Elysia, Mother of Mercy, I am weary of cold, he thought, then dragged his attention back to the matter at hand.
“So what you are saying, man, is that we are winning,” growled Brindur. “That in a matter of a day or two we will have the wall down and our hands on the throats of those corpse-skinned creatures.” But as he talked, Brindur did not even look up from the sharpening of his sword. Since his son’s terrible death it seemed the only thing he did. Isgrimnur knew that look of disinterest and feared it, for he had seen it on other men and they had never lived long. “Already looking to the next world,” his father had said of another battle-mad warrior. What they had lost here in the Norn lands already was bad enough. Brindur was a man Isgrimnur relied on, had always been one of the most dependable of his thanes: but he did not know this Brindur at all.
“No, that is not what I’m saying!” Sludig’s voice was tight-strung with anger, but after receiving a pointed look from the duke, he took a breath and tried again, this time speaking directly to Isgrimnur as though Brindur and the others were not inside the tent with them. “What I am trying to say, my lord, is that we should not be winning this way. Yes, the Bear has all but knocked down the wall. Yes, the Norn archers in the tower have killed or wounded only a few of the men wielding the ram. But there were several hundred Norn fighters in the group that escaped from us at the ruins. Why do they not fight back as we knock down their wall? Such mildness does not signify. Nothing lies beyond these walls but their stronghold in Stormspike itself!”
“Nothing that we know about,” said Isgrimnur. “But our ignorance is as big as my belly. Is he right, Ayaminu? Is there nothing else between us and the Norn mountains? And is my man right to suspect that something else is going on that we do not see?”
“It depends first on what you mean by ‘nothing,’” she said. “The lands between the wall and the mountain you call Stormspike are no longer inhabited, and most of the city that was built there long ago is in ruins now. But that does not warrant they will not be waiting in ambush, or that forces from Nakkiga itself will not meet you before you reach the gates.”
“We will have more talk about these gates later,” said Isgrimnur. “But now we must consider what is immediately in front of us. Sludig, could it be that the Norns simply have no arrows left, no weapons they can hurt us with until we close with them in actual combat?”
“I await that hour,” said Brindur, still sharpening. “I wait for nothing else.”
“You will have a sword that is little more than a dagger if you keep scraping away at it like that,” the duke told him. “But that isn’t my chief concern. Is there anything else that makes you worry, Sludig?”
The younger man shook his head, his forehead and brows drawn together in frustration. “Only feelings, my lord—the smell of the thing. We have fought them many times now and the Norns are nothing if not subtle. They brought many strange weapons against us at Naglimund, both during the siege and later, and just as many tricks in the last battle at the Hayholt. Poison powders. False gates. The dead made to walk. Giants summoned like tame hounds, crushing and rending everything they could reach. But where are these things now? Since their escape from the ruined fort they have managed only noises and shadows, which the men have grown used to, which no longer strike fear in any heart. As for actual fighting, we have seen only a few stones and a few arrows from the tower’s three beaks and that weak spot on the wall, aimed at the siege engines and the ram. A few of our men have been downed—by chance as much as anything else.” Sludig’s frown deepened. “And so I must ask myself—are they truly so weak?”
One of Brindur’s Skoggeymen, an older warrior with gray-shot whiskers, spoke up. “The fairies are few now, Duke Isgrimnur, whatever Sludig may think. They have lost the war and we carry it to their own land, as we should. Soon we will destroy them all so they cannot trouble us again. Why make a mystery out of weakness?”
Sludig scowled. “Because when you suppose that an enemy is weak, Marri Ironbeard, you only realize you were wrong when they’ve killed you.”
“Perhaps you have lost your taste for this kind of fighting,” Brindur said, briefly raising his eyes to give Sludig a hard look. “Or perhaps your friendship with trolls and fairies—yes, I have heard about you, Sludig Two-Axes—has made you reluctant to pursue them. Or even afraid.”
Sludig’s hand dropped to one of the bearded hand-axes in his broad belt. His eyes narrowed. “My lord, did you not grieve the loss of your son, as we all do, I would demand you to prove that charge with your own hand, man to man.”
“Enough!” shouted Isgrimnur. “No accusations. Brindur, you insult Sludig for no reason. His loyalty is beyond doubt. I too have conversed with, and even fought beside, trolls and fairies. If you question his loyalty, you question mine!”
Brindur shrugged. “I take nothing back, but I did not say he was guilty of treason, merely asked him if he had the heart for this fight.”
“This is only what our enemies would wish, to have us arguing and biting each other’s backs. Enough!” Isgrimnur was furious. “I asked Sludig a question, Brindur, and he answered me—before you needlessly insulted him. I ask you the same question. Do you believe that the Norns are as weak now as they appear?”
Brindur tested the edge of his blade with his finger, then sucked the blood from his fingertip and spat onto the packed, icy ground in a place the rugs didn’t cover. Outside the wind had risen again, rattling the duke’s tent so that the cloth hummed like the wings of a monstrous insect. “Yes, the White Foxes are fierce fighters. Hard to kill. I do not make the mistake of thinking otherwise. They surprised us with reinforcements at the ruined fort, but we have seen no signs of any more coming. We killed enough of them there that I doubt more than ten score or so of those reinforcements survive, and they had scarce enough fighters in the first group. So I think they are spent and have but little strength left. Our own men are hungry enough in this blighted, frozen place, and we have brought food for ourselves out of Rimmersgard. The Norns were already hungry weeks ago, and whatever tricks they have, I doubt they can feed themselves on air or they would not have attacked so many villages for grain and other supplies. So my wits tell me Two-Axes is only jumping at the same shadows and strange noises that he himself talked about.”
Another petty, pointless sting. Before Isgrimnur could shape a reply, a figure, half-obscured by a crust of snowflakes, pushed in past the quivering fabric of the tent door.
“I crave pardon, Your Grace, my lords,” the soldier said. “I bring a message from Jarl Vigri. He says there are pieces falling from the wall after the last blow of the great Bear. He thinks it is about to come down.”
Brindur’s dour mood dropped away in an instant. “Ha! By God,” the thane said, climbing to his feet, “If the wall is coming down, I will not be the last to paint my blade with fairy blood!” He turned to one of the younger Skoggeymen. “Fani, you fool, where is my helmet?”
Isgrimnur still had things he needed to discuss with Brindur and the rest, including the letter that a messenger had brought him only this morning, but he would never keep their attention now. As he watched the thane and his Skoggeymen scrambling for their weapons, he thought briefly of trying to make their rush toward the wall more orderly, then decided it would be better to bow to the inevitable. Even if the wall was badly damaged it might not fall for many more swings of the battering ram, and even the most anxious Rimmersgard warrior could not come to grips with the enemy until that moment. In the meantime, letting Brindur and the rest vent their impatience on an immense weight of black stone might just be a good idea. His other news could wait.
Two of Isgrimnur’s house carls were standing outside the tent, one with his battle-helmet and his White Bear and Stars standard, the other holding the duke’s large and patient horse. Isgrimnur heaved himself into the saddle, not without help, then spurred upward after the others.