The Shades of Winter a Novel of Averraine Read online

  It made for a tense day all round, then, compounded not just by a lack of privacy so that our plans could be made, but by Gunnr’s disapproval and consequent lack of co-operation. He didn’t relent, and it was obvious that he’d told Trude all about it, so there was little help from that quarter either.

  I was used to being easy with them, in confiding in them, in not having secrets. One can’t have peace in a hall if there’s no fair apportioning of the load, both in good times and bad, and I knew I was breaking that comfortable family accord of shared decision-making, but I put it away from my thoughts and merely hoped that they would learn to forgive this in the end.

  It was too late now for looking backward. If we were going to do this, I was going into it with a whole heart and not so much as a particle of doubt, because nothing makes your sword arm more sluggish than regret.

  • • •

  It was slow going, with so little wind, agonizingly slow, made all the more so by the mist that was gathering and obscuring what little we could see, and then there was the overwhelming need for silence. Sound can travel strangely over the water, and we were down to bird-calls and the like, and the fewer the better, at that.

  Suddenly Halvar made a soft, hissing noise and held up his hand. I swung the steering oar hard and as we came about, I could even see a smudge of something dark against the midnight sky.

  So far, so good. The sail flapped, windless, for a moment, and heartstoppingly loud in that silence, before we got ourselves angled east. It wouldn’t be easy; we’d need to sail in a time-consuming, zigzag course, chasing the breeze and hoping we wouldn’t miss the western edge of Alvandir entirely, but it didn’t seem to me that we could have been spotted. If we couldn’t see an entire island in front of us, it stood to reason that our little ship had passed thus far unnoticed.

  And Bolle had spoken this much truth: standing off well south of the island, we had seen only the faintest glow of torchlight at the eastern side. We’d had to row in a good bit closer than I’d been happy about, just to make sure of that much, but in the darkness, even if they’d been looking for us, it was unlikely they’d have noticed the Sea-Cat, with her sail down.

  We crept along, in that awful fever of anticipation you get before any raid starts in earnest. Each creak of the sail-ropes against the mast made us twitch, but there was nothing we could do about that. Was the distance really that great? Alone with only my thoughts in the night, I began to wonder if the map had led us astray, or if I’d misjudged the angles.

  Halvar didn’t need to repeat his signal, though. I saw it even as he did, a great black, hulking shape suddenly in front of us, like some squatting, jagged toad, crouched and waiting beside an enormous pond.

  Ingvold and Lavan were already up and hauling down the sail, and the rest were sliding out their oars. Moments later I heard the welcome sound of wavelets hitting a rock-bound coast, and then, well less of a candle-mark on, the yet more reassuring whisper of our keel scraping against a sandy shore.

  By some amazing piece of luck, we’d managed to row neatly into what might have been the only safe, tiny inlet on all of Alvandir.

  Chapter 6

  When we’d made our plans, we’d given a lot more thought to the voyage than to anything else, largely because we had so little information, but we knew from Bolle’s description that there would be some climbing involved. How much, and how dangerous that might be had been discussed, but of all of us, only Audric, born in Hrafnsfell, had so much as a nodding acquaintance with any place where scaling cliffs of granite was a useful skill, and even there, it wasn’t anyone’s idea of a regular pastime. He thought he could find us a safe way to do it, if there was one, but we hadn’t considered how the moonless night would slow this part of our scheme down even more.

  The light mist had turned into a thickening fog now. We could barely see two arm’s lengths ahead with any surety, and if the tale of this being the remains of some fallen stone building were true, it might not be entirely stable, according to Audric.

  He didn’t seem very bothered by it, though. His plan was to scout ahead a little, and then guide us in stages till we gained the heights. Each time he disappeared, leaving us huddled together on whatever ledge or stone pile he’d decided was safe enough, we sat straining our ears for the sound of him falling into an abyss, or the rumble of an avalanche, or worst of all, shouts of an alarm being raised if our little invasion was discovered.

  After a while, it got boring. You can only be that keyed up for action for so long. We held occasional whispered discussions on how many warriors we thought were housed within, and some hushed speculations on how we might combat the Istaran wise ones, when we encountered them.

  “They fall to cold steel like anyone else,” Elke said. “Just spit ‘em before they have time to think.”

  The climbing was getting more difficult, now, and the stopping places were getting smaller. On one, you couldn’t even crouch. We stood tight against a huge block of stone, and I found my fingers were vainly trying to grip into that flatness. All I could think about was how long it would take to reach the bottom, if I fell.

  But this time, when Audric came back, slipping down over the wreckage like a ferret after the hen’s eggs, he was grinning.

  “Found a way up,” he said. “There’s an old bit of wall that joins up with the part they still use. Easy as an oatcake on a griddle. Ingvold, we’ll need that rope. You’ll see.”

  The cheeriness in his low voice did not reassure me, and the slow precariousness of the next stretch of climbing didn’t help, either. There were bits of stone that shifted alarmingly even under my weight, and we frequently dislodged small tumbles of pebble that sounded distressingly loud as they clattered down. Every time this happened, we froze in our tracks, desperately silent and straining our ears for the sound of guards racing to find the source of the noise.

  But no one came. At last, we were crammed in a single file along a narrow ledge that ended abruptly at a short wall of dressed stone, only man-height or so, and we could see, over that, the mist drifting in the quiet night sky.

  “See,” Audric pointed up. “If Ingvold can boost me up, I’ll have a look-see. I’m pretty sure it’s a walkway. Stands to reason.”

  Well, that made some sense. With guard towers at all four corners of these massive walls, there would need to be some way to move between them. The Raeth might not build fortresses like this, but we’d traded and raided southwards often enough to have seen a few of them.

  The wall was higher than it looked. Standing on Ingvold’s shoulders, Audric still only just barely managed to get a purchase on the top edge, and then only with a little sort of jumping motion that gave him that last inch or so.

  I felt sick. If he’d missed, if his grip hadn’t been just quite right, if one of us had merely breathed the wrong way…

  But the rope slithered over the edge, and then Audric’s face was grinning down at us. Elke was already scrambling onto Ingvold’s shoulders, and getting hauled up that last couple of feet. The others were following - it was the work of only moments, and then it was my turn.

  Ingvold grunted. I scrabbled for the rope, and for the tiniest instant I was suspended, sickeningly, between ground and sky, and then I felt Sigurd grabbing my wrists and dragging me over the wall to kneel beside him.

  Everything was dark and silent. From very far away, I could hear the echo of people, the muffled drift of careless laughter, but only faintly, when the breeze carried it. We were still undetected.

  It took our combined efforts to get Ingvold over the edge. If he’d been as little as a half a head or so shorter, we could never have done it, but we managed to drag him the little distance needed before he could grab onto the wall and pull his not-inconsiderable weight over.

  I looked around.

  We were only a little way off from the southwest corner of the wall. Rising just a bit out of my crouching position, I could see the glow of torchlight in three places, all of them in a line along
the eastern stretch. Two guard towers actually manned, I thought, and a central sort of structure lit by a single torch. That would be the way back down into the rest of the fortress, probably.

  Raisa pointed towards the nearer tower, and I nodded. We crept along, keeping low till we reached the corner, and had both some cover and a clear line of sight to the tower at the opposite end.

  “Right,” I whispered. “We need to know what we’re facing. Oddhi, Halvar, do you think you can get close enough without being noticed?”

  “Oh, aye. Elke, slip down with us a ways, just into bowshot, and cover us, eh?”

  It was a tense wait. We could, for a little bit, see them working their way along, one on each side of the walkway, and Elke behind them, but the shadows soon swallowed them up, and then it was just listening, straining our ears for a shout, a cry that said they’d been discovered.

  After what seemed forever, I heard a soft sound, like a cat’s footfall, and then all three of them slid silently back into view.

  “I count five, maybe six,” Halvar said. Oddhi nodded. “And they look to be at their ease about it, too.”

  Five or six on each corner. Perhaps two more at the centre point. If they had three shifts going, that was thirty or so warriors. If they were wary of possible attacks, they might have another twenty or so patrolling the pier below in small squads trading off. The place was pretty defensible, overall. At least half of them might be asleep at this time of night.

  If we took two lots out without raising the alarm, we’d have balanced things up a bit, and even the best of fighters need a few minutes to go from a sound sleep to battle-ready. We’d have to be quick, though.

  We hardly needed to make a plan, when you came right down to it. The thing was obvious: we had to take out both towers as quietly as we could, before they knew what we were about, and without anyone shouting a warning. The best bet was to take both places at once, on the slim chance that there wasn’t anyone else up here. If there was, well, we would just have to take down as many Istarans as we could, and hope it was enough to make our message clear.

  Chapter 7

  You know how when you expect a decent fight and you don’t get it, you feel sort of cheated?

  Taking the guard towers at Alvandir was like that. We’d split into two groups, with Elke and her bow slipping down ahead of Ingvold, Audric and I, back towards the first tower, after giving the others time enough to creep around to the other.

  There was a figure framed in the archway suddenly. We froze in our tracks, but he seemed unaware, moving out and over to the wall. Apparently, there weren’t any serious amenities up here; he was still fumbling with his trousers when Elke stood up and sent an arrow through his throat.

  He didn’t make so much as a gurgle. I slid up to the side of the archway and looked on a slant across into the part opposite.

  There was an older man, half asleep on the bench there, and beside him a girl half his age, talking across to someone who seemed to be just on the other side of the wall I was hugged up against. Audric, at the other side of the opening, held up two fingers. I nodded agreement.

  And then we went for it. I whipped around into the room and gutted the first bit of movement I saw, which turned out to be another older man half undressed, and still holding his shirt in both hands. He dropped, moaning, to his knees, and I reached to slit his throat, and then I felt Ingvold move past me in a leap and saw that he’d collared a boy of perhaps fifteen, who was scrambling for the safety of the farther archway. He fell backwards without a sound. Ingvold hadn’t even drawn his sword.

  Audric was wiping the blood from his long knives. He was always deadly in close quarters like that, the two knives would move like serpents in his hands, and he’d dispatched both of the guards before they’d understood what was happening.

  Once more, we stopped to listen intently. From far away, I fancied I heard the sound of steel on stone, but then it was all very quiet again. No sounds of shouting, no footsteps running to see what was amiss.

  Ingvold looked out along the walkway.

  “Here’s Halvar,” he said. “And Lavran.”

  It had, apparently, gone much the same for the others. No one had been guarding anything. They’d just been sitting around, putting in time until their relief came and they could go to their beds.

  Well, they’d had nearly a hundred years of no one coming near this place unless they were forced to. It wasn’t that big of a surprise that they’d gotten slack. But it was a bit of a let-down. I felt like I’d gotten all organized for death for no reason.

  And I couldn’t shake that feeling of something missing. The legends all spoke of the sense of foreboding that overwhelmed travelers, even from a good few leagues away, and Bolle had owned to it as well.

  “Like a goat nibbling at my burial mound,” he’d said. “Dark and evil, like, but nothing you could put a name to.”

  We’d waited for it. We’d expected it, especially once we’d reached that sandy bit of shore, but not one of us had confessed to feeling anything at all beyond the normal anticipation of a raid.

  Lavran said tersely that I was right about the central staircase leading down into the rest of the fortress, but it was unguarded, and apart from a single torch stuck into an iron bracket on the one wall, it looked dark and deserted. The others had caught up to us by now, and they all just nodded. Raisa seemed especially disappointed.

  “Easier than that raid into Camrhys two years ago,” she said, and then grinned at the thought. “You remember, Tam? That goat bleating for hours, till you hit him over the head with a rock. Thought I’d split my trousers, I laughed so hard.”

  I was smiling, too. We’d not gotten much out of that one in the end. With Camrhys, one never does, what with most of the villages being so slovenly and poor, but we’d run short of supplies coming in from Fendrais, and you make do with what you can get, in times like those.

  I looked out over the sea side of the wall. The pier was deserted and there were only three ships tied up, none of them warships. Two looked to be ordinary trading vessels, probably bringing in supplies, and the third seemed more of a small, open fishing boat, much like the Sea-Cat.

  We started for the stairs. We were still trying to be quiet, though not with as much caution as before, because now that the thing was started, now that we were well and truly in Alvandir, we’d gotten more confident. Ten warriors down, and it seemed likely my estimate of how many others were here had been wildly pessimistic. That didn’t speak to how many of the wise lived here, of course, and they would be the more dangerous adversaries. Rumour said they were canny and cruel, with spells to strike fear into your heart as easy as breathing, even before you could think to draw a weapon.

  Still, we were in it for good or ill, and we’d made a decent start. Gut a few wise ones and some more of their warriors and we’d have done a lot to let Istara know that they weren’t so safe and so mighty as they’d believed themselves.

  That was when it hit me. A wave of nausea swept over me, leaving me in a cold sweat and shaking.

  It wasn’t only me, though. Beside me, Elke had stopped dead in her tracks. Halvor had put his hand out to the wall, leaning on it heavily.

  “What the hell?” That hissing surprise was Raisa, easily the most practical and hardheaded of us all.

  This was what Bolle had felt. This was what countless crews on unnamed ships had been swept away by.

  It was like an oozing miasma of evil, crowding out thought, invading us in a rush of unreasoning fear. Back, I thought wildly. Back, back, over the wall. We had been mad to think this could ever work.

  But even as I began to falter, even as my feet slowed, there was the sound of voices, coming along the dark corridor on our right, and the reflected flickering of a small lantern or a shielded candle, bouncing off the smoothness of the stone.

  That wave of dread, as fast as it had come, receded again, driven off by a surge of anger.

  We leapt for the farther wall, into what
shadows it could afford us, just as the two figures walked casually into the stairwell, still oblivious, and I watched as Raisa and Lavran stepped out behind the two Istaran wise ones and took them down.

  They were not as quick as they ought to have been. One of their victims managed a single cry, shockingly loud, before Lavran’s sword ended him, and the swipe of Raisa’s axe rang out as it hit the wall beside her at the end of her stroke.

  We turned back in a bit of a panic, crowding up the steps a little ways and seeking the protection of the darkness there. Surely now, the Istarans would know that something was amiss in their sacred stronghold.

  The bodies lay unmoving. The clay lamp they’d carried had fallen and cracked, but for a short while, the wick continued to smoke and gutter in a little pool of oil, until that seeped away and there was darkness once more.

  And still, we heard nothing. Perhaps it was just that where we stood was simply too far off from their normal haunts, and that the thick stone walls deadened the sound enough that our presence was yet unremarked.

  Either that, or they were so supremely confident of their defenses and the rest of the world’s fear of this place that they simply assumed that any untoward sounds were only a couple of their fellows having an argument, and that it need not concern them.

  That seemed the more likely answer. I’ve slept through enough brawls in my own hall, comfortable in my knowledge that people will quarrel over any trifle when the mood seizes and usually without any damage that requires my attention. You get used to it.

  Chapter 8

  Once we’d got past the inevitable critiquing of Raisa and Lavran’s methods of dispatch, because there is nothing the Kyndred do so well as to coach each other on the finer points after the fact, we tried to decide what was best to do next.