The Shades of Winter a Novel of Averraine Read online

  “Well, I don’t suppose you came merely to give me bad tidings. It’s been what? Ten days now, since you had this news? Tell me the whole of it.”

  It seemed obvious someone had a plan. It was equally obvious that plan would be at least halfway to madness, but I couldn’t fault anyone for that. There weren’t that many choices.

  Most everyone, over the last years, had sunk into a kind of apathy. Katla had been a strong leader, perhaps a little quick to anger, but willing, if time allowed, to at least hear others’ views even if they seemed contrary, and when Njall ruled in Raethelingas after her, people had understood that their courage and their counsel were valued. With Hrolf, though, one never knew.

  He hadn’t been raised to be king. He hadn’t been prepared for it - his life was meant to be one of service to his brother, like all the rest of the Kyndred. Thrust suddenly into the role of a leader, he’d been grief-stricken and uncertain, at first, and hesitant to take any action that might not turn out well.

  It hadn’t gotten much better over time. He got more comfortable with command - too comfortable, some said: he began to enjoy giving orders. But in times of crisis, he still preferred to wait upon events, to consider every possible angle, or even to firmly ignore a problem’s very existence, until either the situation resolved itself, or, more frequently, he was forced into some inadequate remedial action, shoring up the damage done and hoping for better days ahead.

  It had infected everyone around him. His rage against anyone who took matters into their own hands was terrifying - old Jarl Haakon had been locked in a disused granary at Raethelingas for days, and nearly starved to death before his son talked Hrolf into mercy - and all because, in a perfectly justified blood-feud over an ugly, public insult, he’d gone raiding into Istara and killed someone Hrolf’s wife, Gisla, was related to.

  People began to be cautious. They began to stick closer to home, to watch their speech, and to protect themselves and their own, girding themselves against these new days when they had had to give up even the hope of assistance from Raethelingas.

  The horror of this attack could not go unpunished. The Kyndred were right in this, at least. If we let this one go, it seemed obvious that we would lose everything. After twenty years, it felt as though we were right back to where we’d been when this had all gone wrong - except this time, we didn’t have a strong commander and an army of battle-hardened warriors. Despite everything, we’d been damn close to handing Istara an enormous defeat back then, with every intention of chasing them back into their own scattered islands and laying enough waste to their holdings that they’d think not twice or thrice, but a dozen times over before they set a single foot on Raeth soil again.

  But that had not happened, and in the long years since, we’d dwindled into frightened, hesitant folk, with less far-flung trade and fewer raiding ventures, staying closer to home and trying not to remember the hopeful past.

  There was no question, though, that there needed to be some answer to this outrage, an answer in blood.

  And it had to be one that Istara understood.

  Chapter 4

  “I suppose you’re the advance guard, then?” I said. “Gathering the forces? Who else have we got?”

  “Well, no one, actually,” said Sigurd. “I mean, what with the harvest, and all - there isn’t much time. We need to strike quickly. Besides, we can’t ask anyone else to risk it. It’s down to us, Tamar. We’re the Kyndred.”

  “Are you mad? What are we going to do? Sail into Istri Bay and launch an assault on Jolgeir’s hall? All nine of us?”

  There it was, that reticence again. Oddhi had his face deep in his mug, and there was a general air of shiftiness about them all.

  “Out with it,” I said. “What kind of idiocy have you been dreaming up?”

  Lavran pulled out a ragged scrap of sheepskin, a sort of crude drawing someone - certainly not Lavran - had scratched out, showing the whole of Istara, some of Raeth, and the northernmost bits of Keraine and Camrhys. It didn’t look terribly accurate or reassuring, but it was likely the best he could find on short notice.

  He pointed to a spot, well west of Istara’s main islands. It was just a cluster of small, indistinct dots, most of which were simply rocks jutting out into the sea, inhabited by occasional sea birds and inedible molluscs.

  But there was one place where that wasn’t quite true.

  If we had Heilaegr, Istara had the island of Alvandir. If we had a place that seemed to be close to touching a realm of light, Istara had found a cave under the shadows.

  It had always been a place to be shunned. When we came fleeing out of the north lands, still one people escaping our shared doom, we had not understood the sea road. It had taken long years to learn it, to make ourselves its master. Yet once we had, and we’d moved out from the mainland, it took only two or three foolhardy attempts at sailing those particular waters, before we collectively decided to leave it alone.

  Fogbound and inhospitable, certainly not a useful place, and then there were those ruins.

  Once, a long time before we’d come south, someone had built a mighty place there. The crumbling towers and walls were still plainly to be seen, stark against the wide horizon. There were rumours that a few hardy souls had gone there, early on, but those rumours likewise suggested that no one had ever returned from such ventures. It was best not even to remember it existed at all.

  And then, suddenly, when my granddad was still a lad, so the story goes, some wise ones from Istara had sailed there, and stayed. Not swallowed up into misty misadventure, this time, no. They came with supplies, and clearly with a purpose. Somehow, one could not suppose that purpose to be pleasant.

  They’d rebuilt the walls. They’d added a proper landing place, heavily guarded, where, at intervals, supply ships came and unloaded unknown cargoes. And the rumours of disappearances when uninvited travelers chanced there became facts: it was known, after a time, that among other things, criminals might be sent there, and thralls, sometimes, too, and the sense of wrongness about the place grew.

  But if common report was anything to go by, any lingering fears that Istarans might have had about Alvandir were mixed with awe and reverence, and a sense of peculiar pride. They’d braved an unknown, arcane danger and bent it to their will. It had very quickly acquired holiness and a reputation for producing True Seers and other powerful things, and the kings in Istri began to rely heavily on the wise ones who came from the shadowed island.

  The silence was lengthening. I was simply staring at my friends, my sworn family, these wonderful, beloved, exasperating men and women, with bemused shock.

  Audric said, “It needs to be something that hits them where they hit us.”

  “And how,” I asked, “How, exactly, do you propose to get within a sword’s length of any of them? Ever supposing we could get near the place undetected, do you think they’ll just politely let us sail right up to the front door, tie up our ship, and form up before they spit us like dogs?”

  “No, no, that isn’t what we want to do at all.”

  “Well, then, what?”

  “You remember Bolle, the trader from Andvettsholm?”

  I had to think a bit, before it came to me. Bolle had gotten an entire winter of safe moorings and good dinners out of his tale of a freak storm on his way back from an unsuccessful attempt to open up trade with some Camrhyssi lord on the coast.

  “You’re taking a traveler’s tale for instruction?”

  “Well,” said Lavran, stubbornly, “he swears to the truth of it, even now.”

  That explained some of the days between hearing the news of the attack on Heilaegr and their arrival here, at least. And it explained where Lavran had gotten that drawing.

  Bolle claimed he’d been blown off-course in a sudden, unseasonable squall. Worse, the rudder strap had broken, and by the time they’d managed to effect some make-shift repairs, they had drifted a lot further from their last known position. He’d made his best guess as to where
he was, given the cloudy night, but in the early dawn, he’d found himself standing less than half a league off the shadowed isle.

  He had a knack for the dramatic, Bolle had. By this point in his rendition of the tale, his listeners would have been all riveted, open-mouthed in fascination. He could have told them the wildest things, and they would have believed him without question.

  The quayside portion of Alvandir might be heavily watched and guarded. Bolle didn’t know, and he was honest enough to admit he had had no desire to find out. But the north-westerly shore, he said, was virtually deserted. The wise had not been such good stewards as to completely repair those parts of the fortress they had no use for, he reckoned; the walls were more like a hasty pile of rocks than proper masonry, and the approach seemed to be ignored. The remains of the ruined guard towers were plainly unmanned on this side of the island. He had drifted close enough that he could see the reflected torchlight from two other towers on the southern side, and he’d made note of the general lay of the land.

  The walls, such as they were, melted into a tumble of stone and scree, as if some other structure had once been there long ago, and in Bolle’s opinion, it was entirely possible, on the face of it, to climb up and over, right into Alvandir’s heart.

  “If I’d had some decent warriors,” he’d boasted, “I’d have gone in and murdered the lot of them, filthy Istaran scum. Not but what they’ve probably laid traps and curses all about, hoping some poor fool will try it.”

  I hadn’t really believed his story the first time around. None of us had. But now they seemed to have lost their doubts.

  “Even if every word of it is true,” I said, “that was four seasons past. Maybe they didn’t have a watch there that night. Who’s to say they aren’t watching it now?”

  “Well, we needn’t sail straight up,” said Sigurd. “We could stand off a ways and watch.”

  “Yes? At some point, someone is bound to notice a ship, even in the distance.”

  “That’s why we came in the ‘Sea Cat’, this time. It’s so small. At night, without a sail, who could notice that?”

  I pointed out that none of us had ever believed that Bolle had sailed as close as he’d claimed, always assuming that the rest of his tale was essentially true.

  “We don’t even know if there’s any sort of landing place at all. It could be impossible to get near the shore without some rock scuppering us a half a league away. And I’ll give Bolle this much: what are the odds they haven’t laid a host of traps and curses to save themselves the trouble of guarding a pile of rubble?”

  “Ah, well,” said Sigurd. “Were you planning to die in your bed, then?”

  I slammed down my cup, and walked away, along the length of the hall, till I stood in the open doorway.

  Even in the dark, Dyrsholt was an orderly-looking community. The way from the halls to the docking place was a wide, well-kept track bordered with the workshops and houses of a dozen crafters, separated by tidy little kitchen gardens. All along the headland, I could see the outlines of farmers’ steadings, the gaps that signified open fields, and the silhouettes of communal granaries, filled not just with enough food to get us through this year, but a surplus against calamity or woe.

  It had virtually nothing to do with me, to be honest. I was never here in the spring or summer, off trading or raiding when the real work was done. I was gone most winters to Raethelingas, and I was barely aware of the work involved when I was home.

  Apart from my occasional forays into harvesting barley, whatever time I spent here was mainly involved with hunting, inspecting the defenses, and drilling our own household warriors and any likely youngsters who wanted a little more than farming in their lives. I was aided and abetted in this by everyone around me, too, because they got on with their own tasks so much more easily without my interference. Only in times of violence was my presence at home truly useful, and even then, Gunnr and Trude always managed perfectly well in my absence.

  Every morning was a struggle, not only to come up with some sensible task to fill my day, but to keep hidden the ache in my back that slowed me when I rolled out of bed, or the much-worse ache of my left knee when the weather was about to turn wet. I knew from experience that nothing is more boring than listening to some old geezer’s complaints about their body.

  Raisa came and stood beside me, slipping her arm around me, but wisely, perhaps, saying nothing. I leaned against her shoulder, seeking that familiar comfort, and after a minute or two, I straightened up, and we went back in and rejoined the others.

  “Well,” I said. “We’re going to need a better map.”

  Chapter 5

  Four nights later, we stood two leagues off Alvandir, and considered our options.

  The weather was not unfavourable. The day had been unseasonably hot, humid, and still: one of those last kicks of summer’s memory before the winds change and autumn takes a true hold on things. The light breeze that came up at dusk was barely enough, I thought, to take us on a slanting course between Alvandir’s western edge and the nearest spit of rock that could be termed an island.

  It had been very late by the time I’d stumbled to my bed, that first night, and it was only then that the full horror of Heilaegr quite caught up with me. I lay in the darkness, choking on the bile that rose in my throat, trying not to imagine how terrifying it must have been, trying not to imagine Aesa’s face in place of those unknown children being cut down so young, trying vainly to shut it all out and just be angry.

  Raisa slipped silently in beside me, her warm, strong arms curving round my body. How many times had one of us known, without needing words, that comfort was not merely longed-for, but necessary? Neither of us spoke. We didn’t need to speak. At some point, I turned to her, and gave it back, kindness for kindness, kissing away the silent, unshed tears.

  I woke in the faint light of dawn, and she was already gone, the bed still warm from her body. A couple of candle marks later, I coaxed my aching head into letting me sit up, and I thought, not about Raisa, but about what we had all managed to settle on as a plan, the night before, and what was still left to discuss.

  The timing was the most crucial. We were relying on stealth to make this work, and that required a moonless night. The gods don’t give you any extra ones, not even for holy vengeance.

  The map was an easier problem. After some thought, I went and ransacked my brother’s old things, packed in a battered sea chest and tucked under the stairs in the smaller guest hall, and sure enough, there it was, an ancient-looking chart like those southerners make, that my grandfather had wound up with after a slightly legendary dice game. It didn’t just show a more accurate picture of the islands that made up Istara. Its maker had marked the seasonal winds and the greater currents that governed the sea roads, and had indicated a rough outline of Keraine’s northernmost coasts and safest beaches.

  Once you make up your mind to it, utterly doomed expeditions are not so hard. I’d had time to get used to the idea, and really, it was not quite complete madness. If we could manage it, if we could strike a blow at the heart of Istara’s pride, if we could kill a decent number of their wise ones and warriors, then perhaps we would have given Istara what Hrolf would not or could not bring himself to: an active statement of defiance and revenge.

  If we could do it, and somehow word leaked out - and it always does, someone always talks, and others always weave the threads of rumour together - our deed would echo down the years like thunder. We would have made good on something, after all.

  And Sigurd had the right of it. We were the last of a dying memory, and we had existed for too long already. We were the tragic remnant of something precious that had been lost, and all we could do was this: one final gift of a dead king’s legacy. A debt we could repay, and that, for me and mine, might have been the most important thing of all.

  That was what had come to me in the end: that this was something I could do for my name, for Gunnr, for Aesa. What is it that we do that trul
y lives on, after all? Down the long years, my family had done precious little that was to our credit, but it was barely possible that this was what the gods had meant for me, all along.

  Not that my son agreed.

  Going looking for the map had tipped him off that something was up, although, like me, he’d been wary of this out-of-season visit already. Not even the Kyndred do much that surprises, not anymore, and even if we’d thought ourselves the only ones awake in those small hours when they’d given me the news about Heilaegr, it was possible at least some of it had been overheard. It could have been my imagination, but I thought there was an uneasy feel in the air.

  I’d woken not only with that aching head but still with some unanswered misgivings chasing each other in my mind, and perhaps that made me easy prey for Gunnr’s questions. He’d caught up with me outside the latrines about mid-morning, and I could tell from his face and the set of his shoulders that he wouldn’t be fobbed off with anything like an easy lie.

  Well, what good would a deed be, if no one knew about it? Heilaegr, for a start, that would likely be common knowledge by the time the autumn winds blew in, anyhow. I didn’t tell him the whole of our plans, of course. I didn’t tell him much at all, just the merest cryptic essentials, so that when the rumours drifted back to him, he’d know the truth of it.

  But it was enough to make him furious with me, and I could not, for bags of plunder, think why.

  “What good will it do, if you die for this? Do you never think of us at all?”

  “I am thinking of you. I’m thinking of all of us. Gunnr, if we do nothing, Istara will roll over us like an endless tide, you know it.”

  He glared at me. At times like these, he looked a lot like my mother, implacable and hard. I remembered how adamant she had always been, like iron, and so singular in her purpose.

  And that was odd, because he didn’t take after her in the slightest, not really, not in feature or in form, and still less so in character or temperament. She’d never had much to do with him, after all, and she’d died before he had seen five winters, so it wasn’t a thing he could have consciously tried for. Even so, the set of his jaw, the slight drawing in of his brows, that hard line of his lips - when he was angry, that was all her.