“Why’s that matter to you? Your people belong to neither side.”
“If there’s a war, it’s more dangerous for me to hunt down food and, if it’s more dangerous, my fee doubles. Simple as that.”
3
Hemming descended a gentle slope towards the Svergish keep, his feet cracking through the icy crust. Beside him, Liv panted, a half dozen dogs trailing at her heels, steam rising from their long fur.
After four hours of breaking through snowdrifts, following Brit’s bloody tracks, and cursing the dark storm clouds that slowly descended from the craggy peaks, Hemming finally could see that the stone castle of the enemy lay within reach.
Even from this distance, Hemming smelled char – of wood and flesh.
Nestled where two sheer mountain faces came together, the Svergish keep hardly looked much different from their own. Dark granite, smooth walls peppered with murder holes, a few barred windows higher up, and a crenelated crown. For all purposes, he could have been turned around and looking back at their own keep. Except a yellow banner snapped in the wind rather than a blue one.
After years of war, each country still flew their own banner. Despite all the killing, it was as if no one had really won the war. The borders were maintained. The same families ruled. All that bloodshed only to come back to the same place again. Hemming fought against dark thoughts fixating on the years he had lost for a war that changed nothing.
He puffed his breath into his cupped hands.
Despite his fur vest and the steady pace that he, Liv, and her dogs kept, he was freezing. The wind swirled across the snowfield beneath the mountains and icy gusts licked his exposed neck and wrists. Even where he was properly covered, the cold penetrated his layers.
The bitter cold had reawakened the pain of his old injuries: his ankle that had never fully healed, the ribs broken by a spear butt, the damaged tendons in his left hand, the scars hidden beneath his beard. He was in a foul enough mood without the pain.
The cold also brought back feelings of bitterness at the way his life had turned. Of his brothers. Of everything he had lost.
He glanced again at the clouds swirling down from the peaks and mountain saddles. He thought about how long it had taken them to hike through the deep snow to the Svergish fortress and, doing some mental calculations, figured if they turned around right now, they would still be stuck in the blizzard for at least an hour before reaching the shelter of their keep.
Liv had warned that the winter would be worse than any other he had experienced but he had thought that she was stretching the truth. Now he was realizing that the winter up in the mountain peaks would truly be a bitter one.
Liv, only her eyes revealed through her wrap of furs, raised a mittened hand. The dogs sat heavily in the snow. “The gate’s open.”
Hemming followed her gaze to the large oak gate, studded and banded with iron. It was thick enough to ward off a battalion. But it was wide open, with snow drifting into the keep. “I don’t like this, Liv. Arne should have listened to me. We should have sent word to Riverton. Foolish for us to come here. The two of us alone. Always ordered around by fools. The story of my life.”
“We approach slowly. Wait for them to see us.”
They crossed the snowfield until they stood just outside the gate.
“Where the hell are the sentries?” Hemming asked. He peered into the shadows inside the keep. He felt the familiar gathering of his breath high in his chest, that sensation that came to him in the moments before battle: at the edge of something violent and unknown.
The dogs began whimpering.
“What’s gotten into them?” asked Hemming.
“You smell that, too, don’t you?” The burnt flesh and wood.
Hemming untied the axe from his back. He pulled the hood from his head and immediately shivered, but he didn’t want anything blocking his view.
“I’ll come in with you,” she said. She had drawn a long dressing knife from her belt.
“Might be best if you stay out here with the dogs.”
“I can handle myself. And the dogs are coming with us.”
Hemming nodded. He squinted into the gloom. “No one on the catwalks. The gate wide open. Not a soul challenging us.”
“Let’s do this.”
“Stick close, but not too close. If I’m swinging the axe, I’m swinging hard.”
Hemming stepped through the threshold into the keep and paused, letting his eyes adjust. He looked into a central courtyard, a well in the middle, wooden shacks for animals and storage built along the side walls, and straight ahead the main towering structure of the keep. He wondered if both keeps had been built by the same person. He glanced over his shoulder at the catwalks. Abandoned.
He edged forward, his axe weighing heavier in his hands than it should have. After only a few steps out of the wind, he warmed up immediately, his brow beading with sweat.
He found the first body in the courtyard behind the well. A red-haired woman dressed in chain mail, but it had done her no good. Her throat had been torn open. Hemming squatted and pulled her hair back. A jagged wound. He could not tell if it was from a weapon or claw.
“Brit couldn’t have done that,” said Liv. “Arne told me she was a courtier’s daughter. Pampered.”
“Maybe the dogs?”
“That’s not a bite mark. At least not from a dog.”
Hemming stared up the steps leading to the hall.
Something was wrong. The hostage Brit fleeing to their keep. The enemy gate wide open. The way this woman had been killed.
They found more bodies in the great hall. A half dozen men and women lay on the cold stone floor, killed with weapons, slashes and punctures marking their flesh.
Hemming surveyed the corpses, their positions, the blood on their weapons. Two of the Sverges, a man and a woman, were nearly embracing, swords jammed in each other’s bellies.
“This is all wrong,” he said. “The Sverges turned on each other.”
“Cabin fever, being isolated for so long, it can drive some people crazy,” said Liv. She pointed her dogs to lie down. They whined.
“But winter hasn’t even started. They could not have been up here longer than three months and could easily get back down off the peaks.”
He sniffed the air, picking up again the char of wood and flesh. “I’ve got a feeling this is even the worst of it.”
They came upon a blackened door bolted from the outside. Hemming had to use his axe to break in. A single fire-deformed body lay by the door, hands stretched out like claws. Its skin was black, cracked, bubbled fat and muscle visible.
“It doesn’t even look human anymore,” said Liv.
“Let’s get out of here. No one survived.”
“Except Brit.”
“If there was a fight, I don’t imagine her being the only one surviving. Not her.”
“And, yet, she showed up at our keep.”
“We need to get her to talk. We need to find out what happened here. If someone else attacked them, we need to know.”
Hemming glanced one more time at the burnt corpse. Someone had locked that person in there. Someone had ignored the screams and the cries for help.
He and Liv were hurrying back through the hall when one of the dogs darted off down a side hall, yelping. Hemming hesitated but then followed.
In a small pantry, stuffed with sacks and barrels and ceramic jars, they found one more body.
This time Hemming vomited on the floor. The body glistened in a pool of blood, muscle and tendon exposed, curled up in a fetal position. It had been completely skinned and its lifeless bright blue eyes stared right at Hemming.
“We need to go,” he said. “We need to go now.”
4
They were about an hour from their keep when the blizzard descended.
The sky darkened as if a shroud had descended. The wind redoubled its pace, sending sheets of ice whipping across the snowfield. And the freezing air seemed to get colde
r.
Hemming glanced to where the craggy peaks had been swallowed in a dark gray roiling wall of clouds. He had kept hoping that they would somehow stay ahead of the storm but then it descended on them, the snow lashing from all directions. Where moments before he had been able to make out the sharp ridge in front of them, now the landmark was completely lost behind a sheet of snow.
Just ahead, Liv trudged. Snow had piled thick on her head and shoulders. The dogs fought to cut a path through the snow.
“We’re going to get lost!” he shouted above the wind. “We should wait until the storm subsides.”
“If we stop, we die!”
“Which way is the keep?”
“The dogs know. They’ll get us home.” The dogs one by one shook, sending the snow from their backs.
“We need to find shelter.”
“There is no shelter out here. We have no choice but to continue on.”
They plunged ahead, one step after the other, against a fierce wind that buffeted them from the left. Hemming struggled with each step as if at any moment he might be knocked from his feet. He trailed slightly behind Liv and he was filled with the overwhelming sense of dread that if he fell over he would not be able to get back up. By the time Liv realized he was gone, he would be covered in snow, alone and left to die.
As if to add to his fears, Liv and the dogs slowly pulled ahead of him. She was born of these mountains and her pace was relentless, and he was grateful that every once in a while she turned and waited, but he could see that she was bothered, stomping her feet and flapping her gloved hands as the cold embraced her more tightly every time she paused for him. He wondered if it came down to survival, whether she would abandon him. He wondered what he would do in her situation.
A few times the snow swirled so furiously that her figure disintegrated until she was nothing more than a ghost. Fighting the panic that clutched his throat, he hurried ahead until she slowly materialized, the snow thinning and the distance shortening.
Some time later, Liv stopped and waved at Hemming. She broke away from the path they had been following and descended to the right. He wanted to call to her but she was too far ahead and the howling wind would have swallowed his voice. He was tired, legs aching, fingers numb, lungs burning with cold and effort, so he trailed along blindly.
She led him towards an outcropping and then he saw where she brought him: the hunter’s shack that he and the others had seen when they had climbed to the keep in the late summer. It was a small structure built of rough-cut timbers, with the back wall formed out of a depression of stone outcropping from the mountainside. She pried up the bolt and dragged the door open. The dogs streamed in first, then Liv, and finally, Hemming, stiff-legged.
He shivered uncontrollably, teeth chattering, and could not even unfurl his balled hands to help her as she fed kindling into a small fireplace built into the wall. With the two of them and the dogs, there was barely enough room. He perched onto a small stool and breathed into his cold-burning hands. Soon the fire crackled and the room began warming up.
“We won’t be able to stay here forever,” she said.
“That’s too bad. I was thinking of moving a battalion in here.”
“When we run out of firewood, it will drop to freezing fast. You’d actually be surprised how many people have misjudged that.”
One of the dogs had settled comfortably on Hemming’s feet. He knew he would stink like wet dog for days but it was a price he was willing to pay for the shared warmth. Even with the fire roaring in the small space, tendrils of icy cold slithered through gaps in the boards.
“I don’t like what we saw in the Svergish keep,” Hemming said.
“Sometimes the winter will drive people crazy. The isolation. The cold. Being trapped in such close quarters with others.”
“Winter is just coming now. It’s not like they’ve been trapped here for months. During the war, I witnessed the worst in people. I was hoping to get away from it all. That’s why I volunteered for this post. I wanted to get away from the madness. Who skins another person?”
“And where was the skin? Did you notice that?”
“I’m fine with us not finding the skin.” He was finally warming up, even sweating a little from the sudden heat in the small space. He tried to imagine hiking for the remaining half hour back towards their keep, the growing cold, the ever-darkening days. Maybe he had made a mistake accepting the post at the keep.
“I think Arne is wrong,” he said. “We should get help. A handful of us cannot properly defend that keep. It was designed to hold scores of soldiers. We’d barely be able to keep an eye out in all directions, much less fight off anyone who wanted in.”
“Not much choice, is there?”
“Where we are? This shack is on the trail that leads back down to Riverton, right? What if we just continued on down? We could survive. We get to the barracks and rally a battalion. Come back and deal with this.”
“But Arne and the others won’t know where we went or what happened in the other keep. They need to know what we discovered.”
“I’m just tired of this. The fighting. The war that will never end, not even in peace. I served the crown, and led men into rivers of blood. I just want to get away from all of it. I want to be left alone, away from the madness of men.”
Liv chuckled. “You and I are more alike than we appear. Why do you think I live up here? The world is mad and this is about as far away as I can get from it. But, despite that, we have a duty to the others. We can’t just abandon them. And you’re the one who’s supposed to be protecting them – the decorated veteran, the war hero.”
Hemming let the crackling and hiss of blazing wood fill the silence. He imagined the sheets of snow coursing across the fields of ice. It had seemed like such a good idea accepting this position: a chance for him to get away from everything that tore at his thoughts.
But now he wondered if he had made a tremendous mistake.
He knew he was supposed to protect the others at the keep. It was what he had done throughout the war, risking his own safety to guard the general. But he was finished with all of that. It had left him more alone than ever before.
He only wanted to protect himself, especially from the madness of others. Let them sort themselves out.
After some time, when the flickering flames in the fireplace died down to waves of orange and blue, he rose, upsetting the dog laying on his feet. It was time to return to the keep.
5
“The Sverge knows something,” said Arne stoking the logs with an iron poker. The end of it pulsed orange. “He’s hiding something and we need to make him talk.”
Hemming stomped in front of the large stone fireplace of the keep’s great hall trying to warm up. He had shed his snow-caked furs to the floor, and even peeled off his wet boots. He and Liv had just finished telling Arne about the bloodshed and horror they had found at the Svergish keep.
“Elof’s been here with us the whole time,” said Hemming talking about their hostage. “He’s as much in the dark about this as we are. He can’t know anything. But something happened over there. Something horrible. We should pack up. Head down to Riverton. Why do we need to stay here? The enemy we are defending against is completely gone.”
The others, Magne and Sigurd, were in the hall, even Helga, the cook always in the shadows, and Runa, the witch. Only the hostages were not present, Brit confined to her bed, and Elof the Sverge locked in his room.
“Brit would know,” said Liv. She had pulled back her hood, and her cheeks were bright red from the heat. “She fled from that keep for a reason. We need to get her to talk.”
“Girl, her eyes roll around in her head,” spat Runa. “You’re not getting two words out of her.” The hag’s twiggy fingers were stained orange. She edged closer to the fire, pulling her coarse black cloak around her bony shoulders. “You just don’t like another pretty girl in the keep.”
“You found a body but no skin?” asked young Sigu
rd, swallowing hard. “Where was the skin?”
“Storm was coming,” said Hemming. “The place was a murder pit. We weren’t going to spend the night there.”
“So there could have been someone in there still,” growled Magne. “More Svergish bastards could have been hiding in the keep. I thought you are supposed to be the war hero. You turned and ran.”
Hemming spread his palms towards the fire. His skin itched with the heat. It felt good to finally get some feeling back in his hands. He stared at the dancing flames and wondered how far down the trail towards Riverton he would have been if he had not let Liv talk him into returning to the keep. The major stationed in Riverton would have listened to him. Instead he was arguing with idiots. He should have just descended that slope. He should have left these fools behind. He owed them nothing. He should have been looking out for his own skin first.
But it was too late now.
Every moment as the snow fell more thickly, the path back to civilization was buried more deeply, his way out shrinking with each breath.
“Magne is right. You missed something there,” said Arne. The lip of his mustache was dark with the wetness of mead. Hemming could smell it on his breath even from a distance. “Elof knows something. I never trusted him from the beginning.”
“Me neither,” muttered Magne. “Svergish bastards.”
“If he thinks he can hide something from us, he’s sadly mistaken.” Arne raised the end of the iron poker, the tip glowing orange. “Magne, Sigurd, get the hostage. He will keep no secrets from me.”
The two soldiers disappeared down a dark hall.
Hemming’s skin suddenly chilled. “What are you talking about, Arne? He knows nothing.”
Arne’s eyes suddenly focused, the blacks pinpointing on Hemming. “The Sverges are devils. I was warned of their trickery. Elof knows something. He’s been planning his escape. And revenge. I can tell these things.”
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