The sounds of battle were all about her, and she was but an unarmed child. She saw black-armoured soldiers, red-armoured warriors bearing banners of gold and crimson. They clashed together on the grey fields below her feet, and stained the dark strands of grass red with blood. Above her head a hefty pike clashed against a halberd's point. By her left side a swordsman wielded a two-handed blade against an enemy with shield and spear. She stumbled below the spear meeting the sword above her head in an arched point like the stone arches on the village chieftain's dwelling, and tripped on slippery mud below her feet. The dirt was wet with blood and water, more the first than the second. She'd seen enough sheep and pigs and cows slain and salted for meat over the winter that blood itself was less to her than some nobleborn and gentle girl; but the battle frightened her. It would have frightened any child, the men striving to kill each other and the clang of fierce metals above her head. They did not turn to attack her, though, and as a daughter of Seawolf she watched them. Branwen thought it was as if they did not know of her existence; as if she meant nothing to them through her small size and lack of skill or weapon.
The black-armoured man of the spear was shorter than the one he fought. She saw him strike and lean forward as he did so, and the swordsman went close to him to his unshielded right side. Then the swordsman slid the blade past joints into the red armour of the spear-wielder, and Branwen saw him kill the other man. Her hands were at her mouth in shock, and she did not remember placing them there; she opened her mouth to cry out, but her throat was hoarsely silenced. She noticed also that she had not breathed in this place, that the air was utterly still: and that the chests of the warriors did not rise and fall.
The red-armoured swordsman stepped back from his fallen enemy, and turned to fight another black-armoured man, this one bearing a heavy mace. Then Branwen saw the spearsman's body move and rise once more from the bleeding mud around it. He stepped forward, and fought another swordsman. This one tried the same attempt against him, but the spearsman did not this time allow the sword to come close to his armour: instead he stepped back, and ran his enemy through the neck with the spear's point. Blood flowed upon the mud, and yet another duel began.
It was endless, Branwen thought. She wandered the dark muddy plains below a red sky, all the colours of sunset though she saw no sun within it. There was no sound but the clashing of wood and metal. Then she looked again at a red-armoured man bearing a sword, and facing a black-armoured soldier with a spear: and this time they fought each other to an equal standstill, and lay in the mud once more only to rise again.
She felt herself begin to think: They all fight. And each time they fight, they learn...
Black clouds of fog swallowed her; her head ached badly, and bleary-eyed and dizzy she woke to the blurred face above her.
"Modir," she whispered, her mother, and some broth was forced in her mouth. Everything was in confusing shapes that whirled inside her head. The tree, Vidar, Njall, pain in her head, swirling dark mud. She could remember nothing of it. She closed her eyes once more, and this time there was nothing but darkness and the smell of the lambskin she rested on.
—
Branwen spent almost all of the next year confined on her back. At first she realised nothing at all of it: only that there was weakness in her limbs from the fall, and her head made her fall asleep too often and too quickly. There would be an aching within her skull, and inside her eyes blackness would easily come. Her limbs were numb and would not obey her commands. Each time she tried the exhaustion would take her once more, fading black and hot within her fevered head.
Once, when she was half-awake and drifting, she heard the voice of the village healer, old Ulquissala; the bitter, foul smoke from Ulquissala's herbs choked her and pushed the taste to the back of her throat.
"She may be a cripple should she wake fully at all. The lands of the Lord in the Ice would take..."
Crippled, Branwen heard, and that to her made her stay wakened though the blackness drowned her inside her head. Not to run or climb or tend the sheep or aim a sling: it was not for her, though she had seen old Tarag live on and carve wood and know lore with no need of legs. And if she could do nothing for her family they would suffer in winter, with Alfden far on Jotun-isle and Ingvi but in his first year of apprenticeship and Sigran a baby.
The duty for her was to move...
She opened her eyes and stared at her mother. "I would not put her to the ice," her mother said, looking away from her, "that would be shameful—she is neither unnamed nor old, and only a child."
"She knows it," old Ulquissala said, leaning on her gnarled staff of elder-wood. "The powers of my Sleeper are not given for no repayment." She served, Branwen knew, the father of the giants' kin Ulutiu within the ice: the old lord who slept a thousand fathoms deep in the cold.
"You will be paid," replied Modir. "Has not Hakon—"
Branwen tried once more to raise her hand. She felt her arm briefly rise; she gazed at her mother and the healer, and saw them turn to her by the rustle of the rough sheet over her; and once more her eyes forced themselves closed and she fell into darkness.
Over that year she had no strength in herself that did not come from within. Ulquissala said that it was the injury to her head, and weakness of her limbs that had come from the fall; and that perhaps she would never walk. She grew slowly able to open her eyes and remain awake for hours, and watched Sigran crawl on the floor. Vidar brought her grasses and flowers from outside and wood for her hands to try to carve and reshape. He was sorry for it, but over time he forgot about her and went to play with Njall once more. Branwen thought that she might have wanted to be the same, to leave outside rather than to endlessly stand over. They were poor that winter; it lasted long, and for what they had given Ulquissala they suffered.
She did not dream again while she slept, but in waking she dreamed of it. She moved her legs with her hands when she had strength; she felt her skin cold and softened instead of tanned and weather-ready. The first task she was trusted with was simply to watch over Sigran, the baby; prevent him from harming himself or falling in the fire.
"—And then the mighty warrior Gharlast fell upon the field of battle, and the black ravens circled above his head to eat him as carrion." She told the saga from memory, and parts of it she imagined for herself. Sigran listened to her voice, even though she wasn't entirely sure he understood. "And his brother-in-arms Vallanor rose, and struck forward with the two-handed sword that was forged by the smith of the giants and tempered in Auril's own icy spring at the very end of the world on the highest of the White Mountains. He lunged with the strength of the great bull that pulls the winds of Valkur; and over Gharlast's fallen form he would not yield the grounds of battle..."
Sigran picked at her blanket and tried to eat its left corner. Branwen continued with the tale nonetheless.
She could craft with her hands; she had pegs to carve from Vidar's help, and her mother gave her knitting-needles and coarse wool to card. But she tried to move, and exhausted herself. If she could walk again she could go back to tending the family sheep, she told herself; but was rebuffed for her black sleeping. In the spring her father Hakon returned from his place in the Thirdhill war-band. He had fought bravely but wanted to fight no more, and his few tales were of men wounded and fighting only for breath, bleeding for death and stinking as food for ravens.
Not all ought to have to fight. Branwen's stories changed to include tragedies of brave men dead before their time, and of healers who came at the last and acted to aid warriors to fight another day.
In the last days of summer was when she had fallen, and now again the warm growths had come and the new lambs were beginning to wean. Sigran could talk now and run quite well; Vidar climbed high in the trees. Branwen found it a battle to feel pain in her feet.
But the very pain of trying meant...that she was not dead. That she could fight. She lifted her own legs to force back feeling and muscle to them.
It was almost summer once more when she took her first, tottering step from her pallet. A scarlet triumph sang through her blood and set it to tongues of licking fire. Her teeth were set against pain and bared half in victory and half in suppression. She stepped again across the rush-strewn floor; fell; but even as the black cloud found her she saw, dimly but in bold colouring, that she had begun.
—
The path was red stoned and red thorned, and she ran on it at first without thinking of the way her legs moved. Then she knew it to be another dream. Branwen slowed her pace, and looked to the sides. The thorns surrounded flowers that were not flowers: strange round mushroom-growths made of fog and water. When she looked into them, she saw the legends she had stored for herself and learned to tell come to life.
Jagnar One-Eye swung his blade without stopping, and slew twenty men and orcs in only the turn of an egg-tumbler's time; blood came from his back as if he had been badly whipped but he fought onward.
Mjatholm fell to the poison with his blade sunk within his enemy, and all the purging herbs were unable to help him; but he died with the tyrant who had taken the lands of his father, and the spirits called valkyries who were warrior-maidens rode down from the skies, bearing swords themselves, and armour that glittered with the wild soaked brightness of a storm.
A gold light radiated down upon the warrior Sefian who asked for the ability to aid his comrades, and he became strong and beyond value to them although he could no longer wield weapon himself...
Branwen had learned more of what the stories told since that time a year ago when she was still a child. She looked closely at the red thorns, crimson as fresh blood, and she reached to their sharp ends. Her hand was cut and she felt the pain in full: her palm, the soft veins below her wrists, the knife-sharp cuts open in her. She gripped to the thorn she took for herself with her right hand, blood spilled and slick and iron-salt-smelling, and sought to clear the path.
The thorns rose up to surround her; or was it that she swept herself into their midst? They cut skin and for all she dreamed the pain was true and the slick blood if anything too vivid to be real. She lost heart, in pain beyond any she had ever known—
But Finglavir of Kirstedholm pressed on for all his many wounds.
Stories and tales were part false and part truth. If she had not learned so many, perhaps she would have had a smaller forest to force herself through; if she had not learned so many of what she could, perhaps she would not have had a forest to force herself through at all.
Her legs felt alive, pierced through by the thorns and screaming in exhaustion.
—There was a glimpse of something that had not been in tales: a shadow of a grey faceless helm dented by war, that retreated.
She had begun to walk no longer through the maze of red thorns but through the grounds of battle and a dark red mud. The storms of battle blazed through a black sky. Here, swords and polearms swept through the air and they were not so far from the top of her head as they had been. She walked through the battle.
The man was tall and burly, and none of his skin was visible below his battered grey gauntlets and armour. In his hands was a great black battleaxe stained and pitted by use. Below his grey war helm his face was hidden. A red-armoured woman bearing a sword stood by his side, and like him her face was covered. Around her neck twinkled the ruby-red head of a horse with stars for eyes.
Life is itself a battle.
The deep voice of the man seemed not to speak so much as to make itself directly heard in the head, or as if it forced the thunder overhead to speak its words. Branwen had some knowledge from the stories of what this was. She was frozen in her tracks by it; but then the words of the proverb came to her in time and she did not fall. 'Tis better to die on your feet, than live on your knees.
The red-armoured woman's laughter was throaty and oddly warm. Battles are fought first with wisdom and mind, and battles are fought everywhere. A metaphor is a metaphor.
"But," Branwen argued, words exploding from her chest like drops of blood, "I think you have taken me here for a reason."
You could learn and remain within your home, the red-armoured woman spoke again. Her voice seemed oddly sad, and reminded Branwen vaguely of that of her own mother. Strategy and tactics serve in any place in life. There are ways I can see that would be longer and safer for you; would require another sort of courage; and would be still of use to others.
"They say..." Branwen said. "They say all on Seawolf are born of warriors. The Battlelord; and his...his daughter?" For tales of red armour glimpsed by the side of visions of the Shieldbearer were rare in the accounts that had reached her bedside, and she only guessed. She looked into the cragged mountains behind the grey-helmed warrior of the hidden face; and there she had started to see a great black stallion and equally giant white mare. They stamped the ground as if to cause earthquakes, and smoke and fire seemed fit to burst from their mouths with their furious snorting. Behind them black ravens searched from the skies for prey.
Some of the most valourous of My kingdom. The grey gauntlet drew together, trapping air between its fingers of iron. Branwen of Seawolf.
The iron warrior knew her by name, and yet she was not afraid of him.
You have the strength. You have the spirit, the faceless warrior's thunder-voice boomed around her. I may have great need of you. But the Lady of Strategy would remind...
That there are those who fight only by their minds, spoke the red-armoured woman. Yet you may not view that as your path. Risk weighed in the balance of benefit. Go, Branwen of Seawolf, and turn to either of us at your will...
The red-armoured woman raised a gauntleted hand, and white fog flowed from it to cover the battlefield. It surrounded Branwen, soaking her hair wet and running by its thickness, paler than her house-kept skin. She shook, but she did not want to fall; her knees were weak but she pushed herself; and then all of a sudden she was lying down once more, and could see no more of the presence of the figures.
—
She spent all the time that she could outside now, for she knew now what it was like to be without it.
"Vidar! Can you show me more of what you have learned?"
Branwen was in her twelfth year now; she had almost forgotten fevered dreams, but not quite their substance. She walked to her brother carrying a long stick she had stripped down herself for the size of the quarterstaves they gave boys to learn. Her brother no longer wanted to be a warrior so much as when they had been younger, but like any other boy he learned under the village elders with his friends and would hate to be thought less of a man.
"You're a girl and you're not strong enough," Vidar said, as usual.
"And if you can't fight me, which of the men could you fight?" Branwen reminded him, again as usual. "Had you not practised the high-guard backfoot with me, you would not have done so well against Snorri..."
"Because, Gwen, you're both my least and most favourite little sister," Vidar said. He rose from his seat with a sigh, and took out the staff they had given him. Staves led to spears for the boys, for it was only a few who possessed or could afford a sword. Illugi had not only a sword but a sword sharpened by dweomer, inherited from a raider-grandfather, and was a source of great envy. Branwen beckoned Vidar outside to the small valley not far from the pigsty, where they would not be noticed.
Her brother took a low grip and came at her quickly; Branwen prepared herself to hold the block.
After, Branwen's largest bruise on her rib was slightly darker and much more tender; but Vidar had fallen on his backside in the mud once, and complained that she must be somehow cheating. She was shorter than he, but no cobweb, brown and solid from running outdoors and sheep-tending.
In the village men still left for the wars with Torstvik isle, the returning of raids from Isleifsvarn and Stonecliff and Ehrlasst, aiding of Seawolf's allies Otkelholm and Varlslake. In her village Branwen had never seen the chieftain of all Seawolf nor his band of hirdmen, only the men like her father who had returned from fighting. They said that chieftain Saevil Snakearmed was a head taller than most men, his hirdmen strong in war; he and most of his warriors followed the Battlelord and prayed at highsuns for courage and strength. But the raids were far from their small village. Branwen's father and mother prayed to the Earthmother that it would continue so. She agreed.
But there are times when anyone of courage has to fight, the tales of her people would have told her. We are strong because we are willing to die on our feet...
Her oldest brother Alfden fought; from him they had heard nothing for a year. When he returned the farm would belong to him. If he did not—and that was a terrible thought indeed—then Ingvi would own it, Vidar likely to manage it. Her brothers would take brides and they and their children would stay another generation.
She was quieter than she had been and sometimes she stilled to stare into the distance, and for that some thought of her as strange. Branwen cared little for that; when she was still she wanted to try to remember whispers she had half-forgotten, and when she was quiet she thought of running and what she had seen of the boys' quarterstaff practice, the scenes rising before her eyes in colour and motion. What if Torfi sidestepped more quickly and put down the staff on Njall's shoulder? Jorgli, quick-footed, backed to the corner by slow, broad, Karstbein. Iving raising the staff high above his head, the sun behind him... Sometimes the ground below them was soft mud, where they lost footing.
There was always work to be done, and if there were villagers to whom she had nothing to say then let it be so.
In the field she counted the heads of the sheep; the number of the scraggly-bodied herd had increased, almost all of the last season's lambing living. Branwen had spent long nights tending to the sickly ones, rubbing them with blankets and forcing ewe's milk mixed with mouhgain and jherryseed to their throats. Vallanor Long-Legs, Gharlast the Big, Asgota the Plump, the smallest Sefian the White... She could not see Sefian. She cajoled the herd into the high paddock to continue to graze and went to search.
The setting sun darkened the ground; turning stony hills black and grass dark grey even as the sky was aflame in a riot of colour. Branwen had no fear of darkness and could endure cold, but it would be more difficult to find Sefian. She searched for the last place she'd seen him running. There in answer to her cry came a distant bleat. She stumbled over prickled gorse and sharp rocks; there was still much light to see by.
Then in the evening she heard the howl of a wolf.
Sometimes the wolves the island was named for were heard distantly, but for all the boys' longings to kill one with sling or spear they kept further inland than their village. But she hadn't imagined the cry; and there was Sefian, bleating, trying to struggle from a thorn-bush that held him. She couldn't see the source of the call.
"Sefian, I am coming," she declared loudly. A hand flew to the sling she kept at her waist. "Then your wounds will be bathed and Gerda will give you milk."
There were so many darkened rocks and shadows. Branwen took another sure-footed step across the craggy ground to Sefian in his struggling; she had made herself know how to walk any ground.
Then she saw the grey dark-eyed white-toothed shape, and it flew out of its crouch between rocks.
The pebble and the sling— Sefian, a fragment of a thought— Her hands moving faster than the thought had come, and the moment later the sling had swung and the wolf had moved, off its course away from her sheep—
Sefian's bleat was hysterical now and his struggles with the thorns marked him with blood. The wolf snapped. Branwen took another pebble to her sling, to aim it quickly.
—Seawolf, warriors, by— she almost-thought, in disarray but the form of the smooth pebble and the linen of her sling clear to her.
The second pebble had hit the wolf's side below the fur and the wolf was slender, its side-ribs outlining the shape of a skeleton. It howled again. She saw a bloodstain across its face, that her first shot's mark had managed to hit the eye; she'd no knowledge of how that had been guided— She ran forward, herder's crook taken back to hand, to make sure it would not seize the prey. At last Sefian burst from the thorns; and the wolf leapt at her.
She'd stopped to brace herself, to step back now her duty was done. That gave her a chance to step back, but the claws— And it was big, and breathing with hot breath—
She kicked out. Her hide-wrapped foot hit that bony midsection. Branwen's hands on their own swept out the crook, like a quarterstaff—if she'd thought at all she would have been petrified by fear of it—
The wood hit the wolf's body with all the strength she had, which was little. She could see it—thin, old, starving—pushed back; then she hit again. The crook reached the head of it. On the rocks there was a drop—not too far—
The crook raked down and pushed back the wolf; and then, fearing, she kicked out again. It fell from the rock's edge. She could feel blood upon her arm now; the pain of three long cuts past shoulder and forearm, below her clothing. She forced herself to the edge to look down. There the wolf remained, the fall not much higher than her own height; but one of its legs was bent. Its fur was orange in a last beam of dying light, and the blood over its blind eye the brown of earth.
Jumping down to its teeth and claws still frightened her. But she had to, she thought; it would steal another's sheep, perhaps even return. She selected a large rock and aimed it carefully at the skull. On neck and shoulder it harmed the wolf, sending the starved creature to the ground to stay there; it twitched and stilled.
Branwen went after Sefian to return him to his ewe, and then spent greater time than strictly she had to applying poultices to him. By that time it was dark.
—This is not the action of...of a brave child of Seawolf! she told herself, suddenly. She would have slept in the small shelter; instead she made a makeshift torch and went to look again upon the wolf. It had not moved, and she had truly killed it.
"It was old and starving," she had to speak the truth.
"Then you must have happened across it while it was already dying," Vidar said, and did not seem to notice the mark of a sling bullet at the eye of the body or the lesser one on the side. The tanned skin was gloves and leg-wrappings for winter, and nobody called her Branwen Wolf-slayer.
Bola Kolsdottir from three landholdings over had new-woven clothing that harvest season, and wore her cedar-brown hair in two plaits bound by thread dyed a madder red. Branwen had no reason to notice this, but somehow she didn't look away; they were of the same village, but to walk between holdings was often long. Past the brightness of the ends of her hair Bola smiled, plump-cheeked. Something in her had changed. Branwen stopped and stared, though went unnoticed while Bola spoke the news to Vidar.
"—The priest's hut, filled at last," Bola said. "An old man, all but a cripple; I've a thought he'll find little here. Of the Battlelord, of course, and from the look of him and his scars..."
"Ulquissala will be green as one of her brews with jealousy if he heals," Vidar said, laughing at his own wit. Bola smiled prettily.
"At least 'tis not a doomcrow," she said; the name for Talassans who worshipped the Storm Lord.
"Of course I know him not," Branwen's father said. "I saw many of the Battlelord; of the Waves' Captain; and of the Frostmaiden bitch; and I know they cannot heal all with pure miracles as their stories would say. Leave it."
And of course her father spoke the truth. But in the dirt street of the small gatherings of the village, the priest to the Battlelord was an old man in black and once-crimson rags bearing a network of scars across his face and hands; white-haired, where he had hair left, all but a beggar. Branwen took the bread she would have had for midmeal, warm that morning from her mother's oven.
"Would you have bread?" she asked him. The look in his eyes was wolfish below his steel skullcap; she froze, but did not turn away. He held out a clawed hand.
"Give," he said. His voice matched his face: rough, cracked, and broken by war. She reached out and gave him the food. He brought the first small loaf to his mouth as if he had not eaten in days; crumbs flew everywhere. There were only two teeth left in his mouth. "Obligations...to clergy," he said. "Tempus helps fight; and for his broken-down servants, they scrounge."
Below his rags, Branwen saw, he carried an iron warhammer, spotted and cracked by use. And yet well-kept.
"You're a priest of Tempus," she said, half-desperately, half only trying to remember the dreams that called her while she woke.
The priest said nothing at first. Beside them was a line of thick mud from a recent rain, part human and animal waste besides dirt. He took a plain clay cup fastened to his robes and took up a handful of the waste to fill it; and he spoke words she couldn't understand, not to her but with a hand passing over the cup. Then at once there was steam rising from it, Branwen saw. He held it low enough that she could see, and the clay was clean and filled with boiling water; then the priest dipped the other loaf of bread into the clear water, wetting it to softness before bringing it again to his broken mouth.
"Small blessings," he said, and his black eyes were not looking at her. "Tell me, child!" Suddenly he had leaned down to her; his breath was foul in her face, and though his scars were fearsome Branwen felt she could not dare to glance away. "Wars I have fought for the Foehammer; Seawolf against Isleifsvarn, Seawolf against Stonecliffs. Yet all of the isles of the North worship the same. Why is this so?"
She had learned as many stories as she could, though she was better at remembering events than exact words like a skald.
"My father fought," Branwen said eventually, "and the father of my father died in battle. I do not know nothing of what it means."
"War is fair because it oppresses all equally," the old priest uttered. "The deserving warrior wins, but fortune has its sway and deserving warriors die screaming like cowards. What meanings do there remain?"
It seemed a terror had opened before her eyes, and the mud by their side was no longer only mud but steeped in the red blood of people, scattered with caltrops and daggers and the remains of shields.
"—They say priests have not only the power to kill," Branwen said.
The priest dipped the remains of the bread into his water; ate and drank in a single, quick gulp.
"I will bring more," Branwen offered softly.
He raised a gnarled fist in her direction, but brought it down on empty air. "Go now, little girl. Your father calls."
—
It was not the only day she brought food and drink to the priest. Dried apples, lambskin flasks of goats' milk, lumps of bread and slices of salt pork meant for her. Custom had that old priests were to be honoured.
"The village is poor," she said to him in explanation, or excuse. The sheep had to be constantly moved to find grass to graze; the ground was stony and often dry; compared to the few times she had visited larger villages on market-days they were far from wealthy. She and her mother and brothers were all used to never-full stomachs in the winter months.
"Your best men go to the chieftain to fight endless war," the priest said, and raised a flask that she had not given him to his mouth, drinking on the dark liquid contained by it.
"And some return," Branwen said. She had grown courage enough to answer the old man back when she went to the priest's hut. In some ways he was a memory for her. Or a promise.
"Make sure even foes are armed. Look upon all who act honourably with favour, whether friend or foe," the priest replied. She repeated the words in a whisper to herself.
War is fair because it oppresses all equally— he had also said.
"War should be fair, because... War should be fair. Nobody should attack someone who doesn't want to fight," Branwen said.
"Fair, is it now?" From the side of his mouth the priest spat a brown liquid to the ground. Her family would forbid her coming to see her if they knew, but she was quiet to come when she could spare time from sleep or duties. "And would you rather fight a fair-armed enemy believing exactly as you in the Battlelord's promises, or unarmed weakling of coward's snaketongue?"
"A fair-armed..." Branwen began. Then she stopped, confused. It was better if the boys in training were equally matched; they learned. But she did not want to hurt someone who believed the same. Or turn into a bully of anyone weaker. "Neither!" At last she had an answer she wanted. "It's best to fight a fair-armed warrior and doer of wrongs."
"It is not the name I would use for a denizen of Isleifsvarn or Stonecliff or Ehrlasst. Men, same as all; men still as hopeless at mending their own belly-wounds, or killing a horse shrieking in pain."
It was her father's experience, Branwen thought, and waited confused at what she must do.
"Why is that?" the priest of the Battlelord asked. "Tempus allows the same men ruled by chance, one upon each side."
"...There are some evil men who want territory that they have no right to," Branwen said. "Seawolf is not an isle of thralls." She was freewoman born to freeholding, karl rather than slave.
"Seawolf is not an isle of thralls," the old man mocked. "Do you know what makes all the most trouble? Wagging tongues like yours. Women's wagging tongues. Smooth-tongued that keep out of strife themselves. Hiding behind words."
Branwen flushed. "I do not talk to make others go to war! It would be best to fight against only those who want to take slaves. Smooth-tongued..." she repeated slowly.
"The smooth-tongued and fleet of feet that avoid all strife and never defend their beliefs wreak more harm than the strongest raider," recited the priest, and those words caught something inside her.
"—War is fair because it oppresses all equally," Branwen repeated, as if some wind-gap had suddenly been filled by the right chink of wood to build a hut secure, "but war also gives a chance to defend equally, the smooth-tongued who cause it on purpose—" The boys who practised most were the best in training; they were equal in that, although like her they could have been hurt and confined—
"War is fair in that it oppresses and aids all equally," the priest said, and again Branwen felt that gap filled.
"Tempus rides the white mare Veiros and the black stallion Deiros and brings ravens to the battlefield," she said, "and he is—was—worshipped by Vallanor and Mjatholm and chieftain Saevil Snakearmed himself."
"Another thing said of him," the priest said, smiling his blackened, gummy smile, "is that slow attrition is far crueller than decisive slaying."
He was old and sometimes he spoke almost as if he resented the god he served, but he had his prayers for spells.
"Will you go back to war?" Branwen dared to ask, but he was silent to that, spitting once again on the ground.
He wore his skullcap nestled below a dark cowl, less filthy now than when she had offered to wash it. They also said that priests of Tempus did not cover their faces, because his face was covered by a steel-grey helm. Grey, she thought, sword-grey, sword-black, axe-black. The priest was a crow in his dark garments and remnants of grey-black mail, those that fed on the fallen.
Something crashed on the ground. "Seer, mad, simple or fool?" The priest towered over her; she looked at him. "You fade and you stare to blank emptiness. A girl-child with no sense; a stinking sheep-herder brought to madness. I am sick of it."
The words, for a long moment, stilled like a half-formed child in her throat. Her mother; her father; Sigran growing. But her warrior brother Alfden fought far-off, fought others of Tempus brought perhaps by smooth-tongued thieves who would steal his life and would have willingly stolen that of her father.
"Let me go with you as a servant when you leave," Branwen said, looking into his face and not allowing her gaze to be vanquished.
Then she was able to remember the dreams.
—
Behind the door her father spoke of pigs.
"Ornolf of Greyfur-holding would give three for her. She's strong and knows how to work."
"—Your daughter is barely a step above a thrall and a mad shepherd-girl of no value. Do you dare to lie to me?"
Her mother spoke for her: "She has a chance to wed as a freeborn woman. This is...madness itself. We would hardly give her to you..."
Greyfur-holding was a small farm; Ornolf's wife had died in childbirth three years ago. She'd not thought that she would be given, but other marriages were made among their village. And it was the priest of Tempus who called her valueless and mad.
"—Contract her to me as servant." The priest's deep, cracked voice was unmistakable to hear. "To tend to my clothes and meals. That neither I nor another man shall lay hand on her, if that suits your liking." A dry laugh. "You would find she's done so already; come herself to give an old warrior what he deserves. Or find in me what her madness led her to seek."
Her father's voice was angry. "We would have forbidden her. I returned from my years. I met too many cursed crows like you. You cannot have—"
Then there was the clink of metal; of a large sum of metal, coins run against each other. Branwen pressed an eye to a crack in the door. Gold was almost unknown, and that amount, concealed by his outer self, begging and seeming to starve... It made her draw back in surprise. "What dowry for her else?" the cleric demanded. "What needs for those other strong sons of yours, hey? What of another hard winter? Give her to me for five years and a freewoman she would be once more."
"You cannot bribe us—" Her mother's voice sounded, strained and old.
"Be silent, Geirny," her father said. "If what you say is true; she disobeyed already to go to you..."
"The Foehammer strike me down if I lie," the priest said piously.
"Five years and a freewoman," Branwen heard her father repeat, with thought, and then there was the clink of coin.
—