Guy Gavriel Kay - The Last Light of the Sun

He grinned crookedly. “You are looking right at me, as you said. I can’t be that hard to see. Even a piss-drunk raider falling off his horse will spot me when the sun comes up. Yes, I believe you.”

She let out a breath.

“What will they do to you?” he asked. It had just occurred to him.

“If they find out I was here? I don’t want to think about it.” She paused. “Thank you for asking.”

He felt suddenly shamed. Cleared his throat. “If I don’t ride back into the village, will they know you … warned me?”

Her laughter again, unexpected, bright and quick. “They could possibly decide you were clever, by yourself.”

He laughed too. Couldn’t help it. Was aware that it could be seen as a madness sent by the gods, laughter at the edge of dying one hideous death or another. Not like the mindlessness of the water-disease—a man bitten by a sick fox—but the madness where one has lost hold of the way things are. Laughter here, another kind of strangeness in this dark by the wood among the spirits of the dead, with the blue moon overhead, pursued by a wolf in the sky.

The world would end when that wolf caught the two moons.

He had more immediate problems, actually.

“What will you do?” she asked. The third time she’d seemed to track his thoughts. Perhaps it was more than being a youngest daughter, this matter of having a gift. He wished, again, he could see her clearly.

But, as it happened, he did know, finally, the answer to her question.

Once, years ago, his father had been in a genial mood one evening as they’d walked out together to repair a loose door on their barn. Thorkell wasn’t always drunk, or even often so (being honest with his own memories). That summer evening he was sober and easy, and the measure of that mood was that, after finishing the work, the two of them went walking, towards the northern boundary of their land, and Thorkell spoke of his raiding days to his only son, something that rarely happened.

Thorkell Einarson had not been a man given to boasting, or to offering scraps of advice from the table of his recollections. This made him unusual among the Erlings, or those that Bern knew, at any rate. It wasn’t always easy having an unusual father, though a boy could take some dark pride in seeing Thorkell feared by others as much as he was. They whispered about him, pointed him out, carefully, to merchants visiting the isle. Bern, a watchful child, had seen it happen.

Other men had told the boy tales; he knew something of what his father had done. Companion and friend to Siggur Volganson himself right to the end. Voyages in storm, raids in the dark. Escaping the Cyngael after Siggur died and his sword was lost. A journey alone across the Cyngael lands, then the width of the Anglcyn kingdom to the eastern coast, and finally home across the sea to Vinmark and this isle.

“I recollect a night like this, a long time ago,” his father said, leaning back against the boulder that marked the boundary of their land. “We went too far from the boats and they cut us off—Cuthbert’s household guard, his best men—between a wood and a stream.”

Cuthbert had been king of the Anglcyn in the years when Thorkell was raiding with the Volgan. Bern knew that much.

He remembered loving moments such as that one had been, the two of them together, the sun setting, the air mild, his father mild, and talking to him.

“Siggur said something to us that night. He said there are times when all you can do to survive is one single thing, however unlikely it may be, and so you act as if it can be done. The only chance we had was that the enemy was too sure of victory, and had not posted outliers against a night breakout.”

Thorkell looked at his son. “You understand that everyone posts outlying guards? It is the most basic thing an army does. It is mad not to. They had to have them, there was no chance they didn’t.”

Bern nodded.

“So we spoke our prayers to Ingavin and broke out,” Thorkell said, matter-of-factly. “Maybe sixty men—two boats’ worth of us—against two hundred, at the least. A blind rush in the dark, some of us on stolen horses, some running, no order to it, only speed. The whole thing being to get to their camp, and through it—take some horses on the run if we could—cut back towards the ships two days away.”

Thorkell paused then, looking out over summer farmlands, towards the woods. “They didn’t have outliers. They were waiting for morning to smash us, were mostly asleep, a few still singing and drinking. We killed thirty or forty of them, got horses for some of our unmounted, took two thegns hostage, by blind luck—couldn’t tell who they were in the dark. And we sold them back to Cuthbert the next day for our freedom to get to the boats and sail away.”

He’d actually grinned, Bern remembered, behind the red beard. His father had rarely smiled.

“The Anglcyn in the west rebelled against King Cuthbert after that, which is when Athelbert became king, then Gademar, and Aeldred. Raiding got harder, and then Siggur died in Llywerth. That’s when I decided to become a landowner. Spend my days fixing broken doors.”

He’d had to escape first, alone and on foot, across the breadth of two different countries.

You act as if it can be done.

“I’m crossing to the mainland,” Bern said quietly to the girl in that darkness by the wood.

She stood very still. “Steal a boat?”

He shook his head. “Couldn’t take the horse on any boat I could manage alone.”

“You won’t leave the horse?”

“I won’t leave the horse.”

“Then?”

“Swim,” said Bern. “Clearly.” He smiled, but she couldn’t see it, he knew.

She was silent a moment. “You can swim?”

He shook his head. “Not that far.”

Heroes came to thresholds, to moments that marked them, and they died young, too. Icy water, end of winter, the stony shore of Vinmark a world away across the strait, just visible by daylight if the mist didn’t settle, but not now.

What was a hero, if he never had a chance to do anything? If he died at the first threshold?

“I think the horse can carry me,” he said. “I will … act as if it can.” He felt his mood changing, a strangeness overtaking him even as he spoke. “Promise me no monsters in the sea?”

“I wish I could,” said the girl.

“Well, that’s honest,” he said. He laughed again. She didn’t, this time.

“It will be very cold.”

“Of course it will.” He hesitated. “Can you … see anything?”

She knew what he meant. “No.”

“Am I underwater?” He tried to make it a joke.

Shook her head. “I can’t tell. I’m sorry. I’m … more a youngest daughter than a seer.”

Another silence. It struck him that it would be appropriate to begin feeling afraid. The sea at night, straight out into the black …

“Shall I … any word for your mother?”

It hadn’t occurred to him. Nothing had, really. He thought about it now. “Better you never saw me. That I was clever by myself. And died of it, in the sea.”

“You may not.”

She didn’t sound as if she believed that. She would have been rowed across from Vinmark, coming here. She knew the strait, the currents and the cold, even if there were no monsters.

Bern shrugged. “That will be as Ingavin and Thünir decide. Make some magic, if you have any. Pray for me, if you haven’t. Perhaps we’ll meet again. I thank you for coming out. You saved me from … one bad kind of death, at least.”

It was past the bottom of the night, and he had a distance to go to the beach nearest the mainland. He said nothing more, and neither did she, though he could see that she was still staring at him in the dark. He mounted up on the horse he wouldn’t leave for Halldr Thinshank’s funeral rites, and rode away.