Black River (The Hounds of the North Book 2) Read online

  "Doesn't seem right."

  "A coward."

  "He had told me how grateful he was. Has a family back in Dhurma. Desperately needed the money for them."

  "Anything else you want?"

  Vincius shook his head.

  The Northman clicked at his horse and separated himself from the cart, pulling ahead to his one-eyed companion, where grim-faced words were shared, words lost in the surging wind.

  Earlier that morning, Vincius had made Harad abandon his breakfast to look for the missing man out in the field of skulls, but the red-bearded giant had come back alone, his boots thick with muck, the depths of the field lost to the mists.

  Vincius had been surprised to hear that Harad did not find the Dhurman. How far could he have walked? The man before he had vanished had told Vincius that he was eager for the steady work in Cullan with the Apprentice. It made little sense for the man to desert since there was nowhere for the man to go here in the North.

  Perhaps Vincius himself should have walked into that field himself to see what he could have found but he had wanted to press forward, to get to Cullan and fulfill the mission with which he was charged. The disappearance of a single man was of no consequence in the bigger picture.

  ***

  Later that afternoon, the rain fell heavy, and the Xichil had to give in, wrapping himself in cattle hide to keep himself dry.

  "Where should we stop for the night?" he asked Harad, his voice sharp to be heard above the hard rain. The earth had become a soggy mess, the wheels of the wagon increasingly wallowing and nearly getting stuck in the mud. The sun was lost to them. Darkness would swallow them soon.

  The Northman had ridden ahead and now sat on his horse next to the wagon. He too was cloaked in the skin of a steer, but the rain did not seem to bother him at all. In fact, he face was wide with a smile and a whistled tune flowed from his lips. "I found tracks veering to the west. Hard to see much in the distances but there is a valley full of woods and I am pretty sure that I saw a whisper of smoke."

  "It takes us away from Cullan?"

  "We would need to backtrack in the morning."

  Vincius squinted north. He wished they were already there. He should have pushed the pace.

  "Sleeping out in the weather won't kill us," said Harad. The wrapped Dhurman men in the back of the wagon groaned. "At least not me and Shield."

  Vincius wondered whether he should have even brought the Dhurman irregulars with him. With the passing of each day, they retreated further into their cloaks, declining offers to sit next to the Xichil, sighing when asked to take over driving the wagon. He was surprised that the whole lot had not deserted him yet. He personally could survive a rainy night sleeping beneath the bed of the wagon but he was not so sure whether he would wake with all the Dhurmans still at his side.

  "All right," he said. "Let's see where that trail leads."

  REMEMBRANCE

  EVEN BENEATH THE thatched roof of the roundhouse and within the breath of the fireplace, Shield found no comfort. He had returned to the North where he had sworn one day long ago that he would never return, and with each step northward, his forsaken land burrowed deeper beneath his skin.

  He stared at the sleeping forms of Patch, Harad, the haggard Dhurmans and the Apprentice Chronicler. Beneath the hard rain, they had ridden into the wooded valley following the line of smoke to find a lone roundhouse in a clearing of trampled and dying grasses. An old woman had stood in the shadows of the doorway, her pale hand beckoning.

  In the warmth of the house, the exhausted travelers had eaten quickly and then fallen deep in slumber, so deep that their only movement was the breath in their bodies.

  One other besides Shield was awake: the old woman whose small roundhouse they had occupied. She perched on a stool, feeding wood into the fire pit in the center of the one room house, occasionally dropping herbs into the iron pot suspended from the metal tripod. She was sheeted in black, white hair damp and stringy, her back hunched with the years, her face pruned. She watched Shield as he tugged and tucked his blanket from his spot on the floor.

  Shield was not sure if he slept.

  His eyes closed, the world vanished but then the voices came to him, the near score Hounds lost to him: the Brothers Bull, Hawk, Red Axe, Black Byran, and the others. They called to him, to their leader, beckoning him to bring them out of the darkness, out of the bogs, the desert sand, the cold waters of the Western Sea and to walk with them back home. They howled; they cried; they begged.

  Then Shield was staring at the fire, the old hag looking at him as if she heard the voices too, and doubt crept into his mind, making him wonder whether he had dreamt of his fallen brothers, or whether the ghosts of the Hounds had found him.

  His eyes closed again: darkness, a swirl of time marked by breath that lost track of itself, and then he was back in the tent of the Warlock King.

  Shield was there, carried across time, bent on one knee, head bowed, exposed to the same blade that had taken his father's life. Bowing to show his allegiance to the man who had killed his father.

  The warlock had hung heads from the beams of the tent, woven the hair into the fabrics, two dozen pairs of dead eyes, empty sockets, wizened faces, lips pulled back, smiling, laughing at Shield through the thick smoke of sage and hemp.

  Which one was his father? Was he laughing at him too? Or was he screaming?

  Then after pledging himself to the warlock, Shield had risen into the open arms of the man who betrayed him, stepped deeply into that embrace, Shield's bone dagger in hand. Even as the life dimmed in the Warlock King's eyes, Shield feared that he had made a mistake: not in killing the fiend that had killed his father but in serving as the dog of Dhurma.

  The hag's rheumy eyes fixed on him and she spit towards him. She knew.

  He returned north alone to a world yoked, not by his past but also by what he followed. He rode with a Chronicler, a man bent on snuffing out the old magic beyond the Black River, stealing the words of power if he could, but more likely simply killing all the warlocks and witches he could find.

  Shield joined him in this. The death of the Warlock King had never been enough.

  Shield's mind returned to Birgid, her night black eyes, those lips that unfurled unimagined worlds, and all he could hope was that she was far beyond the Black River and the reach of the Chronicler and that she had forgiven Shield for breaking his promise to her.

  BOGS

  NO MATTER HOW far Birgid Wordswallow walked into the bogs, the stone tower of the warlock hovered at the edge of her vision.

  Inescapable.

  But still she sought a passage out.

  The mounds of peat yielded wetly beneath her feet, and her path was crooked, forcing her to meander to avoid the rivulets of black water that veined the land. She pressed through the uneven mists, the cold gathering in her bones, the heat from the vision of Shield an unreliable memory.

  She walked until her legs ached, but when she turned, the stone tower stood a shadow in the distance, always still within reach.

  "We go back now?" asked Gyrn. He was the one who was always near her, ever since she first came to Fennewyn. He was her minder, a Painted Man, a wiry little warrior, his upper body caked in blue woad, spear in hand, the right ears of his enemies a looping belt around his wool trousers. His eyes glistened; intelligence brewed behind his reticence.

  She could feel the struggles of his soul. Was he different than any other man who served another? Was there not always a time that the fabric of the soul clashed with the construct of duty and promises made? Was it any different for her?

  "The bogs stretch on forever," she said.

  "Not forever," he said. He was chewing his lower lip. She knew that he would come to her with questions later, maybe more than that, and she was ready. For how else would she escape Fennewyn but with a hero?

  Maybe there was another way, but she did want to look into the shadows. In the darkness, anything that was bound could be unwound. Yet, ju
st because it could not be seen did not mean that there would not be the pain of tearing apart.

  "How long have you been here?" she asked.

  He shrugged.

  She could not see where the edge of the sky and the land met. There was no solid line. It just blurred together; earth dissolving into sky or sky concentrating into earth. There was no border between earth and sky, just infinity at the edges of existence.

  She felt his eyes on her bare legs. She had hiked up her skirts, folded them under themselves so that her pale legs glowed in the dim light that filtered through the mists. She had not wanted the bottom of the skirt to get soaked again as they did on that long walk to the stone tower from the lands that she knew. She had hung those skirts in front of the fire overnight and the next morning the cold and wet still clung to them, clung to them still to this day.

  "Is he one of the Painted Men?" she asked.

  "You would know more than I do," said Gyrn.

  Birgid knew nothing. She knew that Fennewyn came on foot out of the mists when she needed him most. He had done what she could not but a price was levied. She had given it willingly so full of fear and rage was she. Now she wondered whether she had had no other choices. She wondered whether what had filled her was not something that heralded him.

  Birds marked the sky, black dots against the haze. They moved south, away from the tower, fleeing the cold, heading back towards the Black River.

  She turned south and listened but she could hear nothing except for the beating of her own heart. It beat there beneath her breath, the words she spoke, the cold wind over the contours of the land. If she quieted enough she could hear it, but she did not recognize it. It felt different. It was not as if she remembered how her heart had beat before. Had it even existed except for the faint recollection of its rushing and pounding when Shield still walked these lands?

  Had she even felt her heart in all those years?

  She did not know, but what she did know was that after she bound her voice with Fennewyn and they brought the souls of the men back into their bodies, after that, she could feel her heart again. Or some heart, maybe not her heart.

  It did not beat as she thought it should. It trembled in her chest, suddenly vacant and then pounding as if to burst out. It was as if a piece of her heart had been taken out, was missing, that what was whole was no longer.

  Had what they had done torn out a piece of her heart?

  Even now the ripples of memories lingered, the memories of all those souls that they had bound. Her words had streamed forth, long lines, looping, circling back, forming a net. And the souls fleeing those bodies had nowhere to go.

  The memories still rippled: a plump wife's eyes brimming with tears, a young boy holding his father's large hand, lips on a neck beneath the blanket of stars, an old woman behind a kettle laughing and laughing. All these things she had held in that net of words that poured from her mouth. She held those souls and Fennewyn squeezed them back into those bodies, any body, reanimating them.

  They had brought the dead back to life.

  The idea of it and the first moments of it had not seemed wrong. The time of the North would come again. With defenders that could rise from the dead, the line beyond the Black River would be held as it had been forever.

  But those first moments of elation had vanished. Instead a heaviness fell over her as she held those souls and their ripples in her body, in her heart, and then she released them and ever since then it was as if her heart was no longer whole.

  But she wondered had something been taken from her heart or could she now only hear it and had come to realize that it had not been whole for a long time?

  "I cannot stay here," she said.

  "Then let's go back to the tower. He will be back soon and what would he do if he did not find you here?"

  "Indeed. What would he do?"

  KILLERS OF THE NORTH

  HARAD HELD THE hag tight against his chest. She spit and cursed and kicked. He wished he had caved in her head with his hammer when he had the chance.

  Instead he was pulled into the depravity of the Chronicler.

  Vincius heated the tip of his curved dagger in the coals of the fire, turning it as the end pulsed orange. "You will give me the words I seek."

  She spat again.

  Harad was still in shock at how things had unfolded this morning. He had been deep in sleep, dreaming of being buffeted by a surging wind that swept through the grasses. He was loping beneath a pale sky towards the silver ribbon of a river. Far ahead, a woman walked, yet despite his calls and his hurried steps, she kept walking, always far, but never out of sight.

  He wanted her. Abruptly she was there, mouth open, finger pointing at his shoulder. He saw that he was bleeding, dark red from a wound that came without knowing.

  Then he was suddenly awake to water that had seeped through the thatch roof, pooled on the floor and soaked through his bedroll to his shoulder.

  He woke to the hag singing. She was a witch. In her hand, she held a small thick blade. Three of the Dhurman soldiers lay in their own blood and she was shuffling towards Shield, who seemed awake but captivated by the song, by the words that slipped through her cracked lips like a susurrant wind.

  Harad had moved without thought, hammer hurled, his body following to pin the hag down.

  She had run through the travelers with her enchantment and blade, not yet slitting the throats of one Dhurman soldier, the Apprentice or the three Northmen. They had been lucky.

  Now the Apprentice Chronicler plied his trade.

  Vincius pulled the knife from the fire and pressed the hot metal against the woman's cheek. "Give me the words, witch. Give me the words that enchanted us."

  Her laughter mixed with her screams. "I killed the wrong ones first. Especially you, Chronicler. I should have seen it and slit your throat first, and then the traitors. The traitors. Was saving the best for last. How long I have been waiting for you to return. Wretched dogs that gave up my sweet King." Her head swung to Shield. "I saw your memories, and when I escape, I will get your witch."

  The leader of the Northman stared at her for a moment and then turned, walked out of the round house and back into the rain.

  "Words, give me your words."

  Harad expected the witch to give the Apprentice Chronicler what he sought, but she laughed and screamed and cried.

  Her flesh singed, blood spurted, her bowels loosened.

  Then as the rains continued to lash against the thin wooden planks of the roundhouse, hammering the heart of the storm, she died in Harad's arms. She felt so heavy. He dragged her outside and heaved her in a shallow ditch away from the house, her body half sunk into the small trench of water. The rain came down hard, beating against her body, washing the blood from her pale wrinkled skin.

  "Is this what we return to?" asked Shield, the rain beading in his beard.

  Harad shrugged. "This is who we are, who we have been since before Tryr."

  "Before Tryr, we were different. The dream was still alive."

  "What dream, Shield?"

  "Has Cassius sent us here to die?"

  "Rather die here in the North than in Vas Dhurma or Hopht or where ever they sent us. The Hounds are home now."

  "Three of us when we were nearly two dozen."

  "Two dozen Northmen rarely survive twenty years together or apart, in war or in peace."

  "They followed me," said Shield.

  "And I still do."

  Shield stared beyond the southern hills. "Are we coming here just to destroy what remains of ourselves? Is this what we waited for all these years? So many men, so many lives."

  "Another day or two and we'll be at the Black River. Damn the Chronicler and the Dhurman occupiers. Leave them to rot. We cross the Black River and return to our people."

  "As if they would have us. The Hounds. The traitor Shield Scyldmund. The man who killed hope."

  CULLAN

  CULLAN HAD BEEN consumed.

  Shield
looked down the slope to the town on the river. It festered on the land like a disease, black smoke billowing, the pastures lost to muddy rows of dismal crops, the squat shacks clinging like scabs around the Dhurman fortress, the great mead hall no more. Even the Black River seemed to have been gnawed away.

  Cullan of old had been lost.

  A biting wind swirled the cloaks of the Hounds. Once they had sat their horses on this same distant hill with Cullan town behind them, something that they believed they had outgrown. In their youth, they had imagined that only themselves would have changed when they returned.

  The riders faced what they had abandoned.

  Harad and Patch were both crestfallen, the disappointment too hard to conceal. Time stayed still for no one or no place.

  Harad was hit the worse. Moments before as they were climbing the backside of the peak, Harad had been full of optimism. He had been bubbly, odd for him. He had pointed out the small white flowers in the grasses, how they lingered despite the season. He had raised his face to the sun, and said that it was an omen that the clouds had parted at that moment. His hand had kept returning to that book that he kept close to his chest.

  Shield, too, was caught up in the euphoria of the return to the North, to their homelands, holding out hope that the act of returning alone would atone for the blood and betrayal that had marked the passing of the years.

  What lay before them was not the Cullan of old.

  In memory, it was a market town at the farthest upriver point of the Black River that was still navigable by the longships favored by the people beyond the Whale Road. Shield recalled the spread of roundhouses and the great central hall built by Beuw in ages long ago. In Cullan, the clans gathered, always armed but light of heart, eager for the company of others. They sold their furs, brought down their cattle for the slaughter, arrived on rafts made from bound logs of precious black wood, and bartered over foreign blades and trinkets for wives and children.