The White Raven

It was from one of these duck-feather mists that we were attacked. Morut led the way, following signs only he could read, from fresh-turned stone to barely visible broken twig. At a bend between rocks, he knelt to study the ground and a spear hissed over his shoulder, skittering across the frozen earth and almost across my toes.

'Form!' I yelled out of habit and, out of habit, Kvasir and Finn slid to me, shields up. From the rocks bounded three figures, much as before, though one carried a shield and another wore clothing and had a skin cap and no sign of scale.

Morut, caught on the knee, rolled sideways and scrabbled away. Avraham, with a yelp, sprang forward and took a blow meant for the little tracker — from a shovel. The shaft smacking Avraham's armoured forearm hard enough to make him grunt; he struck back and the scaled creature shrieked, carved under the ribs.

The one with the fur cap came louping at me, a great curved pick held above his head and relying on speed and power to crash through my shield. His mouth was red and open in a russet-bearded face and his eyes were wild.

Just at the moment he reached me, was about to bring his pick down, I stepped sideways, away from Kvasir and the man ploughed between us; it was moot which of our blades killed him, but both carved steaks off him and he fell, skidding on his face along the rocks.

The last, more powerful than the others, had hurled his spear and had no other weapons. He bounded forward and hurled himself, shrieking and snarling, at Finn, who took this rush on his shield and went over backwards, the creature clawing and biting the edge of it, his scaled, eye-bulged frog-face foaming with spittle and inches from Finn's own.

They fell backwards, in a clatter like someone beating iron on an anvil, broke and rolled. The creature came up, cat fast and spitting, while Finn was slower in his mail. Two powerful blows smacked him, one on the shield and the other under his ribs, so that he grunted. I saw mail rings flying and started in to help — but Kvasir laid a hand across my chest, as if to say that it was Finn's fight. A valknut fight.

It was then that a shape flew from the top of a head-height rock and crashed into Kvasir, so that he went over with a sharp yelp and a crash. I whirled and struck, fast as an adder's tongue and, in that same instant, tried to stop the blade.

It would not be halted, ripped through the ragged wool and the thin flesh and the small, knobbed backbone of the wild-haired boy, whose screeches of hate and fear turned to a great wailing whimper and then to nothing as he hit the ground, cut almost in half.

The scaled creature fighting Finn saw the boy dying in a scream of blood and drumming heels and wailed, high and anguished. Finn, grunting and winded, hurled his shield and the troll batted it away — but Finn was across the distance between them and The Godi swung, changed direction and hissed right into the path the creature took to avoid the feint.

The blade cut half-way through the thing's body, just above the hip and it fell away with a screech and writhed, scrabbling like a crab. Finn finished it with two more blows and then leaned on the hilt of his sword, holding one side and panting.

We straightened ourselves out and took stock. Finn's mail was torn — torn, by the gods, and only with the taloned claws of the creature, which was now twitching in a congealing pool of black blood. His aketon padding leaked wisps of cotton and the linen tunic beneath was shredded almost to the skin, which was marked with a solid red thump, though unbroken. The edge of his shield was shredded and three deep scores ran down the triangles of the valknut symbol.

We looked at what he had killed; powerful, muscled, hair like tree-moss on an old branch and a faded yellow — but human, for all that. He was big and clearly the leader — perhaps father, from his attitude to the dead boy — and might have been a fine, tall man save that he was scaled, frog-faced and wet-lipped as a slug; like the others, the creases of him were raw.

The scaled man Avraham had killed was already stiff, the one Kvasir and I had chopped was cold and looked normal, a dark young Slav with no visible sign of scales. No-one wanted to touch him, so we did not find out what lurked beneath his clothing.

Then there was the wild-haired boy, a fine black-haired boy no older than Crowbone, his face dirty and scraped raw where he had fallen on rocks, his teeth bloody and smashed. Not that he would have felt any of that pain after my stroke had all but ripped his backbone out; he lay, shapeless as an empty wineskin.

I felt the bile in my throat and spat it out; these were, apart from the one Finn had killed, no warriors. Clearly not invisible. For certain-sure they could not cross a marsh, a palisade, evade guards and all the rest without magic and if they had any, they would have used it here. I said as much, the words spilling bitterly off my lips.

'Aye,' agreed Kvasir, rubbing the breath-ice off his beard. 'Something smells like bad cod here.'

Morut took the offered wrist and was heaved back to his feet by Avraham. They exchanged silent glances that said everything about what had just happened and grinned at each other.

'Mizpah,' Morut said, which I learned later was a prayer about their God watching out for each of them when they were absent from one another.

'While we are at it,' replied Avraham, wiping the blood off his sabre, 'I thank you, Lord of Israel, for not making me a slave, a Gentile, a woman — or one of these creatures. Hakadosh baruch hu.'

Grinning still, Morut moved cautiously forward and we followed, stepping as though the ground could open. We had gone no more than a few hundred yards before Morut said: 'There is a hov.'

It was a good hov in a little curve of clearing in the rocks, well built and much like what the Finns call a gamma, though they make them of turf. This one, thirty foot long and bowed at the ends like a boat from the weight of its own roof, was dry-stane, the spaces caulked with mosses and mud and the whole of it to the roof came up only to my shoulders. There was one way in, a low doorway, the wooden door stout and barred.

Finn smacked it with the hilt of The Godi. Someone — something — wailed.

'Well, they are home,' he grinned, wolvish as a pack on a hunt. 'Though they are mean with their hospitality.'

He leaned on the door with one shoulder, bounced against it to test, then drew back, took a breath and crashed forward. The door splintered. He kicked it with one foot and it burst inward. There were louder wails and whimpers.

He made to duck inside, but I laid my blade across the entrance, stopping him, though it took all I had in me to do it.

'This is why I do not fetch wood,' I said and he grinned and offered me a go-before-me bow.

Inside, it had been dug out down to the rock and there was headroom to spare. I ducked through the dark door, blade up, shield up. The floor was stone rather than the hard-packed earth of a hov in the vik, the light dim and woodsmoked and I was blinking, ready for anything.

Anything but the soft, gentle, pleading voice that said: 'Spare us.'

I made out four of them, all women. One was old, roughened by hard work and use, hands twisting in her ragged clothing. A younger woman was propped up in a box bed alcove, her quiet weeping drifting through the mirk. Another young one was still blonde and pretty under the filth, then I saw she had bold eyes and forearms as muscled as my own. These arms she was holding protectively round her stomach.

The fourth was a young girl crouched by the near-dead embers of the pitfire, naked. She was frog-faced, bulbous-eyed, scaled and afraid. 'Spare us,' she said in thick east Norse.

The older woman started to weep and the blonde came forward, hands outstretched and it came to me that these ones were, perhaps, some of those supposedly taken from the village. I had a moment of panic, remembering the tales of rusalka — but these were not the exquisite, green-haired temptresses with magic combs that Crowbone had described.

'Are you from the village?' I asked and the one coming towards me stopped, more at the tone of my voice than my speech. I didn't speak her Polianian tongue.

'Malkyiv,' I said, recalling the name. The woman nodded her corn-coloured head and her head drooped a little. She sighed.

'Spare us,' said the scaled girl, still crouching by the dead pitfire. One tiny robin-egg breast, I noticed was half-white and ruby-tipped. It was clearly all the Norse she knew and I wondered how she even knew that.

The others crowded in; the women wailed. I had Avraham and Morut take the two older ones out, while the