Not to fear,” Bransen assured Callen and Cadayle the next day when they walked down the road out of Delaval, leading Doully the donkey. “For I told Lady Olym that I would be in the North.”
“But our road is to the north,” Callen replied. “And there you will truly be.”
“Exactly,” said Bransen and he flashed that grin, smug and disarming at the same time.
Sure enough, Laird Delaval’s guards, at the request of Prince Yeslnik, streamed out of the city that same morning, heading south in search of the Highwayman as the Lady Olym had directed.
TWO
Feeding the God Well
Samhaist Dantanna crouched low as he moved through the area of knee-deep white caribou moss. The plant could be mashed into a potent salve and made a fine tea, but Dantanna was looking for something even more valuable: dauba bulbs. They only grew among the moss, and never in great number. Even one bulb would make for a fine day’s hunting, though, for the Samhaist could then prepare the most wonderful dauba stew, a brew that would take all the pains from his joints for a week and more.
Dantanna didn’t like this land, Alpinador, far preferring the milder climate of Vanguard, south of the mountains.
It was not his place to question, though-at least not openly.
He had to keep telling himself that, for there was so much afoot in the world that Dantanna, still young and not completely jaded, did indeed wish to question. He bent low and brushed aside the moss as he quickened his pace. He knew there would be some dauba around this particularly thick strand of caribou moss-there had to be.
“That’s a bootlace, not a vine, boy,” came a gruff voice, and only then did Dantanna realize that he was not alone in the white field, though how in the world someone else had come in without gaining his attention he couldn’t begin to fathom.
Until he looked up to see the weathered face, the thick mustache, and the pointed, feathered cap. Then he knew. The man standing tall and straight before him might have been forty or seventy-he had those ageless features that exude both strength and the wisdom of experience. So much experience.
“Master Sequin,” he stammered, sidling back a few feet. The old scout didn’t answer other than to stare un-blinkingly and witheringly at the Samhaist. “I did not know that you were in the area,” Dantanna said.
“Like to state the obvious, do you?”
Dantanna nodded stupidly. “I am Samhaist Dantanna-once we met, in Vanguard and near to where the Abelli…”
“Chapel Pellinor,” the weathered Jameston Sequin said. Dantanna nodded, trying not to look too pleased that this great man had remembered him.
“I never forget a face,” Jameston went on. “Or the name of a man I consider worth remembering.”
Dantanna beamed all the more.
“What did you say your name was again?”
The Samhaist slouched. “Dantanna.”
“You travel with old Badden?”
“Ancient Badden,” Dantanna corrected, and (surprisingly to him) forcefully.
“You’re a long way from home, boy.”
Dantanna didn’t begin to know how to take that. “There is the war…”
“The one your Ancient Badden started.”
“Not so!” Dantanna protested with a severity that surprised him given his ambivalence, often disgust, at the fighting over Vanguard. “Dame Gwydre began it all. She chose and chose ill.”
“Because she fell in love with a man?”
“Because she fell in love with an Abellican monk!”
Jameston Sequin chuckled and shook his head. “An offense worth all of this?” he asked.
Dantanna half shook his head and half nodded, giving no verbal response, because he knew that if he did he would never get any true resonance or confidence in his voice.
“Well, you fight your battles as you choose them,” Jameston said. “I’ll let the folk of Vanguard choose which religion, Samhaist or Abellican, suits their needs.”
“And which for Jameston?” Dantanna asked, thinking himself sly for the instant it took Jameston to mock him utterly with a laugh.
The old scout brought his arm out in front of him, holding a sack, and still applying that withering gaze over Dantanna, he upended it before the man. More than a dozen pointy troll ears tumbled out onto the ground at Dantanna’s feet.
“It’s theirs to choose,” Jameston said.
“As it is yours,” Dantanna replied, still staring down at the multitude of ears-ears of creatures Ancient Bad-den had enlisted in the fight.
“If my choice is between a man and a troll, it’s not a hard one, boy,” Jameston said. “I said I didn’t much care, and I don’t, but you tell your Ancient Badden that I’m not for letting glacial trolls murder families in the name of Samhain or in the name of anyone else.”
“Our struggle is…”
“… none of my business,” Jameston finished for him, “and none of my care. But when I see a troll, I kill a troll, and I don’t ask who it’s working for.” He snorted derisively and started away.
“Master Sequin,” Dantanna called after him. “If we meet again, will you remember my name?”
Jameston didn’t stop or look back. “I forgot it already.”
From a high perch on the very edge of the great glacier Cold’rin, Ancient Badden stared out across the miles of the southland. In his mind’s eye, he looked past the frozen tundra of Alpinador to the thick forests of Vanguard. He envisioned the battles raging there, Honce man against goblin, Honce man against glacial troll, Honce man against the sturdy Alpinadoran barbarians.
His army, battling the men of Honce, punishing them for their growing acceptance of the heretics of Blessed Abelle.
A smile creased Ancient Badden’s face, strangely white teeth (for one of his age) standing brightly in the midst of his wild black mustache and beard, a gigantic affair that poked out in a semicircle of sharp points beneath the old Samhaist’s weathered face, its ends sharpened by dung and plaited with ribbons black and red. He would teach them.
Word had come that Chapel Pellinor had fallen-sacked as much by angry Honce men as by Ancient Badden’s hordes. The few surviving monks were even then being dragged north, to this place, to be sacrificed to Ancient D’no, the worm god of the frozen lands.
Ancient Badden lowered his gaze to the clouds of steam at the base of the glacier’s cliff face, where the ice met the hot waters of the lake called Mithranidoon. The mists seemed to him to thicken. An indication, perhaps, that D’no was pleased by the news? Or his imagination, his thrill, at the prospect of feeding the god so well?
Ancient Badden envisioned the hot waters beneath that cloud, the Holy Lake of Mithranidoon, the Rift of Samhain, the gift of the Ancient Ones to their children as a reward for their wondrous efforts here.
A particularly sharp retort turned the old Samhaist around, to view the crevice some fifty feet north of where he stood. A pair of giants, fifteen feet tall and with shoulders as wide as the wingspan of a great eagle, rolled heavy mallets up into the air, slamming them down concurrently upon the flattened head of a battered log, a sharpened wedge that drove deeper into the glacier with every smash. Once they had driven that one down to the level of the glacier, Ancient Badden would bless the spike and prepare its end with spells and fire, that another could be placed upon it and driven down, pushing the bottom one even deeper.
Over to the right of the giants, where the crevice was much wider and much deeper, several glacial trolls hung by their ankles, suspended beneath crossbeams by thin ropes. Their arms were weighted, forcing them into a diver’s stretch, and their wrists had been expertly cut, their thin blood dripping down into the chasm and turning into a fine, coating mist in the windy gorge. Troll blood did not freeze, and the coating of it in the crevice would prevent the melted waters from mitigating the damage to the edge of the glacier. One troll, at least one, was dead and dried out now, Ancient Badden noted, but no worries, for the wretched little beasts were as thick as hares in summer Vanguard.