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A tale from the Forbidden Lands

I. Three Dwarves

They left the Hollows in the early morning of the fourth day of spring, before the town was properly awake.

The decision to go was not difficult. They had found what they came for — another settlement, proof that the world beyond Oakenheart was inhabited and navigable — and now the Hollows had begun to feel complicated in the way that all places feel complicated once you know enough about them. There were the dead that walked at night and required a spoken ritual to discourage them. There was the brewer who was not what he claimed to be, and the village elder who wanted more than her share of everything that moved. There was the Rust Brother, tall and dark-cloaked, who had looked at Yawin with a private significance that none of them fully understood and did not particularly want to. The Hollows was a fine town. It was time to leave it.

The river ran east from the Hollows and then bent south, opening into a lake — wide and silver in the morning mist, the water steaming faintly in the cool air. The road that had led into town slowly became a trail, and the trail slowly became nothing. They followed the north shore, Sten a few steps ahead as always, Aldric’s eyes moving in their habitual sweep.

Aldric was not at his best. Something about the walking — the progressive distance from everything familiar, the way each day added another layer of country between him and the life he had known — pulled his mind back to his father. To the man who had returned and sat in the house, staring at the walls. He watched too much and saw too little, his attention scattered across too wide a field, catching at everything and fixing on nothing. He was jittery in a way he did not want to name.

It was in this state — distracted, too wide open — that he and Sten came around an outcrop of rocks at the lakeshore and found themselves face to face with three dwarves.

They were packing up a camp. Bedrolls, a small cooking fire still smoking, three sets of heavy packs, and three axes worn at the belt with the ease of long habit. They were broad and low and deliberate-looking, and the moment they saw Sten and Aldric, they rose and reached for the axes, and one of them said, in a voice that expected an answer:

“Who goes there?”

Sten, who had never been good at the opening exchanges of conversation, said they were travelers from the Hollows, about an hour back along the river. He said it with his hands where they could be seen and his bow undrawn, which was, for him, the fullest available expression of peaceable intent.

“You were at the Hollows,” the foremost dwarf said. His eyes were already doing the kind of thinking that precedes a question rather than follows one. “Was there a dwarf there? Brewing beer?”

Osric arrived at this moment with Vasilla, drawn by the voices. The four of them stood in a loose line, and the three dwarves stood in their own loose line, and the morning mist came off the lake, and the situation balanced.

“There is,” Osric said carefully. “Though he does not think of himself as one.”

The foremost dwarf turned to the second and said, with satisfaction, that had been a long time building: “I told you. I told you he was close. He is going to pay for all of it.”

They were not interested in elaborating on what it all was. They asked about the brewery’s location, its layout, and whether Yawin kept guards. Sten said he ran a tavern and kept boys. He said it the way you say something when you are answering the question asked, but not the one behind it. The dwarves seemed to accept this.

They packed the last of their camp, said travel well, and began walking toward the Hollows.

The four of them stood and watched them go.

“They are going to kill him,” Osric said.

“That seemed to be their intention,” Sten agreed.

A silence.

“He gave us breakfast,” Vasilla said. “And beer. And let me perform.”

Another silence, shorter.

“All right,” Osric said. “Let’s think about this.”

* * *

II. The Cemetery Plan

The plan, as it emerged, was Vasilla’s.

This was not immediately apparent. It began as a loose and anxious conversation about what could possibly be done: the dwarves were armed, there were three of them, catching them before they reached the Hollows would require moving faster than was comfortable, and the whole business was, as Sten pointed out, not strictly their problem to solve. Yawin had his own history with these men, his own reasons for whatever had brought them to this lakeshore, and strangers inserting themselves into a dwarf’s private accounting with another dwarf was the kind of thing that tended to create more trouble than it resolved.

All of that was true. None of it settled the matter.

What settled it, in the end, was something simpler: Yawin had been kind to them. He had fed them without being asked, given them the first round for free, and talked to them like people, which was more than the last strangers they had met had done. Whatever he owed these three dwarves, he had earned the right to be warned.

The question was how. Sten and Osric would run ahead — overland, staying out of sight, using the rolling hills and rock outcroppings to keep themselves hidden while the dwarves followed the river path. Vasilla and Aldric would fall behind, then catch up to the dwarves, slow them down with conversation, and buy time. Fifteen minutes. Half an hour. Enough for the older men to reach the Hollows and warn Yawin before three axes arrived at his door.

That was the first plan. It was a reasonable plan. The second plan was better.

Vasilla was explaining to the dwarves — earnestly, with the sincerity that only a good liar can fully commit to — that she had not been entirely honest with them. That Yawin, it turned out, had guards. That there was a Rust Brother involved who was close with him, and that walking up to the Three Skulls in broad daylight would end badly. She watched their faces as she said it. The foremost dwarf’s eyes moved to the other two, and there was a small silence, and then he said they would pay two gold for Yawin to be lured out of the Hollows entirely, to some place where the business could be conducted without the whole town watching.

Vasilla thought about this.

“Actually,” she said, “I have a better idea.”

The cemetery at the north end of town, she explained. Overgrown. Abandoned. Nobody went there. And nobody, she added — carefully, precisely — went outside at night.

She watched the dwarf work out what she was not saying. She watched him understand that an abandoned cemetery in a town where the dead walked at night was not a meeting place. It was a disposal.

She did not say this. She let him arrive at it himself.

“We will wait there after dark,” the dwarf said. “One hour after nightfall. Bring him to us.”

“Understood,” said Vasilla.

Aldric, walking beside her, said nothing. He was looking at the ground.

* * *

III. A Fine Plan

Sten and Osric reached the Hollows well ahead of the dwarves.

They crossed the wall at the same low section as before, stepped past the same gardens and chicken coops and shuttered windows, and nodded to the innkeeper of the Dead Man’s Hand, who waved from his porch and asked if they needed a room. They said they would let him know and kept moving south to the bridge, across it, down the bank to where Yawin stood on the dock, directing two boys with barrels.

He had his back on them. He was in the middle of a sentence when Osric said his name.

Yawin turned. He read their faces before they spoke.

“Inside,” he said. He sent the boys to the brewery, closed the shutters, and latched the door. In the dim interior of the Three Skulls, with the remains of the morning fire still glowing in the pit, Osric told him about the three dwarves on the lakeshore. Yawin’s face went through several expressions quickly, then went still.

“How much time do I have?”

“Half an hour. Perhaps less, depending on how well the others slow them.”

Yawin went behind the bar and came back with a dwarven battle axe. It was a good axe, well-maintained, carried like something that had been used before and was expected to be used again. He held it and seemed to weigh the situation the same way he was weighing the axe.

“They will not stop at a warning,” he said. “I know these men. Dwarves hold grudges the way stone holds cold — a very long time and very deep. They will not be satisfied until one of us is not standing.”

“Then we go out to meet them,” Osric said. “Before they reach the gates. Five of us, three of them.”

Sten, who had been calculating quietly in the background the way he calculated everything, said nothing. He thought about the axes. He thought about the distance, the open ground, what he could do with a bow at a hundred yards, and what three dwarves could do with three axes at arm’s length. The arithmetic was not comfortable, but it was not hopeless either.

Yawin was nodding, the decision already made, the axe already in his hand. He pulled five silver coins from a box behind the bar and pressed coins into each of their palms.

“If we survive this,” he said, “the debt is beyond silver. But silver is what I have at the moment.”

It was at the eastern gate, while Sten and Osric stood waiting and watching the road, that Vasilla and Aldric came through. And Vasilla explained the plan.

Yawin listened to all of it without speaking. When she finished, he looked at Sten.

“I like her,” he said. “She has much better plans than you.”

“She is welcome to all the plans she likes,” Sten said. “I just want to go home.”

They walked back to the Three Skulls, closed it up, and waited for dark.

* * *

IV. Walking in Peace with the Dead

The evening came slowly, the way spring evenings do — light going out of the sky in stages, rose giving way to blue giving way to the darkness that falls over a town that is mostly indoors and mostly quiet.

Yawin shuttered the Three Skulls and put out a Closed sign and cooked another pig, mostly because cooking was the only thing that visibly settled him. He paced. He checked the axe. He asked twice whether they thought the plan would work, and both times received the kind of answer that people give when they are not certain but feel that certainty is called for.

An hour after full dark, Vasilla and Aldric walked out of the Three Skulls and across the courtyard toward the cemetery. The bell was rung — loud, deliberate, the words spoken clearly: walk in peace with the dead — and then rung again for good measure, the sound rolling out across the quiet town and fading into the marshland beyond the northern wall.

Sten and Osric took a position at the back of a house near the northern perimeter. From there, they could see the cemetery wall: old stone, half-collapsed, mostly covered in years of unchecked growth. The graves beyond were invisible in the dark. No lanterns, no torchlight, no sign of movement.

Then one lantern. Low and careful, coming from the northeast, moving along the outside of the wall. The dwarves, staying in shadow, their light shielded.

Sten watched them find the gap in the wall and cross it. He watched the lantern disappear behind a mausoleum — roofless, broken, the upper half long since fallen into rubble. He watched the light go out as they doused it, waiting in the dark. He could hear, very faintly, the sound of two axes resting against stone.

Then, from the far side of the mausoleum, something pulled itself out of the ground.

It was not fast. It was methodical — one hand finding the wall, then the other, then the weight of a body following. And then a second shape, lower and slower, rising from the earth with the greenish fog that seemed to accompany these things, an emanation that had no heat to it, only light, only the cold suggestion of something that should not be moving but was.

The shapes went around opposite sides of the mausoleum. There was a sound of axes hitting stone, wild, desperate, and then a brief and terrible scuffle, and then silence. The kind of silence that is different from quiet.

One of the shapes came back around the mausoleum. It was missing an arm. There was fresh blood on what remained.

Sten and Osric walked back to the courtyard with deliberate unhurriedness, ringing every bell they passed.

“That was a clever thing you did,” Sten said to Vasilla, when the four of them were together again in the lamplight by the well. He paused. “Also, a horrible thing.”

Vasilla was quiet for a moment.

“I didn’t kill them,” she said. “I just told them to stand in a particular place at a particular time. The dead did what the dead do. That’s not the same thing.” She paused. “Is it?”

Nobody answered right away.

“Whatever it is,” Osric said finally, “we helped someone who helped us. That much is clear.”

“Let’s not make a habit of it,” Sten said. “The cemetery part specifically.”

The door of the large building across the courtyard flew open. An old woman came out with a lantern and a cane, squinting into the dark. Behind her, filling the doorway, stood the Rust Brother — tall, black-cloaked, a rusted metal necklace catching the lamplight. He said nothing. He was the kind of person who did not need to.

Yawin appeared, steered them all toward the gate with a cheerful speed that did not invite argument, pressed the remaining silver into Vasilla’s hand and their hands while the Rust Brother’s attention was on the cemetery wall, and said, in a voice just below carrying distance:

“Go. I will clean up. You were never here after dark.”

Vasilla looked at the silver, looked at the gate, looked at Yawin.

“The dwarves said they would pay five gold each if we brought you to them,” she said.

Yawin stared at her.

“I’m telling you this,” she said, “not offering it.”

He laughed — a short, quiet, genuine laugh — and waved them through the gate.

* * *

V. The War Horse

They camped at the lake that night, a mile east of the Hollows, where the water was still, and the stars came out clean between moving clouds.

Vasilla played softly for a while and said almost nothing. She had been composing a ballad about Sten in her head for three days now — the Ballad of Sten the Merciless, who slaughtered hundreds and whose arrows found you before you knew he had drawn — and it was coming along well, but tonight she set it aside and played something older, something her mother had taught her, and let it go where it wanted to go.

Aldric kept watch and sat with his gloves off, reading the runes that had formed on his palms the way you read marks in wood grain — following the lines, trying to understand the pattern they described. They were not painful. They did not glow. They were simply there, and every day they were a little more legible, and he still did not know what they said.

They broke camp in the grey early morning and followed the river east.

It was Aldric who saw the horse first.

On the south bank, a hundred yards ahead, a large animal stood drinking from the river. Large was an understatement — it was taller at the shoulder than any horse Aldric had seen in Oakenheart, by a significant margin, and as they got closer, the details resolved: armor on the upper shoulders, a steel plate on the nose, saddlebags that sat heavy and low. A war horse, trained for combat. And riderless.

The horse put its head up when it noticed them. It did not run. It stamped and circled and kept its eyes on them with the white-rimmed agitation of an animal that had been through something it did not understand and was not yet over.

The river here was perhaps twenty feet across, not deep. Osric waded in without much deliberation, feeling for the bottom with each step, talking to the horse in a low, continuous voice — easy, easy, where is your rider, I am not a threat — making himself as legible as he could to an animal that had learned to read threat the way soldiers learn to read it. At its deepest, the river came to his shoulders. The horse held its ground, circling and nervous, but did not bolt.

He reached the other side and stood with one hand out, and the horse, after a long assessing moment, let him touch its face. Its skin was trembling under his fingers. Not cold — nerves. Whatever had happened was recent.

He fed it an apple. The horse ate the apple with an urgency that said it had not eaten in some time, and after that, it was somewhat better.

Sten crossed on his own, keeping his footing by reading the riverbed the way he read everything — slowly, with attention, using his knowledge of how water moves over stone to find the places where the bottom was solid. He made it across, dry above the waist, and spent a few minutes reading the ground around the horse, crouching at the prints, running his thumb along the edge of the deepest ones.

“It came from the northeast,” he said. “Following the south bank.”

Osric rummaged carefully through the saddlebags. Rations. A bedroll. A few tools. And then, wrapped in cloth and sitting at the bottom of one bag: a silver headband, fine work, engraved with a sigil of two lions facing each other and the letters L-A-V-I-D-E beneath it.

He turned it over in his hands. The craftsmanship was not ordinary. Someone of consequence owned this horse.

“Someone will want this back,” Vasilla said, from the far bank.

“Then we should find out who that someone is,” Osric said.

Aldric and Vasilla still needed to cross. Aldric tied a rope to his belt, Vasilla climbed onto his back, and they went in. It went badly about halfway across — footing lost, both going under, the current taking Vasilla downstream with her pack — and it was Sten on the bank with the rope and two good eyes for a moving target that kept it from going worse. He threw, she grabbed, Aldric found his feet, and the four of them ended up soaked and breathing hard on the south bank in the morning sun.

“I needed a bath anyway,” Vasilla said, wringing out her hair.

Nobody had the energy to argue.

The horse watched all of it and then, once Osric had its attention and fed it the last apple from his pack, turned northeast and broke into a gallop.

“I think it wants us to follow,” Osric said.

“I think,” Sten said, “that it is a horse, and it is going somewhere and we happen to be going the same direction.”

They followed it anyway.

* * *

VI. The Procession

The horse stayed ahead of them for most of the afternoon.

They tracked it rather than chased it — Sten reading the prints in the soft ground along the riverbank, keeping a steady pace, not pushing. The war horse was moving northeast, and so were they, and there was no reason to exhaust themselves proving it. The river curved gradually south, and the lake fell behind them, and the country opened up into long, low hills and planes of grass that moved in the wind.

Alongside and behind them, keeping a wider distance than in the morning, Aldric and Vasilla walked. Both had dried out by midday. Neither of them mentioned the river crossing. They had the companionable quiet of people who have recently been wet and cold together and have decided not to dwell on it.

The giant stag appeared just before midday.

It stood on the south bank, watching them from a distance that it maintained with an intelligence that was unsettling in a deer. When they moved, it moved — matching their pace, keeping the gap constant, never fleeing, never approaching. When Sten stopped, it stopped, and raised its great rack and held still the way something holds still when it is watching rather than merely pausing. Its tracks, when Sten got close enough to read them, were half again the size of any deer track he had ever seen. Its shoulders, at this distance, stood close to six feet from the ground.

Sten unstrung his bow and slung it over his shoulder.

The stag, watching, closed the distance by twenty yards and stopped. It flicked its head north — a gesture so deliberate it was difficult to call it anything other than a gesture — and then turned and walked, maintaining its distance.

“That is not a regular deer,” Sten said.

“Nothing out here is regular,” Vasilla said. “We’ve established that.”

He followed it. The others followed him.

It was Aldric who saw the procession first, or rather heard it — a drum, steady and slow, coming from the south, and under the drum a sound that he could not immediately name. They went to ground without discussion, pressing into the grass on the riverbank, and watched.

There were perhaps fifteen of them, walking in a single file through the grass, all of them cloaked in black, all of them hooded. At the front walked a woman, taller than the others, her pace deliberate and her bearing straight. More than half the line carried whips, and they used them — not on each other, but on themselves, a slow rhythmic flagellation that kept time with the drum. The sound Aldric had not been able to name was the sound of it.

They were chanting. Vasilla, flattened in the grass twenty yards away, listened with the particular attention she gave to language, picking out the shapes of words in a tongue close to hers, the way you find a face in shadow — catching features one at a time until the whole thing resolved.

The mist. Salvation. Return.

And something else, woven through it — a metal bird, a rusted bird, something that would bring what was coming. Something that the mist’s return would herald or serve or follow.

She turned to look at Aldric. He was already looking at her.

“Rust Brothers,” he said, very quietly.

Or something that followed the same god. Something that was praying, in its way, for the Blood Mist to come back.

They stayed in the grass and watched the procession move southwest, toward the Hollows or past it, until the sound of the drum faded and the black line disappeared over a rise, and the plains were quiet again. Then they stood up, brushed the grass off their clothes, and kept walking northeast.

No one suggested going after them.

* * *

VII. The Marsh, the Tower, the Light

The river slowed as the afternoon wore on, its current becoming lazy, its banks softening into marsh.

The land changed around them as they walked — the clean edges of banks giving way to reed beds and standing water, the ground becoming unreliable underfoot, the smell shifting to something richer and darker, not unpleasant but unfamiliar. The river did not end so much as dissolve, spreading out into a delta where the water moved in a dozen shallow channels between islands of sedge and black mud, all of it drifting east toward whatever lay beyond.

They made camp on a dry rise at the marsh’s edge as the light was going golden. Sten put up the tent and got the fire going. Osric took his fishing line north into the marsh and came back an hour later with enough fish to feed them all twice over, and Aldric, keeping the late watch, spent the small hours of the night cooking them over low coals, turning the portions slowly, getting the salt right, thinking about very little.

It was while he was fishing — wading knee-deep into the marsh, eyes on the water — that Osric saw it.

To the north, backlit against the pale moonlight, something broke the horizon. Not a hill — the line was wrong for a hill, too vertical, too deliberate. A structure. A tall structure, or rather the remnant of one, its upper edge jagged against the sky with the silhouette of walls that had once been higher. And at its peak, faint but unmistakable, a single light.

He came back to camp and told the others.

Nobody went that night. The marsh was not the kind of country you navigated in darkness, and the light, single and faint, would still be there in the morning. They ate the fish, watched the fire burn down, and went to sleep.

In the morning, the stag’s tracks and the war horse’s tracks both led north into the marsh.

* * *

VIII. Weatherstone

The marsh in daylight was easier than it looked from the outside.

The ground was soft and, in places, treacherous but rarely deep, and Vasilla, lighter than the others, moved through it with a reed staff she had cut from the bank, prodding ahead with each step, finding the solid ground by feel. The others sank deeper but found footing. They moved slowly, progressively muddier, and said little. The sky overhead was low and grey, the morning cold enough for the jackets to stay on.

The structure resolved itself as they got closer — first a ridge of rock, thirty or forty feet high, rising abruptly from the flat marsh like the prow of something enormous. The ridge was natural, or mostly natural; it was hard to tell where the rock ended, and the construction began. Where the ridge broke, a gap had been shaped — deliberately, a long time ago — and in that gap sat a building. Or the remains of one. Stone walls, massive and overgrown, green with age. A moat of standing water around the base, covered in algae, the surface undisturbed. A path leading left to a large, dark, open doorway in the main structure. A path leading right, across the moat on a stone causeway, to a smaller building set apart from the rest — a watchtower, its upper floors long since collapsed, its base solid, a thread of smoke rising from inside it.

Vasilla stopped.

“I know what this is,” she said. “There were stories about it. In Oakenheart, people used to talk about a castle to the south. I didn’t know it was real.”

They looked at it for a moment — the collapsed walls, the dark doorway, the moat, the overgrown stone, and the single thread of smoke. It was old, the way the cairn on the first day had been old, but much larger and much more aged, the moss and the ivy and the settled weight of centuries embedded in every surface.

“Weatherstone,” Vasilla said. The word had the shape of a word she was remembering rather than inventing. “That was what they called it.”

They smelled it before they reached the watchtower door — rabbit, cooking over a good fire, the smell specific enough that Sten identified it within thirty yards without thinking about it. Someone was having breakfast.

Osric was about to call out when a voice got there first.

“Come in! I have enough for everybody.”

The voice was warm and unhurried, coming from inside the watchtower, from someone who had not turned around and did not seem to feel any need to. They went in.

The watchtower’s roof was long gone, open to the grey sky, the smoke from the fire rising straight up through the empty shell of the walls. Five rabbits hung over the fire on an improvised spit, browned and dripping. The person tending them sat with their back to the door, working something in their hands, perfectly relaxed.

He was tall — that was clear, even sitting. Slender. Dressed in clothes that were better than anyone in Oakenheart would have worn on an ordinary day — fine cloth, well cut, a hint of lacework at the cuffs. His movements had a quality that was hard to name precisely: a kind of ease that was not laziness but something more like the ease of water, of a thing that moves according to its own nature and is never in conflict with itself.

Leaned against the far wall, beside a traveling pack, was a guitar.

Vasilla stopped walking. She stood in the doorway and looked at the guitar the way you look at something you did not expect to exist. It was handmade, the wood worked and etched with careful patterns, and it had six strings — she counted them twice, using both hands, because four was the number she was accustomed to and six was a different number entirely. Six strings were two more songs for every song she knew. Six Strings was a different instrument wearing the same name.

The others had moved past her into the room. She was still in the doorway, counting.

“My name is Dolb,” the man said, still not turning around. “I am, without a great deal of false modesty, probably the most talented minstrel in all of Ravensland. Please sit. There is plenty.”

He passed the rabbit around, pulled root vegetables from the pot, and filled bowls from a ladle. He asked if they were part of Asgar’s group, the Farthing party — treasure hunters who had come through recently and gone into the main structure that morning, seeking the hoard of a long-dead king named Algorad who had ruled from Weatherstone before the mist fell. He asked about the Hollows and smiled when they described Yawin’s beer. He told them he had been here some weeks, cooking for people who passed through, collecting their stories, adding them to what he already knew.

“And what do you know?” Osric asked.

“A great deal,” Dolb said pleasantly. “Ask me something.”

They asked about the towns along the river, about Weatherstone and what lay inside it, about the world as it had been before the mist and what the mist lifting might mean. He answered everything with a fluency that suggested he had seen more of Ravensland than any traveler had a right to see in a single lifetime, which was a thing none of them thought about directly at the time, in the comfortable warmth of the fire and the good food and the pleasure of a gifted talker.

It was Sten who noticed.

He had been watching Dolb the way he watched everything — steadily, without expression, filing details. The height. The ease. The yellow gold of Dolb’s eyes, which in the firelight caught the light in a way that was not quite the way eyes caught light. He had seen those eyes before. Not on a person. On the south bank of the Elaia river, at fifty yards, looking back at him out of a face with a twelve-point rack.

Dolb was still talking. His voice moved through the small room as the smoke moved through the open roof — naturally, without effort, filling the space available. He seemed, as far as Sten could tell, entirely content. He seemed to have been waiting specifically for them, or for people like them, which, in this context, amounted to the same thing.

Sten said nothing.

He watched those yellow eyes catch the firelight, and he ate his rabbit, and he waited to find out what came next and how this minstrel was connected to the odd yellow-eyed stag.