The Last Mortal Bond

12

The deadfall was empty.

For the fifth day running, something had triggered the snare, something strong enough to shift the bait stick, but quick enough not to be there when the huge rock came crashing down. Valyn stifled a curse as he knelt in the soft, loamy soil, sifting through the brown needles and dry hemlock cones, searching for some sign of a print. The deadfall wasn’t perfect. When he was too cautious in setting it, he’d find the bait stick licked clean while the snare remained untriggered. If he wasn’t cautious enough, the whole thing would end up lying in a jumble on the forest floor with no sign that an animal had come anywhere near. Sometimes the stone came down wrong, pinning a hare or a squirrel without killing it. Sometimes the larger creatures-beaver, porcupines-could haul themselves free. It wasn’t all that strange to find the snare empty. What was strange was finding it triggered day after day, finding animal tracks leading in and blood on the stone, but no carcass. No tracks leading away.

“’Shael take it,” he cursed, resetting the trap with nimble fingers, trying once again to figure out what had gone wrong, how he could prevent it from going wrong again.

It had to be a bird. A red eagle would be plenty strong enough to haul a bloody carcass out of the trap. A red eagle or even a balsam hawk. Birds would take the catch without leaving tracks.

“But birds can’t lift the stone,” he muttered to himself, hauling with both hands on the flat slab of granite, grunting as he muscled it into position. Valyn could barely lift it himself-which seemed to rule out a bird after all. No-something else was stealing his catch, some creature strong enough to heave aside the huge stone, but smart enough to move over the soft ground without leaving a track. Valyn tried to puzzle out what it might be, tried and failed.

“Sure is a clever bastard,” he muttered. “Clever, clever, clever.”

As though speaking that word aloud, repeating it, could drown out the other word, the more honest one prowling the back of his mind: not clever, but frightening.

A cold wind gusted through the boughs. Hemlocks creaked, trunks packed so close together that even the dead trees still stood, forced to remain upright, supported by the living as they went to rot. Even at midmorning, sun filtered weakly through the branches, every lance of light casting a shifting shadow.

Normally Valyn didn’t mind the gloom. He knew these woods better than he knew his own home, knew the softest, driest moss where he could catch a quick nap, the best trout holes in the meandering streams, the damp hollows where the mosquitoes swarmed most thickly, and the few sweet spots where the ferns and the breeze kept them at bay. The forest was his; he loved it. Today, though, as he straightened from the newly rigged snare, something felt off, wrong.

He paused just long enough to smear the bait stick with suet, then, crouching low, slipped through a gap in the rough trunks, wanting suddenly to be away from the dark thicket, to get to somewhere he could see more than a dozen paces, somewhere he could actually run.

It wasn’t far to the Jumping Rock-a low, lichen-crusted granite shelf leaning out over a bend in the river, and when Valyn reached it, he paused, hunkering on the lip to catch his breath. The sun had climbed well above the jagged tops of the eastern trees, high enough to burn off the last of the mist above the meandering current, to warm his skin. A little upstream, a trout rose for a fly; tiny waves radiated out from the disturbance, perfect circles on the green-brown water. Suddenly, Valyn felt foolish. Here he was, a boy of eight, jumping at forest shadows as though he were a baby. He offered up a silent prayer of thanks that his brother wasn’t along to witness his cowardice.

“It’s a red eagle, sure,” he muttered aloud, changing his mind once more as he pondered the mystery of the snare. Out of the shadows, sitting comfortably on the rock’s rim, skinny legs dangling down over the water, it seemed like a reasonable answer. A rabbit had triggered the trap, then twisted itself partway free. The eagle could have seized the struggling creature without ever lifting the rock at all. He squinted, trying to picture the scene, the beak hooked in the blood-soaked fur. Definitely a red eagle.

He put the question out of his mind, rooting in his leather sack for a twisted length of dried venison, then sat gnawing it contentedly, looking out over the water. There were still a dozen more snares to check, and one of them, surely, would have a squirrel or a hare, maybe even a fisher cat. And if not, well, he wouldn’t mind an afternoon going after one of those trout. There was still half a deer hanging up over the fire pit back in the cabin, and plenty of game in the forest. His mother might come home with another deer, or his father and brother with that bear they’d been tracking. It wasn’t as though the whole family was relying on Valyn.

He had just settled back on the warm stone, half reclining as he chewed the dried meat, the morning’s agitation all but forgotten, when something made him jerk upright, hand on his belt knife. Skin prickling along his arms, he scanned the forest around him. There had been no noise, no bear’s growl or rabbit’s dying scream. If anything, the woods seemed more still, somber. Even the birds had gone quiet, their light song chopped off mid-note. Sweat slicked Valyn’s palms. He could feel his breath coming fast and ragged. Why were the birds so quiet?

“Leave your knife where it is.”

Valyn spun, searching for the speaker, eyes ranging desperately over the dark wall of the forest. He had to turn in place three times before he finally found the figure, a man almost all in black, standing motionless maybe ten paces away, cloaked in the deepest gloom of the silent pines and hemlocks, face hidden in shadow.

Valyn’s heart lunged inside his chest as he lurched to his feet. His fingers scrabbled at his belt knife, trying to pull it free as he raised his other hand in a feeble defense. The man hadn’t moved, he had no weapon visible, but that hardly mattered. The simple fact of his presence was danger enough.

Valyn’s parents had chosen this buggy, swampy stretch of nowhere precisely for the lack of people. After the Urghul arrived, and the Annurian armies, living in anything like a town became dangerous, even deadly. If the horsemen got you, they killed you, and they killed you slow. Valyn hadn’t seen the corpses, but he’d heard the stories, how they’d take people, stake them out, and then start skinning. Just the way you’d take the pelt off a beaver, only you killed the beaver first.

The story was, the Annurian armies were there to protect the loggers and the trappers scattered through the northern woods. That was the story. The truth was, those armies were just as likely to take your winter’s store of meat and mead as they were to do any protecting. Valyn’s parents had tried to hide the worst from him, but he’d heard tales of Annurian soldiers demanding everything from blankets to bear meat, sometimes the coats right off those too defenseless to object. And that wasn’t even the worst of it; Valyn had heard whispers, sick stories of soldiers insisting on having their way with kids like him, the sons and daughters of the frontier families. It wasn’t right-it was a whole long way from anything even looking like something right-but if you refused, if you tried to fight back, the soldiers killed you. Killed you, or left you for the Urghul. Hard to say which was worse.

And so Valyn’s parents had taken them away. Most folks who fled headed south. Valyn’s mother, though, wouldn’t hear of it. “What do we know about the south?” she had demanded of his father one night when the fire burned down to a few angry embers. “What do we know about cities? Or city people?”

“It’s not all cities,” Valyn’s father had insisted. His father, who had never set foot outside the Thousand Lakes in his life. “There are farms.”

“And what do we know of farming?”

Valyn was supposed to be asleep, tucked beneath his furs in the far corner of the cabin, but through slit lids he’d watched his mother take his father’s face in both hands, pulling him close as though she meant to kiss him, then stopping short. “You’re a tracker, Fen. A tracker, a trapper, and a hunter. You’re a better man than any I’ve ever met, but you’re no farmer.”

He could see his father’s jaw tense. “The forest isn’t safe anymore. We can figure out the farming later. Right now, we’ve got to get out.”

“No,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “What we have to do is go deeper.”

And so deeper they went, plunging north into territory Valyn had never seen before, untouched forest of balsam and hemlock and red spruce, territory only the hardest or the maddest had even tried to hunt or trap. They kept pushing until they were well north of the last logging villages, a week’s walk clear of the lines of battle spreading across the forests of the north, beyond the reach of Urghul and Annurian both. Valyn was starting to think they’d walk forever-all the way to Freeport, maybe, and the oceans of ice beyond that-but one day, just as the sun was setting, the wind blowing cold and hard out of the north, they came to a tiny clearing in the trees, a quiet, mossy spot from which you could see the gray peaks of the Romsdals looming to the north.

“Here,” his mother said, putting down her pack on a low granite boulder.

His father had smiled at that. “Here.”

The next day they started building.

When it was done, the cabin was larger than the one they’d left-two rooms with a fieldstone fireplace built into the wall. The day they lit that fire for the first time, Valyn’s father had taken his mother in his hairy arms, lifted her off her feet, then kissed her square on the lips despite her sputtering protestations.

“You were right,” he said. “This is better than anything in the south.”

Valyn had thought so, too. Exploring the new forests, choosing the best circuit for his own snares, claiming a portion of land that no one in the long history of the world had ever claimed-it was all a small boy’s dream. If he sometimes longed for companionship, for other children to share his adventures, well, he had Kadare, two years older; Kadare, who had taught him even more than Mother and Father about hunting, trapping, and moving silently through the wilderness. Thanks to Kadare, these dark, dense forests felt like home. Until now.

“I told you to leave the knife in the sheath,” the stranger said again, shaking his head grimly.

That voice-low, hard, rough and rusted as a long-neglected tool-made Valyn shrink back, and the voice was the least of it. The man facing him looked more dead than alive, lean as a starving wolf at winter’s end, all the fat and softness scraped away until there was only skin stretched across corded muscle and bone. He wore something that might have been clothes once-leggings and a shirt of black wool so ripped and torn they offered less protection than Valyn’s own crude hides. Beneath the cloth, his flesh was scribbled with scars, small puckered marks and long seams running over his chest and arms. The wounds that left those scars should have killed him half a dozen times over, but he wasn’t killed. He was right there, standing just a few paces away, staring at Valyn, if staring was even the right word.

There had been a blind man in the village where Valyn grew up, an old grandfather people called Ennel the Bent. Valyn had stared at Ennel’s eyes whenever he could, fascinated and a little frightened by the milky cloud splashed across the pupils. It had been strange, queasy-making, but old Ennel’s eyes were nothing beside those of the man who faced him now.

The stranger’s eyes were … ruined. They looked as though someone had hacked straight across them with an ax. Blood, trapped somehow beneath the eyeball’s surface, washed the part that should have been white. The dark part around the pupil-the iris, Valyn remembered vaguely-was black as burned wood, blacker, dark as the dot at the very center, except for a ragged line of star-white scar. They didn’t look like a man’s eyes. They didn’t look like eyes at all. Valyn wanted to scream.

“Keep your mouth shut,” the stranger said, stepping forward. He still hadn’t drawn a weapon, but Valyn could see the axes now, two of them, handles lopped short, hanging from a poorly tanned leather belt. Dangling from the same belt was the corpse of a rabbit, skull crushed and bloody.

“My rabbit,” Valyn said stupidly, words spilling out of him as he stared. “You been stealing from my snares.”

The stranger grimaced. “You have bigger problems, kid.”

Valyn took a step back, trying to keep some space between them, raising his hands. “I won’t tell no one. You can have the rabbit. You can have all of ’em. I’ll show you where the snares are.…” He was babbling, but he couldn’t stop himself. He’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see, had caught this man who was barely a man with the stolen rabbit, and now he was going to die. Valyn glanced over his shoulder into the sluggish river. He could jump, could try to swim it out. Maybe the man in black didn’t know how to swim. He turned back just as the hand closed around his throat.

Valyn felt his bladder give way. He tried to scream, but the hand wouldn’t let him. The man might look starved, but his grip was iron.

“Quit squirming, kid. I’m trying to help you.”

Stars screamed across Valyn’s vision. Everything started to go dark. He aimed a kick at the killer’s gut. Like kicking stone, he thought, just before he passed out.

A hard slap across the face brought him back. The stranger had laid him out on the granite ledge, was kneeling beside him now, hand poised at his throat.

“Don’t scream,” he said. “They’re far off, but that’s no reason to take chances.”

He paused, raised his head. The movement-both wary and predatory-reminded Valyn of a lone wolf sniffing the air. After a moment, the man cursed quietly, then turned those awful, broken eyes back to Valyn.

“You know who the Urghul are?”

Valyn managed a weak nod.

“They’re headed toward your cabin now. A small band of them. Maybe twenty. If you go back now, they’ll catch you, too. Hurt you. Kill you.”

For a few heartbeats, Valyn struggled to make sense of the words. There were no Urghul this far north. He was safe here, he and his family both. They’d come here so they would be safe. The stranger was lying to him, was going to kill him.… He stared up at the man. Those eyes were worse than a skull’s hollow sockets. He was horrible, more terrifying than Valyn’s worst dream, but he wasn’t lying. A new horror bloomed inside Valyn. He tried to yank free, but the man held him down easily. It didn’t seem possible he could be so strong.

“There aren’t any Urghul here,” Valyn protested. “They don’t come up here.”

The stranger grimaced. “They didn’t. Now, it seems that they do.”

“How do you know?”

The man hesitated. “I can smell them,” he said finally. “Horses and blood. They reek.” He turned an ear to the wind. “I almost believe I can hear them.”

It didn’t make sense. Valyn sucked in a huge breath. He didn’t smell any horses. The only thing he could hear was his own desperate panting.

“If there’s Urghul, I gotta warn my folks, my brother.”

The man in black shook his head grimly. “Too late for warning. Your cabin’s a long way off. They’re almost there.”

“Then I’ll fight ’em!” Valyn said, trying again to twist free. This time, to his surprise, the man let him up.

“Four against twenty? All you can do is die, kid.” He looked off blankly into the darkness between the trees, then shook his head. “Don’t go back.”

Valyn expected something else, something more, but the man just turned on his heel. He even moved like a wolf, stalking toward the trees. He paused at the edge of the forest, turned, yanked the rabbit free of his belt, and tossed it to the ground in front of Valyn.

“Yours,” he said, then turned away again.

Valyn caught up with him a dozen paces into the hemlocks. Terror made him reckless, and he seized the stranger by the leather belt, pulled him back a moment, then found himself lifted by the front of his shirt, then slammed against the rough trunk of a tree. He could feel the jagged ends of the branches stabbing at him through his clothes as the man in black leaned close.

“Never touch me,” he hissed.

Valyn could barely breathe, but he forced himself to speak.

“I need your help.”

“You already got it.”

“I need more. I need to save my family. You can fight.…”

He couldn’t say how he knew. Something about the way the man moved, about those twin axes hanging from his belt, about the terrible strength that kept him pinned against the tree. He’s a warrior. The thought spun around and around in Valyn’s mind like an autumn leaf caught in an eddy. He’s a killer.

“I can’t fight them alone,” Valyn pleaded. “I need your help.”

“I don’t help.”

The stranger held Valyn a moment longer, then dropped him.

Valyn struggled to catch his breath, to get to his feet. One of the branches had torn through his leather tunic, tearing open a gash across his back. He could feel it bleeding. It didn’t matter.

“You helped me,” he insisted. “You warned me. You’re not Urghul. You’re Annurian. You speak Annurian. And you warned me.”

“It was convenient.”

Valyn stared, aghast. He couldn’t get the vision of his burning cabin out of his head. This time in the morning, they would all be there-his father and mother chopping firewood for the fall; his brother digging the new well. He imagined his family bleeding, sprawled out on the ground, cut open, bled out like wild game.

“Please,” he said, staying on his knees, staring up at the horrifying figure above him. “Please help me.”

The stranger ground his teeth so hard Valyn thought his jaw might crack, that the tendons of his neck might snap in two. It was impossible to read the emotion on that face: Rage? Regret? He didn’t seem the type of person to feel regret, but he was hesitating, and that hesitation gave Valyn a faint, horrible hope.

“Please,” he said again, voice barely louder than the breeze.

“I need you to guide me,” the man said at last.

Valyn nodded eagerly, lurching to his feet. “All right,” he said, stumbling down the low slope. “This way. Hurry!”

After a dozen steps, he turned, realizing that the man in black hadn’t moved. He remained standing on the rock ledge, back turned to the morning sun, face lost in the shadow.

“Please!” Valyn pleaded. “Come on!”

The stranger shook his head slowly. “I can move through the forest alone, but I’m too slow.” Then, with a movement that was the opposite of slow, a gesture so fast Valyn didn’t have time to flinch, the man slipped one of the short axes from the belt at his side, spun it once in the air, then caught the haft below the head. He held the handle out toward Valyn. “Take the other end,” he said. “Lead the way. It’ll be faster.”

For a moment, Valyn couldn’t move. He was terrified of what the stranger claimed was happening at his home, and terrified, too, of the stranger himself. Touching that ax, even the harmless butt of the wooden haft, seemed dangerous. More than dangerous. “What?” he asked, rooted to the spot by his conflicting horrors. “Why?”

“Because,” the man replied grimly, “I’m blind.”

* * *

We’re too late.

That was Valyn’s first thought when they burst into the narrow clearing.

The cabin was still standing. Nothing was on fire. No one was screaming, but mounted men and women packed the small open space where Valyn’s family had cleared the trees to let in a little light. The riders looked like monsters. Their skin was too pale, their hair too yellow, their eyes too terribly blue. Urghul. The man in black had been right. Somehow, impossibly, the Urghul had come. They’d found Valyn’s home, Valyn’s family, and now it was all over, all finished.

A scream scraped up his throat and out, shivering the late-morning air. Normally Valyn would have been ashamed of the thin, weak sound, but he was past shame, almost past fear, even. His legs shook beneath him, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe, like the air was all tangled up inside his chest. He felt like that chest might explode. It felt like fear, and not like fear. Like something far worse than fear.

He dropped the wooden handle of the ax and stumbled forward a step, searching for his belt knife, wondering if it would hurt when the Urghul killed him. A hand on his shoulder brought him up short. The stranger’s grip again, strong as stone. Valyn tried to twist free, but the man pulled him back.

“Knock it off,” he growled. “Shut up. Get behind me.”

“My family-”

“-is still alive.” The man pointed to the shadow of the stacked woodpile, to where Valyn’s mother and brother stood pinned against the logs by the lowered lances of the horsemen. His father lay sprawled on the ground a pace away, blood seeping from an awful gash across his forehead. “Your family’s alive. Don’t do anything stupid, and they might stay that way.”

Valyn felt his legs collapse beneath him, then he dropped like a deadfall stone.

His mother jerked at the motion, noticing him for the first time, gave a strangled cry, tried to move forward, found steel at her throat, then subsided, tears streaking her cheeks. His brother met his eyes; he was trembling, either with fear or rage. Valyn’s own tears smeared his vision. Again he knew he should be ashamed, and again, the shame meant nothing. He would live with a lifetime of shame and worse than shame if only the Urghul would just ride on, would leave his family to their life here in this tiny clearing.

“Huutsuu,” said the strange man with the axes.

Valyn had no idea what the word meant, but most of the horsemen wheeled their mounts at the sound of this new voice. Spearheads glinted, bright in the unforgiving light. Bows creaked as the warriors took aim. There were enough to kill the man in black a dozen times over, but he didn’t seem worried.

Of course he’s not worried, stupid, Valyn realized. He can’t see them.

“They have bows,” he gasped. “They’re going to shoot-”

Before he could finish the sentence, two of the horsemen loosed their shafts. They couldn’t miss from that distance. At eight paces, Valyn could hit a chipmunk darting along a branch, and the stranger was a lot larger than a chipmunk.

And faster, too, as it turned out. So much faster.

Valyn stared as the man slashed his arm up and across, the motion too quick to follow, too quick to be real … and yet there was an arrow shaft clattering uselessly into the needles just a few paces away. When Valyn turned back, he found the stranger holding the other arrow, the shaft snatched from the air just inches from his chest. He clenched his fist, and the arrow snapped.

“Huutsuu,” he said again. “Check your warriors, or I will kill them.”

The archers didn’t lower their bows, but they hesitated this time, obviously taken aback by what they’d just seen. Some were glancing over at a tall woman with streaming blond hair who was nudging her horse forward through the press. Valyn was no stranger to tough women-his own mother could spend half a day splitting rock maple with their eight-pound maul, then run her own circuit of traps before dark-but Huutsuu, if that was her name, made Valyn’s mother look old, weak. He felt as though he had been raised by a feral housecat, and was only now seeing a mountain lion for the first time. The Urghul woman wore hide leggings and a hide vest that did nothing to disguise the scars carved into her arms and across the flesh of her shoulders. When she shifted in her saddle, Valyn could see the muscle move beneath her skin. She carried a bow across the front of her saddle, but had made no effort to nock an arrow or to bring it to bear.

She considered the man in black for a time, then shook her head.

“So. Kwihna has seen fit to test you,” she said. “You are harder than when we last met.”

The words sounded like a compliment. Valyn’s stomach squirmed inside him. The man in black knew the woman. What if they were friends? What if he decided not to stop her after all? What if he was one of the Urghul himself?

Valyn glanced up at the stranger. His skin was too dark, and his eyes-but what did Valyn know about the alliances taking place beyond his family’s own quiet corner of the forest? Who was he to say that there weren’t Annurians-traitors!-in league with the horsemen? The Urghul had shot at the man in black, that was true, but then they’d stopped shooting. And the stranger had lied, lied about being blind.…

Valyn started to inch through the needles, away from the stranger, toward the dubious safety of the forest. If he could slip away, maybe he could double back. There was a narrow gap between the stacks of wood. They could sneak out that way, get into the dense hemlocks where the horses wouldn’t be able to follow.…

Pain exploded, bright and baffling, across the back of his head. He was facedown on the earth, mouth open, gagging on pine needles, nose filled with the reek of wet dirt and rotting things. Someone had hit him … the stranger … he’d attacked.…

“I told you not to move,” the man said.

Valyn began to raise himself up on his elbows, then caught his mother’s gaze from across the clearing. She didn’t speak, just shook her head slowly, carefully. She had a hand on his brother’s arm, holding him back. Kadare was strong, angry, quick to act. If he was keeping still, letting himself be held back, then it was important. It was necessary. Valyn subsided against the cool ground. He wanted to vomit, whether from the pain or the fear, he wasn’t sure.

“Why are you here?” the stranger asked.

Despite his claims about being blind, he had locked eyes with the woman. To Valyn’s amazement, she was able to hold that awful, wrecked gaze without flinching. The silence lasted a long time, as though the man in black and the mounted woman were both leaning against it, seeing who would collapse first. Finally the woman-Huutsuu, her name was-nodded curtly, as though she had made a decision.

“We are looking. Hunting.”

“Hunting.” The stranger shook his head, then spat into the litter of leaves. “Hunting what? A family of trappers? Doesn’t Long Fist have enough Annurians to murder down on the front?”

“Long Fist is gone,” the woman replied.

The man in black frowned. “Gone. Where?”

“I don’t know. He told us to obey the leach, your friend. Then he left.”

“Balendin.” There was rage in the stranger’s voice now. Valyn could see his fingers tighten around the haft of his ax. “Balendin is leading your people?”

“Most of them,” Huutsuu replied.

“Most?”

The woman glanced over her shoulder at the other riders, then nodded. “It is not right. Some of us have had enough.”

“I didn’t think you ever had enough. Pain is pain, right?”

“You are harder, but still stupid.”

“So teach me.”

“We worship Kwihna. This foreign leach worships only himself. His killing is not a sacrifice; it is a hoarding up of his own power. There is nothing ennobling in it. Nothing ennobling in following such a creature.”

The stranger grunted. None of it meant anything to Valyn, but as long as they were talking, as long as they were focused on each other, no one was murdering his family. He glanced across the clearing. His father was still unconscious in the dirt, but his brother had slipped clear of his mother’s grip, had used the distraction to pull a long log from the woodpile, wrapping his broad hands around it as though it were a weapon, as though he could fight his way free of two dozen Urghul with nothing more than a stick of firewood. Valyn’s mother had noticed, was struggling silently with him, trying to stop him, but he yanked free, pivoted, searching for a target.

“Don’t!” Valyn shouted, but the nearest Urghul was already turning, swinging his spear around. Valyn’s mother lunged forward, trying to put herself between her son’s body and the leaf-shaped blade. She was fast, but the stranger’s ax was faster, flashing end over end through the center of the clearing, burying itself in the Urghul’s back with the sound of steel striking rotten wood. The horseman went all loose in the limbs, then fell silently. Before he hit the ground, Huutsuu was barking something in her own language.

The remaining Urghul looked angry, confused, but they didn’t continue the attack. Valyn’s mother wrested the log away from his brother, then dragged him back against the woodpile, her strong, sun-dark arm wrapped around him as he trembled with rage and shame, holding him close, whispering something in his ear that Valyn couldn’t hear.

Huutsuu was watching the man in black, shaking her head. “Each time I see you, you kill my men.”

“The last time I saw you, you told me they weren’t men if they let themselves be killed.”

If the stranger was bothered to have only one ax left, it didn’t show. Nothing seemed to bother him. There was an angle to the way he stood, something in his posture or his face that seemed familiar. Rabid, Valyn realized suddenly. He’s like something rabid.

Huutsuu’s laugh broke through the thought. The sound was chilling, like the howl of coyotes late at night, when they were closing in on their kill.

“Why are you here?” she asked the man. “Where are your companions?”

The stranger shook his head, as though the word companions had no meaning for him.

“Keep going, Huutsuu,” he said quietly. “Leave these people alone.”

“There is a danger in leaving alive those who hate you.” She smiled. “I thought that I had taught you this lesson.”

“This family doesn’t hate you, Huutsuu. I’ve been watching them for half a year. They hunt and trap. They cut wood for the winter. They’re not part of the war. Leave them alone.”

The woman hesitated, then shook her head. “I will kill them quickly.”

“No,” he replied, voice flat. “You will not.”

Again she laughed. “You are only one man, Malkeenian.”

“And barely that,” the stranger muttered, so softly that Valyn almost missed the words. Then the man raised his chin and his voice both. “Ride or fight, Huutsuu. Ananshael can sort out the rest.”

“Ananshael.” The woman grimaced, then blew out a long breath. “You would die for these people? You would kill for them?”

“I’ve killed for less.”

The Urghul watched him a long time. Valyn’s palms were sweating. His heart galloped inside his ribs. He felt as though he might pass out, but he did not pass out. Finally a new expression crept onto the woman’s face.

“These fools are harmless,” she said, gesturing to Valyn’s family. “I can leave them behind, leave them alive.”

The stranger started to nod, but she cut him off with a raised hand.

“But you, Malkeenian, are far from harmless. You left me alive once, and it nearly killed you. I will not make your mistake.”

“If you think you can kill me,” he said quietly, “you are welcome to try.”

He sounded ready, though to kill or to die, Valyn couldn’t say.

“I don’t want you dead. I want you to join us.”

The man in black narrowed his eyes. “Why would I join a band of Urghul savages?”

Huutsuu smiled. “Because these Urghul savages will kill the leach who corrupts our people. Who profanes our god.”

“Balendin.” The name-if it was a name-sounded like a curse.

“Like us,” Huutsuu replied, “you hate the leach. I remember this well.”

The stranger hesitated, then shook his head. “I hate a lot of people.”

She shrugged. “This is a start.”

“I don’t need a start.”

“Yes,” Huutsuu said. “You do. For half a year, you say, you have been prowling these forests like a diseased wolf. I offer … another path.”

“I don’t want your path. I’m delighted with my own.”

Huutsuu’s eyes flashed. “And if you do not join us, I will kill you, then offer this family to the god. Slowly.”

The stranger studied her a long time, features expressionless as worn granite. “Why?” he asked, the word a growl.

She shrugged. “I need warriors. And whatever else you are, you are a warrior.”

“If you need warriors, then what in Hull’s name are you doing up here? You’re miles from any kind of fight.”

“We’re looking for ghosts, Malkeenian. Three of them. People like you.”

The stranger jerked as though struck, half raised his remaining ax, bared his teeth, as though he were about to leap upon the woman and hack out her heart.

His words, when he finally spoke, were cold as winter stone. “What people?”

Huutsuu shook her head slowly. “We have no names, but they wear black,” she gestured toward the stranger’s shredded clothes, “like you. Only three, but for many months they have plagued us. They attack our messengers and our warriors, sometimes come into full camp to do their killing. Those who give chase come back empty-handed, or they do not come back at all. They have no horses, these three, but they are fast, and they strike always at night.”

“So…” Something that might have been a smile twisted the stranger’s lips. “You want to join them? To help them? I thought Annurians were a weak, degenerate people.”

“Not these. They are hard as any Urghul. More, they are Annurians, like the leach who leads my people. They may know how to kill him.”

“It sounds like they’ve been trying,” the man in black replied. “Failing.”

Huutsuu waved the words away. “They are only three. It is a hard thing for them to move among my people. Together, though, we could open the throat of this leach.”

“If they don’t open your throat first. If they’re so dangerous, they might find you first, kill you.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. You will join us. You will explain the way of things to these Annurians.”

The stranger lowered his ax, hesitated a long moment as though torn, then shook his head. “No. I am finished with all this.”

Huutsuu shrugged. “Then we will fight, and when the fight is through, I will give this family to the god.”

Valyn could only watch, aghast. He understood almost none of it. He didn’t know who Long Fist was, or Balendin, or why this man had been hiding in the woods, or how he knew the woman, or why that woman kept calling him Malkeenian, as though he were some Annurian emperor. All he knew was that his own family’s fate hung in the balance. If the man said yes, they might live. If he said no, something terrible was going to happen. He was sobbing, he realized, moaning into the dirt.

“It’s all right, Valyn.” His mother’s voice from across the clearing. “Just stay still, son. It’s going to be all right.”

He looked up to see her staring at him, a hand half outstretched. Urghul spears blocked her way, and Urghul horses, but he could see her eyes, could hear her voice.

“It’s all right, Valyn, my son. It’s all right.”

Off to his right, the stranger shifted. Valyn glanced over to find the man staring down at him.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Valyn,” he stammered. “Named for the prince,” he said. “The Emperor’s oldest son.”

Why the man cared, he had no idea, but talking wasn’t killing. Please, he prayed inwardly, offering the words up to any god that would listen, please let us just keep talking.

And then, to his shock, Huutsuu was laughing. She was watching the man in black and laughing uncontrollably. The stranger glanced up at her, then back at Valyn, studying him. Finally, something seemed to go slack in his shoulders. He nodded.

“Fine,” he growled. “Getting tired of stealing the food from this kid’s trap anyway.”

“Of course you’ll come,” the Urghul woman replied, as though she’d known it all along, as though all the drawn bows and leveled spears had been just for show. “Your flesh is hard, but there is still a softness in your heart.”

The man looked anything but soft when he fixed her with his gaze. “You may regret this,” he said.

She smiled. “That’s what makes it interesting.” She turned away from the stranger, barked a few commands, and the Urghul were riding out of the clearing, ignoring Valyn and Valyn’s parents as though they were no more consequential than dirt where they had fallen. Valyn could only stare as the man in black reached down, dragged him to his feet by the front of his tunic, then fixed him with that ravaged stare.

“You’re brave, kid. And you’re good. Whatever your name, you’re better than any fucking emperor’s son. You got that?”

Valyn nodded hesitantly. The man watched him a long time, then nodded.

“Good,” he said roughly, then turned away to cross the clearing. He wrenched his short ax free from the flesh of the slaughtered Urghul, then kicked the body clear as though it were a piece of rotten wood, good for nothing; not building, not even the fire.