Ros-Crana would have tried questioning him once more, then put him to justice the next morning, and have done with it. But the man’s screams and a maddened banshee howl had woke her that night and sent everyone scrambling for weapons and looking for the attack.
The Callaughnan chieftain was one of the few close enough to the prisoner who thought she might have seen the shadow that attacked him. The piece of night, breaking off into a swirl of wind and foulness and black, folding shadow, stretching wings around his head while a formless head stabbed at him as a raven pecking at his eyes. The Vanir screamed himself to death in a moment more. Not a mark on him. Only wide, staring eyes, frozen in fear.
T’hule Chieftain had waved aside her story as one of a night’s sudden fear. But Tahmat’s tale, retold for the Conarch lodge, made her wonder again what had happened in Venarium. And where Kern might be now.
Thirteen days! Nearly a fortnight. Still, Ros-Crana could not make herself forget the small band of outcasts. To say that she had grown accustomed to the wolf-eyed one was putting it too lightly. Not with her memory of the bathing pools paining her like a raw and open wound. But there was something more to it as well. A satisfaction she had felt, knowing that Kern fought against the northern raiders. A trust she had given that welcomed his blade at her side . . . and a void now that he had gone.
By Crom! Why should such a man bother her so?
“I don’t feel like resting, T’hule Chieftain. Mayhap none of us should be, resting or feasting, with the Vanir and their Ymirish masters still raping our land.”
Well, there it was. Out in the open, as any problem between clans or kin should be, to be slain, then cast aside.
“Vanir!” A warrior farther along T’hule’s table said it as a foul curse. “They raid us before.” He said it as if that was the final answer to three years of raiding.
Another agreed. “Yea. We always beat them in the end,” she said. “Drive them back into their icy prison.” There were growls and nods all around.
But not everyone was of so easy a mind.
“When was the last time Vanir raiders struck so hard?” another of the minor chieftains asked. “Villages destroyed? Clans sent fleeing?”
“The valleymen. They said it was just as bad across the mountains. Mebbe worse.”
“Worse?” T’hule set a massive fist against his table, half rose. He did not beat on the heavy wood for attention. It was simply given to him. Commanded by him. “Soft-handed valleymen can’t defend their own villages, it is no skin off our back. We faced Grimnir, himself, these three years. And we held. We always hold.” He looked down the table, avoiding Ros-Crana’s direct gaze. “Nay enemy challenges Clan Conarch!”
It was back again. The invisible knife, pricking at the back of her neck with its cold, steel tip, prodding her into line. The legacy from her brother, Narach Chieftain. Clan Callaugh had always lived under the subtle—and at times, not so subtle—threat from their northern neighbor. Conarch was strong. It relied on the Callaughnan, as one ally does another, but only so long as it benefited.
Only so long as it suited.
“Twenty-two kinsmen I sent you, T’hule Chieftain.” Ros-Crana dropped a casual hand to the war sword belted at her left hip. The blade had been peace-bonded, with a leather stay tying it into the sheath. The thinnest veneer of civility. It would be the work of a heartbeat to snap the leather tie and draw blade. “Twenty-two who never came home. Do you insult that sacrifice?”
A trio of pike-bearing guards stood behind T’hule Chieftain. One raised his weapon and held it across his front, gripped in both hands. Ready. Ros-Crana walked a dangerous line, as close as one could come to challenging the region’s most powerful chieftain, and in his own home! Everyone at the table knew it, save perhaps Tahmat, who used his teeth to tear a sliver of meat off a skewer. The soft-bellied merchant had no clear grasp of the moment.
T’hule’s eyes glinted dangerously. He spread his large hands against the table and pushed himself up to stand across from her. Picking up his eating knife, he took the last mouthful of meat from it, scraping the blade clean with white, even teeth. He chewed slowly while pretending to consider her words. All the while waving the knife in her direction.
It could have been simple carelessness.
Ros-Crana did not believe that for a single heartbeat.
“Nay,” T’hule Chieftain, finally said. “I have not forgotten the aid of the Callaughnan. Nor that of any clan.”
It was not an apology. But it was careful. At times one had to be, in Cimmeria, where the line between insult and injury was thin, thin.