The inferno leapt through the trees with spectacular speed. It jumped between treetops faster than it moved on the ground, and several times we found ourselves beneath a roof of flame whilst the beast roared behind us. Trees exploded within moments of the inferno wrapping them. Literally blown apart, great swirls of orange embers rising above them. The flame rushed through the needled branches like a wind, consuming everything. A burning hand pressed against my back, driving me to greater exertions. Ron’s path split from Sleipnir’s; I chose the one to the left. A hundred yards on I saw my horse through the trees to the side, snared on something, hook-briar most like, screaming. It takes a lot to snare a horse, and Ron was a strong one, fuelled with terror of the flame. But he hung there and I raced on, cursing. At least the fire put a quick end to him. The gelding would have been molten fat and charring bones before he knew the firestorm had him.
I saw Snorri up ahead, fire-lit. Sleipnir’s strength failing her, both of them toiling up a steep slope.
“Run.” A gasp, little louder than my rasping breath.
We made the ridge before the flames, save those dancing high above us in the treetops. “Hel be praised.” Snorri leaned against a trunk, gasping. The slope ran away from us, just as steep on the way down as it was on the rise, trees thinning yard by yard and where the ground grew level, stretching out before us, mile upon mile of moonlit grassland.
TWENTY-ONE
A man can drown in the grass seas of Thurtan. In the swaying green, wind-rippled, with twenty miles and more of cold bog and saw grass on every side, it can seem that you’ve been set adrift in an ocean without end.
The fire at our back at least provided a reference point, an idea of distance and measure. These are things easily lost in the grass. As we walked, Snorri had told me the men of the pines had haunted forests like Gowfaugh for generations. The stories differed on the source of the original evil but now they perpetuated themselves, letting out the blood of their victims and replacing it with the sap of the oldest trees. The creatures kept some measure of intelligence, but if they served any master other than their own hunger it wasn’t spoken of. It seemed hard to credit, though, that the Dead King hadn’t steered them into our path.
“No more forests,” I said.
Snorri wiped the soot from his eyes and nodded.
We trekked a mile, another mile, and collapsed on the side of a gentle rise, looking back to watch the smoke and flame swirl above the burning forest. It seemed inconceivable that such an inferno, lofting embers into the heavens and scorching the clouds themselves, could have started with the tiny spark struck from my flint and nursed by my breath. Still, perhaps that’s all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing. It might be said that the whole course of my own adventure sprang from a die that should have rolled a five or a two, landing instead with a single snake eye pointing at me, a pitiless eye watching me plunge further into Maeres Allus’s debt.
“That,” I said, “was close.”
“Yes.” Snorri sat knees to chest, watching the fire. He pulled a stick loose, tangled in his hair.
“We can’t go on like this. The next time we won’t be so lucky.” He had to see sense. Two men couldn’t carry on against such opposition. I’d gambled on long odds before—not my life, but my fortune—but never on so hopeless a bet as Snorri offered. Without prize or purpose.
“I would have given Karl such a pyre.” Snorri waved a hand at the burning horizon. “I built his beside the Wodinswood from deadfall. The trees were too heavy with the winter’s snow for the fire to spread, but I would have burned them all.
“He should have had a ship, my Karl. A longship. I would have laid him before the mast with my father’s axe and such armour as would serve him in Valhalla. But there was no time and I couldn’t leave him for the dead to find and use. Better wolves have him than that.”
“He told you about a key?” I said. Snorri had spoken of it back in the ruins of Compere but fallen silent. Perhaps now, with mile upon mile of blazing forest burning as Compere had burned, he would speak again. His eldest boy broke bones to escape his shackles and his last words to Snorri had been of a key.
And in the darkness of the grassland, with Gowfaugh burning red behind us, Snorri told me a story.
• • •
“My father told me the tale of Olaaf Rikeson and his march to the Bitter Ice. I heard it by the hearth many times. Father would spin it out on the deepest nights of winter when the ice on the Uulisk made sharp complaint against the cold.