Chapter II: The Oathless

  The peat-fire's dying glow painted the hut's walls in shades of blood and shadow as Edryc peeled back the stiffened bandage from his forearm. The wound beneath – a ragged gash from a Legion pike – had begun to fester in earnest, its edges turning an ugly purple-black like week-old meat. Yellow pus oozed when he pressed the inflamed flesh, sending jagged bolts of pain up to his elbow. The stench of rotting meat mingled with the earthy aroma of bog herbs hanging from the rafters, making his empty stomach churn.

  Across the firepit, Líotha ground something between two flat river stones, the rhythmic scraping setting Edryc's teeth on edge. Her fingers – adorned with rings carved from human fingerbones – worked with practiced precision. Without looking up, she spoke in that unsettling way of hers, as if answering questions he hadn't voiced.

  "The wound sings to the dead," she murmured, her voice like dry leaves scraping against stone. "Can you hear it? A little death-march just for you. The iron knew your name before it bit you."

  Edryc stiffened, his calloused fingers instinctively finding the worn leather of his sword's grip. The familiar notches along the crossguard pressed into his palm like old friends. "Speak plain, woman. My patience wears thin as that gruel you fed us."

  She lifted the pestle to reveal a thick black paste that smelled of turned earth and old copper. "The iron that bit you was cursed by Vargor's smith-priests. They quench their blades in prisoner's blood and whisper dark oaths as they hammer." Her eyes – the color of tarnished silver coins – flicked to where Halvar snored against a pile of furs, his grizzled face twitching with troubled dreams. The old spear-thane's breath came in ragged gasps, each exhale carrying the sour stench of a man halfway to the grave. "Your old friend hasn't noticed the change yet. But he will when your skin turns as black as your House's banner and your eyes start weeping blood."

  A sudden gust rattled the hut's hide door, carrying with it a sound like cracking ice from the bog beyond – too rhythmic, too deliberate to be natural. Footsteps on frozen peat. Edryc reached for his sword, but Líotha moved faster than thought, her bone dagger pressing against his throat before he could blink. The blade's edge – honed from some unnameable creature's fang – drew a bead of blood that traced a hot line down his neck.

  "First lesson," she breathed, her voice barely audible over the wind's mournful howl, "nothing in Hárthal dies clean. Not men. Not beasts. Certainly not oaths." The blade withdrew as suddenly as it had appeared, vanishing into the folds of her ragged cloak. "Now show me the banner before whatever's out there shows itself to us in ways we'll both regret."

  The Banner of the Oath lay across Edryc's lap like a wounded animal, its once-proud fabric now a tattered remnant of what it had been. In the flickering firelight, the damage was even more apparent – great rents in the black linen, the silver embroidery frayed to near-invisibility. Where the sigil of the lightning-clasped fist had once dominated the field, now only a skeletal hand remained, its fingers half-unraveled. The sight sent an unexpected pang through Edryc's chest. He remembered seeing this same banner flying high above Brynwood's gates, its silver threads catching the morning sun as his father led the muster out to war. How the men had cheered as the wind caught the fabric, making the embroidered fist seem to clutch the lightning bolt tighter.

  Líotha traced the torn edges with something approaching reverence, her calloused fingers barely touching the fabric. "Your House swore its first vow upon this cloth when the foundation stones of Brynwood were laid," she murmured, her voice taking on a rhythmic quality, as if reciting some long-forgotten catechism. "The threads remember every oath, every betrayal, every drop of blood spilled in their name. They remember the taste of your father's sweat when he gripped this banner at his wedding feast. They remember the tears your mother shed into the fabric when they brought your brother's body home from the border wars."

  Edryc shook his head, the movement making his wound pulse with fresh pain. "How could cloth remember anything? It's just thread and dye. Wool and silver."

  With careful precision, Líotha plucked a single silver thread from the banner's edge. It came away with a sound like a dying man's sigh, vibrating between her fingers as if alive. "The weavers used hair from the Seven Martyrs in the warp and weft," she said, holding the thread up to the firelight where it shimmered unnaturally. "Their souls bind the Sleepers to their barrows, each strand a chain holding back the tide of what should not walk beneath the sun." Her eyes darkened as she studied the quivering strand. "And your father broke that bond when he entered Hár's Barrow seeking power to turn the war's tide."

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  Edryc's hand found his sword hilt, his fingers tightening until the leather creaked in protest. "My father died holding this banner at Dr?m's Keep! Every bard from here to the White Sea sings of his last stand!" The words came out louder than he'd intended, and Halvar stirred in his sleep, muttering something about "black wings" and "teeth in the dark."

  "Bards sing what they're paid to sing," Líotha said, unrolling a scrap of cured hide – a map etched in what looked like dried blood. The markings were strange to Edryc's eyes, all jagged lines and symbols that made his head ache to look upon. "The night Brynwood fell, Eradoc Brynson stood here –" her finger tapped a jagged symbol near the map's edge, "– at the threshold of Hár's Barrow. Not on any battlefield. The servants who fled saw him go in at dusk with a dozen of his best men. At dawn, they found his body at the entrance, the banner clutched in his hands and his men's bones scattered throughout the burial chamber like toys cast aside by a petulant child."

  The hut seemed to tilt around Edryc, the firelight swimming in his vision. He remembered the stories – how his father's men had found his body surrounded by slain Legionnaires, his sword broken in his hand. A hero's end. A lie. Outside, the cracking footsteps grew louder, accompanied now by a wet, rhythmic panting that set the hairs on Edryc's neck standing upright.

  Halvar woke with a start as the first howl split the night, a sound that began as human scream before twisting into something animal. "Gutterwolves," he rasped, already rolling to his feet and reaching for his spear. The old warrior moved with a speed that belied his years, his milky left eye twitching in its socket. "Vargor's trackers have found us. That thrice-damned bog water I washed in must have carried our scent further than I thought."

  Líotha doused the fire with a handful of damp peat, plunging the hut into darkness save for the faint moonlight filtering through the cracks in the walls. In the sudden gloom, her voice was low and urgent: "They're not wolves. The Legion breeds them from men who break oaths. The transformation takes seven days and seven nights, and the victims scream through every moment of it. By the fourth day, their joints snap and reform. By the sixth, their teeth fall out only to be replaced by fangs. On the seventh night, they forget they were ever men at all."

  Edryc peered through a gap in the wall slats, his breath fogging in the chill air. Moonlight painted the bog in shades of corpse-blue, glinting off patches of ice between the stunted black trees. Between the trunks, shapes moved on all fours – too large for wolves, their backs ridged with exposed vertebrae that jutted through patchy fur, their elongated muzzles giving them a grotesquely human cast. One stopped suddenly, its nostrils flaring as it turned its head – and Edryc saw the remains of a Legion helmet fused to its skull, the metal warped and stretched to accommodate the distorted shape beneath.

  Théodred.

  His uncle's name rose unbidden. The man who'd defected to Vargor's side after Brynwood fell. The man whose betrayal had become legend. The creature's lips peeled back from yellowed fangs in something too much like a smile before it loosed a howl – a sound that began as a man's voice before twisting into a beast's cry – and the pack surged forward, their claws tearing up clods of frozen earth as they charged the village.

  Chaos erupted as the first hut's door splintered inward. A bog-dweller stumbled out, clutching a crude spear, only to be borne down by three of the creatures. His screams were cut short by a wet tearing sound that Edryc knew he'd hear in his dreams until his dying day.

  "Out the back," Líotha hissed, already moving toward a cleverly concealed flap in the hut's rear wall. "The peat-cutters' path runs straight to the Dr?mspine foothills. The gutterwolves won't follow where the ground remembers blood."

  Halvar shook his head, hefting his spear. "They're between us and the path. I'll draw them off. You get the boy to the stones."

  Edryc opened his mouth to protest, but the old warrior was already moving, bursting through the door with a roar that would have done a younger man proud. His spear took the nearest gutterwolf through the eye, the force of the throw carrying the creature backward into two others.

  "Go!" Halvar bellowed as he drew his short sword, his back to a standing stone carved with ancient runes. "Tell them Eradoc's son still lives!"

  Then the pack was upon him, and Líotha was dragging Edryc away into the night. They ran until the screams faded behind them, until the bog gave way to rocky foothills where the trees grew stunted and twisted. Only then did they pause, their breath coming in ragged gasps as the first light of dawn painted the eastern sky in shades of blood and gold.

  Líotha pressed something into Edryc's hand – the silver thread she'd plucked from the banner. It pulsed faintly against his palm, like a dying man's heartbeat.

  "Your father's sin," she panted, her breath steaming in the cold air, "was believing he could control what he awoke. Now the Sleepers stir, and only blood can mend what was torn."

  Far behind them, something answered from the depths of the bog – a sound like stone grinding against stone, like a great door opening after centuries of stillness.

  The thread in Edryc's hand grew warm, then hot, then burning. But he didn't let go.