It is always darkest before the dawn.
She shrugged, loosening stiff muscles, a ripple of her broad shoulders that set water cascading as if shaken from a tree, shifting the weight of her shield and the sheathed longsword across her back. The moon slid out from behind rag-torn clouds, silvering the woodland they were standing within, softening the solid dark of the hill before them, a glimpsed snarl of twisted hawthorn and wind-beaten rock. Sig looked to her right, saw Cullen sitting straight-backed in his saddle, ringmail glistening black with rain, a spear in his white-knuckled fist. His red hair was bound tight at the nape, a round shield like hers slung across his back with a white, four-pointed star painted upon it.
The bright star, sigil of our Order.
‘Now?’ Cullen mouthed up to Sig. She gave him a scowl in return.
Anticipation and energy exuded from the young warrior and, not for the first time, Sig wondered at the wisdom of bringing him fresh from his Long Night into such a trial as this.
That decision’s long-made, now. No going back on it. Besides, he was the best of his year, which was no surprise with the blood that runs in his veins.
Sig twisted the other way in her saddle, a creak of leather and ringmail, and glimpsed faces about her, men cold, wet and tired from their night-long journey and vigil, but their faces were stern and set in hard lines. She liked what she saw.
I asked for hard men. They’ll need to be.
Grey trickled into the world, dawn making shadows shift and form where there had been only the crow-black of night. A whisper of wings overhead, the hint of something much bigger than owl or hawk as a darker shadow flitted above the trees, speeding towards the hill. Sig strained eyes and ears, but there was nothing more.
A hundred heartbeats later, a new sound. The pad of footfalls, then a flicker of movement. Shapes appeared: one man, two hounds slipping through the grey. Great beasts, chests broad and solid with muscle, muzzles flat and wide, bristling with the threat of sharp teeth. One was brindle-dark, the other grey as mountain slate. Sig felt men tense at the sight of them, quickly followed by whispers and pats to calm horses, but Sig grinned to see the wolven-hounds, so named because of the mixed blood that flowed through their veins. For a moment Sig was a hundred leagues away, and over a hundred years, seeing in her mind the original parents of this line: the great wolven, Storm, and her mate the brindle hound, Buddai, fighting and rending Kadoshim on that Day of Days. She felt a flush of pride, muted by sadness at glories and friends long past and faded.
The man with them was clothed in leather, fur and soft skins, his eyes dark shadows above a tangle of beard. He too wore a round shield slung across his back, as all in the Order did. A single-bladed axe hung from a loop at his belt, kept company by a brace of knives. He held an unstrung bow in one hand. Keld, her huntsman. Sig only needed one look from him to know it was time. A jolt of excitement rippled through her, which surprised her.
But then, it is not every day that you track a Kadoshim to its lair.
‘Guards?’ Sig said, her voice grating like an old iron hinge.
‘Aye, there were, but the bairns saw to that,’ Keld said, patting the big head of one of the hounds.
‘All right then,’ Sig grunted, feeling the imminence of violence begin to course through her, a tremor in her bones, a wildness fluttering in her blood, and she looked at Elgin.
He pulled himself straighter in his saddle and nodded to her.
‘Aghaidh,’ Sig whispered and Hammer lumbered into motion, out of the trees and across a windswept open space towards the hill in front of them. The rising sun washed the land in pale light, making deep valleys of shadow amongst the boulders. Elgin and his three score swords followed, all proven men, handpicked from Queen Nara’s honour guard. They spread into a wide line behind Sig, Cullen and Keld.
Elgin raised his arm and signalled his warriors; a number of them peeled away to circle the hill, spread to watch for any hidden boltholes.
The ground began to slope upwards, Sig’s eyes fixed on the darker shadow ahead of her, not much more than a crease in an exposed section of the rock of the hillside.
A cave. A lair.
Keld hooked his unstrung bow onto Sig’s saddle and gave the rain-ragged clouds above a dark look – too wet to bother stringing his bow. The huntsman gave a low whistle and his hounds padded left and right, merging with the shadows.
Sig rode past a knot of hawthorn, saw boots poking from it, the stain of blood dark and slick on the grass where the guard had been dragged by Keld into cover. Hammer gave the corpse a cursory glance and sniff as she padded past it.
Only fifty paces from the crease in the rock face, then figures detached from the cave’s entrance: two, three, four of them emerging as if from the very rock itself. Their bowed heads were hooded, cloaked for the rain, one holding a spear, the others with sword hilts poking from their cloaks.
‘Cullen,’ Sig said as she drove Hammer on, the bear jerking into a lumbering run. Behind her the red-haired warrior stood in his stirrups and hurled his spear as the first figure looked up and saw them. His mouth opened wide as he sucked in a gasp of air but the spear punched into his chest before any warning cry could be uttered. The force of the blow threw him back into his comrades in a dark splatter of blood, taking one man to the ground with him in a tangle of limbs. The other two reached for blades as Keld’s hounds leaped in from either side, a blur of motion, a crunch of flesh and bone, a succession of snarling and wet tearing sounds, a gurgled rattle of a cry.
Hammer reached them as the last survivor climbed from the ground, gasping out a warning cry, a glint of steel as he dragged his blade free of its scabbard. Hammer swiped a paw at him, claws as long and sharp as daggers raking across his face and chest and he dropped faster than he’d risen in a spume of blood-mist and gore.
And then there was silence, just the wind and rain, the creak and jangle of harness, one of the wolven-hounds lapping at pooling blood. Keld tutted and the hound stopped. Sig sat high in her saddle, one hand on the hilt of her longsword still sheathed across her back, the other resting upon the weighted net that hung at her belt. These were the precarious moments, when the entrance was still open and unguarded. When escape was still possible for their enemy.
They waited, frozen, all seeming to hold their breath, even the wind dying down for a few heartbeats.