The Treaty Before the Great Winter. Viking Saga Chapter 3

Hunting that tastes like iron - Chapter 3

They left before dawn, while the dark was still whole and a man could hear his own breathing. Sixteen of them — nine from Hrafnvík, seven from Hjorthegn — climbing the trail in single file. Frostfjall stood over the valley, black, seamed with old snow, its trees bent north by a wind that had been blowing since before any of them were born. Nobody spoke. Speaking cost breath, and breath was a thing you counted now, the way you counted everything else.

They did not walk like friends. They walked like two ropes laid down side by side, not yet knotted. The Raven Shields kept to the packed center of the trail, shoulders squared. The Deer Spears took the edges, the loose snow, the places where a man could turn an ankle — and none of them turned one. Eirik walked between the two lines. He felt the eyes on him. Not hostile. Worse than hostile. Waiting. Every man in that column was waiting to see which clan made the first mistake, and Eirik had spent the whole climb deciding it would not be his.

By midmorning the trail bent into a higher valley, where snow lay in blue pockets between the rocks and the air came thin enough to cut. Steam rose from the stone below — the hot springs the old people called the Hot Scars of the Earth. Brynja Runeblood lifted her hand and the column stopped. She was Sigrún's mother, and she spoke rarely, and when she did, men leaned toward her voice the way they leaned toward a fire.

"We stop here," she said. "The water remembers. It carries what we ask faster than smoke."

Jorund Ironbeard's jaw set. Eirik knew the look. It was not distrust of the woman. It was distrust of anything that could not be counted.

Sigrún crouched at the spring's edge and laid two fingers flat on the wet stone. For one breath her face went young. Then it closed again.

"The herd's near," she said. Flat. Certain.

Haldor Deerhorn nodded. Nobody argued, and that was its own small marvel — a Raven Shield taking a Deer Spear woman's word on the herd, and no hand going near a knife.

The tracks showed a hundred paces on. Prints the size of a man's two hands, deep, the edges still sharp. Not the small reindeer a village could run down by weight of numbers. Hrimkron — the great ones, antlers spread wide as a cartwheel, meat enough on a single beast to carry a hall through a month of dark. The line split without a word, hunters peeling left and right on hand signs alone. Eirik's palms went wet inside his gloves. Not the beast. A mistake — his spear in the wrong ribs, a Deer Spear dead in the snow, and the treaty finished before it had a name. He dried his hands on his cloak and took his place.

Then it came.

Not a crash. A silence that leaned. The first Hrimkron stepped out of the pines, slow, sure, ice hung along its antlers in grey beads. It turned its head and the ice clicked. Haldor lifted a hand. Jorund dropped to one knee. Bowstrings drew back. Eirik's whole life narrowed to a single point in the snow — the place the spear had to go so the animal died fast and no one else died at all.

Haldor's hand fell.

The world came apart into motion. Arrows. Spears. Snow thrown up in white sheets. The Hrimkron drove forward with the weight of a falling wall, and a Deer Spear went down under it, the antler laying his shoulder open, the blood already black on the white before he had finished shouting. Eirik ran. He heard nothing but his own breath. When he struck he felt the head go in past the fat, felt the shaft buck, felt his frozen fingers slide on the wood — everything slides once the blood gets into it.

The beast screamed, low, almost a man's cry, and threw itself down the slope. They went after it. A wounded animal does not stop; it spends whatever is left getting away.

Sigrún was at his side, too soon, too exactly, a short spear in her hand with runes cut down the shaft. The Hrimkron wheeled, eyes wide with pain, and came straight at the two of them. For a breath there was nothing in the world but the beast and the mountain. Eirik saw the antler points. He saw where they would open him — low, across the belly. He did not think. He went sideways, got both hands on the antler, and the pull nearly took his arm from the socket. Sigrún stepped in and put her spear into the soft place under the jaw. Clean. Once. The blood came out hot and stood up off the snow as steam.

The Hrimkron fell, and the ground took the weight of it.

Nobody cheered. The kill sat wrong in all of them, iron on the tongue. Brynja laid her hand on the dead beast's brow and moved her lips without sound. Jorund and Haldor caught each other's eyes — two men who would sooner fight than give thanks, giving it anyway. Eirik looked at Sigrún. She was cleaning her knuckles on her thigh, unhurried, and she felt him look and did not look away. Neither of them spoke. There was nothing to say that saying would not have spoiled.

Then he saw the print.

A short way from the carcass, alone in clean snow: not reindeer, not man. Long, clawed, and pressed into the center of it a mark — three arcs, like three moons. The cold that went through him had nothing to do with the air.

He said nothing. In their world you swallow a thing first and wait to see whether it kills you from the inside. The hunters were already on the carcass, knives out, working fast — heat leaves a body the way a chance does, all at once. Axes, tendons snapping, the smell of blood and pine and the small fire someone had lit to warm their hands. Eirik felt the weight of a stare on the back of his neck. He turned. No one was there.

Sigrún leaned close, her voice barely clearing her teeth. "It's not chance. In the dream there was blood on the snow. Not the beast's. Ours. And something walking around it that should be under the ground."

Eirik's hand closed on his knife until the knuckles hurt.

They carried the meat and the hides down as the light failed, and the sky broke again the way it had broken the first night — the sun still gone from it, and that wrong yellow bleeding through anyway, thin, like light strained through old bone. Below them Skjaldra sat small and bright on the black water.

The hunt was the easy part. Eirik had known that going up. The alliance was young, still learning to breathe, and something had already come down out of the dark to stand over its cradle. Winter was not the only thing coming for what it was owed. Something else had woken — or come back — and it had already seen their faces.

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