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“Perhaps. But a guivre will guarantee victory.” She smiled bitterly as she shifted her attention. “Do you not think so, Lord Alain? Would this not be a wise strategy?”
Alain nodded. A sense of peace settled over him. He had done the right thing by coming here. He saw now what he had to do. “Yes,” he said, “a guivre will grant victory.”
3
ONCE the necessary formal greetings were fulfilled at the shore, once folk began to unload the cargo of Alban goods, Stronghand climbed the slope of the valley. He walked into the shadow cast by the heights and across the skin of soft green grass that surrounded OldMother’s hall. Late-blooming snowdrops speckled the ground. SwiftDaughters eyed him from where they stood by the mouths of their cave. Their hair swayed like a glamour, and he paused by the threshold, distracted by their beauty. Wind trembled against his back in an unexpected gust, and he shook himself and walked forward.
He crossed into a gulf of darkness too large to be confined in any finite space, much less the eaves and timbers visible as the outside dimensions of the hall. A tremor teased the ground. He heard as at a great distance a breathy piping like a wheezing breath. No stars shone; blackness veiled the heavens. It was as still as if wind had never been known in the world, utterly silent and cold as the skin of stone in the dark of winter.
She said, “Stronghand.”
“I am here.”
She said, “Go to the fjall. The WiseMothers await you.”
The air twisted around him, spinning the staff he held in his right hand, and he staggered backward and found himself tossed out the doorway, surprised by the light. The SwiftDaughters had vanished. Below, the ships rode high, or had been pulled up onto the strand, lightened of their load.
How had time passed so swiftly? Around the hall and the farther village, seen through a fence of pine and spruce, folk were busy sorting and accounting. Most had gone back to work now that the excitement of his arrival had faded.
They had not forgotten him. He walked among them to reach the trail that led up into the highest reaches of the valley, and as he bent his path in that direction he found himself with an escort, mostly children, none daring to ask what venture he’d set himself this late in the day.
The children loped alongside like a pack of overgrown puppies, all in a tangle that sorts itself out into pairs and triads before melding together again. Human children ran with the hatchlings he had sired. They jostled each other like littermates, and the softer, weaker human kin whacked at the four-legs with stout sticks to keep their sharp teeth at bay when the nipping and tussling got out of hand. The sight of this extended pack caused a stab of foreboding. What strengthened the human children would surely weaken the children of rock, who did not leap to the kill as they would have done in the old days in such a crowd. They ran as one great many-limbed beast, so that he could scarcely tell one limb from another as they tumbled and shouted and galloped and giggled around him.
Perhaps it was too easy to condemn, he thought as he strode on tireless legs, as he inhaled the sweet scent of home flavored with burning charcoal, pine sap, and the cold bite of northern air. The old days, by the reckoning of his kind with their short lives, were easily swallowed by the longer span of years in which humankind revel and which they did not fully appreciate. To live seventy years, as some of them did! Even Deacon Ursuline, who claimed to have survived forty or fifty seasons, could boast of a life span unknown even to the sorcerers of the Eika tribes, the ones who schemed and stole hearts and souls and magics in order to extend their lives.
No matter. A flame may still burn brightly, though its wick is short.
Rikin Fjord prospered because it was now a many-limbed beast. Sheep grazed where meadows found purchase on level ground, although he noted few twin lambs among the ewes: harbinger of a hard year ahead. Goats scrambled nimbly along the steep slopes of the valley. Pens held pampered cattle, who needed a cozy byre to outlast the winter. It was winter still, with frost crackling under each step and snow heaped where shadows lingered longest. A late sowing might prove too short for a decent crop.
Still, the Eika could rely on raiding to fill their larders. Long had they honed their skills as the wolves of the sea. Now, it seemed, they must learn and change, so learn and change they would. There was no going back.
The ground grew rockier as the path cut steeply toward the fjall. The children quieted. Many turned back although a few dogged his heels, too curious to stop. No adult followed him this far, although down the path he saw a dozen or more looking up after him. The trees became withered and stunted, and fell away altogether, leaving boulders and skirts of moss and a patchy carpet of lichen. He looked in vain for the youngest of the WiseMothers, climbing this path, but she had gone.
He crossed over the rim and onto the undulating plain that was the fjall. Snow dusted the open reaches, where the wind battered at all things. In the sheltered lee of boulders and along the uneven rise and fall of the earth, old snow had hardened. It was so cold that his footfalls resounded as his weight cut through the remains of last winter’s snowfall.
In the distance, where the land dipped into a hollow, the WiseMothers congregated. One more stood among them: she had reached her destination who was most recently OldMother, the one who spawned him and his brothers. He crossed the plain, slipping once where the snow concealed loose rock debris along a slight incline. The wind’s howl muted to a moan, and as he reached the edge of the circle the wind ceased altogether. The clouds cast a gray pallor over the day. Every object seemed muted and lessened. Even the WiseMothers looked, for an instant, like nothing more than big, unshapely stones fixed in an irregular oval around a sandy basin, whose smooth surface was untouched by snow or stick or even a wrinkled scrap of torn lichen. The hummock that marked the center had altered. Once, its curve had borne a pearlescent gleam. Now it sat with a kind of menace he could not describe. Corruption had infested it, turning it as black as charcoal, as though it had rotted from the inside out.
He shuddered, afraid, but of nothing he could touch or smell or hear or see. It seemed stupid to make his way across the sands in order to stand on a place that looked as likely to hold his weight as the deck of a ship eaten away by fire. The smell of sulfur made his eyes water and his skin itch. The stench actually seemed to ripple off the ground. He began to think he could see the stink rising in waves. That smell made him reel, gulping air and expelling it as quickly as he coughed and gagged and, at last, calmed his breathing.
Of the ice wyrms, he saw no sign, not even a tracery under the glitter of sand.
He stood for a long time, trying to decide what to do, and after a while he heard the whisper of the wind among the stones and after a longer while he realized that the wind remained becalmed and that these were voices tugging at him, faint and far off, receding as a traveler recedes as he sails away from shore.
“Your. Brother. You. Owe. Him. A. Debt. Is. It. Repaid.”
A life for a life. He knew what they spoke of.
“Go. To. Him. Now. Repay. This. Debt. Now.”
Now.
A sound cracked, as explosive as a heated rock splitting asunder. Not meaning to, he ducked. The air had changed, thickened, hardened until he could scarcely draw in breath. Wave upon wave of heated air rippled out of the hollow.
Their voices were as faint as the hiss of a feather falling.
“Our. Task. Is. Ended. You. Are. Now. Alone. Our. Children. Our. Children. Born. Of. Mute. Rock. Human. Flesh. Dragon’s. Blood. You. Must. Make. Your. Own. Way. Without. Us.”
A temblor eased through the earth. Its groan sighed like longing. The surface of the hollow shifted. In branching lines no wider than his claws, the sands poured away as though, underneath, tunnels were caving in. The black hummock snapped fiercely, so loud that the sound echoed off the far mountainsides. He heard it as through a vast chamber, down along a far-reaching path, multiplied over and over as if he heard not one sound but a hundred cracks each one of which sent him plummeting into the ancient past:
