"The Green Ruin
It is said that, long, long ago, a Grænfadir wandered the world-a sovereign of the green. They called him the Green Walker, for wherever he passed, life flourished.
His walk seemed simple enough. Even so, it was enough for him to cross barren land for it to awaken. Grass sprouted beneath his steps, trees rose where there had once been dust, and clear rivers sprang up where the soil had been dry for generations. Fields that had once been dead turned into paradises of deep green, full of flowers, fruit, and abundant life.
As the years passed, the name of the Green Walker spread across the whole continent of Óbygdheim. And so the stories of his miracles reached the ears of the great sovereign of the west-the ruler of the sands, known among his people as the Great Sun of the Desert.
This sovereign, weary of the endless wars his peoples waged over the few oases, believed he had found an answer to his suffering. If the Green Walker could bring life to the sands, he thought, then the desert would at last know peace and prosperity.
Moved by that hope, the Great Sun set out in person to seek the Grænfadir.
When at last he found him, he knelt before him and begged for his aid.
But the Green Walker refused.
He said it was not his duty to interfere in the matters of the desert. He also said that every land bears its own destiny.
The sovereign returned the next day.
And the next.
Setting aside his pride, he began to follow the Walker through roads, hills, and valleys. Day after day he renewed his plea, begging him to bring life to the sands.
So it went on for a long while.
Until at last, weary of hearing the Great Sun's pleas-and perhaps moved by the persistence of that man-the Green Walker yielded.
And he walked into the desert.
And where his feet touched the sand, miracles were born.
The dunes became rivers. Forests colored horizons that had once been void of life and filled by oceans of sand.
The place once called the Desert of Death came to be known as the Land of Life.
And between the Walker and the Great Sun, a true friendship was born.
For a time, the desert prospered.
But the human heart rarely knows the measure of its own ambitions.
Freed from hunger and thirst, men soon found new reasons to fight. The small disputes over oases became wars over power, territory, and thrones.
The rivers were bathed in blood and poisoned. The grass was filled with bones. The trees were cut down and burned to raise walls and engines of war.
And in the midst of that chaos, the Great Sun was betrayed.
Murdered.
When the Green Walker learned of his death, something in him broke.
The heart that had once spread life grew heavy and dark.
So he withdrew from the desert all that he had granted it.
The rivers dried.
The flowers died.
And the green became sand again.
In the place where the Great Sun had been buried, the Walker raised one final oasis.
There he infused his own megin.
It was a tomb.
A living tomb, dedicated to the only friend he had found in his long journey.
The Green Walker never left that place.
And those who, moved by greed or curiosity, approached the oasis seeking its waters found only death.
Their bodies became part of the soil.
And so they fed the Sun's tomb forever.
As generations passed, the beautiful untouched oasis received a new name among the peoples of the desert:
The Green Ruin."
* * *
Their bodies became part of the soil...
The phrase lingered in Hrafn's mind for a while.
Perhaps nature could serve for more than simple cures with herbs, poultices, and roots chewed into paste. Perhaps there was more beneath the earth than mud, worms, and seeds.
Or perhaps it was only a fable.
With a tired sigh, Hrafn closed the book and let the tips of his fingers rest for a moment on the worn cover.
The pages still held an old smell of dust, tea, and smoke. Saga things. For one brief instant, Hrafn had the absurd impression that she might snatch the book from his hands, call him a fool, and say he did not see. That no serious story ought to be read with such a condemned face. And perhaps there was truth in that.
But hope?
Of that he had little.
My ass hurts.
They had already been on horseback for two days, and Hrafn was beginning to suspect the saddle had been invented by someone who hated poor people. The rich rode in small carriages, surrounded by servants, baggage, and sometimes family. The others got a Hird horse, dust in the face, and the road ahead.
Perhaps at the end of the journey they would assign him a few servants.
Perhaps.
And that would be all.
He had also bought, on his own, a sword. Its weight was honest. When his hand touched the pommel, something inside him quieted. Not much. Enough.
But all it took was a glance back, at the salt road falling farther and farther behind, for the tightness to return.
"Voroirs!" called the same hersir who had been present at the ceremony, the one Hrafn now knew was a hersir thanks to Sigrid. The man's voice held that same deep gravity. It did not sound like a shout, but traveled like one; there was a hardness in it, an authority that seemed built of habit, not effort. "We'll stop here for today."
The voroirs and their servants moved with methodical efficiency, like people who had repeated that same scene hundreds of times. Sacks of salt were opened, tents raised, fires prepared. Before long the whole camp was nearly set and laid out in a fashion Hrafn would have called military.
Then they drew, beyond the road, a thin ring of pink salt. The circle enclosed the entire camp like an apparently symbolic wall, low and fragile to the eye.
There was comfort in seeing it. And worry too. It took only a pink line on the earth to remind everyone there that, outside the walls, the difference between order and carnage could be the width of a finger.
Hrafn watched the process for a time before finally offering to help, when he judged he understood the rhythm of it well enough that his "help" would not become nothing more than a well-meaning inconvenience. He carried what they told him to carry, fixed what they told him to fix, listened more than he spoke. He received a few nods and discreet smiles from the voroirs-small signs, but honest ones.
When everything was ready, the voroirs withdrew to the edges of the camp and took up their watches. The initiates and a good part of the servants remained nearer the center, gathered around the fires.
"We're doomed."
The voice came from one of the nearby initiates. Hrafn recognized the boy. He had been one of the ones riding at the front of the group when they set out, full of smiles, chest puffed with pride, always moving ahead as though he had already won something.
Now he looked on the verge of vomiting up his own fear.
Looks like someone finally understood.
Hrafn took a swallow of the soup he had been given and tilted his head slightly, curious to see how his now-brother fylkirn would develop that sudden illumination.
"No need for so much despair, my dear companion. Some of us shall surely have difficult times, I admit."
The answer came from another young man, seated with the relaxed posture of someone who had spent his whole life being taught to look important. There was something in the way he held his shoulders, his straight back, his lifted chin. Something studied. Something expensive.
A noble, or close enough to one.
"But first of all," he said, "what is your name?"
"Briorn," the boy answered, swallowing hard and casting nervous glances beyond the fires.
"You see... the well-blessed like us," the other went on, opening a confident smile, "will fare better than most, my friend Briorn."
"Yes!" added a freckled girl, too quickly, as though she feared her courage might evaporate if she thought too long. "Look around. I've never seen so many voroirs together, and we're fylkirns!"
Murmurs of agreement spread here and there, fragile and hurried, less because they truly believed it and more because they needed to believe in something.
"Perhaps," answered the supposed noble, letting his gaze roam the group with a disdain both light and evident, as if the word worthy did not sit well upon them all.
Then his eyes landed on Hrafn.
Something seemed to occur to him, and he rose and walked toward him.
"You there, boy. Aren't you that first one... the green, if I'm not mistaken?"
The voice came out too loud, too polished, tailored to be heard by everyone around. Hrafn only nodded and took another spoonful of soup, as though the grease floating on the broth were worthier of his attention than the man before him.
"During my education," the young man announced, making the word education sound like a title, "I learned many things you perhaps do not know."
Hrafn kept eating.
And the silence seemed to trouble the other.
"And I feel perhaps I do not have good news for you, brother."
Nothing.
Hrafn was not surprised. He knew. He had not had the luxury of formal schooling, but his family-Saga especially-had nourished an almost fanatical fondness for stories. Listening to them had been, for years, a daily and unavoidable tradition, and many of those stories taught more than masters paid in silver ever could. The world could change its clothes, but its patterns rarely changed their bones.
"Well... green, isn't it?" the young man insisted, and the false smile was beginning to crack at the edges. "Just try not to die in some shameful way before you ripen."
He laughed. A tidy laugh, rehearsed, shaped to provoke a response.
At last Hrafn lifted his eyes and looked him full in the face. The youth was neither tall nor short. He had the soft skin of someone who had never lifted anything heavier than an inkwell, and far too pale. That became even more obvious beside Hrafn's own skin, tanned and roughened by sun, labor, and salt. The fellow's hair was better arranged than that of many women Hrafn remembered seeing at the docks. His clothes, meanwhile, displayed so many colors they nearly hurt the eyes.
"Hm," Hrafn muttered.
Then he took the sword from his waist, still sheathed, and tossed it toward the young man.
"Here. Catch."
The other tried to seize it in the air by reflex.
That was a mistake.
The unexpected weight robbed him of his balance almost at once. He staggered, lost his footing, and landed sitting on the ground, stiff and ridiculous, with the sword slipping from his hands as though it had rejected him.
Laughter spread through the camp, first in stifled bursts, then more openly, even a few servants forced to disguise their own.
A sword like that normally weighed around a kilo and a half.
Hrafn's weighed nearly four with the sheath.
He had had it made that way on purpose, because he did not know how to fight beautifully. He had never been trained in fencing, never learned stances, elegant cuts, or parlor flourishes. If he ever had to fight, he would trust far more in the brute strength of his shoulders.
The youth took a few seconds to grasp the full extent of the ridicule in which he found himself. When he understood, his porcelain face went red as blood. He lifted his eyes to Hrafn in pure disgust, but the presence of voroirs nearby kept him from ordering his servants to do anything.
Son of a rich merchant, Hrafn concluded.
A real noble would have been trained.
Not that it makes much difference. To him, both are problems.
Deciding that the matter had already consumed too much of his life, Hrafn went back to his soup. If the young man really were noble, perhaps that would have been a concern a few days before, when he was still in a world where family names could reach a man before a fist could. But now he was on the way to Sahirid under the Hird's protection. The rest mattered less.
Two servants hurried to clean the fellow's clothes, while a third, bigger and broader-probably a personal guard-shot Hrafn a look soaked in mute malice.
After that there were no more intrigues. The tension hanging over them all was too great to let small vanities bloom for very long. Most of those there had never truly been outside the walls. At most, they had taken small excursions out of curiosity, walks short enough that fear had not yet had time to put down roots.
Hrafn was no different.
After finishing his meal, he improvised a place to sleep and lay down, but sleep would not come. Every time he looked at the darkness brought by the Star's absence, he had the strange, unpleasant feeling that something inside it was looking back at him.
At last he gave up on resting and decided to walk through the camp. A few youths still remained awake near the fires, speaking either too softly or too loudly, as fear made them chatterboxes or mutes. At the edges, the voroirs on watch were more presence than figure, nearly swallowed by shadow, helms and spears cut by the fire's unsteady light.
With each step, his eyes tried to invent shapes in the shadows beyond the salt. Trunks became limbs. Stones turned into crouched backs. Nothing was there-and for that very reason the fear grew worse. The dark always found more efficient ways of chewing through courage.
It was then that he found the familiar figure he had been looking for, speaking with someone who seemed vaguely familiar.
Sigrid sat beside the other girl near one of the fires, both of them watching the flames dance as though answers might be hidden in them. The smile that almost always lit Sigrid's face had disappeared. Her brow was faintly furrowed, and something in her expression said she was far away, lost in thought.
"Sigrid?" Hrafn called, coming closer.
Before any answer could reach him, a tore through the night-high, sudden.
"Voroirs!" came the roar. The voice was already familiar to him.
The urgency in it was not. Then the trumpet sounded.