Chapter 12 — "The Wolf of the Passes"
My name is Edwyn Flowers.
I am seventeen years old. I was born in a village three miles from the Bloody Gate where my father shoed horses for the garrison and my mother made candles and everyone I grew up with either joined the Gate's service or died young from something the mountains decided to send down at them.
I joined at sixteen. Sergeant Mollen told me I was too skinny to be useful and put me on supply detail for four months before Corwyn watched me spar one morning and moved me to the ranger rotation.
I had been in two skirmishes before this ridge.
I had never seen anything like what I saw on that ridge.
I don't think anyone had.
We came out of the northern approach at dawn — ninety men who hadn't had a fire in three days, moving on cold rations and whatever anger we'd managed to keep burning in place of warmth. I was near the middle of the column. Close enough to the front to see him but not so close that I was the first thing the Painted Dogs hit.
He was at the very front.
Alaric Snow. Fifteen years old. A bastard from the North that half the garrison had spent the last two years quietly deciding opinions about.
I had mine too until that morning.
He hit the ridge like he'd been waiting for it.
The first sentry barely had time to register that something was coming out of the impossible direction before the axe caught him across the chest and he went down and Alaric stepped over him without breaking stride. Didn't look back. Didn't check. Just stepped over him and kept going as if the man had been a loose stone on the path.
I remember thinking — that's it then. It's started.
It is hard to describe what he looked like in a fight to someone who wasn't there.
I've tried since. Sat in the Falcon's Rest in Gateside with men who weren't on the ridge and tried to explain it and watched their faces go politely skeptical the way faces do when a story sounds too large to be true.
I understand the skepticism.
I had it too. Right up until the moment I didn't.
He moved through those one hundred and eighty men the way a river moved through rock. Not fast exactly — though he was fast, faster than anyone I'd seen — but inevitable. Like the outcome had already been decided and the fighting was just the formality of reaching it.
First man he hit went down so hard the sound carried over everything else.
Second man — bigger, a woodcutter's axe — Alaric didn't let him swing. Three steps forward. Inside the reach. Elbow across the nose. Axe into the neck. The whole thing took four seconds. Four seconds and a man who had been standing was no longer standing and Alaric was already looking for the next one.
I was trying to fight my own battle at this point.
A clansman came at me with a short blade and I blocked it badly and took a glancing cut across my forearm that stung like fire and nearly made me drop my sword. I put him down eventually. It was not elegant. It took longer than it should have.
When I looked up Alaric was twenty feet deeper into the ridge than I was.
The part people have trouble believing is the part with the center.
When the flanks broke — and they broke fast, the Painted Dogs not expecting the direction we'd come from, not expecting the heads on the spears, not expecting any of it — the center held. Forty men in tight formation around their chief. Disciplined. Organized. A real defensive position even in the middle of a collapsing battle.
Alaric turned toward it.
I watched him work through the men between him and that center.
There were seven of them. I counted afterward. Seven men between him and the formation and he went through all of them in ten minutes of the kind of close ugly ridge fighting that should by all rights have left him bleeding out on the rock.
He was bleeding. That's true. Cut above his right eye — blood coming down his face the whole time. Cut on his left arm.
He didn't seem to notice either.
A veteran clansman — grey beard, forty years of mountain fighting in his body — swung a heavy blade at him meant to push him back.
Alaric stepped forward into it.
Inside the swing. Where the blade had no power left.
The axe caught the old man in the ribs and the sound it made was the sound of something that wasn't going to be repaired. The old man sat down on the rock with the expression of a man who had just been told something he hadn't expected to hear.
Alaric stepped past him.
Didn't look back.
I heard Mads, beside me — a garrison veteran of twelve years, a man who had been at the Whispering Pass and a dozen other engagements — say something quiet under his breath.
I asked him what.
"Gods," he said. Just that. Just the one word.
I understood.
The center opened up.
Not because we'd broken it. Because Alaric reached it and the men on both sides of him felt what was about to happen and moved away from it the way you moved away from a fire that had gotten larger than fires were supposed to get.
I stopped fighting.
Everyone stopped fighting.
Hundred men standing on a ridge in the grey morning light and all of us — his men and their men both — looking at the same thing.
Alaric Snow standing twenty feet from Goryn.
The Painted Dog chief was the largest man I had ever seen in my life. Old scars on old scars. Two short axes, one in each hand, moving in slow circles. Eyes like the mountain itself — grey and flat and completely without fear.
He looked at Alaric the way you looked at something you had decided to take seriously.
Alaric looked at him the way you looked at something you had already decided.
The blood from his eyebrow was coming down his face and he didn't wipe it. Just let it come. Let Goryn see it. Let everyone see it.
I was seventeen years old and I had grown up in the shadow of the Bloody Gate and I had thought I understood what it meant to be a fighter.
I understood that I understood nothing.
Goryn rolled his shoulders.
Alaric tightened his grip on the axe.
The mountain waited for the blood bath that was yet to arrive.
So did we.
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