by Hazel Hunter
CADEYRN KEPT PACE with Brennus’s longer strides as they led the clan to the river. “The old man may be lying about these powers.”
“Aye, for his lips moved,” Brennus said. He stopped at the edge of the bank and regarded the depth of the rushing currents. “Shaman, reckon.”
Clansmen shifted aside as Ruadri, the largest warrior among them, came from his retral position to join the chieftain. While a head taller and an arm’s reach wider than most of his brothers, Ruadri moved soundlessly, and with a sinuous ease that always unnerved their enemies. The sun on his blue-sheened black hair made the wide silver streaks at his temples look as if spell light poured from them. His prodigious size made his garments strain at the seams. His battle spirit skinwork, half-moons inked on his outer forearms, glowed faintly as he glanced back at Bhaltair.
“Our indenture brands have gone,” Ruadri said, his cavernous voice carrying so that every man touched their now-smooth napes. “My ward marks, Kanyth’s burns and Cadeyrn’s lash scars as well. Only transformation magic could scour them from our hides.” Old hatred blackened his gray eyes. “The tree-knower likely doesnae deceive us on that.”
Brennus nodded. “I shall lead. If ’tis truth, and I change, you and the clan follow me to Dun Mor.”
“And if it doesnae?” Cadeyrn asked, looking skeptical.
“Then we’ll have a bathe before our long walk.” He checked the depths again before wading into the water up to his hips.
As the currents buffeted him, Brennus kept his footing and let the water flow around his hands and legs. At first the river merely felt icy and wet, and then he felt something go liquid in his core. When he looked down he saw his form paling, as if he were fading away, and lifted his hand to his face. His long fingers now looked as if they’d been turned to blue-tinted glass, and an odd satisfaction filled him.
Imagining the stream that spiraled around Dun Mor, the Skaraven’s secret highland stronghold, Brennus dove into the currents.
Magic poured out of his now-transparent form, and the water around him churned with huge bubbles of light. Colors and shapes flashed around him as his body shot through the river, streaming through it a thousand times faster than on a charging warhorse.
The transformation magic had not changed him into water. It had made him brother to it.
His jaunt slowed and then stopped in colder, darker currents, where Brennus found his footing. As he surfaced his body solidified and broke through a thin layer of ice.
Snow drifted down on his shoulders and head as he climbed out of the frozen stream. Shedding cascades from his saturated garments onto the steep, rocky bank, he made his way to a wide mound of stone and jumped up to survey his surroundings.
Frost-edged wind swirled around Brennus as he took in the woodlands. No villages or towns had intruded on the remote massif, which seemed to have grown bigger and wilder since last the Skaraven had left. Narrow tracks, too small to belong to humans, stitched their way through the drifts. He filled his lungs with the cold highland air, which tasted of snow and sky, before he leapt down and returned to the river’s edge.
The currents roiled with light and froth as Cadeyrn rose, his grim expression disappearing as he looked down at himself and then at Brennus. “Skelp me, Bren.”
Hearing his second call him by his boyhood name almost made him smile. “Bring your face here, then, Cade.”
The War Master winced. “I’d rather no’ nurse the first jaw you shatter.” His gaze shifted around them. “Gods above, ’tis truly the Great Wood.”
Seeing his clan emerge from the water dispelled most of Brennus’s ire. The ability to travel in this manner would give the Skaraven many advantages. It might even be possible for them to cross a sea without a vessel. He felt a quiet pride in his men as the first waded out of the stream and took defensive positions on either side. They may have been dead for twelve centuries, and bewildered by these new abilities, but their loyalty to the clan remained absolute and unwavering.
Ruadri, the last to emerge, dropped down on the bank and he spread his arms. The rest of the clan took to one knee while Brennus kept watch.
“Battle spirits above and within, we dinnae ask your notice, yet you see,” the big man said. “Watch now over us as we fight to live free. By the Gods’ will, so shall we be.”
“So shall we be,” the clan echoed as one, and then struck the ground with their fists and rose.
Brennus went to his shaman, hoisting him up from the ground. “Will they follow, do you reckon?”
Ruadri shook his head. “Flen led them away before I entered the river, Chieftain. The pact of indenture died with the two tribes. These druids ken that they hold no power over us.”
Bitterness soured his words, reminding Brennus how much it gnawed at his shaman to have dealings with the tree-knowers. He reached out to the other man. “You’ve only our souls to manage now, Ru.”
“Aye, Bren.” He clasped the chieftain’s forearm and touched their shoulders. “Glad I’m of it.”
“If you two doves have finished billing and cooing,” a mellow voice said, “we should see to the keepe.”
Brennus turned to look into eyes that mirrored his own. All of the Skaraven considered themselves brothers, but he and Kanyth shared kinship through the same sire. Just as tall but far more handsome, his half-brother had long arms and a wide, massive upper torso built by a lifetime of serving his forge battle spirit. “I see twelve centuries in the earth hasnae tamed your tongue, Weapons Master.”
“Aye, Chieftain, but I’m much prettier now.” Kanyth spread his huge hands, now absent the layers of burn scars that had before mottled his flesh. “No’ that I wish to squeeze your spleen, but if the keepe remains, we’ll yet need to fetch food, water and wood.” He swatted at the streaming locks of bronze hair framing his angular face. “And shears, before this clan begins bleating for a barn.”
Brennus watched as grins and chuckles spread through his clan. Ever practical, his younger brother also knew how to quickly dispel tensions. Not for the first time did he wonder if Kanyth would have served better as their chieftain.
“Ruadri and Cadeyrn with me to the keepe.” To his brother he said, “Send scouts to check the trails and boundaries. Set vine snares and collect straight wood to fashion spears. Remain unseen. We’ll signal when ’tis clear.”
Time had erased most of their old paths through the Great Wood, but Brennus had trained himself and the clan to find their way to Dun Mor in the dark. As he led his second and the shaman through the dense brush, he noted the other changes twelve centuries had wrought on their land. The surrounding hills and mountains had further eroded into smooth waves of granite and snow, while new groves of pines, birch and alder had spread through the rims of the valley. Snow devils still danced along the edges of the ridges and deep cirques, but the white drifts that rarely melted seemed much wider and deeper.
Brennus stopped at the labyrinth of what appeared to be weathered tors at the base of an enormous rockfall swathing one slope of the plateau. Heavy carpets of moss and lichen splotched the ancient stones, and deep piles of rotted leaves, snapped twigs and pebbles mounded at their bases. To see the stones weathered by time but still joined as the clan had built them made him feel a flicker of hope.
Cadeyrn handed him a broken pine branch wrapped at one end with a swath of dry, dead moss, and fashioned two more for himself and Ruadri. “I left my firebox on the hall mantle.”
“Never could you put away a thing proper.” He held up his hand, aligning his thumb and forefinger with the center tor, and took two paces to the left before he walked directly into the granite.
What appeared to be stone from without remained an illusion created by the positioning of the worn stone pillars. Brennus’s shoulders brushed their sides as he entered the maze leading into the Skaraven stronghold. It had taken the clan two seasons to quarry and haul the stones to conceal the entrance to their keepe, and here they were, waiting like old friends to welcome them.
Deep
within the maze, he stopped at a tightly-jointed wedge of rock, and pushed at the left corner of the top stone. For a long moment nothing happened, and then a scraping sound grated in the air. The right half of the granite slowly swung out on its weighted pivot to reveal a tall, wide doorway in the stone.
“Shaman,” Brennus said, “regard.”
Ruadri joined him, and lifted his hands. The half-moons on his arms glittered with a surge of his power as he closed his eyes. A moment later he dropped his hands and nodded to Brennus. “Naught within.”
Stepping through the doorway, Brennus entered the long hall they had hewn through the fallen rock. As he expected, the air in the keepe’s dark interior smelled stale and musty. When his boots crushed the rotted floor rushes, small clouds of murky dust rose around them. He made his way by memory to the huge center hearth and felt along the mantle. There he found a carved box covered in dust. From it he took a firesteel and flint, and used them to light the dry moss on the branch. Once a flame flared, he touched the end to the branches his men held, and the torches lit up their surroundings.
Curtains of old spiderwebs undulated overhead as Brennus turned slowly to take in the Skaraven’s hall. Rock dust thickly covered every surface, from the cracked mantle over the big stone hearth to the collapsed long, wooden tables and benches where the clan had once gathered for their meals. The fine tapestries that had adorned their stone walls had fallen into heaps of rotted debris. The great wooden raven still hung mounted above the stone staircase leading down to the lower levels of the stronghold, but time had turned it as black as their clan rings.
“Fack me,” Cadeyrn muttered. “’Tis become a tomb.”
Not quite, but it would take weeks to restore order, Brennus thought. He picked up a rusted iron rod from beside the mantle and said, “Cade, open the air shaft doors, and check the treasury. Ru, tend to the hearth. I’ll go below.”
Using the iron to clear the webs lacing the passage leading down into the tunnels, Brennus felt the stillness of the subterranean level wash over him. He and the clan had built Dun Mor to endure as they had. It had withstood the highland’s ever-changeable weather, harsh winters, and the weight of twelve centuries. He should have felt gratified that their efforts had proven sound, and yet his mind traveled back to the moment he’d awoken. In his memory he saw those wide, crystalline blue eyes, and heard that terrified, cut-off scream.
He’d never been plagued by visions, as Ruadri often was, but he’d had his share of evil dreams. Yet everything about the lass had seemed so real. Even if she was not a trick of his mind, he knew her fate. The giants never let live the mortals they took. He could only hope they had not first tortured that strange, beautiful lady.
Thinking of her turned his mood dark, so that when he reached his private chambers he wrenched the old door off its hinges. Torchlight revealed what he had expected inside: his furnishings rotted and his weapons rusted. Mold encased his trunk, eating through the wood to devour his garments. The shelf of maps and scrolls he’d collected in life now held only small mounds of insect-riddled fragments. Water had dripped down from a crack in the ceiling stone and collected in a pool that now lay frozen over the blackened depression formed by countless other thaws.
The Skaraven had never coveted possessions, as few had been permitted. To see what little he’d had stolen from him by time, however, made new fury bloom inside him.
Ruinous as their lives had been, was nothing left of them?
Brennus backed out of the chamber to seek the one room where he could vent his frustrations. A narrow shadow crossed his, and he impatiently regarded the man waiting for him. Appearing thin compared to most of the Skaraven, Taran had a taut, sinewy build like the swiftest of stallions, and a mane of white-blond hair that he’d already woven into a long braid.
He saw himself in the clansman’s lochan-blue eyes, and rammed back his roiling emotions. “What do you here, Horse Master?”
Taran shrugged.
Brennus knew why he had come. When other men spoke Taran watched and listened. While he preferred to be among his beasts, he had an uncanny sense when one of the men needed to unburden himself. Since their boyhood he had never repeated such confidences, even when beaten by their trainers. No one spoke of it, but all Skaraven trusted the Horse Master as the clan’s keeper of secrets.
“’Tis all we had, and now gone,” the chieftain found himself admitting. “We’ve no’ so much as a dagger between us.”
“As ’twas when first we came here, Bren, and no’ all dust.” Taran reached out to touch the tunnel wall as if stroking the flank of a favored mare. “We persist as does Dun Mor’s stone. ’Tis still standing, and ’tis ours. ’Tis home.”
“Aye, and we live again, and flash through water like graylings gone mad, and the Gods ken what more.” He frowned as the face of the flame-haired lass came into his thoughts. “Tran, if we are to break the old chains, we must leave Caledonia for Gaul, or Hispania, or another land free of the magic folk. ’Tis what I must do to protect our brothers.”
“Yet ’tis no’ what you wish to do.” The horse master tapped the side of his head. “Think again on it. Speak with the clan. Then choose.” His mouth hitched. “We’ve followed you to our deaths. To Gaul seems a garden stroll.”
Brennus accompanied Taran upstairs, where Cadeyrn had the hearth and dozens of torches lit. Men marched in and out as they cleared the detritus from the hall. For a moment he stood and watched his brothers working together to make habitable the old stronghold. They had already begun to put behind them the shock of this stunning awakening.
“We persist,” Taran murmured before he headed to help a pair of clansmen wrestling to shore up some cracked support timbers.
Kanyth entered with a group of their best hunters, each carrying snares of game and greenwood. They’d use the wood to make spears and build a new spit for the hearth. Ruadri had uncapped the stronghold’s interior well, and knelt beside it as he carefully drew out a stone cask brimming with water. Judging by his expression when he sampled it, their supply had remained unspoiled.
“Weapons Master,” Brennus called. “Scout the forge.”
His half-brother eyed his hands and heaved a sigh before he called back, “Aye, Chieftain” and trudged off.
Cadeyrn came to report. “No new settlements within our boundaries or beyond them. The pit traps are filled to the brim with leaves and rot, but some of our blinds remain. We sighted vast herds of reindeer, elk, red deer— no’ white, thank the Gods—and mountain sheep, all fat and shaggy for winter.” He held up a hastily-made purse. “Our coffers remain untouched.”
They had fire, water, game to hunt for food, and shelter. The clan’s treasury had been bursting with gold and silver from hiring out as mercenaries during the few years of freedom they’d had. Brennus would have preferred to hear the men had also found a cache of two hundred newly-forged blades, but it would do until Kanyth could fashion more.
“Take nine men by water to Aberdeen. Buy only what is necessary for the keepe, and that you may carry back with you. And Cade,” he added as the War Master turned away. “Say naught of the clan.”
“Aye, and me as eager as a lad to tell tales of digging out of our graves with our baws swinging in the breeze.” His expression turned rueful. “While my tongue might flap as hard, we’ve no’ forgotten ourselves, Chieftain.”
“I saw that at the river, Brother.” He clapped his second’s shoulder. “Safe journey.”
To make Dun Mor temporarily habitable Brennus issued orders for the stewards to clear the floors and mound dry moss and leaves in the hall for beds. He set his best hunters and masons to work together to fashion enough spears for five patrols this night, and then bowls and cups for the clan’s meals. The rest of the clan he put to salvage what could still be used from the stronghold’s myriad stores. Once the men had their orders, Brennus caught their shaman’s eye and beckoned to him.
“The keep’s water yet runs clear and sweet,” Ruadri told hi
m. “’Tis warm enough for a wash.”
“The flow must have found its way to the hot spring.” He saw the shaman’s expression and recalled how much Ruadri had favored a steaming bath. “You’ll have your soak soon enough. Walk with me.”
Ruadri accompanied the chieftain outside, to find guards already positioned to defend the keepe. Each held spears and stone slings made from patches cut from their boots.
“Keep watchful,” he told the men, who acknowledged the command by tapping their clan rings against the spear shafts.
Ruadri remained silent until they reached the stream. “My soak can wait. I’ll go with you.”
“You’ll stay and attend to the clan. Some of our brothers sorely need your counsel.” He nodded toward the west. “I’ll visit the mountain and see how many giants returned. ’Tis all.”
“If they’ve among them a female healer…” Ruadri said and shook his head.
Brennus thought of his own flame-haired vision. “Tell me the rest.”
“I cannae tell you what ’twas, only that I saw her before we rose. Young, snow-skinned and black-haired, with blue eyes like the tribe of Ara.” The shaman’s voice grew flinty. “The famhair dragged her from an iron cart of a kind I didnae ken, and then into the ground.” He rubbed his brow. “I dinnae ken why I speak of it. If ’twas real, the giants have killed her.”
It seemed the Gods had toyed with Ruadri as well.
“I’ll look. If I dinnae return by tomorrow dawn, name Cadeyrn chieftain, prepare the clan for travel, and go.” Before the shaman could reply Brennus waded out into the stream to let his flesh bond with the water before he submerged.
A few moments later he surfaced from the dark waters of a lochan near the base of Beinn Nibheis, startling a mass of sheep grazing in the adjoining glen. They hurried across the fields and into the trees. More than the scent of the herd tainted the air, and he followed the stink of rot to the battered body of an old shepherd. The man’s skewed head and distorted limbs made it plain that his bones had been snapped like twigs. His flesh showed no sign that he had been beaten. But his face still wore terror like a frozen mask—the kind that the sight of giants might make.