Strifbjorn knew Mingan wasn’t coming. He hoped the Serpent was.
A mourning cry drifted to them on the breeze, and the voices faltered. Strifbjorn raised his shield on his left hand, settling it firmly into place. “Form.”
Shield-edge rattled on shield-edge as the wall took shape. Behind him, spears readied and another rank of warriors prepared to step into the place of any that should fall. A valraven snorted, hooves chipping ice.
Through the snow, Strifbjorn glimpsed the Raven Banner, broad wings snapping on a stiff sea breeze. Before it, the tall striding figure of Heythe, a dark blade in her hand.
It had belonged to Sigrdrifa.
That more than anything crystallized his rage into something
brittle and throat-cutting. Around him, Strifbjorn heard the shouts and taunts of his brethren: Menglad’s wild ululating shriek rising by his side, Muire behind him singing high and sweet. He bellowed—and the children set themselves to meet their brothers’ charge.
No sign of the Serpent.
The mass of the sdadown hit them first, unkillable, driving themselves up the spears of the second rank and, even when beheaded, scrabbling forward. Strifbjorn kicked one back, breaking the neck of a second with the rim of his shield. A moment later, shield wall collided with shield wall, the weight of running warriors behind it.
It is a sound anyone who had heard it carries forever, the impact as of a barn door slammed back by a bull, repeated three hundred times.
The sdadown made the difference. Strifbjorn’s line held against the charge, striving shoulder to shoulder, leaning into the shock. But the vile wolves came
under
the shields, and then the weight of the enemy drove the shield wall back against the second rank as they were abandoning their beast-weighted spears and rising from the crouch, swinging swords like axes. The tarnished struck what remained of the shield wall like the ocean striking a cliff, a staggering force, a blow and a sound like a metal-clad ram striking the hull of a ship.
Strifbjorn’s line shattered. He staggered back under the weight of the tarnished, unsure of how he found himself back-to-back with Arngeir, and then with Herewys a moment later.
Gore smoked on the snow, boots slipping on icy blood-wet stones. Strifbjorn staggered, striking downward with the edge of his shield at motion half-glimpsed. The back of another
sdada cracked under the metal-shod rim, a rank meaty smell clotting Strifbjorn’s nostrils. He gagged and brought his sword back into line.
Alvitr danced in his hand, flaring blue-white, moving like a scythe through the sdadown and then ringing on the shadowy blades of his brothers, his enemies. Teeth met in his thigh. He saw Muire fighting beside Menglad Brightwing as he turned and struck the head off the sdada. Blood stained the length of his leg.
Shouting, he parried a blade away from Arngeir, then stepped into a gap and took Ulfgar through his throat. The bodiless thing still gnawed at Strifbjorn’s leg until he knocked it away.
A moment later he stood face-to-face with Skeold. She howled, her eyes dark in a determined face. Blades crossed and Strifbjorn pressed his shield on hers, trying to overbear—and then they were swept apart.
Something pale hurtled overhead, casting Strifbjorn momentarily in shadow. Herfjotur and her white-winged steed, diving into the center of the fray. Strifbjorn traced the line of his flight and saw Heythe, killing everything that came before her, blood spattering her silver chain mail. Someone shouted a warning. She whirled to face the valraven’s silent, furious charge.
Strifbjorn turned into the tide of battle. Arngeir and Menglad flanked him, Muire at their backs. A break in the combat, like an eddy in a current, opened before them, and they ran toward Heythe and Herfjotur.
The goddess dropped her borrowed blade, stepped to the side, ducked Herfjotur’s sword as if the movement were a dance
and reached out with her bare hands. Strifbjorn could not see how it happened, but the steed tumbled and fell, throwing Herfjotur, and a pack of sdadown were on her before she could arise. The valraven staggered to her rescue, wings dragging, one head dangling, and the beasts turned on him as well.
Heythe raised her hand to her throat, and shimmering light sparked around her. Strifbjorn and the others shouted aloud, four voices as one, and redoubled their charge, slipping over rocks and ice. To no avail.
A wave of sdadown and tarnished was on them before they came within fifty yards of Heythe. Strifbjorn cared nothing for them—they were an obstacle to be surmounted. But before they could break through the line, Heythe stepped onto her rainbow and rose into the storm. The snow and the stones were red all around. Bergdis ran, shouting, and Strifbjorn saw Arngeir miss a parry and take a wound high on his shield arm. He started to shake the shield off. As Strifbjorn turned to interpose his blade he felt a tug, a tearing. Something wet and heavy slipped down his thigh. He struck out by reflex; a sdadown fell in halves. He reeled, saw another of the tarnished knock Menglad’s blade offline when she turned to help her husband, went to his knees in sudden weakness that he did not understand.
The sword fell from his hand.
The Serpent was not coming.
Arngeir fell, and Bergdis, weeping beside Ulfgar’s body, raised a black-bladed sword and struck off his head. All around the battlefield, the Light flickered out in patches, the bodies of the tarnished and the children scattered everywhere. Strifbjorn pushed himself up on one knee and gutted Bergdis, smoking
intestines spilling over his arms and hands. He lost Alvitr in her body, his hand too weak, and as he fell he realized what the hot wetness that covered his belly and thighs must be.
It doesn’t hurt at all.
Muire was hacking her way through the sdadown toward Strifbjorn while another tarnished caught the disarmed Menglad by the throat. He drew her toward him and yanked her mouth open with his other hand, and Strifbjorn lost sight of them as a valraven descended between them, blood spattering from immense rent wings.
The last thing he remembered was Muire’s eyes across the tar-black wave of sdadown.
The Historian
I
had no recollection of how I made it off the battlefield alive. I remembered Strifbjorn falling, Arngeir, everyone around me taken at once—and the sdadown like a river of teeth, and the mad wild thought that if I could get to the war-leader, somehow, I could save him.
And then the pack rolled over him, and there was nothing left worth fighting for. I remembered turning, and the scrape of teeth scoring my thigh and not quite taking the tendon or the artery, and I remembered the pain in my knees and the ache in my lungs when finally, somehow, I stopped running and fell into the snow. Somewhere, I had lost my helm, and Nathr was dark in my hand.
It was cold. I was alone.
When I looked up again, crusted snow shifted on my hair
and broke, sliding down my back. I blinked flakes from my eyelashes and reached out to the light. Nothing answered but the cold and the dark between the stars.
Why am I alive?
If I lived, maybe someone else survived. A bitter thought. I did not want to go back and face my disgrace, and so I argued with myself. I fled. I fled a field of battle. I should have died first.
Maybe someone else is alive.
And they would spit on me if they saw me.
Maybe someone is wounded and needs help.
And so I wiped the gore from Nathr, sheathed her over my shoulder, stood and trudged back through the snow.
The silence lodged in my heart. It was a strangely peaceful scene. Snow quilted over the bodies scattering the battlefield, the scraps of hacked sdadown twitching as they froze. The falling snow had drifted over the blood, but my boots broke through the top layer to lay a red-inked trail behind me. I walked back to the place where I had broken.
I knelt down in the snow and dug with my bare hands.
I found Arngeir first, Bergdis lying half over him, as if they embraced. Wrapped in ice, though, not in flames. Menglad lay cold not five feet away, her hand cast over her mouth.
Strifbjorn. He had died badly. The body was too cold by the time I got there even to close his eyes, and I couldn’t bear to look too long anyway.
If I were mortal, I would lie down in the snow and freeze beside them.
Night fell behind the storm. Again, I called on the Light, and this time, a pale, shredded flickering shone from my eyes and covered my hands. It tattered when I moved. The Light
gleamed around me for a moment. The power built and slid within me—and then like a great, faltering heartbeat fell away. I called on the strength, the Soul of the world. . . .
And the world did not answer.
But something else did. Further on, from behind a tumble of snow-covered rocks, rose a thin, exhausted neigh. I pushed myself to my feet, frozen blood clinging to my boots and trousers, and scrambled through ice and over rock, using Nathr’s scabbarded blade as a crutch until I saw what cried.
Herfjotur’s stallion was gnawed and bloody, but he was not dead. Snow still fell between us, gentling the contours of the battlefield, but I saw him sprawled in the gathering drifts among the gaunt bodies of a half-dozen sdadown. A final sdada still panted, wheezing, nearby. Its jaws snapped, but its spine was severed. It had not the strength to drag itself.
The stallion was crippled, his wings bent horribly and jagged with splintered bone. His eyes were white-rimmed and wide with fear beneath the horns, and his other head, the antlered one, flopped on a broken neck. His lungs heaved; the blood that foamed in his nostrils was bright.
I am ashamed to say I hesitated.
Oh, Muire
, I thought,
for pity’s sake.
So I went to him. I reached out an uncertain hand for his porcelain muzzle, and I let what Light remained shine out of my eyes, feeling as if it faded already. “Bright one,” I said, and had to clutch his horn to keep from falling.
He grew quiet at my touch, and I almost wept at the terrible extent of his wounds. He sighed and pushed his face against me, as a horse might with a friend. That act, somehow, struck me with more pity and horror than any other thing that I had
seen on all that cruel day. And then he said—inside me, as I had never heard a valraven speak—
Alive? Alive how?
I snatched back my hand. “Cowardice,” I said. “I ran.”
The Light?
“No more.” I leaned on the sword. For now, it held me. My leg almost would. “Bright one, I cannot heal you.”
I could not even heal myself.
But I could give him mercy. I shifted my weight and slipped Nathr from her sheath, far enough that he could see the blade. I could give him mercy.
Live.
“We
can’t
.” I finished drawing my sword and thrust her scabbard through the baldric. Ridiculous to keep it, but I would carry her away from here. The echo of a howl reached me. It prickled the hair on my neck. I had nothing to give the stallion but a promise. “I will be quicker than they.”
He surged out of the snow, broken wings flopping. Uncontrolled, one knocked me down. I sprawled under the weight of my mail.
Live.
An order. A command. He extended his head, so I could haul myself hand over hand up his mane.
Live.
One last time, a wistful murmur.
I stroked his forelock from his eyes. The sdada howled again. I could have left him. I could have fled again.
But then the stallion would be alone.
“As well here with you as later, otherwise,” I said. I picked up my blade and whipped ice from it. He shrugged his broken wings wide, to cover my flank. I winced to think how it must hurt him.
It would serve.
The sdadown howled to hunt, but when they struck it was in perfect silence. That suited me also; there were only four, and it had taken more to murder Strifbjorn; but then, I was not Strifbjorn.
The monsters circled, flanked us, and two struck for the valraven’s quarters. I dove over his wing and skidded down before them, blade-first. The valraven kicked one tumbling, and Nathr found the throat of the other—I know not how.
Of course it did not die, but dragged itself back, snarling.
Oh, we fought. What does it matter? By sheer luck I killed one, a chop through its heart that silenced the damned thing where all my hacking couldn’t, and the stallion crushed another. The third closed teeth in my arm and bore me back, against his shoulder. I hammered its face with Nathr’s pommel. Teeth shattered; I knocked it free.
It struggled on in silence.
No more
, I thought. No more. If I must die, I would die like a waelcyrge.
Singing.
Let it call down every vile-wolf left prowling the battlefield. Let them come. Let them
come
.
I waded through drifts and tripped over corpses. I drove the sdada before me; it circled and snarled. Perhaps a bit late, but I was dying now as I should have died before. There was some satisfaction to be had in it.
Unlooked for, Light flared from the blade, and I stared at it so hard I almost dropped her. The sdada, not so foolish, leaped; I cut it from the air. Behind me, a great snap and rattle. The stallion shook the last one like a dog killing a rat. Remembering the trick with the heart, I ran it through while he held it down.
The stallion nudged me with his bloody muzzle and tumbled into the snow. And the pale light died from my sword.
Wait with me
, he asked.
And of course I could do not other.
I tore the ruined harness from him, working with stiff fingers. I unbuckled saddle and blanket, and let them slide into the snow. I sat down in the snow beside him and leaned my blade over my knees.
Sometime in the night, he pressed his cheek to mine.
H
e was still alive in the morning.
I did not lift my head or open my eyes when redness behind their lids told me the short winter day was beginning. Cold ached in the joints of my hands. I had never felt the like.