by T L Greylock
“The lady Aelinvor will do as she is told.”
Now Raef did laugh, a bitter, scornful sound. “She craves power and helped murder her father to grasp it. She will not bend to you.” Raef was glad to see a flicker of uncertainty in Greyshield’s eyes, but words would do nothing to alter the situation.
“Kill him, father,” one of the sons said. Raef could see fear in this one’s eyes, fear masked by eager words.
“No, father, let me drain his life’s blood.” The other son was shorter and smaller than his brother, but his eyes were alive with the promise of bloodshed.
“Better yet, let me fight you both.” Raef spread his arms wide, inviting them in. “I will gut you as Finnvold Skallagrim did Thannulf Greyshield. You are boys still clinging to your mother’s skirts, so weak the Valkyries will never carry you to Valhalla.”
The brothers moved together, snarling and cursing Raef and all his ancestors, swords drawn. They raced into the ring of statues and Raef let them come.
Three strides later, they were screaming and the snow was bright with slick blood as the sons of Tulkis Greyshield impaled themselves on sharp stakes buried beneath the snow. The false cover of skins and branches broke and vanished, revealing the pit that stretched to the feet of the silent, stone onlookers.
Tulkis was as still as the statues, his mouth gaping as he watched his sons die. One went quickly, for he had caught a stake in the throat, and his corpse sagged into the snow. The other, the second, younger son who had been so eager to kill, writhed still, legs jerking, blood coursing from his mouth and seeping out around the stake buried in his belly. His screams turned to shuddering moans of agony, but he lingered and the smell of urine reached Raef, who had eyes only for Tulkis.
The shock and horror frozen on Tulkis’s face thawed into rage and his roar of anger drowned out the cries of his dying son. “I will cut off your cock and feed it to the crows, Skallagrim. I will flay you and make you eat your own skin. You will sob for death before I am done with you.”
Raef kept his voice even. “You spoke true, Tulkis. Here in the wild we are and I am alone. But the wild is mine.” Raef stepped behind the stony-faced woman who watched the eastern horizon and circled around to the north, every step taking him closer to Tulkis and his remaining companions. He had hoped the pit might claim three or even four warriors, for now he was left with five men to fight, but seeing Tulkis watch his sons be ripped from him was worth it. He drew his sword in his left hand and the axe in his right, reveling in the calm their sharp edges brought to his mind.
“Greet the corpse maidens for me, Greyshield. I will send you to Valhalla.”
Tulkis charged and his first swing was full of power and wrath, meant to slash Raef open across the chest. He jumped back, the steel passing by harmlessly, and countered with a lunge of his own that Tulkis only just deflected away, heaving his sword back around in time to keep Raef’s blade from burying itself in his gut, but the axe that followed was too quick and Tulkis could not prevent it from biting into his shoulder. Bellowing, Tulkis stumbled back, nearly falling into a snowdrift, and Raef pressed on. The swords clashed again, Tulkis keeping his sword arm raised despite the fresh wound, but the snow claimed Greyshield’s balance and Raef’s next swing cleaved into his ribs, splitting flesh and splintering bone with ease. Tulkis dropped to his knees, his eyes staring, mouth hanging open, and he did not move, did not try to defend himself as Raef’s axe came to rest against his neck. Blood began to spill from his lips, streaking down his beard, but their eyes locked, hatred and fury blazing in Tulkis’s face. With a short, brutal chop, Raef hacked the axe into Tulkis’s neck and watched the eyes dull, the skin grow slack, and then Raef knew Greyshield was dead. Wrenching his weapons from the body, Raef let it fall backward so the dead eyes might stare at the stars. Only then did he face the four remaining warriors, his heart heaving with the battle-lust.
Two were faces he knew, men who had fought with him at the burning lake. He focused on them.
“So ends the line of Greyshield. Would you suffer the same fate, Olarr? Or you, Hakon? If you fight me now, I will kill you and hunt down your children and my blade will know the taste of their flesh. Is this what you want, to die a traitor, unremembered by the gods?”
Olarr looked down to the snow as though he might find an answer or his courage buried there, but Hakon grimaced, his lips tugged sideways by an old scar, and Raef knew he would have to kill at least one more man that night.
“I broke an oath once, lord,” Hakon said, “when I took mead from Greyshield’s hand and drank for him. I will not break another, even if it means my death.”
“You would stand by a dead traitor?”
Hakon shrugged. “It is all I have left, lord. What am I if I beg for my life now?”
“Then draw your sword.”
There was grit and determination in Hakon’s eyes, but also a measure of resignation. He was a strong man, and tall, but made for chopping trees and hauling loads, not battle. He had never been a skilled warrior, and Raef wondered what had tempted him to Greyshield’s side, but found he did not wish to ask.
It was over quickly and Hakon fell not far from where the hounds crouched, whimpering now as the scent of the blood of men filled their nostrils. Olarr fell to his knees and begged Raef to spare him, or if not him, his wife and children. The other two warriors, unknown men from Silfravall, said nothing, though one fidgeted with his hands. He made a half-hearted attempt to draw his knife, but Raef, pivoting in the snow, hurled his axe and it sank deep into the man’s chest. He fell heavy and hard and did not move again. The other warrior paled and Raef could see the fight fleeing from his eyes.
“Go,” Raef said, weary now, but his voice still sharp with anger. “Run, run back to my cousin. Tell Isolf he will never be free of me.”
Olarr and the other man turned their backs and fled, the hounds at their heels, and Raef watched them tread the snow-sea until they disappeared down the slope. He pulled his axe from the dead man’s chest and wiped the blood from its edge. Only then did he allow himself to expel a deep breath, and he sank against the closest statue, resting his head between his knees, his cloak pulled tight against the wind.
The lone howl of a wolf jerked him awake. A quick glance at the moon told him he had not slept long, but it was not safe to linger. Rest could come when he was better sheltered. Raef hauled himself to his feet and walked to the edge of the pit that had claimed the sons of Greyshield. The bodies were stiff and cold and looked younger in death. With silent thanks to Odin, Allfather, Raef turned his back and began the descent, fixed now on finding Vakre, if the son of Loki lived.
Two
The tracks were not hard to find. Three sets of horse prints in the snow, all headed south from the place where Raef had separated from Vakre. Dawn was breaking in the east, golden light filtering through the valleys, as Raef picked and ate a handful of tart, frost-dusted berries and began to follow the tracks. His stomach raged for sustenance, as it had often since Raef had fled from the smoke and the death and the sound of Isolf’s voice carrying through the darkness, but Raef had little to offer it. He had no bow with which to hunt the rabbits that crossed his path, or the deer whose tracks he had followed to water, and he hungered for meat. He did not have the time to linger over traps that might catch nothing. But it was Vakre he worried about. Vakre needed warmth and food and care that Raef could not provide.
For two days, Raef had led the horse through the trees, winding among the hills he knew so well, the hills that were no longer his. Their progress was halting, slowed by Vakre’s wound, but Raef had found relief in the need to care for his friend, for it kept the other thoughts at bay, the thoughts that threatened to steal away with Raef’s resolve to endure. Even so, he could not banish the sights and sounds from that night outside the walls of the Vestrhall, the battle, the treachery of Isolf, the loss of Siv, the deaths of Finnolf, valiant Finnolf, and steadfast Uhtred, the village burning, always burning. And Hauk of Ruderk, within his reach, and y
et he had been unable to strike down his father’s murderer. He saw it all again in the bitter, dark hours of the nights while Vakre slept a fever sleep. In the daylight hours, he buried his grief and trudged onward.
It was midday when Raef caught the scent of fire. The grey mare had continued south at first, but then her steps had taken her back toward the fjord, and where she went, the two other sets of tracks followed. Raef hurried on, passing a long-abandoned farm, and then coming to the shore of the fjord. He followed the water until he reached the jutting spit of land that marked the joining of the small, southern arm of the fjord to the main body. The burned air was sharp, biting at Raef’s nostrils, and the bodies had already attracted a pair of crows.
The corpses were sprawled close to the shore, stretched out on the great, flat rocks that divided land from water. One would be carried away by the high tide. Both were black and charred, split open as a sausage would when held over a fire. Their faces were beyond recognition though one wore three arm rings, loose now over the shrunken flesh and white, exposed bone. When the tide carried him away, the silver rings would slip to the depths, prizes for the fish to fight over. The other had drawn his sword in the moment of death and the blade now gleamed in the bright sun as water lapped at its edge. A horse was there too, its grey coat unblemished by burns, but its fate made clear by the arrows that bristled from its neck and the dark stain that spread onto the snow. A single pair of footprints, a man’s, led away from the carnage and back into the trees.
Two horses watched Raef from the safety of the trees and they seemed glad to see a living man when he approached them. Raef patted their noses and told them they were brave for not having fled from the fire. Then he mounted one and, the other in tow, went in search of Vakre.
He did not have to go far. The tracks took him up a gradual slope alongside a narrow fall of water that would spill into the fjord below. In spring it would be a rush of snow melt; now it was only a trickle and the rocks were crusted with ice. He found Vakre face down in the snow, as still as the ice, and Raef feared death had claimed him. Raef dismounted and knelt in search of a pulse, but he jerked his fingers back in surprise, for Vakre’s flesh was hot. Not the heat of a man crippled by fever and wound-rot, but the heat of a rock long warmed by the sun. Raef rolled Vakre over and watched as his chest rose and fell in shallow but steady breaths. His face, though drawn with exhaustion, was free of pain. Raef expelled his relief in a long, shaky breath and felt his own fatigue weigh heavy on his shoulders. And yet he could not rest, not yet.
Vakre stirred only a little as Raef lifted him and carried him back down to the fjord. There he collected the swords of the dead men and one spear, for they were good steel, and draped Vakre over the back of one of the horses. The bow that had felled the grey mare was charred and splintered by Vakre’s fire. It would break at any attempt to draw an arrow, so Raef left it with the corpses. Searching in the saddle packs, Raef found cheese and dried meat, and he ate a portion quickly, hardly chewing. Then, after washing it down with a splash of fjord water, Raef turned the horses away from the shore, leaving the bodies to the creeping tide.
**
The hidden fortress of Vannheim was as Raef remembered it, though he had last visited as a boy of twelve carrying his first battle-ready sword and in awe of the great bowl cut out of the side of the mountain. It was not a fortress of walls and stone, but a natural refuge invisible to prying eyes in the narrow valley below. The eagle’s nest, his father had called it. The way up was steep and Raef was forced to carry Vakre rather than risk him falling from his precarious position on the horse, and the trees were thick, blocking the way with tangled branches and heavy underbrush weighed down by snow. But Raef climbed, given strength by the knowledge that he was close, so close. To his left, the end of the fjord sparkled in the moonlight and the sheer cliffs that flanked it on both sides reared up out of the water like guardians to watch over the hidden place. Below him, the river rushed through the valley, a constant murmur in conversation with the owls and the wolves and the other creatures that called this wild, bleak place home. This was not a place for men, or farms, or warm fires in stone hearths, but Raef, as he summited the slope and came over the rise into the bowl, felt a measure of peace fill him for the first time since he had lost everything he held dear, everything that warmed his blood.
The vertical walls of rock lining the bowl were set far back in the shadows and were punctured by a few caves, but Raef had not come so far to crawl into a hole and shiver in the dark. Leaving Vakre with the horses, Raef went back into the trees in search of dry kindling and branches that might burn despite the snow cover. The prevailing winds and the southern winter sun kept the eagle’s nest largely free of snow, a fact Raef was glad of as he worked his flint with frozen fingers and coaxed a spark to life. He watched the newborn flames lick a handful of crispy leaves and dead pine needles, then spring up, eager for more fuel.
The warmth of the fire seemed to revive Vakre, and the son of Loki shifted, his eyelids fluttering, but it was some time before he opened his eyes. When he did, he stared at the cheerful fire for a long moment, and it was only when Raef pulled a whetstone from his belt and began to stroke it along his sword that Vakre stirred and looked around, first to the stars and then to Raef.
“I thought it a dream,” Vakre said, his voice weak.
“It was no dream.” Little else needed to be said. Raef put the whetstone aside.
“Where are we?” Vakre pushed away the fur Raef had taken from the pack belonging to the dead men and prodded at the makeshift bandage Raef had fashioned over the left side of his abdomen, where the knife had gone deep. Raef had changed the binding and cleaned it twice during the flight from the Vestrhall, but he knew it was not enough. It needed to be stitched. And yet Vakre’s probing fingers did not seem to cause pain.
“A refuge in a storm. Somewhere Isolf will not know to look.” Raef lifted his head from where it rested on his arms, his knees drawn up close to his chest, and looked over his shoulder at the walls of rock that shielded them from east, north, and west. “We are above the end of the small, southern arm of the fjord that runs to the Vestrhall and the sea. The secret of this place is known to only a few.”
“And the fire? Will not the smoke be seen?”
Raef shook his head. “Only the wolves walk these hills. And maybe the gods.”
Vakre frowned as though remembering something and glanced around. “Siv.” He looked back to Raef, a question in his eyes.
“She was inside the walls.” Raef found he did not want to look at Vakre. He focused on the bright fire. “Many lives were stolen by Isolf’s treachery.”
“She could yet be alive.”
Raef closed his eyes but Vakre’s words burned into his gut as the red flames did into his eyelids. “It was too much. Isolf’s warriors, the men from Silfravall, the warriors lured by Tulkis Greyshield’s words, and the advantage of surprise. Any resistance would have been put to death.”
“Do not let go of hope, Raef,” Vakre said.
Good words, strong words. And yet hope seemed a distant thing to Raef, a tiny boat far at sea, at the mercy of the volatile waves and storms. If Raef tried to swim the distance, he would be swept under and drowned.
In Raef’s silence, Vakre turned back to his wound and peeled away the soiled cloth.
“It cannot be,” he murmured.
Raef looked and was stunned by what he saw. The wound that had been so red and angry and filled with yellow pus was pink and clean and closed.
“Just yesterday, I thought the rot would kill you,” Raef said. “You burned those men.” He gestured at the thin cloak that had belonged to Loki. “Do you remember? By the fjord.”
Vakre nodded. “Yes, though the effort nearly sent me to the gods. My father’s gift must have cleansed and sealed the wound, but I am weak. I will be a burden to you. Find a farm, someone who will take me in.”
Raef shook his head and felt his hands begin to tremble. “No.”
>
“You have work yet to do,” Vakre said, his voice stronger and insistent. “You are the lord of Vannheim, no matter what deceitful, cruel things Isolf has done.”
“I will not leave you and you will not die.” Raef clenched his hands into fists, his voice sharp with anger that was not meant for Vakre.
Vakre’s eyes narrowed. “What happened in the trees, Raef, after we fled from the walls? What eats at you?”
Raef stared into the fire. “I chose your life.”
“Over?”
Raef could see it in the flames. “You bled. Even in the dark, I could see the snow turn red with your blood. My hands were all that kept you alive.” Raef looked at Vakre at last. “I let him go.”
“Hauk.” Understanding came to Vakre’s face. “He was there, watching. You could have gone after him.”
“I could have sent him to Valhalla,” Raef said, a snarl bursting out of his throat. “I could have earned justice for my father at last.”
Vakre was quiet for a moment. “Do you regret your choice?”
“No.” It was the truth, but it did not make Hauk of Ruderk’s escape any easier to accept. “You are my brother and I hold true to that. But now you see why you cannot die.”
“I will do my best.” Vakre lay down and pulled the fur across his chest once more. “Thank you for my life.” Raef nodded and settled down opposite Vakre. The warmth of the fire began to dull his senses, the fatigue that had slowly gathered strength now overwhelmed. Raef let his eyes close and it was only moments before he drifted off. He dreamed of Siv.
Three
The fog was thick, so thick that even Raef, perched high in his eagle’s nest above the valley and the fjord, could see nothing beyond Vakre sleeping next to the cold ashes of the fire. Above him, the clouds were thinning and the day promised to be bright, but it would be some time before the sun burned through. Raef worked a piece of dried meat around his mouth to soften it, then chewed and swallowed. The cheese was nearly gone, but there was plenty of meat, so he left it all out where Vakre might see, for the son of Loki had not eaten the night before, then Raef collected the empty water skins and the spear he had taken from the dead men and descended down into the fog-filled valley.