorcery animating Hrothmund’s frame could repair the damage with time and restore his limbs to usefulness, though the effort would likely tax the willow spirit beyond his ability to function.
“Will you leave me like this?” Hrothmund rasped. “Or will you finish it?”
“Finish it?” Grimnir spat. “If I had my way I’d gut you like a fish. No, your master would like a word with you.”
“My … My master?” Hrothmund’s eyes widened. “Christ in Heaven! Don’t do this! Kill me, if you wish! But do not deliver me to that vile demon! He—”
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br /> “Yesss!” Grimnir bared his teeth in a snarl of malicious glee. “Yes! Beg, you filthy maggot! Beg for my mercy!”
Hrothmund’s jaws clamped shut and a sullen, stoic heat flared in the willow spirit’s eyes. Grimnir laughed at his discomfiture as he straightened and cast about for Étaín. An aftershock rattled the Rock of Badon; chunks of debris crashed down from the cleft ceiling. One, a length of timber embellished with a plaster veneer, struck the heart of the fire and sent a fountain of embers into the air. The Shepherd was growing impatient.
“Foundling!”
“Here,” she replied.
Grimnir clambered over the ruined clerestory and found her not far away, kneeling beside the corpse of a gray-bearded old Dane. She looked a bit worse for wear: blood and dust matted her copper hair, and her face was a raw mass of bruises; she was clad in torn rags, still damp with blood, and her limbs trembled with fever.
“You are ever a thorn in my side,” he said, by way of greeting. “Let’s go. Time to leg it, and none of your lip. We’ll be lucky to get out with our whole skins.”
She glanced up at him, her eyes red-rimmed from grief and exhaustion. “I suppose I should thank you, though I’m sure you had your own reasons for coming back for me.”
Grimnir shrugged. “I stole you fair and square, like I said.”
“Of course you did.” She stayed a moment longer by Óspak’s side. The old jarl was at peace, now; she could see it in his smoothed brow. “Go with God,” she muttered, touching his cheek. Étaín sighed. This cathedral would be as good a pyre as any for him.
Étaín tried to stand, fell back, and tried once more. Her limbs quaked. Without thinking, she grabbed Grimnir’s arm for support, letting him drag her to her feet. He guided her back to where Hrothmund sat; the lord of Badon glared at her, but could do nothing else. Étaín propped herself against the mound of rubble. “You owe that man a debt,” she said, glancing back to where Óspak lay.
Grimnir went and wrenched his seax from Æthelstan’s throat. He cleaned the blade on the dead man’s trousers before he sheathed it, and then rifled the body, taking a signet ring and a few coins. “Do I now?” He looked around; in the rubble, he spotted a fringe of ermine. It was the Saxon’s cloak. He tugged it free, shook it out, and tossed it to Étaín. “And just how am I beholden to a dead wretch I’ve never seen before?”
“That dead wretch, as you put it, was Jarl Óspak of Mann, and he told me where your cursed Half-Dane is hiding.”
Grimnir felt the cold hands of Fate stroke his spine. He glanced sidelong at Étaín. “Where?”
Étaín settled the cloak around her shoulders. She spared not even a glance for the corpse of its owner, who might have been a good man except that he would have condemned her to torture. “I’ll tell you once we’re away from here.”
Grimnir bristled. He took a step toward her, dropping his feigned goodwill like a mask. “Oh, you’ll do this and you’ll not do that, eh? I say you’ll tell me now, you wretched little hymn-singer!”
Étaín studied him without any hint of fear, her head cocked to one side. “Or what? You’ll kill me? Stop this game! I think you need me. That’s why you came back. And for the moment, I think you need me far more than I need you. You have my word. I’ll tell you what you want to know once we’re beyond Badon’s walls. But my price for this information will be my freedom.”
Rage seized Grimnir in its white-hot talons. He stamped and howled; he kicked Æthelstan’s corpse until it lay half in the smoldering embers of the fire. He cursed Étaín in the harsh tongue of his people. And still, she did not quail.
“You’re wasting time” was her only reply.
As if to punctuate, another aftershock shook the ruined cathedral. Étaín glanced up through the fissures in the roof. It was fully daylight; thunderclouds of smoke mingled with the ever-present pall of gray that veiled Badon.
“Do we have an understanding?” she said.
Sullen, his eyes like the banked embers of a blacksmith’s forge, Grimnir nodded. At this, Hrothmund made a sound between a cough and a chuckle. “You think this is funny, willow-man?” Grimnir fell on him with unrestrained savagery, putting the hobnailed sandal to him until bones gave way. “Let’s see you laugh, now!”
“Just finish him and have done,” Étaín said.
Grimnir straightened, panting from the exertion. “Finish him? Oh, no. He comes with us. Another debt.” Muttering under his breath, Grimnir scooped Hrothmund up and tossed him over his shoulder like a sack of offal. He glared at Étaín. “Follow me, foundling, and keep up.”
23
Étaín remembered little of their flight from Badon. Only flashes, like frozen slices of nightmare: a mud-smeared child, crying beside the body of a young woman; muffled screams from beneath a pile of rubble; rivulets of bright blood running into the gutters. Fires raged unchecked. Survivors struggled and prayed; she heard hoarse and ragged voices calling out for succor—calling upon the Almighty to preserve their lives in this, the hour of their need. She saw a black-cassocked priest kneeling beside a line of corpses, administering the last rites …
“Did … Did you cause this?” she asked Grimnir as they clambered over the rift in the wall where he had entered Badon only hours before. “This suffering? Is this your handiwork?”
Grimnir shifted Hrothmund’s dead weight from one shoulder to the other, and then glanced back over the devastation. The city lay in ruins. Flames consumed the cathedral at the crest of the Rock of Badon; the low gray sky was thick with smoke and threatening rain. As inured as he was to the horror of war, as much as he reveled in slaughter, even he could barely comprehend the speed and fury of the destruction. He grunted. “I could do this with an army of my kinsmen and time, perhaps months. But not even my sire, at the height of his power, could have roused the bones of Ymir like this. No, it was his kind. Bastard broke an ancient compact, older than stone.”
“And so Men must suffer for whatever crimes the willow spirit committed?”
“They suffer because it’s war, foundling.” Grimnir slid down the breach in the wall, pausing at the base of the rubble to wait for Étaín. She came more slowly, and as she drew near, he continued: “All you hymn-singers prattle on about converting the heathen in the name of this so-called salvation, but what you really want is for followers of the Old Ways to break their oaths and swear a new one to your Nailed God. But do you give half a fig for the price of oath breaking? Look around you. Your kind makes out like the gods of the Elder World are just tales to frighten your brats. Now you know differently, and so do these miserable wretches.”
Étaín could have refuted everything Grimnir claimed, had her mind not been shattered from exhaustion; she could have told him that when the earth shook, every man, woman, and child inside Badon shared the same belief: that it was the hand of God, descended to earth to put paid to some nest of sinners, like Sodom and Gomorrah. No, sin was Badon’s downfall, and those whom the Almighty spared would go to their graves hard in the belief that they owed their existence from this day on to divine grace, to piety, and to the love of Christ Jesus. That’s what she wanted to say, but Étaín’s legs shook, and her skull ached, and a fever burned so bright behind her eyes that it drove all other thoughts away. She stumbled along in Grimnir’s wake, barely able to keep pace with him as he led her deeper into the wasteland between the town and the banks of the Avon.
A cavalcade of spirits hounded their steps. She could see them, if she dared glance over her shoulder: a silent throng of misty faces, some ancient and long dead, others who had passed not an hour gone. All of them compelled to follow out of some half-sensed need for justice.
“Grimnir…” A note of concern crept into Étaín’s voice.
He cut her off with a sharp hiss. “I see them! Keep up, you laggard!”
Grimnir retraced his steps through thicket and bramble until at last the two of them emerged at the edge of the Cruithne stones. Without preamble, he strode to the center of the circle and
flung Hrothmund to the ground. The willow spirit struggled to free itself from the prison of Hrothmund’s flesh, its eyes wild with terror.
“Here’s your miserable oathbreaker!”
At the edge of the stones, Étaín felt a surge of power; the gnarled oak that grew at the head of the circle swelled, as though something vast and ancient had entered it. Within its outlines, she could see a ghostly form: a figure robed in faded majesty, its gaunt visage stern and bearded, and its head crowned by a spray of oak leaves. The voice that issued forth turned Étaín’s knees to water.
“Defiler! O blasphemer! The hour of your doom is at hand! Our dealings are at an end, son of Bálegyr. Go in peace, but do not tarry in this land.”
Grimnir backed away. There came a sound like the tearing of fabric as serpentine root tendrils pushed up through the soil; they crawled through the grass—pale and damp and wriggling—to seize Hrothmund’s useless limbs. Immediately, the willow spirit began to writhe; unknown torments racked the ethereal figure as the roots tightened their grip. Pieces of the spirit’s essence detached themselves, withering and turning to smoky ash as they drifted up into the morning sky.
The landvættr masquerading as Hrothmund loosed an anguished cry: “Blessed Christ, why have you forsaken me?”
Grimnir grunted and turned away. Clapping a hand on Étaín’s shoulder, he gestured for her to follow him. She resisted a moment, then shrugged free of his grasp and staggered into the circle of the Cruithne stones.
Grimnir hissed. “Little fool. What—”
“Lord of stone and tree,” she said, ignoring Grimnir’s curses, “this spirit is yours to do with as you will, but the body belongs to the world of Men. He was a man of profound faith, in life, and I ask that you allow me to offer the prayers that were never offered upon his first death.”
Étaín felt the full force of the Shepherd’s gaze, then. The spirits rustled beyond the boundary of the Cruithne stones, and she heard the mingled awe and scorn in their subdued voices. She heard Grimnir mutter under his breath. But she could not tear her eyes from the eerie form of the Shepherd of the Hills—more ancient than Golgotha, where her faith was born; the eyes that pierced her soul had seen countless ages of Man, ages undreamed of, from the fall of doom-haunted Atlantis to the rise of the sons of Aryas, and more. She felt the weight of millennia grinding her into the dust she came from, the dust she would return to.