The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  Water gouted from his mouth. He coughed, chest wracking, limbs flapping. Lira laughed through shocked tears. Dante's lip throbbed where she'd punched him.

  Blays sat up and blinked at the rue tree upstream. "So do we get new names? I don't know why you'd join a new tribe if you don't get epic new names."

  "Like the Man Who Thought He Was a Fish?" Dante said.

  "I was thinking more along the lines of Warrior Whose Balls Were So Big They Scared Away the Sun."

  "You cheated!" Hopp said. "You just floated the last bit."

  "Bullshit. I didn't take a single breath of air." Blays tried to stand and staggered. Lira reached for one arm, Dante the other. His skin was as cold as shadow. He coughed again, spitting stream-water. "See?"

  "I don't remember saying if it could be air or water."

  Blays snorted, shivering, and turned to the three warriors who'd joined the chase. "Which was it?"

  Two gazed away into the trees. The third glared at them, letting the silence draw out, then turned to Blays. "Just air."

  "Roast your eyes," Hopp cursed. He clapped his hands and faced Dante. "Who's next to prove their devotion to the clan?"

  Nether leapt to Dante's hands. "Do you listen to your own words? One of us had to swim for all the rest to join."

  "You're right." Hopp grinned wolfishly, stretching his scar. "Can you blame me for wanting to drown a couple of you and save me the trouble?" He extended his hand, palm down in the norren way. "Welcome to the clan."

  * * *

  Cally was less than impressed with their triumph. "How do you know this isn't another of their games? Have you actually done anything clannish yet?"

  "We just joined this morning," Dante said into his loon.

  "It seems to me this is a perfect example of that particularly norren sense of humor where they're more than content to go on making fun of you for as long as it takes you to figure out that you're being made fun of."

  "What?"

  "They're playing you for a fool. They'll keep you safely tucked away in their camp while you delude yourself that once you earn their trust, they'll allow you into the inner circle of clan chiefs. What proof do you have this is worth a moment of your time?"

  "None," Dante said. "But if we don't try it, we'll never reach these clans at all."

  Cally grunted dubiously. "And what about the dozens of others who would gladly accept our loons right now if only you bothered to visit them?"

  "If they'll take loons from any old idiot out of Narashtovik, then send any old idiot out of Narashtovik."

  "That could make a certain amount of sense."

  "Give it a try. Please. If it turns out you need us to distribute them after all, we can leave this place. But unless we give this a shot, half the clans will never give us the time of day."

  "All right," Cally allowed. "But only because I don't think I've ever heard you say 'please' before."

  Hopp had been circulating through the milling members of the clan for a couple hours, presumably to explain why their numbers had been suddenly bolstered by four new members, three of whom were humans. He returned as the sun peaked, beckoning his new charges in with a swirl of his hand.

  "It's time to discover what you can do for your new family," he said. "You're all warriors, whatever that means to you?"

  Dante nodded. "I can command the nether. Blays and Lira, they're handy with a—"

  "Fine," Hopp said. "What nulla do you possess?"

  "Fletching," Mourn said.

  "That right? Bone, stone, or metal?"

  "Bone and stone." Mourn gazed at the grass. "I'm waiting to work with metal until I perfect the fundamentals."

  Hopp nodded without any sense of approval. "How about the rest of you?"

  "Healing," Dante said.

  "I don't have one besides fighting," Blays said. "Unless looking good counts."

  "Then I have an idea for you." Hopp smiled, eyeteeth white in the late morning sun. "Perhaps it's catching fish?"

  "I don't think so. My appeal transcends most species, but I think fish are too dumb."

  "Let me put it this way: go catch your clan some fish. In fact, perhaps all your nulla is to catch fish."

  "Are you sure this is how we can best be put to use?" Dante said.

  Hopp drew back his head, affronted. "Do you want your clan to starve? What could be more important than keeping them fed and ready to swing their swords? In Narashtovik, does food simply drift in through the windows every night?"

  "No, but it is delivered to the kitchen every morning, because we buy it. Why don't we just go into town and lay down some silver?"

  "Because." Hopp closed on Dante, leaning down until their eyes were nearly level. Dante flinched; it was like standing in the path of a toppling tree. He smelled fresh sweat and crushed grass. Hopp tapped him on the side of the head. "What do you do when there are no towns? Where do you buy your fish from then? If you fling your coins in the stream, do you think it will belch forth trout?"

  Dante sighed and stuck out his hand. "Then give us our poles and let's be done with this."

  "Poles?" The norren chief cocked his head. "You will use spears. Bad news: we are out of spears."

  "What are you talking about?" Blays gestured at two warriors sparring down the stream. Long staffs spun and clacked, metal tips glinting in the sun. "I suppose those are just very long pole-mounted knives?"

  "Those are fighting spears. You do not use fighting spears for fishing. Would you use your father's battle-sword to gut a hog?"

  "Depends. Is the hog armed?"

  Mourn grabbed Blays' shoulder, bunching the doublet's fabric in his fist. "We'll make our own spears. I'll show you if you don't know how."

  "It's easy enough, isn't it?" Blays said. "We just have to find a spear-tree."

  Hopp smiled to himself as they tramped downstream in search of suitably straight branches among the willows and walnuts.

  Dante trampled after Blays through the thigh-high grass. "This whittling will surely help us win the war."

  Blays grinned. "You never know. What if Moddegan attacks with a deadly force of twig-men? We'll pare him to ribbons."

  "I assume this is one of their tests. We're going to have to fish our hearts out. Fish like we're at war with the fish."

  "If trout don't want to be slaughtered in their streambeds, they shouldn't be so delicious when buttered and fried in a pan."

  Blays jumped to catch hold of a walnut's lowest branches. He scrabbled into the tree, showering Dante with bark. Dante glanced upstream. Mourn and Lira were dozens of yards away. A branch cracked, but any other noises they made were drowned out by the babble of the stream and the mindless drone of insects whirring through the slumping willows.

  "When did you and Lira become a pair?" Dante said.

  "What?" Blays glanced down, hands gripping a long branch half as thin as his wrist. "What did she say to you?"

  "It was more of a nonverbal cue. In the form of a punch to the face."

  "When did that happen?" Blays laughed. "Did you make a pass at her?"

  "Earlier this morning when I tried to let you continue drowning for the good of the land." Dante touched his swollen lip. "Haven't you noticed the bruising?"

  "I try not to look directly at your face." Blays tensed, pulling the branch down with a sharp crack. Bark and leaves showered Dante's upturned face. Blays tossed the limb to the ground. "You're not mad, are you?"

  Dante set to the fallen branch with a knife, trimming twigs and skinning bark to shape it into a spear. "Why would I be mad?"

  "Because you always are? I don't know. Sometimes people get mad."

  "Well, I'm not."

  "Good. Guess I thought you might think it would distract us from our duty or something."

  Dante grinned up into the branches. "How dare you two be making moon-eyes at each other? The fate of norren freedom depends on us stabbing these fish!"

  Blays pulled down a few more branches, then climbed down to help carve them into
killing points. Lira and Mourn caught up with them, spears in hand. They splashed along the cold stream until it widened to a gentle flow among the rocks. Sunlight cleaved through the clear water. Current-drawn weeds pointed downstream, dragonfly nymphs clinging to their stems. Flies circled, buzzing in Dante's ears. He waded into a sluggish eddy beside the bank. Dark missiles of trout lurked in the willow-dappled shadows.

  His first thrust missed. So did his second and his fifth and his twentieth. Mourn jabbed, smiled, and cleared his spear from the water, a fish struggling on its tip. After an hour, the norren had landed four. Lira and Blays managed one apiece. Dante had none. His breeches were soaked to the thighs, his patience strained to its peak. Mourn frowned, stepped down from a flat rock, and slogged through the water toward Dante.

  "The water lies to you," he said, bulk hunched over the water as he peered at a trout lurking beneath a wall of reeds. "Well, not really. In fact, it's just kind of flowing there not saying anything at all. But the fish isn't where it shows you. It's lower." He struck at the trout with a splash, withdrawing an empty spear. "Well, you get the idea."

  Dante did, but his arms and eyes didn't. He didn't land his first fish until mid-afternoon, after they followed the stream to a naturally dammed pond. In those languid waters, Dante acquitted himself with two fish by dusk. Lira and Blays had five and four respectively; Mourn shamed them all with 17. They headed home for camp, each step squeezing water from the rivets of their boots.

  Under twilight, Mourn knelt beside Hopp and unrolled the tarp that held their cleaned fish, heads still attached.

  "28 fish." Hopp gazed among the men and women seated around the banks of the stream. "39 warriors. This does not add up."

  "Got bread?" Lira said.

  "Sure."

  "That's enough for me."

  Hopp gave her an unreadable look and rolled up the tarp. "It had better be. The ground sees no seeds until waiting mouths are full."

  Dante ate his bread without complaint. He got up before sunrise to reach the pond by dawn and catch the fish while they were first stirring. He caught a trout and a sunfish before the others splashed into sight.

  Ever since Dante had literally been punched into awareness, it was like a spell had been broken between Blays and Lira. They pushed each other in the water, splashing, laughing, teasing. At times, they disappeared around a bend for twenty minutes or more, returning flushed and grinning. During their disappearances, they rarely brought back fish. Dante waded the waters next to Mourn, talking about the norren, about Narashtovik and Mallon, about responsibility and risk and life. Mourn was a slow thinker, as plodding and deliberate in thought as he was with his footsteps or his Nulladoon play, but he was thoughtful, deep, capable of questioning his own assumptions in ways most men would never think to. Hours flowed as quickly as the stream.

  Days spun by. When spearfishing grew too frustrating, Dante gathered walnuts, walnut-sized snails, and the tender roots of cattails. He plucked breadgrass and mushrooms and wild carrots. On their fifth day, they returned with enough fish to feed themselves as well as the rest of the clan.

  Much like when Dante and Blays had traveled with the Clan of the Nine Pines, the warriors of the Broken Heron paid them little mind. One morning, a woman stopped Dante before he could depart to the stream to show him how to fashion strong hooks from the bones of fish. Another evening, two men came by to swap stories of Dante and Blays' travels throughout the Territories. One challenged Mourn to a friendly wrestling match which Mourn lost after a long struggle.

  These interactions were the exceptions to their isolation. The rest of the clan sparred, rested, painted, hunted, scouted, mended weapons and armor and clothes. So often left alone, Dante spoke to the earth. It didn't answer back. He let his mind sink like water through its surface, past the turf and the damp confusion of roots and worms and last year's leaves. Somewhere below imagination, in the silent beds of dirt and stone, the nether rested, untouched, a deeper shadow than the darkness of the underground. Dante let it stay there, watching it, nothing more.

  After a week, the Clan of the Broken Heron picked up and walked downstream to the northwest, covering some 15 miles before bedding down. In the morning, Hopp came to them with fishing poles and hooks and cunningly tied lures of feather, fur, and shiny metal.

  "Turns out we had these all along," he said. "Go ahead and use them if you want."

  At first, Dante returned to the rod with relish, but standing on the bank and waiting for a fish to strike was far less fun than creeping into the water and impaling it with a single thrust of a spear. He fixed a bit of wood near the end of the line and wedged the butt of the pole between rocks. He left it there to catch what it may, rushing back to it, spear in hand, whenever it bent under the weight of a strike.

  That evening, they returned to find the clan in bloody disarray. Men limped to the stream to wash their grimy hands and faces and put cold water on their cuts and scrapes and burns. A handful of warriors were gone entirely. Dante found Hopp by the creek, shirtless, wincing. Blood dripped from his hand into the water and swirled downstream.

  "That's why we moved," Dante said. "You got word of a battle."

  Hopp chuckled. "With such sharp eyes, it's no wonder you catch so many fish."

  Dante watched him bleed, seething. "We can stab more than trout, you know."

  "Keeping us fed is vital. It leaves the rest of us to fight. Why does anyone ever want to be chieftain when all you get to do is rebuke foolish questions?" Hopp pressed a cloth to his wounded hand, breath hissing between his bared teeth.

  "Let me see."

  "I'm fine. No one ever died of a cut finger."

  "Yes they have. By the thousands. Because a finger and any cuts it carries is the most likely thing to touch dirt, feces, stagnant water, and all the other spoiled things that spoil the body too." Dante came around Hopp's side and grabbed the man's thick wrist. "Now let me see."

  Hopp glared at him like an angry cat, then extended his bloody left hand. The tip of his index finger was nearly severed, hanging by a flap of skin. Blood pattered the grass. Dante sealed it back together with a cord of black nether.

  Hopp wiggled his finger. He licked his thumb, wiped away the blood, and gave Dante a shrewd look. "I thought they exaggerated what you did in Plow."

  "For all I know they did. Now bring me anyone you want to stop bleeding."

  A line of wounded cycled between Dante and three men who waited to dress the minor cuts and scrapes with needles, stitches, cloths, liquor, and water. Dante chatted with those he treated, piecing together the day's battle. The clan had rendezvoused with three others just after dawn, rushing down a hill to enswarm a legion of some 120 Gaskan troops in the thick shrubbery between ridges. They broke the surprised redshirt soldiers quickly, pushing them to the very bottom of the valley, but as the norren mounted to rush down the fold and overwhelm them, a cavalry troop burst over the hills and flushed the norren into the brush. From there, they fought a running back-and-forth among the brambles and walnut trees until the chiefs, concerned about the possibility of more reinforcements on the way, beat a slow retreat under cover of the trees. The kingsmen tried to pursue, but after a ferocious norren counter killed eight men in moments, the redshirts backed off to bow range, peppering the clans until the norren slipped away into the hills.

  Their adopted clan had lost five warriors in the battle, with another nine suffering modest-to-serious wounds Dante healed as best he could.

  At dawn, the clan left the stream and cut north at an easy pace. Three hours and six miles later, they settled back down beside a pond. Mourn strung his bow and shot three mallards, two on the water and another from the sky. Dante saw to those who still needed seeing, then took his rod and spears and caught fish in the yellow haze of a waning afternoon that smelled of budding plants and the gentle rot of still water.

  This pattern continued for several more days. The clan recovered. Blays and Lira popped off into the tall grass. Dante fished and t
ended and gathered. Warriors began to invite Mourn to sit with them during meals. Sometimes he accepted; others, he declined, eating with Dante instead.

  Hopp called a meeting. It wasn't a meeting like the Council of Narashtovik, where members were brought together to reach a consensus, but a meeting where a newly-established ruling would be handed down from on high. Previously, the clan had sent out four or six scouts at a time. But Hopp had heard more soldiers were on their way. Henceforth, a full quarter of the clan would be sent out to range at any given time. They would scout in shifts. The shifts would begin that night. There would be no exceptions, including Hopp and the old norren woman who spent most of her days sitting beneath the trees. The humans would scout, too.

  Dante was assigned to that first night along with nine other warriors. He'd been up since dawn and didn't trust himself to stay alert through the night. He was paired with a woman named Yola who rarely spoke except to tell him he was too loud. She slipped up the hills as if she'd been walking them her whole life (which as far as he knew she had), bow in hand, undisturbed by the rising cackles of nocturnal birds and the whisper of rodents in the grass. A cold half-moon touched the hills with silver. Before cresting each ridge, Yola dropped to a crouch and crossed the peak, then knelt in the grass and waited, watching the horizons for silhouettes.

  After the warmth of the mid-spring days, the frigid night felt like another world, a place where the cold and dark might last forever. But Dante walked that world as if he'd been born to it. Birds hooted. Crickets chirred. His steps stirred the scent of wet dew on broken grass. When the dawn came, chasing that world away in a bloom of ethereal gray-blue, he was more excited for the next night than he was to get to bed.

  He asked for and received ongoing nighttime shifts. Blays and Lira asked to scout together and were denied, which Blays complained about until Dante told him he was scaring away the fish.

  One afternoon, a scout returned to tell the clan he'd seen a trio of armed men a few miles west headed their way. Hopp arranged a picket and roving sweeps, but the men weren't seen again. Three times they saw scouts from other clans. Once a full clan passed two miles to the south, and every warrior of the Broken Herons readied arms until the wanderers were identified as the Clan of the Lonely Hill, a distant cousin-clan that was generally but not always on good terms with the Broken Herons. Hopp walked out to see them and returned unscathed.