“What’s happening?” cried Koll, staggering up wild-eyed, wild-haired and tangled with his blanket, then he fell over and was promptly sick again, to gales of helpless laughter.
Within a few moments the two crews were once more exchanging tales, and finding old comrades in common, and arguing over whose was the better knife while Safrit dragged her son away by the ear and dunked his head in the river. Crouch was left nursing his grudge alone, standing with fists on hips and glaring daggers at Thorn.
“I’ve a feeling you’ve made an enemy there,” muttered Brand, sliding his dagger back into its sheath.
“Oh, I’m always doing that. What does Father Yarvi say? Enemies are the price of success.” She threw one arm around his shoulders, the other about Odda’s, and hugged the two of them tight. “The shock is that I’ve made some friends besides.”
A RED DAY
“Shields!” bellowed Rulf.
And Brand was hooked by panic and torn from happy dreams of home, scrambling from the comfort of his blankets and up into a chill dawn the color of blood.
“Shields!”
The crew were stumbling from their beds, bouncing off one another, charging about like startled sheep, half-dressed, half-armed, half-awake. A man kicked the embers of the fire as he ran past and sent sparks whirling. Another bellowed as he tried to struggle into his mail shirt, tangled with the sleeves.
“Arm yourselves!”
Thorn was up beside him. The unshaved side of her head was chaos these days, braids and snarls and matted worms bound up with rings of silver clipped from coins, but her weapons were oiled and polished to a ready gleam and her face was set hard. Made Brand feel braver, to see her brave. The gods knew, he needed courage. He needed courage and he needed to piss.
They’d pitched camp on the only hill for miles, a flat-topped knoll in a bend of the river, broken boulders jutting from its flanks, a few stunted trees clinging to the top. Brand hurried to the eastern crest where the crew were gathering, stared down the slope and across the flat ocean of grass that stretched away into the sunrise. As he scraped sleep from his eyes with trembling fingers he saw figures out there, ghostly riders wriggling in the dawn haze.
“Horse People?” he croaked out.
“Uzhaks, I think,” Father Yarvi shaded his pale eyes against Mother Sun, a bloody smudge on the far horizon, “but they live on the shores of the Golden Sea. I don’t know what’s brought them here.”
“A deep desire to kill us?” said Odda as the riders took shape out of the murk, red sun glinting on metal, on the blades of spears and curved swords, on helmets made to look like the heads of beasts.
“How many are there?” muttered Thorn, jaw-muscles working on the shaved side of her head.
“Eighty?” Fror watched them as calmly as a man might watch a neighbor weed his garden. “Ninety?” He opened up a pouch and spat in it, started mixing something inside with a fingertip. “A hundred?”
“Gods,” whispered Brand. He could hear the sound of hooves as the Horse People circled closer, yells and yips and strange warbles echoing across the plain, above the rattle and growl of the crew making ready their own war-gear and calling on their chosen gods for weaponluck. One rider swerved close, long hair streaming, to try an arrow. Brand shrank back but it was just a ranging shot, a taunting shot, dropping into the grass halfway up the slope.
“An old friend once told me the greater the odds the greater the glory,” said Rulf, plucking at his bowstring with calloused fingers and making it angrily hum.
Dosduvoi slipped the oil-cloth from the head of his great ax. “The chances of death also increase.”
“But who wants to meet Death old, beside the fire?” And Odda’s teeth shone with spit as he flashed his mad grin.
“Doesn’t sound such a bad outcome.” Fror pushed his hand into his pouch and pulled it out covered in blue paint, pressed it onto his face with the fingers spread to leave a great palm-print. “But I am ready.”
Brand wasn’t. He gripped his shield that Rin had painted with a dragon, it seemed a hundred years ago and half the world away. He gripped the haft of his ax, palms still sore with the rope burns underneath their bandages. The Horse People were ever-moving, their troop breaking apart and coming back together, flowing across the plain like swift-running water but always working their way closer, a white banner streaming under a horned skull. He caught glimpses of brave faces, beast faces, battle faces, teeth bared and eyes rolling. So many of them.
“Gods,” he whispered. Had he really chosen this? Instead of a nice, safe, boring life at Gaden’s forge?
“Skifr!” called Father Yarvi, low and urgent.