Savage Moon (eBook)

CHAPTER ONE

She smells pine needles, and death.

The sweet, damp scent of the forest litter. A scent so unmistakably of the north that she knows she must be dreaming. She feels the warm earth beneath her feet, its touch familiar to her as her father’s embrace. Even in the dream, her heart aches with a sudden pang of longing.

For home.

So far away. And yet, in the dream, near as her hands and feet.

There has been rain not long past. And now she sees the pines around her, their branches close enough to reach up and touch. Droplets of water still cling to the tip of each needle. She brushes them, her fingertips scattering tiny jewels of light to the ground. There is no hurry. She is at peace. As she always has been in the Kingswood, close to her father’s hall.

The hall that was torn from my grasp.

This thought enters her mind like a splinter. But the forest air is still. Her footsteps tread softly in the earth. The light is dim, though she cannot tell whether it’s the gloaming of dusk or else the grey before the dawn. She glances up again and the tops of the trees now seem far away. Far as the great vaulted dome of the Holy Wisdom. Far as the heavens. Yet dark as them, too.

No light penetrates their branches, only shadows seeping through like a mist, filtering down to her from on high.

Now that other smell grows stronger. Sickly sweet, like rancid meat.

She is following a trail through bracken. A deer trail, maybe. There were often deer in the Kingswood. Some animal has been this way, anyway. She knows this place, knows where it leads. To the Great Ash. To her ash. The one tree in all her father’s kingdom which, as a girl, she could make believe might be Yggdrasil itself – the ancient World-Ash and the bridge between the world of men and many others. Later, when a woman grown, she went there to breathe in the smoke of Urtha’s Weed, thinking herself wise, and skilled enough to journey between them, like a vala of the Old Times. Now she knows better. Now she is wise enough only to know her own ignorance.

The smell of death becomes a stench. She covers her mouth. A low hum invades the silence, dull at first but growing louder, and louder still, till the sound fills her ears. Fills her skull. Flies buzzing. Hundreds of them, thousands. All come for a feast, swirling about her head like the sands of some desert storm in a spice-merchant’s tale.

Then she sees it – a great hulking shadow in the dismal gloom. A monstrous beast, its outline blurred in the hungering dark, a huge muscular back, spiked with hair stiff as thorns, head bent low to some busy work. A boar, she now sees, and over the buzzing of the flies she hears a repulsive, eager gulping as the boar scarfs down… something.

She cannot make out what.

She circles the clearing until, through the swarming flies, she is able to spy what the boar feasts upon. Another creature of the forest. A large grey wolf stretched out under the boar, its lifeless limbs jerking with each thrust of the brutish snout as the boar burrows hungrily into its innards.

She halts, revolted, yet gripped by the weirdness of the scene. She wants to turn away but cannot. And as she looks, the vision becomes stranger still. The shape of the wolf corpse begins to change, like a long, lean sculpture of wax, melting away, resolving into something new. Now she could not have torn away her gaze though her life were the forfeit.

For where before she saw a wolf lies now the wasted body of a man. Naked, limbs withered, face gaunt. And worse, a face she knows. The long black and grey hair, the blunt edge of the jaw, the strong crooked nose.

Father.

The word ghosts over her lips as the boar gives the corpse another shunt. His head flops over, his dead eyes fix on her. Calling to her. Accusing her…

Where are you, my daughter?

She recoils, her belly filling with horror. A stick snaps underfoot. The boar lifts its head. For a long moment, they regard one another – woman and beast – the air between them filled with the boar’s grating pants, the coarse bristles of its snout glistening with her father’s blood. And as she looks, the animal’s long, thin lips curl into a sneer, moving as though in human speech, a whisper in her ear:

Whatever you have, I will take from you…

Queen Lilla Sviggarsdottír sat up suddenly, pulse thudding in her temple. Her long hair hung like a funeral veil over her eyes, dishevelled and clammy with sweat.

For a few seconds she stared wildly through the tangle of honey-gold strands, panting as if she’d run a league, forcing herself to take in the pale cream curtains, the thick marble pillars flanking the muslin drape across the doorway, its folds riffling with the breeze off the Bosporus. She smelled cedarwood and cinnamon. And the scent of the man beside her.

‘Are you all right, my love?’ His voice cracked the darkness, his breath close to her cheek.

Erlan.

It didn’t seem long since that had been her question to ask of him – when the fever had had him in its grip. Are you all right? Which really meant: Are you still alive?

Too often, she had feared he was not.

She nodded at his shadow, unable to do more as the terror of her dream leached from her mind. This was her present, she told herself. This was her now. And yet she heard the echo of those words:

Whatever you have, I will take from you…

Words from her past. Words that the man who usurped her kingdom had hissed in her ear as he thrust her face down into the fresh earth of her husband’s grave.

She brushed aside her hair, sank back into the goose-down pillows and expelled a long sigh. ‘I’m… I’m fine.’

‘You were dreaming again.’ Erlan was propped on one elbow beside her, his dark eyes still luminous in the shadows of night, even though the sickness had stolen much of their lustre. He reached out and chased a last lock of hair from her face. ‘Was it the same?’

‘Yes. The boar… and my father.’

‘I’m sorry… that it troubles you so.’

‘Of course it troubles me,’ she answered quickly. ‘It’s four months since you told me it was time to go home.’ She sat up, drawing her knees to her chin under the silk coverlet. ‘Yet here we still are.’ She knew she sounded cold. She couldn’t help it. The well of her sympathy was deep. But even the deepest well could run dry.

‘I can’t help that I was sick—’

‘You know I don’t mean that.’ Still her tone was sharper than she intended. After all, Erlan had come within a blade’s edge of death. The wounds he had taken on that night of fire had festered. It had needed all the skill of the emperor’s best physicians to keep his feet from the Hel-road. Looking at his sunken eyes, his hollow cheeks, it was doubtful whether even now he was quite well. ‘I’m not blaming you. I just…’ She shook her head. ‘We must go back. I owe it to my father’s memory. And to the oath I swore to my husband.’

‘Your father’s memory has waited this long. Wherever he is, he can wait a little longer,’ he said, his voice a croak. ‘As for Ringast, you owe him nothing.’

She stared at him in the dark. ‘How can you – of all people – think so little of an oath?’ Gods, hadn’t he made her suffer for his own?

Erlan jerked upright, fully awake now. He reached across her to a cup and the pitcher of watered wine on the stand beside the bed. He poured it out, gulped down a couple of mouthfuls. ‘Oath or none, you heard what the emperor said. He has nothing to spare you. No gold, no men.’

The disappointment of her last audience with Emperor Leo still lingered, sour as rancid milk. Leo the Isaurian, third of his name, now hailed the Great Lion of the City. Saviour of the Faith, the Anointed of God. She frowned, remembering how her appeal had fallen on deaf ears. It is a time to rebuild, Leo had said. For the city to breathe. And you, too, my lady. Wait till the spring… then we will talk again.

‘We still have the crew,’ she said, fumbling for some thread that would still hold. ‘And the Fasolt, thank the gods.’ Although the last time she’d seen him, her helmsman Demetrios had said the ship was in need of some upkeep if they were to make any voyage north again. As usual he was evasive on the details.

‘It’s not enough though, is it?’ Erlan offered her the cup but she refused it with a flick of her hand. This argument was stale, each time they had it more frustrating than the last. ‘Even if we made it back, what then?’

‘The longer Thrand holds the Twin Kingdoms, the harder it will be to take them from him. He’s destroying Sveäland. The dream—’

‘You don’t know that for certain,’ he said, his voice clipped with impatience. ‘Dream or none.’ He threw the rest of the wine down his throat and sagged back into the pillow. As if even impatience was too heavy a burden for him to bear for long.

‘I feel it. That’s enough for me.’

Thrand was the last surviving son of King Harald Wartooth. Brother to her own dead husband, and the man who had taken from her the throne, her lands… and...