A Crown of Flames

by Pauline Creeden

  Ibr stammered while his face brightened like she’d never seen before.

  She just kissed him again, winding her arms around him. He chuckled deep in his throat, kissing her back.

  “No shenanigans,” said Ibn.

  Then they stood there, grinning at each other like idiots.

  “Maybe a few?” Dyrfinna offered meekly.

  Ibn roared with laughter. She laughed, too, at that little meek voice that had come out of her. Then he folded her into his arms and they kissed.

  They were kissing for quite a while.

  “Well,” Ibn finally said. “Maybe a few.”

  “Yeah,” Dyrfinna said, laying her hand on his face and tracing his eyebrow with her thumb.

  Ibn became serious, his dark, intense eyes studying hers. “I need you to survive,” he said, gently brushing her loose hair out of her eyes. “We can’t forget what we are walking into. I haven’t seen power like hers before. I don’t know what this Gorm is that she answers to, but I must confess that under all my bluster, I’m afraid for you. You have great power but you haven’t quite mastered its control. When you face her in combat, that control is going to be the difference between life and death for you.”

  His black eyes met hers, their intensity making her knees go weak.

  “I want you to be able to walk into battle and know that you will come out alive. Because. I need you. Dyrfinna.” His voice cracked a little in a way that pierced her heart. “I want you in my life.”

  They kissed again. Dyrfinna’s heart was pounding with the sheer force of those kisses, and they clutched each other tightly.

  “Can you be sure, this soon?” she whispered when they broke apart slightly.

  Ibn laughed softly. “I was in love with you when I first saw you go into battle, and when I talked to you after I nearly lost you. I’d never believed in love at first sight. But it’s so easy to talk to you, and I feel as if I have found the best friend in the world. Every time we talk to each other, I discover something new. It’s such a rare, precious thing. And so irresistible.”

  They kissed again, this time gently. Dyrfinna’s mind was full, and her heart was overflowing. But she said, “Let’s see how things go between us on this journey. That’s going to be the true test of our affections.”

  Ibn’s lips smiled against hers. “So practical. But true. We’ll either come out of this as inseparable or we’ll drive each other to distraction and will never want to have anything to do with each other ever again.”

  “I have many terrible habits,” Dyrfinna said.

  “I bet mine are worse.”

  “Well, I can see that this new relationship is all going to die in a big, fiery ball of flame.”

  “O ye of little faith.” Ibn kissed her again. “You should probably go to sleep. You’ve been fighting all day.”

  Dyrfinna kissed him some more. “I really have lost all interest in sleep.”

  “No, no, no. You are going to sleep, and I am going to sleep. There will be time for delicious kisses later.”

  Dyrfinna stole a kiss, but Ibn said, “No, no, I adjure you,” and sent her on her way. “My heart burns for you,” he said as she moped away, “but we have work to do, my sweet bird, my burning angel.”

  “Stop, or I’m going to turn around and come back,” Dyrfinna said over her shoulder.

  “My withered brussels sprout, my poky puffin,” he added.

  She got scrubbed up as quickly as she could and donned fresh clothes as a maid took hers to wash. When she returned to camp, she decided it best to keep her distance from Ibn.

  “Love love,” she called over her shoulder toward him as she lay down with her head on her bed roll, wrapped in her cloak.

  “Love love,” he replied from across the camp.

  Despite her bounding heart, and despite trying to stay awake to relive, moment by moment, all that had gone between them, Dyrfinna fell asleep within moments of lying down.

  25

  A Small Whimper

  Dyrfinna slept through most of the night, exhausted in body and soul. When she woke up early that morning, she was still exhausted. Even so, she did not want to waste a moment. She’d had a dream that woke her and she wanted more than anything to get started.

  She met Ibn who had piled up some wood at a ember-filled cook fire and was pouring oats and water into a pot to boil. “Good morning,” he said drowsily.

  She sat next to him. It soothed her heart when her eyes met his and he smiled. Really, there was nothing else like it in the world, this feeling.

  “But we have work to do,” she reminded herself sternly.

  She handed him a cup brimming with water, as she stirred the porridge. Other fighters joined them for breakfast, and she was too self-conscious to start kissing on him as she longed to.

  Once they’d had breakfast, Dyrfinna got up to lead her army into the field to blast the undead into dust. The army came down the road out of the castle, Dyrfinna and Ibn leading them. The fighters carried their shields on their backs, their battle armor glittered in the torchlight, as did the sharp blades on their spears and swords.

  The emberdragon flew in. Good morning, she called. We’re here to clear the shamblers from the castle walls so you can leave this place.

  “Thank you,” Dyrfinna called. “Very kind of you.”

  They came out of the gate and began to arrange themselves in order of battle before the walls as the dragons blasted the shamblers that were coming up alongside the walls and trying to flank the attack before it even started. Dyrfinna had placed some of the strongest magicians and warriors at those two ends to be able to keep fighting off the attacks and not tire.

  A new attack of shamblers came lurching forward. Three soldiers who were closest to the undead pointed at the small group, said, “We’ve got these,” and blasted them. They’d all agreed to call out and point at the shamblers they were singing down so they wouldn’t have any potentially troublesome incidents in which twelve soldiers would all be singing at the same shambler and not at the rest of the shamblers that were coming in.

  The next two days were filled with Dyrfinna leading her forces through King Varinn's land and dispatching the undead. The dragons burned what they could and kept their eyes out for Nauma’s undead dragons, which, fortunately or unfortunately, never arrived. They also flew survivors and refugees back to Varinn’s keep, to safety.

  Little by little, the undead forces dwindled before them.

  Halfway through the third day, they were walking through the hills at the edge of Varinn’s kingdom. The dragons were having less and less success finding shamblers.

  “I think we have most of them,” one of the dragonriders remarked. “We’ll keep looking for them, but I think we’ve gotten the better of them.”

  She flew on, and Dyrfinna marched on.

  "This should make Nauma mad," Dyrfinna muttered as she led her army over the wooded hills, looking for more undead. One of King Varinn's dragons flew overhead, its head turning to the left and the right as it searched for any ambushes of undead along the holt and heaths of the summer woods.

  "We should nearly have this place cleared," Ibn said. "We've spiraled out from the royal palace and the numbers of the undead have dwindled the more we travel. And we've cut down so many."

  She swatted with her sword at some tall grasses that they passed. She hated they had to cut down the dead in the first place. The dead should have stayed dead. It was hard enough to kill people once. The thought made her stomach turn.

  "Let's go up to the farmstead," Dyrfinna said, pointing to a cottage ahead with a fenced area in which no cow roamed, and a pigsty in which there were no pigs. No goat stood on the roof, no chickens strutted in the yard around the house.

  "The undead found that house," said Ibn.

  A woman came out and waved her apron at them joyfully.

  "But they didn't find everyone," Dyrfinna said, relieved, waving back.

  "I just came out of the cellar to see if ther
e were any of the dead left," she said as Dyrfinna and her army joined her. "It's been so quiet up here all day, but they seem to be gone. All-Father be praised, but my cellar was full of animals and people. The place has got to be slopped."

  "You're safe," Dyrfinna said. "We've been killing off the dead for the last several days."

  "Then come, rest your weary limbs at my house for a while. The dead killed my oxen and cattle, but I still have a barrel of flour and enough yeast to raise it."

  So Dyrfinna’s warriors sat and rested, though a small number of the band patrolled the borders of her land to make sure all the undead were gone or destroyed, and that none of the undead were hiding around her place.

  While they were gone, several good bakers joined the woman to mix and knead and bake. And a couple of unfortunate souls took shovels and began to slop out her cellar, carting the manure up the steps and throwing it outside. The ox, the cow, and several pigs and chickens roamed around inside their fences, happily eating their grass and blinking in the sun.

  Soon the smell of baking bread, nearly finished, began to rise from the ovens and the two cook fires where the bread cooked in cast iron pots, covered with a lid. From the house came the delicious smell of bread, enough loaves for all.

  Dyrfinna's stomach growled. She stretched out her worn-out feet before the fire and sighed. One of the dragons had brought a keg of water from King Varinn’s to drink. Nobody wanted to drink from the nearby stream, which was clogged with the dead that lay stinking where they’d fallen.

  Dyrfinna had filled her clay cup and had downed a great drink, and she could just about feel the water soaking into her insides. She filled her cup again and had taken another drink when she heard an odd sound, like the whimper of a puppy.

  She set down her cup. Others had heard the sound, too, for several others were looking out into the blackness of the night beyond the fire, into the burned lands.

  "What's that?" Dyrfinna said, hand on the hilt of her sword.

  “Is that a dog?” Ibn asked. “How would it have survived all of the undead?”

  Now everybody around the fire was alert, sitting silently, looking toward the sound.

  “What do you think it is?" somebody else whispered.

  More whimpering sounds.

  “That’s not a dog,” Dyrfinna said quietly.

  “Definitely not,” somebody else replied in a low voice.

  Everybody around the cookfire had one hand on their most effective weapon.

  And out in the plain appeared ... very small shamblers.

  Children.

  Five of them.

  Somebody’s family that had been found by the shamblers.

  Horror and grief erupted around the cook fire.

  "How could they?"

  "This is awful, this is awful."

  "The poor babies."

  Several burst out sobbing at the sight.

  Dyrfinna tried to clear her mind of all her shock and horror, tried to not think about how the children came to die, but she couldn't. And now she had to destroy these children, dead through no fault of their own, made into undead by somebody who placed no value on their tears, their loves, or their grieving parents, if they were somehow still alive.

  Nauma.

  The little ones came on with sad noises.

  "I want to hold these poor children," one of the men wept.

  "Don't do it. Don't." Children or not, they were still undead. If he picked them up, they'd be gnawing through his arms and neck in seconds with their baby teeth.

  At that moment, one six year old scared up a rabbit from the shelter of a clump of grass. She leapt forward with unimaginable speed and devoured the small animal.

  The rest of the children came on toward Dyrfinna and her company making those sad sounds.

  Dyrfinna took the worst breath she’d ever taken.

  “I call this one,” she said as she got to her feet.

  Dead silence followed her.

  She added, “Those of you with children, with families, if you need to step away for a moment, none of us will hold it against you.”

  She heard, behind her, several people stumbled away, sobbing.

  She waited until the sounds had subsided somewhat. But not too long, for the children saw her now and were hobbling toward her with blank, hungry eyes, making those sad noises.

  Dyrfinna couldn’t let her voice choke, or break. Not now.

  She couldn’t let herself think of how she wanted Nauma to die in pain. Not now.

  She sang the magic, as soft as a lullaby.

  One by one, they fell into dust.

  Dyrfinna crouched there, staring at the dust she’d created until Ibn gently raised her to her feet, wrapped his arm around her, and walked her back to the house.

  “We cannot save them all,” he said, “and the world is exceedingly cruel. But, if it’s any consolation, five roses now grow in Paradise in the light of heaven.”

  “I don’t know if it is any consolation right now,” Dyrfinna said, but she leaned against him.

  They walked on a little way toward the woman’s house where the smell of bread drifted.

  “You know what would give me consolation? Just a little bit of consolation? If I could find Nauma right now, and take my revenge on her,” Dyrfinna said, her voice cracking on the statement. “Where is Nauma at? Take me to her, now.”

  And the next moment, she was there.

  And she was talking to Egill.

  26

  The Wooden Stag

  Egill sat on a chair, carving a small wooden figure and, as usual, ignoring her as she spoke.

  “Now you’re going to ignore me?” she asked. She felt the huge smile come over her face. “You were the one who called me here. I walked into your queen’s castle in disguise and everything for you. But, fine, if you want to be that way,” she said, stepping over to the wide windows that looked out over the ocean, trailing her fingers over the beautiful wall hangings and the beautifully-carved stags that stood on the nearby table.

  "I can go," she said coyly. "I’ll just trot up to the queen’s quarters and tell her about your little dalliance. I'll deliver this news in person. Tell her why I know about it. She’ll appreciate that."

  Egill didn’t blanch nor blink. He just sat on his fine chair in his fine clothes and fancy brooch, the dragon brooch that clasped his cloak was made of silver and rubies, and kept carving his dragon, tiny flecks of wood falling from where he worked.

  "How are you going to deliver the news in person?” he asked, not even looking up. “Her guards will kill you on the spot. There's a price on your head." He raised the carving to his lips and blew off some wood dust, squinted at it, and did some detail work.

  She just grinned. "I walked right into this place and I can walk back out."

  "You can't walk past me," he said, almost as if he’d half-forgotten she was there.

  She snorted. So he was going to play this game.

  She narrowed her eyes at the wood. Made the connection with the Gorm through her feet on the floor. Felt the power rise through her body like swift floodwaters. Staring at the carving in his hand, she whispered three words.

  The wood slowly darkened in his hand. Turned black. Began to smoke.

  “It’s burning!” Egill dropped it and it fell in his lap. He immediately jumped up to get the smoking piece of wood off his lap, and it fell to the floor. “What did you do to it? It burned me!”

  “Pay attention, old man,” she said slowly and clearly as his precious carving burst into flames.

  With a muffled grunt, Egill kicked it into the fireplace after several attempts. Then he spun back on her. “I already told you, no. But no is not a good enough answer for you, is it? You have to have a temper tantrum and burn my carving. I’d been working days on it, girl.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, looking at the lifelike carved stag that stood on the table next to her. “I’ll burn all of them just for fun.”

  “Don’t.” He s
tood there with his arms at his side, his carving knife forgotten in his hand. “Tell me what you want. I’m listening now.”

  “Mm.” She ran her fingers over the stag. It really was a good carving. But it wasn’t anything to her to burn it. “I’ve already made my demand. But you don’t want to sacrifice the queen for me. Of course, you’ll do it for your own good. But not for mine.”

  “We can’t sacrifice Queen Saehildr yet,” Egill said. “People have been questioning her actions. The dragonriders are all in an uproar after the dragons left for some unknown reason, though most of them came back and have been cleaning up your undead shamblers ever since.”

  “Unfortunately,” she muttered. “So why wait to get rid of Saehildr? This is the perfect time to kill her, while this uproar is raging. There’s a thousand ways to ease her out of this world and nobody will know the difference.”

  “You can’t talk like that,” Egill suddenly stammered.

  She liked talking like that. She wasn’t ready to kill the queen yet; she just liked to watch him squirm.

  With a disdainful look, she said, “Saehildr killed that little boy and fed his heart to Varinn.” A slow smile crept over her features. “I never would have thought that she’d come up with something like that all by herself! We’re so alike, the queen and I. Isn’t that funny?”

  His face darkened. "And what have you done for us, to give me this treatment?"

  "I've spared you," she said coolly. She grinned at Egill, who was sputtering and smoking like a piece of wet wood in a hot fire.

  "You have no authority!" he said.

  Before he could say another word, she held her hand pointing at his heart with a sphere of red lightning crackling between her fingers. She felt her hair all over her body standing on end from the power she’d called up. Strands of her braided hair rose and tickled.

  She grinned more broadly at that distressed look on Egill’s face.

  But he stopped his bluster.

  She closed her hand over the lightning and felt it snap and go dark inside her hand. "I have all the authority I need, don't you think?"