a corpse with a broken skull. He staggered to his feet, shook himself, and immediately regretted the decision as lightning flashes of pain erupted in his back. He had to fight for his balance, breathing in shallow gasps.
He coughed, choked, and spat. The taste of bile reminded him of other times, other fights. For a brief, tantalizing moment, he could remember what he had dreamed about, where he’d just been, but then it was gone.
Biting back the waves of nausea, he started moving again. One step. Then another. He did his best to ignore the three dead men as he picked his way carefully down the slope of the hill. The rain had made the ground even worse for walking. He stumbled, almost lost his balance, and had to grab hold of a tree for support. After taking a moment to catch his breath, bite down hard, and try his best to ignore the lancing pain in his hip and back, he set out again.
His leg gave way completely and everything tilted. Waves of heat washed over his back as he crashed to the ground, sliding, moving, rolling. Trees whipped by his head, the horizon pitched and lurched, suddenly he was staring up at the sky, then he was turned around again. His shin smashed into a tree stump; he flailed and grabbed for a bush, a root, anything to slow his fall. When he finally rammed into a big fir tree, the breath was knocked out of him and he rolled over, gasping for air. Around him, the red, gold, and yellow of the dying forest blurred into the colors of the forge. Tiny stars burst across the blue sky. In a panic, Audun started punching his chest—harder and harder. He could feel the veins in his throat bulging, his face heating up.
Something gave way inside him, and sweet, cold life flooded his lungs. He coughed painfully as he tried to swallow all the air in the world. When his heart had stopped thundering, he clambered to his feet. His back screamed at him, and he broke out in a cold sweat, but he remained standing.
Then he noticed the tall man, lying like a child’s broken toy in the clearing. The side of his head was one open wound.
“I told you to go away,” Audun mumbled. “I told you.”
He stumbled off, away from death and blood, heading south.
The going was slow.
He’d found a branch that served as a crooked walking staff of sorts, but his leg was still giving him a hard time, his back seized up, and his throat felt like it had been scraped raw. He coughed and permitted himself a cold smile.
Things had worked out fucking great, hadn’t they?
He should never have got involved. And he never should have followed Ulfar off that wall.
The sun was sliding down beyond the horizon. Soon it would be dark. Winter would come. Audun scanned the horizon and found nothing—no shelter, no hills with good caves, nothing. Just acres and acres of fields.
He did not like the idea of sleeping outside again, exposed to everything and anyone, not in this state. Swallowing hard, he turned and walked toward the road he’d seen from the hill.
It was overgrown and underused. Audun shivered and stumbled onward, gritting his teeth and ignoring his back, legs, and aching shoulders. The road led him up onto the small rise. The farmer had not yet done his harvesting, and from the looks of it he’d be too late. Beyond the field, the farmstead appeared about ready to collapse. The road led in a curve alongside the cornfield and into a yard. He could see a ramshackle shed of some sort, a main building, and possibly something behind that, but none of it looked very good. The wood was gray with age. About five hundred yards behind it, the forest rose like a green-capped wall.
A sharp wind bit at Audun’s back, and he felt suddenly sick: sick of it all, the wandering, the fighting, the loneliness. He hunched his shoulders, winced, and set off toward the house, tightening his grip on his makeshift quarterstaff. Just in case.
The door to the main house opened when he was about four hundred yards away. He flinched but kept going. An old man walked out; Audun’s heart beat faster when he saw the soft glow of a hearth inside the house.
“Well met, stranger!” the man shouted. His hair was white, but his voice was strong.