Guy Kay - The Last Light of the Sun

Everyone, but not enough of them. Too many of his men were north and east. Days away. Even as she re-entered, tasting bile, that thought was in her head. Then another one: swift, blessedly so, for it gave her a pulse-beat of time to anticipate.

"Rhiannon!" her father said, wheeling to look at her. "Get the stablehands to saddle your horses. You and your mother—"

"Must ride out to alert the labourers. I know. Then we'll begin preparing to deal with any wounded. What else?"

She stared at him as calmly as she could, which was not easy. She had just been physically sick, her heart was pounding, there was sweat cold on her skin.

"No," he said. "That is not it. You and your mother—" "Will ride to the farm workers, then begin preparations here. As Rhiannon said."

Brynn turned and confronted his wife's steady gaze. A man stood behind her holding a torch.

Enid wore a blue night robe. Her hair was down, almost to her waist. No one ever saw it that way. Rhiannon, seeing the look exchanged between her parents, felt unsettled by the intimacy of it. The hallway was filled with people, and light. She felt herself flush, as if caught in the act of reading or hearing words meant for another. It occurred to her, even in that moment, to wonder if she would ever exchange such a glance with anyone before she died.

"Enid," she heard her father say. "Erlings come for the women. You make us… weaker."

"Not this time. They are coming for you, husband. Erling's Bane. Volgan's slayer. The rest of us are ordinary fare. If anyone leaves, we should all leave. Including you."

Brynn drew himself up. "Abandon Brynnfell to Erlings? At this point in my life? Are you seriously—?"

"No," said his wife, "I am not. That is why we stay. How many are coming? How much time do we have?"

For a long moment he looked as if he were going to hold his ground, but then, "More than last time, I think. Say eighty of them. Time, I'm not sure. They'll come from Llywerth again, through the hills."

"We need more men."

"I know. Castle's too far. I'll send, but they won't get back in time."

"What do we have here? Forty?"

"A little less than that, if you mean trained to weapons."

There were two lines on her mother's forehead. Rhiannon knew them, they came when she was thinking. Enid said, "We'll get as many of the farm workers as we can, Rhiannon and I, and their women and children for shelter. We can't leave them out there."

"Not the women. Send them north to Cwynerth with the young ones. They'll be safer away. As you said—Brynnfell is what they want. And me."

"And the sword," his wife said quietly.

Rhiannon blinked. She hadn't thought of that.

"Likely so," her father was saying, nodding his head. "I'll send riders to Prydllen and Cwynerth. There should be a dozen men at each, for the harvest."

"Will they come?"

"Against Erlings? They'll come. In time, I don't know." "And we defend the farm?"

He was shaking his head. "Not enough men. Too difficult. No. They won't expect us to have a warning. If we're quick enough, we can meet them west, at a place we choose. Better ground than here."

"And if you are wrong?"

Brynn smiled, for the first time that night. "I'm not wrong."

Rhiannon, listening, realized that her mother, too, had not asked about the warning, how Brynn knew what he seemed to know. She wouldn't ask, unless perhaps at night when the two of them were alone. Some things were not for the light. Jad ruled the heavens and earth and all the seas, but the Cyngael lived at the edge of the world where the sun went down. They had always needed access to knowledge that went beneath, not to be spoken.

They weren't speaking of it.

Her mother was looking at her. Frowning again, doing so, that expression everyone had been giving her since the end of spring. "Let's go," Rhiannon said, ignoring it.

"Enid," her father said, as the two women turned away. They both looked back at him. His face was grim. "Bring every lad over twelve summers. With anything at all that might do for a weapon."

That was too young, surely. Her mother would refuse, Rhiannon thought.

She was wrong.

+

Brand Leofson, commanding five Jormsvik ships as they made their way west, knew where he was going. He'd rowed his first dragon-ships in the final years of the Volgan's raids, though never with Siggur's men. Had lost his eye in one of those, had been recovering at home when the last of the Volgan's journeys had ended in disaster in Llywerth. Hadn't been there.

Depending on his mood, in the intervening years, and on how much he'd been drinking, he either felt fortunate to have missed that catastrophe, or cursed not to have been one of those—their names were known—who'd been with Siggur in the glory years, at the end.

You could say, if your mind worked that way, that his failure to be in Llywerth was a reason he was taking five undermanned ships west now. The past, what we have done or not done, slips and flows, like a stream to a carved-out channel, into the things we do years after. It is never safe, or wise, to say that anything is over.

They were at risk, he knew it, and so would the other captains, all the more experienced men here. They still had all their ships but they'd lost sixty men. If the weather turned, it would get bad at sea. So far, it hadn't. On the second night the wind switched to southerly, which pushed them closer than he liked to the rocky coast of Cadyr. But they were Erlings, mariners, knew how to stay clear of a lee shore, and when they reached the western end of the Cyngael coastline and turned north, that wind held with them.

Your danger could become your gift. Ingavin's storms could drown you at sea—or terrify your foe on land, adding fire and the flash of lightning to your own war cries. And the god, too, Brand was always telling himself, his private thought, had only one eye, after his nights on the tree where the world began.

Salt in the air, sail full on each ship now, stars fading above them as the sun rose, Brand thought of the Volgan and his sword—for the first time in years, if truth be told. He felt a bone-deep stirring within. Ivarr Ragnarson had been malformed, evil and devious, had deserved to die. But he'd had a clever-enough thought or two in his head, that one, and Brand wouldn't be the one to deny it.

To have turned home with sixty dead and nothing to show for their loss would have been a disaster. To come back and report the Volgan's slayer slain and the sword found and reclaimed…

That would be something different. It could make up for the deaths, and more. For not having been one of that company, twenty-five years ago.

It had occurred to Bern, rowing west, that there was something unsettling about what he was and how the world saw them all. They were Erlings, riders of the waves, laughing at wind and rain, knifing through roiling seas. Yet he himself was one of them, and he had no idea what to do in rough weather, could only follow directions as best he could and pray the seas did not, in fact, roil.

More: they were Jormsvikings, feared through the world as the deadliest fighters under sun and stars and the two moons. But Bern had never fought a battle in his life, only one single combat on the beach below the walls. That wasn't a battle. It was nothing like a battle.

What, came the thought, as they turned north and wind took the sails, if all of the others were—more or less—like him? Ordinary men, no better or worse than others. What if it was fear that made men believe the Jormsvik mercenaries were deadly? They could be beaten, after all; they had just been beaten.

Aeldred's fyrd had used signal fires and archers. Brand, and Garr Hoddson, had called it cowardly, womanish, making mock of the Anglcyn king and his warriors, spitting contempt into the sea.