Cimmerian Rage(6)

In fact the three of them had known each other—been friends—for most of their lives. Reave because he had barely an ounce of guile and, as a youth, no real care for his own position with the clan. He hadn’t cared his friend was so different from the others, and continued to stand by Kern when the youth was made an outcast within the Gaud before reaching even his twelfth year. Already people had begun to whisper about the boy with “winter in his bones and the blood of wolves.”

Reave had been the first man to ever call Kern “Wolf-Eye” as one friend often nicknamed another. It stuck. But not always in the best sense.

As for Daol, it was friendship by association. Kern all but lived with Hydallan, Daol’s father, after his own mother died. Learning from the veteran hunter until Hydallan’s own son came of age and Kern was shuffled off by Clan Gaud to be one of the village foragers—a wood axe and basic trap-setting skills his only needs. But his only two friends in the entire village had never let him down, no matter what they personally thought.

“Half a league?” Kern asked, doubting. His frown weighed heavily, far more comfortable on his face than a smile had ever been.

“Smelled it a ways back,” Daol admitted with a slow smile. His gray eyes had a hawk’s look to them, hooded and calm. “Your wolf has a real nose. He’s already faded around behind us.”

Kern turned to look, knowing he would be unlikely to spot Frostpaw unless the animal was either hungry or maddened. Still, he’d gotten used to the dire wolf’s company. Even come to appreciate the infrequent sightings. They all had, as the animal dogged their tracks from Conall Valley, over the western Teeth and the Pass of Blood, and had even run down its fair share of Vanir.

Daol grabbed Kern’s arm and turned him nearly halfway around, then used the tip of his bow to point between a pair of leaf-budding apple trees. “Wait for him.”

There. A stealthy shadow passing between the trees, all strength and grace. Nothing like a timber dog, the dire wolf was a large brute, eight hands across the shoulders and nearly twelve-stone weight these days after a winter feasting on the trail of warm corpses left behind Kern’s ragged band. Silver-gray fur except for a dark band around the eyes, like a mask, and the white front forepaw that had given him his name. A rogue without a pack.

No. Not without a pack. Frostpaw had Kern and the others as much as any of them could claim each other.

The wolf dodged behind some bramble, and was lost.

“Still back there,” Kern said to no one in particular. Still amazed.

It had made more sense in the deprivation of the long winter. Where Kern’s small band traveled, they left behind a ready source of food for any scavenger. Also, at one point Kern had wrestled the animal—driven at him by hunger—to the ground, dominating the animal in a way that all wolves and most men understood. But with spring arrived at last, and the return of plentiful game . . .

He readjusted his bedroll sling, easing where the rope bit into his shoulder. “Why does he still follow?” he asked no one in particular.

Aodh marched along beneath the shade of some spreading red cedar, fingers pressed to his temples. For days on the march south he’d complained of severe headaches. He blamed them on the beating Ossian had handed him in the Breaknecks. An accusation Ossian shouldered with great pleasure. “Might as well ask that about any of us,” he groused.

Kern did not need to ask it of the other warriors. He knew, or suspected, what lay behind most reasons of the men and women who had turned outcast to follow him.

And these five in particular?

Daol and Reave, beyond their friendship, also felt responsible for allowing Cul Chieftain to cast Kern out of the clan, abandoning him to the wilderness in the harsh depths of winter. That had happened on the journey to take the body of Burok Bear-Slayer to his final rest at the Field of the Chiefs. Burok had been a man Kern respected, and, he felt, one of the few in Gaud to show him any measure of respect in return. But Cul, seizing the chieftain’s role by traditional challenge, had never trusted Kern. Not his odd appearance or the strangeness that followed him.

His casting Kern away from the clan had come as no real surprise, and Kern himself had kept Reave in check, preventing the large man from coming to the outcast’s defense and ruining his own position with the clan. But both Reave and Daol had anguished over that decision.

Then the Vanir had attacked, killing several of Cul’s men and taking Daol as a slave. Also Maev, Burok’s daughter. Kern, having tracked the Vanir pack, helped run off the final attackers, then set himself to go after the captured kin. Refusing to abandon them, no matter his own standing within the clan.