“That did not go well,” Gard said with calm strength.
Then he turned suddenly, coming on his guard, relaxing only as Desagrena slipped out of some nearby shadows. The tight quarters between buildings became very crowded.
She carried her blade naked in one hand. Her oily hair hung in dark, damp clumps. Frowning at the blood crusting between Reave’s fingers, she slapped his hand away and studied the wound for herself. With a muttered curse, she thrust her broadsword into the ground and stooped over the fallen woman. Using her belt knife, Desa cut a wide swath of wool from the woman’s sash. Folded it into a long pad and used it to cover the wound.
The wail of the war horn blew its question again. Ehmish cocked his head to one side. “A league,” he decided.
“In this mist and a leaved woods?” Daol asked. “Half that.” Another long blast. “And getting closer.”
Kern looked at the Vanir horn lying in the nearby mud, its silvered gray stained with flecks of blood. He’d heard such horns echoing through winter’s stillness, and blasting across fields of battle. His own estimation had run closer to Ehmish’s, but when it came to such questions he implicitly trusted Daol to be closer on the mark. The damp. The spring budding that created a soft wall against sound. It could be as close as half a league. Hardly anything, at a good run. A Cimmerian could cover that kind of ground in hardly any time at all, and without breaking a sweat.
Whipped on by a Ymirish war leader, he didn’t expect the Vanir to take much longer.
“What do we do, Kern?” Ehmish, looking torn between battle lust and caution. There was still very much of the boy he had been just this last winter left in him.
But Kern had no doubt that if he sent Ehmish off to meet the raiders alone, the man he had grown into would do so, and would take more than one northern warrior to the grave with him. By Crom, he would at that.
“We ready ourselves,” Kern said, biting off each word. “We stand. Here. At Gaud.” They had come home to nothing more than death and loss, but if the ground was thirsty for more blood, then Kern would see that it drank its fill.
“With no count on the enemy host moving at us?” Reave asked. “What if they have two to our one? Or three?”
“What if they do?” Kern snapped back.
Though he knew what it was Reave truly asked. His friend wanted to hear Kern’s plan. Kern’s newest trick. Wasn’t that how they had stayed alive for so long? Moving from one victory to another, even when the odds were stacked against them? Kern had always found a way to turn the advantage toward his people. His pack.
But there was no trick this time. No plan. No way to tip the scales being weighted against the Cimmerians. The raiders were coming from two sides. At least one pack was almost on top of them, and Kern was tired of running. They had already been west of the mountains, and seen lands that no one in the village had ever known outside of the tales of travelers. Had even laid eyes on the terrible side of Ben Morgh, Crom’s throne. And now they’d come home to death and ruin.
“We’ve come home,” he repeated. “For better or worse.”
Most of the others shifted uncomfortably, but Daol and Reave merely took in their friend’s steady gaze. Then they looked at each other as the northern call changed, the Vanir horn blasting out one final, long wail. No longer the sharp, questioning blasts, unanswered by their scouts. This was one, long, angry peal. Their own warning, and challenge.
The two men looked at each other, and shrugged.
“Worse,” they both said at once. And then broke out savage grins.
With a sharp laugh, Daol balled up a fist and thumped Reave hard on the chest, shook his bow at Kern, and dodged back around a corner to begin spreading the word. Reave let his woman tie a binding strip of leather over his shoulder wound. Hissing between clenched teeth as she put a tight knot right over the wool bandage.
Wallach used his one hand and teeth to tighten the leather straps on his cuff. Gard and Ehmish checked the fallen warriors for plunder. Neither had carried a food pack or bedroll. Their armor was too confining for Cimmerians to enjoy it. Ehmish already carried a silver-chased broadsword, taken in another battle, and Gard preferred his long pike to a blade.
Ehmish did scavenge the woman’s buckler. Faced with blue iron, it had obviously come down with them out of the northwest lands and was a valuable piece of gear. Knowing his place, he did offer it first to Kern, then the others. Desa was the only one who hesitated, but then shook her head as well.
Kern approved. They would all use whatever they could, whatever worked best for each; but in the end, they had to remain a close-knit band. That was their greatest strength, and one he would not abandon even in the face of a Vanir onslaught. A strength that rivaled even Crom’s gift to the Cimmerian people, that they were born with . . .