The Shades of Winter a Novel of Averraine Page 8

  We expected them to resume this pattern in the spring. Some of the Jarls argued that we might do better to carry the fight to Istara first, storming Istri or some other port as a warning not to overstep the mark, but we weren’t sure we had the strength for that, not without leaving ourselves dangerously exposed. Better, said Njall, to see if we can’t make raiding us too costly to continue, and so we armed and fortified every place we could.

  But in the spring, Istara did something no one could have thought of, something we could never have expected.

  They took Fraylingsgard, and held it. It was a bustling port town, and strategically, they couldn’t have dealt us a worse blow. All of Raeth lay before them, open and ripe for the plucking.

  They threw everything they had into it. Every warrior, every warship they could spare, and they didn’t leave.

  Instead, they set about reducing the halls, villages and isolated farms in the area to subjugation. Day by day, they moved inland and increased their presence on Raeth soil, and we - caught flatfooted and unawares - we were scrambling to meet this new tactic.

  We’d never had to fight something like this before.

  It took weeks to bring everyone together. Weeks to convince them that they could not, this time, sit it out in their own halls and think they’d get through unscathed.

  Weeks where ever more of Raeth came under Istaran control.

  This was where Njall made his reputation. This was where the sense of something better being in store began. A legend in the making, right before our very eyes.

  If we had a hard time understanding this new way of making war, well, so did Istara. The first thing Njall did was to garrison two small harbours, taking control of the sea lanes into Fraylingsgard, so that Istara’s huge warband was, effectively, marooned on our turf. They could have retreated, of course. Njall had given orders that any ships heading back home should be let through, on the grounds that news of defeats, if there were any, would do more good for us than corpses, but not so much as a fishing skiff out of Istri was to make it past the blockade.

  The rest of us assembled ourselves into a massive army, and bit by bit, we began to take back the land. Village by village, holding by holding, we showed Istara that they had bitten off far more than they could chew - Njall had an innate grasp of how to manage these bigger battles on shore, how to use the terrain, how to keep thousands of sea-raiders working together and doing precisely what he told them to do.

  By the end of summer, they were reduced to just the port they’d originally taken, and their supplies were undoubtedly running low.

  And yet, they still showed no signs of leaving.

  Well and good. We’d take back Fraylingsgard, and then we’d follow them home and make sure they understood that they were beaten.

  A little ways outside our camp, we had a fine view of the ramparts and the hastily thrown-up palisade walls. Not clearly, of course, it was still a mile or so out, but we could keep a watch. They seemed to be sitting tight, waiting for our next move.

  It wasn’t going to be any kind of surprise, but by now, it didn’t matter. They would be reduced to the slimmest of iron rations in less than a seven-day, and it was entirely possible they’d run before we attacked, but we didn’t care. We could fight them here, or we could fight them on the water, or we could fight them on their own islands. Whatever they chose, we were going to make sure they never tried this sort of thing again.

  “Ride with me, slug-a-bed,” Njall pushed at my back with a booted toe. He had a good head for drink, and he seemed to enjoy tormenting those of us less hardy, with early morning risings and noisy cheer.

  “I - uh - why are you - ?” He was laughing. I wasn’t fond of that laugh. But I knew I couldn’t avoid this, so I rolled out of my blankets and started hunting for my boots.

  “Come on, hurry up! I’m not waiting for noon.”

  It was barely dawn. Of course it was. That was, as always, part of the joke.

  Once up, though, and out into the chilly air, it wasn’t so bad. We saddled up, and started out from the camp.

  It wasn’t until we crested that second hill and could see Fraylingsgard clearly below us that I realized he’d had a purpose in this.

  “Look,” he said.

  You could just make out the landing place.

  There were a lot of ships.

  “What is it you want me to see?” I felt stupid. Njall was always doing this to me. Asking me to grasp things on my own. Asking me for judgements I wasn’t capable or qualified to make. I adored him, but he was a pain in the rump.

  “They’re planning something,” he said. “They’re unloading things off those ships. Things they brought with them from the start.”

  “Oh, yes? How can you tell that from here?”

  “I rode out and watched yesterday. And the day before. All the last seven-day, actually. You can see it. Just look, damn you. Don’t be so lazy.”

  I watched for a while. You couldn’t make out details, of course, but you could see a sort of ebb and flow of activity around the boats, and I began to believe him.

  “Extra stores? Maybe they put things by, when we set up the blockade?” I couldn’t think what else it could be.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  Hours later, when our riderless horses came straggling back into the camp, our army realized what they had feared was true. But by then it was too late.

  They’d risen up out of the long grass and taken us, swarming over us before we could even think to shout or flee. Tens of them. We never had a chance: someone hit me hard from behind, and I remember only blackness then, and tumbling, down onto the hard, cold ground.

  I awoke to darkness, too, and a sick feeling of dread. There was blood, still wet, trickling down the back of my neck, and I felt as weak as a kitten, bumped and bruised all over. It took only a few seconds to remember why, and then the real fear took hold.

  “Tam.” His voice was a whisper. The darkness receded to just being dimness, and I could see him there, in the shadows.

  “Where are we?”

  Njall shifted himself closer. “Fraylingsgard, where do you think? In a sheep-cote, if the smell is anything to go by.”

  There was a moment of stillness while we both took that in. Then, unbelievably, we began to laugh.

  Our merriment didn’t last long.

  Did they know who we were? Undoubtedly. They must have seen him, on those lonely morning rides. They must have noticed the regularity, and laid their plans.

  We listened all day to the sound of people moving about near us. They shouted orders about guarding things, about putting things in other places. None of it made any sense. Sometimes, through the slim gaps between the planking, we saw shapes and shadows moving, but fleetingly. It didn’t seem that there was much attention being given to us at all.

  We couldn’t understand what was going on, but it hardly mattered.

  The only real question left was why we were still alive.

  I shivered. I didn’t want to die. I desperately did not want to die.

  We tried to consider a way out. After dark, perhaps? The walls seemed flimsy enough to break through, though how we’d disguise the noise, we didn’t know.

  Hours later, someone pulled one of the wall boards away and silently shoved a stale loaf and a skin of water into the opening, then put the wood back and nailed it closed.

  In that small glimpse, although we’d seen very little, any hope of escape had ended. We were surrounded by dozens of warriors, maybe more than dozens. Eating, walking, drilling, watching. They looked alert, and confident, but not so confident that they hadn’t had three other people attending that hatchway while their comrade had it open.

  “They’ll know we’re here,” I murmured. “Hrolf will attack. They’ll get us out.”

  Wishful thinking, but it got us a few hours without utter despair, until night fell, and still, in the darkness, we saw glimpses of figures moving about, watching our little prison.

  It was the cold, perhaps. We hunched ourselves together, trying for what little warmth we could find.

  And there was the other thing. The thing that had always lain between us, even when we were children, a thing never acknowledged.

  You couldn’t call it lovemaking. It was born out of that unspoken attraction, perhaps, but out of fear, too, and the need to remember that we weren’t quite dead yet. An animal thing, desperate and untender, and wondrous, even so, that left us gasping and trembling, holding each other close in the darkness.

  In the morning, I felt even weaker, even more prey to my terrors. I could feel myself shivering, shaking, I couldn’t make it stop.

  And then they came back, wrenching that board away again, and one of them leaned in and grabbed me, dragging me out into the sunlight and away, and I could hear Njall yelling at them, cursing them, threatening vengeance from beyond the grave, to haunt them all of their days.

  They were laughing. I remember that.

  They bound me, arms and legs, and threw me face down over a horse. The world became a crazily ragged tumble of disjointed images, legs of armed fighters marching past, pots of hot coals, horses’ hooves and incomprehensible shouting, and the acrid smell of smoke and sweat.

  And then the makeshift gates they’d built swinging past, as we rode joltingly over the wide meadows and the scarred fields and the wet grass that smelled like rotting corpses.

  We’d stopped. I could see more horses. I heard the voices. Voices I knew. Someone called my name, but I couldn’t breathe right, I couldn’t fill my lungs enough, and it hurt to try.

  People were talking. Angry words - that was Hrolf. Soft ones, sweet ones, from someone closer to me. The world swam and then, in a sudden instant of clarity I realized
what it was I’d seen in Fraylingsgard, what it was they were planning, and I sucked in the biggest gulp of air I could and yelled.

  I’m not sure what words I managed. But I knew a warning had to be given, that this parley was just a stall, a feint, that worse was coming, and that they were using me to gain the time they needed.

  It was enough, no matter what it was I screamed out. The man who had carried me literally threw me to the hard, bone-jarring ground, and there was suddenly dust and hooves and the roar of a thousand angry voices rushing past me.

  Above me, the sky was an incandescent blue and the sounds grew fainter and fainter, dying away until, a long time later, someone bent over me and said my name, in a tone that didn’t really expect an answer.

  Chapter 17

  I was probably already quite sick, or so the wise one who tended me said, but getting knocked about in that stampede hadn’t helped. Everything that happened, I heard about it a long time later. They carried me back to the camp, and then, though they were advised it was risky, back to Raethelingas, to the halls and comforts that were familiar to us all.

  I was abed with fever for over a month, and a good few weeks more were spent listlessly staring into empty air. People came and explained things to me, but I hardly heard them. I hardly cared.

  What did it matter, if my warning had upset Istara’s plan to trap and destroy our army inside Fraylingsgard? What did it mean, in the end, if they’d killed a few of the people who had tormented us?

  Raisa came, they all came, and they tried to make me understand, but I turned my face to the wall, and did not weep for it, not then or ever, because tears would do no one any good now.

  The warriors who’d brought me out on the excuse of a truce to discuss terms, they’d died before they reached the gates of Fraylingsgard, but the most of the rest of the Istarans got clean away, after setting fire to the whole of the town. The forces from Raeth had tried to battle through the blaze, but it was too much, and then it was too much and too late.

  They’d found Njall’s body, twisted in the charred remains of that sheepcote, just a man-shaped cinder, but they knew him by his ring.

  Two months after this, the mound that Hrolf had ordered was ready. The stone outline of Njall’s last ship was laid, and the place prepared. Blankets had been woven, fine threads brilliantly dyed in blue and scarlet. There was horse gear laid beside the bed, trimmed with beaten gold ornaments, and the best of weapons made for him, to carry with him to the gods. They killed a wild boar and roasted it, and set it on a huge, carved platter, and filled an enormous bronze cauldron with summer mead, because no king should go hungry or thirsty into this last journey.

  I wasn’t well enough, not really, but I went stumbling into the quiet night with them anyway, bereft and broken Kyndred that we were, after everyone else was done. We hung the twenty silver-mounted drinking horns along one wall. They had been his gift to us, after Katla died, for the promise of both his youth and his kingship. It wasn’t anything for anyone else to see.

  It was a little while after that, when the wise one tried to tell me, tried to offer me a way out, but I pretended I was yet too addled by fever and illness to understand. Later, she’d said regretfully that it was too late for the easy remedies, and that I still wasn’t strong enough for the hard ones. I counted up in my mind the days, and felt my heart break that little bit more.

  By the time I could walk unaided and act as if I was a person again, the secret was more or less out, and I knew that the best thing for everyone was, and always would be, my silence.

  I loved Hrolf as my brother. I couldn’t add to his confusion and grief.

  He assumed, everyone assumed, as people will, that I’d been raped, that some nameless Istaran fighter set to guarding me was the father of this unexpected child, and that my obvious ambivalence was completely understandable. It was a reasonable explanation, and as long as no one asked me outright, well, it seemed safe enough, my secret.

  People were carefully kind. No one thought less of me for not ridding myself of the problem, either. After Rei’s sudden death in a hunting accident, I had become Jarl of Dyrsholt, and any child of mine was a potential heir, whatever their father’s name had been.

  And when I was well enough, I asked Hrolf if I could go home, just for a little while.

  • • •

  The sunlight in that cheerful room was fading.

  I couldn’t have told the woman across from me all of this. I couldn’t have put words to those memories, not to a stranger. I hadn’t ever really discussed most of it with those who were nearest and dearest to me.

  I knew it would be a disjointed tale at best. There were too many things I couldn’t explain, or at least should not. The less Keraine knew about us, the better, I thought, but if they could help Njall - what price wasn’t I prepared to pay for that?

  I began with the story of Thrain, to get across to her how important it was that her wise ones did not mistake the nature of his derangement.

  Convincing her of his real identity was a little harder. I had to explain about the fire, and the ring, and she grasped that easily enough. But then, I’d had to explain how the Kyndred were. How close one became, each to another, after all those years together, and how I’d known with such absolute certainty who it was that I’d fought in that cavernous place under Alvandir. It was still more than most people knew about, the wild magic of those bonds of heart-vows and shared history, but that seemed little enough for the exchange.

  Heilaegr - that was trickier. There was no way around it, though. Our reasons for going out to a place of such dire reputation as Alvandir in the first place had to be explained. I couldn’t escape the feeling that she would have agreed with Gunnr on this, and that she found our reasoning faulty, but she said nothing outright.

  By her questions about it, though, I knew that Heilaegr was not something she quite understood. Luckily, neither did I, not in any way that she was interested in, so there was little enough I could tell her about it.

  It helped, too, that she had already seemed to have pretty good information about us, that she knew what had transpired politically, more or less, in Raeth and Istara. And she seemed to know about Alvandir, somewhat, but then, I suppose all wise ones take an interest in places like that.

  And then I thought about how she might have come by all that information, and about the unusual chance of my uncle having gained access to Keraine’s richer markets, and I grinned inwardly in appreciation. What had seemed like a triumph of tact and diplomacy and hard work to Arvid must have been like an unlooked-for gift for Keraine’s rulers and wise ones: an endless and artless flow of information about a constant enemy, in exchange for some exotic trinkets and a new market for their wheat.

  It gave me pause, even so. I would need to be careful with these people. Twisty words and twisty minds go together.

  Chapter 18

  The next morning, I endured another interrogation, this time led by Sigurd and Oddhi, and that one was a little worse, because they’d had some time to consider what I might have needed to tell the wise ones, and all the reasons why I should not have.

  “I had to tell her about Heilaegr,” I said, for the third time. “And, no, Oddhi, I didn’t give it a name, or say where it was. But we didn’t go to Alvandir on a whim, and she knew that, as soon as I said it. I had to tell her something.”

  The place they’d given over to us was actually quite nice. Keraine takes its guesting customs seriously: there were proper beds for us, with down-filled mattresses and soft wool coverlets, and on the long table opposite the row of beds, they’d come and set out pitchers of hot water, and basins, and clean clothing for each of us.

  “You shouldn’t have said about the other thing, though.”

  “Well, what was I to do? She needed a reason just to let us come ashore.”

  “And she didn’t ask about it again? Now that,” said Sigurd, “that I do find strange. You’d think, if someone told you there was a danger out there, you’d ask about that, first thing.”