Gray dusk descended over the road as Alweard rode out once more, the Oathsworn’s camp long behind him. His memory of the meeting with the two Dunlendings was already as hazy as a dream. The two hillmen, standing on the slope, could well have been apparitions; when he stood next to Wrecca, Alweard’s hands had been cold as a corpse’s. Warmth still eluded him; he didn’t need to see his misted breath to know that much.
The path led up and out of the Gap and into a forest that would have been verdant and lush with life in the summertime. Now the wood was as forbidding and colorless as it had once been green. The quiet of the wild, broken only by the hoofbeats of his mare, had long since yielded to the low groaning of the wind; the pillars of trees that flanked the road provided little respite from the weather. That same wind had stripped every last leaf from grasping boughs. Though the earth below was barren, glistening vestiges of the last snowfall had carved wet tracks that wound like snakes through the soil.
“What a cursed place,” Alweard whispered. With the reins in one hand and a torch in the other, he spurred his mare deeper into the wood.
As the earthen path wound deeper into the forest, the trees grew closer, blocking out the last pale rays of the sun. Long shadows danced over the path in the torchlight, flickering as the wind swept over the earth. When his cloak snagged on a branch, Alweard knew that it was too late to hesitate. A torn cloak was a far better price to pay than the deaths of man and mare both. He bent forth in the saddle, urging her forward. In the silent wilderness, the rip of his cloak was sickeningly loud.
Alweard found the trees thinning as dusk finally gave way to night. From the edge of the clearing, he could look up and see the stars like pinpricks in the velvet blanket of night. His torch burned steadfast as he slipped from the saddle. In the firelight, he saw what was once a tent, now gutted and torn open at the side. Though a poor shelter on a winter night, it was still preferable to nothing. A single step forward revealed that its former owners, however, were not far; his foot nudged a body that had not been cold for long. Two dark-haired men and a woman were strewn over the bare ground. Dressed in travelers’ cloaks, all three were gray-faced and unmoving. Though he could not tell whether they were Dunlendings or Rohirrim—or both, like Osythe, or souls like himself who now spent more hours in disguise than out of it—he murmured a few words of pity before climbing back into the saddle.
The gray mare hardly took two strides down the path before he heard it. Too fierce to be a man’s cry and too clear to be the wind, the howl tore through the trees like thunder. His horse—whom he had ridden into battle at the Isen’s banks, who had never flinched when he had hunted wargs from her saddle—was startled at the sound. Her fearful whinny made his chest tighten. When he reached for the reins, she bucked beneath him and threw him from the saddle. Lying on the cold ground, he felt pain stab through his ribs as he tried to turn and watch her gallop away, hoofbeats swallowed by another great howl.
Immobilized by pain, Alweard watched his fallen torch burn. Dampened by the earth, it flickered as the howling softened, each cry quieter than the last. If it were a wolf, he noted, it would be traveling further and further away. The air grew colder; the torch became a blackened stump. Whether caused by his aching ribs or the faint starlight, the gray world blurred around him. As the tingling in his fingers turned to numbness, he clung to the memory of warmth. It seemed so long ago that he had gathered around the fire with Wrecca and Osythe; Thorvall, usually vigilant, had fallen asleep. Osythe had told them many stories of her mother’s people, but he only needed to remember one.
“The cwn annwn you cannot kill, old man,” she had said, chuckling at Wrecca. “It is as I’ve said before. When you hear their howls, close at your heels, you’ll know that they are far afield. But as they draw closer, so their howls quiet, and drift off on the wind. It is then you must beware, for your death is at your heels and there is nothing much left to do but face it.”
Alweard was a rapt listener even then. Now, he clung to each remembered word. “So death is inevitable at the sound of their baying?”
She had nodded, her face illuminated by the dancing flame. “Oh, aye. Only the doomed can hear their howls.”
His reverie was interrupted by another howl, this time hardly louder than a whisper. Still, the howling was all that broke the silence of the clearing—the howling, and the beat of his heart.
As the sun crested over the horizon, a dapple gray mare returned to the Oathsworn’s camp alone.
