FIVE

Sweet Child of Summer,

I mourn for your skin

Your cold fingers and

Chillblained toes.

Mother of the Autmn,

When you fell in love

You tumbled with the earth

And snared its acrid bounty.

Hellish Bastard of Winter,

Blanch before your betters

And return to us our warmth

Which you’ve forever stolen.

Hard Father of Spring,

You stood tall as an oak

Sentinel before our home

Your leaves soaking up all our woes.

Ithica (b. 413). Journaled Year 433.

I

It is a good night to hunt. 

He bounded across the dusky trails round the pathetic Village in the Shins. His stomach growled, demanding its fill; slaver sloughed from his sopping jowls. Meat. Gods, he needed meat. Real meat, any meat. Not the lean martens clinging to their boughs, nor the rancid dogs hiding in the stables, tails between their legs. Anyone. I shall eat anyone.

He pointed his nose to the waning gibbous moon and let out a desperate, famished howl. Not a one answered his call.

Fortune turned with the breeze, bringing with it a savory aroma. Charcoal and leather. Sweat and flesh, tinged with soot. Meat! His maw quivered, and his hackles raised as he darted into the night, descending the hills towards the village.

He could not know, but somewhere deep in the brumal wood, the Old God watched on, a smile set upon his unknowable face while he enjoyed the fruits of his unending labors.

It was a good night to hunt…

* * *

Garland Musher woke to a pained howl, just as he had every night since the boy was killed. He rolled uncomfortably on the straw mattress in the byfoged’s unoccupied servant’s quarters. The lord knight had decided to move their stay into the longhouse, to remain close to the blood-drinker and those held for questioning.

He peered out the hazy windowpane; the moon shone silver and had finally deflated to a more natural gibbous shape. Morgana willing, we might find some peace soon. The blood moon had smoldered on for three nights; a phenomenon that Garland, nor anyone, had ever seen.

Sighing relief he rolled onto his stomach, held the scratchy sack pillow atop his head, attempting to recall the warmth of his bonnie wife pressed up against him. For some reason, he could only imagine such physical sensations when lying prone. 

If he turned on his back, the illusion dispelled in an instant.

She must think me dead by now… How long might she wait?

Not long, Garland reckoned. Despite his vigorous efforts, he had yet to put a bairn in her. Wystran women unburdened by children never tended to wait long. ‘Twas a dangerous life on the sprawling tracks of the Wyse, and nearly as dangerous in the shadows of Castle Morose. He would be hard pressed to find anger when he returned home to find her in bed with his younger, more handsome brother—or, more likely, the thick-skulled, broad-armed bastard who had recently taken up residence at the old silver smithy.

Squeezing shut his eyes, he groaned and growled to drown out the unpleasantries echoing inside his ears. Meln’s warm, thin waist against mine… Meln had always been too pretty for him and the world had always been quick to remind him of it. Garland was an ugly bastard with a thrice crooked nose and thrice as many thickly scarred pockmarks spanning his face, chest, and back. Not to mention, he always reeked like a wet dog. She was likely sitting atop that chiseled silversmith at that very moment, Garland being the farthest thing from her mind.

A crash in the other room pulled him from his miserable ruminations. The servant door to the kitchen splintered open; chairs screeched against the floor. Garland scrambled out of bed and into his woolen under-trousers, holding his breath as he crept beyond the safety of his quarters, fearing ’twas the Valentine vampyre causing all the ruckus. Garland’s breath returned when he laid eyes on the shadowed musculature of Syr Martikov leaning back in a chair, panting and heaving as he struggled to fit into his boots.

“Musher!” the lord knight growled. “Attend me! Bring my armor.”

“Aye, syr!” Garland rushed to Syr Martikov’s quarters and collected a bulging bundle of arming clothes, mail, and plate and brought it clanking and creaking back into the kitchen. Setting it down before his new master, Garland gasped when he realized the noble prick was naked and caked scalp-to-sole with mud. “Milord, what’s happened?”

“Do as I say, dog.” The lord knight quaffed a pitcher of water in four gulps. “No questions.”

“Perhaps you should bathe—”

A feral glint flashed in Martikov’s eyes, a rabid snarl striving against the cage of his bared teeth.

Garland swallowed his protests and did as he was bid. How low I have fallen… Mushing the tracks was hardly a glorious profession, but ’twas honest, respectable. Back home, he could count on hot meals every evening, a stein of ale, a warm bed, and a much-too-beauteous wife, who did not hate him, even if she had eyes for swollen-armed smiths. Though the trails were long and the winters longer, ’twas a comfortable life, all considered, and far more sumptuous than he had ever thought to achieve.

When the lord knight had approached him, now several weeks past, Garland was taken with a fancy of going on holiday when he returned; it was said the Martikovs shit bricks of Eastern gold. Instead, he had found himself indentured to the bastard—without promise of back pay—in a miserable shantytown with neither food nor warmth. All the while a killer roamed free, and worse, his wife was happily shagging someone richer, stronger, and a league more handsome.

How low, indeed.

Even sealed in his armor, the lord knight stank, as if he had dunked his head in a sow’s dirty trough. He tightened his sword belt and drew his blade, examining its edge. “You are shit with a whetstone.”

“Ain’t ever used one ‘fore now, syr.”

“No matter. Come. We go to visit the prisoner.”

“Now?” Garland whined. He planted his hands onto his lower back and yawned a cracking stretch. His aching arse already yearned for the nostalgic comfort of the lumpy straw mattress awaiting him in the stuffy servant’s quarters. “‘Tis’ the middle of the night.”

“Yes,” the lord knight said, hunching as stepped through the kitchen door and out into the moonlight. “Her ilk are most active after dark. You must witness her monstrous nature.”

Garland followed the lord knight round the other side of the longhouse to an iron-reinforced oak door, set into the cliffside which overlooked a sprawling sea of evergreens. Syr Martikov yanked open the door; the cold, rusted hinges groaned beneath the door’s heft. Garland wheezed and coughed as they descended into a small torchlit dungeon; the air was acrid with mildew and mold. Particulates flitted through the air, visible only by the beams of light piercing the barred vents hewn into the stone foundation of the longhouse.

Laughter echoed down the corridor. Garrick and Torrin stood with satisfied grins upon their dumb faces, a bloodied scourge hanging from Garrick’s hand at his side. The byfoged’s sons did not acknowledge Garland and paid the lord knight only the barest respects.

“She willnae talk, milord.” Garrick spat on the ground and chuckled. “I’ve done everything I can think of.”

Garland shrank into the corner of the dingy chamber. The Valentine girl was strung up to the ceiling, wrists bound in rusted shackles. Her gown was ripped and soiled, revealing bruised and ruptured flesh, which even then mended itself with the sorcerous autonomy of miraculous healing, a High Art known only to the Keepers, those ghostly priests of Great Mother Death who tended to the cemetery at Castle Morose. Some wounds appeared older, more healed than others, while the fresh lacerations quickly stitched themselves closed, visibly scabbing over with extraordinary speed.

He inched back on his heels until cold iron bars blocked his retreat. He jumped, gasping with fright and spun round and saw a lass he recognized from back home curled in the corner of a cell. Falda had served him drinks at her Da’s alehouse back in Wystra. Reluctantly, Garland took in the rest of the room; all six of the tiny cells were occupied by haunted women, locals and caravaners alike. His chest burned with sour sickness. 

What the hell have these freaks been doing all night? The girl’s sharp, maroon eyes flickered to meet his gaze, their somber glow telling all.

Garland looked away; he could not bear it.

The lord knight approached the blood-drinker, bent over her. “Where is Baptiste Fournier?” When she refused to answer, he drove a gauntleted fist into her gut. Only the faintest whistle of air escaped her lips. “Speak! Where is your master?”

“I’ve told them…” the girl murmured, her voice laced more with shame than with pain. “He ascended the Guardian. He is nowhere near this place.”

“See?” Torrin said. “Naught but bloody lies.”

“Then you know where your master is at all times?” Syr Martikov asked.

She said nothing, her eyes blazing with loathsome fire. If a vampyre this girl truly was, naught could save them should she break loose of her bonds.

“What of the missing woman and her boy? The gardener, and her strider husband?”

Her head sagged towards her chest, and Valentine said naught else.

This is bloody madness.

The lord knight shook his head, turned back to the others “She is telling the truth, bloody fools.”

“What?” the brothers said in incredulous unison.

“Then who, milord,” Garland croaked, “killed the innkeep’s boy?”

“She did, clearly. Or her master. There is little difference. It is clear that more creatures still haunt this village.”

The brothers exchanged glances.

Garland’s temples ached; he feared his skull might crack from the building pressure. “I dinnae follow, milord.”

“Fournier is creating fledgelings, building his nest.” Syr Martikov shrugged, heading back up the stairs. Garland scrambled to follow. “Only the master is useful to us.” Garrick handed Torrin the scourge, both their faces smeared by wan smirks. “Release the rest of these women. They know nothing and are not tainted. You whelps have sullied your souls this night. Seek penance at the chapel.”

“Chapel’s burned down,” Garrick said.

The lord knight spun round in a flash of movement, grabbing the byfoged’s eldest by the collar of his tunic. “Then kneel in the ashes and pray that the Great Mother has not already marked you for Grahtz!” He shoved the boy to the ground and kicked him in the gut with his plated-boot. “I shall take both your heads next time you detain a Wystran without my command! Understand?”

“Aye, lord.” Garrick groaned, curling on the damp flags.

Syr Martikov leveled his smoldering, primal gaze upon Torrin. He yelped, scrambling to unlock the cells.

“Come, musher!” Syr Martikov barked. Garland loped behind him as if he had withered from houndmaster to hound. Despite the panic throbbing in his heart, he knew that, like the byfoged’s young curs, he was naught but a mongrel subdued by an alpha.

* * *

For the first time since Collin opened his doors, every room of the inn was filled. The Wystran rangers came in after the blizzard, just as the caravaners drifted off like cold winds fleeing the sweltering exhalation of a smith’s billows. The caravan had brought a small supply of grain, but little else that would sustain the village, let alone a cadre of soldiers.

He had spent the last day toiling in the humid kitchen, working well into the night to keep food and drink on the tables. How Ignar had managed the place—hell, how he enjoyed this!—was beyond Collin. The thought gave him pause, and he found himself staring listlessly into the mirrored sheen of a fish knife, his own hollow eyes staring back him.

I failed you, Magnolia. Collin threw the knife into the washbasin, uncaring of the dull crack which surely meant a fresh chip in the fine ceramic. I should have been there.

A raucous call from the dining room dragged Collin back to his culinary toils, back into the hellish heat of bubbling cauldrons, searing stoves, and guttering hearths. He rushed about the kitchen plating haunches of venison smothered in garlic creme and bowls of potato and onion stew. The rangers’ appetites were insatiable, and in less than two days they had eaten through nearly all of Collin’s stores.

Collin stumbled out of the kitchen, his arms lined with scalding, steaming plates and dropped them rattling onto the longtable. The same dozen or so veterans had been lounging and merrymaking for the better part of the morning. Seemed only recruits had the burden of patrolling and soldiering in this troupe.

The ranger-captain waved off Collin, not sparing him a single glance nor even a half-arsed thanks.

“Good sir.” Collin cleared his throat, puffed out his chest. “We’ve not much left. As I’ve said, we’re in the beginning of the winter famine.”

The captain waved again, clearly not listening nor concerned about the fat man and his problems dimming his candlelight.

Gerdur entered with a pitcher of ale. In his turmoil, Collin had yet to thank her for all the slack she had taken off his shoulders. He had yet to thank her for anything. The soldiers cheered and pounded their fists on Collin’s once-polished table, ogling as she filled their steins. Topping off the captain’s cup, the big man howled and pulled her onto his lap.

Gerdur huffed a nervous laugh and made to rise. The captain forced her back down.

“Stay awhile, lassie,” the captain mewled, pulling at her skirts.

Gerdur’s face burned red and she reared her hand, poised to strike.

But Collin’s steady simmer boiled over. “Get yer filthy grabbers off me woman!”

The table fell silent. The captain tossed Gerdur to the floor and rose, standing nearly three heads taller than Collin. “I should have yer tongue, fat man, fer speakin’ such to an officer of the Morosian army.”

Collin looked up, clenched his fists, pressing his soft chest against the captain’s stone cut stomach. “Aye. I should tie yer innards in a bow, for all the bloody grub ye’ve sucked down yer gullet! Get out me inn, bastard!”

Swords scraped from scabbards and suddenly Collin’s fire was entirely smothered as he laid eyes on the gleaming, naked blades. Seems I’ll see Magnolia and Ignar sooner than I intended. But that thought sobered him, seeming altogether more appealing than bending over in apology to these brutish sods ravaging his community with their pointless presence.

“Come now, lads,” Gerdur quavered, eyes alight with a terror all too familiar to her. “Surely, we can make amends.”

“Nay—we cannae.” The ranger-captain pressed his sword point into Collin’s lower chin. “Not till this ungrateful nanny apologizes for his bleatin’.”

Collin’s lip curled with disgust. To be disrespected so—in my own home!

The door burst open; a young, sweating scout nearly collapsed at the threshold. “Captain! A body’s been found; the creature is nigh!”

“Who is it?” Collin asked, his concern for his fellows overcoming the captain’s brittle intimidation.

“An ol’bodac! Grey in the beard.”

“Move it, lads. We’ve some bloody work to do.” The captain lashed a venomous glance at Collin. “We’ll be back ‘fore nightfall, fat man. Best ye find somewhere else to rest that red head.”

The door slammed shut behind the last soldier, and finally, the inn was empty. Just as it should be.

“Morgana’s tits, Collin!” Gerdur screamed, flinging the slap meant for the captain into Collin’s blushing cheek. “They’ll bloody kill ye!”

“They willnae do shite,” Collin murmured, collecting the chipped, begrimed dishes.

More of Hromgir’s work tarnished.

“I ken ye’ve lost a son, Collin, but the Winter’s gusting bitter winds. If I’m to be by yer side, ye need to mend those cracks, I willnae be blown away with ye!”

“Go off, then!” Collin’s arms spasmed; his hands cramped and the ornate earthenware dishes fell from his grasp, shattering to shards upon the hardwood floor.

A moment passed. Not even the wind gasped.

“I’ve already had one wrathful monster in mine bed,” Gerdur said. “I’ll not have another.” Without a glance over her shoulder, she walked out the front door in the soldiers’ wake.

* * *

The lord knight slept late into the morning, which gave Garland a few hours to himself. His dogs were going hungry with the soldiers about. Townsfolk had not enough to go round to begin with, which left his dogs to wither and shiver in the derelict stable, their ribs rattling like macabre wind chimes.

“I’m sorry, boys…” Garland scratched his youngest malamute under its plush ivory chin. ‘Twas one from Hati’s last litter, one of the few remaining.

He did not know how he would get home without his pack—he had never been much of a hiker—nor did he know what miseries awaited him should he return alone, empty handed. His shack would be vacant and boarded up, or another man would have taken up residence. A month’s wages were all he had stowed away with his brother. Getting more dogs, training them, building another sled; such things took time and much more money, more than he had ever had. Dogs were bloody expensive, nevermind that meeting with the Fenris breeders was perilous. Garland could count on his hands how many times he had met with the striders; if he never did so again, it would not be too soon. Three generations of his pack had he raised, delivered pups out of Hati’s Ma, who had belonged to Garland’s father, who had passed the business on to him in the first.

“Some’ needs to give, boy,” Garland whispered to his dog. He did not remember its name; only Hati had had the privilege of a real name. This byfoged is a fool, his sons filthy lechers, and Martikov is bloody insane. He dared not risk saying it aloud, even to a pack of mutts, for fear the lord knight or those of his posse lurked round every corner.

Garland wandered away from the stable, grimacing at the hungered whines at his back, his dogs confused as to why he had not left behind any grub. ‘Twas a cold day in Pan when Garland failed to feed his pack. A chill rattled his bones, chattered his teeth as he rubbed his hands over his arms.

‘Tis a cold day, indeed.

Approaching the inn, a woman burst from the door, stomping toward him through the snow. Garland flung himself from her path, never one to cross a woman scorned, and slipped inside before the door swung shut. The smoky air was rich with the scents of venison and garlic. His fingertips tingled as warmth began its slow return to his limbs. ‘Twas likely the warmest place in the whole damned village, and Garland intended to enjoy a good thaw before returning to Martikov’s frigid service.

Garland found the innkeep in a heap at his longtable, surrounded by a mess of food scraps and potsherds. Collin did not move while Garland swept up the pieces with his hands, swinging round his head in search of a proper cleaning implement.

“Don’t worry yourself,” Collin moaned into his arms. “I’ll get to it.”

“Nonsense, friend,” Garland called over his shoulder from the hall, where a milled board and a ratty besom lay in a dark corner. He returned to the dining room and swept up the mess. “We smallfolk need to stick together. “

“There’s a canvas sack in the kitchen,” Collin said, finally looking up at Garland with watery eyes. “Thank ye, lad.”

“Troubled times, we’re in.” He dumped the potsherds in the sack, which was bulging with a kitchen’s worth of broken dishes. “Mighty clumsy, eh?”

Collin huffed some semblance of a laugh. “Nay—I collect scraps from the town to return the potter. He likes to reuse em’.”

“I see.” Garland said, though he had no idea how broken plates could possibly be useful to anyone. He sat in the chair next to the red-faced man and fiddled with his thumbs. “Master Collin, is it?”

“Aye, lad.”

“Garland Musher.” He held out his hand. “Apologies, we havenae properly met.”

“How could we? With all this nonsense mucking up our fine village.”

Garland had to resist laughing at “fine village.” Place was nothing short of a rubbish heap, even ‘fore the soldiers and murders and vampyres.

“People seem to look to you for guidance, yeah?”

Collin knitted his brows. “S’pose so. What’s it matter?”

“Ye need to do some’, sir. They’ve got that lass chained up, other lassies in cells. Ye cannae stand by while Morgana-kens-what goes on in that dungeon.”

The innkeep puffed out his cheeks, shaking his head.

“I dinnae think the Valentine girl guilty, neither, if I’m honest.”

“Lassie’s a blood-drinker,” Collin said, closing his red hand into a white fist. “Heard her master say so with mine own ears. She took me boy.”

“I ken how it looks…” Garland looked round, then met the innkeep’s eyes. “But I’ve seen and heard some strange things, too. And I’m tellin’ ye, I dinnae think this is right.”

Collin twisted his face like people do when they hear a hard truth they would rather live without. Then he softened, letting his coiled hand rest slack upon his leg. 

“Tell me what you’ve seen lad.”

* * *

Five times Collin pounded on the byfoged’s emerald door, which his long wait gave the undesired opportunity to examine in detail. The paint was fresh, possessing a rich and vibrant hue, while the hinges and knob appeared to be cast from solid gold. Collin scraped a thumb over the knob; a flake of gold leaf fell and was carried off on the wind. Jukil is certainly fool enough to lavish in such pretentious excess. Collin sighed, looked back over his shoulder at the starving village below. The indulgence of the rangers was to be expected, but it seemed the byfoged’s sons had grown unscrupulous in following their fathers shining example.

Shaking his head, Collin knocked again.

The King and his rangers, the byfoged and his sons… No matter where one looks, seems there is always a pack of hungry dogs circling, waiting to feed.

“Bridget’s mercy…” he whispered, fog billowing from his mustachioed lips. “What am I doing?”

Gunhild opened the door. She wore a fine green gown which matched the door, and her wrists were adorned with bracelets of glass beads, with twin pendants of polished iron and tarnished gold displayed prominently upon her breast. Yet her countenance was haggard, her eyes sallow and bruised from lack of sleep. She held a crumpled kerchief.

“Well met, Collin.” Her voice was hoarse as if she had spent the night hollering. “How can I assist ye?”

Collin breathed heavily, conjured a smile and bowed. Despite the unpleasant conversation awaiting him, the byfoged’s lovely wife was undeserving of Collin’s ire. “Mornin’ Gunhild. I need to speak with Jukil. Is he here?”

“Aye. He is. But he’s nae takin’ visitors.”

“‘Tis no social call; I need to speak with him about the rangers… and some other matters.”

“I see.” She stepped aside, looked down at her polished floor. “Ye’ll need to present yerself. I willnae stomach his presence, this day.”

Collin nodded his thanks and entered the longhouse. It had been many winters since he was last invited inside, and the place had only grown more sumptuous since. The common room was furnished with silken duvets and curtains imported from the eastern continent of Li’hai. Lacquered wooden side tables, legs carved like foaming waves, stood about the room, set with gilt bowls filled with multi-colored glass beads and silver chains. Framed oil paintings from Valencia were propped up against the walls, yet to be hung.

‘Tis no wonder the caravan never misses us, all the way out here.

In the main hall, Jukil slouched upon a large chair with a high back, almost like a throne. The longtable before him was set with porcelain dishes, centered by three loaves of braided bread and a platter of sliced boar.

The floor creaked beneath Collin’s heavy feet. Jukil gasped, startled. “Morgana’s heaving tits! What are ye doing here? I told Gunhild I’m—”

“We have a problem, Byfoged. Can’t wait, I’m afraid.” Collin’s eyes flickered up and down over the sweeping designs carved into the byfoged’s throne. “New chair?”

“Aye…” Jukil grumbled, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Had it commissioned in the spring, just came in with the last caravan. Gunhild thought it would complement the dining space.”

“I’m sure she did.”

“Why do ye disturb me, Collin? I’ve much on me mind.”

“Aye—I’m sure you do.” Collin cleared his throat and dabbed his sweating brow with his father’s handkerchief. “I’ve a few concerns that need your ear.”

Jukil rolled a dismissive hand, as if to say get on with it.

“First off, the rangers are devouring the villagers’ food and refuse to hunt their own game. My stores are all but depleted. Another week of this, and I’ll have naught left for them or our own folk.”

“What of Hromgir’s willful besom… Ithica is it? Can she nae support the village with that garden of hers?”

“Ithica…” Collin realized he may be the only one who knew where Ithica had gone. “Lass is among those missing.”

Bridget, let her be safe.

Jukil barked a laugh. “Then we’re all doomed. Mind the blood-drinkers in the night; and for what? Hunger shall claim us first! No harvests, useless hunters! What are we to do?”

“The rangers could manage their own rations, for a start. Each one has a bow.”

“I’ll speak with their captain come morn.” Again, Jukil waved his hand. “What else?”

“Well, I’ve heard some disturbing tales,” Collin sighed, rocking toe to heel, “regarding the handling of Miss Armelia Cordoba… and of other women who have been wrongfully detained.”

“Disturbing tales?” Jukil leaned forward. “From whom?”

Collin scoffed. “‘Tis hardly important. I’ve been told of monstrous treatment! Our own women left in cells; Armelia, chained to the ceiling, beaten and bloody—Morgana knows aught else!”

“Armelia Cordoba’s incarceration is attended by my sons, as is the questioning of any who are thought to be in league with Baptiste Fournier.” The byfoged’s face twisted with willful ignorance. “I willnae hear ill of them. What care do ye hold for the Valentine anyway? The she-devil savaged yer boy.”

“There’s little proof of this. Shelka Morn swore ‘fore us all that she saw Armelia leave the stable well before Ignar was killed—which, might I point out, has nothing to do with the women who were abused by your sons.”

“Shelka Morn!” Jukil rose, his belly jigging with his booming cachinnation. “She claims that she fought off a great black wolf! Only a fool could believe it. Not I. Shelka Morn is but a troubled lassie from a broken home.”

“She held a bloodied knife, no?”

“She cut the blood-thirsty wench when she attacked the lad.”

“Was Armelia bleeding when you took her?”

“That matters not. Her wounds close swiftly by the power of her master’s black seidr.”

“Aye. Ye’ve witnessed such forces, have you not?” The byfoged’s face curdled with wrath as Collin rose to his full height, stepping nose-to-nose with the sorry fool. “This must stop, Jukil. Everyone held in your dungeon is protected by our laws. Armelia stands accused of murder? So be it—she still deserves a bed and a meal. ‘Tis your duty to protect our people. And what do you do? You subject them to yer laddies’ wicked fancies! Be you down there, too?”

“The she-devil will burn!” Jukil seethed. “Whatever hatred you hold towards me for my treatment of a demon matters naught! Guilty of this crime or no, the girl is a blood-drinker! Her master lays siege on the town, picking us off one by one. How many more children must disappear, Collin? How many more bodies do ye want to see ‘fore ye believe the threat in front yer very eyes! Justice be damned! This is war.”

Collin breathed deep, exhaled his building fury to make room for reason. “I do not believe we are under attack by vampyres. I have heard strange accounts regarding this knight of the Black House. He disappears in the night, returns naked and filthy. There’s not been wolves prowling our hunting grounds for a generation, yet we’ve all been woken by the keening howls in the night. Surely, ye’ve heard the skalds’ tales of the Fenris shapechangers.”

“Nonsense and superstition! Gods, man, I thought you better than this. The lord knight patrols the wilds at night in search of Fournier! Leave my home, bastard. Dinnae mind to return.”

“Byfoged—”

“Get out, damn ye! ‘Fore I have my rangers throw you in chains and leave ye to be eaten by that bloody she-devil.”

Collin slammed the byfoged’s ornate door on his way out. Red-faced and seething, his mind churned with possibilities. What truly causes all our woes? He thought back to the night he lingered beneath Ithica’s window, the roil of troubling truths he had consumed all at once and refused to decipher.

Elder Hama charged Ithica with the task of finding the Fenris Clan and learning about—the Ghost of the Mountain… But what is that? Some strange entity of a cursed wood that feeds on the people of the village. How many bairns had gone missing in those woods, presumed frozen, yet their bodies were never found. ‘Tis how the Ghost feeds? But what does that have to do with Ignar?

All these troubling happenings, evils pulled straight from the mouths of skalds, telling tales to scare bairns from Winter’s clutches. Surely, ’twas all such things like blood-drinkers, shapechangers, and woodland ghosts were. But Collin had seen too many strange things in his life to dismiss all that he had heard.

If Jukil will do naught, I shall.

He marched across the village and pounded six times upon another door, this cracked and hanging crooked in its frame. Kartha opened it, took half a glance at the innkeep, moaned and made to close it on Collin’s face. He planted his boot in the jamb and shoved into the hunter’s cabin.

“Hell, Collin,” Kartha whined. “I’m bloody exhausted! Get someone else to fetch yer meat!”

“More important than that, Kartha,” Collin said, a sudden surge of certainty blowing through like wind. “Rouse yer brother. Summon the Shinfolk to the inn. High time we take matters into our own hands.”

* * *

The blizzard had passed by midnight, but the storm never left. They camped beneath the watchful gaze of the Great Mother, her stone image standing tall atop the Guardian. Mornings melted into evenings, and the Dusk and the Dawn rolled ever onward, trading day for night, their Holy Brother of High Noon carrying the sun from one Sister to the other. For as resplendent as was the sunrise in those misty highlands, Bridget’s claim on the day was ever dwarfed by Morgana, her dark mirror.

Ithica had lain awake in the musty shadows of the tent, never moving, nor eating. Hromgir lay beside her through the dusky hours, stroking her sweat-matted hair. He struck off periodically to tend the fire and walk the ground’s perimeter with Helgi’s laddie. Helgi would sit by Ithica’s bedroll, holding her thin hand, coercing her to drink Hama’s herbal remedies.

The bleeding stemmed within a day, Though the pain lingered, festered, embedding itself in her insides like a grub within shells of moldering bark. Every breath carved away at her, every exhalation discarded the shavings to rot in the soil.

Drifting between fitful sleeps, Ithica oft woke to the sounds of hushed conversation round the bonfire. Voices ethereal, words incoherent. Surely they discussed what she had lost. What had been stolen from her.

“You never need rise again,” a ghastly voice breathed in her ear, so faint, like wind hissing through the cracks of an old window frame. “How could anyone go on?”

Aye—how could anyone go on? ‘Twas the question churning in her mind, fermenting and souring and bloating. Why walk this treacherous path, only to return to a dying home, when she could lay there and save herself the trouble?

Ithica blinked. The dark of midnight shifted to the piercing rays of morning. Helgi had returned, taken Ithica’s hand in hers.

“The wizard has gone ahead, Ith,” she whispered. “Hama says ye’re well enough to walk. We can be home by nightfall, if we pack up now.”

Ithica rolled to her side, away from Helgi.

“It’s happened to me, too, ye ken.” Helgi squeezed Ithica’s shoulder and left.

Hromgir returned some time later, and shrank beneath the furs, his lone hand limp and forlorn on her protruding hip bone. His presence was all she could stomach, for surely, he too ached. Not like her; Ithica smoldered as the charred beams resting in Father John’s ashes. But he ached. ‘Twas his son also, which was taken.

Theirs. Stolen. Spent. Swallowed.

Moonlight sliced open her black dreams, illuminating the musty leathern hole where she had been hiding. Hama appeared before her as a specter, her paper-like skin shone milk-white, the darkness spreading out behind her on ebon wings.

“The Ghost of the Mountain hungers,” the old woman croaked. Hromgir stirred, tightened his hold on Ithica’s waist, but did not wake. “He has feasted upon your womb, through no fault of your own.”

Ithica scowled and groaned, squeezing shut her eyes in hopes Hama might disappear as a new dream lapped upon the battered shores of her sleepless mind.

“You have learned the secrets of the Fenris,” she went on, undeterred by Ithica’s resistance. “It is up to you to return, so no one else may again know this rapine.”

“And what do you know of it, crone?” Ithica said, lacing her words with as much poison as she could muster.

The old woman only offered a melancholy smile. “I have lived in the Ghost’s shadow since the day I entered this world, hen. Long have I wallowed in my impotence, allowing the Old God to steal away my love, who turned to dust in mine fingers. I’ve watched it feed upon the lives so many of us have toiled to maintain… I’ve allowed to consume my unborn children so it might protect us, rather than savage us.”

Hama laced together her fingers in an irregular pattern; her opposing pinkies linked, then both pairs of ring and middle stacked, arranging the runes burned into the quicks of her nails into a word of Old Skjöldrunnar: Endrborinn. The gouges glowed like dewy fir needles glittering in the Mourning Sun. A cool breeze swept into the tent, slaying the acrid stench of blood and sweat for the sweet aroma of spring. For a moment, birdsong trilled along with the rustling of a rich canopy o’erhead. Ithica gazed upward and saw not the tarpaulin of the tent, but a clear blue sky begotten with plump alabaster clouds.

Then, Ithica stood in a lush forest, her bare toes entwined with moss and lichen, her soles prickled pleasantly by red needles. Hama awaited her across a well trod path, her arms spread wide. Ithica ran and fell into the old woman, who held her with the warmth and care afforded only by a mother to her babe.

“You see it now?” Hama murmured, rubbing Ithica’s back and pressing Ithica’s head against her chest as she inhaled the crisp, fertile air. “This is what awaits us, if you can but find the will to carry on! This need not be the end. Breathe, and know the life burgeoning upon every knoll, hiding within every meadow, burrowed among the cracks of pine bark.”

Ithica breathed deep, her lungs swelling with vitality… potential. All round critters chirped and chattered, boughs swayed and shuddered, insects droned and dived.

“The Old God only takes; it offers naught in return. ‘Tis the selfish nature of black seidr.” Hama pulled back, grasping Ithica’s shoulders. “But power needs not be gained by inflicting pain. We can grow and flourish together, tend carefully the greater forces of our world like a tender gardener tilling her soil. Breathe, Ithica, and know what it means to wield a power that is not stolen, but given!“

Ithica woke with a start, early light filtering through the tent flaps. Hromgir stirred, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes as Ithica hurried up and wriggled into her trousers.

“What is it, my love? Aught disturbs you so?”

“Naught, my husband. Naught,” Ithica said, still recalling the sweet touch of spring through her tangled brown tresses. “We must return home and finish what we’ve begun.”

II

Everyone that Shelka knew—those who still lived, anyway—had packed into the common room of Collin’s Place. Well, everyone aside from her grumpy ol’ Ma, who had inexplicably written off the fat innkeep and sequestered herself at home. Just like her, Shelka mused, to shut us out when the goin’ gets tough!

Red-faced men argued and blustered, as did red-faced women. Everybody had shown up when Collin called for an old fashioned ting. The Wystran rangers gorged themselves on their meager stores; the byfoged’s elder sons ran amuck, stealing away girls in the night… more and more bodies piled up; houses were found empty and ransacked.

Farmers and fielders, hermits and herders, ranchers and rogues, all wrangled by Kartha the Hunter. His brother, Bjorn, roused the locals. Big Jorn was there, without Little Jorn, nor Little Jorn’s Ma, which Shelka thought odd—and worrying. Sergi was a ghost walking, clutching Gertrude and Angelika to her sides, haunted by the loss of Hod, whose savaged remains had been found only the night before. That stung Shelka. Hod had shown her kindness, and that was a rarity to be treasured.

Even Old Tarmun showed up, and he had not left his ranch on the edge of the Shins in years. He hunched upon a bench at the back wall, his sheathed antique greatsword thrust into the floor in front of him like a cane. She could not recall if she had ever met the codger face-to-face, and what a face it was! Sun-kissed and scarred, it was, his left eye covered with a flaking leather patch. Aught anyone ever talked about was the old man’s size… never his missing eye.

In total, there were scant more than a score of able-bodied folks left in the Village in the Shins. The dour atmosphere filling the room like sweaty musk made it seem as if the town were under siege.

“Thank you all for coming,” Collin said, standing atop his polished longtable, mud sloughing off his well-worn moccasins. “I wouldn’t have asked you out in this dire time if it were not vitally important.”

“Ye find me wife?” Big Jorn bellowed.

Collin rubbed his hands together. “Nay.”

“You’ve learned who gutted my Hod?” Sergi gasped.

Collin grimaced. “Nay.”

The crowd grumbled and snickered. “Then, surely, ye’ve located Baptiste Fournier!” cried a fielder.

The innkeep shook his big head, looked to his feet, clenching his red hands into fists. Shelka smirked, cocked her hip against the wall as a shimmer of fire sparked within ol’ Collin’s sunken eyes. 

“I’ve called you folk here because of all that’s happened. Our community is fractured. We’re being torn apart from the inside, as well as from without.”

“Aye—that we are!” Big Jorn rose, tall enough to stand eye-to-eye with Collin, though the innkeep stood upon the table. “Torn apart by that blood-drinking bitch and her cowardly father!”

“Father!” Sergi scoffed. “I’d bet he’s been slithering those cold fingers beneath her skirts all those lonely nights in that big, bloody house of theirs.”

“We’ve been lied to! We have to—” 

“Aye, we have.” Big Jorn stomped his foot. “Those Valentine toffs came into our town to feed upon us. An’ we let ’em in—just like that!”

“No, that’s not—”

“Oh, do ye mean to defend them, Collin? Come now! Ye’ve seen—”

Kartha stood suddenly, his chair squealing across the muddied floors. “Hear ‘im out, dammit! Has Collin ever steered ye wrong ‘fore?”

The throng quieted, remembering their manners. Tings, Shelka’s Da had once told her, were meant to be peaceful forums of discussion. Though they rarely were.

Collin cleared his throat. “‘Tis true! Monsieur Baptiste Fournier is indeed a blood-drinker. I heard him confess as much to Ithica and Hromgir with mine own ears.” Murmurs rolled across the room. “But ’tis not he who has ravaged us, these grueling weeks! ‘Twas not he who took my boy, nor your husband, your wife… your daughters.” A few farmers glowered at that. The local girls the byfoged’s sons had taken were released only that morning. “Fournier has ascended the Guardian, escorting Ithica and Hromgir to seek out the Fenris Tribe.”

“I knew that hairy bastard was a turncloak!” a farmer hollered.

“Striders never stray far from their packs!” cried another.

“Shut yer bloody holes!” Collin’s sweltering voice crackled across the ceiling, stunning the raucous villagers. “Morgana’s tits, you stubborn shites! Deign to let me speak?” Only after the room stood silent for a couple breaths did the innkeep continue. “They went looking for the Fenris to learn how to destroy the real menace haunting our wood. I know not its nature, though Elder Hama confirmed that we be cursed by some Ghost of  the Mountain, which the Fenris worship.”

“The Fenris?” Kartha knitted his brow. “Aye, they still follow the old ways. I’ve heard tell they’re shapechangers, go berserk in their beastial forms. Wasnae Lord Martikov pulled into town on the musher’s sled, mauled by a great wolf?”

“Aye.” Garland Musher, an outsider, a stranger, emerged from the shadows of a dark corner. “I seen the beast with mine own eyes—screamed at it till it went off. I swear it gazed upon me as if it understood my words.”

“Aught else have you seen, good man?” Collin murmured, helping Garland mount the table. “Tell the rest what you’ve told me.”

And so the musher told of the tale of Martikov’s escapades in the night; his early morning returns covered in muck and blood and hair. The unwilling harem that Garrick and Torrin had forced into the byfoged’s dungeon. The bloody torture they have enacted upon, not only Armelia Cordoba—a proven blood-drinker—but the innocent daughters of Wystran merchants and Shinfolk farmers, helpless to resist the sons of a man representing King Varland’s will, so far from Castle Morose.

Garland’s testimony had Shelka convinced. His words illuminated a lost memory that she had been wrangling with for weeks. Finally, she saw a clear picture of that strange dinner in the cave, with the vampryric Valentines, with the hermit who had saved her from the cold more times than she could count… and the Old God, standing the head of the table, his jagged antlers reaching for the spectral ceiling of the cavern.

The Shinfolk rose again into red-faced shouting matches, slinging frothing insults and rehashing old woes. Some had converted to Collin and Garland’s side; others remained convinced that all their ills would cease if they found a way to turn over Baptiste Fournier.

Finally, Old Tarmun rose from his seat in the back of the room. He need not say a word; the pall cast by his lumbering form sufficed to smother the flames of their ire.

“I’ve heard enough.” His gravelly voice commanded attention like a general who had led armies to a hundred victories. “I know this Martikov. I’ve known his lord father—and his elder brother, who now helms the Black House.” He drew his sword, its massive blade scraping from the scabbard. The mirror-bright steel glimmered in the candlelight. “‘Tis been longer than I can remember since last I drew this blade. I swore, no matter how old and feeble I might become, that I would grant no quarter, should the Snakes of Wystra come slithering into the Shins. Had I known this knight,” he spat the word as if it were a curse, “had come stinkin’ up our town, I’d have cut the bastard from scalp to stones the very night he arrived.”

No one rebutted the old man; they listened, rapt, hanging on to his every word. Shelka wondered who he was, this Old Tarmun, and what he had done in his long life to win the respect that Collin struggled to even snare a taste of.

The door burst open with a shrieking gale. The byfoged, joined by the Wystran ranger-captain, darkened the doorway, the sinking sun at their backs.

“Collin!” the Byfoged squealed. “Ye’ve organized an illegal assembly!”

“We’ve organized a ting,” Collin fired back, still atop his table. “‘Tis our right as Wystrans!”

“Ye are a foreigner, sir, and ye speak of treason!” He pointed to Garland. “And you, musher! The lord knight will deal with yer treachery in his own way… In the name of Syr Edmund Martikov, I demand ye both come peacefully for questioning.”

Old Tarmun sweltered, leveraged his sword-point at the byfoged’s chest. “I should have known you’d bend. I should carve out your lungs, hang you like an eagle, as our forebears did to heretics encroaching upon the old world.”

The captain clapped his hand to the haft of this axe. “I’ll gladly cut down the bodac, byfoged, if ye command it.”

“Please, Tarmun,” Collin said, raising his hands. “There’s no need for this. Fine—I’ll come, but we stay outside my doors. You can ask me anything you like there.”

Byfoged Jukil mulled this over, screwed up his face with an unflattering scowl. “Aye. The lord knight awaits in the dooryard, along with a host of rangers. Should we find ye guilty of conspiracy, we’ll carry out the king’s justice upon yer doorstep.”

Collin nodded grimly.

“I’m going, too,” Kartha said, standing in front of Collin. “Ye kill him; Ye’ll kill me, too.”

“Kartha…”

“Nay. ‘Tis my choice. I ain’t been feeding this village all my life just to see it go to shite. Let’s talk this out, get to the bottom of it, eh? I still believe we Shinfolk can achieve such!”

A few of the rural folk joined the three men, and left together to confront Syr Martikov’s entourage. Shelka was moved, inspired to join them. She launched from her perch by the wall, only to be stopped by a massive hand clamping upon her thin shoulder.

“Not so fast, lil’ lady,” Old Tarmun said, smirking down at her. How had the giant snuck up on her? “‘Twill get nasty out there. You stay here with me till it all blows over.”

Shelka wanted to protest, but one glance at the worried faces filling the room told her all she needed to know.

This was not her fight. Not yet.

* * *

With Ithica in Hama’s care, and Hromgir supported by Helgi and another seasoned strider, Baptiste set out for the Village in the Shins the moment the blizzard had spent itself. Starving and decrepit, he had not the endurance to sprint. Still, he walked through the nights, suffering through the bright cloud cover of day.

Baptiste’s mouth was paper dry. His fangs chattered, not with the chill, but with the anticipation of a cur staring at a flank dangled by a pit-dog trainer. Every woodland critter for a league surrounding him piqued his ravenous senses. He strained to resist his instincts to hunt, to feed.

Armelia’s aura dwindled. I must free her. 

It had been Little Jorn who told him aught that happened while they were away. It was just as I feared… Without Baptiste’s presence, Martikov had moved upon his naive apprentice. To draw me out, so he may finally carve me from this world.

It might have taken mere hours to return, if Baptiste possessed the full extent of his vampyric powers. At his present belabored stride, he would be fortunate to arrive by next nightfall—perhaps the following morning.

The winds howled. The snows raged. Draugr trailed his every step, their cerulean gazes hot upon his back. The land protested his advance. Baptiste would not be deterred.

A strident crack resounded. Baptiste snapped his attention to a shadowed child standing at the treeline. The child pointed to a ridge above. He swung about. A thunderous tremor ripped through the ice encasing the valley, and waves of snow surged down from the slopes.

“Gods—” Baptiste gasped, then took off running.

The avalanche gathered speed, roaring as a charging bull in the labyrinthine corridors sprawling within the hellish Ducal Court of Sundicar. Baptiste’s breath hitched. His thirsting stomach clutched. Snarling, he pulled upon his precious reserves of arcane potential, siphoning vigor from his unnaturally preserved muscles. ‘Twas not enough. The avalanche swallowed him. Snow and ice piled atop him, consumed a tumult much like the cyclones which plagued the rainy shores of Lake Valentine in early summer.

When the land again grew calm, he peered into a perfect dark that not even his eyes could pierce. He strained to move; he was stuck, fixed in place like a fly caught in amber.

“No!” he screamed, his icy tomb quivering in response.

“Great Mother, please, guide me… I must defeat this foe—I must free my daughter!”

Death’s silence was the only answer, just as it had been for the tortured millenium since first they met.

Baptiste began to dig, tearing his overgrown talons through the ice. Hours he worked, his flesh rending from his bones, regenerating as quickly as he tore it off, draining more and more of the ancient reserves that he had left untapped since escaping the clutches of Pandemonium. When finally he tore himself free of his icy tomb, the overcast sky was cast in red; Holy Dusk was fast approaching. He started down the uneven slope, bristling with toppled boles jutting from the snow like pikes thrust into the earth.

His heart nearly ceased as he laid eyes upon an alabaster giantess standing in the vale, her ebon wings unfurled.

It cannot be… Baptiste stumbled to her, collapsed at her feet, stripped bare of his protective clothing, the fleeting sun lancing his ashen flesh with fiery tongues. Once again, I’ve summoned Death.

“You swore to return to me when next I called.” The voice of Mother Death was multifarious; a harmonious chorus of angels singing in the heavens.

Baptiste pressed his face to cold ice. “I beg grace, Great Mother! I would have followed you home the very day my sire perished upon your blade.”

A glimmer of a smile danced across the goddess’s gorgeous face. “I had yet to call you, my son.” 

She closed her fair, slender hand into a fist and drew a blade from the void. “This blade is called Scapha. Once, my champion used it to free me from my own bonds.” She placed the flat of the blade upon Baptiste’s shoulder, then the other. “Rise, Syr Baptiste Fournier. Rise, my Chosen. Assist the people of this mountain to free themselves from my Brother’s unholy grasp… then return to me. Our work is far from finished.”

The sun fell beneath the Guardians as Baptiste rose and claimed Scapha. Upon seizing the hilt, his vigor was instantly restored; as the blood which had been used to forge the sword forever quenched his unholy thirst. The blade thrummed with the whispers of a thousand souls. All spoke of death.

* * *

“Now what did you—” The ranger-captain drove his fist into Collin’s gut; his words were quashed by blooming agony, and he fell into the snow gasping for breath. Collin stared into the dusk, the bright moon burning amid a red, fading sunset.

Again and again the captain kicked. Collin clutched his arms together and curled. The captain’s armored boots found crushing purchase with every strike. At some point the musher fell groaning beside him. 

“Bloody bastards!” Kartha drew his axe, advanced upon Jukil. The byfoged smirked, hands crossed upon his chest, as a broadhead thudded into the hunter’s chest. Kartha gasped, clutching at the shaft, then fell next to Collin.

Tears filled Collin’s bulging eyes as he looked into his friend’s lifeless gaze.

“Kill the rest,” Syr Martikov said. “Leave the innkeep and the musher.”

The rangers converged upon the farmers and fielders, disemboweling those too afraid to run, and cutting the throats of those who tried. 

Sabotons crunched in the snow. Syr Martikov crouched beside Collin, clamped his fingers round Collin’s jaw, and forced him to look into his maddened eyes. “I told you to watch the vampyre. What do you do? Speak against me. Defend the devil haunting your village. Were I more merciful, I might forgive your ignorance. No—you will come with me to Wystra once all this is done.”

“Collin!” Gerdur screamed, running across the square in her shift. “Let ‘im go!”

Collin struggled against Martikov’s grip as the captain caught up Gerdur in an iron hug. She kicked and bucked like a bobcat caught in a snare.

“What shall I do with this bonnie hussy?”

Syr Martikov casually dropped Collin’s head painfully bouncing on the ground, handling him like a small fish he had pulled from an ice-hole. The lord knight reeled on the captain. “No more Wystran women shall come to harm! Touch her and suffer twice what I inflict upon the traitor!” The lord knight snapped at a pair of low-ranking rangers. They took Gerdur from the captain’s grasp, clamping her wrists in iron shackles. “Place her back in her home. Free her when all is finished.”

“Edmund Martikov!” an accented voice thundered across the square. The rangers wheeled as one, brandishing their axes and setting arrows to bowstrings.

Baptiste Fournier manifested at the edge of gathering fog like a wraith in the night. His pallid form shimmered in the moonlight, burning crimson. Though his face was gaunt and ghoulish, his eyes were signal fires, alight with radiant rage. At his side, he held a strange, silvered longsword.

The lord knight raised a fist, calling off the rangers. “This one belongs to me. Guard the prisoners.”

* * *

“I have to do something!” Shelka screamed, thrashing against Old Tarmun’s renewed grip.

The rest of the adults only exchanged languid glances. Bjorn had collapsed in a corner, his head in his hands. Big Jorn had laid a big hand upon Sergi’s quivering back; she held tight her two golden-headed girls.

“Me Ma is out there! Let me go, damn ye! Let me go!”

“Calm, lassie…” Tarmun crooned, as if she were naught but bairn throwing a fit. She may as well have been a girning bairn, for all the power she had to help. “‘Tis naught you can do. Your Ma will be fine.”

“No! She willnae! The rangers will beat her bloody—ye heard the musher’s tale!”

“Shel…”

Shelka’s breath hitched. She looked up past her steaming tears and damp red locks hoping to see Little Jorn standing before her. Instead, ’twas Vander, his ash-faced Da lingering behind him.

“Aye?” She was breathless.

“When one of us gets hurt, you always drag us to safety… Let us do the same for you.”

Shelka stared at the wall. She had never been one to take favors, only to bestow them. That way, everyone owed her something, and she owed no one nothing. Safer that way. 

She looked to the old rancher. “How do ye ken? That—Ma will be fine?” 

He smiled, lifted his eye-patch, showing her his empty socket. Somehow Shelka saw more in the hollow of the old man’s skull than mere shadow. “I’ve seen it, lassie. Dinnae fash.” 

Shelka blinked, at peace, and uncertain as to why.

“Oy, ye old bastard!” Big Jorn had risen, glowered over Tarmun, who still sat, now holding Shelka like he might a cherished granddaughter. “Instead of yappin’ with a lassie, how ‘bout you take that great stinkin’ blade of yers and teach those shites a lesson? Or are ye too craven to stand by your mighty words?”

The elderly rancher rose to meet his challenger. He stood a head taller than even Big Jorn, who shrank beneath Tarmun’s cyclopean gaze.

“Aye,” Tarmun growled, thrusting the point of his naked blade into the floorboards. “Might be you’re right.” Big Jorn blinked at that. Tarmun lumbered toward the door, his sword now resting on his shoulder. “What you reckon? Seven rangers and an armored Martikov knight?” He grunted. “I’ve gotten through worse odds.” A proud smirk on his lips, Tarmun looked over his shoulder. “I fought a dragon, once.”

“Did ye kill it?” Big Jorn asked, eyes wide.

Tarmun laughed.

“Wait!” cried a fielder, leaning on a window sill. “It’s Fournier; he’s returned!”

“Ho!” Tarmun chuckled. “S’pose he’ll take it from here.”

“Bloody coward.” Big Jorn huffed. “Ye’ll let the toff do yer fighting?”

Baptiste is back? Shelka’s mind raced; images of Armelia in shackles, how terrible it must be in that dungeon. ‘Twas my antics which landed her there… caused all this strife. She backed into the inn’s shadowed corridors as the big men argued. Red-faced farmers hollered. Big Jorn spat his rage on the old rancher’s face. I need to make this right.

Old Tarmun flicked his wan gaze to Shelka for a moment, winked with his good eye.

She slipped out the back door, unnoticed.

* * *

Baptiste stood on the edge of the square. Unfamiliar Wystran rangers formed a half-circle behind Martikov. The lord knight spat on the ground, leered up at Baptiste with cold eyes bitten with hunger. He had seen such hunger countless times; he had lived with it, nagging at the back of his mind every day of his unnaturally long life.

No longer—for the Great Mother Death had called him home, given him charge. This night, perhaps for the first time since the fall of his sire, he knew the full extent of his powers and naught of hunger.

Brandishing Scapha above his shoulders, the blade heavy and unfamiliar in Baptiste’s hands; he never had been much of a swordsman beyond the castle training he underwent, centuries ago. Martikov took up a low olber stance, which Baptiste had read about in manuals but had no notion how to counter. He was a journeyman duelist—if he was being generous—and unarmored. Martikov carried himself with the poise of a life-long master, wearing a full-suit of plate and mail, though he lacked a helm. If not for the thousand spirits haunting Baptiste’s holy blade, calling for tainted blood, he might have been grossly outmatched.

Martikov lunged, throwing a cursory thrust at Baptiste’s chest. With instincts, not his own, Baptiste parried, batting the blade aside. The lord knight’s blade glinted silver in the rubrous moonlight; the strike would have killed the vampyre then and there. But with inhuman speed Baptiste strafed, slashed and back-slashed, his blade biting only steel breastplate. Martikov smirked, grasped the front of Baptiste’s tunic and threw him sprawling on the ground.

Rolling back on his feet in an instant, Baptiste knew no pain; though now he understood that traditional swordplay was useless against his armored foe.

“What do you hope to accomplish? To make yourself a jest?” Martikov laughed.

The rangers watched on in mortified silence.

Baptiste shook his head, reorienting his off-hand to grasp his blade near the point in a half-sword grip. The lord knight did not wait until Baptiste regained his bearings; he unleashed a litany of slashes and arcing cuts, his silvered blade screaming through the frigid air. Puffs of fog expelled from his mouth in rhythmic, disciplined breaths. Despite the slush at their feet, Martikov placed every step with calculated intention, building an unshakable foundation. He advanced, forcing Baptiste on his heels, desperately parrying and back-pedaling away from Martikov’s deadly blade.

Just one cut from that cleaver and I’m dust. He chided himself for his sense of honor; his insistence to fight fair. I did not earn my matron’s blessing by taking a well-trod path…

Laughing wildly, not unlike Ramr Fenris’s maddened guffaw, Martkov’s attacks came faster, more ravenous, that bestial hunger burning brighter in his umbrous eyes, each moment his blade striving to split Baptiste in twain.

The lord knight’s patience ran thin. Slaver sloughed from his mouth and he began to over swing, shedding his mastered discipline for lascivious desperation. He tore forward, snarling and snapping his teeth. He cleaved overhead. Baptiste dove to the side, lashing his blade at the knight’s ankle. Martikov stumbled, slipped on a patch of ice, falling backward in a clangor of links and plates.

Baptiste slithered forward with imperceivable speed, planting a foot on the wrist of Martikov’s sword arm, driving the tip of his blade beneath the gap between his breast plate and armpit. Mail split apart; Scapha hissed delight as its chthonic steel tasted beast blood. Pressing all his weight on the pommel, Baptiste imagined the suppurating squelch that would accompany an impaling.

But Martikov roared, the Old God’s own agony ringing in Baptiste’s mind. The blood moon raged and flared, painting the sky the color of the lord knight’s blood. Incongruous, monstrous hands closed round Scapha’s blade and tossed it aside. Baptiste was flung a stone’s throw, his back cracking against the log walls of Collin’s inn.

Syr Edmund Martikov rose as a bulbous, gangrenous crossbreed of man and wolf.

Baptiste smiled. Now, I shall unveil all I have thus held back.

* * *

As she had done countless times before, Shelka expertly and covertly scuttled across the darkened avenues of the village. The clangs and scrapes of a sword fight rang stridently at her back as she made her way to the byfoged’s cliffside longhouse.

She gripped her Da’s bared silver fish knife in both hands as she came to a cellar door, hanging ajar. Chittering laughter rumbled from deeper within the dungeon. Creeping her way down the creaking stairs, torchlight guttered, barely illuminating her way. Reaching the bottom, Shelka heard a man’s voice, Torrin’s, and darted inside, clinging to the shadows of the dungeon wall.

Armelia dangled from chains mounted to the stone ceiling at the end of the hall, the sumptuous gown she had worn the night of Ignar’s death soiled and torn. Torrin stood before her, his back turned to Shelka.

“Tell me, she-bitch!” Torrin cackled, cracking a scourge upon the Valentine girl’s back. “Where is your master?” Crack! “Tell me! Hah-hah, come now!” Crack!

Every lash split open a rent upon the girl’s alabaster shoulders. Every breath knitted the wound back together, unmarred, as if nothing had happened. Torrin lashed with sequential rhythm, as if the act of torture was child’s play to him.

Sickness welled up in Shelka’s gut. Somewhere up above, a lycan roar sent tremors through the earth, and down her spine. Shameful images of the bloody beast that tore Ignar to pieces seared upon Shelka’s eyelids.

Torrin turned from his game at the noise, then looked down at Shelka confused. “Hell ye doin’ here, brat?”

Shelka pounced, driving Snorri Morn’s guttin’ knife into Torrin’s guts. She withdrew it; he gasped, fell to his knees, pawing at the spurting hole in his belly. She drove it thudding into his chest. The boy gasped, and slumped over.

“Torrin!” came the elder brother’s voice from the entrance. “You hear that racket in town?”

Shelka scurried to the boy’s corpse, yanking a tarnished iron key from his belt.

“Torrin!” Stair planks squealed under heavy footfalls.

Shelka wheeled toward Armelia, the girl’s blank face suddenly animated in surprise.

“I’m sorry!” Shelka shook her head frantically, fumbling the key in the latch. “I’m so sorry.”

Armelia looked at her with unreadable, scarlet eyes, almost alien.

“What in hell?” Garrick spat, drawing his mace. “Torrin!”

Chains clattered upon the floor.

Armelia descended upon him like a tower’s moonlit shadow at midnight. Shelka witnessed naught of Garrick’s demise, though his throaty scream rattled her ears. The vampyress relished in the blood, a moan’s whisper escaping from the back of her throat as she drank. Then, she rose slowly from the boy’s corpse and again turned her sanguine gaze upon Shelka.

Shelka swallowed, unsure if she would live to see the next moment.

“Baptiste is here,” Aremlia said, her voice luminous, ethereal. ‘Twas not a question.

Shelka nodded her red head.

“He’s unveiled the full extent of his sorcery. I must help him.”

“Aye,” Shelka croaked, sucking in a tremulous breath. “I’ll come with ye.”

“Go home, Shelka Morn.” Armelia had already started up the stairs. She stopped for a moment. “And thank you… Know that none of this was your doing.”

The vampyress vanished, and Shelka was left alone with her roiling thoughts and the dead bodies of boys she had known all her life. Rotten boys… but boys she had known.

* * *

Collin rose to his feet as the rangers screamed. He had heard of skinchangers who wore the guises of wolves and bears; but never had he imagined a creature so foul.

Martikov stood on his hind-legs, his arms had grown gangly, long, bulbous with overwhelming thews. Patchwork fur pierced a bed of grayish-pink flesh, which sloughed off him in dry husks; blood and pus wept from the web of lacerations spreading across his shoulders, his wide chest, jutting with misplaced bones. His snout was long, open now, in a ululating howl that quaked the earth, sent icicles crashing down from frozen gutter-drains. Rows upon rows of teeth obtruded from his maw like basalt crags obtruding from rough coastal waters, his slaver foaming and simmering as sea-water upon a bed of packed sand.

The ranger-captain called to rally his men, but they scattered at the horrific sight of the accursed knight. Martikov pounced on him, obliterating bones and flesh beneath the unfathomable strength of his jaws. The captain’s death knell was drowned by the beast’s ghastly, blood-gorged guffaw.

Gerdur sprinted past them to the inn. “Shel!” 

“Cannae…” Garland gasped. “Never thought…”

Collin grabbed the musher by the hem of his tunic. “Run!”

He had meant to follow Gerdur inside. Instead he found himself fleeing down the avenue, dragging the musher behind him as carnage incarnate snapped at their heels. The Martikov Wolf bounded through the square as if it had infiltrated a chicken coop, tearing rangers apart and devouring the pieces still spurting blood. To the beast, men were no less tender than a roast hen.

Heaving, pumping his legs, Collin felt as if he had entered a nightmare—the kind in which you cannot escape nor fight back. Life and breath drained from him, while bruises and fatigue burned in his ribs with every step.

“Syr Martikov!” cried Jukil, his ornamental sword trembling in his grasp. “Wait! ‘Tis me, the king’s man—” His words were replaced by a gurgling wheeze, like the bubbling of thick broth. The Martikov Wolf cackled as if the byfoged’s final words were a wondrous jest.

A burst of light and an incorporeal wave of force sent Collin flying upon his back. Baptiste Fournier rose before the blood moon, wreathed with foul, crimson magics.

* * *

Baptiste hovered amid the rooftops, riding upon a red cloud of sorcery. All around him ice melted, boles cracked, hibernating insects burst. Power unlike any other surged through his veins. He felt a living man again.

He channeled sweet potential from the corpses of rangers, gathering it in bundles like hot embers until he could not bear to withhold it, then rained it down upon the bloody path paved by the Martikov Wolf.

The sorcery was loose and imprecise. He missed his every shot, scoring plastered walls, gouging craters wherever the beast had been an instant prior. In his ecstasy, Baptiste noticed too late that he had drawn upon the living, too. Scrambling villagers he could not identify in the chaos fell to the greedy pull of his sanguinary sorcery.

Slurping up the last of his victim’s innards, the Martikov Wolf turned up his dripping snout to the wizard above. Baptiste hurled a wave of crackling energy which cascaded upon the fell beast, staggering it to its knee for a blink.

Then, in a blur of movement, the Martikov Wolf gained the roof of an adjacent cottage and leapt into the air, wrapping its arms around Baptiste in a bone-splintering embrace. Claws rent the pallid flesh from his back, razor fangs pierced his neck. Vision flickering, Baptiste accepted his death.

Careening to the ground in a geyser of slush and earth, his head lolled to the side as the Martikov Wolf dug his sniffing nose into Baptiste’s split stomach. Scapha protruded from a mound of upturned soil next to him His eyes fell to Armelia, standing in an alleyway, her eyes shining with grief—that same spread of agony which smeared her face as she watched her mother perish, denying the aid Baptiste so wished to give. Oh, Sylvia! I have failed you—I promised to watch over your daughter… our daughter…

Fading fast, Baptiste clawed his fingers into his own split insides and pulled upon the dead blood of an elder vampyre. Baptiste screamed with the voices of a thousand heretics, the lost souls whose ethereal crimson had been forged into Scapha. The fabled blade pulled itself from the ground of its own accord and plunged into the beast’s bulging back. A burst of light, a deafening clarion, and the Martikov Wolf bloated, belched—fulminated into utter disassembly….

* * *

A sorcerous explosion shattered the windows of every cottage in the village. Shelka ran toward the source, rounded the street corner, her ears ringing. She skidded to a stop at the edge of the square; she dared not intrude on what she saw there.

Armelia sat on her knees in a heap of charred remains. Her shoulders heaved with every straining breath. In her hands, Armelia held a gleaming silver sword. The vampyress ran her finger along the length of the blade, sealing her tears into the imperceptible grain of the mirror-polished metal.

Shelka thought back to that week in the woods with her Da, what all she would do for a chance to return to that time, if only for a moment. Sick spread across her chest.

Armelia threw back her head, tore open her mouth in a silent howl, her knuckles white round the the grip of her father’s sword.

III

I am naught but a bag of bones, animated by a will not mine own. I know nothing but the loathing of a man I wished above all to murder, and whose murder was stolen from me, snatched from my very fingers.

I am a bloody bag of bones, rattling and clacking in miserable, macabre percussion. A small echo within the symphonic legion that swallows me, makes of me a speck of salt in a vast tenebrous ocean. The screams of the damned swell in the overture of our lord’s final act, lashing at my immaterial senses like eager waves prodding at heaven’s shores, never taking hold of even a fleeting semblance of salvation.

The Old God, whom I now know had once worn the face of the Demon King Grahtz, jitters and writhes in the ecstasy of his black magic. His wheezing cachinnations hiss from invisible gills lining the fetid flesh beneath his farcical cervine coat. He reaches and probes, grasping and groping for purchase amid a landscape which has turned on him.

Long has the Old God held dominion o’er the highlands, the sprawling gusty tracks of the Withershins, the frigid peaks of the Guardians. Long has he donned and doffed masks of divines like so many pairs of woolen winnigas, each dyed with the remains of travesty after travesty.

The Old God; Grode; the Ghost of the Mountain; the Sticks; Demon King; Grahtz… High Noon. I have discovered that I have sold my soul to the God of Countless Names, the Deceiver, who had deceived me into believing that I had saved young Shelka Morn those years ago, which now felt eons away, as my awareness lingered in bitter limbo.

No, perhaps my odious rage against Snorri Morn is not all I know; so too, do I mourn the damnation of his neglected daughter, never given a chance to pledge herself to benign powers.

I am naught but a bag of bones, raised from the dead to walk in mindless rage, cursed to contemplate my lifetime of sins, yet never earn the right to atone myself of their weight. I wander to the shore of souls, lapping and undulating in the Old God’s haunt. A cave, I have realized, not carved of earth… but of infernal stone hidden beneath the bedrock.

A heart pulses, in some lower plane. Thump, thump.

Ten cerulean orbs wink open before me. Five small hands reach out and touch my smoky mass. At the same time, I can see their living hands touching my heart, decomposing in the soil of my love’s garden where she had buried me.

I step into the snow and feel the cold bite my stiff toes. I gaze down at my hands, strong and gray and untiring. 

No longer am I a bag of bones; I am flesh and sinew.

I am awake.

* * *

Following Baptiste’s impossibly wide tracks, Ithica and Hromgir crested Spurn’s Ridge and gazed upon the distant rooftops of their village. A great plume of black smoke rose from the square. A pyre. Ithica exchanged worried glances with Helgi, then looked to Hama.

“The sunrise burns crimson,” Hama said. “Bridget mourns, this day.”

“Aye.” Hromgir laid his hand atop the blade of his axe. “And the wind reeks of charred flesh.” He looked to the strider who had guided Helgi from town. “Your blade is sharp, my brother?”

“Always,” the boy said, half drawing the messer hanging from his girdle. “Must admit—I’ve only used it to cut meat and logs.”

“Morgana willing, ’twill remain so.” Ithica shielded her eyes against the glare. The village stood as it always had, but somehow lopsided, as if the earth itself had shifted while she was away. “Come, we must make haste while the weather favors us.”

The troupe descended the final track home. The rough terrain smoothed to mule beaten trails, distant buildings rose and leveled. Wind howled; droplets of breath froze in crystalline beads in Hromgir’s moustache. All was silent beyond the crunch of footsteps in hard-packed snow. Not even the trees dared to shiver, nor did a pinecone deign to fall.

Little Jorn nervously whispered. Helgi crooned, rubbing his shoulders. “Ye’ve done so well, my sweet, so well. Dinnae fash, now. We’ve almost made it.”

Ithica placed a hand on aching her stomach, a phantom pain radiating through her pelvis, down her legs, and to her numbed toes. Would you have been a boy, my sweet?

As if sensing her trouble, Hromgir touched her back, between the shoulders. They both looked ahead, neither saying a word… Only his warmth kept her walking. If she had been forced to make this fraught journey alone, surely, she would have flung herself off the ridge.

The village was quiet, clouds of smoke drifted through the air indifferent to the howling screams of distant gales. Shinfolk had gathered in the square, standing with their heads bowed before the ashes of a massive funeral pyre, recently spent.

Ithica searched among the crowd. Who still walks among the living?

“Da!” Little Jorn cried, running ahead of the troupe.

“Bridget’s Mercy!” Big Jorn called, emerging from the throng. He knelt as his son crashed into him, then swept him up in his arms, hammering weeping kisses upon the boy’s head. “Gods in Hell, laddie, I thought ye gone!”

The big man looked up at Helgi, incriminating contempt splitting his gnarled face. Tears filled her eyes.

The crowd moved about, spilling from the square to form a wall of bodies round them. Ithica’s chest ached, confronted by the mass of haunted faces and discordant stares. Sergi stood alone, her girls clutched to her sides. Bjorn lingered at the edge, staring at his feet.

“Thank the Mothers, and all that’s good,” came a low, familiar lilt. Collin appeared before Ithica, drew her into a hug. He turned to Hromgir, clapped him on the shoulder, then his eyes traveled down the length of his left arm. “Gods! What’s happened?”

“I must ask the same of you,” Hromgir said, crossing his arms, enfolding his empty wrist beneath his furs.

“‘Tis been a fraught few weeks, since you two departed with Baptiste Fournier…” Collin sighed. Ithica and Hromgir exchanged glances, looked back at the troubled innkeep. “Come. Join us inside, and I’ll tell all.”

Together, the Shinfolk shambled toward the inn. The village was in as much disarray as were their hearts. Ithica withheld her gasps as they passed by leaning, crumbled cabins, mounds of broken glass, fouled blood spatter on the walls and cobbles, and scorched craters embedded in the road.

Inside, the inn had not fared much better. Where usually every table and chair and adornment was placed according to the whims of Collin’s precise eye, everything had been toppled and strewn about the floor. A horde of cabinets, chairs, and a bed frame had been shoved down the foyer, as if to form a barricade that had just been torn down.

They sat together for a while in silence at the long table. Naught but the occasional whisper, perhaps a weary chortle, slipped out. Collin disappeared into the kitchen, emerged again half an hour later with Gerdur Morn, who spread the table with plates of stale bread, salted fish, and foraged blueberries. Cups of icemelt and days old ale were passed round, and, as the drink flowed, easing parched throats, so too did it ease reluctant tongues. Conversation eddied and flowed. And though they were scarred from a night of unfathomable horror, the Shinfolk finally broke their fasts together. 

Ithica took in the survivors; many she knew were present, and thankfully, all of the children who once visited her garden. Some were strangers; the musher, the farmers and fielders who lived a ways down the road, the one-eyed half-giant, who would be more at home among the Fenris.

Sitting at the head of the table, clutching Gerdur’s hand, Collin told them all that had transpired in their absence: Collin’s eavesdropping, the arrival of the rangers, the byfoged’s despotic spiral, Armelia’s imprisonment, Martikov’s deception… and his curse.

“I shouldnae have brought the lord knight here,” Garland Musher said, his head in his hands. “I should have left him to bleed, went home, saved me dogs. ‘Tis not honorable, but how many might have been spared if I were more guttersnipe?”

“None of us would have survived the night, if not for Monsieur Fournier’s timely arrival.” Collin shuddered. “‘Twas his sorcery… Aye. And his sacrifice, which saved us.”

Chill spread across Ithica’s chest, a bitter mistral swelling in her blood. “Sacrifice? He’s—dead?”

Collin picked at his overgrown nails. He and Gerdur looked at each other, then said in unison: “Aye.”

“Where’s Armelia?”

“At home, mourning.” Gerdur rubbed Collin’s back. “She has not said a word since Shel released her—Shel’s been holed up in one of the rooms. I reckon Gunhild, too, is still at home, being as she’s lost all but her infant daughter.”

“I’ll check in on her soon,” Helgi said.

“Hell ye are, woman!” Big Jorn said, wrapping his massive hand round her wrist. “Hell if ye leave me sight again!”

Helgi twisted, palmed her husband’s shoulder, breaking his hold. “Lay another hand upon me, and ye’ll never see me nor yer son again.” She retreated to the rear wall, where she leaned against the wood paneling, her muscled arms crossed.

Big Jorn looked to the table for support, but found none.

“So,” Collin cleared his throat, “tell us, Ithica, of what you learned among the Fenris. What is it that truly haunts us? What evil has fed upon us since our arrival?”

Ithica inhaled sharply, closed her eyes, then rose. Exhaling, she cast her gaze upon the weary, the worried, the lost. All of them were looking to her for answers, direction. 

“Grode, the Old God of Summer, was carried here from the homeland, in a box of Skjold soil. I dinnae ken when, exactly, but ’twas ‘fore any of us came to live in the Shins. I fear that we have always been haunted by this ghost of a dying god… The Fenris sacrifice their bairns to the Old God in exchange for the power to change skins so they may hunt as wolves, and for their lands to remain temperate throughout the frigid winters. Their forebears, who brought the Old God here, made a pact, giving dominion o’er the land to him.

“Their village is much like ours. The woods surrounding are frozen and treacherous, but fallen snow never sticks upon roads, nor the fields. Mine own garden has stayed warm, even in the thick of winter; we, too, have made a pact with Grode—though I dinnae ken if our predecessors did so of their own accord. Since we’ve ne’er sacrificed our young, the Old God simply takes what it desires. All those bairns gone wanderin’ to the woods found not chill, but jaws. All those yet unborn,” Ithica placed a shaking hand upon her hard, flat stomach. A deep ache within spurned her touch, “the unrealized spirits we’ve bled… were taken from us, to maintain the Old God’s hold on our lands.”

Hromgir rose and drew his axe, raised it above his head. Ithica drew her knife. “We must put an end to his devil!” she cried. “We must destroy this dying god, who would sooner subsist upon our starving young than do us any good!”

The ashen faces of the Shinfolk ignited, then, like a bloom of fiery marigolds spreading across the table. They rose and cried out, taking each other in their arms.

“How are we to destroy this dying god?” Collin murmured amid the din. The table quieted as the realization of the inquiry settled in. “We’re simple folk. Aside from Old Tarmun and your good husband, not a one o’us is a warrior.”

“I have taught Ithica and Helgi to assist me,” Elder Hama said, her stance relaxed, her face austere. “I shall call upon the white seidr which will aid us.”

“I’ll send a bloody shaft through the bastard!” Bjorn cried. “For me brother!”

Garland Musher stood. “I’ve lost everything… So—ya. I’ll go, too” He laughed, slamming his stein on the table, now scuffed and dented. “Nay, not everything. Still got a couple o’ starving dogs left to me. Whether they feed on the flesh of gods or demons, makes no difference.”

More of the men joined in with turbulent bravado and unfounded bragging. Disorganized and inept, a mob had been raised like levies answering the call of the crown.

Again, Collin had been the one to quiet the arousal. “I’m bloody glad to see all you folk finally agreein’ on some’—but where is this Old God? Surely, we can’t just go blunderin’ through the woods, calling his name. And the question remains, how do we ensure a god is destroyed? This menace ain’t like mice infesting a coop; this be some elder being beyond our ken!”

“I ken where the Old God lives,” Shelka Morn piped from where she stood in the corridor leading to the guest rooms. She was dressed in furs and muddy boots, a silvered knife hanging from her belt. “I’ve met him. He has an army of ghosts—our ghosts… He let me see me Da, while I was there.”

Gerdur Morn twisted her face. “What in hell are you on about, Shel?”

“When I went missin’, that’s where I was! Talkin’ with the Old God, the ghost of me Da, Snorri Morn. I only remembered last night—just popped in me head.”

“This be bloody hogswill.” Big Jorn huffed. “Go back to yer room, lassie!”

“I’m nae lying! I told ye’all about the wolf-knight! I told ye’all that Armelia was innocent! I’m no liar—I’m no runaway.”

“Shelka…” Ithica sighed, seeing the red-headed girl in a new light. Now she saw the shadow looming over young Shelka Morn, the very same that still clung to Ithica, that had stolen the child from her womb. “You’re lucky to be alive. The Old God feasts upon the young.”

“The Old God will not feast upon Shelka.” 

The throng turned as one. 

Armelia stood in the foyer, the front door hanging open behind her. She was wearing worn travel boots and a plaid woolen cloak wrapped about her linen tunic. A glinting longsword hung from her hand at her side. Chittering whispers seeped in with the draft. “It has darker plans for her yet. Baptiste and I were there with her that night. We had hoped to learn what the foul beast was after, if we could appease it and ease the strain on all of you. I know now that nothing shall sate its hunger.” She raised her blade and gazed into the etched pommel. “Baptiste had encountered this foe before, though I know not if he had realized before he… I know, now, what manner of horror we face. A heart beats within the deepest point of the Old God’s lair. I shall drive this blade into its putrid flesh, and send the demon back into the pits of Pandemonium whence it came!”

Collin nodded. “We’ve a plan, then. All able-bodied men and women will follow Armelia to the Old God; we will fight; and the beast will be vanquished. Some must remain to watch over the young and infirm. All in favor, say aye!”

Fervent ayes rolled about the room. ‘Twas decided, then. Either the Old God would perish that night—or they would.

* * *

In all his years, Collin never thought he would see his community come together for a meal. He almost laughed; all it had taken was a slaughter. Once all was said and decided, folks went home to dress for travel and violence. Most did not own a sword nor mail, but many did have helms and battered shields, passed down from their fathers and grandfathers who had fought against Valencia in the First Rebellion. Everyone had an axe, many even carried spears.

Collin withdrew a chest under his bed, emblazoned with his father’s coat of arms—an eagle shrouded in laurels—unlocking it with a black iron key he had thought never to touch again. Opening the lid, he scowled at the gleaming treasures within. Among them, was a shining shirt of mail, given to him by some Earl back home, in hopes Collin would marry the Earl’s lowly daughter. He donned the mail over his tunic. Beneath it was a castle-forged shortsword, which he had stolen from his lord father on his way out of the castle.

Realmtamer it had been dubbed in wars long passed. And an apt name it was, now that the Shins had fallen into chaos. Da would roll in his grave if he knew his blade would be wielded alongside Northern plebians! He knew nothing of swordplay, nothing of his boyhood training had stuck. Such skills had always belonged to his brothers’. Here’s hoping I’ll never need draw it.

As the ragtag militia mustered in the town square, Collin saw to it that all the children were accounted for. They remained in the common room with their parents: Gerdur, her pale arms wrapped about Shelka; Sergi with her Gertrude and Angelika; Big Jorn and Helgi with Little Jorn; Young Vander and his elderly father, with whom Collin had never before spoken.

These are all that’s left of our tomorrow.

Collin knelt before Shelka. “I know I’m not your Da,” he said, avoiding her bright eyes. “I’ll never be him—but I’ve come to love your Ma, and I love you. Please—stay here. Don’t go runnin’ off again.”

“I can help,” Shelka insisted, furious.

“Aye—I’ve seen all the good you’re capable of. Which is why you must stay behind. You’ve a way with folks, and we’ll need a tactician to lead us to the future.”

She eased at that, though she remained irritated. Shelka Morn always wanted to take on more than anyone had ever asked her to carry. Perhaps that’s because we’ve asked too much of her; she’ll only adopt more burdens to prove herself.

He rose, melted as Gerdur’s wet eyes locked with his. “Come back to me, Collin,” she gasped. “I cannae take much more.”

“Neither can I. I’ll be back.”

“Dinnae make a promise, fool.”

“As you wish,” he smiled, his overgrown moustache tickling his lip. They kissed and embraced and then Collin turned from her, before he lost the courage.

On the other side of the room, Helgi and Big Jorn bickered about which of them would go. She insisted that he stay with Little Jorn. “I’ve gone this far for Ithica, I’m nae goin’ to stop now. She and Hama need me there.”

The big man tried to argue, but his wife quashed it before he could get in a well-thought word. Helgi walked out the door.

Collin followed her, stopped on the porch, where sat Old Tarmun on a foot stool, grinding a whetstone upon his fine greatsword.

“I’ll be at ease knowing one such as you will be here,” Collin said. “In case another bloody wolf comes howlin’.”

“Aye,” the old man chuckled. “We’ve all a part to play—though I yearn for my younger days; I’d be first in that blasted cave, racing the Valentine girl to the bottom so I might be the one to thrust Redquill into this Old God’s heart. Should be a Wystran who frees the Shins, not some posh invader.”

“Redquill? Your sword?”

He grinned madly. “Aye. ‘Twas me Da’s—forged long ago in the fires of Castle Morose, ‘fore the squirrelly Varlands took the northern crown.”

“It’s seen many a battle.”

“Aye. It has.”

Collin sighed, shuffled side-to-side. “Alright then. Pray for me.”

“Aught will be well.” Old Tarmun offered a cyclopian wink. “Have faith.”

That summoned a laugh. Faith that we’ll slay a god!

Without looking back, Collin emerged into the overcast afternoon, joined Hromgir and Ithica at the front of the militia, and began the perilous march into the haunted woods.

* * *

Garland Musher marched with the Shinfolk through the frigid wood. Loping at his heel were a massive, uncut Katharc Malamute and an estrous Kuzo Husky, both with ribs and hips protruding from months of hard pulling and weeks without proper grub. ‘Twas the first time he could remember that he had found himself on a track without a sled. His dogs ran wild alongside the torch bearing mob, frothing after hares and martens to no avail. They were no hunters, never had been.

That day, they all were hunters.

Having left in the morning, they spent the daylight hours wading through piled snow, cutting down the pervasive boughs and bushes leaning to block their path, as if the wood itself knew their grim purpose. The Shinfolk marched on with glistening fury in their eyes, and the old-world fire smoldering in their hearts, as they chopped away branches and burrowed through the man-high drifts, toiling to ascend the steep trail of the Guardians.

‘Twas dusk when finally they confronted the black hole in the earth at the northern edge of the Shins; they had crested a peak, then dropped into a gorge, the mountain yawning open with unhinged jaws. The Shinfolk shivered. Garland’s dogs whimpered. Garland let out a tremulous sigh, his breath billowing out in a thick plume.

“What’s the plan, then?” Collin whispered.

Collin looked to Hromgir, then to Ithica, who looked to Hama.

“The troupe should go in first.” The old woman pointed to the cave mouth. “Ensure the path is safe. We’ll follow close behind, and I’ll work my seidr.”

Armelia drew her uncanny sword, her crimsoned eyes lit with a murderous luster.

The Shinfolk parted. At the rear was Hama, Ithica, and Helgi in a tight triangle, joined by Hromgir, who was fixed to his wife’s heel. Then there were the rest of them.

Bjorn nudged Garland’s shoulder, reminding him to draw Martikov’s silvered broadsword, to unsling the borrowed round-shield from his back. The hunter held his brother’s bow, a rusted broadhead set upon the hardened ashwood.

“I’ve got yer back, Musher.” Bjorn smiled. “We stragglers need to stick together, eh?”

“Aye.” Garland swallowed, a burning sickness scraping down his throat. “That we do.”

“You ever swing a sword?”

“Nay. Sharpened it once.”

“Keep the edge straight,” said the strider lad, who came with Ithica. “Else that fancy sword will be little better than a club.”

“Send your dogs in,” Collin said, drawing his own shortsword, which hung awkwardly from his grasp. “I want to know if all these weapons are truly necessary.”

Garland shook his head, looking down forlornly at his dogs. Shouldnae have brought you, pups. I’ve done ye wrong. A sharp whistle shrieked from his chapped, peeling lips. The malamute snapped to attention, his big hazel eyes darting about, uneasy upon his ghostly white face. Another whistle, short and terse, sent the dog sprinting and barking into the cave.

Silence. The husky laid flat at Garland’s feet, a whine like a creaky door hinge ringing from her chest.

A gale exhaled from the cave, carrying a wail like the shrieking yips of Hellriders galloping down a distant hill in the hundreds. Thunder like multifarious hooves made the ground shudder. Garland’s malamute did not return when he called. The men exchanged glances, untold terror set into the lines of their windswept faces. Collin bared his teeth, sucked in a seething breath, and started down into the cave. Reluctantly, the rest followed.

Garland looked to the husky. “Stay.” And he joined the death march.

* * *

“Ye went on a bloody adventure wi’out me?” Shelka whined, as the rest of the children sat listening to Little Jorn’s tale with rapt attention.

Little Jorn, who had taken the helm of the Shin children since his triumphant return from the frigid track, neither grinned nor cringed beneath Shelka’s criticisms. “Aye, Shelka Morn. I did what ye’ve always told me to do; be a man.”

“I didnae mean for ye t’do it on yer own…”

“Cheer up, Shel!” Angelika said. 

“Cheer up, Shel!” Gertrude echoed, her Ma sitting and watching not far behind. “‘Twas you who led the grownups to the monster.”

“Nay.” She shook her red head. “‘Tis Armelia leading them. They only believed me ’cause she vouched for me, when just yesterday they were ready to hang her!”

That’s the worth of a runaway’s word. Less reliable than a hiss escaping the gallows.

“We all’re just as helpless as you,” Vander said. “There’s no need to always charge into battles. Ye’re just a lassie, Shel.”

“Stop calling me that!” Shelka rose and kicked a nearby chair clattering to the floor; that shut them up. She balled her fists white and stomped off to the kitchen where—Morgana willing—no one would follow her. Gods, how she wanted to tear her hair out.

All these folk marching on the Old God, and I’m stuck here being chastised by bairns!

In the kitchen, she plopped her arse in the middle of the floor, crossed her arms to better stew and ponder. She had not much time to simmer down when a hard finger tapped her shoulder. She yelped, boiling over with a litany of startled curses. Old Tarmun sat cross-legged behind her, wiping spittle from his ratty beard as he laughed heartily, sending tremors through the floorboards.

How does this giant keep gettin’ the jump on me?

“I wish to be alone,” Shelka said, once her heart returned to her chest.

“Aye—as do we all. I’ve spent much time on me own…” Tarmun’s lone eye glittered. “You and I are of a kind, young Shelka Morn, we both yearn for adventure, for glory; not ’cause it will gain us anything, but because we cannot bear to let aught else claim it for themselves.”

Shelka gasped as the old man’s eye bore into her, as if he could see past all those hard, cold walls she had spent so many lonely nights building up after her Da left her. She found words flitting off her tongue, uninhibited. “Not just that, I need to prove that I’m nae what they say, that my words matter. I’m no runaway. I’m no liar!”

“Ah…” Tarmun scratched his eyepatch. “Yes, I see. No matter how hard I fought to prove otherwise, nigh every man I encountered treated me as no better than a roach. We are of a kind; but you, lass, have yet to be defeated.”

“I want to help them. I need to help them!”

The old man smiled, the kind of smile a father would grace upon his daughter when she had finally proven herself a woman; the day she marries, or the day he dies… the day she goes off on her own quest in life, unburdened by expectation yet supported by loving thoughts.

Old Tarmun pointed to her girdle. “Your blade is sharp?”

Shelka drew her Da’s guttin’ knife. ‘Twas sharp enough to split open Torrin. She nodded.

“Go, then. I’ll not stand in your way.”

She rose, made for the hallway. He did not budge, nor did his eye follow her. She thought to thank him, but felt somehow that was contradictory. Instead, she crept to the backdoor, then, as her moccasins touched the cold earth, she ran as fast as she could to the snow-shrouded Sticks, charged headlong toward the toothless maw of the Old God’s cave.

* * *

The cave was cast in a perfect dark. Even with half a dozen torches lighting the way, Collin squinted into the smothering gloam. He began to sweat profusely; the air was sweltering; the packed earth at his feet was dry. When they descended deep enough, the ground turned to hot stone, which burned his soles if he stood in place for too long.

After shambling in the shadows, they came into a wide, open rotunda lit with the pinkish, silver light of the corrupted harvest moon. The Shinfolk gasped as one at the wonder above their heads: an open ceiling looking out to the sprawling night sky, consumed with a wavering aurora borealis of shifting emerald and sapphire hues. Snow piled gently on an invisible canopy, then was blown away with the ghastly winds, which were muffled and distant.

The tranquility of the moment was soon interrupted by a set of cerulean eyes blinking open before them. The men jolted, brandishing their weapons. Another set of blue orbs appeared, then another. Then, they were surrounded by dozens, if not hundreds.

Collin wished to say something to steel his people. He opened his mouth—an ululating roar cracked like raging thunder and the orbs converged on them. He saw too late the small shadowed forms to which they belonged.

Men screamed. Ghosts hissed. The Shinfolk thrust their spears into misty masses of living shadows, which passed right through. Spirits entered their bodies, they fell to their knees, convulsing and frothing at the mouth.

Chest heaving, Collin had no time to run, to reorient himself. All he could do was close his eyes and flail his father’s blade before him in clumsy circles. Blade bit flesh, tore open a gash. He opened his eye a sliver, afraid he might see a dead comrade before him; there was only the amorphous face of a spirit, churning through myriad facial expressions as it burst from existence.

He gaped at the glinting steel in his hand. No, he realized, not steel. Realmtamer… Every noble blade is gilt in silver. I’ve always wondered why.

Collin roared and charged into the sea of undeath. The spirits were many, overwhelming the panicked spearmen who fell to their wretched enchantments, but they were no warriors. He swiped his blade this way and that. Realmtamer sang, cold silver slicing through hot air. Spirits burst and popped into swirling clouds of gray mist.

Garland crashed into Collin’s back, Martikov’s blade wet and steaming. Spirits swarmed them, cascading and spurting on the circle they carved together.

Bjorn howled, loosing arrows flying free into the dark and clattering upon stone as a monstrous shadow charged him. The hunter squealed as the shadow wrapped darkling tendrils round his neck and smashed his skull upon the stone.

The swarm then parted, edged to the shadowed corners of the rotunda.

Snorri Morn staggered into the moonlight, an axe slung over his shoulder, his ravaged mouth dripping with drink, jaw hanging by a single joint.

* * *

The lumbering Draugr charged Garland and Collin. Garland stepped in front of the innkeep and screamed a battlecry, channeling his people’s warrior ancestry, imagining his forebears running fearlessly into battle, headfirst into Pan’s embrace.

He swung Martikov’s sword.

The Draugr knocked it aside with its ghostly axe, drove a heel into Garland’s chest and brought down its heavy blade.

The last thought which crossed Garland Musher’s mind before the axe split his skull was of his bonnie wife, in the arms of that strong, handsome silversmith who would give her comfort and children and a warm hearth for the rest of her days.

Don’t grieve for me, Meln. ‘Tis better this way.

* * *

Ithica inched forward with bated breath, close on Elder Hama’s heel. Together, they formed an arrow, with Helgi on her left. Screams clashed about the jagged walls. Hromgir emerged from a dark cavern, axe drawn.

“What’s happening?” Ithica called.

He shook his head. “They need us.”

“We must make haste!” Hama cried and ran into the gloom. Reluctantly, Ithica and Helgi followed as if pulled to the old woman by an invisible tether.

Crimson parts were splayed about the bright rotunda. Seething death knells filled the room, battering Ithica’s ears. Helgi gasped, clutched Ithica’s hand. Dark spirits converged upon the scant few men who lived, led by the shade of a half-giant, throwing around a woodsman’s axe how a charger flings its hind hooves. Collin clutched a bleeding wound on his thigh, his gleaming sword on the ground. He stumbled and dove from the shade’s powerful, deadly strokes. 

Hama’s voice boomed; an eldritch command of a tongue long lost to mortal lips. Ithica’s eyes widened, the tether gently pulled upon something deep inside herself, a reserve she never knew she bore. She’s pulling from our font… Desperately trying to remember the simple verse Hama had taught them on the road, Ithica began to chant, to channel arcane potential. The air around her was electric, charged with unseen power.

Hromgir and Armelia stood before the coven of women as royal sentinels over their queens, his dark, discerning eyes following the monstrous shade and its tirade against Collin. He never faltered in his watch, even as the innkeep hollered for his aid. Dark spirits drifted towards them, catching the scent of Hama’s contradictory siedr. Hromgir roared and chopped a silver arc, splitting a halfling spirit in twain; the pieces hissed, dissipating into ebon smoke. More came, then. Hromgir slashed and slashed, flinging his ancestral axe furiously side-to-side. Walls of ghostly interlopers manifested and dispersed with every stroke. At his back, the vampyress wielded her mysterious longsword with the practiced grace of a Southern fencer.

Collin howled, the shade’s axe rending a chunk from his thick arm. “Hromgir!”

Hama’s voice pitched. Breath fled Ithica’s chest. Helgi’s hand tightened round hers. Cool wind swept into a gale, turned to cyclone and forced back the darkling legion to the rotunda’s walls.

Suddenly unaccosted, Hromgir sprinted towards the massive shade; its axe raised, poised like an executioner with Collin knelt panting on the block.

Hromgir snarled, drove his own axe into the shade’s bloated belly. The shade recoiled and let out a ghastly wheeze, then disgorged a stream of amber muck from its unhinged jaw. Hromgir fell screaming on his back, rolling in the acrid fluid.

Armelia lunged, her sword point trained on the shade’s chest; it strafed, kicked her in the small of her back and sent the vampyress sprawling to the ground. The shade laughed and wiped its slavering jowls with its decayed wrist. Stomping a boot on Hromgir’s chest, it licked its lips and raised high its axe….

* * *

Shelka had never run so fast in her life. Nor had she known the toil of traversing the haunted wood without the aid of a dark god. Roots reared and boughs bowed to obstruct her path. Every footfall sent seizing tremors skittering up her thin legs. Still she ran and ran, following the dozen tracks of the furious Shinfolk. But she knew the way, as if she had visited the Old God countless times. And perhaps she had. A troubling thought, that, but there was no time for troubling thoughts.

Out of breath and shaking, Shelka dove into the black maw of the mountain. The screams had already begun, her people were already dying. What in Pan’s black Hell was she to do?

“A little girl, with naught but an old butter knife.”

She paused a breath. She now knew this voice for the deception it intoned. “Get out of my head!” She covered her ears, thrashed side-to-side.

“You are worthless. You are hated. You are nothing.”

Shelka fell to her knees, rolling in the dark soot on the cavern floor. “No, no, no!”

The litany went on, splitting her red head as a spearing migraine. Doubt, admonishment, shame; the Old God had known her heart and now dredged up everything she had long since buried.

“You shall never be loved. Ignar loved Armelia, not you. Jorn loves his mother, hates you. Poor little Shel—they all hate you.”

And for a moment Shelka believed it. All evidence confirmed the Old God’s summation. How could it not be true? She wanted to let herself fall into that pit of rumination—what help could she be? Had she ever been?

A massive hand closed upon the hem of her tunic. Her breath lodged in the back of her throat as it launched her into the air and onto her feet. Tears and snot streamed down Shelka’s face as she gazed into the ashen face of a monster.

“Shel…” the monster hissed. “Listen. To. Me.”

She blinked. The voice in her head was farther away. “I remember you.”

Black Odhun, her Da’s drinkin’ buddy from way back. He had come to check on her when she broke her arm, which had been the last anyone had ever seen of him.

“Come.” Odhun released her, then lumbered toward the ululating terror deeper in the cave.

“Do not—” The Old God spat, but Shelka forced him out, stopped listening.

She followed the spirit of Black Odhun to the rotunda where she had supped not long ago. The place had become a scene of butchery, spattered red in every corner. In the center was the grotesque form of her grotesque father, about to bring down his axe upon a howling Hromgir.

“Da!” Shelka screamed.

The ghost of Snorri Morn looked up at his daughter, his smoldering blue eyes glistening.

Black Odhun became a blur, crashing into her Da’s unholy ghost.

* * *

Loathing winds howled as I unleashed my bitter rage upon Snorri Morn. With my one, strong hand, I grasped a fistful of his shadowed essence and I dragged him down into the bowels of the Old God’s cave, then down into the bowels of the earth. Distant gasping gales bemoaned the Old God’s fury at my intervention; for I was finally free of my master, free to do as I pleased. For a lifetime and more I had dreamed of a murder, of killing the one friend whom I hated above all else, the one I had been bound to, heart and soul.

Snorri Morn roared like a boar in a snare, clawing at my spectral arm with overgrown nails, slamming the flat of his axe upon my untouchable shoulders. We careened into the depths, down into the bedrock until the air shimmered with red mirage.

Long had I dreamed of killing Snorri Morn! Together, we had lived a wretched life. Together, we now plunged into the molten core of the earth, melted to flaring slag, and coalesced and solidified into a new igneous crag, obtruding from the jagged cliffs overlooking the hellish plains of Grahtzildahn.

* * *

Elder Hama pushed forward against the ghostly legion. Sweat rilled down her brow. Ithica gasped, her mind straining with the unfamiliar effort of channeling arcane potential. White seidr flowed through her with the grace and power of a raging river, as if she were a water wheel turning a sawmill. But the serrated edge of her will, like a blade overused, the grating resistance of the sorcery wore away with each passing moment.

Hromgir picked up Collin, shouldered his arm and carried the innkeep limping forward. Armelia led the way, Shelka Morn’s hand enclosed in hers, and her chthonic blade in the other, lighting the deepening shadows beyond the rotunda. Whispers of the damned chittered and gibbered, conversing with the ghosts imprisoned within the Old God’s infinite gorge.

Thump, thump. 

A pulse like heartbeat resounded beneath their feet. The jagged stone tremored with sick anticipation as the troupe neared the Old God’s heart. The passage narrowed and stretched, as if they were plunging down a titan’s esophagus into its cavernous stomach.

Thump, thump.

Hama bared her fangs, growling as unseen spirits pressed in against her shimmering barrier. Helgi’s hand round Ithica’s went limp, and the big woman collapsed. Ithica turned to help her, but the old woman’s siphon on her spirit was too great. Ithica gasped, drained of all her breath. Radiated heat from the stone pierced the soles of her feet, skittering through the inflamed veins of her calves, her thighs, passing hot through her heart and out the very pores of her face. Her eyes ached and boiled, her temples blared with piercing shocks, fizzling arcs shooting across her scalp.

Ithica’s vision wavered, and she too nearly collapsed; Hromgir was at once at her side, slinging her arm over his free shoulder.

Thump, thump.

The Old God stood in a tiny chamber of sweltering heat. It looked like a deer, its fur matted with mud and blood. Its antlers rose twice the height of a man, thorny and serrated as a dead hawthorn; its tongue lolled out its gaping mouth, and it gasped tiny breaths. Shaking and trembling, knobby knees buckled as if in heat, the creature was a pathetic thing. Starving and fat; Famished and engorged; the Old God was a glutton and an urchin, a beggar-king sitting on a throne of bones.

Grode’s laugh radiated through the cavern, trembling Ithica’s heart.

Thump, thump.

The creature stood before a monument of tarnished metal, amber as rusted iron crudely alloyed with brass. Pulsing as a heartbeat, the dark metal crunched in and stretched out, squealing under the strain of its own operation, as if simply existing required more fuel than it could ever hope to obtain.

“You’ve arrived…” a familiar voice gasped in Ithica’s mind. “You have fed me well, my daughter. Will you feed me one final time?”

Another sorcerous tether lashed out, piercing her chest. Ithica cried out and fell to her knees. Shelka Morn fell, too, writhing at Armelia’s feet.

“You’ll not have them, demon!” Hama roared. She intoned more foreign words of power, but her coven was broken, and her potential alone was not sufficient to challenge that of even a starving, dying god.

Hromgir’s eyes blazed, went wide as he madly battered his axe upon an invisible wall of force mere inches from the Old God’s too-human eyes. Armelia joined him, thrust her fabled blade repeatedly into the barrier, to no avail.

The Old God moaned its pleasure. Legs buckling, it collapsed to its knees and lashed back its overgrown mantle, bleating and heaving. Its perverted resemblance to nature shifted, its fur falling out in massive, grimy tufts, flesh bubbling. Shrinking and compressing and crunching the Old God morphed and adopted the shape of a man, too beautiful to look upon, for fear one’s eyes might evaporate at the radiant beauty. Such heavenly allure was sickening to acknowledge; not just to behold, but simply to understand the foul blackness of the heart enclosed within. Grode laughed with relaxed ease, sighed in satisfied decadence.

Shelka shrieked, curled into a ball. Ithica rolled and screamed as the creature’s incising scalpels extracted any potential for life her ravaged womb still held.

“Yes… yes!” The Old God gasped and sighed his satisfaction. “If even for a moment, it is ambrosia to know such beauty! Oh, oh!” His voice was deep and smooth, almost comforting in the way it filled the ears, overwhelming in the way it consumed the air. He laughed, shuddering, edging upon the essence he reaped. “I shall never be denied again! Never again!”

Ithica’s eyes rolled back in her head, her skull threatening to split at the seams. A final ululating cry and all went black…

* * *

You woke early that morning. Da was in one of those quiet, contemplative moods, as he oft was since the Ma you never knew left this world. You went out to the coup, collecting eggs from the bitter hens, shivering and wondering how such creatures could withstand even the brisk springs of the lowlands. When gales swept down from the Guardians high above, you wished you could sweep up all the chickens and goats and corral them in a warm bundle in the house. Da would never allow that, of course. Cold was not the word for him, but he certainly was not warm. You fried up the eggs, praying to the mother for the unborn ghosts of the chicks. You and Da ate in silence, as you oft did, then out to the garden to toil in silence.

‘Twas a chilly day full of shivers, even as the Mourning Sun rose amid dark clouds to grace you with her intermittent warmth. Together, you and Da shoveled a smoking mixture of manure and sawdust, depositing into a wagon one miniscule pile at a time. Soon your arms and back ached. Your neck cricked to one side. Your moccasins and your clothes were filthy, spattered with stinking brown smears you feared might take several washes to remove.

You groaned, but you ne’er complained; Da never complained, so neither did you. An unspoken rule, but one that kept alight that inner fire the cold winters always wished to snuff out.

“I ken it seems pointless,” Da said, after an hour of shoveling. He thrust his spade in the earth and wiped his sunkissed brow with his hairy forearm. “Look in the wagon.”

You crept over, your calves spasming. Standing on tip toes, you peered over the edge, surprised to find the seemingly endless wagon nearly full, ready to spread the fertilizer over the fields.

“That’s what love is like, I reckon.”

You looked at him, confused. “Like horse dung?”

Da laughed his strained, faraway laugh. “Nay, the shovelin’. That dung there will help our garden to grow. It takes work and devotion to fill the wagon with enough to matter. But we’ve put in the work, so the harvest will come.”

“What if the wagon breaks and it all spills out?” You hold out your blistered palms. “Then it was all for naught.”

He gazed wistfully at the reeking heap in the cart and knelt down to your height. His eyes were so bright, so full of life and potential in a way they only were in moments such as these. “‘Tis ne’er for naught, sweet girl. You can always do it again, and ye’ll be stronger for it.”

His lips were warm upon your brow, his embrace like a wool blanket against the fierce winds. A tear rilled down your cheek, carving an icy path. You gazed up at the sky, and the clouds parted.

The tether was broken.

* * *

Ithica’s eyes fluttered open. Even as chaos ensued around her, all was quiet as she gazed into Hromgir’s wet eyes.

“You’ve returned to me,” he gasped, pulling her into his arms.

“What’s this?” the Old God snarled behind his barrier. “No! No! Back to sleep, the lot of you!” He raised his perfect arms, fingertips crackling with energy. “I am not finished!”

Hama’s voice thundered, ancient words of white seidr rolling off her tongue as a scrawling epic. A wave of sorcery undulated around them, strobing with radiant light. The shadowed ghosts of children who had died in the Shins screamed, consumed by white fire which burned away their darkness.

Ithica’s head lolled. Collin held Shelka in his arms, weeping and cooing. Ithica met the girl’s fiery gaze, and she knew then that they were both free of the Old God’s grasp. Beyond them, the ghosts converged on the troupe, no longer hungry and vengeful, but bright and vigilant. The spectral throng multiplied, populated with taller specters: guardians to shepherd the bairns to their rests. One bore a familiar, easy face, a stoic flat-mouthed grin Ithica saw only in her dreams.

You can always do it again.

The ghosts swarmed the Old God, pressing against his sorcerous walls. Cracks webbed through the milky barrier, and it shattered. Grode shrieked as a petulant child, falling to knees, then pinned to his back by the myriad spirits he had consumed for so long.

Behind him, his heartbeat quickened. Thump, th-thump. Thump.

Armelia raised her sword, blade thrumming with the whispers of a thousand vengeful spirits. She leapt forward, and thrust the silvered point into the beating heart.

The Old God screamed, spasmed, and fading away in a cloud of mist, a black shadow imprinted upon the ground where he had lain.

All went quiet. The ghostly children rose, looked up to the guides, and together ascended to the heavens, leaving those still living to rebuild.

IV

The sun shone bright and yellow o’er the Village in the Shins, as it had every morning since Winter’s bitterness fled amid Spring’s awakening. Collin mounted a cautious expedition into the woods some weeks ago, when, for the first time that anyone could remember, the wild snow began to thaw. What was at first a tense affair quickly became a jovial one. Trickles of flowing eddies and the chirp of fertile robins harmonized to an unfamiliar, but welcome song. The next day, the remaining Shinfolk and their bairns embarked upon a daylong hike round their local woods searching for signs of spring, as was once a tradition of their Skjol ancestors from the old world.

And for the first time that anyone could remember, the wood became a place of laughter.

Collin limped across the square, his cane squelching in the muddy grass growing in thick tufts round the wagon tracks. His gait had become more of a belabored hobble; his wounds had not healed quite right, which was not unusual for a man in his condition pushing fifty winters.

Sweat trickled down his cheek; he wiped his face with his father’s patterned handkerchief—the only reminder he still had of the old bastard—and shielded his eyes to survey this week’s market. More than a dozen stalls had been erected, many were overflowing with heads of lettuce and cabbage, and bright crimson radishes. Wystran traders peddled trinkets, barrel-fermented ales, and braided breads. The Idraani caravan arrived early, selling boxes of tobacco by the dozen. Even Old Tarmun came into town for Gafldagr, freely doling out bottles of goat’s milk and butter, all the while warily eying the Idraani, as if they might be hiding envenomed blades beneath their flowing yellow silks.

Down the way a horse whinnied, hauling at a wagon seized by grasping muck, its driver cursing and whipping the reins, his wife and two young daughters exchanging weary, frustrated glances.

“Ho!” Collin hurried over as fast as his limp allowed. Big Jorn and a few other nearby men joined him and together they hoisted the wagon and freed the snared wheels.

“My thanks, sir!” The driver called, removing his hat and waving it in greeting. “Do ye ken where I can find the byfoged?”

“We’ve been without a byfoged for some months,” Collin said, now adept at masking the grimace the repeated explanation had once summoned. “But I’ll get you sorted. I’m Collin, by the way, we’ve been writing!” He led the newcomers back to the inn, where they stabled their exhausted horse and collapsed into a shadowed booth along the wall. The driver sighed his relief at the succor of a warm mug of ale, his wife satisfied that their family was finally safe within the embrace of four walls.

The inn had flourished since Spring showered her beauteous tresses upon the Shins. Caravaners, locals, newcomers, and more filled the common room each morn to break their fast, and returned each night to ease their aches to the soothing lilts of a wayward skald who had rolled in with Winter’s last breath.

“Hon!” Gerdur called from the kitchens, which she now worked with an intensity close to Collin’s late-adopted son.

He ambled over to her and leaned on the wall, taking pressure off his bum leg, smiling at the gorgeous woman laboring over the iron-oven Ignar had so treasured. Her reddish brown locks were tied back with a stained linen, rogue strands coming down in tangles, wet with sweat. Collin never cared much for kitchen-work, too hot and too busy; he much preferred cleaning the rooms after folks departed, preparing thoughtful surprises for the next guests, especially now that there were guests.

Oh laddie, how I wish you were still here. Blessed, though I am, to have her in your stead. No man may be rich enough, can he?

“I’m here, dear.” Collin hobbled into the kitchen, taking hold of a hot frying pan in which sizzled a dozen eggs. “I’ll take over for the afternoon; you rest up.”

“Thank ye,” Gerdur sighed, pecking his sweat-slick forehead. “Where’s Shel?”

The question roused a familiar panic, quickly quelled. Collin thought back and smiled. “She and the other boys are with Ithica this morn; Helgi took them all over.”

“So kind of her to teach the bairns her craft.” Gerdur untied her hair and wiped her forehead. “We’ll be needing more gardeners with all this business!”

Flutters stirred within Collin’s gut as he watched her walk away, the subtle sway of her hips. Alongside every confident step, his mind meandered back to a few nights ago, and their newly made marriage bed, the sweet passions they shared beneath the furs. He gave a lusty laugh, then turned up his nose and screwed up his face at an acrid stench; he had burnt the eggs.

* * *

Shelka Morn knelt in the moist soil alongside ol’ Miss Ithica, who no longer seemed so much older than Shelka. Withdrawing her dirty hands from the cool, musty earth, she gazed over the field where Little Jorn and Vander wrestled sticks from the mouths of the late musher’s dogs. She was a good couple winters older than those boys, but now it seemed she had a lifetime on them. Ithica’s strider husband watched them tussle with a glint in his dark eyes that Shelka could not place.

Somewhere between pride and mourning? She squinted. There was still so much she did not know, but she had a budding awareness that, like the stalks just sprouting through the soil to reach for the sun, such mysteries were beginning to clear beneath the light of her growing understanding.

Ithica patted down the loose mound before her; Shelka shook herself from her reverie and did the same. 

Gardening had not come easily to her, but there was something rather peaceful about kneeling at a level with the plants, getting up close with the beetles and spiders, witnessing their importance to the cycle of life. Mostly, she just liked being round Miss Ithica. She was still thin, her shoulder bones poking through her fair skin beneath a ratty tunic that hung too loose. But with the famine over her rosy cheeks had begun to fill out again, which cushioned her soft, round face and her tangle of mousy, sandy hair.

Gazing down at her own awkward stature, Shelka wondered if Ithica, too, had once felt so unwelcome in her own body.

“Thank you,” Shelka mumbled. “For teaching me all this.” The words came like regurgitated pebbles scraping against her teeth on their way out. They had not spoken much during their lessons; only worked.

A small, half-smile appeared on Ithica’s face. “Of course. I should have done this with you ages ago.”

Even now, Shelka could not call Ithica a friend. Despite the seasons of trespassing in her garden. Despite the horror they both shared, something about Ithica’s toiling beauty remained out of reach, distant—just like her own Ma.

“What was it like?” Shelka blurted.

Ithica cocked her head. “What was what like?”

“Ye ken… all we’ve been—”

“Shelly!” Collin cried from down the hill. Shelka bristled and let out a frustrating snarl from the pit of her stomach. She loathed Collin’s newfound infantilization. “Me and your ma need some help back at the inn!”

Before rising to meet the chubby old lout at the gate, Shelka glanced once more at Ithica—just in case she might finally deign to shed some light on last winter. You’re the only one who could ever understand. Shelka worried her expression betrayed the pleading of her heart. If it did, Ithica showed no indication of noticing. Or caring, for that matter.

“Best not keep ‘im waitin’,” Ithica said, leaning back on her haunches. “You ken how he gets.”

“Aye,” Shelka groaned, disappointed twofold.

Hromgir opened the gate and wrapped Collin with his massive tattooed arms. Their deep voices rumbled incoherently on a sweet, briny breeze as the men followed each other back to the house where they would likely remain till nightfall.

“Guess they dinnae need me, too much…” Shelka looked back at Ithica, hopeful.

Ithica rose and hurried after them. “I’d best get some tea going!”

* * *

Ithica’s cabin sweltered with the heat of the hearth, compounding with that of her guests. Collin and Hromgir sequestered in a corner, his one hand pointing between pots and cups, new and old, as he explained the subtle differences in his sculpts before and after his maiming. Helgi sat on the bed with the boys, telling stories from the sagas. Shelka followed in on her heel, clearly in desperate need of an older sister… Or her mother.

So full. So why do I still feel so alone?

As the kettle boiled and sighed, so did she, though she could not be heard amid the raucous din overfilling her house—for that’s all that cabin was. She had had a home in her youth with her Da, then he passed on. Hromgir had never had a home, having spent his life on the sea and in the wilds. 

Am I tearing him away?

Even now, after years of domestic life, her husband seemed so invigorated when he stepped onto the porch each morning, gazing upon the looming mountains, as though shedding ten winters in an instant. Hromgir would point to the horizon and tell her again and again how he had sailed into Wystra on a storm, climbed the Guardians alone, crossed the Shins, and fortuitously found himself at Da’s farm in the lowlands.

Together, Ithica and Shelka pulled a couple tables inside from the shed and put them together. Hromgir tended a stewpot, refreshing it with fresh flanks of venison as Ithica and Shelka washed and chopped the lettuce they had gathered that afternoon. Filling their tiny cabin like the swollen belly of a gluttonous sow, they squeezed round the makeshift long table and broke the braided loaf of buttered bread that Collin had brought with him.

“To good friends!” Collin raised his cup. The table followed suit. “And good mead!”

They ate in merriment for a time, conversation slowing as mouths filled more with the delicious food than words. Once everyone’s stomachs settled, Ithica glanced to Hromgir, who nodded his affirmation to her silent inquiry.

Hromgir cleared his throat. Collin and Helgi looked to him, their faces immediately filled with concern.

“It’s been refreshing to see you all smile after so many hurts.” Hromgir fiddled with an indent in his cup; he always talked about how all his pieces had been lopsided since he began potting again. “I’m afraid we’ve got to stick one more skewer in the hog… Ithica and I have decided to leave, start fresh.”

Helgi furrowed her brow, mouthing to Ithica: “Ye didnae tell me this!”

Collin huffed disbelief. “Start fresh! Ye’ve only been here a few years!”

“A few years are naught but a holiday,” Hromgir said forlornly, avoiding his friend’s gaze. “We’ve yet to find a home.”

The innkeep recoiled, as if Hromgir’s words were a lash of nettles. Collin squeezed shut his eyes, then opened them again. Shelka stared at the wall. Little Jorn and Vander were still eating their stew, loudly slurping on their wooden spoons.

“Where will you go?” Collin finally asked.

Hromgir cast his pleading glance to Ithica. She grinned, nodded.

“Back to the homeland.” His timbre shifted, revitalized. “We’ll travel to Wystra, then set sail to Skjoldwe!”

Collin shuddered, shot to his feet, his face red—blustering with rage or overheating, Ithica could not know. He stared into Hromgir’s eyes for a breath, then his great moustache turned up as he shook jovial laughter.

“You bloody striders!” He clasped Hromgir’s hand. “Can’t stray too far from the sea, can ye?”

The night went on. Warm and loud, tinged with a hint of mourning.

* * *

Shelka walked ahead of Collin down the hill, their way illuminated by Dusk’s bright flower moon. All around them were fields of long, bolting grasses decorated with patches of purple heather and countless blue and white flowers that Shelka had never seen before. Vines climbed boles like striders ascending the Guardians, and the trill of crickets filled the gentle night with their droning song.

Bright as could be; yet Shelka carried a gloomy shroud over her heart. Ithica is leaving… She could not explain to herself why that had made her so profoundly sad. We’re not even friends, after all.

She waited at the bottom of the hill for Collin to catch up. Since winter’s bloody battle, his age had caught up to him, as if the terrible injuries he had sustained slowed him too much to outrun the years any longer. Huffing and heaving with fatigue, he clapped his thick hand on her shoulder and offered a fatherly grin, which she found infuriating.

“I’m disappointed, too,” he said, redoubling his wobbly stride.

“I’ve said naught.”

“Don’t need to, lassie. ‘Tis all over your face.”

She flashed him a searing glare, which dissipated as she saw the corners of his mouth sagging with pain.

“Everyone must find their own path. Even as the Shins blossom again with plentiful bounty, much pain still stains these lands red. You and Ithica were similarly enraptured, but the Old God stole something from her that can never be replaced.”

Shelka nodded. She had an idea of what that might be—an idea of the void its theft would leave behind. Perhaps I’ve placed too much on her shoulders…

“You’ve always been a perceptive lass, can always get the measure of someone just by looking them in the eye.”

“Aye,” Shelka whispered and sucked in a tremulous breath. “I’ve always thought… if I can just give people what they want, they might—that I could…” She trailed off, unsure of the thought’s conclusion, now that it came to words.

“Part of being a leader is accepting a bit of loneliness. We cannot always give folks what they want; for they often don’t know what that is, until circumstances reveal to them what they lack.”

“Ye think that I’m a leader?” She was embarrassed even to say the words.

“Aye, lass. Natural born to it. Ain’t no byfoged in the Shins—so someone’s got to take up the responsibility.”

“What about Gunhild? Shouldnae she take Jukil’s title?”

“Aye, I’ve spoken with her on the subject. She’s taken over his estate, but she’s got her young lassie to worry over—and sons to mourn. Now, I’m a foreigner and can’t hold Wystran titles, but you, sweet Shelly, have the trappings of a damn good byfoged. From now on, you’ll be my apprentice. I’ll teach you to read and write and how to do arithmetic… and we’ll work together to keep this village afloat.”

Collin stopped and knelt down, holding out his hand. “What do ye say?”

Tears filled Shelka’s eyes, streamed down her cheeks. She threw her arms over Collin’s shoulders and wept into the crook of his neck. He laughed easily and folded her into his fatherly embrace. They stayed there a moment, then walked the rest of the way in companionable silence to the inn, where the needs of the people were, thankfully, less complicated, and they helped her Ma to serve supper to a hungry village.

* * *

On the first day of Summer, Ithica and Hromgir closed the door to their cabin for the last time. They did not bother latching the padlock, for a new family would soon fill its walls and the homestead on the hill overlooking the Village in the Shins would again be a home. The garden was lush and green; radishes were ready to pull, the lettuce about to bolt, strawberry bushes about to bear fruit, but none of it resembled the uncanny bounty Ithica could single-handedly yield for the last several years. The earth and its soil were again in harmony with the cycles intended by the Sisters of Life and Death, and this new garden would need to content itself to feed only its new family.

They packed little aside from traveling equipment. Ithica had a crate of herbal tinctures, and Hromgir brought four cups he had thrown in the last month; they all tapered to the left, which he had learned how to make to appear as an intentional choice of design, rather than a product of his limitation.

Their hardy horse pulled them down the hill, the lone husky from the musher’s pack, whom they could not find another home for, running beside them and barking with excitement at the new journey ahead. Their friends awaited them outside Collin’s Place. Helgi and Little Jorn—and even Big Jorn—were awaiting them on the inn’s stoop. Big Jorn and Hromgir shook hands and exchanged a few terse words, and Hromgir ruffled the boy’s shaggy hair.

Helgi folded Ithica into an embrace. “I’m so glad for ye, Ith; but I’m glum to lose ye so soon.”

“We’ve done well with the time we’ve had.” Ithica touched Helgi’s wet cheek, offering a pained smile. “Thank you for coming all that way for me. Take care of your boy.”

“Take care of yers,” Helgi grinned, her eyes glistening.

Ithica looked to Hromgir, who only shrugged.

Collin, Gerdur, and Shelka came out next. Collin opened his wide arms and wrapped both Ithica and Hromgir into his armpits, then spent the next hour fussing over their cart, checking the crates and the ropes and the knots.

“Your horse fed and watered?” he asked for the third time.

“Aye, and freshly shoed,” Hromgir assured him.

As the Mourning Sun ascended towards the High Noon, bathing the village in sunlight where once the burned-down chapel would have cast its looming shadow, Ithica and Hromgir mounted their cart, waving and calling repeated goodbyes to their beloved Shinfolk.

“Wait!” Ithica cried as Hromgir was about to whip the reins. “Where’s Armelia?”

Collin waddled up to their wagon, his red face stricken. “She’s moved on. Few weeks back, now. Left a note on her front door.”

“What did it say?”

The innkeep shoved a hand into his vest and withdrew a folded sheet of crumpled paper. “‘Do not look for me. I am not to be trusted. I shall remain alone.’ ‘Twas not signed, but it needn’t be. The house was empty, and no one’s seen much of her since the weather warmed, besides. I had paid her a visit a time or two, to thank her and pay respects to her father, but she wouldn’t see me.”

Ithica nodded, swallowed ash. She felt guilty for not thinking to visit herself. Then again, what could she have done? She hardly knew the lass.

“Give her my best, if you happen to see her.”

Collin split his moustache with a wide grin. “Will do, Ithica. Now, be off with ye!”

“Sing our songs!” Hromgir boomed as he whipped the reins.

Ithica sighed relief, and deflated into the wagon’s bench once the Village in the Shins had disappeared beyond the horizon. 

They camped that night beneath the stars; the fluffy white dog snuggled between them nixed the need for a blanket in the Summer humidity. She stared at the sprawling stars and purple nebulas and listened to the song of the crickets, praying to Bridget that she might find some sense of belonging or purpose in the homeland, that leaving behind this place she had called home would finally open the doors to healing. Her husband fast asleep and snoring, he was unbothered by Ithica’s repeated trips to make water in the heather.

Without a wink of sleep that night, the next day, Ithica watched the lush, green land roll by. Even beyond the Shins, the Wystran highlands had taken on a new life that could have never been beneath the old regime. Woodpeckers swooped across the path as bluejays and cardinals competed for rule over the sky. Squirrels chittered on their perches and martens scurried across branches.

When they stopped for lunch that afternoon, Hromgir sifted through their supplies and suddenly ceased. Ithica, sitting by the campfire, looked over her shoulder and saw him staring dumbfounded at something she could not see.

“What is it, dearheart?”

Hromgir sighed and withdrew a red clay pot full of dirt and tiny sprouts. Ithica rose, her heart sick with longing.

“Didnae you give that pisspot back to the Elder?”

“Aye I did… but look at what’s within.”

They came together. Ithica grasped Hromgir’s strong, shaking shoulder.

“Our son…” Ithica gasped.

“He’s found us again.”

Thus ends the tale of Soil…