THE SHADOW OVER VINLAND sample: “Vale of the Serpent”

The common room at the Boar’s Tusk was full of thick smoke and shadow and the smell of rain and traveling men. The Tusk was not a public house for local men; it hunched along the edge of the newer Regent’s Road, cut off by hills from the village to the east, and served for food and lodging to the travelers to and from the Chill Lands to the north and the Duchies to the south. In any season of temperate weath­er, as this was, the common room held a good throng of merchants and tradesmen and the occasional refugee, but the core of energy and sound this night was the knot of hard-calloused men of war grumbling and laughing over their tankards in the tables nearest the roaring fire. The serv­ing girls—women rather than girls, old enough to be able to deal with rough-mannered customers and worn enough not to attract the bad sorts of attention—kept their tankards full of the local ale between serving simple fare on pewter plates to the quieter travelers.

“By the ruddy beard!” a bearish man roared in aggressive good humor. “Come a week’s time—or at any rate, a fort­night—we should be splitting skulls down in the Evernest, if the coin is good enough!”

“The coin is only part of the wage,” his companion re­marked, a smaller man but lean with muscle, “as every con­quering sword knows. Sometimes, it’s the least part, de­pending on the women!”

The two men laughed in unison and were joined by a half-dozen around them. All were men of muscle and sweat, armed with swords and axes even here in the common room. Each face was rendered unique by its pattern of scars, but even in this they were joined in an unspoken brother­hood of the soldier for hire.

“One hopes the Evernest has put up enough of a fight!” another said, ale in his beard. “The Crow knows, with the time it took for us to hear word and travel south to join up, the whole war may be over but the burying if the ’Nesters haven’t tempered their steel since my father’s time.”

“Ah,” said the first bearlike man, “but I have a plan. A day south of here, we cut east, away from this coast road, and wind through the hill country. We’re traveling light enough that we need no easy road like a caravaneer, and that route should save four to five days. The war will still be joined, mark me!”

“There is flooding in those hills. You’ll not save time. Best stick to the easier roads.”

The voice was new to the knot of mercenaries, and all turned to find its source. Sitting outside the halo of light from the fireplace, but not as far back as the knots of merchants and tradesmen, a black-haired man sat alone at a small table. His dour face was angled downward with his chin almost on his chest, and his hands rested easily on the oak­en tabletop near his own tankard of ale.

“How came you by this news?” demanded the bearish man.

“I came by that route,” the other answered, his voice clipped and unloosened by drink. “I lost my horse in the spring floods. Be not foolhardy, as I was.”

Something in the stranger’s manner raised the hackles of the party of mercenaries. The bearish man thrust out his bearded chin belligerently.

“Come from the Evernest, then?”

“I have,” the man answered simply.

Shrewd eyes took in the man’s sturdy boots, his damp cloak hanging over an empty chair with the wide rain-spot­ted hat on one corner, the sheathed sword at his side.

“You don’t seem like a refugee.”

“No.” The man raised his tankard for a single swallow of ale. His eyes, flinty under the simple cut of his straight black hair, never left the bearish one as he drank and set his cup back down.

The bearish man’s face spread in a humorless smile. “I’m Maddeg, and these are my friends—brothers in arms, really. I’d have your name, fellow.”

“Why?”

All eyes in the room had found themselves drawn to the deceptively quiet dialogue unfolding at the edge of the fire’s light. Even the innkeeper, whose huge round shoulders framed a bald head and a nose almost as wide as his mus­tache, came around the bar watchfully, meaty hands wiping a used tankard with a cloth.

Maddeg’s smile revealed two broken teeth in a yellowed mouth.

“You’re obviously a fighting man,” he said, with an amused glance to his compatriots. “Yet you’re coming north, away from the fight, when other sellswords are flocking south. I was just wondering your name so I wouldn’t have to think of you simply as ‘the coward.’”

The last of the sounds in the room died away as all atten­tion was riveted to the quiet confrontation. Only the crack­ling of the fire and the low whistle of wind around the shut­tered windows kept the Boar’s Tusk from silence.

“Very few men have called me that,” the stranger said. “Even fewer yet live.”

Maddeg hooted at that, though none of his companions took up his derision as they watched the unfolding.

“And what name better fits better a man of war who shrinks from the fight? Do you pay for your drink with coin from Evernest or the Ochre Duchy, coin you didn’t earn but simply took with you when you ran, tail between your legs?”

“Now, see here,” said the innkeeper, breaking into the cir­cle of light and setting down the tankard he had been wip­ing. “You’ll keep courtesy in the Tusk or you’ll be out on your ear. I’ll not have my custom insulted under my roof, when his coin is as good as yours—”

“My shield is indeed blank,” the stranger said in a voice which quietly interrupted the innkeeper’s growling protests. “But my sword goes not to the highest bidder. I’ve not met a captain whose cause bids me bind myself to him in over two decades. That includes both Evernest and the Duchy. So blank my shield remains, for now. And my name is Vult.”

…

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