“We are difficult to kill. All of us. This Kern, he would be no exception. But his companions! They draw strength from him as well, in a way the Vanir do not.”
Flames wisped and guttered over the darkened coals. Ash flaked off, burned red, then yellow, and finally crusted over in dead layers of gray and white. The blackened area grew among those embers. Spreading down toward Lodur’s feet. Then out and away in a rough outline. Like a shadow, cast down into the embers. Pushing back against the heat and the light.
“Each has sacrificed. And through that trial, has grown mighty.” We move on. “Each one fights with our strength. Our will.” The darkened outline grew wider, as large as a shadow Lodur might have cast with the sun blazing behind him.
“Where they go, others renew their own strength to stand against us.”
Grew beyond his frame. Large and hulking. Man-shaped. Giant-kin.
Twin coals popped back to life, glowing with reddish-gold brightness, looking back out of the shadowed area.
“They must be stopped, Great One. We can do this. We will.”
Then, like a rush of fire sweeping through tinder, the dead ash suddenly burned away across the darkened outline, and blackened coals swept back to full life. The wash of heat staggered Lodur away from the fire. Backed him up several paces, to where Magni waited.
A rumble of thunder shook throughout Conall Valley.
Above, a hawk’s piercing cry.
“They travel east,” Magni said. Lodur glanced up sharply. “I can sense the ice,” he reminded his brother. “Blood of our blood. The scent of a northern wind.”
Lodur nodded. In the back of his mind, the cold, blue spark was distant, and growing faint. But there. Still there.
“What do we do, Lodur?” Broader across the chest, seeming to stand taller than the sorcerer, still Magni deferred to the other man. As it was meant to be. “What shall the Great One have us do?”
“We follow,” he said, nodding at the darkened, eastern sky. That was what Grimnir wished. What he had set these two after. They would chase down Kern and his band of rogues, hunt them, and kill them. And they would rally other war hosts, creating an army to deal with anyone else who stood in their way.
“We—”
—move on.
17
THEIR THIRD FULL day out of Gaud, Kern woke to a morning as thin and crisp as any he recalled since the break of winter’s long stranglehold on Cimmeria. His breath frosted above him in a small cloud. His right arm, which had slipped out from beneath the coarse, woolen blanket and his heavy fur cloak spread atop, puckered with goose-flesh. It did not want to be moved.
Stretching it out against its will, flexing some feeling back into his hand, he reached up to rub across the numbed tip of his nose. The familiar touch of winter.
Not that Kern worried overmuch about a return of that hard, unending season. His thoughts clearing, he accepted that this was just part of their overland trek of the Black Mountains. Already into the Pass of Noose, his band couldn’t be more than a half day’s run below the Snowy River country, where the snow line never disappeared, not even in high summer. It swept down off the high peaks, crossing several of the high plateaus and diving deep into narrow canyons. It was traversable only by the Pass of Noose, which cut from Conall Valley over into eastern Cimmeria. The only other passages were far south, circling beneath the Black Mountains by way of Ymir’s Pass, or north, where the Hoath Plateau stretched between the Eiglophian Mountains and the Blacks.
Two days up and over, and they would come down into the eastern lands. Murrogh Forest. The lake-country clans of the Lacheish Plains.
Until then he expected hard, rocky terrain. Cold and unyielding. Even through the felt mat he’d doubled beneath him the night before, he felt the ground leaching away his body’s heat, working a painful stiffness into every muscle, every joint. Kern rolled his shoulders, hearing creaks and groans, feeling the knots deep down in his back muscles that had not been there the summer before. He stretched hard, arching his back, shoving his booted feet down as far as they could reach. Then, with a violent thrust, he kicked the covers back and sat up, assaulting the morning with a hard grimace as the mountain air tightened the skin across his bared chest.
Hydallan crouched not far away, warming his hands over a bed of coals as he fed a few dry twigs into a small, guttering flame. The old man pulled his bearskin cloak tight about him, gripping it closed at his throat, but other than that looked impervious to the cold touch of the mountains. He merely nodded at Kern’s explosive rise.
“Wakes you up in the morning, doesn’t it, pup?”
Kern scrubbed hands over his face. Two days’ growth of beard rasped against his callused palms. “Not all of us have winter sap for blood,” he shot back. And Hydallan scowled.