When the cold had set that night and the fires were lit and all the men and women dressed in heavy furs, the Iron Bears produced the spoils of their hunts: twelve white rabbits, the scavenged haunches of a fire-aurochs, three antlered bucks, and the twisted remains of a doe with five legs. The rabbits and the aurochs and bucks were spread amongst all the tribes equally without regard to rank or station, but the Moonchildren refused to touch the doe, which they called abomination. “You would do well to remain far away from such foul meats,” a woman of the Moonchildren said, one hand upon her pregnant belly. “The flesh of abominations makes monsters of men and gods alike. It is well known in our country.”
“We’re not in your country anymore, Neri,” jeered a reedy man of the Wenderways, wearing a lopsided grin.
“Aye, and we’re not in yours neither Eegin, and don’t you take that tone with me.” Her voice was amused, but there was a hint of steel in it too.
As they began to sup upon the gains of the hunt, the sky thundered distantly with the promise of future fury. All knew that a wet, miserable night was to follow; none dared ruin their dinners by speaking of the matter. Though their camp had been made in the forests amidst a clearing in the soldier pines, the shade of trees and cloth tents would not keep the icy winds from piercing through their meager protection. Amidst the tribes, ten fires in ten iron braziers burned bravely against the night and the cold, ruffled occasionally by the fingers of the north wind sweeping down from the sky. The smoke rose and rose in tall columns high into the air until they seemed to mingle with the storm clouds.
The rangers stood at the flanks of the camp with eyes unblinking, tall and silent like the shades of death. By day and by night they would go out in all directions, riding parallel to the march of the host to scout the lands and keep them clear of enemies, man or beast. The horns clasped at their belts were pewter, and sounded like squealing boars when they rang. In their hands were wicked curved swords that gleamed like yellow moons in the firelight. Once—and only once—Minna had seen those blades in action, cutting swiftly through the flesh and bone and sinew of an unruly Iron Bear, who had made the unwise decision to settle a blood feud with a Stone Thrush in front of a ranger. One time was enough for such a sight; he avoided the approach of rangers since.
A strong arm thumped Minna’s shoulder, and a gust of hearty laughter boomed from behind him. Augett, he thought when he saw the face, but that was not right, Augett was of a quieter sort than this man.
“Harreg,” he said. It was as much a greeting as it was a question.
“The very same,” came the answer, with a grin of animal teeth. The face that greeted him was only twenty-five, a mere three years older than him, but worn and weathered beyond its years. A long mop of straw-dry hair sat atop his furrowed forehead, and over his barrel chest he wore a deerskin jerkin, clasped with a bronze brooch of a snarling wolf, the symbol of his tribe, Bonefang. “Augett let me wear his skin tonight. A good lad, knows when to listen t’ his father.”
Minna had heard of this arrangement the father and son had. Some foul disease Harreg had caught years ago was eating his belly from the inside. His warg son let him clamber into his skull on occasion to be free from the pain, while the son would wear the father’s skin and bear the anguish turning his stomach to soup.
“You are waiting to see the red comet too? The star-seers say this one will not be seen for another hundred years.”
Harreg’s eyes widened with mirth before he burst out in a gale of laughter. A boom echoed in the sky, thundering in common jest. “Stargazing? Piss on that. I come to hunt.”
From all that he knew of the man, Harreg did not seem one for caution. “In the nighttime? Your game is more like to see you than you it.”
“Not this game. They say these woods harbor a fell beast, a hornedwyrm, one of them monsters from the widows’ tales. Poor eyes, that one ‘as, so blind in the dark they say it does not dare leave its oaken hollow for fear of being lost.” He leaned in closer, his voice growing soft and conspiratorial. “The Moonchildren say its flesh holds strange powers. I intend to find the truth of that.”
Minna shrugged. “They also say ‘Never trust an owl after dawn, or a crow after dusk,’ and that if you sneeze under an elm you will grow berries for ears. The Moonchildren say many odd things.”
“Hrmm.” Harreg straightened.
“And who’s to say they don’t have the truth of it?” Minna added quickly. “I once heard of a man with berries for ears. He was sad about it at first, but he got so hungry that he started nibbling on them one by one. They were gone by noon.”
Harreg remained silent, unmoved. “And what sort of powers did they speak of anyway?” asked Minna.
Harreg fingered at the bronze ax at his hip, his eyes fixed deep and stern as if on some unseen target. “I best be going. The winds are rising, and soon comes the storm.”
“I wish you good fortune,” Minna said measuredly.
“Ah, piss on luck. Harreg will find the beastie, just you see.” Harreg turned his cloak and set off into the night.
* * *
Minna awoke from unquiet dreams with his forehead beaded in sweat. I should go back to bed, he thought. The night will be long, and cold, and I am weary already from the long day. Instead, he found himself taking the sheet off himself, and his feet taking him elsewhere.
Minna found Augett where he knew he would: in his tent, groaning, the weight of his bearish body set upon so many furs and pillows. One hairy hand was clutched to his belly, the other gripping a bladder of wine, tight as if it were the last tether to life itself. Augett’s — Harreg’s — hoar-and-pepper beard glinted with fat wet drops of wine, dark as blood in the half-light.
As Minna parted open the aperture into the tent, a shaft of pale moonlight crept up one half of Augett’s face, his stained-ruby lips opening slowly in recognition. “Minna,” he said.
“Aye.” He did not know Minna, not truly, yet it was hard not to learn the names of those in the camp when they ate and traveled as one. “Your father’s gone hunting in your skin, did you know?”
“I did.” Augett’s voice was no more than a low whisper, yet it carried with the same strength and timbre that it had when he was in his own body. “A fool thing. On such a night as this. I could never deny him anything, could I?”
“Did he tell you what he was searching for?” piped up a tinny voice from the corner. A small shadow stirred at the edge of Augett’s tent, unfurling itself taller and taller. It looked to be the silhouette of a girl. As the shade stepped into the penumbral light of the tent, he saw that it was Augett’s little sister, Ayla, a tall skinny thing with knobble-knees and long loose hair that hung about her big ears. She peered at him out of the dark with wide owlish eyes. “Did he tell you why he needed to go?”
“A hornedwyrm was what he was looking for. Known to these woods, he claimed, he said that its flesh held power of some sort.”
Augett muttered an oath. “He didn’t mention that. Didn’t care to tell me, knew I’d object. Well, it’s my body, why should he be allowed to put it in harm’s way?”
Ayla looked sympathetically. “You know how Papa gets, Auggie.”
“Only too well.”
Minna started to edge out of the tent. “Only came by to tell you. Just thought you ought to know.”
Ayla raised a hand to stop him. “Wait. Please stay.” She turned to Augett, put a bony hand on his hairy one. “Can you see where Papa is?”
Augett grunted an affirmative. He closed his eyes shut tight. When he opened them again, his eyes were hollow and glassy, as pale as milk. A brief breeze shuddered through the soft flaps of the tent. Augett was perfectly still. But not slack — every muscle in his body was taut and tense, like a panther in preparation for the pounce. “He is just beyond the brook,” he said, his eyes fluttering to normalcy. At the foot of that tall hill due west, getting a vantage of the woods.”
“He’s not far,” said Ayla. “We can still make after him.”
“And I wish you the best of fortunes in that endeavor,” said Minna, attempting his second escape.
It was Augett this time that called for him. “Wait, Minna,” he croaked.
“These woods are dangerous. What my father does is folly, but he is driven by fear of pain and desperation. And if he should die in these woods…I will be stuck in this body forever.”
“Can you not re-enter your own body through force?”
Augett shook his head. “I can see through his eyes, but I cannot pilot the limbs he pilots. To do that, I would have to wrest it from him. I dare not risk it; that could kill the both of us. You will have to seek him out, keep him safe.”
Minna looked up at him, then down at himself. His tent was so warm, his bed so soft, compared to the cold night. “Alright,” he huffed.
“I’m coming,” Ayla said. “I have the warger’s gift too. I can track my father through those woods.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I wasn’t going to say no.”
Augett looked up with concern, but he didn’t have the strength to argue with his sister. With titanic strength, Augett heaved himself atop his mound of pillows. “Be safe,” he said to them.
* * *
They set out together, the two of them, the rain a light drizzle that nipped at their ears. As they went deeper into the woods, tracing the steps from which Minna saw Harreg enter the woods, the long grasses brushed against the hems of their cloaks.
“And so that’s how I made this brooch,” Ayla continued without pause. She had been talking ever since they had started from the tent; Minna wondered whether she had taken a breath in the past ten minutes. This one talks enough for her and her brother, he thought. The branches reached down all around them as if trying to keep them from plunging deeper, their outlines lit by the pale luminescence of the full moon.
“Ayla,” Minna interjected, when she finally stopped to find her breath, “tell me about your father.”
“What’s there to know?”
“Is it true he’s getting worse?”
“Papa has been growing bolder of late,” Ayla admitted, as she hopped over the gnarled root of a burled spruce tree. “He’s had this curse for a while, but it used to not be so bad. The worse his condition grows, the more reckless he is in wearing Augett. He’s been like this ever since Godsgrief.”
“But that was two full moons ago.”
“Uh-huh.”
Godsgrief had been where the Iron Bears and Moonchildren and Stone Thrushes and the rest of the tribes of their detachment had separated from the main host. Too many mouths and not enough food, they had been told. The main host was 20,000 in number, a grand confederation of over a hundred tribes all united in search for better lands, for Omeshta, fleeing the violence of the Sarmetians. Whatever food they hunted had gone first to the important tribes, the Merchippi and the Willows, whose numbers were large enough to cause issue if left unfed. They, on the other hand, were too small to matter. To the strong goes the victory, he thought bitterly. The forests had not enough food for the lot of them, nor the farms and smallholds they had raided on the exodus. If it was true that Harreg had been like this since Godsgrief, it was small wonder that Augett was so shrunken and reserved as he was.
“And what of your mother?”
She smiled without humor. “Still dead.”
“Ah. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It’s alright.”
“Did…did you know her.”
She shook her head. “Papa said she looked like me, but she might have looked like Olly the Trollslayer for all I’d know.”
They ducked under the low snapped branch of a poplar tree, its wet leaves grazing against his hair as he ducked.
“What will you do when you get to Omeshta?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “Never thought about it. So long as we are left in peace, I don’t much care. Watch out—”
She tripped on a root, stumbling with arms wide onto the ground. “I’m alright, I’m alright!” she announced, spitting out flecks of fallen leaves as she rose.
“To be honest,” she said when they were further on, her voice dropping to a low whisper, “Papa’s never been good to Augett. If something should happen…” Her voice broke. “If something should happen, I only want Augett to be well.”
She straightened and looked around, as if breaking from a trance. “Hmm,” she said, dropping her whisper. “Hmm…No no, don’t turn left, I saw through Papa’s eyes and he turned right at this burled oak. Right here. Yes. If the gods are kind, we’ll find him soon.”
As if on cue, the winds picked up in fury, and the clouds began to weep rain. It was never a good idea to tempt the gods. Minna sighed heavily, and Ayla pretended not to notice.
* * *
“That’s not right,” said Ayla, frowning at a silver stream that burbled at them in greeting. She looked up at Minna with wide eyes. No, he realized, hollow eyes. She’s seeing through her father’s sight. She blinked twice, her dark pupils returning to her, and looked up at him sheepishly. “Papa, er, didn’t cross this way. I’m not quite sure where he is, but it’s not close to here. We’ll have to turn back.”
And so they did, trudging through soil that had now become mud. Minna pulled his hood over his head. A trickle of rain crawled down his neck, itching like a spider down his back.
It soon became clear that they were lost.
I should be warm and asleep in my tent, Minna thought ruefully. Instead he was here, trudging through clod and muck and rain, through long dappled grasses that no doubt had stained his boots with mud by now, though in moonlight it all appeared as one hue. For what? For whom? These people meant little and less to him. In a week he would forget about them, damn their powers and their warging. Yet he could not walk away, could not hold back. It was all his own fault, he knew. If only I’d gone to Augett’s tent sooner. If only I’d never gotten involved. If only I’d had an extra leg of that doe, his stomach offered hungrily. A whole extra leg, made just for me, and what did I do? Follow some Moonchild’s bloody superstition and spurn it.
From above them, a caw pierced cacophonously through the night. A feathery shroud flapped noisily from the canopy above them, straight towards him. He cried out, swatting an arm before him. But it was not necessary. The raven flapped down beside the two of them, cawing in indignation at him.
“Augett!” said Ayla.
Minna blinked. “He can warg into animals? Why didn’t he do that before?”
She rolled her eyes. “He can’t stay in an animal mind for too long,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Even staying for an hour risks losing your mind to beastliness. Everyone knows that.”
The raven warbled in agreement, then hopped in front of them. He pecked at the ground twice, and took flight.
“He’s leading us to Papa,” Ayla said.
“I knew that,” Minna grumbled.
Augett led the way impatiently, having seemingly scouted the lands from overhead. The ground beneath them was getting more rocky and hilly, and coupled with the speed at which Augett expected them to keep pace, he found himself losing footing many a time. Never trust a crow after sunset, Minna thought. But this was a raven, not a crow. Did the gods care for such distinction?
The clouds had begun to part like a curtain, and through their interstices he could make out the stars. The forest appeared brighter now, the moonlight shining strong through the canopy. The rains had stopped, the distant thunder descending to an irregular growl. Tall into the sky the trees rose, standing long and thin and stern like sentinels in the night.
A muscle in Minna’s thigh ached with a sharp pang. The cramp rode up his leg slowly like a knot of stone, getting tighter and tighter with each step. He massaged his leg slowly, leaning against a tree as he did.
“Are you alright?” called out Ayla. She was only twenty paces away. He could catch up easily enough.
“Fine,” he called, waving her forward. “Only a minute.”
Augett cawed with impatience. “Come on, we’re almost there,” said Ayla. Minna felt a wet tickle on his nape. An orphan droplet of rain perhaps.
“You go ahead, I—”
“LOOK OUT!”
In half a heartbeat the world turned on its side. A long wet thing lashed against his neck, snaking down his arm and wrapping around his torso. In one fluid motion it jerked up, taking him with it up into the air, five feet, ten feet, twenty feet. He was dangling by his shoulders, his leather-shod feet were hammering against the tree, struggling against the thing around his body. One hand wrested against the tentacle, his fingers grappling for purchase between it and his body, until he heard a slick pop as his arm was loose. Suddenly he was falling, grasping madly for the trunk, the branches, anything to break his fall. The ground came up to meet him, and he felt something snap in his foot as it kissed the forest floor.
A skinny hand was on his shoulder, rousing him from stupor. “Are you okay?” asked Ayla.
“Fine,” he lied. His head was pounding. His arm was bleeding where the tentacle had touched it. He tried to get up, but the pain in his foot made him reconsider.
Something stirred in the trees. He scrambled away from the tree trunk with his hands, remembering himself. A long red tentacle slithered up the trunk, undulating like some wild snake edged with serrations snarled along its length. The hornedwyrm, he realized with a start, but where are its horns?
“Look,” whispered Ayla, pointing to a burl on the tree about thirty feet from the ground, half-shrouded in leaves and darkness. It appeared completely ordinary.
“I don’t—” Minna began, but he stopped himself. From the mass, he saw, rose jagged prominences, like teeth that snarled against the night. It was no burl.
It was the body of the hornedwyrm.
The beast’s body was furled and involute, half-nestled in a hollow of the tree. Its chitinous dark shell was covered in spines that sprouted all over, lobstered into three segments. The sinuous red filament that sprouted from its shell and wrapped down the tree was not its body: it was the hornedwyrm’s tongue. The thread-like tongue lolled up and down the tree in pulsating waves, blindly groping for him in the night. In place of sight, the hornedwyrn used its long tongue to find its way through the night.
“Boy,” roared a voice behind him. He turned to see a hulking wet figure with an ax in his hands, chest heaving with exertion. “Trying to steal my beastie from me, are ya?” No, he tried to say, Harreg, I wasn’t, but his head was still swimming with pain.
Harreg lunged at him with his ax. “Stop!” shouted Ayla. Minna rolled to the side, his foot smashing awkwardly against another trunk. The ax lodged itself in the wood of the tree. Augett scrawked with terror.
As if a monstrous god reaching from its heaven, the long tongue of the hornedwyrm descended for its second foray, wrapping itself around the head of the ax. Harreg snarled at the thing, pounding against its snaking red tongue.
He wrenched a paw-like hand in the interstice between the ax head and the hornedwyrm’s tongue. With savage animal strength he pulled the ax free of the tree with one hand. “Ha!” he shouted triumphantly. But the wyrm seized blindly at his other hand. It began to pull him up by his arm, its grip around him coiling and tightening as Harreg dangled by one arm like a ragdoll in the hands of a petulant child. Wriggling free was fruitless; the wyrm had a much better grip of Harreg than it had had of Minna.
The raven flapped over to him, and crooned over his ankle. Scrawk? it intoned. “It’s bad,” Minna confirmed. “I don’t think I can walk.”
A flash cut through the night, a wet squelch following soon after. Harreg fell to the ground, having severed the tongue of the hornedwyrm with one fell swoop of his ax. It flopped at his dazed feet, a long wet coil of muscle, as the shriek of the beast pierced through the night.
Lying on the damp forest floor, he turned to glare at Minna. His eyes were black beads glinting with malice. “Mine I say, and don’t dare come near it. Did ye think ye’d take my cure away from me?”
“We were only trying to find you—.”
“NINE YEARS,” he bellowed. “Nine years I lived with the scourge in my belly, eating me from the inside. I’ll not have you take away my one chance at an antidote.” With bear-like strength he rose. Minna, still on the ground, rose as well, but as soon as he stood on his foot he felt faint, the world swimming in his vision. “We can still make it back to camp—” The first punch took him square in the jaw. The second got him in the ribs, bones cracking beneath Harreg’s fists. Minna gasped out for air, but the pain that wracked him then was too much.
A flurry of feathers flapped through the air as the raven-form of Augett lunged at Harreg’s face, his slick dark feathers limning a pale ghastly outline in the light of the moon. Harreg swatted at the raven with his broad arms, but each time the raven would duck and return, slashing at Harreg’s face with his talons. Yet there was a reservedness to Augett’s aggression. He’s trying not to hurt him, Minna realized.
Of course not. Idiot. That’s his own face he’s attacking. Not for the first time that night, he cursed himself for getting involved in this entire thing. This damn affair was too bloody confusing.
The world took on a strange ruddy hue. He wondered if it was the pain clouding his sight, but Ayla saw it too. “Look,” she said, pointing to the sky.
Like a gash in the sky, a blood-red tail spilled across the stars, fiery and vivid and bright as the moon. The red comet. It was in full view now, no longer obscured by the clouds. It illuminated the sky in matching finery, the dark murmuring shadows of the trees red and regal against the fearsome palette. The whole forest seemed to breathe in awe at the sight of it.
But Harreg and Augett did not notice it. Beneath the red pale sky, beneath the comet that cut through it like a scar, a man and a raven tumbled in the mud. Harreg reached for his ax, and swung it about his head. The raven ducked to the right, then swooped in. Harreg swung again, this time arcing his swing upwards in a savage thrust. Again Augett ducked. The third time he was not so lucky; the thrust caught him in the wing, hacking it clean off. A shriek echoed through the forest.
The bird flapped lamely. It looked up at the comet with a strange calm. With the strength of its remaining wing, it drew up its strength and hopped onto Harreg’s face. The raven began to savage his eyes with its beak, talons digging deep runnels into his cheeks. Harreg shook around violently, spinning and slashing and grabbing at the body of the raven, but the raven refused to let go.
The ax thumped to the floor. With impossible strength Harreg pulled with both hands at the raven, fresh streams of blood trickling down his cheeks. He threw the bird at his feet. The raven looked up dazed, with hollow eyes. It looked up at Harreg, now blinded, and uttered a small quork. The great boot of Harreg came down like the smiting of a god, and the raven was dead.
The rush of energy Minna had felt after panic was starting to fade as the blood in his temples pounded with ever-greater intensity. The pain in his chest grew greater with every second, sharp-daggered agonies pressing closer with every breath. He could hear horns in the distance. That’s funny, he thought. They sound like squealing boars. And then the world went black.
* * *
He awoke in a tent, his mouth tasting of ash and burnt meat. Light spilled through the tent curtains in soft rivulets, like a bugle song calling him to wakefulness. When he arose without a whimper of pain, he thought he had dreamt the last night, until he saw the scars on his arm where the hornedwyrm had sliced him.
Outside the world was dawn. The tents were in a clearing in the woods, the same place the Iron Bears and the Stone Thrushes and all the rest had encamped last night, and supped on fire-aurochs and rabbit stew. His stomach grumbled at the thought. But instead of a camp of hundreds, only four tents remained. The rest were gone, another day on the march to Omeshta.
Ayla was waiting for him. She sat on the ground around a low fire, finishing the last of her salted aurochs. To her right sat a ranger with bushy eyebrows and a mustache sopping wet with stew, a curved sword strapped to his back. The horns, he recalled. The rangers came after us, found us.
“I owe you my life, sir,” he said.
The ranger looked up at him through his beetled brows. “Yes, yes, all well and good. I’ll tell you wha’. Sooner we get back to the main host, the sooner I’ll consider the debt repaid.”
“My life for your time. That sounds like a bargain to me.”
He turned to Ayla. “Thank you, too.”
Ayla shrugged.
“Where’s the others?”
“Papa’s dead.” Her voice sounded like dried tears. Her expression was unplaceable, only characterizable by what it was not: she was not sad of it, he realized. “Sesrag here killed him to save you.”
“Oh.” There was nothing else he could say to that. “And Augett…?” He trailed off. The squelch of the raven’s body under the boot of Harreg still echoed in his ears.
“Augett is alive,” she affirmed. “He warged back before Papa killed that poor bird. Sesrag is of the Moonchildren, and knows of the old ways. He was able to use the tongue of the Hornedwyrm to heal him, and you.”
Sesrag shrugged. “A foul art, but one well known in our country. The tongue has antidotal properties that can only be activated through blood sacrifice. The death of your Harreg gave me the means to do that. The vessel, once used, becomes shriveled and shattered. But the sacrifice requires a live body, flush with beating blood, not a dead one like your Harreg’s.” A blood sacrifice. Abomination, Minna recalled.
“So my scars—”
“Are healed, thanks to me.” He gave a mock bow. Two droplets of stew collected on either side of his drooping mustache, and dripped to the ground.
“Augett is well,” Ayla said again, her eyes fixed on a point behind Minna’s head. “Healed by the wyrm tongue. But we had to burn Augett’s body when we killed Papa. Things are…Augett is…he’s different now.”
A shadow fell over Minna. He turned, and saw a figure broad as a bear. The face that greeted him was an old one, world-worn and weary, yet its eyes shone with the vitality of youth. Faint scars slashed across the man’s cheeks and eyelids, and across his broad chest he wore a slashed brooch and a pendant. Harreg, he thought when he registered the face, but that was not right. “Augett.”
A weak grin lit up Augett’s new face. “The very same.”