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Aethren spat dirt. She
(they)
was alone in a forest of black and red, running for her life. No – their lives. All of them. Her pack. He had promised that there would be enough food for them all, but they had starved and the crops had failed and then – and then—
Aethren's shoulder hurt. That was real. That was them. They surfaced from the foreign memory to find Kristan looming over them. Backlit as he was, his face seemed like a pale hole cut out of the burning sky. Aethren blinked several times but their vision refused to focus. "Aethren? Come on, talk to me.”
“Give them a moment,” Thrigg said.
“We don’t have a moment!” Kristan’s voice was so shrill it set Aethren’s teeth on edge.
"Shut up," Aethren mumbled and tried to sit up, but their back was stuck to the ground. Or the ground was stuck to them. Everything was off-kilter. Even the rain was wrong, warm and faintly salty, and the air smelled of heated earth and blood.
Hands slid beneath Aethren's back and peeled them away from the ground. The world lurched and spun, then slowly resolved itself into a scene not even Aethren’s wildest night-terrors could have conjured.
Humans and wolves faced one another in two straggling lines. There were twenty or so pony-strides between the two groups, but neither side seemed willing to cover that distance. Yet. Some humans had collapsed as Aethren had, while others stood with dazed, far-off looks on their faces, weapons held in lax hands by their sides. Those few who still had sense left were frozen in defensive stances as if unable to decide whether to cover their fallen friends or charge on the wolves.
Aethren’s group was behind the wolven line, trapped between an army of people they had once considered home and a burning forest. The rain was already quenching the flames at the forest’s edge, but great gouts of smoke still billowed up from the canopy. Aethren could feel the heat from the flames against their back, even from this distance; an impossible, ravenous heat that turned the very air to ash.
“Aethren, can you look at me?” Marken knelt at Aethren’s side. Aethren didn’t know where he’d come from. “Keep still. I’m just going to look at your shoulder. Kristan, help your mam with Yrsa.” Aethren was vaguely aware of Kristan getting up and moving away, then of Marken’s steady hands peeling up their soaked shirt. Odd. They hadn’t realised it was wet.
“The stitches’ve burst,” Marken murmured.
“It doesn’t look healed at all,” Thrigg said. “Marken, I think—” She was cut off as a flaming, wolf-shaped blur sped past. It crashed through the line of wolves who had been standing shoulder to shoulder, snarling at the humans, and hurtled out onto the open plane. Even as burnt flesh sloughed from its side, the wolf continued to charge at the humans in a senseless frenzy.
“Atta!” Myr raced after his child, and the tension snapped like a strained rope.
A spear whistled through the air and took Atta straight in the throat. He stumbled a few more steps, still carried by the momentum of his run, then keeled over. Myr skidded to a halt at Atta’s side and made as if to turn away, but it was too late. The dam had broken.
Sunlight shattered on metal spear tips as three humans broke from the main group and ran at Myr. Other wolves rushed to help him, snarling their defiance. Every fibre of Aethren’s being sang with the need to get up, to move, to stop this before it went any further – but they were bound by the weight of their body.
“Stay here,” Thrigg stood, took a single step forwards, and flowed. Her body was at once real and unreal, too vast to be contained inside her skin but not entirely formless, either. She crossed the distance in an eyeblink and solidified between Myr and his attackers. The three advancing humans drew to a halt, but they didn’t back off. Why would they? The bulk of the human army was closing in behind them, converging in the point of conflict like seabirds on a whale carcass.
“They’ll kill her.” Aethren tried to get up again, but Marken caught them by the waist with the practised ease of a healer well-used to helping stubborn patients.
“Aethren, you’re losing too much blood.”
“I’m fine,” Aethren lurched to their feet and managed to pull free from Marken’s grasp. Or perhaps he let them go. A second spear flew, and Aethren saw it embed itself below Thrigg’s ribcage. They started to run.
The semi-ordered lines broke into knots of violence as Aethren stumbled across the uneven ground. They caught sight of black feather-laced smoke, darting to-and-fro – a raven one moment, then a woman, then a raven again. Thrigg. And she wasn’t alone. Two more amorphous shapes whistled down from the sky and wove between the humans, distracting and confusing wherever they flew. Perhaps if Aethren could get there – find the right thing to say, plead for them to stop – someone would listen. Ornhild had helped when they hadn’t given her a reason to. That head to mean something, didn’t it?
A weight knocked into Aethren and crushed them to the ground. There were fingers in their hair, forcing their head back. Aethren caught a glimpse of Faren’s face and felt the cold bite of a blade before he was wrenched off them. They rolled over in time to see Mati dash Faren’s head against the ground, then turn and take a stone-shot in the cheek. Two humans closed on him with a weighted net.
Mati went down, his legs tangled in the netting. Nearby, Aethren saw a spear take Flannað through the back in mid-shift. A group of humans descended on Flannað with spears and quarterstaffs, blocking her from view, and she must not have been able to escape because they began to thrust their spears downwards and they kept thrusting, and there was nothing Aethren could do.
Several pairs of hands grabbed their arms. Ropes closed around their midriff and their legs, and Aethren must have blacked out for a moment because suddenly Thrigg was there. She stood before Aethren with a spear in her hands as if she’d been born to it. Aethren could see her trembling, could smell the smoke of the burning forest and hear the yelp of a wounded wolf, and knew everything was over. This wasn’t a battle. It was the desperate act of a people – of two peoples – pushed to their limit. Whatever Rostfar had done with the wyrdness had earned a brief reprieve, but it hadn’t been enough. It would never have been enough.
From somewhere beyond the chaos, a horn called. Aethren’s brain refused to process it at first, but then the call came again: a single, resounding note far louder than any scream or howl. Silence fell by degrees, until it seemed that everyone, human and wolf and hrafmaer, turned to look at the sound’s source.
Two figures were descending the hillock that shielded the Erdansten camp. Ornhild had Skelda’s Horn in one hand, and was supporting Hrall on her other side. Neither looked particularly steady on their feet, but Hrall still managed to draw himself up and cup his hands around his mouth.
“Retreat!” Hrall bellowed. It had been so long since Aethren heard him shout. He had the voice for it: deep and resonant, with an air of command that could carry through storm winds and across vast distances. “Is this what we are? Mindless children who obey because we’re scared? Retreat, damn you! As the last council member, I invoke – I have the right—” he broke off, wheezing, and Ornhild staggered as he pitched into her.
“No!” Faren shoved his way out of the group who had come to his aid, swaying dangerously. Ornhild stepped away from Hrall’s side and nocked an arrow in one fluid motion. She aimed it straight at Faren’s throat.
“You heard Yrl Hrallvir!” Her voice wasn’t anywhere near as commanding as Hrall’s but it rang out clear enough. “You’ve all seen that vision – seen what Faren’s done. We’re not murderers. Not like him. That man—” Ornhild jerked her chin at Faren, “is responsible for Urdven’s death. He attacked Yrl Hrallvir so’s to hide the truth – you can see the state Hrall’s in for yourself. So for Erdan’s sake, pick up your fallen friends and retreat.”
⁂
Yrsa’s burnt side seared with pain as she hauled herself to her feet. She stood on Deothwicc’s slope with Marken, tasting the ashes of her home with every breath, and stared out at the killing-field through a sheen of shock. Everything was still. She could hear the heavy breaths of humans and wolves alike; the susurrus of wind in the grass; the crackle of flames.
The wyrdness was mangled and quivering, but it still carried Myr’s command to Fall back. Yrsa saw Bryn back away from where he had been defending his pack-father’s flank, and others of the pack began to follow his lead. They moved gracefully but cautiously, with a coordination the humans could never have managed.
“No!” The pup-killer, Faren, ran at Myr. Yrsa’s alarm flew through the wyrdness to Myr like one of the human arrows, and he turned just as the human hurled himself forwards. A knife flashed. Myr leapt. They collided and rolled, and Myr came out on top. Humans surged back in fear as Myr pinned Faren down and bared his teeth in a spine-chilling snarl.
“No more,” Myr growled. Yrsa couldn’t see his face from this angle, but she could see his pain spiralling out through the wyrdness. “You have taken a child from me, but I’ll not take one from your pack. We have both lost enough.” He stepped off Faren, knocking the fallen knife away with one paw as he did so, and backed away.
Two members of Faren’s pack darted in and hauled him back. Nobody made any move against Myr as he turned and walked back to where the Deothwicc pack waited, his head held high and blood running from a gash across one eye.
“Retreat!” The old man on the hill shouted again.
One human began to move. Yrsa tensed, but there was no cause for alarm. He walked away from the killing-field at a slow, weaving gait, and his spear fell from his hands. A girl who looked no older than Kristan followed his retreat. Then another human. And another. Four, five, nine – a whole wave of them, stumbling away in tandem. They carried their fallen friends or supported those who could walk, and they did not look back. Within less than ten blinks, they were gone.
Yrsa should have felt triumphant. She watched her packmates go to Myr or to Atta’s corpse, but couldn’t make herself move. There was still something wrong. Something she should have been able to pick up on, but the pain and horror were like swamp-water inside her head.
“Where’s Rost?” Natta’s voice snapped nearby, making Yrsa startle. “Rost, Isha, Grae – they’re missing. Has anyone seen them?”
All eyes turned to the smouldering forest.
“Grae!” Yrsa howled as realisation pricked her. The sound ripped at her already-raw throat and ended in a pitiful whine. Bryn blocked her path as she tried to run forwards, refusing to move even as she snapped at him.
Grae was in there. Grae, whom she had lost and found and now lost again. Grae, her last littermate. Grae, now burning with the home he had only returned to because of her.
“You cannot enter, Yrsa. It is still burning,” Myr said in a low voice. He was right. Great gouts of smoke billowed up from the canopy and tarnished the pale sky. The remaining trees at Deothwicc’s edge were blackened, skeletal things, their green skirts and branches reduced to ash. Beyond them, everything inside the forest seemed dead and dark.
Mati uttered a heartbroken cry. It took Marken, Natta and Thrigg to stop him from charging straight into the trees. He stumbled to his knees beside Yrsa, and she saw tears shining on his bruised and swollen cheek.
“What’s that?” Kristan asked sharply.
Yrsa thought it was a falling branch at first. A fleeing animal. Something inconsequential. Then a human silhouette emerged. Isha was limping heavily and covered in ash, and didn’t seem to have noticed the group waiting for him. He stooped and pushed aside a half-fallen branch.
Grae, ash-blackened and singed, stepped from the forest. He stumbled a few steps before his legs gave out and he pitched forwards, spilling an unconscious Rostfar from his back.
