‘Out there,’ Keld said with a nod of his head to the back door. ‘He left, just before . . .’
Not again. Sig snarled, remembering the sound of a door opening and footsteps as she’d approached the cabin. ‘See to Keld,’ she ordered Cullen as she stood and ran for the rear door, bursting out into semi-darkness. A frantic glance. She saw Elgin and his warriors leaping from their horses, the ground churned to thick mud. One rider bearing down upon a fleeing acolyte. Sig’s eyes swept further out, the small hold a mass of shadowy buildings. Then movement, higher up the hill. A spark and a torch flared to life.
Sig ran down the mud-churned track that wound through a tangle of outbuildings, ever higher, burst into open ground to see a shaven-haired man shoving his torch deep into the piled bonfire. Smoke bloomed, leaking into the night, the flicker and crackle of flames as wood ignited. Tongues of fire curled skywards, an orange glow spreading through the heart of the bonfire. Sig ran at the acolyte, who saw her and drew a sword from his hip with one hand, a short axe with the other, and strode to meet her.
Steel clashed, Sig parrying the sword slashing at her throat, pivoting so that the axe whistled through air a handspan from her head, punched the pommel of her sword into the man’s face. He staggered, spitting blood and teeth, and Sig, shoving him hard in the chest, sending him stumbling back, swung her sword in a loop over her head and down low, chopping into his leg just above the knee, shearing clean through flesh and bone, trailing droplets of blood in the air that glistened like a string of red pearls in the bonfire’s glare.
The acolyte collapsed screaming, dropped his sword. Sig kicked the axe and fist it was gripped within. Bones snapped and the axe went spinning away.
‘What was your message?’ Sig snarled, but the acolyte just looked up at her, the bonfire crackling and popping into scorching life, heat rolling off it in waves. The acolyte grinned through bloody lips. Sig put one iron-shod boot upon the man’s severed leg and ground her heel, screams ringing out across the hill, louder than the hiss and crackle of flames.
‘What was the message?’ Sig growled.
The acolyte began to laugh, blood and spittle frothing through his shattered teeth and mangled lips. Sig leaned down and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, hauling him up and shaking him, but he only laughed more wildly.
Footsteps behind her, Cullen supporting Keld, behind them Elgin and a handful of his men. Sig shook the acolyte again, and a scrap of parchment slipped from where it had been stuffed inside his shirt. Sig dropped the acolyte and snatched up the parchment, unfolding and reading by the firelight as Cullen and Keld reached her.
‘What does it say?’ Elgin asked, as Sig shared a grim look with Cullen and Keld. She showed the message to Elgin – one word scrawled upon it.
Anois.
‘What does that mean?’ Elgin shouted over the wind and the hungry flames.
Cullen slapped Sig’s arm, pointed through the dark. In the distance a pinprick of light appeared, flaring brighter, roaring into crackling life. And then, further away still, another flame flickering, another bonfire igniting. The sensation of creeping dread that had been haunting Sig swelled in her veins, making the hairs on her neck stand on end.
‘It is a word from the Old Tongue,’ Sig said, not taking her eyes from the string of beacons that were appearing like stars in the darkness. ‘And it means: Now.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DREM
Drem woke to his da’s boot kicking the wooden leg of his bed.
‘It’s still dark,’ Drem mumbled.
‘Things to do,’ Olin answered, giving the bed leg another kick for good measure, then turning and leaving Drem’s room. For a moment Drem thought about rolling over; the change in routine unsettled him. He liked to see the grey of dawn before he rose.
‘Drem,’ his da’s voice called, insistent.
With a groan, he hauled himself out of bed. It was a painful experience, and not just because the net of sleep still had a few hooks in him. He was battered and bruised all over from his fight in Kergard.
Fight! Beating, more like.
Five nights had passed since the skirmish at Kergard’s market. His da had helped Drem to the wain and, with Fritha climbing in as well, they’d returned home as quickly as possible. Before they left town, Calder the smith, one of the original members of Kergard’s Assembly, had told them that the trappers Drem had fought with were new to Kergard, having arrived that day. Apparently they were all kin, and were looking to find work and a roof at the new mine on the shore of the Starstone Lake.
‘A lot like them coming up from the south,’ Calder had said with a grimace. ‘They don’t like what the Kadoshim are up to, or the Ben-Elim’s rules; fair enough,’ Calder said, ‘but they’ll not come up here and act like there are no rules at all.’
Drem pulled his breeches and boots on, wincing as muscles complained and bruises throbbed. His nose was swollen from where he’d been headbutted, and he was still blowing thick clots of blood from it.
This’d better be good, he grumbled to himself as he went in search of his da.
Drem found him sitting on the steps of their cabin, looking out onto the courtyard as dawn leached into the world. His da had been quiet, impenetrably so since the fight. He’d been troubled and withdrawn before that, thinking on the lump of black rock that he’d buried in the paddock, but since the fight Drem had felt as if he was living on his own.
‘You all right, Da?’ Drem said as he sat down beside him, shivering as a cold wind clawed his skin. His da just pointed into the distance, into the darkness. Drem frowned. There was a light, flickering small and bright in the ink-black of night.
‘What?’ Drem whispered. ‘Is that a fire? In the Bonefells?’
‘Would have to be a big fire,’ his da said, a frown turning his face into a place of deep-shadowed valleys.
‘Don’t like the look of that,’ Drem muttered. Absently, he pressed fingers to his neck, found the soothing rhythm of his pulse.
‘And look, there,’ Olin said, twisting to point to the southwest. There was another pinprick of light, smaller and fainter than the first.
They turned back and watched the closer flame in silence as dawn pushed back the night, shadows solidifying, then slowly dissolving as darkness retreated before light, the fire up in the Bonefells dimming with the coming of the sun in a grey, cloud-bloated sky.
Looks like snow, Drem thought, his breath misting.
‘All my life I’ve tried to protect you,’ his da said, breaking the silence. ‘Ever since your mam . . .’ A muscle in his jaw twitched and he pinched his nose. ‘I swore to keep you from harm. To keep you from war, from the evil that men do. Not just men – other things.’
Aye, you’ve watched over me every step. But what is it you’re so scared of? What is it you’re protecting me from? What does ‘other things’ mean?