And, worse, as she held her ground.
With Reave filling the narrow gap between the lean-to and a nearby hut, Kern tried to shoulder past. The taste of battle was already bitter on his tongue as his mouth dried. He ended up tangled against his friend, who was trying to force the raider back and to one side with only the leverage of his hands on the greatsword’s hilt. Even for Reave’s bearlike strength, no easy task. Especially when she wrapped a hand against the blade, trapping it against her side.
The sword had cleaved only partway through the cuirass, bending the thin, bronzed metal and cracking it open just enough for a measure of the blade to cut into her side. But the blood leaking out was no bright red fountain. And the snarl on her face promised the fight was nowhere near drained from her. When Reave shoved her aside, she stumbled back to keep herself between the Cimmerians and her companion, giving him time to draw blade even as she clawed with her free hand for her own arming sword.
The second Vanir would never free his war sword. But he did set his horn to lips, and blow three, long, mournful calls that echoed through the surrounding forest.
Warnings.
The third cry from the horn choked off short as Wallach ran up from the side and rammed three feet of steel through the raider’s gut. The broadsword’s wide blade stuck through and out the man’s back, stained and dripping with bright, red blood.
The Vanir dropped the horn, finishing the call himself as he bellowed in pain.
Wallach Graybeard didn’t both to pull his blade free, but instead stepped into the raider and with a short, chopping motion slashed the pike tip at the end of his left arm violently across the other warrior’s throat. The well-sharpened blade cut deep and fast.
Blood spurted out of the wound, spattering splashes and spots across Wallach’s arm, chest, face. And the raider fell back, silenced. Dead.
Meanwhile, the woman had clawed her own blade free, cursing and screaming a northern war cry as she lunged forward, wrenching Reave’s blade out of the cleft in her cuirass and slashing for the large man’s throat. Reave ducked aside, the tip of the arming sword barely missing his ear and instead cutting a shallow gash from his left shoulder down his upper arm. He hissed in pain, dropped beneath her next backhand stroke, and drew his greatsword back on guard.
Kern wasn’t about to wait and give the agile northerner a second chance at his friend. Ducking in low and fast, he slipped past Reave. Sword ready. Arm coiled back against his chest. His field of vision narrowed down to this one woman, this warrior from Vanaheim, who snarled her own pain and anger as she leaped forward to slash again, ringing her steel against the Cimmerian greatsword Reave held up for protection. A warm thrill raced through him as his first thrust was slapped aside by the iron-faced buckler she wore on her left arm, but his second found its target as it punched in for a swift, clean kill over her heart.
With a spasm that wracked her entire body, the northern warrior tumbled to one side and fetched up against a wall of the nearest hut. Propped on her feet, her eyes already dead, she stood a moment longer, then slowly slid to her knees, then her side, as a new wind howled in sympathy.
Kern stood over her, breath coming in short, furious gasps. Burning with pent-up rage and the pain of what had been done to Gaud. Barely noticing when Wallach Graybeard stepped up next to him and laid a cold hand against the fever-flushed skin on his arm. He shivered.
“Nay done yet, Kern.”
Which was when he noticed that it was not the light wind howling in such a mournful dirge, but the distant call of a Vanir horn. And another. War hosts! A distant echo from the east. The other, much closer, sounded three long blasts from the north.
He felt a tiny spark at the back of his thoughts as the northern horn blasted again. “That one,” he decided.
“Yea?” Reave asked. He held a hand to his shoulder, putting pressure against the wound. His brushy beard did not hide the question in his face.
“That northern horn,” Kern said, “is on the lips of a Ymirish warrior.” One of the frost-haired war leaders who so often herded a Vanir host like a master with his hunting dogs. He had no real basis for such a decision. He simply knew.
Shaking his head, he threw aside such empty-headed thoughts. He guessed. That was all. And it was a fair-to-better chance he was right.
Ehmish dropped down nearby, sliding off the thatched roof of a larger home, crouching to all fours in the muck and stepping up as Daol and Gard Foehammer also approached from around a nearby corner. Daol and Ehmish carried bows and had left their swords in their sheaths. Gard held his pike loose across his body, like a staff, though its tip was stained with fresh blood.