1
ON THE SHADOWED side of a Breakneck ridgeline, Kern Wolf-Eye scrambled along a narrow switchback, clawing for purchase among cold, sharp-edged hardscrabble and granite boulders, fighting his way upward over the treacherous ground. Frozen slush. Loose stone. Thorny brush.
The ends of his fingers bled where he’d cracked several nails down to the quick.
His chest heaved as he gulped the cold, thin air. It tasted of ice and felt like a dull knife stabbing into his chest.
No slowing down. No rest. Even the thought of it was driven from his mind as another arrow sliced in close—tight enough he felt the whisper of its passing—and shattered against the sharp wall of gray shale looming over his left shoulder. The arrow’s heavy, broadleaf head skipped off the rock with a strike of sparks. Splinters showered the side of his face.
The shout from behind, in a language nasal and flat, sounded closer. Too close.
A fresh fall of rock, calved from one of the many overhangs, piled up on the trail ahead. A true Cimmerian would hardly have questioned any need to climb a sheer cliff face or slippery clay shelf most days. But with a pack of four . . . five Vanir jackals racing up after him, the head-high slide might as well have been a fortress wall.
Kern’s growl of anger died in his throat. His muscles ached from this Crom-cursed uphill sprint, but still he gathered himself and leaped up the side of the pile, hands reaching and grasping, feet churning as he powered his way up the fall and halfway over the top, where he risked a single glance back.
Five. Five invaders who raced up on his trail, giving chase after discovering the raider campsite Kern and his small band of warriors had attacked—butchered—that morning before the springtime sun even peeked over the Teeth. All but one raider had the flaming-red hair so common among Vanir. The other was more of a reddish gold, telling of Aesir blood somewhere in his past, curly and hacked short over the shoulders. To a man they wore the heavy, leather skirts preferred in the north’s deep mountains and wastelands. And boiled-leather cuirasses banded or studded with metal. Bracers and greaves. Helms decorated with the horns of many different beasts.
All of them wrapped up in their own furious bloodlust.
All with large swords strapped over their backs or sheathed at their sides. Broadswords. War swords. None kept a naked blade in hand, but they could draw them fast enough if he slipped too close.
Two raiders also held Vanir war bows, and that was bad. Hard to outrun an arrow. One of the raiders nocked a new shaft and drew back, sighting along the polished ashwood. He let fly with a smooth release and a thrumming bow-string.
Kern threw himself over the far side of the rock fall, ducking beneath the whistle. He half climbed, half slid down the pile, rocks scraping his arms and gouging at his chest through a tattered leather jerkin. Rough edges of frozen slush cut at his face as he collapsed into a rough pile at the bottom of the fall.
“Ymirish!” one of the pursuing raiders shouted after Kern. And a long string of guttural curses that turned their name for a Vanaheim war leader—one of Grimnir’s faithful—into a mockery.
And that was exactly what Kern was to them. A savage mockery. Sharing northern blood just as certainly as he shared the appearance of a true Ymirish—a “Son of Ymir.” The dead-frost color of his long hair, so strange to Cimmeria and Vanaheim both, and the feral, golden eyes of a wolf. It was an appearance many raiders had been taught to fear.
Yet they would see him dead all the same.
Him, and any Cimmerian who dared follow him.
Untangling his legs from around a stunted bellberry bush, Kern picked himself up and checked the short sword at his side with a quick slap. Part of him wanted to draw the blade, charge back into the teeth of his attackers. Tired of running. Angered at being hunted. But he pulled his feet beneath him and raced onward, gaining the next turn without trouble as the northerners clambered up the rockslide behind him. A shelf peeked out above him, over a muddy bank. Child’s play. Leaping from foothold to foothold he got above the broken path, onto the shoulder of the ridgeline.
And there, squatting over a thin layer of melting snow, Kern picked up a large rock big as his own head. He raised it high in the air. Waited for the first raider to make that last dogleg.
Crouched in the ridge’s shadow, facing into a northerly breeze that still held a last touch of winter, Kern shivered. Cold. Forever cold. Exertion taxed his body but did not warm him.
A trickle of sweat sluiced down from his brow, running into the corner of his right eye, burning. His labored breathing sounded heavily in his own ears, all but drowning out snatches of distant birdsong, the grunts of nearby exertion, and the grinding clacks of rock against rock. Then the stomps of boots against the lower path.