The Last Mortal Bond (22 page)

“Leave your knife where it is.”

Valyn spun, searching for the speaker, eyes ranging desperately over the dark wall of the forest. He had to turn in place three times before he finally found the figure, a man almost all in black, standing motionless maybe ten paces away, cloaked in the deepest gloom of the silent pines and hemlocks, face hidden in shadow.

Valyn's heart lunged inside his chest as he lurched to his feet. His fingers scrabbled at his belt knife, trying to pull it free as he raised his other hand in a feeble defense. The man hadn't moved, he had no weapon visible, but that hardly mattered. The simple fact of his presence was danger enough.

Valyn's parents had chosen this buggy, swampy stretch of nowhere precisely for the lack of people. After the Urghul arrived, and the Annurian armies, living in anything like a town became dangerous, even deadly. If the horsemen got you, they killed you, and they killed you slow. Valyn hadn't seen the corpses, but he'd heard the stories, how they'd take people, stake them out, and then start skinning. Just the way you'd take the pelt off a beaver, only you killed the beaver first.

The story was, the Annurian armies were there to protect the loggers and the trappers scattered through the northern woods. That was the story. The truth was, those armies were just as likely to take your winter's store of meat and mead as they were to do any protecting. Valyn's parents had tried to hide the worst from him, but he'd heard tales of Annurian soldiers demanding everything from blankets to bear meat, sometimes the coats right off those too defenseless to object. And that wasn't even the worst of it; Valyn had heard whispers, sick stories of soldiers insisting on having their way with kids like him, the sons and daughters of the frontier families. It wasn't right—it was a whole long way from anything even looking like something right—but if you refused, if you tried to fight back, the soldiers killed you. Killed you, or left you for the Urghul. Hard to say which was worse.

And so Valyn's parents had taken them away. Most folks who fled headed south. Valyn's mother, though, wouldn't hear of it. “What do we know about the south?” she had demanded of his father one night when the fire burned down to a few angry embers. “What do we know about cities? Or city people?”

“It's not all cities,” Valyn's father had insisted. His father, who had never set foot outside the Thousand Lakes in his life. “There are farms.”

“And what do we know of farming?”

Valyn was supposed to be asleep, tucked beneath his furs in the far corner of the cabin, but through slit lids he'd watched his mother take his father's face in both hands, pulling him close as though she meant to kiss him, then stopping short. “You're a tracker, Fen. A tracker, a trapper, and a hunter. You're a better man than any I've ever met, but you're no farmer.”

He could see his father's jaw tense. “The forest isn't safe anymore. We can figure out the farming later. Right now, we've got to get out.”

“No,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “What we have to do is go deeper.”

And so deeper they went, plunging north into territory Valyn had never seen before, untouched forest of balsam and hemlock and red spruce, territory only the hardest or the maddest had even tried to hunt or trap. They kept pushing until they were well north of the last logging villages, a week's walk clear of the lines of battle spreading across the forests of the north, beyond the reach of Urghul and Annurian both. Valyn was starting to think they'd walk forever—all the way to Freeport, maybe, and the oceans of ice beyond that—but one day, just as the sun was setting, the wind blowing cold and hard out of the north, they came to a tiny clearing in the trees, a quiet, mossy spot from which you could see the gray peaks of the Romsdals looming to the north.

“Here,” his mother said, putting down her pack on a low granite boulder.

His father had smiled at that. “Here.”

The next day they started building.

When it was done, the cabin was larger than the one they'd left—two rooms with a fieldstone fireplace built into the wall. The day they lit that fire for the first time, Valyn's father had taken his mother in his hairy arms, lifted her off her feet, then kissed her square on the lips despite her sputtering protestations.

“You were right,” he said. “This is better than anything in the south.”

Valyn had thought so, too. Exploring the new forests, choosing the best circuit for his own snares, claiming a portion of land that no one in the long history of the world had ever claimed—it was all a small boy's dream. If he sometimes longed for companionship, for other children to share his adventures, well, he had Kadare, two years older; Kadare, who had taught him even more than Mother and Father about hunting, trapping, and moving silently through the wilderness. Thanks to Kadare, these dark, dense forests felt like home. Until now.

“I told you to leave the knife in the sheath,” the stranger said again, shaking his head grimly.

That voice—low, hard, rough and rusted as a long-neglected tool—made Valyn shrink back, and the voice was the least of it. The man facing him looked more dead than alive, lean as a starving wolf at winter's end, all the fat and softness scraped away until there was only skin stretched across corded muscle and bone. He wore something that might have been clothes once—leggings and a shirt of black wool so ripped and torn they offered less protection than Valyn's own crude hides. Beneath the cloth, his flesh was scribbled with scars, small puckered marks and long seams running over his chest and arms. The wounds that left those scars should have killed him half a dozen times over, but he wasn't killed. He was right there, standing just a few paces away, staring at Valyn, if staring was even the right word.

There had been a blind man in the village where Valyn grew up, an old grandfather people called Ennel the Bent. Valyn had stared at Ennel's eyes whenever he could, fascinated and a little frightened by the milky cloud splashed across the pupils. It had been strange, queasy-making, but old Ennel's eyes were nothing beside those of the man who faced him now.

The stranger's eyes were … ruined. They looked as though someone had hacked straight across them with an ax. Blood, trapped somehow beneath the eyeball's surface, washed the part that should have been white. The dark part around the pupil—the iris, Valyn remembered vaguely—was black as burned wood, blacker, dark as the dot at the very center, except for a ragged line of star-white scar. They didn't look like a man's eyes. They didn't look like eyes at all. Valyn wanted to scream.

“Keep your mouth shut,” the stranger said, stepping forward. He still hadn't drawn a weapon, but Valyn could see the axes now, two of them, handles lopped short, hanging from a poorly tanned leather belt. Dangling from the same belt was the corpse of a rabbit, skull crushed and bloody.

“My rabbit,” Valyn said stupidly, words spilling out of him as he stared. “You been stealing from my snares.”

The stranger grimaced. “You have bigger problems, kid.”

Valyn took a step back, trying to keep some space between them, raising his hands. “I won't tell no one. You can have the rabbit. You can have all of 'em. I'll show you where the snares are.…” He was babbling, but he couldn't stop himself. He'd seen something he wasn't supposed to see, had caught this man who was barely a man with the stolen rabbit, and now he was going to die. Valyn glanced over his shoulder into the sluggish river. He could jump, could try to swim it out. Maybe the man in black didn't know how to swim. He turned back just as the hand closed around his throat.

Valyn felt his bladder give way. He tried to scream, but the hand wouldn't let him. The man might look starved, but his grip was iron.

“Quit squirming, kid. I'm trying to help you.”

Stars screamed across Valyn's vision. Everything started to go dark. He aimed a kick at the killer's gut.
Like kicking stone,
he thought, just before he passed out.

A hard slap across the face brought him back. The stranger had laid him out on the granite ledge, was kneeling beside him now, hand poised at his throat.

“Don't scream,” he said. “They're far off, but that's no reason to take chances.”

He paused, raised his head. The movement—both wary and predatory—reminded Valyn of a lone wolf sniffing the air. After a moment, the man cursed quietly, then turned those awful, broken eyes back to Valyn.

“You know who the Urghul are?”

Valyn managed a weak nod.

“They're headed toward your cabin now. A small band of them. Maybe twenty. If you go back now, they'll catch you, too. Hurt you. Kill you.”

For a few heartbeats, Valyn struggled to make sense of the words. There were no Urghul this far north. He was safe here, he and his family both. They'd come here so they would be safe. The stranger was lying to him, was going to kill him.… He stared up at the man. Those eyes were worse than a skull's hollow sockets. He was horrible, more terrifying than Valyn's worst dream, but he wasn't lying. A new horror bloomed inside Valyn. He tried to yank free, but the man held him down easily. It didn't seem possible he could be so strong.

“There aren't any Urghul here,” Valyn protested. “They don't come up here.”

The stranger grimaced. “They didn't. Now, it seems that they do.”

“How do you know?”

The man hesitated. “I can smell them,” he said finally. “Horses and blood. They reek.” He turned an ear to the wind. “I almost believe I can hear them.”

It didn't make sense. Valyn sucked in a huge breath. He didn't smell any horses. The only thing he could hear was his own desperate panting.

“If there's Urghul, I gotta warn my folks, my brother.”

The man in black shook his head grimly. “Too late for warning. Your cabin's a long way off. They're almost there.”

“Then I'll fight 'em!” Valyn said, trying again to twist free. This time, to his surprise, the man let him up.

“Four against twenty? All you can do is die, kid.” He looked off blankly into the darkness between the trees, then shook his head. “Don't go back.”

Valyn expected something else, something more, but the man just turned on his heel. He even moved like a wolf, stalking toward the trees. He paused at the edge of the forest, turned, yanked the rabbit free of his belt, and tossed it to the ground in front of Valyn.

“Yours,” he said, then turned away again.

Valyn caught up with him a dozen paces into the hemlocks. Terror made him reckless, and he seized the stranger by the leather belt, pulled him back a moment, then found himself lifted by the front of his shirt, then slammed against the rough trunk of a tree. He could feel the jagged ends of the branches stabbing at him through his clothes as the man in black leaned close.

“Never touch me,” he hissed.

Valyn could barely breathe, but he forced himself to speak.

“I need your
help
.”

“You already got it.”

“I need more. I need to save my family. You can
fight.
…”

He couldn't say how he knew. Something about the way the man moved, about those twin axes hanging from his belt, about the terrible strength that kept him pinned against the tree.
He's a warrior
. The thought spun around and around in Valyn's mind like an autumn leaf caught in an eddy.
He's a killer
.

“I can't fight them alone,” Valyn pleaded. “I need your help.”

“I don't help.”

The stranger held Valyn a moment longer, then dropped him.

Valyn struggled to catch his breath, to get to his feet. One of the branches had torn through his leather tunic, tearing open a gash across his back. He could feel it bleeding. It didn't matter.

“You helped
me,
” he insisted. “You warned me. You're not Urghul. You're Annurian. You speak Annurian. And you warned me.”

“It was convenient.”

Valyn stared, aghast. He couldn't get the vision of his burning cabin out of his head. This time in the morning, they would all be there—his father and mother chopping firewood for the fall; his brother digging the new well. He imagined his family bleeding, sprawled out on the ground, cut open, bled out like wild game.

“Please,” he said, staying on his knees, staring up at the horrifying figure above him. “Please help me.”

The stranger ground his teeth so hard Valyn thought his jaw might crack, that the tendons of his neck might snap in two. It was impossible to read the emotion on that face: Rage? Regret? He didn't seem the type of person to feel regret, but he was hesitating, and that hesitation gave Valyn a faint, horrible hope.

“Please,” he said again, voice barely louder than the breeze.

“I need you to guide me,” the man said at last.

Valyn nodded eagerly, lurching to his feet. “All right,” he said, stumbling down the low slope. “This way. Hurry!”

After a dozen steps, he turned, realizing that the man in black hadn't moved. He remained standing on the rock ledge, back turned to the morning sun, face lost in the shadow.

“Please!” Valyn pleaded. “Come
on
!”

The stranger shook his head slowly. “I can move through the forest alone, but I'm too slow.” Then, with a movement that was the opposite of slow, a gesture so fast Valyn didn't have time to flinch, the man slipped one of the short axes from the belt at his side, spun it once in the air, then caught the haft below the head. He held the handle out toward Valyn. “Take the other end,” he said. “Lead the way. It'll be faster.”

For a moment, Valyn couldn't move. He was terrified of what the stranger claimed was happening at his home, and terrified, too, of the stranger himself. Touching that ax, even the harmless butt of the wooden haft, seemed dangerous. More than dangerous. “What?” he asked, rooted to the spot by his conflicting horrors.
“Why?”