1
HALDUR OAKENSEN
Snow squeaks as I adjust my weight on feet so frozen that they could be blocks of dead oak and not living human appendages. I grimace at the sound – faint as it is – and my breath huffs to mingle with Hessa’s doggy gusts. We two are one in this moment – bound by ties of love and loyalty but also in the need to keep silent and wait.
I ease my hand on her head in a moment of shared comfort, though her brown eyes are bright with anticipation and her tongue lolls with excitement. For me, the only feeling inside is fear. Whatever glamour dazzles my eyes and fills my waking days with nightmares does not affect her. She hunts by scent and feel, a living spirit greater than her doggy body manifests. I, human as I am, must hunt with murky senses – a nose that tells me nothing of my opponent unless he sets the trees ablaze, ears and eyes deadened by my weak mortal flesh.
The sound of a twig snapping – not from behind where our pickets lie, but from in front – sends an echo of movement down our line. My breath hitches, tight on the cold air, tighter on the fear I keep gripped down against my breastbone. There’s something about a group of warriors that makes them one entity in the fight. Individual but not. More aligned even, than a murder of crows or a pack of wolves. We are one in spirit, for all of us streak like arrows toward one target.
Today’s target is an ambush.
Hands shift their grip on weapons – even mine on this sword I’ve come to both love and hate. My salvation and my damnation, an extension of my violent self.
Their arrival is not quiet. Even the fae, magical as they are, cannot change the nature of snow when the cold descends long and brutal on the earth and rules us harder than tyrants. It announces them as easily as a trumpet, and I bite the inside of my lip as I flash my hand signals to the men on either side of me.
They’ve taken the bait. They’ll be amongst us soon. Now is the moment to hold our nerve and be ready.
Answering signals rippled down to meet me.
Every man knows his job. Every boy, too, and there are too many of those. This war has gone too long. We’re left now with boys and old men. A man in his prime still living is such an oddity that some of the men make sacred signs when they catch sight of one.
I’m one of the boys lifted to rank too soon. Barely twenty. Only just a man. My father and brothers cut down in the past twenty moons and carved away until I’m the last to bear the name and standard. Me and Hessa. The only ones left who once lived on Castle Tor.
I can hear the voices of my enemies now. It’s a shock every time.
Before we fight, we see them as men – or as close to men as fae can be, with their pointed ears, and wings, and horned heads. As close to men as fae can be while riding elk, or big cats, and fighting with lightning strikes as often as with blade or staff.
The moment we charge them, they’ll shift to monsters of shadow and the ripping horrors of hell unfolded.
But for this one painful moment, we see them enter our trap looking not entirely unlike us. As if they have hearts that beat. As if they have hearts that love. Just like us.
I wrap up these thoughts and bind them down with my terror. No room for them here. No place for them.
Our quarry is spread out along the snow-packed trail. They follow in each other’s paths like yellow ducklings following the mother.
I bite the inside of my cheek until it bleeds, until I remember that there’s no room for anything but the work at hand. And then I chop my hand through the air, and we charge.
Hessa, too. I dare not worry for her. Her doggy instincts will keep her safe. They always do.
“For the valor of the Blue Eagle! The Blue Eagle!” someone screams down the line.
“The Blue Eagle!” The cry is taken up around me.
I save my breath, plunging forward as the world transforms from bright white snow and charcoal branches to a howling mass of black smoky creatures with red fires for eyes and mouths, their faces distended and drawn out until they look more like billows of smoke come alive to attack us than like the pretty golden-haired men in bright armor that I saw from my hiding place.
I swing my sword and slice at one, and then quickly turn the motion and hack to the other side. Strike, strike, advance. Strike, strike, advance. Just like the training yard. Just like practice. I must ignore how they howl in my mind. I must ignore how they seem to find my every evil thought and wish and bring it to the front of my consciousness and whip me with them. My own heart accuses me and tells me to surrender and die.
I must not agree.
Strike, strike, advance.
Hessa howls as her teeth sink into the shadow figure I fight.
Strike, strike – he falls, morphing back into a man-like shape, his golden hair spilling around him in the snow, his bright armor frosted at the edges with the last heat of his life, his red, red blood staining snow and ice around him.
And I have no time to stop. I spin to the next.
Gragor shouts from beside me, his throat caught in a shadow hand. I spin and plunge my blade into the shadow. Gragor drops into a defensive stance and strikes out in a slash, too tough to break at the attack, despite his willow-fresh fourteen years.
