More shouts. The sound of swords—more than one—rasping free of metal-clad sheaths.
A glimpse of white horn, metal, and a red fall of hair.
With a savage grunt Kern heaved the rock down with all his strength. It glanced off a ledge of gray shale, then slammed into the side of one Vanir’s face where his helm stopped just above a high cheekbone. The impact knocked the raider back, stumbling him from the narrow trail. With a bellowing yell the raider plummeted over the edge, screaming a short-lived curse cut short as he smashed into a spread of boulders several lengths below.
Four.
He took his victories where he found them.
Before one of the Vanir archers swung around with a readied arrow, he abandoned his perch for an all-out run along the ridge shoulder. Pumping his arms. Finding the best footing by instinct more than anything else.
Kicking through the last vestiges of the long winter’s blanket, he sprayed a gray sheet of wet snow and muddied slush between each stride as he struggled up onto the exposed ridgeline. There the sun found him, still low on the horizon but already spreading warming rays over the knife-edged hills. The Breaknecks. A fitting name for the rough land spread between Clan Conarch’s northwestern territory and the lower Eiglophian Mountains, full of canyons and clefts and jutting escarpments.
A narrow crevice split the ridgeline, but he easily jumped it. Stumbled forward. Picked up speed again as his fists and legs pumped and lungs struggled for more air as he ran.
Racing up onto a dead-end drop.
Steep falls on three sides. Patches of thorny brush ringing a small, circular landing, then out over several lengths of open air the tops of some tall pine and redwood cedar. From there he looked out over the tops of a thin forest, or back along the narrow ridgeline with four Vanir raiders running up behind him.
Kern did not hesitate. Running between two clumps of the thorny, deadwood brush, he leaped out over the deadly fall, arms and legs flailing, eyes squinted nearly shut and with a blood-hammering yell . . .
... to smash into the upper branches of a tall pine. Grabbing hold of the narrow trunk with frantic strength, Kern saved himself a long, bone-crushing fall through the tree. As it was, the evergreen’s top bent far over, dangling him above the ground at a dizzying height. Then . . . slowly . . . it straightened enough for him to hook his feet into lower branches.
Surrounded by the sharp scent of the evergreen, Kern managed to climb a few lengths down the pitch-sticky tree before the Vanir invaders crashed through the same break in the thorny brush he had, hauled themselves in, and spread to a short line across the edge of the cliff. Then he waited. Holding on. Barely protected by the narrow trunk and a few thin, needle-covered branches. Watching as the raiders glared and grinned.
One brayed a short laugh at his expense.
Heavy gusts of chill, northern winds whipped at their hair, their cloaks. Two pulled new arrows from leather quivers. Nocked them into their war bows. The others didn’t even bother to draw swords.
Easy meat.
For Kern’s warriors.
Like trapping spiders, springing from camouflage to snare their prey with long, hooklike legs, five men suddenly erupted from beneath the dry-stick brush behind the Vanir. Kern watched as Reave and Daol threw off their blankets first, shaking themselves free of a light covering of dirt and rock, kicking aside the thorny brush they had carefully stuck in the ground to deter the raiders from walking over the top of them. Ossian, as well. Then Garret and Aodh.
Reave held his greatsword across his massive chest like a staff, left hand carefully gripping the edged blade as he shoved the nearest archer forward. Daol, never quite as physical, used a short javelin. He took his man in the back, ramming the steel tip out through the Vanir’s broad chest, then kicked him forward, off the spear.
Both raiders screamed as they fell.
Aodh and Garret Blackpatch were both older men, over forty summers, but warriors still. And they had the advantage of teamwork. Seizing the second archer between them, they simply yanked him around awkwardly, shaking him like camp dogs on a rat, then threw the raider far out over the drop. Nearly far enough to catch a tree, as Kern had done. But not quite. He smashed violently through a few lower branches before his cries were ended by a meaty thud.
Ossian was the only one to run into trouble. One of the warriors Kern had picked up from the village clan of Taur, he was always easy to pick out of a group. He scraped his head bald almost every day and trimmed his facial growth into a goat’s beard as had his father, the Taurin chieftain. One of Kern’s best men, usually, this time he moved too slow or his victim too quick. The Vanir warrior turned and grappled with Ossian, getting one hand curled into Ossian’s beard while the other seized a handful of wool cloak. Together, they wrestled for several long heartbeats, twisting too quickly for Daol to thrust home with the javelin.