He shook his head, to clear it, order his mind. He was tired, not thinking well. He didn't have to kill the other two. Could just rise up now, while they slept, start back east. He snorted softly, amused at himself. That still wasn't right. He didn't even need to sneak away. Could wake them, bid farewell, invoke Jad's blessing on the two of them (and Ingavin's, inwardly). Alun ab Owyn had told him to leave. He didn't have to be here at all. Except for the one thing. The awareness that lay under the folly of this night like a seed in hard spring ground.

His son was on those dragon-ships, and he was there because Thorkell had killed a man in a tavern a little more than a year ago. If you were a particular kind of man (Thorkell wasn't) you could probably throw away a good deal of time thinking about fathers and sons; time better spent with an ale flask and honest dice. He couldn't truthfully say he'd put his mind very often to the boy over the years on Rabady. He'd taught him something of fighting, a father owed that duty. If pressed he'd have pointed to a house, land, a position on the isle. Bern was to have had all those when his father died, and wasn't that enough? Wasn't it more than Thorkell had ever had?

He didn't carry many memories of the two of them together as the boy grew up. Some men liked to talk, spin tales at their own hearth or a tavern's—spin them so far from truth you could laugh. His first tavern killing had come about because he had laughed at someone doing that. Thorkell wasn't a tale-spinner, never had been. A man's tongue could bring him trouble more quickly than anything else. He kept his counsel, guarded memories. If others in Rabady told the boy tales about his father—truth or lies—well, Bern would learn to sort those for himself, or he wouldn't. No one had taken Thorkell in hand as a boy and taught him how you handled yourself when you came ashore in a thunderstorm on rocks and found armed men waiting for you.

Sitting in that wood that lay like a locked barrier between Cyngael lands and Anglcyn, awake while two young men slept, he did find himself recalling—unexpectedly—an evening long ago. A summer's twilight, mild as a maiden. The boy—eight summers old, ten? — had come out with him while he repaired a door on the barn. Bern had carried his father's tools, Thorkell seemed to remember, had been amusingly proud to do so. He'd fixed the door then they'd walked somewhere—he didn't remember where, the boundaries of their land—and for some reason he'd told Bern the story of the raid when the Anglcyn royal guard had trapped them too far from the sea.

He really didn't tell many of the old tales. Maybe that's why the evening was with him. The scent of the summer flowers, a breeze, the rock—he remembered now, he'd been leaning against the rock at their northern boundary, the boy looking up at him as he listened, so intent it could make you smile. One evening, one story. They'd walked back to the house, after. No more to it than that. Bern wouldn't even recall the evening, he knew. Nothing of any meaning had taken place.

Bern was bearded and grown. Their land was gone; an exile's house always went to someone else. You could say the boy had made his own choice, but you could also say Thorkell had taken choices away from him, put him in a circumstance where a poisonous serpent like Ivarr Ragnarson might think through whose son this was and take vengeance for what had happened at Brynnfell. You could say his father had put him on that branching path.

Even so, you might even find a reason to chuckle about all of this tonight, if that was the way your humour worked. All you needed to do was think about it. Consider the three of them in this wood. Alun ab Owyn was really here, more than a little maddened, because of a dead brother. Athelbert had come because of his father—the need to make proof of himself in Aeldred's eyes and his own. And Thorkell Einarson, exiled from Rabady, was-truthfully—in this forest for his son.

Someone should make a song of it, he thought, shaking his head. He spat into the darkness. He was too tired to laugh, but felt like it, a little.

A small sound. The grey dog had lifted his head, seemed to be watching him. He really was weary, but it almost seemed as if the dog were tracking his thoughts. An unsettling animal, more to it than you'd expect.

He had no idea which way the Jormsvik ships were going, none of them did. This desperate, foolish journey might be entirely unnecessary. You had to come to terms with that. You could be dying for no reason at all. Well, what of that? Reason or no reason, you were just as dead. He'd already lived longer than he'd expected to.

He heard a different sound.

The dog again; Cafall had risen, was standing rigidly, head lifted. Thorkell blinked in surprise. Then the animal whimpered.

And that sound, from that source, frightened him beyond words. He scrambled to his feet. His heart was pounding even before he, too, caught the smell.

That smell first, then sounds, he never saw a thing. The other two men rose, jerked from sleep at the first loud crashing, as if pulled upright like toys on a string. Athelbert began swearing; both unsheathed their swords.

None of them could see anything at all. It was black beyond power of sight to penetrate, stars and moon blocked by the encircling trees and their green-black summer leaves. The pool beside them dark, utterly still.

Such pools, Thorkell thought, rather too late, were where the creatures that ruled the night came to drink, or hunt.

"Jad's holy blood," whispered Athelbert, "was is that?"

Thorkell, had he been less afraid, might have made the easy, profane jest. Because it was blood they smelled. And flesh: pungent, rotting, like a kill left in the sun. A smell of earth, too, underneath, heavy, loamy, an animal odour with all of these.

Another sound, sharp in the black, something cracking: a small tree, a branch. Athelbert swore again. Alun had not yet spoken. The dog whimpered again, and Thorkell's hand on his hammer began to shake. One of the horses tossed its head and whinnied loudly. No secret to their presence now, if ever there had been.

"Stand close," he snapped, under his breath, though there was hardly a reason to be quiet now.

The other two came over. Alun still had his sword out. Athelbert sheathed his now, took his bow, notched an arrow. There was nothing to be seen, nowhere to shoot. Something fell heavily, north of them. Whatever this was, it was large enough to knock over trees.

And it was in that moment that Thorkell had an image burst within his mind and lodge there, as if rooted. His jaw clenched, to stop himself from crying out.

He had been a fighter almost all his life, had seen brain matter and entrails spilled to lie slippery on sodden ground, had watched a woman's face burn away, melting to bone. He'd seen blood-eaglings, a Karchite hostage torn apart between whipped horses, and never flinched, even when he was sober. These were the northlands, life was what it was. Hard things happened. But his hands were trembling now like an old man's. He actually wondered if he was going to fall. He thought of his grandmother, these long years dead, who had known of such things as the creature out there in the night must be, perhaps even its name.

"Ingavin's blind eye! Kneel!" he rasped, the words forming themselves, forced from him. But when he looked over he saw that the other two were already kneeling on that dark ground by the pool. The smell from beyond the glade was overpowering, you could gag or retch; Thorkell apprehended something hideous and immense, ancient, not to be in any way confronted by three men, frail with mortality, in a place where they should not be.

In terror then, weariness entirely gone, Thorkell looked at the shapes of the two men kneeling beside him, and he made a decision, a choice, took a path. The gods called you to themselves—wherever and whatever the gods might be—as it pleased them to do so. Men lived and died, knowing this.