The Song of the Ash Tree- The Complete Saga

by T L Greylock

  Raef struck off in a more northern direction than the one he had taken on his first foray into the trees. The route would take them directly toward the fire’s point of origin, though much of their path traced the curving edge of the burned swath of land and they walked a line between blackened trees with crumbling bark and untouched birches, stark white, solemn sentinels standing watch over their burned kin. They walked in silence and the forest was quiet around them, the birds and rabbits and squirrels chased away by the smoke. The stillness began to wear on Raef’s nerves and the sound of his own footsteps grew irritating to his ears in the absence of bird song and the chatter of territorial squirrels.

  Their path dipped here and there, but always climbed higher than before, and soon they found themselves high above the devastation. The air was fresher and Raef stopped to breathe it in for a moment, closing his eyes as a shaft of sunlight glanced across his cheek. Cilla wandered ahead as Siv paused to adjust the quiver of arrows that hung from her belt.

  “Fengar is not dead,” Raef said.

  “You let him go.”

  “Yes.” Raef breathed in, letting the cold air sink to the bottom of his lungs. “For all his faults, the war was not of his making. The blame for that rests with Hauk of Ruderk, Stefnir of Gornhald, and Torrulf Palesword.”

  “And Einarr of Vannheim.” The voice seemed to claw at Raef’s ears and he spun, reaching for his axe and scanning for the owner of the voice among the trees as Siv nocked an arrow on the string of her bow with one swift motion.

  Hauk Orleson, lord of Ruderk, stood twenty paces away, half in shadow, half in sunlight. He held a knife, the blade bright in the sun, and its edge rested against Cilla’s neck. His left arm was wrapped across her collarbone but the flesh of his forearm had been seared, the hair burnt away, and a bloody gash, half cauterized, ran from his elbow to his wrist. Whatever he had worn to fend off the cold had been discarded when it caught fire, but Hauk seemed impervious to the winter air. He stared at Raef, unblinking, his eyes blazing with desperation, and yet his face was strangely calm, his hold on Cilla strong but easy.

  “Let her go.” Raef ran his thumb across the worn shaft of his axe, felt the weight of it in his palm, and wondered if he could bury it in Hauk’s forehead before the knife cut deep enough to guarantee Cilla’s death.

  “Have you heard me, Skallagrim?”

  “I hear a liar’s tongue, nothing more.” Raef kept his voice steady but he was sure Siv, standing off his shoulder and ahead of him, could hear his thundering heart. He did not break his gaze from Hauk’s but the world around him was sharp and vivid. He could see the sweat-darkened hair at the base of Siv’s neck. He could see the grime beneath Cilla’s fingernails. He could see the pulse thrumming at Hauk’s temple.

  “Would you like to know your father’s darkest secret?”

  “My father would never have manipulated Fengar as you have, he would never have relished this war.”

  “Oh, it is not of this war that I speak, or Fengar, or even of the promises your father broke in the days before the gathering in the Great-Belly’s hall. This is a far deeper secret, one he harbored since before you were born.”

  Raef felt himself shake his head. “I will not hear you.”

  “You will. Because you do not wish to watch her die.” Hauk tightened his grip on Cilla. The girl’s eyes flared but she did not cry out, did not even flinch. Siv released some of the tension on her bowstring and lowered it so that the arrow was no longer aimed at Hauk’s head. When Raef made no move to protest, Hauk urged Cilla forward until they halved the distance to Raef, but he was careful to keep the greater part of his body angled behind a tree. “Do you know how your uncle died, Skallagrim?”

  The question was so unexpected that for a moment Raef let go of his anger. “My uncle?”

  “Your father’s brother. Older brother. His name was Dainn, was it not?”

  “It was.”

  “Yes. It was. And do you know how Dainn died?”

  “He drowned,” Raef said.

  “A truthful answer, but not the entire truth.”

  “I grow weary of this game, Orleson.”

  “Then you better discover your patience, Skallagrim.” Hauk shifted his weight, his face twisting in a grimace of pain as he moved. “The deep waters of the Vannheim fjord filled your uncle’s lungs, this you know. But you do not know that your father watched him die and did nothing to save him.” Raef wanted to close his eyes, to stopper his ears against the vile words Hauk spoke, but he could not look away. “I was there, Raef. I saw it all. I saw them quarrel, I saw the oar raised in your father’s fist. I saw him swing, saw your uncle’s neck snap back so far and so fast I was sure it had broken. I saw Dainn fall overboard, but he was alive yet, and he struggled. He fought the pull of the deep, fought to keep his head above water, but the blow to his head had sapped all strength from his limbs. I saw him sink and I saw his last breath bubble to the surface.”

  Raef wanted to rip Hauk’s tongue from his throat but his own limbs were as worthless as Dainn’s must have been.

  “I do not believe you.” The small, shattered voice was his own.

  “Your father begged me to keep his secret. He vowed he would pay for my silence, whatever I might demand. I could have asked for gold, silver, a horde of treasure to put the mighty Fafnir’s to shame, a sword from that bladesmith of yours, a ship, even, and Einarr would have seen it done. But I asked for none of this. I told him one day I would need something from him, and we would consider the debt paid. That day came last spring when the snow first grew soft and the ice began to wither. The king was old. He was dying, you see. Did your father not tell you?” Hauk’s voice remained level, betraying little, but his eyes grew bright and Raef knew he was laughing at Raef’s ignorance. “Do you know how many men have called themselves king since first our ancestors knelt to one man?” Hauk waited for Raef to answer and then continued as though he had spoken. “I learned their names as a boy, and I learned the stories of their lives and deaths. Think, Skallagrim, of the destruction they have wrought, all to be king. Battle after battle, year after year, ravaging our families and our lands. Think of the blood spilled in their names, think of the drain upon the future of Midgard.” Something earnest had crept into Hauk’s voice and his gaze grew unfocused, but his grip on Cilla never wavered.

  “You speak as though we have always been at war,” Siv said. “It has not all been steel song and bloodshed since Kyrrbjorn Wolfbane hunted down his rivals and our ancestors knelt.”

  Hauk brushed Siv’s words aside but Raef spoke before he could. “Why do you talk of Kyrrbjorn Wolfbane and all the men and women who have sought power? Speak plainly.”

  “We need peace, Skallagrim. We need a peace that will last so that our sons and daughters and their children can live without the shadow of war.”

  “You started a war, Hauk,” Raef said, his voice ripping forth, low and angry. “How dare you speak of peace.”

  “Could I have done what needed to be done without spilling blood, I would have. But we are crude beings, we warriors, and we consume violence as the gods do mead.”

  “What did you hope to accomplish?”

  Something shifted in Hauk’s face. The hard lines of his cheeks softened and his eyes lost their sharpness as he spoke of his ambition. “Deliverance. No more gatherings. No more kings.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Do not be so quick to make that assumption, Skallagrim.”

  And Raef knew the pull of Hauk’s words, knew there was a grain of truth in what he said. Raef remembered Sverren of Bergoss, who had refused to ally with Raef, whose messenger had said Bergoss would stand with no king. He remembered his own pride in Vannheim’s resistance of Kyrrbjorn Wolfbane so many generations before. He thought of little-known lords who made their homes in the farthest reaches of the wild, lords who paid no mind to the greater world outside their hidden valleys and high vales, whose people had never seen a fortress made of stone and lived and died
without leaving the small village that birthed them, and he wondered if they would not rather be free of any king.

  “There will always be men who seek to rise above the rest, who believe others should kneel,” Raef said. “And there will always be men like you, men who try to write the fates of others, who would hide behind an honest face and a hope.”

  “Then you think there is hope?” Hauk’s eyes were lined with scorn, but his voice, eager and hurried, betrayed desperation.

  “I think you have betrayed all the codes of gods and men. But what does this have to do with my father?” Raef dreaded the question and the answer he might receive, but he asked it without hesitation.

  “And so we come to it at last. For twenty-eight years I waited, holding onto the debt your father owed me. In the spring, when the king was ailing, I met your father in secret on the border between Vannheim and Bergoss and I demanded what I was owed.”

  “Twenty-eight years is a long time, Hauk,” Siv said. “Long enough that the lord of Vannheim might no longer fear retribution for his brother’s death. Who would punish him? He was well-loved by his people.”

  “It seems, lady, that Einarr of Vannheim did not rest so easily as you believe. Or at least he was willing to honor the promise he had made to me as a young man.” Hauk looked from Siv to Raef. “He agreed to support me and the path toward our liberation.”

  That his father would have harbored such a secret, that he would have thrown himself behind Hauk’s scheme, seemed like madness to Raef.

  “Then why kill him? More likely he spurned you and you had to silence him for fear of discovery.”

  “By the time we gathered in Balmoran, your father had weakened. The wisdom that had shown him the virtue of my plan had abandoned him. He clung to the illusion of the gathering and would not be reasoned with.”

  “And for that you had him butchered like a beast of the forest.” There was anger in Raef’s voice, and fury burned in his belly, but for all Raef tried, he could not summon the sight of his father’s corpse, could not see Einarr stretched out in the tall grass, eyes staring, sword in hand, wound gaping. Instead he saw a fjord, dark and beautiful, but deadly, and he saw a face much like his father’s slip beneath the surface, saw his uncle thrashing, striving to live, and succumbing instead to death. He could not bring himself to speak, nor move, and at last Siv broke the silence.

  “What do you want, Hauk?” Siv’s eyes had been full of concern as she looked at Raef, but now she fixed the lord of Ruderk with a cold gaze and raised her bow once more, aiming at a point between his eyes.

  “My work is unfinished. Peace can be attained. But there can be no gathering. Join me,” Hauk said, shifting his gaze from Siv to Raef. Raef felt that stare like a knife in his chest. His breath caught in his throat, though his heart pounded between his ribs. “Join me, Skallagrim, as your father should have. We can return Midgard to the greatness we knew before we kneeled. Fengar may be dead, but I am not without friends. There are those who have kept their spears unbloodied, who have watched the three kings break each other. We can release all the lands from the burden of kings.”

  “I will never join you.” The words were nothing more than a whisper. Raef tried again, forcing air from his lungs though he still felt caught in the grip of the fjord his uncle had drowned in. “I will never join you.” Raef kept his eyes locked with Hauk’s, but a slip of a shadow moving between trees behind Hauk’s shoulder caught Raef’s attention. He did not need to look to know who approached. He knew only one man with such wolf-like movements. “You must be desperate, indeed, Orleson,” Raef said, intent on keeping the lord of Ruderk focused on him, “if you think I will ever hear what you have to say, if you think I will ever join hands with my father’s murderer.”

  “You could rise above all your ancestors, Skallagrim, you could be the greatest of them all,” Hauk said. “Or you could cling to the same faults that plagued your father and be no different than a man who killed his brother.”

  Raef blinked, then, for the image of his drowning uncle that shadowed his vision vanished, replaced by a pair of lungs, quivering, red and bloody in the cold winter air, framed by the splintered shards of Isolf’s white ribs, the gaping ruin of his cousin’s back and spine searing into Raef’s open eyes.

  But then Vakre was there, emerging from the shadows, his knife caressing Hauk’s throat, and the son of Loki was commanding Cilla’s release. Hauk’s grip on Cilla was slipping, his eyes widening, his muscles stiffening against the cold steel on his skin, and then a quick hammered strike to Hauk’s temple with the hilt of the knife sent the lord of Ruderk crumpling to the ground.

  Raef turned away, a long breath shuddering out from deep within his lungs. He put one hand against the smooth, soft trunk of a pale birch and only then did he see the tremors in his fingers and feel the weakness in his legs. He did not dare let go, though he wished to be far from that place, wished to run as though his strides could carry him away from the horror Hauk had unleashed in his mind.

  Raef closed his eyes, summoning shreds of memory, his father showing him how to steer a long, lean ship, the first deer felled by Raef’s arrow under Einarr’s watchful eye, the jarring blows of Einarr’s sword against Raef’s shield as father taught son to keep it raised high, no matter how heavy, no matter how weary the arm grew. Raef could hear the blows as the sword battered again and again against the wood, he could smell the leather his father wore and the sweat that warmed the skin beneath, he could feel the burning in his shield arm and the calluses on his left hand, his sword hand, slick with his own sweat. The memory grew and grew until Raef no longer knew he was in the wilds of Narvik, until he no longer remembered Hauk, Vakre, or Siv, but then it changed and Einarr’s eyes were no longer his own. Raef saw his father’s face shift, saw his own anger and fury burning back at him from those blue depths, saw what it was like to look into the face of the Skallagrim in Vannheim and see death there.

  Pain brought Raef out of the depths of his mind. Blinking, he saw a droplet of blood welling on his palm, saw that he no longer held the smooth bark of the birch, that he had stepped into the thorny embrace of a blackthorn bush. He plucked the thorn from his palm, let the dark blood gather and pool, then knelt and placed his hand atop the snow. He waited until the snow had cooled his palm, then rose, leaving behind a stain.

  “Raef?”

  Raef looked over his shoulder. Vakre had left Hauk where he fell but he had not shed the hunter’s stance.

  “Do you want me to kill him?”

  “I must,” Raef heard himself say. The words seemed to rouse him further and he could feel the sunlight on his face once more. He looked to Siv. “But not now.”

  Vakre nodded and sheathed his knife. “The fire,” he said, “it spread far too fast, as though carried on the wings of eagles. I only meant to separate my uncle from the rest but no sooner had I set the spark than the forest was blazing.”

  Behind Vakre, Siv closed her eyes and Raef could see her eyelashes darken with tears. Vakre, seeing Raef’s gaze shift, turned and went to Siv.

  “What have I done?”

  Siv blinked back the salty tears that threatened to spill over. Her cheeks were pale. “Nothing. I grieve only for the hostages who did not escape.” Siv reached for Cilla and took the girl’s hand, together they knelt beside Hauk of Ruderk and Siv withdrew a pair of leather thongs from a pouch at her belt. With nimble fingers, she began to fashion knots that would bind the prone man’s wrists.

  Vakre looked at Raef, his anguish plain. “What have I done?” he asked again.

  But Raef would not betray Siv’s truth, whatever had caused her to hold her tongue, so he told Vakre of the strange wind that had vanquished the fire so suddenly. “The spark may have been yours, but I think the fire answered to another.”

  “My father?”

  “It seems that way. But I do not pretend to understand the will of the gods or the workings of the nine realms.”

  Vakre looked to Hauk. “And him?”r />
  “Will you take him to the river? Bryndis’s army awaits on the eastern shore. The men of Vannheim must be there, though I have not seen them. Find Dvalarr.” Raef glanced at Hauk. Ordering Einarr’s death had been the work of much preparation; the savaging of Einarr’s reputation was the work of only a moment but it had proved no less thorough or painful to Raef. “Keep Hauk for me. I will return when I can.”

  Vakre nodded, though Raef could see he had not set aside his guilt and the son of Loki glanced at Siv once more before returning his attention to Raef. “I heard what was said. Do you believe his claims?”

  Raef did not trust himself to answer. He put a hand on Vakre’s arm. “Go. Please.”

  Raef watched as Vakre, Hauk draped over his shoulder, took to the descent. Cilla, still wrapped in Raef’s cloak, trailed after. She clutched the hem up to her chest to keep from tripping on it as she picked her way down among the trees and Raef looked away only once they were out of sight. Siv had come to stand beside him, and he saw now that her eyes were dry.

  “You did not tell him?”

  “It is yours to tell.”

  “What will you do?” Her voice was raw, but she did not accuse, and Raef knew what she did not say.

  Though the thought of choosing Siv over Vakre opened a pit in his stomach that seemed deep enough to swallow him, he would, if it came to that. “I will be guided by you,” he said. Raef took her in his arms and kissed her. “I am yours,” he murmured.

  Twenty-Nine

  Bekkhild’s hair was longer than Siv’s, but the sisters shared the same bright, rich blonde color, suffused with so many undercurrents of red and gold. She wore it loose, the long strands falling to her waist.