She rose to face Rignar, her face somehow managing to convey both a snarl and imperious disdain at the same time. “I’ll not be gawped at! Mage or no. And my blood is not your concern.”
Rignar reclined in the face of her anger, a half smile playing over his lips as he raised his hands. “Spoken like a true queen,” he said, which did little to calm Lyvia’s ire.
“Well, I’m not a queen.” She turned away from him, stalking to the opposite side of the fire to sit down, arms crossed and her back to them all. “I’m just a dishonoured, disgraced outcast, like each of you.”
Silence reigned as her voice faded, although Tolveg apparently found such a thing intolerable. “I prefer ‘honour-seeker’, myself,” he said. “For that is why we came here, is it not? And this is not my first journey to far-off lands, let me tell you. Once, I stood at my uncle’s side when he captained a ship all the way through the ice shards to the lands of ash smoke where the gryphons still soar . . .”
Shamil listened politely as the warrior continued his tale, finding much of it hard to credit, even though it was spoken with an earnest sincerity. The northman’s tale wore on as Rignar unfurled a blanket to settle down to sleep, whilst Lyvia, plainly having already had her fill of Tolveg’s voice, rose and walked off to seek shelter amongst the surrounding rocks. Eventually, once it became apparent this story was unlikely to have an end, Shamil abandoned courtesy and slumped down at the edge of the fire’s glow. Wrapping his cloak around himself, he soon drifted into sleep to the sound of the northman’s unending recitation, seemingly indifferent to the absence of an audience.
2. The Climb
“. . . And, though she implored me to stay at her side, I steeled my heart and returned to my uncle’s ship, for bound by duty was I, and even the promise of a queen’s love was insufficient to sway me . . .”
“Does he ever stop?” Shamil muttered to Lyvia as they clambered to the top of a craggy rock face, one of several they had traversed that morning, each time to the accompaniment of Tolveg’s endless epic.
“When he finally gets to the part where he returns home,” she replied with a wince. “And then he just starts over, and the story changes with every telling. His lovelorn queen was merely a countess last time.”
Shamil had woken that morning to the stomach-teasing scent of meat on the spit, finding Lyvia roasting a fresh-caught rabbit over the fire. Noble origins or not, she was no stranger to the wilds or the hunt. Her stern silence from the previous night abated somewhat once they had shared a meal and commenced the long climb to the Eyrie’s summit, although they were obliged to converse during the all-too-brief respites from Tolveg’s story.
“So you think it’s all lies?” he asked her. They paused on a ledge, waiting for the others to catch up. He and Lyvia had quickly proven themselves as the most agile climbers, and it would have been easy to leave the two older men behind. This climb, however, was bound by an ancient custom that dictated they all arrive at the summit together.
“Possibly.” Lyvia shrugged. “Though that sword certainly isn’t just for show. I’ve seen enough warriors to know the face of one who’s actually tasted battle.” She frowned, lowering her face a little. “Unlike me.”
“And me,” Shamil admitted.
“Truly?” Her frown became puzzled as she nodded to the raptorile-tail whip on his belt. “I thought that must be a trophy. Your people war endlessly with the lizardfolk, do they not?”
Shamil’s hand went to the whip, unwelcome memories rising as his fingers traced over the azure- and emerald-hued scales that formed its base. The eyes . . . There was a soul behind its eyes . . .
“Just a gift,” he said, swallowing a cough. Eager for a distraction he leant forward to offer a hand as Rignar clambered the final few feet to the ledge.
By Shamil’s reckoning they had scaled near a third of the mountain by midday, their progress partially assisted by the pathway cut into the stone, presumably by the previous generations of sentinels. It wasn’t much of a track, however, being frequently too narrow for easy navigation and often disappearing altogether at the base of yet another cliff face they needed to scale to progress. The surrounding stone was often marked with various inscriptions, most of them carved in letters or glyphs beyond Shamil’s comprehension, though both Lyvia and Rignar had little difficulty in providing a translation.
“‘Loelle Estarik of Mira-Vielle,’” the mage read, his blunt fingers tracing over one inscription that appeared less weathered than the others. “‘Second Wing of the Sentinel Eyrie. To my mother’s shade I offer the most earnest contrition for my sin.’” He raised an eyebrow at Lyvia. “A country woman of yours, it seems.”
“It’s a famous scandal,” she said, a shadow passing over her face as she surveyed the carved symbols. “She fell in love with a lord from a rival house and, at his urging, disclosed her family’s treacherous scheming to win the throne. The entire family went to the gallows, save Loelle, who was allowed the mercy of exile and service in the Sentinels.”
“Then perhaps she awaits us above,” Shamil said, eyeing the winding and irksomely narrow trail ahead.
“I doubt it.” Lyvia started forward with a faintly mocking grin. “Unless she’s found a means of extending her life by two centuries. Plays have been written about her, none of them particularly good, it must be said.”
Mention of theatre, unfortunately, provided yet another opening for Tolveg to regale them with more of his adventures, on the pretext that such high drama would surely one day attract the attention of a playwright.
“For it was with my words, not my sword, that I laid low the three-eyed reptile of the Black Fjord, famed for taking the form of a comely maiden in order to lure besotted sailors into her deadly embrace . . .”
The tale wore on for the remaining hours of daylight and much of the night that followed as they huddled in their cloaks and tried to sleep on a ledge no more than three feet wide. Once again Shamil drifted into a fitful slumber to the sound of Tolveg’s voice only to awaken come the dawn to find he had begun the story all over again, only, this time the shapeshifting three-eyed reptile had become a water nymph of astonishing beauty.
“In the name of the four winds . . .” Shamil began through clenched teeth only for the words “shut up!” to die on his lips when Rignar clamped a firm hand to his shoulder. Meeting the mage’s eyes, Shamil found an implacable command to silence and, as they flicked towards Tolveg, a measure of pity.
Shamil noticed it then: the small quiver to Tolveg’s voice as he spoke, the way his hands would sometimes stray to the scars on his neck, trembling for a second before he snatched them away. This was a man filled with fear, a fear that could only be assuaged by the constant recitation of his own story, real or imagined as it may be.
So they shared a sparse meal of salted meat and resumed their climb without a word of protest as Tolveg’s saga continued. He filled the next few hours with such contradictory constancy that, when he finally fell silent, Shamil found himself halting in surprise at the sudden absence of his voice.
They had scaled a steep, winding path to the mountain’s eastward flank, finding a stiff, chill wind to greet them that held the sting of more than just the cold. Shamil’s nostrils flared at the acrid, sulphurous taint to the air, eyes tracking to its obvious source half-a-dozen miles distant. The cloud rose in ugly billows of yellow and grey, shrouding much of the craggy ridgeline below, thinning periodically to reveal the gaping, circular fissure from which it poured.