Kern’s muscles tightened. All his life, he had been the outsider. The different one. He remembered Maev, Burok’s daughter, accusing him only the day before the old chieftain passed. Before the nightmare of the last few months began. It should have been you. Lying on a sickbed. Dying.
And it should have been him, now, stretched out in the filth. Was that what Ashul wanted to say to Kern Wolf-Eye? One of the Ymirish. One of them?
But she said nothing more. Her reserves spent, she eased back, eyes clenched against the pain. Her breath came faster, shallow, and smelling of fresh blood. Aodh pressed his hands to either side of her face, arms quivering. A gut wound, she could linger for moments, or hours. Hours they didn’t have, and that she would know only the worst kind of suffering. Everyone waited. And finally the veteran nodded.
Kern reached for Ashul’s knife, belted at her side still, tied down with a strap of leather. But Ossian’s hand shot out, grabbing him by the wrist. Stopping him.
“She’s my kin,” the Taurian said.
It wasn’t a denouncement. Or a challenge. Kern couldn’t even be sure how he would have handled either at the moment. Hard enough to think of it as a request—an offer from a good man with a strong heart—as a hot rage warred within him against a bloodless, chilling calm. For a moment, he thought the anger might win. Sparks fired off behind his eyes and, overhead, thunder crashed through the heavens, shaking him. Lightning sheeted across the sky, and for an instant, Kern thought he might drown in the violet, violent light.
But sixteen pairs of eyes burned cold against his skin. People who relied on him. Lives for which he had made himself responsible.
And whether Ashul would still claim him or not, he still claimed her as one of the pack. He quashed the rage, no matter how much he craved the warming heat it might bring, and raised his eyes to find Ossian.
“Mine, too,” he promised. And the other man pulled back, leaving Kern to draw forth Ashul’s knife.
Everyone held their breath. Watched the fallen woman measure her strength against the pain. Not one of them shamed her by looking away. Kern laid the edge of the short blade alongside her neck, where her life pulsed hard but thready. One quick movement, and he would ease her pain in a few last heartbeats.
Then he glanced up. His gaze drawn away by movement, or the silver-gray splash of color against the dark forest. Looking between Desa and Aodh to find Frostpaw. The dire wolf stood rigid and calm at the very edge of the village proper. Golden eyes on fire. Also respectful. Also waiting.
The pack took care of its own, always.
Then it moved on.
Kern dropped his gaze back to Ashul’s pale, bloodless face. Memorized every last detail, from her sharp-lined nose to the widow’s peak that tilted down toward her brow. Then he said his own quiet farewell.
“We move on,” he promised.
And released her.
LODUR SMELLED THE fresh blood. Metallic, and not a little acrid, like the scent of a blade new-sharpened against a whetstone. It left a dry taste on the back of his tongue. Not even the fresh mud or the heavy mixture of woodsmoke and scorched flesh lying over Gaud could hide that familiar taste from him.
Not anymore.
Behind the sorcerer, who hunched down in his great cloak of white bear, half a hundred raiders stood at the forest’s edge, surrounding a good portion of the village. They watched. They waited. While an arrow-shot away, small buildings huddled together in shadow and the early evening’s gloom. No sign of life. Or threat, either. Just the glow of the burning lodge and the echoes of a lost battle in Lodur’s ears.
Shouts and curses. The ringing clashes of steel against steel. The wet slap of blade into flesh. At first, he had thought them the strains of a nearby battle, brought to him on the valley’s cold, springtime winds. But then he had pulled the one voice out from among all the others. Magni. One of his brethren. Who had been outmatched and run off like a cur licking his wounds, to be laughed at around an evening’s campfire, no doubt.
By him.
Kern.
Striding forward, he left behind the cold echoes of Magni’s presence. One of Grimnir’s faithful, yea, but not yet having reached his own ascension. Not yet answered Ymir’s Call. Magni, who waited still in the woods with his hawk and his shame. Waited for judgment. His. Lodur’s.
“They came down through that break in the trees,” Lodur said, his voice barely raised above that of a cold, alpine breeze. He could feel the energy of the Vanir’s charge, tasting like red meat crisping over a flame. The northern warriors bled their emotions like sizzling juices. Days from now, he still would have been able to sense what had gone before.
“They came through, pushing right into the heart of the village, between these two hovels.”