Thirty warriors or more, men and women, spread their campsite through a thinly sheltered glade. A small stream gurgled along one side, providing them with fresh drinking water. Several of the men had staked a skinned fawn over their cooking fire, and the warm scent of savory game drifted out into the forest.
For fresh meat, they had made such a mistake.
He had already counted five guards set out near the forest’s edge and a huddle of six or seven prisoners near the center of camp. With his night vision, Kern scouted briefly around the entire area before returning to his men and setting out a plan. Now he waited for his part in it, huddled down next to Reave and Nahud’r. Waiting. Watching.
Startled when a scuffling step behind caused him to whirl about with a ready blade, nearly leaping at Frostpaw.
The dire wolf so rarely showed itself at so close a distance. Near enough that Kern might almost have cut him with a longer sword. Though the animal jumped back a full length and set itself in a low crouch, growling at Kern’s sudden and violent movement, it did not attack and did not bolt for the trees. Its golden eyes flared in the night as it caught a stray piece of starlight, or perhaps a spark from the campfire. It bared its teeth, and waited.
“Just wrong, that,” Reave whispered. Not to anyone in particular. But he lay back across the soft forest floor, turning his back on the large animal.
Though Kern had also gotten used to the dire wolf’s hesitant company, he never turned his back on it so easily. His chest still had angry scars from that dead-winter morning when the wolf first attacked him. Since then they had shared kills, and victories. But it was still a wolf. One of the most massive and terrifying of breeds. And a warrior who forgot to respect that might find those teeth at his throat and the foul, carrion reek of the animal’s breath the last thing he ever knew.
Carrion . . . Kern leaned back, sniffing the air. “Smells the fawn. Crossing the pass so quickly took some weight off him as well.”
“Whatever reason,” Nahud’r whispered, staring wide-eyed at the wolf. He had seen it many times, but never so close. “I will take him at my back than at my throat any day.”
Then there was no more time for whispered conversation or worrying about the nearness of the dire wolf, as the coughing chirrups of a hunting owl warned them that the last of Kern’s warriors were in position.
The Vanir sentries did not even glance at the forest sound, though Kern thought he noticed one of the prisoners huddled in the camp’s center suddenly stir.
So much the better if one of them had recognized the false call. They would be prepared.
Not a dozen heartbeats later, the first arrows struck at the camp. They hammered in from east and west, slashing, not at the sentries, but deeper into the camp. Picking off a few of the raiders who sat near their bedrolls or diced for sport among their companions. A barrel-chested man rose off the ground with a violent roar, one shaft embedded deep in his chest, not that it seemed to matter. Two others on the western edge rolled away yelling, one with an arrow lodged in his rump, the other dying with a shaft buried in the side of her neck.
“Now!” Kern yelled, and he and Reave and Nahud’r broke cover from the clearing’s north edge just as the sentries all turned away from them.
They crashed through the trees and a waist-high stand of bellberry brush, making no secret of their approach. In fact, trying to advertise greater than their own number. When they burst out from the tree line, just behind the nearest sentry, the flame-haired northerner had perhaps a handful of heartbeats to think on his situation before Reave’s greatsword fell across his shoulder, cleaving away one arm with one mighty blow.
Reave kicked the dead man aside as Kern stepped up in full view on his left, and Nahud’r—wrapped nearly head to knees in woolen garments—on the right. One of the other sentries caught Kern’s features and ran up quickly, sword sheathed and waving his hands overhead, shouting in Nordheimir for Kern not to attack.
A mistake, he shouted.
The flat, nasal language of the northern raiders was not well suited to fear, but this one came close.
Then an arrow took him in the back from the eastern side of camp, and he stumbled the last few paces to end up impaled on Kern’s short sword. Recognition flared in his eyes, followed by a sudden shift to loathing and anger. Then he died.
As his anger rose, and stole over him with comforting warmth, Kern watched the light die in Vanir eyes with great satisfaction.
“Ymir-egh,” a few of them shouted. Warriors rolled out of bedrolls or abandoned their gaming circles, snatching up blades and warhammers, axes, and even a few long pikes.
As Kern had hoped, most of the other sentries were at a hard run, circling around his small trio. Inside the camp, a few moved to guard the prisoners, keep them in place, but most surged forward in a ragged line.