Leif was grateful.
Given the circumstances, that might have sounded like madness. His left arm hung broken at his side. Displaced ribs bit into his flesh with every deeper breath. His left eye, now blind, robbed him of half the night and made his return to camp slower than it ought to have been.
Even so, he was grateful.
Grateful to be a hersir. Grateful to be strong. Grateful to be alive. Grateful to have been there that night.
Because everything about it was wrong.
There should not have been so many óhreinn so far inside the sacred realm. So near the road. So near the new blood.
That was why he advanced with shortened breath and a shattered body, feeling pain like a succession of dry hammer blows beneath the skin, but never allowing it to take up more room than it should. The sacrilege that had done that to him was dead. That was enough to keep his feet moving.
A greater sacrilegious one.
One of the filthiest things the night could spew out.
The fight against the creature had been a disgrace. To watch, if anyone had watched it. To take part in, even more so. It had been teeth and steel, heresy and miracle, raw brutality on both sides. The beast was too fast for its size and far too strong for such strength to have been permitted by the world. Even so, it had fallen.
Leif had lived.
And for that he was satisfied.
His men would live, the commons would live, the new blood would live, and so-
The Hird remains.
Soon he sighted the camp.
Even from a distance, with his broken vision and the night eating away at shapes, he saw enough to know the work was not finished. Some fallen ones still ran loose.
He entered the camp again without slowing. He was Leif.
And he would not cease until every abomination had been washed from his lord's earth.
His arrival was marked by violence. Direct. Swift. Bloody.
The first fallen one barely had time to turn its head. Leif reached it from behind and the axe went through spine and chest in a single short blow. The second tried to drive its pointed tail into him. Leif twisted his torso, letting the stake scrape iron and leather, and crushed the base of the creature's neck with the broad edge. The third came larger, rearing up on its hind legs like some warped union of bear and dog. Leif took one step into the lunge and opened its throat from one side to the other.
The black blood fell.
His presence alone was enough to rekindle what remained of order.
The voroirs, who a heartbeat before had been fighting with the desperation of those trying to hold shut a door that was giving way, found new breath at the sight of him. Not by miracle. By habit. Because the sight of the hersir still on his feet, still killing, still advancing despite the state in which he had returned, reminded them what they were.
"The Hird remains!" Leif shouted, as loudly as his wounded lungs allowed.
"The Veil guards!" the voroirs answered.
The reply came with the sound of metal entering flesh.
Leif wasted no time on questions. The formation was beginning to steady again beneath the weight of his presence and the renewed vigor it dragged with it. That was enough. The rest could be understood later.
He pushed deeper into the camp.
The place was a carnage. Bodies lay strewn among wagon wheels, torn tents, dropped weapons, and stains of blood that shone black in the wavering firelight. If the Star were merciful, he thought, little of that blood would belong to fylkirns.
It was a morbid thought.
It was also a practical one.
Leif did not grant himself the luxury of lying to himself. Commons were many. Voroirs, few. The weight of losses was not equal, even when the death was the same. Even so, every body on the ground demanded an accounting. Every failure of the line would be paid for.
That was when he saw him.
A tall, athletic youth, still green in the body despite his build, caught in the exact instant between life and death.
A bony stake, larger than the boy's own arm, was coming toward his chest.
Leif gauged the distance at once.
Even gathering the most from the little he had left, he would not reach him in time. He might save the other two around him. He might clear the area before another fallen one broke through. But that one was doomed.
Then he noticed something strange.
The boy's eyes moved wrong inside their sockets. Not with blind panic. Not like the eyes of a man searching for a way out. They were moving too quickly, taking in everything at a rhythm that did not belong to a common body.
Leif narrowed his one good eye.
The boy moved.
Not quickly.
Leif knew speed. He had seen and used true speed more times than he could count. That was not it.
It was something else.
The boy's movement was slow enough to look flawed, but precise to an absurd degree. Ridiculous. The sort of precision that not even many trained voroirs would have under pressure, much less an untested initiate. Even so, his body found the only space possible between death and survival.
He came out alive.
Paying for it.
His right arm was nearly torn from the shoulder when he twisted his body to escape the main strike and, at the same time, drove his sword into the creature. He did not kill it. He came nowhere near. But he delayed the beast enough.
That was enough for Leif.
He planted one step and cut half the distance.
He planted another and was already upon the creature.
The axe came down in a brutal arc and split it in two.
The opened body collapsed in two uneven halves into salt and mud.
Leif looked at what remained of the fallen one for an instant. Then he let his gaze linger a moment longer on the mutilated youth. Not from pity. To mark him. Because of the strangeness of what he had just seen.
Promising.
But there were more óhreinn to kill and more blood to preserve.
He turned back to what mattered.
With him there, the remaining fights quickly lost their strength. What had been a bloody, badly contained struggle became a cleansing. Fallen ones remained scattered, wounded, isolated, or without direction. Still dangerous. But already condemned.
One voroir smashed the skull of a smaller one against the wheel of a wagon. Another drove a short sword under the jaw of a beast trying to drag a woman away by the ankle. Leif cut down two more with dry blows, never allowing any of them to approach the piles of wounded.
"For the Hird!" some of the voroirs shouted when the last resistance began to fail.
Leif admired their spirit.
He did not share their triumph.
There were too many bodies on the ground for that victory to taste clean.
Commons. Fylkirns. Voroirs.
What followed was the cold work that comes after.
The blood stood out all the more as it ran over the holy white of the wide steel-salt road, tracing dark streaks through purity. The sight displeased him more than any cry of that night had.
He saw a woman down near an extinguished fire, as dead as the flames.
Blessed by blue.
Leif recognized her.
The body was broken through the middle, mutilated in pieces. She had finished her voroir training only a year before. She had served under his command since then. Still young, promising, steady in the field.
She had died saving five commons.
A good woman, a foolish death.
She was worth a hundred of those she had saved. Perhaps more. Given time, she might have come to be worth much more. Now that no longer mattered.
Leif held the thought only long enough to recognize it. Then he forced it down.
"Burn the bodies. Give them their due rest," he ordered. "And bring me a report of losses."
There was no use lingering over what could not be undone.
Those who had died, had died with honor.
They had died for the only cause that, in Leif's understanding, was worth their lives.
Bodies-or what remained of them-began to be gathered. They were dragged across the salt, the mud, and the cold of the night to a single place. The armor was removed with care where there was still armor to remove. The dead were laid out in the most honorable position the situation allowed.
As for the fallen ones, the Star's light would deal with them at dawn. It would wash their blasphemous existence from the earth, giving whatever there was of good in the world room to take breath beneath the twenty hours of its blessing.
"Report!" a voroir called, approaching.
The man tried not to look at the hersir's broken body any more than courtesy allowed. He himself was not whole either. There were new holes in him where no holes ought to be. Even so, he remained standing.
"Proceed," Leif answered. His voice remained deep. Strong. Only a little more dragged than it would otherwise have been.
"Yes, exalted hersir. The deaths number in the dozens. Most, in the center, were untrained commons. Of those, twenty-three died in all; among the common warriors we had fifteen losses. As well as three of the elevated fylkirns and... two voroirs."
The last part came out heavier.
Leif tightened his jaw.
He nodded once.
He looked around the camp, now reduced to fire, bodies, salt, and survivors in shock.
"That is all, brother," he said.
He dismissed the man with a short gesture.
There was not much more to elaborate. He understood enough of what had happened. There was no point in lamenting the dead aloud. The dead were at rest.
And the shame of losing so much would not be washed away by lament.
Only by strength.
By becoming better. By becoming more powerful. By guarding the new blood as was his role. Until the day he was too broken to carry it out.
Or until the day they themselves were ready to guard something on their own.