by Tom Hansen
Gritting her teeth, she stepped past the invisible line in her head, and continued down the silent road.
Along the way, she tried to take in as much as she could about the terrain, the road, and its conditions.
Boot prints, horse prints, and wagon ruts abounded in the mud, which meant they were organized. Officers and lackeys both came along this road.
A recently broken wheel discarded to the side meant they had traveled with a wagon, possibly two.
Still, Ynya only found enough evidence to suggest there was one wagon, and it was a big one. It would have been loaded down with a lot of provisions for the journey because the ruts it left were deep in the hard-packed clay.
Or it carried people.
Ynya’d been through her entire village. The three people she didn’t find and place back in their homes for rest were her two younger sisters, and Hvarf, a kindly older gentleman whose wife had died three winters back. He had left for Holmslatr to sell his wares the same day Ynya left for her fishing trip.
I hope he’s still alive.
Ynya continued along the eastbound road all night, stopping once to cook and eat another fish.
Every crackle of bone and slurp of mouth reverberated in her head more than normal. She was the loudest thing out here and the eerie silence terrified her more than the tracks in the snow.
Ynya buried the fish bones under the soil, and dusted her small temporary camp in powder, suddenly aware how alone she was right now.
Wasn’t solitude what she had been relishing just a day or two before? How quickly priorities changed when your world shifted beneath your understanding.
Ynya spent time scrutinizing the road ahead. She tried to memorize every track, print, and divot in the muddy soil. She noted the hoof prints from the horses, three of them. One larger and heavier than the rest, with two others tied to the wagon, their prints overwritten by the wheels.
Then there were the foot soldiers. Their prints were haphazard and scattered, like the men had been marched for so long they couldn’t follow a straight line. The rut they followed was deep but only as wide as a man’s shoulders. They had to have been following along in single file for them to be making such a track.
But the most curious ones she found were prints outside the convoy, a single person wearing moccasins. Every step had been planned, and meticulously placed in the soft tundra. Whoever made them walked with surety, like they had been trained to walk through snow and barely leave any tracks.
They never faltered, never broke more ground than was needed for a single footstep, and never turned to the side or backed up. In fact, if a storm had come through and dusted these footprints with even the slightest snowfall, Ynya would have never seen them.
Those footprints terrified her the most. Whoever made them knew what they were doing.
Something crunched in the distance, the soft sound of the thin crust of the melting snow breaking. It was followed by a deeper sound as the weight hit the heavier snow beneath. It was a distinct sound that Ynya had heard a thousand times in her childhood while she played hide and seek.
A footstep.
Chapter Six
Ynya crouched to the ground and listened.
She was glad she had the moon’s light to guide her and hadn’t done something so stupid like use her hair to light her way.
But she had been so focused on the ground in front, studying the tracks and footprints, she had forgotten she was tracking a band of murderers and rapists.
She needed to be more careful. She couldn’t risk getting her sisters killed by her own stupidity. Talia would never forgive her.
Remembering her mother, Ynya felt for the cold heartbeat in time with her own. It was still there, an enigma waiting to be unlocked, but now wasn’t the time for testing of a newfound magic skill, now was the time for caution.
Ynya was exposed here on the small rise. She moved to the side about thirty paces before poking her head above the hill to look out on the valley below.
There were men, about a dozen if her eyes didn’t deceive her. Some stood and stretched, but most of them sat on the packed earth, drinking from skins and chatting with their neighbors.
At first, panic rose through her body as she counted them out.
How am I going to take on twelve men by myself?
She realized there was no wagon.
Her heart beat faster and she counted them all again. Eleven men, but no one else. No smaller fire-headed girls among them.
This was good news. They didn’t have her sisters.
All the men wore traditional parkas and boots for living and working in the north. Most likely from Lyraville or somewhere in the Hyndalskyr, these appeared to be her people. Normally seeing someone dressed like this wouldn’t give Ynya any reason to think they were enemies.
Only she had never known this many men to be traveling out in the nighttime along a road rarely ever used during the day.
These men shouldn’t be here, and that meant they were up to no good.
After a few minutes, one of them barked orders, rousing the remaining men into action.
Slowly, the men formed into a loose line and continued to trudge through the snow westward toward Marsfjord.
A sharp worry swept through Ynya’s body.
They’re patrolling the road between the two towns!
Had she stayed in Marsfjord for one more day, the soldiers would have found her while she milled around her burned out hometown. She would have been taken prisoner like her sisters.
Ynya frowned.
What happened that would cause a group of men to travel between towns like this?
They left, trudging through the snow. Every so often one of them would trip, falling into the man in front of him. They would recover while the man in front barked epithets at them before continuing on.
Ynya realized why one of the tracks she’d been studying was so erratic. These men had no idea how to walk in snow! They must have been brought up from somewhere farther to the south and given northern clothes to blend in, but knowing how to live in the north was a skill you acquired over time. Most of these men were not of the north.
But one of them was. The leader knew how to walk in the snow. Each footstep was solid and sure.
Ynya thought back to the lighter separate footprints from earlier. Despite knowing how to walk through the deeper northern snows, he was still too large, and there was no way he could walk across the tundra while making such small footprints.
A bitter smile crossed her face.
They had to have been there for the ransacking and murder of her village, these men clearly had been part of it, and they would know where her sisters were. If these men weren’t used to the cold north, then maybe her fire would surprise them, possibly hurt one of them until they gave up the information she sought.
Ynya thought about running in, grabbing one of them and dragging him off, but no, that wouldn’t be a good idea.
The immediate area had no trees or large rocky outcroppings. It was flat with little contour to the frozen landscape. With half a mile between rises, there was nowhere to hide for long.
“Dammit.” Ynya said under her breath. “I will be back for you.”
She would. She would mete out revenge on every person who wronged her family and her town.
These men, all of them, would die by her hand.
Reluctantly, Ynya pulled away from the small hill and skirted around the soldiers, putting some distance between the group and her back. After a while, she watched them in the distance starting to crest the small hill she’d just come over.
“I will be back.”
“But you never went anywhere,” a woman’s voice replied.
Panic rose in her chest as Ynya whirled around looking for the source. A female soldier explained the footprints being so light.
A white flurry blinded Ynya and something struck her on her head, knocking her down.
Ynya’s heartbeat raced as pain lanced through
her skull. She rolled backwards, trying to keep a view on her attacker, but all she saw was blackness and white flurries.
From her side came the voice again, this time closer. “So thin.”
Something wrapped around Ynya, blacking out all her vision. “I’ve been watching you for a while, little one. You are a feisty one, aren’t you? What are you doing out so late?”
The force that wrapped around Ynya flipped her upside down into something large – a sack perhaps? Ynya flared her magic for a second, about to burn her way out from her prison, but the cold beside her heart snuffed out the heat she grasped.
Patience, my love. Give it time.
Her mother’s voice echoed through Ynya like a ghost. She stopped struggling, stopped moving and listened, but the voice never came again.
Ynya flared her fire once again, but then changed her mind. Her mother had told her to be patient. Maybe she should listen.
She dropped her magic, rage still coursing through her veins just under the surface.
Ynya would wait, she would listen, and she would watch.
And then, she would strike and make them all pay.
Chapter Seven
“Look at what I caught here, boys!”
Ynya hit the ground hard, bounced, and came to a rest another foot away. Her head hit the icy terrain first, then her shoulder, shooting pain down her back. She should have turned over in the sack.
“What is it?”
The sack opened, and someone grabbed Ynya by the hair and pulled her upright.
“Found her snooping around behind us.”
The woman had her hands in Ynya’s long wavy hair, yanking her around to show her off to the men.
Salacious looks crossed their faces as they took her in.
“Sweet morsel.”
“Come to give us a present?”
“Hope she’s feisty as you are.”
The woman threw Ynya back to the ground, and then moving like the wind, she knocked down three of the men in a flash. Ynya got a good look at her attacker and realized why she hadn’t been able to see the woman.
She’s covered head to toe in white fur, like a frost bear!
It made her near-invisible in the light flurries and black backdrop of the starry sky.
All the woman had to do was stop moving, maybe crouch down, and Ynya would have walked past her without even noticing her. The whole thing would’ve been especially easy since Ynya had been watching the soldiers and not the ground.
Ynya needed to be more careful next time, but the more pressing matter was to get herself out of this situation.
Something glinted in the moonlight, and a thin silver blade appeared next to the throat of the last man to hit the ground.
“Care to continue your line of thinking, Hans?” The woman’s blade stopped right under his ear, digging into his skin just enough that blood welled, coating the tip of the blade and dripping onto the snow with each of his labored breaths.
She pulled the man’s furry hood back, exposing his darker skin and deep eyes. He trembled.
“No, ma’am. Didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“Didn’t think so.” She dropped him, spun her blade around in her hand, and was about to put it back into some hidden sheath when she noticed the blood on the tip.
The man who had been leading the other men spoke up for the first time. “Kalda.”
His voice was deep and rich with wisdom. His tone was calm, meaning he’d probably spent a lifetime waiting on people to follow orders. He wasn’t a man who had to yell. He spoke and people obeyed.
Kalda flashed him a fierce scowl, and stormed off into the snow, grumbling under her breath about southern men and blood staining her blade.
“You three. Continue with the group while I interview our little rapscallion here.” The man bent down and extended a hand to Ynya.
For a second, she thought about burning the man where he stood. He was the only competent one in the party besides Kalda, and harming him would give her enough time to run for it. She glanced out into the snow to look for Kalda, but the woman was already lost in the darkness and snowfall.
Ynya realized she’d blown her one chance to escape, and it would probably be prudent to play the role of someone lost in the snow, rather than someone on the hunt.
She took the hand and stood. “I’m from Lyraville, and I got lost in the snow.”
“Lyraville, eh? That’s at least five miles from here, how did you manage through the snow without any clothes?” He looked her up and down, and she suddenly realized just how bad this looked. She normally never wore anything more than this due to her own internal magic heat, but to outsiders, people who hadn’t spent time with her, they wouldn’t easily comprehend how she could survive in the frozen north.
She needed a plausible lie.
“I had just dug myself a burrow in the snow to sleep in when she came and grabbed me. My stuff is still out there now.”
It wasn’t a complete lie. Ynya did have a pack out in the snow somewhere, and for all they knew she was just bunking down for the night. Snow caves were so well-insulated once you crawled into them that most people shed their outdoor clothes for the warmth of the cramped space.
He scrutinized her for a moment, his bushy eyebrows furrowing with worry and concern. He could be a nice man if he wasn’t leading a group of murderers.
Ynya meted out her breaths, hoping he took the bait.
“Lyraville’s been taken over by my soldiers for weeks now. How have you survived this long by yourself?”
He squatted down, concern on his face. He didn’t believe her.
“I’ve patrolled this stretch of road for two weeks now and I haven’t seen anyone come by here. If you’ve been out here this whole time we would have seen you.”
He reached out his hand and grabbed Ynya by the wrist. Shock hit his eyes as he felt her hot skin. For a half moment he was confused by the sudden warmth, but she didn’t wait.
Ynya poured a massive amount of heat into her wrist, just below the surface of her skin. The patch under his hand glowed a faint white in the darkness.
He glanced over his shoulder at his men. “Hey! Bring the chains! I think they’re going to want to see this one.”
In between calm heartbeats, Ynya pushed the heat from her wrist into his hand.
He let go, his eyes wide with alarm.
The pungent scent of burning flesh filled the air as Ynya whirled around and took off running into the night. She’d managed to burn him far worse than she thought.
She was a dozen yards away before his yell hit her ears, but Ynya kept running, kept zig-zagging through the snow.
She couldn’t go back to her pack, and she couldn’t get caught by the woman in white again. She needed to keep running to stay out of reach.
Before long, she stopped, and crouched down in the snow.
Ynya surveyed every inch of the horizon around her. Nothing. Not a hare, not a moose, not a single woman wearing a bear’s skin.
She’d made it, somehow.
The Gods Below had helped her escape and she would not put that grace to waste again.
Chapter Eight
Ynya spent the rest of the night trying to get back to her pack, but every time she came within sight of it, she noticed a prowling Kalda.
Kalda was good, too. She staying far enough away from Ynya’s pack that it wasn’t always obvious she was nearby. But she stayed close enough to easily catch Ynya.
Dammit, I’m going to have to leave it behind. I’m so stupid.
Not watching where she was going, and not paying attention to her surroundings had lost her food and weapons tucked in the pack. The handful of knives she’d brought with her for gutting fish were all she had taken before leaving the town. Even though they might not have been soldier-quality, they were sharp.
But they weren’t effective in the slightest if she didn’t have them on her.
After long last, the sun started to come up and Ynya realized this w
as a futile effort. She’d wasted too much time trying to get back to her pack.
Realization dawned on her more as she followed the road eastward once again. Every mile or so, another soldier monitored their spot, vigilantly surveying the land to the north and south..
Ynya’d spent so much time trying to get back to her pack she’d given all the soldiers plenty of time to fan out.
Ynya couldn’t follow the road anymore.
She had reached the Skoroberg, a massive, sheer wall of solid rock jutting hundreds of feet into the eastern sky.
Much like the shorn terrain that separated her town of Marsfjord from the road, another, much larger step in the land separated the district of Hyndalskyr from Skoro.
Nestled at the base of the Skoroberg was Lyraville, a small town about twice the size of Marsfjord functioned as a stop-off point before travelers ventured up the rocky berg to get to Skoro.
The town crawled with soldiers. By the time Ynya’d gotten within sight of the massive cliff of rock, soldiers had spread out along the base, preventing her from even reaching the rock.
A single road wound up through the rock with narrow, steep switchbacks, the only passage from the bottom to the top for miles in each direction.
Even though she’d never been this far east, she’d heard stories from her father about the area many times. The vast cliff disappeared over the horizon in the distance, something Ynya hadn’t believed until she saw it with her own eyes. If she couldn’t make it up the road, her only option was to scale the wall, leaving herself exposed and vulnerable on the rock face, assuming she could even make it up on her own.
She was stuck.
Proceeding forward meant capture, and the ever-vigilant eyes of the soldiers scanning the area around the road meant they had her cornered.
Ynya didn’t know where her other two sisters had been taken, and there was no way she was going to be able to get past this blockade.