A Dark Sacrifice Read online

  The giants began to disperse, heading off in several directions: some toward the woods, some toward the mouth of the vale. One of them, with an aspect wilder and keener, and his sapphire hair caught up in a great horse’s-tail by an iron ring, heaved up his war hammer and proceeded to reduce a pile of boulders into tiny fragments, roaring hugely all the while. So far as Kivik could see, his action served no other purpose than to flaunt his strength.

  “And that one?” he asked. Merely to look into those eyes was like sinking into a well of dark water, wickedly cold and deep.

  “A brute and a bully. I’ve seen him come to blows with several of the others. See, now, how the old one snarls and shakes his head, as though rebuking the braggart for his swagger?”

  Kivik would have preferred to refuse the obvious conclusion but it clamored for his attention anyway. It gave him an odd sinking feeling to think of the giants as distinct personalities, with friendships and rivalries, antipathies and loyalties.

  They were an ancient, mysterious race, the ice giants. Skørnhäär, that was an old name for them—whether Eisenlondish or some other foreign tongue Kivik did not know—a difficult word to get the mouth around. For years almost past counting there had been very little reason to call them anything, everyone believing they had been driven beyond the boundaries of the world ages past by southern wizards, or else bespelled into an endless slumber. He wondered if someone would make a new word for them now they had returned, and how they named themselves in their own language. In no way akin to humans, according to all the old accounts they were self-aware, rational, emotional, and therefore capable of barbarisms unknown to the animal kingdoms.

  The silence on the wall turned prickly with things unsaid. “You don’t care to think of them being like us in any way,” Skerry observed wisely.

  “Do you?”

  His cousin thought for a moment, then grunted a negative. Kivik could almost read his mind: as giants, the creatures were formidable; as Men, they were monstrous.

  “Like or unlike, they will probably grind our bones for bread readily enough,” he said glumly, “if they ever find a way to breach these walls.”

  Skerry did not answer, but the sky flung down a stinging spatter of snow that burned where it touched bare skin.

  Once everyone had accomplished the move indoors, a giddy enthusiasm broke out. Inside the keep and the adjoining towers, some of the braver souls took the ragged banners and tapestries off the walls, hanging them inside doorways and across shuttered windows to keep out drafts. Inspired by the broad marble fireplaces and deep circular fire pits, they started felling trees in the gardens and courtyards, where they had barely found the courage to gather deadfall before, until every room where people congregated had its own roaring fire. Farmwives and herdsmen brought their livestock in with them. Soon, sheep and goats were seen wandering in the splendid high halls; geese, chickens, and other small fowl mingled with the human inhabitants in the snugger antechambers, wardrobes, and closets.

  An odd winter-holiday atmosphere began to spread, even though it was the wrong time of year, even though no one had anything to celebrate. Yet the merriment was infectious. What if they were on short rations and often went hungry? They had shelter, fires, fellowship; they were surrounded by the wonders of a magical, long-ago age. No one was willing to believe that the food might run out entirely before help arrived.

  And perhaps, Kivik told himself with a thin smile, there was a kind of wisdom in making the most of the fires and comfortable surroundings while they still could. Who could predict how long this peaceful interlude would last? He thought of the giants and were-bears outside the walls, he thought of the Eisenlonders—they were coming, and no amount of optimism among the refugees and camp followers could banish his certainty of that.

  So while the halls resounded with a cheerful stir of activity and the people made merry with the little they had, the Prince made certain that his men continued to keep a careful watch from the battlements, and that those in the barracks spent a large portion of each day in mock swordfights, sketching out plans of the outer fortifications on bits of parchment, and otherwise preparing for the inevitable siege.

  But there was someone at Tirfang who shared in none of the gaiety, someone who wandered through the cursed fortress like one in a bad dream.

  A strange mood was on the princess Winloki, an intimation of evil that grew each day. She was always starting at noises or at scurrying shadows that nobody else heard or saw, and things seemed to be constantly, inexplicably going awry, though none but she recognized a steadily worsening pattern: Food stores spoiled despite the cold. Wounds went bad that had seemed to be healing. Small objects disappeared the moment she turned her back on them.

  Caught between fear and frustration—and angry because of the fear—she even found herself quarreling with the oldest and most experienced healers, Syvi and Thyra.

  “We should use only the simples and potions we brought with us from Lückenbörg,” she cried out one day. “Everything we brew here turns to venom!”

  Startled by her outburst, Thyra dropped a glass phial, which shattered on the hard stone floor. “You acccuse me of poisoning our patients, Princess?”

  “Not you—the Old Fortress.” Yet Winloki could see that her words were utterly wasted. There was puzzlement and disbelief on the older woman’s face—Thyra, who not many days past had been as terrified as anyone of entering the buildings.

  Wherever Winloki went, she was always aware of some lingering residue of monstrous passions, ancient cruelties, and blackest sorceries. Yet altogether worse, because more palpable and encroaching, were the shadows: shadows milling about, clawing their way up the walls, shadows clinging to doorways and windowsills or hanging from the lofty ceilings like giant bats. Sometimes, where the shadows were deepest, there was a glint of blood-red eyes.

  At times she was convinced that she was breathing in shadows. As the days passed, she began to feel starved for light, parched with the lack of it, as though she could never get a sufficiency. The great hearth fires seemed weak and anemic in the presence of her need, she felt so steeped in shadows. When that need was greatest, she took brisk walks through the courtyards, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sun struggling through the clouds. If it chanced to break through she lifted her face, letting the light beat against her skin, drinking it in.

  In a pond in the courtyard a child had fallen through the ice and very nearly drowned. He said that a water nixie had pulled him down. But when his grandfather and another man plumbed the pool (it was not, after all, very deep), all that they found was pebbles, mud, and the roots of water lilies. Nevertheless, Winloki was inclined to credit the nixie.

  She did what she could to warn the others of their peril, cautiously at first to avoid starting a panic, and then more directly. Every hint, every warning was received with polite incredulity. Even Skerry, who ought to have believed her—knowing the peculiar intuitions of which she was sometimes capable—even he returned nothing but the same infuriating silence he had used since they were children to outlast her more determined efforts to have her own way.

  But can’t you see? she wanted to shout at him, folding her arms across her chest as if to contain all the anxiety and frustration brewing inside of her. Don’t you know that this is different?

  He did not and would not. In truth, she sometimes wondered how she could ever have pledged herself to marry a man capable of such determined blindness. Then he smiled at her and brushed his fingers across her face, and she knew that even though he did not believe a word she said—even though he thought her whimsical, unreasonable, possibly delusional—he remained steadfast in his devotion, which was either heroic or heroically stupid. She preferred to think the former.

  But none of this brought Winloki any closer to being heard, much less heeded. On the day she realized that the refugees were beginning to make use of the fortress’s perilous treasures—ploughmen eating moldy bread off dishes made of silver and onyx, their da
ughters wearing combs of opal and ivory in their hair—she very nearly gave up trying.

  She spent too many hours lying sleepless in her makeshift bed, listening to a black wind that always seemed to be blowing during the brief hours of twilight and darkness. And when she did sleep, tales told by her nursemaids came back to haunt her, until her dreams became a web of nursery-tale horrors: golden apples spiked with venom; innocent stepmothers forced to dance themselves to death in red-hot iron slippers; the slimy amphibious suitor who changed into something infinitely worse once he was admitted to the maiden’s bedchamber. A silver spinning wheel shone in the dark behind her eyes; it went round and round like a millstone grinding corn, but it was crystals of ice that came out of the mill and fine blowing snow.

  Most confusing was the presence of two women who came to her often as she dreamed, out of no tale that she could remember, yet strangely familiar. They were alike in form and feature, yet so different in expression, one mild, one fierce, that she never had difficulty telling them apart. The first wore stars in her sunset hair; the other a diadem of moons. Each seemed to require something of Winloki, a word or a deed or an answer of terrible significance—though sleeping or waking the Princess could never quite puzzle out what that something might be.

  And so it went, day after day and night after night. If others would not see the truth, it was up to her to take steps to protect them. While daylight lasted, she gabbled half-remembered charms she had picked up over the years from servants at the Heldenhof. She hunted up bits of charcoal in the fireplaces and fire pits, and used them to scribble runes on thresholds and windowsills. Rüadin for rowan, a specific against witchcraft. Tysa for mint, often used in healing. Tiné. Dair.

  “Only it’s no use,” she cried out in a sudden fit of nerves, flinging down her piece of charred wood. “These aren’t even Wizard’s Runes, just the names of plants.” It was no use. She had only the dimmest idea of what she was doing, that and a natural gift which had never been trained.

  Hopeless, she thought, glaring down at her broken fingernails, flexing her thin, charcoal-smudged fingers, hopeless and worthless. What use was it to see, if having seen you could still do nothing? The magical arts had been declining in Skyrra for more than a hundred years, ever since the north severed ties with the south. Even healers were not what they had once been, their gifts steadily diminishing, and the indigenous runestone readers had all but disappeared. So much had been lost, so much knowledge, so much skill, and yet the enemy Eisenlonders kept all their black arts.

  Too late, the shadows whispered, in a deep, throaty murmur coming from a place just over her shoulder. Already too late; they are almost here.

  Winloki clapped her hands over her ears, but it did no good. The whispers only continued.

  5

  The day everything changed began with an excited milling down among the beast-men and Skørnhäär, who had already gathered in numbers much greater than usual outside the gates. Giants trumpeted to each other across the valley. White bears rose up on their haunches and sniffed the air. A snarling and a growling started up, so terrific as to freeze the blood of the men stationed on the outer fortifications.

  Then one man with keener eyes than the rest spotted, very small in the distance but still unmistakable, the vanguard of an Eisenlonder army, their bronze armor shining dully in the weak sunlight, their wolf’s-head banners snapping in the wind.

  Word spread very swiftly through the fortress. Messengers went running to the barracks, to Kivik’s apartments, and to the armory. Meanwhile, a hum of excitement travelled even faster than the messengers could sprint; before very long the news was being gabbled from person to person among the refugees and camp followers.

  Skerry first learned what was afoot when a young guard came tumbling down a stone staircase by one of the gatehouses, almost knocking him over, so eager he was to spread the word: “The enemy has been sighted. They are almost here.”

  He helped the youth to right himself, asked a few sharp questions, and sent the boy on. Then he went off with a great swinging stride through successive gateways and yards, then into the keep, arriving at the quarters he shared with Kivik only to discover that his cousin was already gone.

  The Prince had been there, only moments before, a bewildered Deor told him, but after issuing a great many rapid orders he had disappeared. Skerry was not yet ready to give up the search. Moreover, he had an idea where Kivik might be found: the same place that he would have gone in his kinsman’s place.

  Hastening down a hallway near the infirmary, he met Winloki hurrying along in the opposite direction. “Something terrible has happened. All day long, I’ve had a presentiment. And the shadows—the shadows have been practically in a frenzy.”

  “Nothing has happened that we haven’t been expecting,” he told her soothingly. “The Eisenlonders are coming, but we have no reason to suppose they’ll attack immediately, not after a long march through the mountains. Even when they do, it’s likely to be a long siege.”

  Casting a harried look back over her shoulder, Winloki continued on her way, leaving Skerry to go his.

  He climbed a spiralling staircase in one of the towers, up to a breezy, roofless chamber at the top that offered an unobstructed view of the entire valley. As he had expected, Kivik was already there at one of the tall windows, watching the forward edge of the Eisenlonder army: a dark mass moving slowly yet inexorably toward the Old Fortress.

  An hour later, they had still not seen the end of it. Horsemen and foot soldiers continued to flood into the valley. Those who had already arrived had set up a camp just out of arrow range—and a careful distance from their gigantic allies.

  “So many of them. How can there be so many?” Kivik finally spoke in a dull voice. “It seems that for every man we’ve killed this last year a dozen more spring up out of nowhere to take his place.”

  Skerry nodded grimly. “Whatever they say back at Lückenbörg, there were never such numbers in all of Eisenlonde. They must be hiring mercenaries; nothing else makes any sense.”

  “Mercenaries,” Kivik said bleakly. “Let us say that most of them are mercenaries, for the sake of argument. Then how have the petty lords and chieftains of Eisenlonde found the coin to hire so many? Are there gold mines in that gods-forsaken part of the world that nobody knew about?” He put his back up against the wall between the windows, folded his arms across his chest. “Or have they rich friends, friends who are somehow, for some unknown reason, our real enemies? Are the barbarians hiring mercenaries, or has someone bought them?”

  Skerry struggled to think of a logical answer. Slowly at first, ideas seemingly unrelated began to link up, to grow connections—finally creating a picture that, if it still eluded complete comprehension, at least made a coherent whole.

  “Perhaps not enemies of Skyrra,” he said. “Perhaps someone else’s enemies. People in a place where a child was born with such extraordinary gifts, it was decided to spirit her away for her own protection and entrust her to strangers in another country.”

  “Winloki.” Kivik caught his breath; then he nodded, one short, sharp movement of his head. “We both know, though it’s supposed to be a great secret, that she’s not truly our kin—nor even likely to be Skyrran, but of southern stock instead. And that ring, the one with the queer symbols that she wears sometimes, it’s no heirloom of our house.”

  In truth, there were many strange things about their young cousin-by-adoption: that she was capable of healings even the oldest, most experienced healers could never hope to accomplish; that she had other odd, unpredictable abilities even she did not understand. What they did not know, because they had never been told, were the exact circumstances surrounding her birth.

  “But who…” Kivik groped for words. “Who could be powerful enough, ruthless enough, to involve two countries in a bloody and senseless war, all because of a nineteen-year-old girl who doesn’t even know who she is?”

  Skerry shook his head. “Someone who does know,
only I can’t even hazard a guess who that could be.” Then his eyes went wide; he felt all of the blood drain out of his face. “Unless—unless it might be someone who keeps half of the world at war. Someone who has been sending out her armies and conquering other kingdoms for longer than either one of us has been alive. And all of it, they say, for mere vanity and greed!”

  “Phaôrax?” The very name seemed to darken the air, though it was a name seldom thought or spoken in the north. “But that’s so far away, it’s almost impossible to imagine such a distance.”

  It was an immense distance. The island where Ouriána, the self-styled Empress, self-styled goddess, ruled might as well have been on the moon or at the bottom of the sea, it seemed so far removed, so inaccessible. Skerry gave a little mirthless laugh, shaking off the thought. “We are building theories out of sand, snatching fantasies out of the air. It’s too incredible.”

  But then another thought struck him. “Whether or not any of this could possibly be true, I think it wisest to say nothing to Winloki. She’s been so odd lately, so skittish.” He did not mention meeting her near the infirmary, or what she had said then; it was all of a piece, anyway, with the way she had been behaving for so many days. “If she took it into her head that she endangers the rest of us just by being here, she might do something reckless, something foolhardy.”

  Unfortunately, they both knew that where Winloki was concerned, that possibility always existed, even under ordinary circumstances. She had a good heart, but she was headstrong and prone to act on impulse. On the other hand, neither was she a fool.

  “Although there is no saying that she won’t eventually make some of the same guesses we have,” Skerry continued. “She may have done so already, which would certainly account for her extraordinary behavior.” His fingers curled, reflexively, into a fist.

  Kivik nodded glumly. “With that in mind, I will assign guards to watch her for her own protection.” His scowl deepened. “In fact, I will double—no, triple—the number she had on the journey here, just to be safe.”