The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  Foot- and hoofprints dried in the muck of the streets. Sobs filtered through broken shutters. Arrows poked from the ground and the walls of unburnt homes. Blood crusted the stones of the main road. The first undamaged inn they passed was closed, but the second had its doors wide. Inside, a handful of norren sat in tired silence, soot griming their nails and ringing their eyes. Behind the bar, a dour woman watched them with open hostility. Her hair was drawn back in a bun so large and round it resembled a second head.

  "What happened here?" Dante said.

  She gave him one look. "Jainn must have left the stove on again."

  "Oh yeah?" Blays said. "Cooking king's-soldiers-surprise again?"

  The woman almost smiled. "It has a way of flaming up."

  "Who resisted?" Dante said. "Townsfolk?"

  "Wandering do-gooders."

  "A clan? Which one?"

  "Of them."

  It took Dante a moment to realize that wasn't a foreign norren word. His temper flared. "It's critical we speak to the clan. We're here to help them fight back."

  The woman glanced between the four of them. "Quite a host you've brought, too. The king will be running scared in no time."

  Dante crossed his arms. While he composed himself, Mourn gave the woman a small smile and a smaller nod. "We'd like to speak to the chief. If that can be arranged, we'll be here in town for the next few days."

  "No we won't," Dante said. "We can't waste time here when Dollendun's being overrun by—"

  "Yes, we will." Mourn turned to him and bent down until their eyes were level. "We came here to answer need. Look at this town: is there any question that it is in need? If we leave without helping, haven't we declared there are some who aren't worth saving?"

  Dante nodded jerkily. The woman watched them go, motionless as a grave-pillar. Mourn marched them back to the burnt-out rows of houses on the south side of town. The gazes of the locals were as cold as the sunset. Wails carried down a hoof-churned side street. Mourn led them to another inn where the tables had been piled along one wall. On the floor, norren lay head to toe, groaning and bleeding, some unconscious, tended to by silent men and women bearing bandages and rags. As Mourn stepped inside, the tallest norren Dante had ever seen arose from the wounded, detoured to the wall to pick up a chair, and stopped a few feet from the door, chair cocked back in one hand as easily as Dante would brandish a torch.

  Mourn nodded at Dante. "This man is a healer."

  "Step outside." The norren's voice was as low as a bear's. "Continue stepping until all you can see are the empty hills."

  Mourn advanced a single step. "Take my head if he harms one soul."

  The man drew back his head. A drop of blood slid from his hand and spattered the floor. "Kneel, then. Your face to the wall. And speak to Josun Joh if one word's been a lie."

  Mourn turned and knelt along the wooden wall, eyes closed, hands folded behind his back. The towering norren grabbed Dante's neck with his free hand and half-carried him across the room to a norren whose brown hair was matted to her head by blood and sweat. Her face was ashen, twitching. The man crouched down and unwrapped a blood-soaked rag from around her middle. A rope of gray-pink intestines oozed from a gash in her stomach.

  Dante inhaled with a hiss. The man's hand ground into the muscles of his neck. Dante reached for his knife; the hand clasped his throat, crushing it closed.

  "I can help," Dante gasped. "Please."

  The strangling pressure eased. Dante coughed, massaging his throat. Once his coughing had settled, he cut a quick line on his left arm. Shadows flocked to the gleaming blood. He balled them in his hands and lowered his palms to the woman's blood-slick belly.

  "Water," Dante muttered.

  Footsteps plodded between the moaning wounded. Dante pushed the loop of intestine back inside the woman's feverish body and held it in place with a firm hand. The nether flowed from him to her, seeking torn flesh, spurting veins. Dante took long breaths to fight the dizziness that still seized him when faced with the worst of wounds—particularly those of the gut and their hot, sour stink that threatened to close his throat as firmly as the norren man's grip. The woman barked in pain, head contorting to one side. Boots clumped across the floor. Dante's dizziness evaporated. Nether rushed alongside her rent belly, mending it like a pink zipper.

  A jug thrust into Dante's view. He took it with one hand, other still clamped to the woman's stomach, and splashed water over her wound, rinsing loose scraps of flesh and pink water to the floor. He removed his hand from her body. The cleansing water revealed clean and unmarked skin.

  The norren man sank to his knees and leaned forward to press his forehead against the woman's. He spoke her name, but she slept. He rose with tears dripping into his beard. "She's my wife."

  Dante poured water over his grimy hands. "And she will be for years."

  He nodded to the ranks of wounded. "Can you help the others?"

  "A few. There are limits."

  "I humbly ask you to exhaust them."

  Dante nodded, stood, and shuffled to the next victim, a man so young his beard was still patchy. His right arm ended just above the elbow. A belt knotted it off in a tourniquet. A far easier fix: all Dante had to do was stop the bleeding.

  He beckoned to the shadows. Mind half-submerged in his work, he heard the tall man approach Mourn at the wall and bid him to rise. Dante ran his fingers along the severed arm, snagging bone. Scabs followed wherever he touched.

  "We'll leave you here," Mourn said from beside him. "There is work elsewhere, too."

  "Thank you," Dante said.

  Mourn paused mid-step, as if puzzled, then thumped away. The door closed. Sunlight shrank from the windows. The unwounded norren lit candles, brought Dante water and stitches and cotton, which he turned to with increasing frequency as the nether grew stubborn and his head grew sluggish. Still, this work came easier than it ever had, as if the fickle shadows had decided, this once, that his work was their work as well. He helped heal a dozen villagers before he reached for the nether and found it wasn't there.

  The tall man—his name was Soll—insisted Dante stay at his house, where he was fed seared beef and smoked salmon to "repay his body for its labors." He ate until he had to be helped to bed.

  At breakfast, Mourn joined him. Soll had found the others last night fresh off digging a survivor out from beneath a collapsed barn. Today, they planned to continue to clean up wreckage and to patrol the outlying fields against any return of Gaskan soldiers. Dante accepted this without complaint. As much as he wanted to continue to Dollendun, he wanted to finish his work here first.

  He spent the day at the makeshift hospital, tending to the lesser wounds he hadn't had the strength to mend the day before. Norren came and went to watch him work, moving on in silence. He napped through noon and woke halfway refreshed. At suppertime, he rose with Soll's help to move to the next patient and found none remained.

  "Come," Soll said. "Farren wants to see you."

  "That's nice," Dante said.

  "The woman at the Inn of Three Fingers."

  "The one who talks like her words cost a penny apiece?"

  "That's her," Soll smiled. He walked Dante across town. Norren swung massive hammers into charred walls, bashing them to the ground. Others shoveled wreckage into wheelbarrows. At the Inn of Three Fingers, Farren offered Dante a single nod.

  "The Clan of the Broken Heron is camped outside town."

  "They're the ones who fought the king's men?"

  "Chief's named Hopp. If you can keep your eyelids apart, he'll see you tonight."

  Dante knew he couldn't, so he returned to Soll's to nap again. He woke after dark sore but relaxed. The others were just getting in.

  "No time for dinner," Dante said. "We have a meeting with the clan."

  "The clan can wait," Blays said. "My stomach can't."

  Lira socked him on the arm. "Eat while you ride. Or are you one of those people who has to hang on to the saddle with both hands?"<
br />
  "Just one. I need the other to cover my eyes."

  Soll put together a sack of bread and sausage and showed them the way, leaving his brother to tend to his still-mending wife. A three-quarter moon drenched the grass in silver. Four miles east from the town, he crossed a stream threaded between two hills, then followed it north for a few hundred yards until Mourn pointed out a trio of fallen sticks.

  "Wildsign."

  He'd no sooner spoken the word than five norren warriors emerged from the trees lining the streambed. They peered at Soll, nodded, and led the group further through the trees.

  The Clan of the Broken Heron had no fires or children. They slept and sat beneath the trees, trimming twigs from arrow shafts, sewing ash-rubbed bone and dull bits of metal into cured leather hides. In a moonlit clearing, a man of late middle age laid clean lines of black paint onto a circular canvas tied to a wooden stand by leather thongs. He was beardless, the first shaven man Dante had seen since Dollendun. On his stubbled right cheek, a circled R was branded into his skin.

  He didn't look up from his paint. "I'm told you're a friend to the norren in Plow?"

  "We're a friend to all norren," Dante said. "Are you Hopp?"

  "How can you be friend to all norren? Are you my friend? Are you friend to my enemy clans, too?"

  "Yes, in fact. It's my intent to ensure that you and all your enemies survive to keep killing each other for generations to come."

  Hopp glanced up, mouth half-open as he considered Dante. "You're from Narashtovik?"

  "And we're here to make both our homelands free."

  "You think we can't keep ourselves free?"

  Dante took a step forward, holding the bag of loons. "I don't know. I do know we'll have a better chance if we all stand the same line."

  "I see." The branded norren laid another stroke of paint on his canvas and chuckled in satisfaction. "We'll be fine on our own."

  Dante quashed a surge of anger. "Do you know what loons are?"

  "Do you?"

  "As well as how to build them." He held up the bag of earrings. "We want to give one to each of the clans. We can coordinate movements. Attacks. Bring all the norren to bear against the king's armies."

  A woman laughed from the darkness. Dante startled. She sat against the trunk of a nearby tree, her remaining teeth white in the moonlight. Hopp smiled over his painting.

  "Okay," he said.

  "You'll take it?"

  "Who wouldn't want to fight together in perfect harmony?" He held out his hand. Dante fished a loon from the bag and set it in his palm. It was bone and bluish silver, the color of moonlight.

  "A drop of blood on the bone will link it to you," Dante said. "Let us know whenever you see Gaskan troops. With enough warning, we can prevent what happened in Plow from befalling any more towns."

  "That would be nice, wouldn't it?" Hopp said. "Good night."

  The contingent of warriors saw them back across the river. Soll led them back towards town.

  "Chalk this up to cultural differences," Blays said, "but I didn't get the idea he took that very seriously."

  "It's hard to say," Mourn said. "Not hard in the sense that I find the words physically difficult. They are no harder than other words. But in the sense that norren can be guarded even between clans. Trying to read their responses to humans is like reading the face of a fish."

  At Soll's, Dante tried to raise Cally to tell him the news, but the old man didn't answer. Dante paced, contemplating a second attempt, then realized it was somewhere after 2 AM. He went to bed and tried again in the morning.

  Cally answered within seconds, his tone somewhere between annoyance and amusement. "I take it you made contact with your first clan."

  "Did Hopp reach you?" Dante said. "What did he say?"

  "I will recount the entire conversation. First, there was a fart. Followed by 'Goodbye.' Then came a splash. Our chat concluded with an hour of what sounded like rushing water until the loon went dead."

  "A...fart?"

  "Yes," Cally said. "That's what I choose to believe, anyway, as the alternative would be far worse to contemplate."

  Dante rubbed sleep from his eyes. "Maybe a child got ahold of it."

  "The timbre was notably adult. Of the voice, that is."

  "Okay. I'll go speak to him and find out what happened."

  "Do that. Where are you, anyway?"

  "A town called Plow," Dante said. "Few miles from the border. Yesterday, Moddegan's men burned half of it to the ground."

  "Plow," Cally said, distant. Paper ruffled in the background. "Somburr's been in Righmark the last three days. That's due west on the borders. Two days ago, he reported a troop heading east. Another left yesterday."

  "A second wave?" Dante glanced at the sunlight through the window. It was at least nine o'clock, approaching ten. "I'll ride out this minute. If Hopp's got any doubts about us, this should put them to the grave."

  Mourn was already awake. Lira answered at a knock. Blays didn't; Dante had to barge into his small room and rip the sheets away from his bed. As they readied, Dante found Soll pulling planks from a charred home down the street. He nodded at Dante's request to act as their guide and led them back into the wild.

  The Clan of the Broken Heron hadn't moved. Soll was intercepted by a man and a woman a bowshot from the camp. After a brief and somewhat tense discussion, they took Dante alone to Hopp, who knelt by the stream, shirtless, washing black paint from his hands, as if he'd kept painting all night. His back was crossed with switch-thin scars.

  "What happened?" Dante said.

  Hopp smiled at the water. "I was inspired."

  "To drop your loon in the water?"

  "Are you sure that's what happened?"

  "No. You might have thrown it instead."

  Hopp took his hands from the water and dried them with a cloth finger by finger. "I dropped it. I couldn't find it. Have you come to give me another?"

  "If you're sure you won't drop it." Dante reached in his pocket. "I've got another gift, too. More troops are inbound from the west. They could reach Plow today."

  Hopp squinted through the sunlight bouncing from the stream. "Someone ought to do something about that."

  "We'll help if you'd let us. We're stronger than we look. I'm one of the strongest nethermancers in the land."

  "Why are you so keen to help?"

  Dante splayed his palms. "Why is every norren in the world so suspicious of that?"

  A woman laughed the same laugh from the night before. Again, she leaned against a tree, concealed by the grass and the tree's low boughs.

  Dante gasped involuntarily. "Are you scaring me on purpose?"

  "An old woman can't rest her back?"

  "It wouldn't be an issue if she rested more loudly."

  She laughed dryly. "This reminds me of a story. It's a story from very long ago. No one who was there is alive to remember it. Instead, we remember for them. Do you want to hear my story?"

  Dante glanced through the trees in the direction of the others. "Of course."

  "Everyone should listen as well as you." She hunched forward, speaking to the space between them. "And so. Long ago, foxes lived in trees. Why did they live in trees? To hunt what was there, and to go unseen by the creatures of the ground. Foxes never fell. When they did fall, they waved their tails and landed softly. This is how one fox was spotted by a passing votte.

  "The votte thought about pouncing, but the fox was already back among the limbs. It sat on its haunches and said, 'There is a fire. Why don't you come down?' The fox flicked its tail and said nothing. The votte sniffed the air. 'Can't you smell the smoke? Get down from that tree, or the smoke you smell will be your own bones.' The fox sniffed, nodded, and said nothing.

  "The votte began to pace in the dirt around the trunk. 'This is unreasonable,' it said. 'I can see the fire there on that hill. What do you think you're going to do?' The fox squinted between the leaves, saw the fire, and said nothing. 'The flames are here,' the
votte said. 'I can feel them like a smothering hand. Its smoke is maggots in my nostrils. And you're in the tree! Come down, and run with me!'

  "But the fox was gone. The votte ran. The flames pursued." The old woman lowered her hand, bladelike, to her lap. "Much later, when the world changed, the fox changed with it, and moved to the ground. This is the end."

  "What's a votte?" Dante said.

  "I don't know. I've never seen one. They're gone."

  "Did they all die in the fire?"

  "Why would you think that? Do you think the fire burnt the whole world?"

  "Give me another loon," Hopp said. "We've got plenty of scouts. We'll tell you if they come to take the town."

  Dante smiled and handed him another earring. "Give us the word and we'll be there."

  The old woman watched keenly as he returned across the stream. Blays spat out a blade of grass he'd been chewing. "How'd it go? Did the conversation actually take place via mouths this time?"

  "No. Now if you'll excuse me, I need a moment with the creek."

  "I'll be upstream. Far, far upstream."

  "He took the loon," Dante said. "He'll tell us if they see the soldiers. Be ready for a fight."

  They returned to Soll's, keeping the horses saddled and their weapons handy. Compared to the racket of industry of the last couple days, the streets were as silent as the wilds: while they'd been out, Soll's brother had spread word another troop might be approaching. The locals had taken to their homes with swords and hammers and spears and axes and hoes.

  Hours dragged on. They ate a light lunch of cheese melted on flatbread with greens and herbs plucked from Soll's back garden. Dante killed a few minutes by checking on Soll's wife. She was pale and had lost weight. Her arms were perversely thin for a norren; when she sat up in bed, they hung from her shoulders like broken flowers. She spoke and gestured freely, however, and her stomach was pale and cool, free from infection.

  The loon pulsed a couple hours before sunset. Dante's heart pulsed with it.