Hall of Smoke Read online

  “Sit,” Eidr broke in. “You made your climb; you made your sacrifice – twice – and there’s nothing that forbids you from sheltering at someone else’s fire.”

  I looked back at the shrine. It was well-lit now, my offering set to burn into the morning hours. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps I could sit for an hour at my husband’s and cousin’s sides, just until my shivering stopped and my clothing began to dry.

  “You need to be back before anyone realizes you’ve left,” I said. Then, more soberly, I repeated, “I’ll not have you suffer for my sins. Please.”

  “Fine,” Eidr agreed. “Now sit, my arm hurts.” I rounded the fire and sat down.

  * * *

  In the half-light of dawn, Eidr’s warm chest left my back and Yske’s soft breath, inches from my forehead, moved away. I couldn’t bear to say goodbye, so I pretended to sleep on, holding still as Eidr wrapped his cloak around my solitary form and kissed my temple.

  I sat up only once their footsteps had been replaced by the trills and lilts of birdsong. The rain had stopped, leaving the world dripping, scented with green and earth and damp. Our campfire had died off, but the one in the shrine burned more brightly than ever. Yske or Eidr must have stoked it.

  That gesture alone was enough to make my eyes prickle. Why was I doing this? If Eang hadn’t responded by now, did she intend to at all? Yes, the goddess was not everywhere, but she would have heard my prayers. This was her shrine, a place where something of her essence always remained – a place where the fabric between the human, Waking World and the divine High Halls was torn.

  Eang knew I was here; there had to be another explanation for her silence. Maybe, I thought, I should go back to town and consult the High Priestess. The idea was a tantalizing one, undergirded with the promise of seeing Eidr and Yske again. Maybe I could still catch up to them.

  No. I reined that thought in. The sun was breaking through the canopy, the poppies were unfurling, and my blood was required in the offering bowl.

  I crossed to the shrine in the cool of the dawn, pulling my ritual knife and flexing the wounded fingers of my left hand. But as I passed into the shadow of the structure and prepared to slit my thumb for the third time, the sight of dangling feathers and carved owls distracted me. My apprehension turned outward. Upward.

  Eang was wildly powerful, ancient and undying, but she was not immortal. Almost no god was – at least, not naturally. What if Eang ignored me because she was in battle? What if she didn’t respond because she couldn’t? It had happened before.

  That thought gave me all the determination I needed. Banished or not, I was an Eangi priestess, and I owed it to my deity to be patient.

  I reopened the cuts on my left hand and let the blood drip. I prayed. Then I sat down in the meadow and sunlight, dangled my stinging fingers over my knees, and began my vigil once more.

  The morning passed. The sun roosted high above the peak of the mountain, my frizzing black hair burned with heat, and I left my post to drink from a stream. The cool water took the edge off my thirst and the aching hunger in my belly, but only just.

  When the rain started again, it was almost a relief. I let Eidr’s cloak stay in the shelter of the pine tree while I lay among the poppies and closed my eyes, relishing the droplets of cool water on my face and scalp. Above me, the blue summer sky reverted to the same muted grey as the evening before.

  Eidr and Yske would have returned home hours ago. They and the rest of our order would be watching the mountain, waiting for me to join them.

  “Eang, Eang,” I murmured, willing my words to be heard across distance, time and the division between worlds. “The Brave, the Vengeful, the Swift and the Watchful…”

  The rain pattered down on my cheeks, my lips.

  “Eang, please.”

  War horns blasted up the mountainside.

  TWO

  Branches. Rain. Mud. Rock. There was no time for aching muscles or precarious footing; instinct propelled me down the same path that had brought me up the mountain the day before – the same path Eidr and Yske had taken back to town that morning.

  The horns came again, long, drawn-out wails that ended in two high blasts. Eangen horns. Another bay followed them, this one lower and culminating in a twisting, deep crack. Algatt raiders.

  There were raiders at the foot of the mountain, raiders in my home while I spent hours stumbling down a mountainside. Hours during which my people fought and died.

  Eidr. Yske. I let out a frustrated, gasping choke and plunged through the forest.

  Raids were relatively common. In the south, along the border with the Arpa Empire, farmers battled unsanctioned taxation from rogue legionaries. In the north, the mountains unleashed Algatt raiders once, sometimes twice yearly, initiating weeks of skulking and skirmishing. My own mother, far away in the village of my birth, had been killed in one such raid five years ago – the kind of loss everyone in my world shared.

  Scars from fighting off raiders this spring were still fresh and pink under my clothes. But by now, the Algatt should have retreated to their northern mountains until harvest. That was their way. That was how it always was.

  Was this my response from Eang? Was this my punishment for disobedience? The thought crept into the back of my mind, but it was too horrific to hold onto.

  Could this raid be my fault?

  By the time I sighted the town of Albor, the Eangen horns had long since stopped. I skidded to a halt on an open bluff, staring down into the valley through misty rain and billows of smoke.

  My heart dropped. The great timbered Hall smoldered in the center of the town and the circular embankment around the settlement, with its wooden walls and crude towers, was a wreath of flames. The bulk of the fifty homes were still intact, but outlying farmhouses were already ash.

  Nothing moved in the town or fields. The only signs of life were riders rounding up flocks on the eastern horizon, sending ewes and husky lambs skittering after the low, spreading bulk of their horde.

  My knees threatened to buckle. I was too late. Eidr, Yske, nearly everyone I loved – they were down in that smoking ruin or carried off over the horizon.

  I clutched at a sapling and felt myself crumpling towards hysteria. I had been frightened last night at the shrine, but this – this was a feeling I hadn’t had in years: the inexorable slide of fear building into a rampant charge. If I let it go, it would tear through my mind like a winter wolf.

  But there would be survivors. I blinked, focused on the swaying sapling beneath my hand and the wind on my face. Algatt raiders never killed – or took – everyone.

  I dropped off the bluff and landed hard on the forest floor. As I ran, I saw the Hall of Smoke in my mind’s eye, whole and vaulted and filled with warmth. Eidr and Yske were there with a hundred other familiar faces, moving around the central hearth, carrying and weaving and sharpening and singing. They wrapped themselves in furs in the winter; in the summer, they returned from the river at dusk, wet-haired and laughing.

  The Hall belonged to the Goddess of War and her chosen warrior-priests, but it was also the heart of our town. The heart of the borderlands. The heart of my people.

  Just inside the edge of the forest, the rhythm of hooves shattered my reverie. I ducked into the bushes as three riders barreled up the rise a dozen paces away, following a woodsmen’s track. Another came after them more slowly, off the trail on my other side, and then a fifth.

  I dropped into a deeper crouch, disjointed prayers clattering through my head. They were Algatt. There was no mistaking them, not with their weathered, pale skin, the cut of their tunics – tapered to a point, just above the knee – fitted trousers, and the blue and yellow paints smudged into their angular fringes.

  But why were the Algatt still here? Why would they risk leaving a handful of riders behind? Surely not to hunt down stray villagers. There was no point in that.

  The rush of blood in my ears became a thundering river. Even as instinct urged me to run to the vill
age and Eidr, I put out a hand to ground myself. My fingers sank into moss, soft and lush and cool with rain. The feeling steadied me in the midst of my disassembling world.

  I waited in the moss, in the shelter of an arch of ferns, until the Algatt moved on.

  My muscles complained as I eased out of my crouch, but I kept low, following game trails that I had run for the majority of my life, until the narrow earthen path ended in fields.

  There were no fences here, no walls or rises to hide behind, but the wafts of smoke were dense and low. I darted across the open ground and stepped through a smoldering break in the ring wall.

  Smoke curled past me. I wanted to call out, but the presence of Algatt in the forest demanded caution. I followed the wall around half of the settlement, gaze flickering between singed wooden walls, grass-covered roofs and small plots of vegetables and herbs, protected by wicker fences. There were no bickering children. No goats stood on their hind legs, trying to crop grass from the eaves. No women knelt at millstones, no men manipulated wood into a new cradle, a new stool. There were only creeping swaths of fire, smoke and an eerie hush.

  I stared at fabric fluttering in a window, bold Eangen colors of blue and green and soft greys intertwined in endless patterns. Looking at it, I could almost believe nothing was wrong, that the air did not reek of seared meat. But when I peeked inside the window, the house was overturned and empty, and there was a smear of blood across the floor.

  I reached the center of the village and halted, unable to move any further. The Hall rose above me in a lattice of stark, charred beams. My entire body rebelled against looking at it, but the corpses on the ground were worse. The old and the weak lay in piles, as if the Algatt had herded them in front of my home’s great, gaping doors to slaughter them in the sight of their goddess.

  Then there were the Eangi priests. My people. My family. Some had managed to drag on their armor before the attack, but the rest were in daily working garb. However much warning the watchmen had given them, it had not been enough.

  Only the Eangi’s narrow collars of bronze declared their status as Eang’s warrior-priests – the same collar that Eidr and Yske wore, and that the High Priestess had cut from my throat before I made my climb.

  My vision glazed over corpses, shattered doors and churned, bloody mud. I had witnessed slaughter before; there was no one in my world who hadn’t, child or adult, priest or farmer. But this was like nothing I had ever seen. This was no raid. This was a massacre.

  And in a settlement of this size, I knew everyone. The face of each corpse was familiar to me. I knew their stories, their habits and the obscure ties in our bloodlines.

  But Eidr was not there; nor was Yske. Of course they weren’t, I told myself. They had escaped. They must have escaped.

  Mechanically, trembling, I passed through the sea of bodies, fingering my ritual knife as I went. Every face I saw, every wound, reinforced my growing suspicion that this was more than a raid – an Algatt army had swept through my home, one that even the infamous Eangi of the Hall of Smoke could not stop.

  Numbed by this realization, I entered the Hall of Smoke itself. Shafts of light poured through great scorched sections of roof and walls. The flames had died down, but the heat was still close and the air heavy with smoke. I pulled the edge of my tunic over my face and forced my feet forward.

  Some detached, emotionless part of me began to give orders. Search the bodies. Find my husband and cousin. Find more weapons than this pitiful knife. Get to East Meade, to the rest of my family.

  Give the dead their final rites.

  I blinked, wrestling my mind away from flight, and tried to focus on that final task. Exiled or not, if I was the last Eangi standing in Albor, it was my duty to write the runes in the ash and release the spirits of the dead. Only then could they leave the blood-soaked earth and pass on into the High Halls of the Gods.

  The High Halls where I could not follow.

  Eidr. Yske. Where were they?

  My world buckled, cracked and narrowed. Eidr’s and my bunk, one of the dozens of Eangi beds clinging to the walls of the hall behind shredded curtains, was a nest of embers. The bearskin that I kept rolled at the back was shriveled and reeked of burned hair. Our dangling bags of belongings were destroyed, childhood talismans spilled into the cinders.

  The only salvageable thing was a bone and silver hairpin that Eidr had given to me, carved with birds and the runes for belonging, protection, and eternal promise. I let the collar of my tunic slip from my mouth and, clearing my throat, took up the hairpin. Desperate for some feeling of normality, I tucked its three prongs into my hair and blinked back across the Hall.

  My eyes glassed over the bodies again. Somehow, before my gaze found her, I knew Yske was there; a flash of open, staring eyes, all too like a butchered doe. Near her, a flash of red hair. A limp, masculine hand. Eidr.

  I did not move. Did not breathe. This was a vision – yes, that must be it. I was lying in a meadow of poppies and this was a vision from Eang, a warning, a…

  The hoot of an owl broke into my shock. I thought I saw a grey bird up among the rafters, its feathers sleek and its eyes great, honeyed wells, but as I searched my gaze snagged on the Algatt silhouetted in the doorway.

  We stared at one another. I saw a bloodied warrior in mail and decorative leather, eyes rimmed in black and skin streaked with blue and yellow paint. Little older than Eidr, his cheeks were still flushed under blond-lashed eyes and his sun-darkened forearms were laced with scarification – ritual and otherwise.

  He, in turn, must have seen a bedraggled young woman in tunic and loose trousers, holding a knife as if it were an empty bucket.

  “Come, I won’t hurt you,” he said. His voice was warm and only mildly accented. “Or you may run. You might even get away.”

  I blinked sweat and smoke from my eyes. Run? He didn’t know I was an Eangi – not in this state, not without my collar. He thought I was just a girl. The offer was a fair gesture on his part, perhaps some acknowledgement that what his people had done here was far beyond heinous, far beyond honorable. Maybe I could even get away, like he’d said.

  But the sound of his voice ignited something else in my gut. It was hot. Alive. And it grew.

  I made myself look at the bodies strewn across the floor. I named them one by one, forcing the memories into my reluctant, grief-stricken mind to feed the heat – my deadly Eangi Fire.

  Yske. There she was, cast over a fallen beam. We had been sent to the Hall together as children, holding hands on the cart for the entire journey. We’d become women together, bled and grown. Trained together. Fought together.

  Eidr. His red hair a mass of fraying braids and blood. I’d been twelve when I kissed him and suggested we marry. He’d laughed at me then. But last autumn he had not, and the High Priestess joined our hands at the head of this very Hall.

  “I pledged myself to you,” my husband’s words from the night before echoed through the disjointed hum of my mind. “Yske is your blood. You may have been cast out of the Hall of Smoke, but you cannot be cast out from us.”

  My eyes flicked away. I saw Sixnit, one of my dearest friends, near the central hearth. Sweet and full-breasted, she’d come to the Hall two years ago when she married an Eangi priest. Now her husband lay dead in the hearth itself, and she curled around the silent form of their infant son.

  Their son. My dazed eyes fixed on him. The baby was tiny, mere days old – I’d attended his birth, the day before my banishment. Now, the baby’s hand twitched on his mother’s chest – a chest that, as I watched, rose and fell. She was alive. They were both alive.

  The heat finally filled my mouth and burst out in a hiss. The ritual cuts on my fingertips healed, my exhaustion fled, and my mind cleared, clean and sharp as a winter wind.

  My fingers slipped into position on the hilt of the knife.

  The Algatt barely registered my movement in time. My knife embedded in his forearm, an inch from his face. He turned his cry of pa
in into an enraged bellow that shook me to the bones. In an instant, his sword was in hand and he charged.

  I broke into a forward crouch and screamed. It was low, the undulating, unearthly sound every Eangi was taught. When we lined for battle, when we prepared to leave the forest on a fog-choked morning, we each had our notes. They would clash and blend and rise, sending goosebumps up our own arms, let alone our enemies’.

  My cry was alone, but it only made me more furious. I plunged forward, stooping to rip a broken spear from a corpse as I passed.

  He never saw the blow. I ducked his sword and drove the spear through his padded tunic, into his gut, with the force only an Eangi could muster. Then I dropped, hauling the shaft down like a lever and opening his intestines with a squelching, sickening crack.

  Relief trickled through my fevered thoughts as he toppled. I wiped tears from my eyes with the back of one hand and looked at Sixnit and her barely breathing child, but I didn’t try to rouse them yet.

  “Eangi?” the Algatt choked from the ember-strewn floor.

  I took up his sword and squatted just outside his reach, ignoring the growing stink of his open belly. With every breath I pushed out of my nose, I gathered my grief in tighter and forced my careening heart to steady. I could not look at Eidr.

  “Your collar?” He blinked languidly.

  “Cut off.” I rested the point of his sword in the ash, keeping my eyes fixed on him. “Did the traveler bring you here? Omaskat?”

  He stared at me, clutching his welling insides. “Omaskat?”

  I rocked my weight into my toes. “The traveler, with the eyes – one gold, one blue. He was here a week ago.”

  The Algatt said something, but his voice was too low. I leant forward. “Did he bring you here?”

  He gave no answer.

  I felt a tear bead on my upper lip and swiped it away. “Why are you here so late in the season?”

  Even on the edge of death, his fear of the Eangi – and the goddess we called on – was enough to make him speak. “Arpa.” His words ended in an agonized croak. “Legionaries. In our mountains. They drove us out… We took the rivers south. Nowhere… nowhere else to go.”