by K. Eason
“Until you got between us.”
“Not then, either.”
Veiko did not want this conversation. Did not want her gratitude, no, because that meant obligation. Meant connection, a twining of fates and lives. Better to settle debts now and be free of each other. Walk away
alone
and leave her to her fate. He looked at the dogs. At the bat-snake. He had spoken more in this short sliver of afternoon than he had in two long months.
His throat hurt. He cleared it. “My name is Veiko Nyrikki.” His father might not permit him that name anymore. He might be only Veiko Clanless, now, Veiko Outlaw.
“Veiko Nyrikki,” she repeated carefully. Nodded. “Snowdenaelikk.”
Nothing about her was easy. “Snow. D’Naelikk.” It sounded like a Jaihnu clan-name, maybe one of the settlements on the tundra’s eastern edge. “Snow is your . . . House?”
He thought she would laugh. Saw the grin crack her features wide, heard the sharp hiss of breath going in. Only silence, coming out, and her teeth clicked together. “Just Snow, yeah? No House name. I’m not highborn. My mother chose the name. And by now I think my mother’d rather pretend I never happened, yeah?”
He nodded. She must be another outlaw, then, whose family disowned her. A man did not pry into another’s business. Guess what she had done, yes, imagine it, but do not ask.
Oh, ask her, skraeling. Blood on her hands, yeah, soaked to her wrists. That one is a murderer.
So am I, Veiko thought. And said, over the ghost’s laughter, “The storm is light now, but it will get worse. Be quick, whatever you do.”
She tipped her face up. The snow collected on her cheeks, brief scattered white before turning to wetness. The wind caught the edge of her hood, pulled it down to her shoulders. Her pale hair was close-clipped around the lower half of her skull, with a long topknot gathered at the back. A trio of fine gold rings, and one heavier silver, flashed high in the curve of her ear. She was like no woman he’d ever seen, Dvergir or half-blood or otherwise. Like no one he’d seen in all his life.
“Yeah? How can you tell?” Looking at him now, head tilted, curious. “Veiko?”
He was, he realized, staring. Stopped and turned his face into the rising wind. “The air gets colder. There is a . . .” He couldn’t find the Dvergiri word. Shrugged at her. “Feeling.”
“Feeling. Right.” Flash smile as she twitched her hood up again. She started collecting the dead man’s javelins, which had scattered during his dying. Wedged them under her boot and leaned on them until the wood snapped.
Crack.
Like ice in spring thaw. He managed not to flinch at the surprising violence she brought to the task.
Crack.
She wore another smile now, small and grim. Didn’t ask for his help, and Veiko didn’t offer. Revenge was a private matter.
That it is, skraeling. So why don’t you run? That’s my only warning.
Maybe it was the spreading twilight that made Veiko think he saw a smile on the dead man’s face. Maybe.
Crack.
Sweat beaded on his skin. Chilled there, through all the layers of wool and linen. Spirits could walk, after sunset. Wear their flesh and do terrible harm to the living. A hunter should have no business with them. A man should not see them or hear them, and he had done both.
Easy to step back, fade into the forest. Get far away from this Snowdenaelikk, this angry spirit, this wounded soldier who would live to remember them both.
And it wasn’t imagining, wasn’t twilight, the sudden stretch of a dead mouth, or the gleam of long teeth.
Think I’ll get up and chew your flesh, skraeling? Maybe I will. But her first, yeah? So run.
Dust in his mouth. Ice in his chest. His heart was somewhere between them, fluttering in his throat. He forced words around it.
“You will perform the burial rites, will you not?”
Crack. Snow dropped two more pieces of javelin onto the small pile of broken wood. “For the corpse? Never mind. Of course for the corpse.” She frowned at the body. “No. Let his own people handle that.”
“You are Illhari. He is, as well. I have heard you burn your dead.”
Her mouth quirked again, and this time it wasn’t a smile. “You heard Mila Highborn, didn’t you? I’m half-blood. And a conjuror. That’s two different kinds of Illhari than he is. I think this motherless toadshit would just as soon I let him rot than touch him. I don’t mind. And this makes no sense to you at all, does it, Veiko Nyrikki, who just happened to be walking through this particular forest and picked a fight on my behalf?”
Dizzying, baffling, the number of words that came out of her mouth. He seized on the ones he recognized.
“I am here because of the bat-snake—”
“Briel?” She laughed, for the second time in their short acquaintance. “Svartjagr, not bat-snake. I asked her to find me a safe place, not a person.”
“She did. My campsite. You did not make it that far.”
She stared at him, mouth open and, for once, empty of words.
Somewhere, hidden by soot-colored clouds, the sun dipped behind the mountains. Veiko grimaced. “Among my people, we cover a body in stones, to hold it to the earth. I do not think we have time for that.”
He scooped up his axe in both hands and dodged around Snowdenaelikk, straddled the dead man, and hacked, once and cleanly. The blade slid through flesh, through bone. Only a little resistance at the end, before the head rolled clear. And it was not his imagination, no trick of light and shadow, that the dead man’s face twisted hate for a heartbeat.
Toadfucking skraeling.
“Laughing God. Why did you do that?”
Veiko shook gore off his blade. Swiped it through snow and shook it again. Wiped it clean on the boy’s remaining sleeve. Kept his shoulders turned so Snow would not see his trembling.
“It is sunset,” he said slowly, so that his voice did not shake. “The angry dead can walk if they are not prevented.”
“The angry dead. Worry about the angry living, yeah? No, not me. Fuck and damn. The legion, Veiko. The ones who were not supposed to come after us, because we didn’t give them cause. Except now we have. Killing in battle is one thing. Desecration’s something else.”
“So we burn him in the manner of your people.”
“You know that bodies don’t burn like sticks, yeah? And that I don’t know a fucking thing about building pyres?”
He did not, either thing, but: “You were intending a fire already.”
“A little one so the boy won’t freeze—oh here. Fine.” She dropped to her knees, dumped her bundle of broken sticks on the corpse. “We’ll need more wood than this.”
Which would not be easy to acquire, down in a dead riverbed, when the nearest trees were a man’s height up the banks and any fallen branches would be soaked and rotten. Veiko decided he did not need to tell her that. He retreated instead, dogs at his heels, to search for wood that he might not find.
Run, skraeling.
It might have been wind in dead branches. Might have been his own better sense talking. Easy to fade into the snow, to disappear. She would manage a fire. Would survive until searchers arrived.
And then?
It was not his concern what the legion did with her. He had intervened once already. They were not kin, he did not even know her clan-name, and—
“Chrrip.”
He hadn’t seen the bat-snake—svartjagr—move. Saw her now, closer than he liked, her head on a level with his. She clung to a tangle of roots in the steep bank. Solid black, darker than even a Dvergir, with a live-coal stare. Snowdenaelikk had sent Briel to find a safe place, and she had found him instead.
A wise man would have shot the bat-snake when he first saw it, but a wise man wouldn’t have a mountain range and two seasons of exile between self and home. Fools involved themselves in others’ business, and Veiko was, by that measure, already far down that path.
“Chrrip?”
His chest tightened with an anxiety he should not feel—and did anyway, because the svartjagr wanted it. Wanted him.
“I am not leaving.”
“Chrrip.” The tension eased abruptly, like a bowstring released. Well-being flooded after, warm satisfaction that was not his. That clashed with the knot in his belly and turned sour. Fools bargained with spirits. Fools, or noidghe.
He chose fool, for the moment. Under Briel’s supervision, he collected a pathetic bundle of twigs, one still bristling with green needles. A recent casualty of wind, that one. Probably still green inside.
“This isn’t enough,” Snow said when he came back. “Not for a body.”
“It will prevent him from walking.”
She looked at him. Swallowed whatever she meant to say and didn’t, if her expression meant anything, enjoy the taste.
She rummaged through her pack one-handed. Clinking. A rattle. A sound like dried leaves. And swearing, recognizable by its venom, even if he did not understand the words.
“You have a firestone?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Drasan had ours.” She pulled out a blown-glass bulb, very small, and shook it doubtfully. She squatted and drizzled the oil over the broken, meager kindling, dumped it more generously over the corpse’s torso.
“Do not forget the head.”
Narrow look, but she didn’t argue. The oil collected in the crease between helmet and hair, like blood from a wound, glistened as it soaked into the dead man’s black braid.
Think I won’t follow you, skraeling?
Veiko knelt beside the corpse, turned the head facedown.
He struck flint to steel. Sparks mixed with snowflakes, brief alliance that ended in spitting flames and spots of damp on the wood. And—there. The oil caught. New flames flickered and spread and spat. Fought for territory with thick flakes that soaked in all the spaces the oil had left. Hiss. Spit.
He leaned over the fire. Tried, with little success, to shield it. Too much in the open here, too unsheltered. The fire would die, and the boy would freeze, and the dead man’s spirit would not pass into the next world. Might follow them, haunt them, wait for a new chance at vengeance.
“Get back.” Snow wedged her shoulder in front of him. Passed her hand in front of the fledgling pyre. Once. Twice. Shadows flowed away from the flames, liquid blackness, and the fire surged in their wake. Brightened and steadied and carved new shadows out of the twilight and drove them back in an ever-growing ring of heat and light. Oil pop, flesh sizzle, the stink of burning hair, the spirit’s muffled shriek as flesh caught and burned.
Veiko edged away—from the flames and the corpse and her. Wished he hadn’t, in the next moment, when she glanced at him sidelong. But it was one thing to hear about Dvergiri witchery, and another to see it, high flames where there had been flickering.
She offered him a smile worn thin on the edges. “Light to shadow, shadow to light. It’s not even conjuring, yeah? Any Dvergir can do it. Even half-bloods. It’s just most don’t bother to learn.”
He held the shiver under his skin this time. “There are stories about your people.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that. We’re stitched from the shadows, we’re the living incarnation of malice, we’re motherless, godless, heartless women who keep our men chained and gelded—ah. You hadn’t heard that one, then? Don’t worry. Been a long time since the Reforms. It’s elective surgery, these days. Only ones who do it are highborn.”
Unsettling notion. Veiko glanced at Kenjak. Frowned. “Did he . . . ?”
“Do I look like his family’s personal chirurgeon?” Snow crouched behind Kenjak. Hooked her hands under his arms. Dragged him closer to the fire. “He’s a soldier, so probably not. It’s only the ones who aspire to politics or tradition who bother.”
“It is a wonder any man aspires to either.”
A snort. She settled Kenjak between the pyre and the riverbank. “A highborn man’s aspirations matter only as much as his mother thinks they do. Most times, politics for a man means being a consort where his mother thinks he’ll do the most good for her House. It’s a little better for the lowborn, yeah? We just leave unwanted boys in the forest and have done.”
“That is also tradition among my people. Only it is the girls who are killed.”
“Yeah. Well. Taliri and Alviri do that, too.” She seemed a little older then. A little tired. “You were serious about the angry dead. Ollu, there. He was dangerous.”
“Yes.”
She stared somewhere past the growing pyre. Through it. Into the spirit world itself, for all he knew. “So that’s twice I owe you.”
“You.” Do not owe me shriveled in his throat. One thing to lie about small things. This was not small, and it did no honor to either of them to pretend otherwise. He offered an explanation instead, to excuse the obligation he’d laid on her.
“I did not—do not—think that you deserved to die.”
She tilted her face toward him. Looked at him from eyes gone blacker now than her skin, as if the flames had burned the blue away. “And I thank you for that, Veiko Nyrikki, more than I can possibly express.”
He had not wanted her gratitude, and now he had it. Had not wanted responsibility for her life and had accepted it twice. He would only add to her debt if he took her back to
a safe place
his campsite. She wouldn’t freeze, not immediately, not with the pyre. But she had no firestone. No more oil. And she couldn’t—wouldn’t—stay here alone. The legion would come, and he could guess at their mercy, no matter what she’d done for the boy.
“We should go,” Veiko said. “Now. My camp is not so far.”
“We, is it?” She had not assumed, then. Hoped only, and wouldn’t quite look at him. Veiko recognized lost when he saw it, and fear, and averted his gaze. Those things, too, were a private matter. He would not add any more to her debt.
“Briel believes so.”
Flicker-smile. She nodded. Gathered her pack and waited, wordless, as he collected both dogs and his bearings. And she followed him, still silent, into the storm.
CHAPTER FIVE
First Spear K’Hess Rurik was not an easy commander. Not loved, not liked. Feared, perhaps, by some of the troops, although First Scout Szanys Dekklis would not have admitted to that particular emotion. She’d have called her tangled guts anticipation if someone had asked her. The way a good soldier should feel when her commander summoned her out of her tent during a blizzard. Oh, not the commander personally, no: his optio poked her head into the tent flap, snapped, “Dekklis. First Spear wants you now,” and jerked her head out of sight like a startled turtle. Snow swirled and settled in her wake, pindot wetness on the canvas floor.
The lamplight splashed across a dice game gone suddenly quiet. The tent reeked of wet wool and lamp oil and warm bodies. They’d been outside for hours, stacking the residents of Davni like cordwood, to finish on a proper pyre what the first burning had done only partway—had been inside, now, for not long at all. Boots still soaked. Cloaks still dripping.
A good soldier didn’t say toadshit under her breath. A good soldier swallowed the sentiment and let it sour the dinner still warm in her belly.
“You have all the luck, Dek.” That was Teslin, gathering up her dice, raising an eyebrow. “Bet he wants you to go out there, yeah? Look for that brother of his.”
“This weather, that’s suicide,” Barkett said. He grinned, all teeth. Cut a glance at the back of the tent and grinned wider. Loudly: “Maybe he wants something a little more personal, yeah?”
She ignored Barkett, scooped her winnings into her palm. Made a show of counting them, as the shadows at the back of the tent rippled. Istel crossed the narrow space, fast and quiet, dodged the wet cloaks dangling off the center pole, and cuffed Barkett hard enough that the bigger man rocked on his stool.
“Shut it,” Istel said quietly.
“Joke, Istel, shit!” Barkett swatted retaliation, missed completely as Istel smok
ed aside. “I think Dek’s honor’s safe enough without you—”
“Shut it,” Teslin repeated, and Barkett’s teeth clicked. Same sound the dice made as Teslin cast them onto the table. “Your own fault, Dek, that he’s asking for you. Too damn good, yeah? Told you to fail once in a while, didn’t I?”
“Mm. Be glad I didn’t. It’d be you he wanted, then.” Dekklis found her cloak among the others. Pulled it off the hook and shrugged into it. She didn’t upset the makeshift dicing table, or the lamp. Managed, somehow and anyway, to flick a sodden hem across Barkett.
“Dek, rot it—”
“Owe you for that mouth.—What are you doing?”
Istel slung his cloak across his shoulders, with another rattail flick at Barkett. “Going with.”
Of course. And hell no. “You stay. Don’t need an escort. Rurik didn’t ask for you, did he?”
“Rurik won’t send one scout anywhere. Save you a walk back here if I come with you now.”
“Rurik might want something else, yeah? And don’t you say it, Barkett.”
A friendly chat, maybe, with one of his senior scouts, during a snowstorm, during what had to be third watch by now. Rurik was such a socialite, sure.
Istel raised eyebrows at her. Pulled the tent flap aside and held it. “He hates to wait.”
“Better go,” Teslin echoed. “You’re letting in all the toadshit cold, yeah?”
No, not all of it. Dekklis discovered there was plenty left outside. The optio hadn’t waited for them. Probably ducked into shelter, dismissed for the night—last orders, dredge out Szanys Dekklis, then take some rest, thank you, Optio, that will be all. Trust any soldier here could find the commander’s tent, especially his best pair of scouts.
That tent looked like all the others, squat and weather-stained goatskin, flap weighted against the weather. Grant Rurik that much: he didn’t wear his rank like a title. There were some who did, in other cohorts: stories about officers who thought rank made them some kind of highborn, all pomp and title and ceremony. Those officers didn’t get command of the Sixth, which was scouts and rangers and seasoned troopers. Mostly men, too, by design: a good place for senators’ sons to make a career, if they had that luxury. The foremothers who passed the Reforms hadn’t been stupid, oh no. Send the uncut and unmarried men into the legion and get those units far out of Illharek; send them to the borderlands among the Alviri. Keep the men and the Republic out of trouble in one stroke.