Blood of Wolves (30 page)

It was as good an answer as any.

“And if you find what you are looking for?” Brig asked. “What then? Try to go back? Challenge Cul's decision . . . challenge him as chieftain now that you have proven your own worth?”

Desa shifted as if readying herself to launch at Tall-Wood. Something in his tone, both dangerous and challenging. Kern heard it as well. Heard it, and knew Brig touched a deep, sore spot.

“What about you?” he asked. “Would you go home?” He saw the younger man's hesitation and the guarded look that shielded his eyes all of a sudden. “If there was the one thing you could look at and say,
There. That is it for me.
Would you then go back to Gaud?”

Brig stood abruptly. The younger man was not small, as wide across the shoulders as his brother or any man in the small band of warriors save perhaps Reave. Kern readied himself for an attack or a challenge. Whatever ate away at Brig Tall-Wood was very close to the surface. Kern couldn't say why he felt it was so, but his instincts warned him to be wary.

“That is the question, isn't it?” And surprising Kern, he stepped back from the fire and the small group, pulling away once again. Brig found a piece of cleared ground and rolled himself into his blanket and cloak for the night.

Another twig flared brightly for a moment, and Kern stared at the others in turn as each one drifted away for their bedrolls and what sleep they could grab before morning. Only Aodh remained up, on watch, circling at the edge of camp and decidedly not looking at Kern until the outcast leader rose for his own roll of felt and the blankets of his bedroll.

Then Aodh stopped and waved Kern over.

He thought that Aodh might want to make some comment on Brig. Instead, the other man tugged at his long moustache, and whispered, “Listen.”

“More branches?” Kern asked, in no mood for another wild chase into the night.

But he closed his eyes anyway and reached out for the night with his other senses. The smell of the campfire was down to a weak telltale of ash and smoke. The night air tasted of snow, but the scattered clouds made a fresh fall unlikely. But other than a few hissing pops from the embers and some loud snores as Reave sucked at the cold, crisp air, Kern heard nothing.

Until it moved again. A shuffling, careful step, then a pause.

And then another hesitant step.

Aodh nodded out into the dark. “There,” he said, pointing with his chin.

It took Kern's eyes a moment to find the shadow as it moved carefully among the nearby trees. A glint of moonlight fell through the broken clouds, and he caught an amber glare from two small yellow coals.

“Not possible,” Kern breathed out softly. Except that it was. Frostpaw. “He chased us over that stone arch?”

He had, or found another way, and had struck Kern's trail again on this side of the valley Teeth. That spoke of more than a desire for food. More than a need for basic survival. It bordered on loyalty, or at least a need for kinship.

“We all have our reasons,” Aodh said, answering the unasked question. “And Brig can't be any more dangerous than reining in a starving dire wolf.”

Kern was not so certain of that. The wolf had attacked him out of hunger and need. The desperations eating away at Brig Tall-Wood, Kern felt certain, were not so easy to define. And they bore careful watch. Because one should never turn their back on a wild animal.

Another good reason that Kern had watches through the night, and none of them would be Brig Tall-Wood.

Regardless, the night passed without further incident. Kern rolled out of his felt blanket at first light, greeting the overcast day with a few stretches to work the kinks and the deep cold out of his muscles. Others joined him, Ossian and Wallach, and while they began to sweat freely so fast, the chill of winter's touch faded slowly with him.

Frostpaw made two appearances while the war party broke camp, hovering farther back now that light betrayed the wolf's position. Mogh was the first to remark on it, though certainly not the first to notice.

“That ain't normal,” he said, with a glower in the wolf's direction. As if startled by the glance, the wolf turned and bolted for the cover of some tall pine.

“What is these days?” Kern asked. Settling his shield over one shoulder and his pack over another, he nodded Daol and Hydallan ahead of him, then struck out again for the long day's hike.

Midday found two more burned farmsteads, and another the raiders had somehow missed. It stood farther back from the trail, granted, and was partially hidden behind a stand of thorny acacia. No clansmen, though, and no livestock. There were signs of recent life, tracks in the snow and ashes on the hearth, but nothing else.

“Dead or fled,” Desa said.

Garret nodded. “Or hiding nearby. We could search for 'em.”

“We move on,” Kern decided. “Where there are farms, there will be a village nearby.”

He proved to be right. Just the other side of the next bluff, in fact, where a stream they chanced across splashed quickly down a narrow cut, then wound underside of a mammoth cliff overhang. The stone of the overhang was wet black streaked with rusts and yellows, and appeared alive with smoke. It dripped and splashed a constant light rain over ground suddenly devoid of snow, with several nearby fields sprouting enough greens that one might think for a second that spring had broken through in an eye blink.

The air smelled of minerals and metal. Sulfurous. Not so bad as rotten eggs, but heavy enough to burn inside Kern's sinuses.

Ossian called it first. He recognized the scent. “Hot springs,” he said.

Not smoke, then, but steam. Warming the air with a moist, mineral touch that lay over the village like a blanket. The stream pooled in several places before it bent wide around the first of the visible huts and the charred ruins where others had once stood. It continued past palisade walls, behind which more steam rose no doubt from more hidden hot springs.

Because of their location or simply from what they had to protect, these people had been far more industrious in their defense. Digging enough rock out of the nearby bluff face to build a thick wall, on top of which they had planted sharpened timbers lashed together with bands of metal as well as leather ties. With the palisade joining on both ends to a steep rock face, it would take a large raiding party to even think of cracking such a defense.

Clearly the local clansmen had learned a great deal, caught between marauding Picts from the lowlands and Vanir from the north.

Kern pushed Daol ahead to find a good path down among the lower hills. Ehmish and Hydallan went with him. It was on a lower ridge where Ehmish discovered a funeral mound of dead bodies, half-buried in snow and left to rot. The aftermath of a large battle that had taken place the previous summer, certainly. They were Picts mostly. Swarthy skin gone slightly gray with death. Bodies painted in tribal patterns, and wearing little else but the loincloths favored by the lowland savages. A few heads had been set up on pikes, as trophies or as warnings. Or both.

Kern saw that there were quite a few Vanir heads near the end of the line. In fact, one could see in the scattered death masks where the Picts had stopped their late-summer attacks and the Vanir raiders had stepped up their own. The freshest heads were all northerners, taken over the long winter as raiders pushed for food and shelter and the slaves they needed to work their northern mines.

There was even a fairly recent Ymirish, with frost blond beard and hair. His yellow eyes stared blankly now, but Kern imagined he still saw a primal rage glinting in them.

Down in the glen, an alarm bell rang as someone finally sighted Kern's small band. Cimmerian clansfolk ran to front their wall, grabbing up whatever weapons were close by and waiting to see what manner of invader had come at them. They didn't hide from the challenge as had the previous village. They seemed to welcome it, in fact.

Kern did not rush into the situation. He circled his people around, letting them be seen, looking for a good path of approach while the clan chieftain no doubt summoned his elders and his best warriors. Give them time to feel safe, Kern hoped, and they would be less apt to strike out of fear or habit.

It worked. When Kern's men stayed out of bowshot, the local chieftain sent out a small band of warriors to challenge them directly. Faces carried the same deep-lined, craggy look that Reave had gotten from his mother, a native of Clan Conarch. Any one of them might be a distant relation of the tall Gaudic warrior. Kern saw more than one of his warriors frown in Reave's direction, but they were quick glances, with eyes snapping back to the fore right quick and hands never far from the grasp of weapons. These did not look the part of beaten men and women. They carried their heads up and their eyes blazed a fierce challenge.

The single woman in the group was as tall and strapping as any of the men, and she wore a feral snarl on her lips that reminded Kern, in a way, of the smaller but no less fierce Desagrena.

“Valleymen,” the tall woman said, in about the same way one would spit out a piece of gristly meat.

She had blue eyes the dark, shaded color of an autumn twilight, and her raven-glistening hair was tied up in a knot on top of her head. She carried a spear in one hand and a war sword across her back. Her frown built up in slow measure, wrinkling in the corners of her eyes first, and then in the thin, flat line of her mouth.

“But not more Cruaidhi,” she said. “Not Clan Maugh either.”

Which gave Kern some idea of the warriors loosed in the Broken Leg Lands who had already passed this direction.

“You are the wolf-eyed one,” she said at last, and the tip of her spear dropped a fraction. “I am Ros-Crana. I thought the story hard to believe, a Ymirish who is not of Nordheim and Grimnir's personal worshippers. You are of Gaud?”

“We are,” Kern admitted, slightly taken aback by what this woman already knew. And also that the men obviously deferred to her. Crom's ancient blessing on Cimmeria gave many women as great a strength as the men, but few followed the warrior's path intentionally. “Of Gaud and of Taur, and lands to the south,” he said, giving Nahud'r a nod.

Ros-Crana dropped the spear to her side, holding it loosely now. Kern had no doubt that she could whip it back to a guarded position in less than a heartbeat. “Then you may approach and speak with Narach Chieftain, who has also heard of you.”

Kern eyed the well-manned defenses with a wary glance. “Strong walls and many tall warriors,” he said by way of compliment. “I would ask your chieftain to meet me outside of his keep.” Well outside of those walls, in fact.

But she bridled at this, obviously taking a measure of offense. “My word is your safety, Wolf-Eye. If it is not good enough for you, turn around and go back to your valley. Otherwise, you may advance as far as the gate.” She held her spear up across her body in a warding gesture. “But you will not be allowed inside the walls.”

There was something important in that distinction, to her at least. Kern thought to ask why, but there was no need. She told him in her next breath.

“If Grimnir comes for you here, we will not stand between you.”

THE SUN WAS setting into the Pictish wilderness in the near west when Kern brought Sláine Longtooth back to the village. There were no shadows stretched over the ground, not with winter clouds filtering the sun's light to a stark overhead gray, but there was no mistaking the cold touch of coming twilight.

Clansfolk continued their work in and around the glen. If anything, their pace seemed to increase as dark approached. Animals were brought in from a day of sparse forage, and always there were homes to rebuild. A few women continued to tend fields of early greens that survived under the steaming rain falling off the cliff overhang. A line of tall youths packed carrying straps of sharp, head-sized rocks through the palisade, adding to a large pile that could be glimpsed through the narrow gate, and smaller children used flat-edged stones to scrape the outline of new pitfalls into the ground.

Longtooth nodded his approval at the industrious work. “What was its name again?” he asked.

“Callaugh,” Kern reminded the elder man. Kern had also learned that it was the area's strongpoint. “Much as Cruaidh is the stopgap for any force coming into Conall's Valley through the Pass of Blood, any large war host moving north must pass within a half day's travel of here.”

Its location, and its hot springs steaming against the bluff, made it an important village to Clan Conarch. Important enough for the Vanir to test its walls regularly. The funeral mounds (there had been more than just the one) and several dozen Vanir heads on pikes proved to Kern that the raiders had had no easy time of it.

Also, that these Callaughnan warriors were not to be taken lightly.

Sláine Longtooth agreed. But he'd also had no choice but to follow behind Kern as he led the core of his small army north.

With Ros-Crana and Narach Chieftain already aware of their presence, Kern had seen immediately that the Cruaidhi chieftain must strike a bargain with Callaugh or risk an attack from behind even as he hunted the Vanir. At his suggestion the two chieftains agreed to a meeting under the walls of Callaugh's keep. Longtooth was allowed a guard of no more than two fists of men. Ten in all. All weapons would be truce-bonded. Sword and dagger hilts tied to sheaths or belts with a strong leather cord. Bows unstrung. Spearpoints wrapped in a leather sheath.

Kern cinched his arming sword in place with a strong knot. He'd already been under those walls once. He knew it would not do to anger Callaugh further in the face of what Sláine Longtooth was likely to demand.

A few clansmen hauling in armfuls of wood looked over at their arrival, faces dark, craggy, and glowering. Gard Foehammer glanced left then right as he rode at his chieftain's side, carrying a bearing spear with Clan Cruaidh's fox-tail totem on it.