Too close by half.
With a sharp thrust, she planted her hunting spear in the soft ground, leaving her clan’s standard standing by itself. Bending down, she snatched up the arrow and held it overhead. With a quick snap, she broke the arrow in two and threw it aside. There were more than a few cheers from the sevenscore warriors who spread around half the sheltered glen, waiting her signal, or her success.
She never doubted which it would be. Wellem didn’t have the stones to start a feud with Clan Callaugh. A smart chieftain would have realized that before and fallen in line. A strong chieftain might have let it be decided by a Challenge Circle. He was neither.
And now, drawing her belt knife, Ros-Crana charged forward the last half dozen steps. With a violent yell, letting her voice be filled with the contempt and rage she had felt over his insults, she slammed the blade into the palisade’s wooden gate.
Stepped back. Leaving it stuck there in a challenge Wellem would have no choice but to answer.
Seven warriors marking Corag’s gate? In full view of a war host made up from a half dozen local villages?
“I am Ros-Crana of Callaugh. My army surrounds Glen Corag. Wellem Chieftain will treat with me, or I will rip his village apart and leave it for the nearest Vanir host. If he is too timid, let him send a woman to do his job properly.”
A public scathing. And more than any man of Cimmeria should be willing to bear.
Curses and unfriendly shouts gave way to an order to move aside, then came the long, scrape of a wooden timber being draw out of its irons. The main brace. For all its shoddy construction, the single-door gate swung out effortlessly on a hinge forged from blue iron and greased with boiled fat.
Wellem Chieftain stood just inside, flanked by two solid-muscled warriors and backed by another two dozen men and women who waited, blades naked in their hands. It was an invitation for war, to show this kind of force. And she’d have none of it. She drew her own blade, handling the heavy war sword as if it weighed nothing more than a knife.
Her escorts all rasped weapons free from sheaths.
“Insults and threats, Ros-Crana? This what Narach’s people expect of you?”
He sounded tired. Especially for a man of only thirty summers. A good age for a chieftain, except the last few years for any of them had been long, long. Strapped with brawny muscles, and an arrogant stance she had once admired, but there was something fragile behind his eyes. Something she’d noticed last autumn, after his daughter had been captured by Vanir raiders. Ros-Crana hadn’t witnessed it herself, but the talk had worked its way to Callaugh. Her screams had echoed through Glen Corag, tempting the man to battle until he had pounded his fists bloody against the gates. But two Ymirish sorcerers and a small Vanir war host camped on the ridge had convinced the chieftain that duty to his clan—always, clan before kin!—was to remain shut up and safe. Dawn, the raiders moved on for easier prey.
Ellai, Wellem’s daughter, lived for half a day after they found her.
No one had challenged him since, because he had given so much for Corag, and he enjoyed T’hule Chieftain’s favor as well. Trade with Conarch was always favorable.
But he dared stand there and lecture her on the needs and wants of Clan Callaugh?
“Your archers shot four arrows at me,” she said in outright contempt. “One warning is generous. For kin’s sake.” They were distant cousins, after all. “If you had marched on my walls, as I did just now, you would have been put down like a foaming cur.”
His face tightened. Folding thick arms across his chest, he challenged her with a scowl. “Time with that wolf-eyed Ymirish did more than taint your vision, Ros-Crana. Poisoned your tongue as well.” He took a stab at a smile. Failed. “Now you demand lives to throw after him? Let the valleyman go chasing after Grimnir to his death and good riddance.”
“I don’t go to chase after him, Wellem. I go to join him against our enemy. And when Callaugh calls on Corag for assistance, it answers!”
A sneer. “T’hule Chieftain spoke truth when he turned Wolf-Eye away. He is outcast! Outside the clans.” A grumble of agreement rolled up from his people, but it wasn’t as strong as it could have been. “No place for him here.”
“Yea? And would there have been more room behind your walls if Wolf-Eye had come last harvest? And Ellai lived?”
Wellem paled. His craggy features smoothed with shock, as if he’d been slapped. He stepped right up to the gate’s threshold, but—one wary glance at her palisade, the line of ready warriors who ringed half his village glen—did not cross that invisible line drawn between them. That way invited bloodshed and death for his clan, his kin.