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The tremor drags at her, and she feels the ground slide away under her feet, spun not by sorcery or some monstrous flying creature but by a sudden disturbance cutting through the earth itself. She is torn away, but she is still dreaming. She hasn’t left the land of dreams, she has only been displaced.
The earth slides under her and the heavens are black. Neither star glints nor moon shines, but the breath of dawn licks at her face; she can see it in the graying scene unfolding before her, and she knows she has traveled a long way, thrown off course by the trembling earth. She is somewhere she has never been before. She feels another mind and another soul tangling with hers as she dreams, and he has brought her here, unawares, perhaps. No malice oppresses her, but the heart that beats inside her is unlike anything she has ever known, unlike her own simple and apprehensible heart, more cruel than merciful, more just than kind, yet in its contradictions unfathomable.
She walks among them and she falls inside.
Spring came early, as foretold by the merfolk who can taste the weather in the salt of the sea. No pounding storms troubled the fjords over the winter. Now he stands in the stern of his ship and the sea slides underneath as smoothly as melted grease coats a hot pan. The pull of the land is almost enough to draw them in. Scarcely does any oar touch the water.
Victory can be had in many ways, and this victory will be taken at dawn on a foe who lies sleeping.
Nokvi is, no doubt, shrewd and strong, and the magic of his allies can undo many an enemy. But that magic cannot harm the host of Stronghand, and Nokvi’s strength will not avail him in the confusion brought on him by a dawn raid.
The ships beach silently on the far side of the land’s finger, where a steep ridge thrusts out into the sound. His warriors disembark as mute as stones; for this raid, they have left their dogs behind. They begin the hike that will take them over the ridge and down into Moerin’s vale, where Nokvi rules. As they climb, pine and birch grow increasingly thick about them, and the host speeds silently between the trees until, cresting the ridge, they see the watch fires marking Nokvi’s long hall burning crisp and clean below them. All lies quiet.
As they move down the slope, their noise increases, and he feels a stab of misgiving, but it is already too late. His warriors are beginning to howl, full of their cleverness, ready to slaughter, and as they break from the woods and course over the fields he knows that even with this brief notice Nokvi’s people will be easy prey, bewildered by the early hour and the unexpected attack.
Still no movement comes from the hall.
Distantly he hears a shriek, like a raven, suddenly cut off.
They reach the hall in a thundering roar, and it isn’t until the first of them strikes down the door and heaves it aside that he understands the worst. Outside, the watch fires bum. Inside, the hearth fire burns but warms no one, because no one stands or sits or leaps up in astonished and enraged surprise. The hall is empty.
“Blow the retreat,” he cries to his standard bearer even as he knows it is already too late.
Perhaps this will be his harshest test.
“Set the hall on fire,” he calls, “and light every torch we have.”
A new force emerges out of the trees, leaping in a wild ecstasy, and their ululations rise like the flames now streaking up the walls of the long hall. They are Soft Ones, but their skin is the color of the night sea and without clothing or adornment save spears and clubs spiked with iron they race toward the Rikin warriors shrieking and laughing like madmen. They plunge forward without fear, and in the instant before they fall upon his warriors, he sees robed humans walking among the trees with staffs upraised: sorcerers. His own staff he grips tightly, but their magic does not afflict his warriors, only their own, who hit the Rikin line with howls first of battle fever and then of agony.
“Retreat!” he cries again, and this time he wrenches the horn from his standard bearer and blows the call himself, sharp, imperative.
“Nay, nay,” his warriors cry, “let us slaughter them. They are weak as calves.”
But he drives his troops forward. They know to obey him. They know he is more farsighted than they are. And by now, some of them can see that they have been tricked. With spears and fire they beat their way forward through the throng of naked men, headed for the ridge and the trees. Only the stupidest are left at the hall when Nokvi’s troops come racing out of the dark from the other direction. It’s a clever plan. Nokvi hoped to catch Rikin’s army from behind while it wasted itself killing ensorcelled men.
It is a hard and humiliating run back up the ridge and down to his ships. Only four of the ships are burning so fiercely that the fires set on them can’t be stemmed. He kills one of the arsonists himself, a naked human man who gibbers and pokes ineffectually at him with a knife before the creature falls, doubled over, from a thrust to the guts.
Four ships lost, as well as a third of his men. One ship has to be scuttled in the sound, and ten more warriors dumped overboard when they die of their wounds.
But he counts himself lucky. He has underestimated Nokvi and his allies. It could have been much worse.
It is not in victory that you learn how strong you truly are.
Sorrow licked him, and he startled up like a hare bolting and found himself weeping at Lavastine’s bier.
It is not in victory that you learn how strong you are.
Ai, God. He could not weep for himself, not truly. He was weeping for what they had done to his father’s hopes and dreams, shredded now. Thrown to the dogs.
Not my father any longer.
Nay, King Henry had not yet judged the case. Yet if Henry ruled in his favor, could he ever truly call himself Lavastine’s son again without wondering if it were a lie to say so? Couldn’t it be true, as Cook said, that Lavastine had lain with the young woman as well? Might he not have walked to the ruins one night and succumbed to temptation as Alain had almost done so long ago with that girl, Withi? How could they ever know one way or the other? How could one tell?
What had linked Lavastine and poor Lackling, who were so unlike that it seemed impossible they could be father and son, even after Cook’s testimony? Nothing had linked them, except blood, except perhaps the way the hounds had whined and whimpered at both their deaths.
Geoffrey’s blood claim to the count’s chair was stronger than Lackling’s merely by reason of competence. But if fitness was the only standard, then couldn’t he argue that he would be a better steward than Geoffrey? Under his rule, the people would do better than under Geoffrey’s rule. Was it pride to think so? No, it was truth. Lavastine had recognized that truth and he had made his decision based in part on sentiment and emotion, certainly, but in equal part on reason, because Lavastine took seriously his duty to the land and people under his rule.
What was blood, anyway? It was everything, all that you had to mark kinship, and yet the bond he had shared with Lavastine was no less real whether or not blood had tied them together. He and Lavastine had been woven together in some way evident to them both.
