They ran for an hour, with Brokk complaining about his blistered feet, the stitch in his side, his heavy bladder, but to his credit, the oversized warrior didn’t fall behind. Not until he grabbed Reyker’s arm and said, “I’m not going to walk around in piss-soaked trousers. Slow down a bit, and I’ll catch up.”
Reyker slowed to a jog, not letting Skrim get out of sight. Space fell between him and Brokk.
He didn’t notice the woman until she was right in front of him. He skidded in the sand, stopping just shy of her.
He knew what she was instantly. Dark hair, fiery-gold irises that burned like twin stars, draped in garments made of the earth itself.
“Seeress,” he breathed. “I thought your kind was dead.”
There had been a seeress in Vaknavangur when Reyker was a boy. Draki had taken her captive when he seized the village, marked her, forced her to remain in the netherworlds between life and death for days, awaiting visions of the Dragon and his fate. It had driven the woman mad. Reyker didn’t know if she’d killed herself, or if the visions had drained her life. He just remembered her body burning on a pyre, one of many magiskas whose end came too soon under Draki’s rule.
“I am the last, like you.” The seeress reached up, running cold fingers across his cheeks. “A male magiska, allowed to live only because you share blood with the Dragon. Turn around, magiska. Go back.”
“I can’t. What I seek lies before me.”
She smirked, a deeply unsettling expression on her uncanny face. “Death lies before you. Sacrifice. Misery. Abandon your chase and the two you followed here will die, but the Dragon will be weakened, perhaps enough to be killed.”
Reyker did not question how the seeress knew—as with his battle-madness, the nature of her visions was beyond her control—nor did he question the truth of what she saw.
Let the Glasnithians die. This was the cost of crippling the warlord. “Is there no other way to weaken him?”
“There is always another way.” Her gold-rimmed eyes lost focus, one looking toward the ground and the other toward the sky. “He is part god, born of the womb of Ildja, eater of souls, to defy a death by mortal hands. Because you are the same flesh as the Dragon, he keeps you close. That makes you his weakness. You carry the answer to his death inside you.” She tapped his forehead. “You’ve already witnessed how it can be done.”
Something he had witnessed? A memory of Draki, or of Aldrik?
Something insignificant enough that he’d missed it, or terrible enough that he’d entombed it beneath the black river of his soul so he wouldn’t have to relive it.
“Turn back,” the seeress said, “and you won’t need the answer. Others will make sacrifices. Others will fight this war.”
“I fight my own wars.” He pulled away from her icy hands. “And I don’t let innocent people die if I have the power to stop it.”
“No,” she whispered. “But you will.”
Reyker heard Brokk calling him. The moment his gaze left the seeress, she was gone, as if she’d melted into the earth itself. Her words faded from his mind, until he could hardly remember what she’d said, and then he could hardly remember her at all. He pushed away the sense of foreboding and took off running, continuing with his hunt.
Brokk came up behind him. “Talking to ghosts, Lagorsson? Has the wilderness scrambled your wits?”
Reyker shook his head, speeding up so they could catch Skrim. “I wasn’t talking to anyone.”
When he found the wolf carcass, Reyker knew the Glasnithians were as good as caught—the organs and blood hadn’t frozen yet, nor had the remnants of their fire been buried by snow. “A few hours more,” he said.
“Soon as we find them, I’m going to make those Glasnithians rub my feet. The girl can call us up some dinner. I could eat an elk whole.”
“Is that how you got so big?”
“If I can’t get an elk, I could always gnaw the flesh off your scrawny bones. Don’t think I’m above it.”
“These scrawny bones bested you a good many times on the training field, as I recall.”
They traded barbs and reminisced about their boyhoods in Vaknavangur, to make the time pass. Reyker let himself enjoy it, laughing in earnest about their escapades. Things had been simple back then: hunting, swordplay, wooing village girls. That’s all they had cared about before the Dragonmen came. Before they were forced to become men in the span of a day.
In his loneliest moments, Reyker had tried to befriend several of the Dragonmen, but the ones who didn’t sicken him rarely lasted—Draki sensed the honor in them, that these men wouldn’t do his bidding long, so the warlord sent them on the most dangerous missions or executed them for disloyalty as a warning to others.
Brokk was his only friend. All the rest were dead.
“What about the other children of Vaknavangur?” Reyker could still see them, boys and girls his age and younger, screaming as they watched their brothers and fathers die. They would have been rounded up, enslaved by the Dragonmen. “What happened to them?”
“That bastard didn’t tell you?” Brokk grunted. “After the warlord took you away, he left his soldiers to march us through a valley to one of the other villages he’d captured. There was an avalanche in the mountains that killed most of the Dragonmen, so those of us who survived were able to escape. We separated into groups, changed our names, and went into hiding for years, afraid the Dragon would return for us. Some of them I’ve lost track of, but I can get a message to the others. They’ll want to see you.”
Alive. His people, the ones his father had been responsible for, the ones he was supposed to be responsible for.
“When all of this is over, I’m going to rebuild Vaknavangur,” Reyker said. “I’ll give them back their homes, their land. I’ll be the leader my father wanted me to be.”
“That’s a mighty big job for scrawny bones like yours. Suppose you’ll need some help.”
“There might be an elk in it for you.” The grin dropped from Reyker’s face as the glacier came into view.
Two sets of tracks led straight to it. He saw their footprints in the snow, the wounds in the ice where axes had dug in. The Glasnithians were on the glacier, heading for the mountain.
“Stay here, Skrim,” Brokk said.
The skrikflak lurched up the glacier, leaving them behind despite Brokk’s threats and curses. “That stupid ball of fur is a danger to all of us,” Reyker said. He knotted one end of the rope they’d brought around his waist before handing the other end to Brokk. The big warrior looked nervously at the ice sheet, but he tied himself to Reyker.