Valkyrie's Shadow

Winter's Crown: Act 7, Chapter 12

Winter's Crown: Act 7, Chapter 12

Chapter 12

“They’re late.”

"They are,” Sigurd replied, “but that doesn’t mean anything in itself. We’re Frost Giants, not Dwarves.”

Gudrun looked up from tending to their wounded son. He had come home with a metre-long gash on the outside of his thigh: the result of sparring with the other young warriors of the settlement. Coming back with wounds was a regular thing for those in training, but Sigurd’s wife always had a halfway annoyed expression when it happened. Probably because she was the one that had to heal it.

“?Cure Serious Wounds?.”

After Gudrun had finished inspecting the wound, the glow of healing magic washed over the boy. The gash closed, leaving only the unmarred blue flesh of his thigh and the torn section of his leggings. Gudrun glowered at that too.

“Weren’t you the one who was convinced that a new calamity would come from the south?” She asked after sending their son on his way.

“I still am,” Sigurd answered, “but I’m also of the mind that a calamity should be more calamitous – I expect nothing less than the mountain to fall on our heads. Since it hasn’t yet, there’s no reason to worry. Let them do their thing: they’re a scouting party, and the foothills are full of tribes to raid.”

“You sent them to look for signs of danger,” Gudrun noted, “not to raid.”

“I did,” Sigurd nodded, “but the accounts of those few that witnessed the last calamity and survived were very clear. The nations of the lowlanders burned first, their cities sending up great columns of smoke over the entire horizon. The scouts were instructed to return if they noticed any sign of this.”

“So you’re letting them run wild down there until then.”

“Their task is simple,” Sigurd told her, “and I will not deny them their right to raid if they find something worthy of their attention. We haven’t been down there for years, so there should be plenty to fight by now. The tribes in the mountain valleys have been thinned out, so there’s not much to fight or plunder there…why the sudden wariness, anyways? This is something that you’d normally encourage.”

“A feeling.”

“A feeling…like an omen?”

“Perhaps,” Gudrun sighed. “The last few decades have been so bad that I find it difficult to discern anything out of the ordinary.”

Sigurd rose from his seat in the hall, a stony expression painting his face. Nearby, several of his family members moved to attend to him. He waved them away.

“I won’t be long,” he said. “If anyone comes looking for me, tell them that they can find me at the top of the southeastern approach.”

It was not until he made his way out of the icy longhouse and well outside of the settlement that he blew out a weary sigh through his pale white beard. It was not a sigh that spoke of physical or mental exhaustion, but the sort that he thought must come from the soul: one eroded from long decades of worry. No one but his wife and the Jarl ever saw this side of him; to most, he was the bold champion of the Frostreaver Tribe.

‘Hope’, Jarl Frostreaver termed his regular, audacious statements, but to Sigurd, it was feeling more and more like desperation – no matter the words he used. His hope was the salvation of his kind: war. The strife and chaos that would rouse his people from their complacency and call them to glory once again. Conflict to revive their strength and rejuvenate their thinning blood, lest they fall so far that the way to the afterlife was forever closed to them. Even now, he wondered what their honoured ancestors would think of their descendants’ current state.

Preying on the weak tribes below was not enough, and true challenges were few and far between. His people had grown toothless and did not even war between themselves. The Dwarves had made powerful new allies – the same ones that had seemingly subjugated the Frost Dragons – but nothing had developed out of the tribes’ decision to confront them. Indeed, it seemed like their complacency had anchored them to inaction once again, and they were content with simply watching whatever was going on in the Dwarven passes.

Did they think that they could remain in that state forever? Just as the weaker denizens of the Azerlisia Mountains remained at the mercy of the Frost Giants, the strong had the privilege of exercising their power on a whim. Waiting for this strong newcomer to do something to them was bound to end in some disaster. A challenge was in order: to settle where each side stood before inaction was perceived as weakness and the newcomers moved to take everything.

Gunnar Frostreaver, the Jarl’s son and the representative sent to lead their warriors at the gathering of the tribes, should have understood this very well. Perhaps he was being snubbed by the rest of the tribes due to the Frostreavers’ weakened influence.

Sigurd came to the top of the glacier that flowed down into the southeastern approach after an hour’s journey. Below, the pass that stretched from east to west looked the same as it always had – icy, windblown and filled with all manner of lesser Undead. The foothills and forests to the east showed no evidence of being greatly disturbed, nor did any signs of devastation rise from the lowlands beyond. If not for the threats that loomed in his mind, it would have passed for another bright and frozen day.

Scanning the landscape, he looked for the hunters that were stationed on the lookouts. With the younger, more inexperienced ones out scouting below, the veterans had taken their posts. He squinted in annoyance – they were much harder to spot as they stood their quiet vigil; some impossibly so. After some time, he finally managed to find one: not by spotting them from afar, but walking to a common lookout spot near one of the cliffs overlooking the glacier until he finally came close enough to spot her.

“Thegn,” the huntress, Brynhild, nodded.

She sat with her legs dangling over the lookout, one arm resting on a pile of boulders. Unlike the young sentries that were usually placed to watch over the pass, the veterans were more adept at hurling boulders from a great distance and were significantly more relaxed in their approach to destroying any notably strong Undead that manifested.

“Bird still out?” Sigurd asked.

“Yep,” Brynhild replied. “Gudrun had me send her further out, but she should be back any time now. What’s she so worried about, anyway? Those kids have only been out for a week, and there’s plenty for them to fight down there.”

“I said something like that as well,” Sigurd said, “but she has a ‘feeling’.”

The huntress frowned and scanned the horizon with a grim expression. Sigurd snorted in amusement.

“I swear you all take her more seriously than you do me,” he said.

“She’s the village Shaman,” Brynhild smirked. “You’re just the village meathead.”

Sigurd barked out a laugh. She wasn’t too far off: he might be a champion of the tribe, but life outside of warfare mostly revolved around their mystics, who stood outside of the hierarchy of strength. Beyond that, Gudrun just wasn’t someone that anyone wanted to get on the bad side of.

A speck appeared against the greenery of the foothills, growing larger as it rose to their altitude. The huntress’ ‘bird’ wasn’t actually a bird – it was a Peryton. The magical beast was something like a cross between an eagle and a demonic stag, sporting a full rack of sharpened horns on its deer-like head. It sat upon the pile of boulders beside the huntress, silently conversing with its mistress in the strange way that hunters and their companions did.

After a few minutes, the Peryton settled down more comfortably on the boulders and started to preen its feathers. Brynhild stood up to face Sigurd.

“Looks like something got ‘em,” she said.

“‘Looks like’?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “There’s signs of a battle in the foothills about fifty kilometres southeast of here, ending in a forest clearing. There aren’t any bodies, but the damage from the fighting is clearly from our scouts…unless there’s some other Giant tribe running around down there.”

The possibility of that was slim: the Frostreaver Tribe was the only surviving Frost Giant tribe of the southern ranges.

“What about the other side?” Sigurd asked, “Who did they fight?”

“Something Hobgoblin-sized, going by their tracks.”

The huntress paused to look over her shoulder at the Peryton.

“It wasn’t Hobgoblins, going by the smell.”

Hobgoblin-sized, but not Hobgoblins. Sigurd’s gaze turned eastward.

“Humans?”

“Humans?” Brynhild wrinkled her nose, “Besides their having no business being there, Humans are soft. Remember the ones we used to raid up on the Dwarven highway?”

Humans once traded regularly with the Dwarves, but their activity had declined sharply in recent decades. From what he remembered, even the guards that they sent with their caravans were mostly weak. Certainly, there were a few that might match a weaker Frost Giant, but he had never seen so many that they could wipe out a large scouting party like the one that had just met its demise. That their opponent had the luxury of cleaning up the battlefield so thoroughly suggested that they were of notable strength, but they were still not remotely qualified to be some catastrophic threat.

“It’s your call, Thegn,” Brynhild prompted him. “What do we do?”

Sigurd snorted at the edge of anticipation in her voice. It wasn’t something that he had heard in a long time.

“We’ll have to check and make sure nothing is going on along the other approaches first,” Sigurd told her. “If they turn up with nothing, we’ll send some stronger parties down. You’ll want to be a part of that, I’m guessing.”

“Damn straight,” she grinned. “I haven’t had a good fight in thirty years.”

He left her to her excitement, setting off to check with the other hunters along the southern pass. Within a day, they determined that there was nothing else of significance in any direction their tribe was responsible for. Upon returning to the longhouse, Gudrun looked up from her work and peered at him suspiciously.

“I knew it,” she said. “I haven’t seen you so giddy in half a century.”

“The scouting party was wiped out with no remains left behind,” Sigurd said. “The excitement of the veterans is just a bit infectious. They’re all clamouring to be the next.”

Gudrun rose from her seat, wiping her hands on her apron.

“How many do you plan on sending now?” She asked.

“Three parties of ten,” Sigurd answered. “We have no idea where our new friends went, so they’ll be sent to cover a wide area.”

“Who will keep watch over the pass?”

“Hm…well, they might miss each other down there, so my warband will stand over our part of the pass. The other Thegns should be taking care of their own.”

“How greedy can you…” Gudrun started, then sighed at his wide grin, “How long until all this happens?”

“It will take a few days to arrange provisions for the scouting parties,” Sigurd replied, “but I’ll be taking over at the pass right away so they can rest before they leave. It’s too bad that we still don’t know what we’re up against down there – I’m getting pretty curious about them.”

Gudrun knelt down to pull aside the quilted rug on the floor. Beneath it was a shallow depression filled with ice.

“What–”

“Names,” Gudrun said as she brushed the surface of the ice clear. “Maybe I can at least find out what you’re dealing with by divining the location of the missing remains or their belongings.”

Sigurd listed the members of the scouting party as Gudrun continued her preparations. From the chest near Sigurd’s seat in the hall, she retrieved a black cowl fashioned out of some unknown material. It was an heirloom of his family, passed down through at least three generations. One of its effects was that it foiled all attempts at gathering information on the wearer by divination spells and effects. It also protected against all mind-affecting spells and abilities.

There were a few other benefits, and it served as a powerful item that protected one from various types of magic that were commonly used against Giants. As a Shaman, Gudrun used it to render herself immune to counterdivination attempts when she herself was scrying.

She donned the cowl and held out a hand.

“?Summon Monster I?.”

A tiny Fire Elemental flickered to life before them, and she directed it to the ice. Spells existed that could change the temperature of water, but they didn’t last in the frozen climes where Frost Giants made their homes. When the pool had completed thawing, Gudrun took a deep breath and cast another spell.

“?Scrying?.”

They waited in silence for a full minute before Gudrun’s focused look relaxed.

“What happened?” Sigurd asked.

“The spell only works on live targets,” Gudrun said. “So they’re either dead or under some sort of counterdivination effect.”

“I thought the cowl protects against divination.”

“Divination against the wearer, yes,” Gudrun told him. “The target of my Scrying spell was not the wearer of the cowl.”

“I knew that.”

Gudrun shot him a look before falling into thought again. After a moment, she cast another spell.

“?Locate Object?.”

Another minute passed. As with the Scrying spell, it appeared that Gudrun had failed. Her face carried a vexed expression as she muttered to herself.

“Who would ward something like that against divination?”

“What did you search for?” Sigurd asked.

“A trinket that one of the people you listed always carried around,” Gudrun answered. “Either the person who fought this scouting party is absurdly cautious and has mana to spare, or all of the remains are under a larger effect that prevents attempts at divination.”

Gudrun dismissed the Fire Elemental and a thin film of ice covered the pool within seconds.

“What does that mean, exactly?” Sigurd asked.

“Exactly? I’m not sure,” Gudrun answered. “They at least have some sort of powerful magic caster in their number if they can block me off so completely – maybe more than one.”

She removed the cowl and held it out between them.

“Make sure you have this on out there,” Gudrun told him. “I’m confident that you can account for yourself properly against a warrior, but a magic caster is another thing entirely.”

Gudrun reached over and fastened the cowl around his shoulders. Sigurd thought to make a quip over how she was being overly serious about him standing watch just an hour away, but the look in her pale blue eyes stilled his tongue. As a powerful Völva, her omens were not something to be treated so frivolously.

“Fight well, husband,” she said.

“Should I be so lucky to meet my match,” he replied. “I shall await you in the halls of our honoured ancestors.”