Cimmerian Rage(95)

Something metallic.

Brig Tall-Wood and Reave stood over the Vanir’s body, which lay propped back against the willow’s thick, silver bole. It might have been that the flame-haired raider had simply fallen asleep there except for the open, unseeing eyes. The two men watched as blood stained the front of his tunic, around the arrow shaft sunk into his gut. More seeped from the deep cut in the side of his neck, running off his shoulder to stain the tree’s bark.

Kern swiped his way past the last few branches and joined them at the willow’s secluded heart. A few spiders had fallen out of the curtain, black orb weavers that skittered across Kern’s shoulders and arms, clung to his hair and the back of his neck. Patiently, he brushed them aside. Harmless spinners. And once one faced the giant mountain spiders of the Pass of Noose, hardly worth more than a passing thought.

This raider, however, was worth that and more.

“Now we know for certain,” Kern said. He kicked at one of the splayed-out legs. “They’re here.”

Brig nodded. “Hardly a surprise. The Galla. They did say that raiders had pushed through the pass.”

“An’ come around north,” Reave added.

Finding the death grounds the day before, Kern had wondered about that. What clan went to war against its neighbor when raiders threatened all? After several months of hard fighting against Vanir and Ymirish, he had not looked to walk in on a blood feud. It made as much sense as slaughtering your own cow for meat as a neighbor is stealing its milk anyway. You killed the neighbor first, or at least beat him within a hairbreadth of his life. Then you considered the other decision. Right?

The question had rolled around in Kern’s head, taunting him and distracting his attention, riling him, until he had all but given up understanding.

But Vanir, on the hunt—that gave him a direction to focus his energies, his anger, and whatever force inside him was pushing so hard to be released that he now worried at times for the safety of his own people should they be near him when the pressure became too much for him to bear.

“He should have kept still,” Kern said.

Anger boiled near the surface, and no little fear that he had nearly lost a man this night. He spat, striking the dead man between the eyes. The dead northerner. A long beard the color of fresh copper, braided with silver thread into a half dozen locks, he’d kept his hair chopped short, barely reaching his ears on the side and well away from his eyes. The better to hear, to track?

“Should have let us move past, then circled behind to warn his people. But he nay thought of it.”

He’d seen it before, how the Vanir so often refused to work together. All of them looking out for themselves, and themselves alone. Which was how Kern’s warriors managed so well against them.

And the raider’s urge to kill? The drive that had pushed this one to break cover and try for at least one life before fleeing?

Kern was beginning to understand that. Relied on it more and more, as the odds piled up against him and his “pack.” It was a strong part of why he swore to hunt them, and kill them, wherever he could. It was what he had left in his life. What he had chosen.

What he was born as.

“Hydallan all right?” Reave asked, reminded of the ambush.

Daol’s father had been up near the front when Ehmish suddenly turned and shoved the elder roughly aside. The arrow had sliced in against the side of the old man’s head, slicing through ear and scalp and spattering a great deal of blood across the forest floor. Gard and Kern had leaped to Hydallan’s aid. Most everyone else charged ahead, after the assassin.

They worried for each other. Kern recognized that it was a strength as well as a weakness.

“Kern?”

But he was saved from any answer as a string of soft curses chased up from behind him, and the branches parted for Hydallan and Gard Foehammer. Then Wallach Graybeard behind them. Hydallan held one hand with a thick, sopping ball of woolen blanket against the side of his head. With the other, he swatted at one of the small orb weavers that clung to the side of his face.

“Crom-cursed spinners! A muck-fed nesting tree for them, that’s a-what these piss-smelling willows are. Nay!” Hydallan shook Gard’s hand off his arm. “If’n you need someone to hold you up, lean on that fornicating great hulk over there.” He nodded curtly at Reave, whose face froze in a careful mask. Leaning in he studied it for one smirk, one sign of a smile.

“Someone needs to sew that up,” Kern said, drawing the old man’s attention away from Reave. He’d seen the wound. Hydallan had lost a good chunk out of his right ear, and was lucky not to have had his skull cracked open. So much blood. “Another finger’s width to the left,” he said, “and you’d have taken that shaft through the eye.”