Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (2 page)

The aurora flared at the red peak of its cycle,
shrouding the northern half of the sky with rippling curtains of crimson light.
It was midday and while the sun tried mightily to outshine the trespasser in
its azure domain, it had to settle for sharing. Below this luminous duel
stretched a noble, northern land of soaring mountains and vast evergreen
forests, pockmarked by countless lakes and scarred by rushing rivers and rocky
crevasses. Here, among an ancient forest that enveloped the boundary between
civilization and wilderness, one daughter and two sons of this land walked
along a trail towards their home village with a morning’s worth of successful
fishing.

Tyrissa was a tall girl, built lean from years of
running and climbing through the Morgwood and topped with a mane of golden
blonde hair that did not see a comb often enough. Her face was somewhere short
of pretty, but her smile was broad and striking, her blue eyes always bright
with a touch of mischief. As the eldest, a scant few weeks short of seventeen
years, she led their party of three through the forest with a comfort that a
dwindling number of their people possessed. With a fishing spear propped on her
shoulder, Tyrissa scanned their surroundings for the spot she had marked
yesterday.

The path was little more than a game trail that
followed the top of a short ridge. To either side the ground slopped away into
the summertime tangle of undergrowth and fallen branches. Thin pines towered
above them in all directions, their heights swaying in the gentle breeze and
filtering any sunlight that reached the forest floor into narrow slits. The
fresh scents of resin, pollen, and foliage in full bloom filled the air.

Tyrissa brought the three of them to a stop near
a tree with her initials carved in its bark. She pointed the spear off the
trail to their left, pushing aside the fronds of a summer fern.

“This way,” she said. Her two brothers returned
only blank stares.

“Home’s back that way Ty,” ten-year-old Sven said
while pointing up the trail, his voice tinged with a whine. Sven shared
Tyrissa’s features, those of their father, though his hair was a typical boyish
mop and his mouth usually held a tight, petulant frown, as it did now. At least
he pointed in the correct direction this time.

“I know,” Tyrissa said, “But we still need to
catch dinner.”

“But we have all these fish! We’ve been out here
all morning and I’m
tired
.” Sven carried a small pack filled with
fishing gear and hitched his shoulders to punctuate his discomfort at all this
walking.

“This’ll be the first time we’ve seen Liran in
two years. We’re going to have something better than salmon or elk.” It was
their brother Liran, five years her elder, who introduced Tyrissa to the trails
and secrets of the forest. In turn, she tried to pass those same lessons and
wonders onto Sven and Oster, with limited success. “Besides,” she said, “you
need to toughen up. Mother coddles you too much.”

“She does not!”

“Then you won’t mind us taking a few more steps,”
Tyrissa leaned on her youngest brother’s recently found need to prove himself
stronger, a useful tool against his stubbornness.

“Fine,” Sven muttered.

“That-a-boy,” Tyrissa said, ruffling his hair.
Sven ducked away. He hated that.

“Ty, what’re you up to,” Oster asked. As usual,
the boy of fifteen preferred patience over interruption.

“When was the last time you had wurm steak?”

Tyrissa smiled as Oster’s eyes widened and took
on a distant cast as the memory returned to him. He took after their mother,
with a rounder face, brown eyes, and hair that was more honey than gold. Though
built wider than average he wasn’t fat, just solid with the effects of his
apprenticeship at the town smithy starting to show. Tyrissa had already given
up trying to beat him in arm wrestling.

“Midwinter’s Feast the year before last,” he
said. “Mistress Forran said we could only have one each, but I snuck out a
second under a big slice of bread when she wasn’t looking. It was the best
feast ever.”

“Right,” Tyrissa agreed. Oster had an impeccable
memory for great food. “Can you think of a better dinner to welcome Liran
home?”

“No. Lead on.”

“Great,” Tyrissa said, stepping off the trail,
the ferns slapping at her legs.

Ten minutes of traversing the wilder, off-trail
terrain of fallen trees and shallow creeks led to a wide clearing covered in
moss, dried needles, and fallen pine cones. Thirty feet across and roughly
circular, the stillness of the area was distinct from the typical forest calm.
The ground was too clear of small ferns or saplings or other undergrowth that
would rush to fill such a space with its pool of unfiltered sunlight.

Tyrissa dropped her pack to the ground and held a
hand up to her brothers.

“Stay there. Don’t come any further.” Tyrissa
began poking the ground in front of her with the butt of the fishing spear,
taking small steps forward between each jab. After a few paces the spear sunk
into too-soft earth. She then dragged the spear through the ground, creating a
shallow trench that filled with murky water.

“What’s she doing,” Sven asked.

“This is a
raeg
,” Oster said, “a pool of
muck and mud that forms from years of spring rains and snowmelt collecting in a
low area. If you’re alone and fall in, you’re done for as it’ll drag you down
if you struggle against it.”

“And that’s why you never go into clearings you
don’t know?”

“Correct.”

“Which is what Ty’s doing right now?”

Oster paused and said, “Also correct.”

Her brothers weren’t wrong but sometimes, Tyrissa
reminded herself, you have to take risks for the big prize. Tyrissa finished
drawing a line in the earth and returned to the two boys. She smacked the
fishing spear against a nearby pine tree, shaking off the mud coating the butt
of the spear. The tree leaned precariously over the
raeg
, the growing
pool threatening to topple the forest giant in the coming years.

“I saw a wurm here
a couple weeks ago,”
Tyrissa said. “It should still be in there, they like to lurk in the muck
during the summer. Here’s the plan. We’ll toss a couple fish in there to get
its attention. Oster, unhook all of those and pile them up over there.” She
pointed to the slope they came down, about fifteen feet away from the edge of
the
raeg
. Oster simply nodded and went to work.

“One fish will be hooked on a line as bait for
the wurm to chase out. It’ll smell the pile once it’s on dry ground and rush
over. Their vision in daylight is bad and it probably won’t even see us.”
Tyrissa knelt and pulled a weighted net from the bottom of her pack.

“Sven, all you have to do is throw this net on it
after we lure it out, all right?” The boy took the net from her hands in
agreement, though his brow was furrowed in worry.

Tyrissa softened her voice and placed a hand on
her youngest brother’s shoulder. “They aren’t as fast on dry ground when
there’s no snow to burrow through. If anything goes wrong you can outrun it.”

Sven nodded, looking only somewhat reassured.
“How do you know all this Ty?”

“I read a book. Ranger rule of the forest number
four: know your prey.”

That proved to be of little reassurance. Even
Sven had taken to rolling his eyes whenever she quoted one of her ‘rules’.

“But you haven’t done this before,” Sven said.

“No. Anyway, Oster will man the fishing pole and
lure. You stand between the
raeg
and the fish pile.”

“And what are you going to do?”

Tyrissa drew her belt knife, a well-built blade
etched with
Jorensen
, their family name, and pointed at the fishing spear
propped against the doomed, leaning tree.

“I get to kill it,” she said with a grin. She had
re-read the wurm section in her old ranger manuals a dozen times in the last
few days, memorizing the instructions and diagrams. All it takes is one quick
stab in the right place to kill a wurm. It should be easy.

Tyrissa sheathed the knife and walked over to the
pile of fish. She chose a smaller one and tossed it to the middle of the
raeg
.
It landed with a wet smack and sank into the muck. The three youths watched,
waiting for their prey to make an appearance. Soon, the surface of the pool
quivered and a guttural gulp swallowed the area around fish.

Tyrissa let out a short laugh.

“Right! Let’s do this. Sven stand a little to the
side.”

The three took up their positions. Sven and
Tyrissa stood a few steps to either side of Oster who stood at the line in the
earth. Tyrissa funneled her buzzing energy into rotating the spear in her
hands, feeling the friction of the wood turning in her palms.

This should work
, she thought.
Lure,
net, and stab. That’s all
.

Oster paused with his arm pulled back to throw
the hooked fish into the pool. “Does anyone else find it funny that we used
worms to catch fish and are now using fish to catch a wurm?” He gave a small
grin, pleased with himself.

“Throw the fish dummy,” Tyrissa said, wishing she
had thought of that quip first.

Oster skipped the fish across the surface from
the edge of the
raeg
, backing away once it came to a stop, dragging the
bait across the top layer of moss and mud. Nothing happened, the
raeg
was still. He shared a shrug with Tyrissa, and repeated the process.

“Maybe it’s full,” Sven suggested.

Halfway through the second cast there was another
gulp from below that missed the bait by inches. As Oster dragged the line
across the surface, a bulge of mud rose and followed the fish like a giant,
seeking finger of the earth. It inched up to the edge, and hesitated as the
fish passed onto dry land. Tyrissa waved her hand downward, and Oster let the
bait come to rest halfway between the pool and the pile of fish. He dropped the
fishing rod and took up the emptied staff, brandishing it at the moving mound
in the
raeg
.

The wurm emerged onto dry land in an explosion of
mud. Its head was a pointed snout with bony ridges on either side that bore
sunken and beady black eyes. Thin, flexible plates lined its body under a
clinging layer of mud. It was five feet long, a foot wide, and much larger than
Tyrissa expected.

As planned, the wurm ignored the three youths,
instead snorting at the air before undulating towards the bait. They stared at
the beast, transfixed. They’d all heard stories of wurms and eaten the
occasional hunted one, but seeing one alive and writhing across the forest
floor was something else entirely.

“The net! Now!” Tyrissa’s command snapped Sven to
attention and he threw the net from where he stood. It spread properly in the
air but fell short, a single weighted corner hitting the wurm with a pitiful
thock
.
Provoked, the wurm abandoned its free meal and surged towards Sven, stopping
partway and twisting its body around, whipping its tail as a bludgeon with
surprising speed.

That wasn’t in the book
, Tyrissa thought.

To his credit, Sven jumped over the wurm’s tail,
but was bowled over when it recoiled back around. The boy landed hard on his
side and cried out in pain. He pushed himself up on hands and knees and tried
to back away. Right into the
raeg
. Sven screamed and struggled against
the sucking mud, hands scrabbling against the soft earth. There was nothing
firm to grasp at the pools edge, and he only managed to draw himself downward
to the waist.

“Oster! Help him!” It happened so fast that
neither of them had moved.

Tyrissa stepped forward, flipped the spear
around, and smashed the butt against the wurm’s snout. It turned to her and
opened its mouth to reveal a single row of widely spaced teeth that looked like
carved points of stone, ancient arrowheads. Mouth agape and hissing, the wurm
surged towards Tyrissa in a brutish slither as alien as a snake’s but with none
of the grace. She hopped back a few steps, spinning the spear around to face
down the creature’s charge, waiting until the critical second when the wurm was
just the right distance away.

Tyrissa yelped something resembling a battle cry,
crouched low, and thrust the spear into the wurm’s open mouth. The creature
twisted at just the wrong moment, dodging a fraction of an inch out of the way
of Tyrissa’s strike. The thin spear point struck nothing but the earth, the
shaft grazing against the wurm’s jaw. The wurm turned and bit down on the
spear, narrowly missing one of Tyrissa’s hands. Thrown off balance by the
sudden weight, she pushed herself away, falling backward to the soft ground.

The wurm closed its jaw around the spear,
snapping off both ends. It lay still for a second, struggling with the chunk of
wood lodged in its mouth. It coughed and hacked, trying without success to
eject the spear fragment. Tyrissa glanced beyond their supposed prey to see
that Oster had pulled Sven out of the
raeg.
She spared the briefest
thought to abandoning the idea, settling for a lesser meal. Instead, Tyrissa
sprang to her feet, drew her belt knife, and jumped atop the wurm’s back.

As soon as she was atop it, the wurm began to
contorting wildly, thrashing about in every direction. Tyrissa held on,
wrapping her legs around the beast and stabbing at its back in quick jabs with
her knife. Her strikes left only superficial scratches against the wurm’s thick
skin. The wurm’s tail lashed around in circles, causing the two combatants to
roll away from the
raeg
. They came to a stop against one of the trees
ringing the clearing, Tyrissa on top. She shifted her weight and managed to
plant a knee against the wurm’s back, trying to pin it down. It must have been
a sweet spot on its spine, for the creature’s violent spasms weakened.