The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "What do you think?" Blays pointed into the twilit woods. A couple hundred yards off the road, a log shack stood beneath the trees. "Won't do any better than that tonight."

  Dante nodded and directed the driver to turn off the road. The shack's roof was half collapsed, but it was empty of humans and animals. Half-melted snow lay across half the floor. Dante helped towel off the horses, gazing steadily at Mourn.

  "What happened back there?"

  Mourn looked up and shrugged. "You were stopped by kingsmen. They questioned you about smuggling, then let you go on your way."

  "Yeah, I remember that. Along with when a total stranger leapt out of the woods and lied to save our asses."

  "I didn't leap."

  "All right. You strode from the woods, without warning, to assist three total strangers."

  "You're not strangers."

  Dante threw up his hands. "I've never seen you before in my life!"

  "I've seen you," Mourn said. "You've been down here for months. Bringing us things. Things that could get you in trouble. I know what you're trying to do for my people."

  "Wrong," Blays said. "We've been down here for years."

  Mourn stiffened, face going slack with horror. "You're right. I've only seen you here for months. I'm so sorry."

  "I was just fooling with you," Blays frowned. "Don't take it so seriously."

  The young norren drew back his head in reproach. "Speech is a dangerously imprecise form of communication even when we try to be as exact as we can be. If we're sloppy on purpose, who knows what disasters might come of it? Nobody, that's who. Nobody mortal. Unless there is a soothsayer somewhere I don't know about."

  "Well, talking's the best system I've come up with so far," Blays said.

  "If you've watched us that long, you must live around here," Dante said.

  Mourn nodded. "Sometimes. My clan ranges more widely than most. That I know of. You would think it's nice, but you can only see so many hills before they all become the same hillish blur."

  "Which clan is that?"

  "I belong to the Clan of the Nine Pines."

  "Oh no," Blays said.

  Mourn cocked his head. "Do you know of us unfavorably? You must. Otherwise, a groan must mean something different to you than it does to me."

  "It's not your clan that's the problem. It's what you've got."

  "We don't know they have it," Dante said. "We don't even know if it's real."

  "You're right, I'm being sloppy," Blays said. "It's not about what the Nine Pines may or may not have. It's about Dante's monomaniacal desire to have it for himself."

  "If the Quivering Bow is real, we could use it to threaten the king into leaving the norren alone forever and destroy the whole capital if he doesn't. What's so monomaniacal about that?"

  "Ah," Mourn said. "The Quivering Bow."

  "Well?" Dante said.

  "Well what?"

  "What else could I mean? Do you have it or not?"

  "I'm not going to just assume that's what you meant," Mourn said peevishly. "Anyway, if we have the Quivering Bow, I am not aware of it."

  Dante's face fell. "Oh."

  "But there is much about my clan that I am not aware of, because I am young, and they don't tell me things because young people can't be trusted with wisdom. Which makes no sense to me. How can young, foolish people become not-young, not-foolish people if you never expose them to wisdom?"

  "By hitting them?" Blays said. He smacked his horse's freshly-toweled flank. The smell of animal sweat competed with the frosted pines. "Anyway, in a few minutes it'll be too dark to tell what's kindling and what's a snake. I don't know how much you guys know about building fires, but those aren't ideal working conditions."

  He wandered off to gather small branches for the night's fire. Small birds settled into the darkening trees, silhouettes on skeletal branches. Dante rummaged through their catch-all pack for the spade, but the ground was half-frozen. No matter how hard he leaned into the undersized shovel, he could only scrape away a handful of dirt at a time.

  "You are trying to dig a pit?" Mourn asked after a futile minute.

  "I'm trying to dig a hill so we can build a fort on it and be safe and never leave." Dante scowled up at him. Although it was cold enough to see his own breath, he was sweating under his doublet. He flung down the spade. "Forget it. It'll be morning before I'm finished with this."

  "Perhaps I can help." Mourn knelt and picked up the small shovel. His thick shoulders bunched as he drove it into the ground, dislodging a healthy load of black earth. He glanced up. "How large would you like your pit?"

  "Fire-sized," Dante muttered.

  He dug steadily and contentedly, dislodging a half-frozen mix of dirt, leaves, old needles, and dormant grass roots. The smell was earthy and gently rotten. Once, the iron wedge of the spade bent on a rock; Mourn gripped the point and the handle in his heavy hands, bore down, and straightened the bend right out.

  "You've already saved our lives," Dante said, "or at least from a load of trouble. So I'm loath to ask you another favor."

  Mourn flung another scoop of dirt. "But you would like me to ask my chieftain if we possess the Quivering Bow."

  "Would you?"

  "Would I? That is a good question. The asking costs me nothing in a physical sense. On the other hand, if we don't have it because it is imaginary, I could be mocked by my entire clan." He sat back and pierced Dante with his gaze. "What would you do with the bow?"

  Dante froze. Could he really just say it out loud? To a total stranger? On the one hand, Mourn was a norren himself. He would make for a very unlikely traitor or spy. On the other hand—what if he was?

  The truth would be a risk, then. But if there was any chance they had the Quivering Bow, it was a risk worth taking.

  "We'll use it to free the norren from slavery," he said. "To gain your independence. And that of my homeland of Narashtovik as well."

  Mourn stared at him beneath the blackening pines. "I will ask them."

  "Ask who what?" Blays said, returning with an armload of branches, twigs, and yellow grass.

  "What took you so damn long with the firewood," Dante said.

  "Well, it's not like this stuff just falls off of trees."

  Blays knelt over the firepit and arranged the kindling. He groaned as Dante and Mourn struck out the details of when the two humans would meet the Clan of the Nine Pines. Owls hooted through the barrens. Night stole over the woods, as gentle and cold as ancient ghosts.

  "You two are a couple of chowderbuckets," Blays said as they layered their blankets inside the half-ruined shack. "There's no such thing as a bow that can shoot down walls."

  "You should be in favor of this," Dante said. "If the Quivering Bow is real, and we get ahold of it, it'll save us years of work. No more camping out in gods-forsaken woods delivering swords to some clan that might turn them on their clan-enemy as soon as we turn our backs. Not when we can say, 'Hey, King Moddegan. Release the norren—and us too, while you're at it—or we'll bury you under a thousand tons of your own palace.'"

  "Huh," Blays said into the darkness. "Any chance we can do this meeting tomorrow, Mourn?"

  There wasn't. Mourn claimed the Clan of the Nine Pines was too far away. Instead, the three of them would reconvene in three days at the old norren ruins on Kerrin Hill. In the morning, he said his farewells. Dante and Blays hopped on the wagon and made their delivery.

  Three days later, the two of them climbed Kerrin Hill under cover of night. Mist curled up the hillside. A face loomed downhill, obscured by gray vapor and black branches. In fact, between the distance and the gloom, Dante couldn't be certain there was a face at all—that pale, unflinching shape could be a patch of trunk rubbed of its bark, the wilting white flower of a five-foot shrub. He glanced at Blays. The blond man was tracing an obscene drawing on the mist-slick surface of a fallen stone. When he looked back, the face was gone.

  "I think someone's following us."

  Blays added anot
her curve to his outline. "No one is following us."

  "What I'm proposing is the radical idea that they are."

  "For one thing, you can't really be followed when you're just standing around. For another, we're six miles from nowhere in a graveyard that hasn't been used since we started putting points on the ends of our sticks."

  "It's not a graveyard."

  Blays smacked the table-sized stone with his palm. Dozens like it littered the hilltop, a handful of others still standing upright, weathered and patchy with lichen. "Then what do you call this?"

  "A rejected bed." Dante peered into the mist. The weather had warmed in the last three days, shrinking the snows and feeding the fog. Streamers wafted between the pine needles, carrying the mud-and-clams scent of the river with them. "It was a holy place, once."

  "Whatever it is, I'm cold as hell. Does Cally even know about this little mission of yours?"

  "More or less."

  "Oh really? I'm guessing that 'less' is going to be upset to learn it's being used in place of 'not at all.'"

  Dante put on his haughtiest voice. "The purview of my authority is as far-ranging as its cruelty and you would be wise not to disrespect it."

  Blays smeared his forearm across the sketch he'd drawn in the dew. "Wasn't Mourn supposed to be here an hour ago?"

  "Yeah."

  The shape reappeared among the pines, oval and unmoving. Too pale and small to be Mourn. Dante leaned forward on the stone he'd seated himself on. Blays shoved his shoulder, spilling him into the sodden grass.

  "If you're that concerned with being watched, let's go ask that guy what he's doing here."

  "You can't just ask him."

  "Of course I can." Blays stalked downhill. "If I don't like his answer, I can punch him, too!"

  Dante hustled after him, boots skidding in the grass. Instinctively, he reached for the nether, drawing the dark power from the shadows of rocks, the undersides of leaves, the night air itself. It coiled around his fist, so perfectly black most people couldn't see it at all. Blays swished through the carpet of brown needles, one sword swinging from his hip, the other bouncing from his back. Dante threaded through the gnarled trunks. By the time they reached the base of the hill, the stones at its crown were blurs in the mist.

  "Well?" Blays said.

  "If the watcher was here, you probably spooked him."

  "Sounds like he'd deserve it, creeping around in the fog like that."

  Dante turned in a slow circle, scanning the trees for movement, flashes of color, but saw nothing but the pressing gray air. A stick snapped among the trees. Blays' smile vanished. Dante drew the nether closer. Just ahead, a hulking figure plodded through the fog, seven feet tall, shoulders so solid he looked as if he could walk straight through the trees without slowing down.

  "Hello, Mourn." Dante said. "Bit late, aren't you?"

  "Aren't we all, sooner or later," the norren said. He gazed down at his sodden pants-cuffs with exasperation too deep for a sigh. His silver-and-bone earrings glinted in the darkness. "Can we do this down here? Or do we have to trek up to that fallen-down garbage up there?"

  "Your people built them."

  "So they claim."

  "Here's fine," Blays said.

  "Good." Mourn ran a thick hand over the equally thick beard that grew from every inch of his face besides a gap around his eyes and a small patch directly below his cavernous nose. "So. About the bow."

  "Yes?" Dante said.

  "The clan would like to know how they can be sure they can trust you."

  Dante scowled. "We've been in and out of these hills for two years now."

  "Spend two thousand more and we'll be on equal footing."

  "Our word?" Blays said.

  "Is good for a laugh." Mourn's bovine eyes considered Blays. "Nothing personal."

  "Who could take offense to that?"

  Dante glared into the fog. Over a year ago, he stopped thinking of his duty in the Territories as a political favor to be discarded at the first sign of trouble; instead, he now regarded it as something he wanted to do, a cause he'd fight for even if Cally weren't forcing him to be here. He liked the norren. He believed in them. The problem was such feelings were rarely mutual. The norren, in large part, distrusted anything that came from beyond the Territories. Hell, most of the time they distrusted anything that came from the wrong part within the Territories, meaning anything beyond their village or their clan's roving-range. No matter how much time Dante spent here, he kept having to prove himself to each new norren and clan he met. Sometimes he built up a relationship with a group, returned six months later, and found himself treated as a stranger again, the trust he'd established eroded like a beach during the storm season. The whole experience was so frustrating there were times he wanted to smash a block down on the norren's oversized heads.

  By norren standards, Mourn had been extremely trusting to date. Against his better judgment, Dante had cultivated hope his whole clan would be the same. Open. Helpful. Faced with the truth, his hopes came crashing down.

  "I don't even know what the Clan of Nine Pines is, exactly," Dante said. "How am I supposed to know what they consider worthy of trust?"

  "Oh." Mourn's disappointment was as thick as the fog. "Well, I'm off, then."

  Blays glanced between them. "That's it?"

  "It's a long walk home."

  Dante stood stunned, watching the norren slog into the trees. At times he believed it was all a game the norren played, these endless spirals of approval-winning and worth-proving, and that when Mourn returned home to tell this story, he'd be met with bearish laughter and grinning shakes of the head: Gullible outlanders! Would probably give their own balls a whack if you told them a man's testicular fortitude was considered an equal sign of the fortitude of their loyalty.

  He shook his head. This business with Mourn and the clan was just the latest fence they'd have to hop. Under Cally's direction, he and Blays had burned two years arranging and bodyguarding shipments to and from the Norren Territories to the south—silver, swords, spears, great wains of grain. He met with village leaders, brokered peace and pacts with the human settlements on the fringes, delivered memorized messages too sensitive to be trusted to a page. Days and weeks and months spent preparing the Territories for something they would never have dreamed possible: independence from the empire of Gask.

  Throughout his travels, he began to hear rumors of the Clan of the Nine Pines, who, along with the Dreaming Bear and Three-Part Falls, were widely considered one of the fiercest clans in all norrendom. But—again, according to rumor—they had something else on top of that: the Quivering Bow. When Dante asked what that was, the norren had smirked knowingly. Why, it was just a legendary weapon whose arrows sent enemy walls shivering down like the banks of a flash-flooding river.

  From that point on, Dante learned all he could about the Nine Pines. Which wasn't much. Like most of the other clans, they were nomads. They traveled on foot, were rarely seen, and almost never spent time among the civilized city-dwelling norren. In the past, the Nine Pines' paintings sold for sums that could have established estates. In present times, they were said to forge swords that never lost their edge.

  That in itself was interesting. But what had really snared the bunny was the bow. A bow that maybe—probably—didn't exist. When he first voiced his interest to Blays, Blays had dismissed the whole thing with a broad swipe of logic: If the bow were real, why wasn't the Clan of the Nine Pines picking their teeth with the king's bones right now? To Dante, that didn't prove anything. You couldn't free a people or conquer an empire with a single weapon, no matter how powerful that weapon may be. You needed soldiers. Lots and lots of soldiers. Most clans only had forty or fifty of those. And the fact the clans weren't exactly fond of banding together was perhaps the main reason so many of their people were enslaved across Gask.

  Still, in the months since learning about the bow, his hope had cooled. Until he met Mourn, the first member of the Nine Pines he'd
seen with his own eyes. Because what if the bow were real?

  "It's all bullshit anyway." Blays' virtual mindreading had grown increasingly common—and somewhat unsettling—the more time the two spent with each other. "If it comes to war, our best weapon's going to be stabbing. Lots of stabbing."

  "That's your answer to everything."

  "That's because it's such a good one. Now can we get out of here already?"

  Dante stirred fallen needles with the toe of his boot. "I'm sick of these games. If they'd drop all the ritual and let us do what we're here for, we'd already be hoisting their flags over the ramparts of Setteven."

  Blays gave him the sort of frown reserved for the unanticipated expulsion of something that was just in your body. "Then cut through the games, dummy. Follow Mourn back to them."

  "The clan would not care for that at all." He scanned the forest floor for anything white. "Hope you've got your chasing shoes on. Now help me find something dead."

  "I'm beginning to hate those words."

  "If it makes you feel better, it can be alive."

  "Until you get your hands on it."

  "If the rabbit's family comes seeking satisfaction, I promise to stand as your second." Dante stooped and shuffled through the damp mulch. Finding a spare body, he had long ago learned, was much trickier than common sense tells you. In a world of living things, you would imagine the ground would groan with the fallen dead, that beneath the forest's skin of leaves and needles would lurk a second layer of bones and fur. But animals occupied a small corner of any given space. They were so rare, in fact, that when they dropped dead, their remains tended to get snapped up by any other creatures who shared the area. A nice enough truth when the goal is walking through the woods without plunging ankle-deep into a former muskrat. Not so nice when the goal is to put that muskrat to one last use.

  Blays crunched through leaves uphill. Dante smelled fresh mold and wet dirt. Mourn was getting further away by the moment. Dante straightened, relaxing his gaze until his vision blurred. It was perhaps that very rarity of remains that made them stand out so sharply if only you knew how to look. Possibly, it was that corpses still held on to some trace of the nether, the grist of Arawn's flawed mill, that quickens all mortal life. Whatever the reason, within moments a cold, silver light glimmered at the base of a nearby pine, flickering like moonlight on a pool. Dante knelt to brush away the leaves. A faded whiff of decay rose from a scatter of small bones. Hair and sinew clung to ribs and joints. Dante smiled.