It was cramped and dark. The center glowed with an iron cauldron hanging from a tripod over a small fire of wood and ember. The liquid inside bubbled and hissed.
Slowly Harad's eyes adjusted. The room was filled with skulls, plastered in mud to form the walls. From rafters, hung dead pheasants, foxes, the paws of a bear. The place reeked of death.
At the opposite wall stood a large sheet of obsidian, volcanic glass from somewhere far to the north, and in it, Harad saw his own reflection captured for a moment, a man bent out of shape in the rippled surface.
Bodies lay on the floor, wrapped thick in furs, a child, a pregnant woman, an old man with a rasping cough, and a warrior whose black swollen leg had slipped from beneath the furs.
A solitary figure sat against the wall draped in the pelt of a wolf, the head of the wolf, empty eyes and bared teeth, forming a hood.
Harad followed Shield and sat. "Birgid?" he asked.
The woman in the wolf skin shook her head. "I am Eliode. Birgid is my mother."
She was as Birgid had looked twenty years prior. Her face held the same sharp angularity around woad painted cheek and chin. Her black hair hung thick, near hiding those eyes dark in shadow, those eyes that appeared to have looked into the abyss and even though living in this world always seemed to be watching that other world.
"You could be her," said Patch. "I feel as if I've stepped back in time."
"Nowhere to step back to, and nowhere to go. We are here now," Eliode said. Harad saw that she was even younger than he had at first thought, perhaps no more than sixteen summers old, a child just becoming a woman. But her voice suggested a being much older. Not simply in the words spoken but in the sound. She had that same gift as Birgid where every word evoked a world.
"Eliode," Shield whispered. "You are her daughter. Birgid. Where is she?"
"After she left, I saw dogs in the clouds, dogs stretched thin by the winds, and a wall of clouds. I knew you, who I do not know, would return. As if you never left."
"A boy came to Cullan town and sent a message that Birgid needed me, and so I have come in answer to her."
Harad felt as if he were tumbling into Eliode's eyes, falling head over heels in the deepening blackness. He clutched at the dirt floor beneath his legs.
"After Fionn, she died," said Eliode. "I saw it in her eyes. I saw how far down she had fallen, deep into the abyss. At first sorrow but then it was a madness, a rage. She found something in that place, brought it back, but he was ashes to the sky and the rivers. She had the words she needed but she could not bring Fionn back."
"Who is this, Fionn? Was he your father?" asked Shield.
A small smile touched Eliode's face. But it was not a smile of joy or happiness. "You know nothing, do you?"
"I have been gone for half a life time."
"You have been gone for an entire lifetime. Fionn was Birgid's son. By you, Scyldmund."
Harad's stomach tightened and the ground pitched beneath him, but it was Shield that fell forward, hands trembling in the dirt and dust. He sat there hunched for longer than Harad could understand. It may have been a moment. It may have been hours. They all had been caught within that single moment of eternity.
Shield spoke without raising his head. "My son? I had a son?"
"You never knew?" asked Eliode. "You had no idea that you and Birgid had conceived a child that night?"
"How would I know such a thing? Why was word never sent to me in all those years?"
"Why would word need to be sent when you promised that you were coming back?"
"How do you know what I promised?"
"My mother told me everything."
"Birgid?"
"Yes."
"And you?"
"I do not know who my father is. My mother said I come from the land, the wolves, the wind, that I was formed through her words and the memory of what once was."
Shield stayed head to the ground, knelt forward. Harad himself wished that he could hide behind his closed eyelids and block out all that he had heard. Why was it so painful for him as well? It was Shield's choices that were coming back to him. Not Harad's. But how could he not feel sympathy for the man along whose side he had walked for so many years, the man who in moments of weakness or reflection or drunkenness evoked the name of Birgid, the man had chosen to give up love in order to avenge the death of his father.
Birgid was a witch. Though she had no part in the killing of Shield's father, the young warrior could only see her as one and the same as the Warlock King. Magic that tainted one, tainted all as far as Shield cared.
So he hunted witches and warlocks.
But each battle was simply one more time that their blades and hammers were wet with blood. Each time, the odds were greater against them, and each time they prevailed, but for what? Blood only led to blood. Dark magic had not retreated from the lands.
Now the Hounds returned home. Even though the last part of their journey had been filled with blood and death. Back at Lake's End, there was no solace, no rest, and no one waiting for them at the end of their days. Here there was only misery and a deep-seated hatred against them.
Harad's dream was to return home with the magic of the written word, but home had long ago vanished. He was not a man who brought a gift, but one who wandered with blood on his hands and a stain on his soul.
That dream was dead. To arrive with his hope lost, crushed him, made him feel as if there was a greater pressure on his chest, sucking in, emptying more and more with each subsequent breath.
Shield slowly unfolded from the ground, his lips tight, eyes narrow, the same calm look that he wore when he stepped into battle, betraying no emotion, no fear, no rage, no desire.
"How do I find her?" he asked.
***
While Harad was relieved to be free of the witch's den, he found no comfort in the mead hall with the clan elders. Eyes bore down on the Hounds. Too many scarred warriors sat against the walls of the wooden structure, too many gathered at the only exit. Too many weapons against three.
"We owe you nothing, son of Scyldmund," said Talon, one of the clan elders. Harad remembered him from when they had left. He was still a big, bearded man, wide in the chest and thick of arm. His beard flowed thick, a bit of gray in it, less than one would have thought. The strong persevered in Lake's End.
"I don't ask that you do it for me but for Birgid."
"She is dead to us." A murmur of assent bubbled from the gathered clans people, though even with in it, Harad heard voices bend the other way, those who remembered and were faithful.
"She is good," said Shield.
"What would you know of who she is or what she has become in all this time?" asked Talon.
"And you accept Fennewyn and what he brings?"
Talon inhaled deeply through his nose. "He is a warlock, intent on dark magic. Enough darkness we have seen."
"You know that he brings Dhurma. To the legions, all the clans will be guilty of his crimes. None will be spared. Their spears will come to Lake's End. The waters will be polluted with the blood of Northmen. If he lives, they will push beyond the Black River. What little we have left will be lost."
"The clans will rally once again. Eliode has seen signs. The North will unite."
"But will we win?"
Eyes turned towards Eliode, but she said nothing, kneeling next to Shield.
"I ask for two dozen men. In two days we will reach the stone tower that Eliode has told me about. Fennewyn's tower. I will make sure that Empire has no reason to cross the Black River."
The old crone, Sword's mourning mother, separated from the mass at the door. "Murderer. Murderer. Shield Scyldmund kills our hopes, one by one, Sword, the Warlock King, Fennewyn." Arms dragged her back through the doorway, her cries turning to unintelligible sobs.
"Two dozen men is all I ask."
Talon spoke. "Eight riders and once you leave, you never come back to Lake's End. Any of you Hounds. Ever."
EMBRACE
"Forest is old," said Urbidis. "Feels older than those in the South."
"It's sloppy soldiery," said Pullo sniffling and running the back of his hand across his nose. "A few men patrolling the perimeter but lots of gaps. Be easy to get through."
"It's not an army. It's clans. Held together only by fear."
"My people," said the boy.
"If a legion were to come," continued Urbidis, "it would be slow and cumbersome, announcing itself from miles away. The clansmen would be able to fade away into the mists."
"And then emerge as if out of nowhere," said the sergeant.
Urbidis, with his small band, if he could even call the few men around him that, had the element of surprise. The warlock and the clan chieftains would never expect a handful of Dhurmans to come straight at an encampment of a hundred.
"We were fools to come here."
"Sir?"
"Dhurma has no real need for the North, Pullo. It was only so the young general could build his claim for becoming Emperor."
"Best to leave those thoughts up here."
"At home, we have our neighborhoods. You know where you were born, and where you are born tells you how far you will rise."
"But the Emperor rose above his station."
"He is still Vas Dhurman, Pullo. He was still a general. He rose as he was allowed to. Because there is an order to Dhurma and that is our strength. Our enemy, our weakness, is chaos. That's why we persist in the North – to year by year undermine the great chaos here, to bring it under control. Because we can't have chaos rule. If it did, everything we believe in would turn on its head. All our laws and regulations and social orders would crumble and what would we be left with."
Here in this forest of old, across the Black River, the order of Dhurma meant nothing.
"The dead rose," he said. "Hours of practice – thrust, parry, slash – had meant nothing. The legendary shield wall of Dhurma crumbled when they came. Then our own fallen men turned."
"It's an abomination," hissed Pullo. "That's what we are fighting here. It's against the will of the gods, commander."
Urbidis wondered whether he was a commander of anything anymore.
The mists thickened as if a river of fog poured through the trees in which they hid and rolled down the slope towards the wide grass and rock strewn valley where the clans of the Northmen had made camp.
Spear appeared at Urbidis's shoulder, as if he too were simply a thickening of the mist, something created out of the darkness.
The Northman was ragged, unshaven, looking more a clansman with each passing hour as if he were slipping away from the vestiges of Dhurma and back towards who he truly was.
"Now as good a time as any," said Spear. "I can slip in unseen."
"Find out if he is there."
"Just find out?"
"You do what you need to. But I want proof."
"Easy enough to slip into the camp, but to come back with a bloody head in my hand might be more challenging."
The Dhurman stared into the mists. He hoped that Spear was trustworthy. All it would take would be a single word and the assembled Northmen would surround him, knives dropping before he even knew that they were there. He imagined Painted Men tearing at his limbs, blades piercing his flesh, his arms being bound again.
He would die first before he allowed them to capture him again.
The mists beside them thickened, slowly taking form. Vincius emerged, shivering beneath his cotton cloak. His teeth were chattering, ticking away like the wings of a wood-eating beetle. "He has words that the Grand Collegium would want. I can capture them. Give me the chance to get within hearing distance. Let me capture the words and then we can finish him."
Urbidis shook his head. "Too many dead already. We cannot take him directly, and I don't care any more about what the orders from Vas Dhurma may have been. At this point, the warlock dies. If the generals want to score my back with lashes for insubordination, fine. But the warlock must die."
"You are making a mistake," said Vincius. "The Grand Collegium will reward you."
"Damn the Collegium. I do this for all my men, dead and defiled by that beast. No more games of Empire to be played, only a game of swords."
Spear interrupted. "And if he's not there?"
"Find out where his tower is. We need to know. We will go directly there. If not, we will be wandering the fens for weeks before we would stumble upon it." Urbidis turned to Vincius. "Then you will have your chance to capture his words, but you will have to do it fast because I will be driving my blade through his heart as soon as I am close enough."
The mists thickened again and moments later when they thinned again, Spear was gone. The Dhurman tried to track the Northman's progress among the boulders, the few trees, but the man faded, smudged, faded again, became invisible. Then there was nothing but the great dark mass of the encampment, the tents, the horses, the milling about of the Northmen, the wink of light from the fires strewn about the camp.
The boy was beside him. "My people," the boy said.
"I will bring you back to Vas Dhurma," Urbidis said. "Bring you out this darkness and squalor."
"This is my home. My father's land."
Urbidis remembered the heads on the poles along the banks of the Black River. The boy's connection to the land had been severed. How hard would it be for him to adapt to the great avenues, the crowded markets, the towering temples and buildings? Would the heat of the sun on his skin change the boy? The boy could become Urbidis's, the son he never had. Through the boy, Urbidis could make amends for the killing and the bloodshed that he had overseen in the boy's land. Urbidis could make amends. The boy was his chance for redemption.
"My people," the boy repeated and, then without another word, he walked down the grassy slope towards the encampment of clansmen.
"Stop," Urbidis hissed. "Come back, boy."
The boy faded into the mists. Urbidis stumbled after him, the whispers of Vincius and Pullo trailing behind him.
The boy walked, just beyond him, but then the commander's foot clipped a stone and he tumbled head over heels, the wet grasses licking his body. He could not get up. He felt broken, worn down, and overwhelming desire to stay in the cold grasses but the boy was going to the Northmen.
Even if the boy did not want to give Urbidis and the others away, he would. How would a boy arrive at their camp, emerging out of the mists, bruised and dirtied, so far from his home? They would question him and even if he tried to lie, they would know and the game would be lost. Scouts would slip into the mists, eyes to the ground, tracking, sniffing out, until they found the hapless Dhurmans on the hill. Screams would unfurl across the sky. Even if he and Pullo could bring down those few men and could leap to their horses, a pursuit would begin. They would be tracked down, hunted like animals, bound again.
He could not stand it. He could not let them capture him again. To be captured would be to die, to never again see his wife and daughter, to never again return to warm, dry Dhurma, to never sip wine and nibble on cheese and bread along the banks of the river.
If the boy got to the clansmen, all would be lost.
The boy was a blur in front of Urbidis. He had reached the bottom of the slope at the wide grassy meadow. Closer now, dark figures, tents, the brighter burn of the fire through the mists.
Urbidis dug his feet forward, lunging, and his arms found the boy, pulled him down to the ground.
"You little fool," he whispered. "Will I have to tie you to a tree and gag you the rest of the way?"
"Let me go," the boy cried, too loud, a sharp voice cutting through the fog.
Urbidis clamped a hand over the boy's mouth. He squinted through the fog. The lights and tents were still far enough away. What was he worried about? What w
ould they have heard at that distance? A wild animal, a bird? The distances protected them.
Then he saw the figure on horseback, standing a dozen steps from them, a gray shadow peering into the mists, a spear held in hand.
They were invisible in the grasses, shadows in the shadows. He pressed down on the boy, heavy with shoulder and chest, one hand clamping over mouth and nose, the other binding arms, his legs grapevined around the boy's so his movement, so his struggling, would not give them away.
Urbidis lay there on top of the boy, waiting for the horse warrior to turn, but the clansman sat still as a stone. How long the clansman paused Urbidis would never know.
Then the horse's hooves thumped on the earth, grasses hissing against its legs, the horse and rider disintegrating into the fog as they turned away, back towards the camp.
Urbidis waited longer, waited until a sudden thickening of the mists enveloped him, and then he stood up pulling the boy with him, the reluctant heavy boy. He dragged the boy like a rag doll to the foot of the slope.
"Okay, boy, stand on your own feet. I am not dragging you back up the hill."
But the boy did not answer. He never would.
Urbidis stood there alone in the mists, between encampment and wood, stood there trembling over the body of the boy he had killed.
DARK WOODS
SHIELD STOLE ONE last glance at the lake. The surface was smooth and silver, undisturbed by any wind, reflecting the hazy morning sky. It was as if a slice of silver had been placed in the heart of the valley.
"Never to come back," said Harad. He had been grumbling since their breakfast of porridge and smoked meats. Shield's companion was haggard, his face drawn, the age grooved into his cheeks, the gray in his beard sharp in the diffuse morning light.
"We've seen 'never' before, Harad."
Harad scoffed. "Lake's End is where I was born. And now never to return to the place of my father and his father. I was to bring back a gift after all this time."
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