Nothing moved in the town or fields. The only signs of life were riders rounding up flocks on the eastern horizon, sending ewes and husky lambs skittering after the low, spreading bulk of their horde.
My knees threatened to buckle. I was too late. Eidr, Yske, nearly everyone I loved – they were down in that smoking ruin or carried off over the horizon.
I clutched at a sapling and felt myself crumpling towards hysteria. I had been frightened last night at the shrine, but this – this was a feeling I hadn’t had in years: the inexorable slide of fear building into a rampant charge. If I let it go, it would tear through my mind like a winter wolf.
But there would be survivors. I blinked, focused on the swaying sapling beneath my hand and the wind on my face. Algatt raiders never killed – or took – everyone.
I dropped off the bluff and landed hard on the forest floor. As I ran, I saw the Hall of Smoke in my mind’s eye, whole and vaulted and filled with warmth. Eidr and Yske were there with a hundred other familiar faces, moving around the central hearth, carrying and weaving and sharpening and singing. They wrapped themselves in furs in the winter; in the summer, they returned from the river at dusk, wet-haired and laughing.
The Hall belonged to the Goddess of War and her chosen warrior-priests, but it was also the heart of our town. The heart of the borderlands. The heart of my people.
Just inside the edge of the forest, the rhythm of hooves shattered my reverie. I ducked into the bushes as three riders barreled up the rise a dozen paces away, following a woodsmen’s track. Another came after them more slowly, off the trail on my other side, and then a fifth.
I dropped into a deeper crouch, disjointed prayers clattering through my head. They were Algatt. There was no mistaking them, not with their weathered, pale skin, the cut of their tunics – tapered to a point, just above the knee – fitted trousers, and the blue and yellow paints smudged into their angular fringes.
But why were the Algatt still here? Why would they risk leaving a handful of riders behind? Surely not to hunt down stray villagers. There was no point in that.
The rush of blood in my ears became a thundering river. Even as instinct urged me to run to the village and Eidr, I put out a hand to ground myself. My fingers sank into moss, soft and lush and cool with rain. The feeling steadied me in the midst of my disassembling world.
I waited in the moss, in the shelter of an arch of ferns, until the Algatt moved on.
My muscles complained as I eased out of my crouch, but I kept low, following game trails that I had run for the majority of my life, until the narrow earthen path ended in fields.
There were no fences here, no walls or rises to hide behind, but the wafts of smoke were dense and low. I darted across the open ground and stepped through a smoldering break in the ring wall.
Smoke curled past me. I wanted to call out, but the presence of Algatt in the forest demanded caution. I followed the wall around half of the settlement, gaze flickering between singed wooden walls, grass-covered roofs and small plots of vegetables and herbs, protected by wicker fences. There were no bickering children. No goats stood on their hind legs, trying to crop grass from the eaves. No women knelt at millstones, no men manipulated wood into a new cradle, a new stool. There were only creeping swaths of fire, smoke and an eerie hush.
I stared at fabric fluttering in a window, bold Eangen colors of blue and green and soft greys intertwined in endless patterns. Looking at it, I could almost believe nothing was wrong, that the air did not reek of seared meat. But when I peeked inside the window, the house was overturned and empty, and there was a smear of blood across the floor.
I reached the center of the village and halted, unable to move any further. The Hall rose above me in a lattice of stark, charred beams. My entire body rebelled against looking at it, but the corpses on the ground were worse. The old and the weak lay in piles, as if the Algatt had herded them in front of my home’s great, gaping doors to slaughter them in the sight of their goddess.
Then there were the Eangi priests. My people. My family. Some had managed to drag on their armor before the attack, but the rest were in daily working garb. However much warning the watchmen had given them, it had not been enough.
Only the Eangi’s narrow collars of bronze declared their status as Eang’s warrior-priests – the same collar that Eidr and Yske wore, and that the High Priestess had cut from my throat before I made my climb.
My vision glazed over corpses, shattered doors and churned, bloody mud. I had witnessed slaughter before; there was no one in my world who hadn’t, child or adult, priest or farmer. But this was like nothing I had ever seen. This was no raid. This was a massacre.
And in a settlement of this size, I knew everyone. The face of each corpse was familiar to me. I knew their stories, their habits and the obscure ties in our bloodlines.
But Eidr was not there; nor was Yske. Of course they weren’t, I told myself. They had escaped. They must have escaped.
Mechanically, trembling, I passed through the sea of bodies, fingering my ritual knife as I went. Every face I saw, every wound, reinforced my growing suspicion that this was more than a raid – an Algatt army had swept through my home, one that even the infamous Eangi of the Hall of Smoke could not stop.
Numbed by this realization, I entered the Hall of Smoke itself. Shafts of light poured through great scorched sections of roof and walls. The flames had died down, but the heat was still close and the air heavy with smoke. I pulled the edge of my tunic over my face and forced my feet forward.
Some detached, emotionless part of me began to give orders. Search the bodies. Find my husband and cousin. Find more weapons than this pitiful knife. Get to East Meade, to the rest of my family.
Give the dead their final rites.
I blinked, wrestling my mind away from flight, and tried to focus on that final task. Exiled or not, if I was the last Eangi standing in Albor, it was my duty to write the runes in the ash and release the spirits of the dead. Only then could they leave the blood-soaked earth and pass on into the High Halls of the Gods.
The High Halls where I could not follow.
Eidr. Yske. Where were they?
My world buckled, cracked and narrowed. Eidr’s and my bunk, one of the dozens of Eangi beds clinging to the walls of the hall behind shredded curtains, was a nest of embers. The bearskin that I kept rolled at the back was shriveled and reeked of burned hair. Our dangling bags of belongings were destroyed, childhood talismans spilled into the cinders.
The only salvageable thing was a bone and silver hairpin that Eidr had given to me, carved with birds and the runes for belonging, protection, and eternal promise. I let the collar of my tunic slip from my mouth and, clearing my throat, took up the hairpin. Desperate for some feeling of normality, I tucked its three prongs into my hair and blinked back across the Hall.
My eyes glassed over the bodies again. Somehow, before my gaze found her, I knew Yske was there; a flash of open, staring eyes, all too like a butchered doe. Near her, a flash of red hair. A limp, masculine hand. Eidr.
I did not move. Did not breathe. This was a vision – yes, that must be it. I was lying in a meadow of poppies and this was a vision from Eang, a warning, a…
The hoot of an owl broke into my shock. I thought I saw a grey bird up among the rafters, its feathers sleek and its eyes great, honeyed wells, but as I searched my gaze snagged on the Algatt silhouetted in the doorway.
We stared at one another. I saw a bloodied warrior in mail and decorative leather, eyes rimmed in black and skin streaked with blue and yellow paint. Little older than Eidr, his cheeks were still flushed under blond-lashed eyes and his sun-darkened forearms were laced with scarification – ritual and otherwise.