“He should have been taken to the Field of the Chiefs,” Mogh complained, but softly, softly. Ashul and Danon, the other Taurs in Kern’s band, nodded.
But Ossian merely stared straight ahead as the first flames licked up through the drying thatch. “This will do,” he promised. The next best to delivering his father’s body to the burial field for all Cimmerian chieftains was to offer it up over the battlefield on which he had fallen.
The scent of damp ashes and singed greenwood mixed with a greasy, scorched-meat smell that could only be burning flesh. Thick, black smoke roiled up into the rain, malting a tall, dark smudge against the gray sky.
“This weather, this long since the slaughter.” Daol shook his head. “Any raider will know it was nay an accident. This is deliberate. Maybe we should have done this closer to twilight, or at night.”
Ossian grinned, baring his teeth in a humorless smile. Feral and wild. “If we had done this at night, then the raiders would not know where to look for us,” he said. “Would they?”
Daol, Aodh, and others answered with grinning snarls of their own. And somewhere inside the nearby forest, a wolf’s howl rose up long and mournful and savage. As if in its own answer.
Kern slung the torch forward through the open door, then followed the tall column of smoke with his golden gaze.
“Here we are,” he challenged.
“Come get us.”
14
KERN PROWLED THE edge of Gaud. Short sword naked in his hand. Crouched low to the ground, and moving from hut to hovel as directed by silent hand signals flashed his way by Brig, Ashul, Aodh, and a few false birdcalls whistled by Hydallan and Daol.
The scent of scorched flesh clung to his hair, his tunic. It burned with a rancid taste at the back of his throat. A haze of gray smoke—greasy and acrid—hung over the dead village, stinging his eyes like some kind of infernal fog raised by a Ymirish sorcerer.
But it wasn’t.
This was his own handiwork. The leavings of battle between the rains, having tapered off to little better than a persistent mist, and the fired lodge that raised bright tongues of flame into the sky as fresh twilight rolled over Conall Valley. Logs cracked and split as the fire’s heat continued to bake water from the heart of the wood. Steam roiled from the water-drenched ground, mixing with sooty wisps and binding those to the earth, twisting sinister runners along the muddy paths between the abandoned homes.
A tall column of black smoke waved overhead like Crom’s own war banner.
Like a challenge.
By setting the lodge hall aflame, Kern had waved a flag that every Vanir raider for several leagues had seen. Seen, and come on the run, looking for prey. In pairs and small handfuls they converged on Gaud. Most had crept in, attempting to be stealthy though Kern had eyes in every direction. Hands reached out from darkened doorways to pull one of the flame-haired Vanir inside for a quick and silent dispatch. Another met his end when Ehmish came off a roof, riding a spear down through the man’s chest and pinning him to the ground.
A trio of raiders chasing up from the south met quick deaths under the arrows of Brig Tall-Wood and Daol. Desagrena and Nahud’r had claimed a kill between them. And Reave’s greatsword had let the life blood out of two others.
The end of Kern’s blade was smeared with blood where he’d punched the tip through a Vanir’s kidney—arm snaked around the man’s throat, choking down on his windpipe to keep him silenced as the raider bled out over the muddy ground.
But these four who had slipped down out of the northern woods, Kern recognized something different in their manner. They walked in brazenly, unconcerned, as if they owned all under the sky. Which was why he slipped around them, to a partially enclosed lean-to where Reave and Wallach Graybeard waited behind a shoddy plank wall.
Reave crouched on his knees, greatsword laid carefully aside while he stared through a knothole in the wood to observe the raiders’ approach without being seen himself. Wallach rested, lying back in some damp straw, his injured arm across his chest. His broadsword waited, stabbed into the ground at his feet, but he was not without a weapon. He had taken the tip of a pike and run it through the leather cap that protected the end of his amputated wrist, adding a sharpened blade tip where his hand had once been. Practical, if not sensible. The wound was still not fully healed, and could not stand up to much stress without reopening. Wallach’s face was pale and drawn, with dark circles under his eyes.
Concerned, Kern touched the old man’s shoulder. One eye opened lazily, staring at him with the hard blue of deep, winter ice. “They here yet?”
He shook his head.
“Then lemme be.” His words were slurred, but only a bit. “Been a long day, and it’s gonna get longer.”