Fritha laughed at that, making her wince again.
‘What do you think that fire is?’ she asked.
‘Don’t know,’ Drem answered. ‘But we’ll find out. And it had better be soon.’ He looked up, the pale glow of daylight shining in fractured beams through the canopy of pine needles above.
‘What’s wrong?’ Fritha asked.
‘It’s almost highsun,’ he said with a shrug. ‘If we don’t find whatever it is we’re searching for soon, we’ll be looking at staying a night out under the stars.’
‘So?’ Fritha said. ‘We’ve furs and blankets. Enough bodies here to keep warm if it gets that cold.’ She paused, looked at him a long moment. He felt his neck flush red again, though he still wasn’t sure why. He saw that shadow of a smile ghost Fritha’s lips.
So speaks a southerner, he thought. No one who’s tasted a winter in the north would say such a thing.
Something brushed against his face, cold. He blinked, saw a snowflake drift lazily down to the ground, others following, like silent feathers.
‘The Bonefells are not the place you want to be sleeping come Crow’s Moon,’ Drem said.
‘Why? Winter is harsh this far north, I imagine. But it’s not upon us yet.’ She looked at the snowflakes floating about her and shrugged. ‘A little snow. It’s not a blizzard, and we’re only half a day’s journey from our holds.’
Not a blizzard yet, he corrected, knowing how quickly winter’s caress could turn into a fist.
‘I wasn’t talking about the snow,’ Drem said. ‘I was talking about what the snow drives south. Those things that travel out of the north to escape the worst of it. We saw a giant bear, a little west of here; must have come south for a reason. Storms and blizzards are coming.’ As if to prove his point, a snowflake landed on his nose. It felt good as it melted, a momentary easing of the pulsing throb where his nose had been broken.
‘A bear.’ Fritha shrugged.
‘And other things. Wolven packs,’ Drem said, shivering at the memory of last winter. ‘And bats.’
‘Bats?’
‘Aye.’
‘I’ve heard tales,’ Fritha said, a seed of doubt creeping into her voice.
‘These are as big as a shield and will suck the blood right out of a person, like they’re a skin of mead.’ Drem said.
‘Thought they were just tall tales,’ Fritha muttered.
‘No. I’ve seen what they can do.’
For the first time Fritha didn’t look so confident. She eyed the trees suspiciously.
‘Best be home before nightfall, then,’ she said.
‘That’d be best,’ Drem agreed. ‘I don’t think they’ve come this far south, yet. But I’d rather not put it to the test.’
‘Aye.’
They spilt out of the woodland onto an open strip of land, a few hundred paces ahead the slope levelled off. The snow was starting to fall more heavily, the wind swirling it in sweeping eddies. Drem glimpsed his da at the head of the column, saw him ride over the slope onto level ground, Ulf and Calder with him, saw them rein their mounts in and stop, still as the boulders gouged into the land about them.
Drem joined them, their party spread into a loose line along a ridged plateau. The burned-out remains of a huge bonfire lay before them, black and charred, the wind snatching flakes of ash and mixing them with the snow, a dance of black and white. A thin line of smoke still curled from the fire’s cooling heart, the lingering glow of a dying ember at its root.
Drem’s eyes didn’t linger on the bonfire. A body lay spread across a boulder only a dozen paces from the fire. His belly had been slashed open, a ragged mess of torn flesh, his guts pooled around his boots like blue-coiled rope.
Olin was at the man’s side, Ulf and Calder a few heartbeats behind him. Drem dismounted and went to help, though there wasn’t much he could do. As he drew closer he saw the dead man was old, wisps of white hair frozen to the granite boulder, his face twisted in a grimace of terror and agony. Olin was on one knee beside him, lifting the tatters of his torn clothing to look at the shredded ruin of his abdomen.
‘It’s Old Bodil,’ Calder said, hanging his head.
‘What happened here?’ Fritha asked, looking from the bonfire to the frozen corpse.
‘I reckon Bodil might have met your bear,’ Ulf said to Olin.
Drem looked at the ground, already covered in a thin layer of snow. He scraped some away and stamped on the ground beneath, sending a jolt up through his heel into his leg.
Ground’s frozen solid.
He still would have expected to see some sign of the bear’s presence, the memory of its great bulk vivid in his mind, but the snow was covering all, and there was little point in looking: Old Bodil’s wounds told the tale clearly enough.
‘Made the fire to scare the beast off,’ Calder said, looking from the corpse to the bonfire.
Drem felt himself nodding. That was a tactic that he and his da had used before, against wolven, not bears, but it worked much the same, as long as you kept the fire burning all night.
Didn’t work for Old Bodil, though.
‘We should raise a cairn over him,’ Fritha said.
‘Aye,’ agreed Olin, still checking over Bodil’s wounds.
‘Not if we want to be by our hearths by nightfall,’ Ulf said. ‘Won’t be digging any rocks out of this.’ He dug a heel into the ice-bitten ground.
‘Can’t leave him to be gnawed at,’ Calder muttered.
‘No. A pyre,’ Ulf said. ‘And quick about it.’
It didn’t take them long to gather more dead wood. Drem helped his da, Ulf and a few others carry the frozen corpse to the bonfire. Then flint and tinder were being struck, flames catching in the dry wood despite the falling snow, and soon hungry flames were clawing at the sky, the snow hissing and steaming.
They rode back to their homes in silence, Bodil’s pyre roaring and belching flame and smoke behind them. Drem didn’t like the smell: flesh sizzling and charring.
Fritha tried to talk to him as they rode through the trees, eerily silent as the snow fell thicker, but he was distracted, preoccupied with his thoughts. He had that anxious feeling he had in his belly when he felt something was wrong, tingling in his blood, all the way to his fingertips. An inexplicable dread.
A bonfire to hold back a bear, maybe, but what about the other fire we saw, in the distance, far to the southwest?
It was a question he wanted answered, but something else was foremost in Drem’s mind. He was thinking on the feel of Bodil’s corpse in his hands as he’d carried the dead man to his pyre, and the scar he’d seen on Bodil’s wrist when Ulf had tripped.
No, not a scar. A fresh wound. As if he’d been bound at the wrist and struggled to break free, like an animal in a wire trap.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
RIV