He broke his fast on something light. Three hard-boiled eggs, as many pieces of bacon, a honey roll, and a flagon of brown ale with lemon. Parchment, ink, and black raven feather quill were laid out before him on an increasingly cluttered desk as his breakfast continued to go untouched. Her message was there as well. The one he had been struggling to respond to. A dozen or more crumpled half-started letters lay strewn on the desk and over the rushes on the floor.
Cérmæ, guide me. He thought as he picked the raven quill up once more. A knock at his solar door interrupted his flailing attempts at choosing words.
“Come in.” He called, grateful for the distraction. In came Rogar, one of his men.
“Captain.” Rogar greeted with a nod. He was a slender man, skinny as a spear and thrice as deadly when holding one. He was only twenty years older than Dorian, hardly more than fifty, and yet his hair that went braided down his back stopping just above his butt had all gone grey, yet some black remained in his well-maintained beard. “She’s been found.”
“Where?” Dorian asked, getting to his feet and preparing himself for travel. He stood a head and half taller than Rogar and was nearly twice as wide with thick muscles that even hidden as they were now under a layer of warm fur clothing made Dorian look hard and strong as a block of stone.
“Exactly where you suspected,” Rogar answered as Dorian swept by him and out the door, a large wooden chest in his arms. Rogar followed a step behind for a while before they took leave of each other as they left the great hall of Hardhaven and headed toward the town at the foot of the hill on the bay. Hardhaven the city was a great mess of a settlement where old mixed with new as it seemed to grow larger and larger each year. The wealth of the city had declined over the last three centuries as their people were nearly extinguished and yet the population of the city grew and grew as life outside of the walls became more and more perilous.
The sun was hardly peeking over the bay to the west and for the most part, the city still slept as Dorian walked through the mist that carpeted the streets. The smell of baking bread told him that several of the city’s bakers had begun preparing for a day of work and there was a crowing of cocks greeting the still pink-blue rising sun but for the most part he walked in silence until reaching a small tavern near the docks.
The city may be sleeping but the docks were awake and alive. For someone with enhanced hearing, the noise of the place could be enough to be a soreness right between their ears. A man shouted to his crew as they loaded two dozen or more large crates into the belly of a large cog. Another much smaller ship was from the smell of it full of blubber and shelled fish began unloading its rather pungent hall onto carts to be wheeled to the dockside market. His eyes lingered longest on the longship moored to the dock. A fifty-oar bench Drakkar made from ebon dark, stone strong yronwood found in the black forest to the north of Hardhaven. A fearsome dragon’s head was carved into the prow with rubies larger than a man’s head for eyes.
Bold.
Entering the tavern Dorian set his chest down on a table by the door, lifted the lid, and took from it a leather pouch.
“You ‘ere for dem?” A woman asked, jabbing a thumb toward a back room. She was taking chairs from the tops of tables and setting them right on the floor and wiping down the table tops, getting ready for business.
“Good guess,” Dorian said with a smile.
“Don’ wan’ no blood in ‘ere if it can be helped.” The woman said once she took note of the two-handed great ax across his back and the sax and Skeggøx on his belt. Dorian just continued smiling as he pushed open the door and entered the back room.
It was madness. There were half a hundred warriors packed into the room, four different drinking songs were being sung seemingly with the goal of drowning out the others to the point that words could not be understood and it sounded more like the shouts of battle or the cries of childbirth, actual shouts were coming from the back corner as a group of the warriors gambled at orleg or drinking, he dare not look to see but Dorian was certain he could also hear the distinct sounds of mating. A howl rose above the rest of the noise loud and long until all else went silent and still.
A woman warrior pushed her way from the back of the dimly lit room, a horn of ale in her hand. His eye however was drawn to her full weapons belt. Sax, sword, bearded hand axe and a blacksmith’s hammer hung about her waist. She wore animal hide pants and boots, and a scaled leather chest plate stained black over a black iron ring shirt. A fearsome red-eyed dragon was stitched into the leather.
“Look who’s walked into our celebration!” She shouted to the rest of them half-sauntering, half-stumbling to where he stood. She was tall for a female, close to six and a half feet, and yet he still needed to look down to meet her eyes. No, her eye; Her right eye was hidden behind a thin leather corded patch, raw painful looking scars clawed past the edges of the patch but her left eye was a fierce icy blue.
“A son of Durin has come down from on his hill!” She shouted turning this way and that to make sure she had every last warrior's attention. The silence that hung over them like a pall was a sign that she had it.
“What brings you down her Durinsblood, surely you don’t mean to put an end to our revelry!?” She yelled with a laugh though none joined in her mirth. There was the sound of chair legs scraping over the wooden floor and the scratch of scabbards being shaken loose but no laughter.
She moved faster than he could react, faster than he could see, faster than he could think. Her arms flew around his neck and pulled him into a tight embrace.
“Let’s drink!” She yelled, yielding just enough space to plant a hard kiss on his cheek. The room erupted in a cheer as she dragged Dorian to a table and shoved him roughly onto a seat. She left him to go back to the place in the room she had emerged from but he was not alone at the table. Across from him in charcoal grey robes nursing a bowl of stew was a young man near his own age.
“Vali.” Dorian greeted.
“Blessings to you, Dorian. How do you fare?” Vali said, breaking up a layer of grease atop his stew.
“Blessings to you,” Dorian responded courteously. “How do I fare? Quite well Vali to look upon your face. I had feared you had gotten yourself killed.” It had been three years since he watched Vali ride out the northern gate of the city and this was the last place on Islimore he would’ve thought to find him.
“Cérmæ smiled on me, there is no doubting that,” Vali said with a smile.
“You seem different, Vali.” Dorian told the man.
“How so?”
Dorian studied Vali. The two had practically grown up together. Vali was a cousin or a nephew or something to Dorian’s mother. He had never been what one would call ‘robust’, both skinny and short Vali was never confused with a warrior but he had always been sharp of mind and had never been fearful, so instead of being a part of the shield wall, Vali was Vateos. The vateos were keepers of histories, and records of births, deaths, and matings. Creators of law, and leaders of the Pilgrimage.
“Your hair for one. It’s gone.” Vali’s head was shaved bald but his beard had grown to a fierce wolf tangle of rusted wool and he was no longer just skinny. He had turned gaunt and hard like an iron skeleton wrapped in flesh. “Is that how the savages prefer you to look or did you catch fleas?”
“Are you truly asking or just making jokes?” Vali asked sharply, still stirring his stew. Dorian just shrugged. When Vali had left three years ago to go on a mission in the Yronwood forest to try his hand at living amongst the feral savages that lived there, Dorian had been sure his kinsman’s head would have been sent back to them within a day, two at the most but it had been three years and Dorian had found no sign of Vali anytime he had been forced to range through the black trees though he had looked for him.
Vali seemed to decide the shrug was an invitation to explain his new look.
“The pack…” Vali paused to give Dorian a black look when he snorted derisively. “The pack that I lived with, the Vultúir, once a member of the pack has their first change and spills blood in a battle, their own and an enemy’s, they have their head shaved and keep it that way. It’s the mark of a warrior. Even their women participate in the practice, in fact, their alpha was female.” He finished.
“And I suppose you convinced this wildling to let you live by becoming her concubine?” Dorian asked with a laugh. Vali’s response was to turn a deep shade of red.
“Better to be a whore than to be dead.” The one-eyed warrior said returning to the table with a flagon, three drinking horns, and two bowls of the stew. She poured a horn for each of them and slid a bowl of stew to Dorian. It was cold with a thick layer of congealed fat and grease on top.
“It’s from yesterday. Venison, barley, onion, carrots, potatoes, and I had the woman fry up some bacon and throw it in.” She explained as she tipped the bowl up and slurped a mouthful of the stew. Dorian had no more appetite now than he’d had in his solar. However, he found himself with a thirst, lifting the horn to his lips he was surprised to taste sour blueberry mead, not the thick brown ale he had smelled when he came in.
“Is this…?” He asked her.
“One of my dad’s last batches I’d wager. Only the best for the son of The Protector.” She said.
“What were you two chatting about before I interrupted?” She asked the two of them.
“Ways I have changed,” Vali answered. “So far was have gotten to my hair or lack of such.”
“You carry steel as well,” Dorian said of the bearded black wood-handled axe on Vali’s belt. “You being in this room with this particular crew and carrying a weapon? Looks like you’ve traded one set of raiders for another.”
“Is that why you’re here, Dorian? To see me hanged?” She stared at him with her one blue eye while taking a long draft from her horn.
“You
are a criminal accused of treason, Malinda. As the captain of the Alpha’s guard and leader of the army, it would be my duty to bring you to justice.” Dorian said taking a drink as well.
“Ha! You save me from the end of one rope just to see me at the end of yours? I think not, Gallow-Slayer.”
The Gallows-Slayer. That is what he had been called since the day he put an end to the wildling Chief, Rik, King of the Gallow Wood, in single combat.
They circled each other. Dorian, the son of one Alpha and brother to another, wrought in royal ringmail, and Rik, a giant in mismatched pieces of plate armor stolen from the dead. Two hundred corpses hung overhead–a silent eyeless audience. The newest corpses had been hung no more than two days earlier, the oldest were so old they’d turned green-black and rotted through their ropes crashing to the forest floor below, bloated and stinking. Steel screamed against steel as the two warriors met in a flurry. One clash turned to two and then three, again and again until it seemed to just end with the spring snow greedily drinking Rik’s lifeblood.
Their duel had started with the sun barely in the sky and it had taken him until the sun started to set the following day to cut down, bury, and perform The Rites for every Lupo in the wood, Rik included. Five-thousand crows watched chittering and squawking in their crow-speech while their feast was laid to rest.
Dorian laughed finished his mead wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and Malinda poured him another.
“If you’re not here to clasp me in iron, Dorian, why
are you here?” She asked.
“I can’t come and have a drink with an old friend?” He asked trying to sound offended going so far as to put his hand over his heart in mock outrage.
“You never have.” She answered coldly.
“You’re never here. When was the last time you docked in the city? Half a year? Longer?” He retorted.
“Like I even could come back here. You said yourself, I am a criminal wanted for treason. As if it is treason to attack your enemies or visit vengeance on those who have harmed you.” She snorted a laugh.
“It is treason to disobey your Alpha.” He reminded her
“My Alpha is locked in a cage somewhere or have you forgot?” She blazed.
Dorian took a small sip of his mead. He would not be baited by her.
“And how exactly does raiding the human’s fishing villages and dockside hamlets get that cage open?”
“Better something than nothing.” She replied bitterly.
“Until that something sees Durin pay for it with his life.”
She gave him a dismissive wave but did not continue to argue. She knew as well as he did, that as long as Durin remained a prisoner of The Fayth, Clan Kanaka could not risk open retaliation against them.
“I have another brother I wish to speak with you about,” Dorian said.
“I swear I turned those twins away every time they showed up at the dock.” She said hastily, bringing a wide grin to Dorian’s face.
Those boys are so eager for glory they are just as likely to get themselves killed as they are to put in a saga song.
“No. Declan has come back.”
He studied her. Dorian’s brother Declan had gone missing–a presumed victim of the humans–nearly two decades ago when Dorian was only a pup yet to make his change. Malinda and Declan were close, the best of friends until shortly before Declan’s disappearance and Dorian was unsure how she would take this news.
“I don’t see him here with you,” she said.
“Back to Islimore, I mean. Well, he had been here but you were not so that doesn’t much matter. Anyway, he has gone south with the twins and a few others including your uncle, to find Durin. Hljóðleva, do you know of it?”
“The old ruin? Yeah, I know it. Wait…are you asking if I will sell my sword and go help Declan and his merry band?” She asked.
“Not exactly.”
“Then what’s the bag of silver for?”
“Okay, fine. Exactly.”
“It seems I’m not the only one here willing to commit treason.” She said, gleefully drinking her horn of mead.
No, you’re not.
“What if he…what if Declan does not want my help?” She asked and for the first time in many many years, she sounded like that girl from the village that his brother used to fancy.
“Why should he not?” Dorian asked. “I would think him glad to see you after so long with how close you were.”
“How close we were?” She asked stunned at his words. “Before he disappeared, we had not spoken for a year. I tried to see him before he rode off to face the Anasi of the wilds with your brother and father. I did not know if he would come back. He didn’t say a word to me and he never came to see me after he returned.”
“It was never the same after Erik.” She said. “One day Declan comes to our village as he did so very often. On this day our uncle was with him. A good man our uncle he had risen high to a place among Durin IV’s guard. Anyway, Declan and uncle Gunar come to the village, your brother must’ve been fourteen at the time. Declan and my uncle spent three days teaching everyone willing or able how to craft a spear and how to use one–”
“
We are sworn to protect you! Your brother called to the village.
But we can not be everywhere all at once. So we will teach you how to protect yourselves should the worst ever happen. Your brother was a sweet boy and he cared for others in that way. One day he brought wooden swords just to play and found my brother Erik to be a natural so my brother got to go live in a castle. A year later he went on a hunt with your brother and fell through some ice. Declan came back out and Erik didn’t.” for a moment it seemed as if she would cry but could not remember how.
“I told Declan…I told him, I did not blame him. I told him softly that it wasn’t his fault. I told him sternly to brook no argument, yet we still grew apart. I lost my brother and my best friend. It did not seem fair.”
“It were not fair what happened to your brother.” Dorian agreed. “And my own should have seen past his feelings. I do not blame you but when you lied to him, Declan handled that poorly.”
“Lied to him?” She was aghast
“Yes, lied to him. It
was his fault.” Dorian had been but a pup but he knew well of the incident that led to her brother’s untimely end. “Declan’s choices put your brother in that water and he knew that as well as anyone but he was the Alpha’s son. Who would dare tell him that? No one; instead they told him that mistakes happen. that leadership meant seeing those beneath you die. My brother did not need absolution from you. He needed to hear that you hated him for what happened even if you did still love him. He needed to know what he felt about himself was true. Everyone always thought Declan tried to get out of being responsible. The truth was that Declan
always felt responsible…
always. My brother had a soft heart.”
“Your brother’s heart was the only thing soft about him.” She said smiling once again. “Okay, Gallow-Slayer, for that sack of coin my crew and I will do what we can.”
“You have my thanks but I need something else from you. Treason is treason at this point, I need passage.”
“South to your brothers?” She asked.
“North.”
Two days later and Dorian was hard at work at an oar bench. The muscles in his back and arms screamed for reprieve and despite the frigid wind blowing across the black icy waters of the Great North Sea sweat poured from him but every time he even thought of quitting or even slowing down he need only look over to see Vali pulling his weight and knew he could not do any less. One of Malina’s crew came to relieve him. He stood, stretched, heard, and felt every bone in his body crack or pop. He groaned loud and long and the seasoned sea wolves all laughed at the son of an Alpha who had worked an oar bench for the first time in several years. Dorian like his brothers and father before him had made several trips north of their domain to Frosthold, the seat of Clan Ylva, distant kinsman and longtime allies. There they learned everything they would need to about ships and ship craft or that was the idea anyway. Dorian had spent as much time following after Astrid as he did on a ship.
Somethings never change
He could not say how much longer it took him to be awoken to Malinda shouting for the oars to come up as they docked at Frosthold. Dorian said his goodbyes. Rummaged through the chest he had carried all the way from Hardhaven dressing in the best finery he owned. He wore black leather from head to heel save for the white fur cloak wrapped around his shoulders large and proud.
He found a dockman, and handed him his chest and two silvers, telling him to make sure it ended up at the castle proper.
When he finally reached Frosthold he was ushered through the place, thought to be no more than one of many who sought an audience with The Alpha. Dorian waited patiently as issue after issue was presented to Astrid. When his turn came the herald leaned close to ask his name and his business. Dorian pushed past the man.
“Dorian Durinson of Clan Kanaka!” He yelled to the gathered crowd. Dorian knelt in front of Astrid.
“I could not think of what to write.”
Astrid Ylva
Dorian Durinson
