Voices of ice giants, thundering, tremendous, boomed in the distance.
Prince Kivik shivered and wrapped his patched green cloak more closely around him. The western sky had cleared, allowing the sun to shine out brightly, but a wicked, bitter wind blew down from higher peaks to the northeast. Gritting his teeth at the thought that this killing cold—unexpected, unseasonable—was likely to continue, he leaned across the pitted white stones of the parapet.
From his present vantage point, high on the outer walls, he could see a wide swath of snowy ground below the fortress and before the gates, where the enormous footprints of giants and the bearlike Varjolükka coming and going were pressed deep into the drifts. And even though he could not see them, he knew that a host of fierce white bears and blue-haired giants would be somewhere very near, patrolling the valley floor just beyond the range of his vision, or lurking in pinewoods along the valley walls, maintaining this siege that kept him and his men confined inside the ancient fortified city like rats in a trap.
Standing there with the wind lifting his light brown hair, King Ristil’s son felt a familiar rage and frustration building inside of him. Before him lay the muddy chaos of the snowy fields, littered with the frozen bodies of men, horses, and things that were neither beasts nor men, behind him a vast landscape of towers, spires, parapets, balconies, peaked roofs, and cupolas, all arrayed in a glittering, improbable armor of ice.
Far in the distance, he spied a bright splash of color, green and gold, against the white glare of snow. For a moment he felt his spirits rise, thinking it might be some vanguard of his father’s armies. But as they advanced, growing ever sharper and brighter, Kivik could just make out the indistinct forms of five—no, six men riding their horses at breakneck speed down the throat of the valley. He felt his hopes sink, a cold lump begin to form in the pit of his stomach. These were his own scouts, sent out many hours earlier under cover of darkness.
But what madness, he wondered, could have possessed them to return in broad daylight, when they risk being seen by the giants and the skinchangers? Then he saw what followed in pursuit: two of the Varjolükka, moving along at an incredible speed considering their ungainly, bearlike bodies, gradually narrowing the distance between them and the scouts.
Turning sharply on his heel, Kivik moved swiftly toward the stairs, meaning to alert the men who minded the gates. He had descended only two or three steps when a murmur of voices and a rattling of chains down in the gatehouse told him that the guards had seen everything, were already preparing to throw the gates open. Realizing he had no other help to offer, he returned to his vantage point by the parapet, to watch the race and shout encouragement at the riders.
As always, it disturbed him to see how the were-beasts moved: the way bones and muscles slid beneath the skin; the uncanny action of the limbs, apparently clumsy but deathly efficient, as if magic rather than sinew held everything together.
On came the men, their green cloaks whipping in the wind; on plunged the frantic, wild-eyed steeds, their flanks gleaming with sweat. Only when they drew near enough for Kivik to see foam flying off their bits did he realize that at least two of the horses were not so much running as running away, terrified to the point of madness by the proximity of the Varjolükka. It would not take much to spook them into throwing their riders.
“Hold on,” he whispered around a hard knot in his throat. “Hold on!”
To his horror, a grey mare near the rear of the pack stumbled. By sheer force of will, it seemed, her rider just kept his seat, gripping with his knees while he fumbled for his sword. Before he could yank the blade more than halfway out of the scabbard the skinchangers were on him. Man and mare disappeared under a snarling pile of dirty white fur and bloody muzzles. The grey screamed once and then was silent.
Kivik spotted his cousin Skerry (the one dark head among so many shades of blond) twisting around in his saddle to see what was happening. He began to rein in, as if to go back and render assistance, but a glimpse of the carnage was enough to convince him it was already too late. Skerry gave his sorrel gelding its head, and the big red horse flew across the field. Not far behind, the bear-men left what remained of the scout and his mare in a tumbled, bloody heap and went lurching after him.
With a last desperate rush, Skerry and the others reached the gatehouse and disappeared inside, only moments before the iron gates slammed shut in the very teeth of the enraged Varjolükka. Rising up on their mighty hindquarters, the were-bears bayed their fury to the skies.
A short time later, just long enough to cool down the horses and stable them in an alley of makeshift stalls in the outer bailey, the cousins met by the second gate.
“Another man lost,” Skerry ground out between clenched teeth. With his red nose and wind-bitten ears, he looked every bit as chilly and miserable as Kivik felt.
The Prince nodded wearily. The tally of his dead grew longer and longer as the days went by. Twice he had gathered together some of his hardiest fighters and attempted a sortie out through the main gate; twice he and his men were beaten back. Though the numbers each time seemed to favor him, the axes and war hammers of the giants, the immense strength of the were-bears, somehow prevailed. He and his band of stalwarts had been forced to retreat back through the gate, staggering under the weight of wounded and nearly lifeless comrades they carried in with them. Reckoning up his losses now, he found them much too great to justify a third attempt.
Nor, Kivik decided, would there be any more scouting parties. “Even if we could break the siege,” he said, continuing the thought aloud, “even if we could, where would we go?
“More to the point,” he added as he and Skerry left the windy outer ward for a smaller, more protected enclosure where the Prince and his officers had set up their tents, “what of the refugees who followed us here, the hundreds we found waiting for us when we arrived? Where can they look for safety if we leave them here undefended?”
With a sigh of frustration, Kivik ran a hand through hair grown shaggy and unkempt. Now that the excitement was over, he was once more keenly aware of his own dirt and discomfort, of unwashed skin itching under steel byrnie and quilted padding, in places he could not reach to scratch. He tried to remember the last time he had been warm enough, or clean, or had slept in a real bed. Between that time and this stood the memory of a thousand mischances and miscalculations, a thousand horrors.
A wild, inhuman ululation came carried on the wind, raising the fine hairs at the back of his neck. As he paused to listen just outside the entrance to his tattered green pavilion, the sound echoed from ridge to ridge along the valley walls, then came back again, slightly altered and in a different key, from one of the high eastern peaks where clouds still gathered, black and swollen with snow.
The giants are exchanging messages with their own kind farther up the mountain, he thought, all the blood in his veins rushing backward toward his heart. “What mischief are the creatures plotting now?”
“I can’t imagine them trying to storm the walls while we still outnumber them,” answered Skerry, following him into the dank, ill-lit interior of the tent. “Though when their friends from Eisenlonde arrive, I think we should be prepared to defend our position.”
“Defend this fortress which ought to be impregnable, yet somehow never is?”
Skerry shrugged. “We needn’t hold it for very long. The hawks we sent out with messages, some of them will get through. And then it can be only a matter of days before your father comes with the army he’s been raising to relieve us.”
But Kivik did not feel nearly so confident. When King Ristil would arrive was a matter of sheer conjecture, but the Eisenlonder barbarians, being so much closer, were certain to turn up first. Along with more of the ice giants and the bloody skinchangers, unless he was much mistaken.
Yet somehow his greatest fear was of the citadel itself. The Old Fortress at Tirfang, it had a bad name: witches built it, raised it by magic, infecting even the ordinary materials in which they worked—stone, timber, and slate—with their dark sorceries. It was not a place of safety, not of long-term safety anyway; Kivik was well aware of that. It had not proved so for the ancient witch-lords, or for anyone since. No one in a thousand years had successfully defended it. The seven great encircling walls, the seven mighty iron gates, they still stood, but the flesh-and-blood defenders had always died.
“We can’t really know what happened here five hundred or a thousand years ago,” offered Skerry, as if reading his thoughts. An ice-edged wind swirling through the courtyard shook the flimsy silk walls of the pavilion, blew a wintry gust in through the open doorflap, and then moved on. “It would be a great pity, would it not, if we defeated ourselves with our own superstitious fears, all for the sake of some old tales which might not even be true.”
Yet when it comes to these old tales, how do you tell the true from the false? Kivik wondered, rubbing at a cheek grown bristly with red-brown stubble. As recently as two years ago, he might have dismissed frost giants and Varjolükka as purely imaginary, but now he knew better.
The long hours of the day dragged on, bright, chilling, implacable. The constant glare of sun and ice made Kivik’s eyes burn; the cold ate at his bones, making old wounds and battle scars ache. Like a greybeard, he thought with a wry grimace. Not a man of barely twenty-four years and half a hundred battles. Yet to feel the sharp edge of cold was good; already, some of those who let themselves grow numb and drowsy had died.
By the next morning, when the Prince and Skerry set out to take a tour of inspection around one of the inner wards, the sky was mostly overcast and spitting snow.
Just like the other six courtyards, this one had become a squalid clutter of patched tents, ramshackle little sheds, shacks, byres, chicken coops, huts, hovels, and shelters more primitive still: hastily erected out of scavenged wood and fragments of stone; backed up against the bailey walls wherever possible; gathered together elsewhere in tipsy congregations that seemed to stand merely because every single one was relying for support on the others around it. A dark smoke, from hundreds of tiny cookfires, hovered over everything. Someone had dug a trench down the middle of the yard, and it was already half full of filthy ice and raw sewage. Piglets squealed, goats bleated, hens cackled; the cacophony was almost as bad as the stench, which was considerable. It was worse than the squalor of the most despicable slum; it was the way, maybe, that thousands of people displaced from their homes were forced to live now, throughout Skyrra.
It was war—just one more toll of the war, to be paid in the coin of human misery, Kivik reflected angrily, and it made no sense, not any of it, because the war itself made no sense. They had been attacked, savagely, mindlessly, relentlessly, and they did not know why.
To make matters worse, for all the hardships the refugees were prepared to endure, they had fled their homes pitifully ill-equipped to deal with this murderous cold—which no one could have expected in what ought to have been the middle of summer.
Yet from the first they might have found snugger quarters. Much of the fortress appeared inhabitable—the tall houses in the outer wards, the massive central keep, the lower floors of the soaring white towers—but no one had summoned the courage to venture inside. In truth, it took all the courage that most of them could muster just to pass through the gatehouses from one yard to the next, convinced as they were that the witch-lords, though dead, still lingered on as a malignant presence.
In one of the hovels, an old woman began to cough, a deep, racking, bone-shaking cough that went on and on and on—reminding Kivik that spectral sorcerers quite aside, these deplorable living conditions were, of all dangers, the most immediate. Already the smoke and damp were rattling in too many chests; more deaths would come of that if this freakish weather did not break.
A small figure made its way toward him across the crowded yard, bobbed an awkward curtsy, and shyly pressed something into his hand.
Gazing down at the child, Kivik experienced a pang of deep distress. A little maid of ten or eleven, she was dirty and emaciated, with fair hair ragged and snarled. He opened his fingers to see what she had given him.
It was exactly what he expected it to be, a wooden charm, crudely carved and brightly colored, strung on a leather cord. He owned dozens, probably hundreds, of these primitive talismans, presented to him by his father’s subjects. Yet he thanked her gravely, as was his custom, and slipped the braided cord over his head, so that the charm hung at chest level over his mail shirt. The little girl rewarded him with a tremulous smile, took two steps backward, then whirled and ran off.
In my charge, all of these people. A fierce protective instinct flared up inside him as he watched her go. Under my protection.
He slid a sideways glance in his cousin’s direction, and Skerry’s words of the day before echoed in his mind: “It would be a great pity, would it not, if we defeated ourselves with our own superstitious fears…” Then he thought of those ugly black storm clouds the giants were accumulating higher up the mountain.
He came to a sudden decision. “Summon all my captains together,” he told Skerry. “I’ve a plan to discuss with them.”
I wish I’d held my wretched tongue, if anything I said gave you this mad idea!” Skerry protested a short while later.
They were seated inside the tattered silk pavilion along with a handful of Kivik’s surviving officers, gathered around a meager fire of sticks and straw. Though the other men muttered and shook their heads, they seemed content to let the Prince’s young kinsman voice their concerns.
“Granted that the danger may be—probably is purely imaginary. But what if it isn’t?” said Skerry. “You are far too important to us, and we dare not risk losing you when one of us could just as easily go in your place. I’m quite willing. I should be the one to go, since it was I who gave you the idea, at least indirectly.”
“I would never,” answered Kivik, flushing to the eyebrows, “order anyone to do anything I feared to do myself. No”—he threw up a hand, demanding silence, when Skerry looked like he might argue further—“my mind is made up, and I certainly don’t require anyone’s permission. Nor have I asked you all here to debate the matter; I simply wish to inform you of my decision. I am determined to spend the night alone inside the central pile of the fortress, and if—when I emerge in the morning alive and unscathed, it’s more than likely the people will take heart, follow my example, and move indoors out of the weather.”
The men were silent, no doubt considering the consequences should he not emerge unscathed, if some ancient evil still dwelling within those walls were to deal him a swift and appalling death.
And for all that he strove to put on a brave face before the others, Kivik could not quite shake off his own dread. As a lad, he had listened far too closely to far too many ghost stories told by his nursemaids and the servants at the Heldenhof. He could remember most of those tales, in every ghastly detail, far too well.
Yet whatever might happen, it had to be better than slowly freezing to death out in the courtyards, knowing that shelter behind stout stone walls was available all along, that only his own cowardice left him wretched and shivering in the cold outside.
“At least let me go with you,” said Skerry. “To share the adventure—if there is an adventure.”
“No. I suppose there must be other perils in old ruined buildings, besides supernatural ones. You are my second-in-command and will have to take charge if anything happens to me.” Nor was Kivik prepared to place his closest friend in unnecessary danger so soon after the last time.
Skerry made a wide gesture, indicating the other officers gathered in the tent, seasoned warriors all: men with grey in their hair and beards, yes, grim and battle scarred, but still hardy, still battle ready. “Any one of these men could lead in my place: Regin, Deor, Haestan, Roric. Any one of them more experienced, more worthy than I.”
“More experienced than either of us,” sighed Kivik. “But the people might lose heart without a prince of our house to rally them—and they’ve suffered so much already.”
Unfortunately, that was not the end of the argument. Deor, Haestan, and some of the others were moved to state their opinions, and because he was accustomed to listening (if not to yielding), Kivik let them say whatever they would. Finally, he agreed to allow two guards from among the ordinary fighting men—volunteers, he insisted—to spend the night inside the building with him.
“Though whether I take two men or two hundred,” he grumbled, fingering the wooden charm, “I don’t see what difference it could possibly make if the spirits of any dead witch-lords turn up to challenge me.”