The Blade and the Flame

The heart left by Ylva's envoy steamed in the icy gloom, staining the snow a deeper black. No one moved to touch it again; even the ravens, bold with hunger, shied from its scent. Kerr stood unmoving, eyes hollow, jaw set like carved stone as the clans clustered in frightened knots below the moothall’s battered roof.

Inga pressed close, flanked by Hrawg—her father’s weight now borne on a raw-boned thegn. Eirik, lips split from frostburst and worry, lingered by the fire-pit, missing only his sword and the last dregs of hope.

Seeress Freyja watched from the edge of torchlight, hair tangled, lips pale, eyes lost in dark seeing. She alone seemed untroubled by the heart’s presence, tracing unseen runes in the ashes with her cane’s tip. Snow lashed the walls in gusts; every face flickered, half-alive.

Kerr called council before the blue of dawn could sink too deep. The battered chieftains gathered in the meeting-hall—a shed now, really, the roof tar-patched and flanked by guards who whispered of monsters behind every snowbank. Even the oldest Jotunstag watched the corners, fingers itching for weapons.

He set the heart before them, the scent of copper and bitter smoke thickening the room.

“She comes,” Kerr rasped. “Ylva’s host will break upon us before the next moonrise, or my name is not Wolf. Would any still heed old mercy: lay out arms and kin, kneel for the Queen, and barter hope for a fatter spring?”

No voice answered—only the sigh and jangle of chain mail being checked again, the scraping of a fire worked to shameful life. In the silence, Inga touched Eirik’s hand beneath the table. Even Hrawg stilled his threats.

Kerr’s gaze fell on Seeress Freyja. “We have axes and old hands, but not enough. If you hold a spell darker than custom, speak it.”

Freyja did not flinch. “Such power is not given, Wolf. It is taken—and it always carries a price.”

"Name the cost. If I must bear it, I’ll bear that and worse."

Her mouth twisted. “Powdered crow bone and black root—burned at the gate with an oath of blood. The old way forbade such things for good reason. Spirits come hungry. But it holds fire back and hearts trembling with dread.”

Hrawg spat, “You trust a woman who killed men in the cradle with her omens?”

Freyja’s smile was gray as smoke. “I have outlived all who doubted me.”

Kerr shrugged the weight of tradition from his shoulders. He drew his broken hand across a dagger’s edge, letting blood tap upon the floorboards. “Do it. Bind runes at every gate and cross. And teach every boy, girl, or witless crone who can still swing a tool to lay death for Ylva’s kin.”

That order rippled, dread and resolve mingling. The moot became a work camp. Every hand—warrior or woodcutter, widow or child—was pressed to labor as the sky paled. Along the outer ditches, old carts and wagons were hacked to pieces, their wheels bound with tar-soaked rope. Oil was ladled into pots, hoarded as fiercely as food. Stones were shaped to fists and set above the gates in wire slings. Inga’s nimble hands built snares rigged to drop saplings sharpened to impale. Eirik, though still bandaged, oversaw clusters of boys learning to fill jars with heated pitch, his voice cold and even.

Freyja limped from post to post, chalking bone white runes on doors and rafters: protection, terror, flame. At the north gate, she built the altar of crow-bone and black root, set in a ring of carved stones. There, beneath low clouds and utter silence, Kerr drew his blood into the snow and cast it by hearth-flame, shadowing his own soul to the work. Behind him, the warriors muttered prayers or spat, fearing more the cost of victory now than of defeat.

As the wind rose, those with ears for such things heard strange whispers—cries in voices not of the living, ululations like distant horns, the flutter of wings without visible birds. By dusk, the children of the camp—including even the hardiest of Skjald boys—slept huddled in heaps, their dreams infected by omens and the stench of coming carnage.

By the second dawn, the outriders returned—two fewer than had ridden out, their horses flecked with wounds. The Black Ravens, they reported, massed in the birch shadow north and east, hundreds at spear and bow, with fires burning strange colors under their frost banners. Their priests sang in the old tongue; black-fletched arrows, dipped in some fouler stuff than tar, stuck in every tree on the old river road.

It was coming.

Kerr stripped his last doubt and steeled each defender at the battered wall. “You are cursed or blessed, each of you. Hold until the Wolf falls. Then flee, or carry the word to other towns, if any remain.”

He gave no speech for glory. His eyes—dark, wild, and glazed with red—glittered in the half-light. He gripped Eirik’s arm, then Hrawg’s, then Inga’s, making silent promises that could not be kept in words. Freyja alone did not take his grasp—she only traced her chalk-stained thumb down his brow, anointing him with dust and dread.

The first arrows came in deepest night. Black fire ran over the walls as oil-jars exploded, and the sentries on the north rampart vanished in shrieking flame. Warriors hauled snow to douse the fires, only to slip on burning pitch that ate flesh like lye. Above it all came the sound of horns—at once wolf and crow, a torment made audible. Then the Black Ravens poured forward, axes in gleaming arcs, shields licked by rising wind.

The traps held—saplings sprang, skewering the first ranks, stones smashed in hails of marrow and iron. Fires howled higher as the enemy threw torches soaked in witch-oil. For every Raven cut down by cunning, three more pressed into the breach. When one wall faltered by the cattle-gate, Eirik rallied the Sundr and beat them back, swords singing their pain. At the outer ditch, Inga and two Skjald held with bow and javelin, losing ground only when a witch-priestess called the wind and sent frost knifing through the ranks.

Through all, Freyja remained at the altar by the north gate, chanting in a voice stripped of age and mercy. Her arms bled where the runes opened, white light and blue flickering over the gate. At her word, the torches at the entrance turned against the enemy—fire snaking up the bows of Raven archers, smoke blinding them. Several fell shrieking into the ditch, burning from within.

It was not enough. The Ravens surged again, now under the cover of shriven men and children bound at the fore—slaves, kin taken in earlier raids, their presence freezing the defenders in indecision. Behind them, Ylva herself rode a black horse, her arms lifted, singing in a language that made some men weep and others gnash their teeth. A second wave of burning arrows cut through the dusk, setting half the thatched moots alight; one Skjald elder died howling, mowed down as he tried to shield his daughter.

Betrayal stalked from within: a Valskar woman, caught trying to unlatch the east gate, claimed she was only saving her son—was she an agent of the Raven Queen, or merely broken by fear? Kerr could not tell. He struck her down with the flat of his blade, tears hot and useless in his eyes, and left the Sundr to bind what wounds they could as the siege pressed closer.

By morning, the walls were breached in two places, the snow blackened with soot and blood. Freyja collapsed, exhaustion and spell-ache draining what color she had left. Inga was pulled from a heap of Raven dead, battered but grimly alive. Eirik, wounded, led a dwindling knot of defenders from pit to barricade. Hrawg, refusing to die in bed, hobbled on a spear, driving back an axe-wielder with a roar that woke the embers of Skjald glory—even as he took a wound deep in the flank.

Ylva did not press beyond the breach; her host lingered at the gates, burning, razing, taunting with black flags, but unwilling—perhaps unable—to finish the work by noon. Something in the night’s defense had unsettled even her magic. Or perhaps new horror brewed behind her silent eyes.

The survivors, bloodied and half-mad with loss, gathered at Kerr's call, staring at walls ruined half to rubble, at kin who wept for their dead or glared with the rage of the prey denied death. The runes still bled at the gates; the altar’s fire guttered, burning blue.

Kerr did not claim victory. He lifted his voice, more growl than speech:

“We are not broken, not yet. But if you would quarrel, do so on your own. If you would curse the Wolf for bargains made—blade or spell or both—remember what waits if we lose. Today, we killed as monsters to live as men.”

Across the battered moot, no one could answer. The clans—what was left—stood divided by loss and bound only by dread. Ravens spun above, feasting on ruined dead.

Below, Kerr and those who still walked counted their wounds and their trust, measuring each to see which hurt more. They had survived, but unity flickered on the edge of ash, warmed only by the uneasy dance of blade and flame.