small fire-pit, fat from a quartered hare spitting and sizzling as it dripped into the flames.
‘Smells good,’ Olin grunted as he finished tending to their packhorses and furs, then came and sat down, wrapping a deerskin about Drem’s shoulders and pulling one tight about his own. Drem felt cold now that he had stopped digging, the night’s chill seeping into his bones. Rolls of skins surrounded them, tied and piled high. It had been a bountiful hunting season, and now they were almost home.
Drem carved the meat with his favourite knife, the wide blade was wicked-sharp and longer than was usual for a hunting knife.
They call a blade like that a seax in this part of the Banished Lands, his da had told him when they’d forged it together.
Drem didn’t care what it was called; he just knew that he loved it, that it felt a part of him, his permanent companion. The bone-antler hilt was worn to a perfect fit for Drem’s fist. He shared the meal between them and they sat eating in companionable silence. They were partway into foothills that led up to a range of snow-capped mountains at their back, but Drem was staring in the opposite direction, out over the landscape that unrolled below them. A great lake dominated the view, its waters dark and shimmering in the setting sun, about it a patchwork of tree and meadow that was tinged with red and gold as autumn slipped into winter. Between Drem and the lake the lights of a large town flickered into life, tiny as fireflies from this distance. A sturdy stockade wall ringed the town, dotted with torchlight. It was Kergard, the most northerly town of the Desolation, built by hard people to survive in a hard environment. Drem liked the look of it all, the colours merging, lights glowing soft and warm like candles. Other lights sputtered into existence beyond the stockade walls, homesteads scattered across the land. Drem’s eyes searched out their own home, a little to the north and nestled amongst the fringes of woodland, though he knew there would be no fires lit, no torches or candles burning at a window.
Home, if I can call anywhere that, when I’ve spent most of my life travelling from one place to the next. This will be our fifth winter in the same place, though, and that’s the longest I can remember staying anywhere since Mam …
He was looking forward to returning home after half a year of hunting and trapping in the Bonefells. He liked his life in the Wild with his da – loved it even – but his da was right: winter was almost upon them, and that was not the time to be sleeping on root and rock.
As he stared at the speckled landscape he saw a new cluster of lights appear, further north and east from his home, close to the northern bank of the lake.
‘That wasn’t there when we left,’ he said to his da, pointing.
‘No.’ Olin frowned. ‘Looks like Kergard’s grown. Hope they know what a winter this far north is like. The land won’t be green like this for much longer.’ His da looked from the panorama before them and then up and over his shoulder at the snow-capped mountains and darkening sky, watching his breath mist before him. ‘Winter’s following close behind us.’
‘Aye,’ Drem grunted, pulling his deer-skin tighter. ‘Strange that this land is called the Desolation,’ he murmured, struggling with imagining the landscape before him as an uninhabited wasteland of rock and ash.
His da grunted, licking fat from his fingers.
‘And that lake was once a crater?’
‘Aye, it was,’ Olin said. ‘The Starstone Crater, where a rock fell from the sky. Started a lot of trouble, did that rock.’
Drem knew all about that, had listened to the tale-tellers speak of how the Starstone had crashed to earth, though he struggled to imagine such a thing happening. The tales told of Seven Treasures that had been forged from the Starstone, and that the first war had been fought over those Treasures, men and giants shedding a river of blood. It had taken a god to stop it; Elyon the Maker had unleashed his legions of Ben-Elim, raining a judgement of death and destruction upon the world and its inhabitants. Elyon had only stopped when he realized that he had been tricked, lured into the plan of his great enemy, Asroth, Demon-Lord of the Fallen. Elyon had walked away then, abandoning the world of flesh