Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

Charland reminded me of the Thurtans. Which is never a good thing. The peasants were muddier and rougher than one might encounter in more civilized southern climes but at least we weren’t so far north that we’d slipped out of Christendom. By and large your Christian peasant knows his place better than the heathen, being more likely to tug the forelock and respect the God-given authority of a nobleman. In the north few jarls are more than two generations away from the bloody-handed reaver who carved out the miserable clutch of rocks they currently claim to rule.

Fortunately, apart from being dank and overburdened with streams, lakes, ponds, rivers, bogs, marshes, fens, and mires, Charland had been blessed with ten years of unbroken peace. This meant that with coin in one’s pocket one could cross large distances in short order on well-maintained roads, and find half-decent accommodation each evening.

The closeness that had grown between Snorri and Kara, and between Snorri and the boy, on our journey south, started to grow again. There’s a magnetism about the Viking that draws people in, and something in the man needed to be a father. Some women grow broody for a babe at breast; perhaps some men need a son to raise. At best I had served Hennan in the role of disreputable uncle, but Snorri took on a broader responsibility, teaching the boy without ever seeming to be a teacher, everything from tying knots to throwing knives, reading the lie of the land to reading the runes of the north scratched into the dirt.

Watching the three of them, I’ll own to pangs of jealousy, but mixed with caution. In some ways it was like envying a man on a high cliff edge the view, whilst being thankful no such urge steered my own feet to any such precipice. Snorri loved too easily: that capacity for love, for unselfish giving of himself, drew people to him but at the same time opened him to the possibility of grave hurt. With axe in hand Snorri had proved himself nigh unstoppable, needing to fear nothing. And yet here he was handing the world a stick to beat him with. In Osheim a man has a hard enough time hanging on to his own skin. Taking a child in was bad. Taking a son in was like holding a knife to your throat and asking the world to cut you.

Only as the border with Osheim grew closer did the air of prosperity and good cheer start to wane. Villages grew fewer and farther between, fewer people kept to the roads, fields looked poorly tended and swathes of forest grew unchecked, their interiors dark and worrisome.

Hundreds of miles behind us, deep in hostile territory, my grandmother and the flower of Red March’s army would be fighting a desperate battle to hold on to Blujen and maintain the siege of Lady Blue’s tower. Little time could remain to them, and not much more remained to everyone else according to the oft-repeated prophecies of doom. And yet with each mile that passed beneath Murder’s hooves I wanted to slow down, to drag the journey out, to do anything but step once more into Osheim and let the Wheel draw me down into the horrors at its midst.

“The world is changing.” Kara rode alongside me as we forded a stream that cut across our trail through the ill-named Bright Forest. She had that tone she used when being profound-I think she copied it from Skilfar.

“It is?” I’d really rather it wasn’t. Then we could go home. “Can’t you feel it?” She nodded up at the bright line where the trees failed to meet across our path. The sky had a brittleness to it. As if a sufficiently loud noise might shatter it and set the pieces tumbling down. “Everything is growing thin. Magic is spilling through the cracks.”

“That spell of yours, trapping the unborn in the hedgerow, worked well.”

“Better than it should. Better than I’ve seen outside the Wheel.”

That night we camped in the woods, a cold, black night in which the whole forest seemed to move around outside the thin walls of the tent.

Somewhere on along the course of the next day, following old and overgrown lumber trails through a nameless expanse of woodland, we passed into the kingdom of Osheim close to the point where it meets with both Charland and Maladon. Already we were north of Os City where King Halaric cowered on the edge of his own domain as if scared to venture any farther into it.

After another day the trees also appeared to lose courage and their advance gave way to a miserable and blighted heathland where the only things to slow the wind were frequent heavy downpours, sometimes laced with wet snow.

In the distance a shadow loomed, a bruise on the sky, letting us know the Wheel waited, letting Hennan know he was coming home. That night I felt the pull of the Wheel for the first time in nearly a year, though it seemed then as if it had always been there, ever since it first sunk its hook as we fled the Red Vikings. I slept fitfully, a poor meal of dried meat and hardtack roiling around in my stomach, and in every moment I knew the Wheel sat out there in the distance, I knew exactly the direction, and I knew that my legs, restless with the need to take me there, would not let me spend long asleep.

The sunrise found us already up and about, readying ourselves for travel.

“It’s stronger this time.” Snorri crouched over a little fire, heating oats and water in a small, blackened cauldron.

In the east the sun hid behind a louring bank of cloud, sending rosetinted rays fanning out across a pearl sky. To the north the Wheel waited, reeling us in.

“Much stronger,” Kara said. “It’s turning faster, approaching the breaking point.” She had an ethereal beauty in the dawn light, her eyes having that strange blurriness they take on when working witchcraft, stray hairs lifting up from her braids as if we stood in the midst of an electrical storm. The power of the Wheel echoed in her.

“How far now?” The land had run to the low hills and rolling valleys of Hennan’s homeland, the sky above us bruised a yellow-purple, and swirled in some great spiral about a centre point directly ahead of us. “About two miles less than when you last asked, Jal.” Snorri led the way, swaying to the gait of his steed, offering me no view but broad shoulders beneath a leather cape, and thick black hair reaching down past his neck.

“Twenty miles, maybe.” Kara took pity on me.

Hennan rode with me on Murder, perched on a collection of blankets secured to my saddle. His words had run out as we reached the margins of the Wheel-lands where his grandfather had once tended goats. Approaching from the south this time we saw no signs of life, either on four feet or on two, save once a pair of ravens flying west.

The countryside had not yet taken on the twisted and alien aspect encountered further in but everything about it felt wrong-the grass an unconvincing shade of green, the wind whisper-laden and beating strange patterns into the rushes that grew thick around the valley fens.

“Do you see them?” Snorri asked.

“No.” I had been hoping they were figments of my imagination. “What are they?”

“Figments of your imagination,” Kara said behind me, struggling to keep her nag from panic.

“Oh good.” It had seemed that shadowy shapes had been pacing us on both sides, quite far off, and either vanishing when I looked directly at them, or refusing definition, remaining indistinct blurs in the middle distances, like a stain on the eye.

“It’s bad. Very bad.” Kara glanced around. “The Wheel is reaching out this far and starting to put flesh on our fears. I had expected something like this, but much closer in.”

“Hell.” Several weeks’ worth of good intentions melted away like a snowball tossed into a furnace. “This is never going to work. We don’t stand a chance.” I’d spent my time worrying about what I might do if we really got to the heart of the Wheel, somehow allowing myself to gloss over the business of actually getting there. As I stared out at the indistinct shapes some of them started to look more solid, more sharply outlined. One in particular darkened and began to sprout long thin legs . . . “Shit! We need to run!” I hauled on Murder’s reins. He’d galloped me to safety before, he could do it again.