‘The Wilderlands,’ Chapter 1

I.

Ears! Ears! Attend me now!

Come away from the freezing walls. Gather harthward, hold close those you love, fill your cup. I have an oft told tale from the far west that can spin you away from this warsome winter and the howl-hungry things at our doors. Attend me now, while my bones can still bear it.

Many of the best tellers insist this tale begins with loss, a soul-dragging loss to rattle your ribs. The oldest, and most world-weary will tell you it begins with Death doing the work that befits him. The more eager and less experienced say this story begins with a man, one who swallowed sorrow and loss as much as he dealt it.

In truth, tellers are dishonest folk.

This tale began as all things do: In fire.

It was a single flame-wreathed arrow at first, cutting through the night. Its hundred red wings struggled to keep it in the air—flailing and failing and elegant. As it passed the apex of its journey, a flock of its brethren bit into the night behind it.

For a breath, a beat, a sinful stretch—there was quiet.

Then the fire’s wings brushed the top of a wagon, as if flapping to lift the vessel into the air.

Soldiers steamed from the wagons as flames reached out after them. The quick soldiers escaped. The quick and lucky did so unscorched.

Those who were neither were left behind, cooking in their armor. Their screams and the shrieks of civilians smothered by the battle-bark of the attackers.

The Wilderfolk were birthed from fear and night. They came like devils, clothed in the skins of wild things and bearing weapons more gnarled and deadly than the most fume-blown beast you ever faced.

Knalc was at the head of this stampede and gave himself to battle as easily as you all hear my words now. His cruel blade split helmet and head from fleeing soldiers; his blackened, bare feet beat past fallen friend and smote foe in same stride. ‘Round his neck hung a clay sphere which he protected from dent and damage more than his own human heart.

One soldier—a soul more stupid than brave, more frightened than thoughtful—charged him. “To me!” he screamed to his fellows as he pressed toward Knalc. “To me, men! Protect the wagons! Protect your families!”

Not all tellings of this tale include this death-damned soldier. In those that do, he and Knalc sometimes duel ferociously, leaving naught alive around them. Sometimes the soldier takes a hundred blows, while Knalc endures twice as much. Sometimes Knalc barely even notices the soldier as he shaves head from shoulders in a single swing.

All those accounts agree though, the soldier died there and Knalc persisted, reveling the flame-wrought ruin of the caravan.

Knalc’s lungs stung with ash and smoke and his coywolf pelt grew fat with sopping blood. The nearer he came to the center of the caravan the more soldiers gave way to crying women, whining children, and common men praying to false gods. Knalc’s muscles bubbled like wrathful clouds, trailing drops of red rain behind him. He stormed by with the wrath and speed of a summer storm: most knew instinctively to move from his wake—those that didn’t screamed and were made silent.

Valforians scrambled from wagons, cradling all manner of the bright and burdensome things the fool-folk from Valian find so precious even in flame-blistered arms, leaving food and water behind.

Smiling, Knalc slowed his rampage and stepped into the back of one of the covered wagons that had not yet begun to burn. He entered slow-like, steadily breathing the smoke-stained air. He stood still, gorging his eyes on the darkness of the wagon to make them strong against it.

His eyes had not yet had their fill when a knife cut at him.

He moved away without thinking and found his attacker.

A woman.

In the moment he took to laugh, she painted fresh blood across his bare arm. The wound was scarcely more than a scratch, but it killed his laughter.

Knalc warned awkward-like in Valforian tongue. “Stop.”

Howling and crazed, the woman pounced again.

He stepped away, but those Valforian wagons are small, and it only took the woman a moment more to blade-bleed him a second time.

Quick as she came, she shrunk back, admired the wound she had greeted him with, and sprung again to stab his chest.

But Knalc was ready this time. He caught her wrist—the metal weapon pointing the way to his heart.

He remained calm. “Stop.”

With another guttural cry, she clawed his face—her fingers raking flesh and drawing blood. Without wanting to, he fell, bringing her with him.

As I tell it to you here, the two of them rolled and shrieked on the floor—like laughing-cats. As I tell it to you here, she didn’t beg or cry or coo—but bit and slashed and butted, sinking her teeth so deep into his shoulder she tasted marrow. As she did, she clawed with one hand at his chest, looking to rake the life from his skin but instead brushing the clay heart Knalc had hanging from his neck. As I tell it to you here, he felt her fingers against that cold clay sharper than her teeth in his living flesh. As I tell you all here, he didn’t realize he’d slid his blade deep between her ribs until he heard a gut-gurgle and felt her go limp on top of him.

“Damn,” he hissed in proper-tongue.

He rolled her off. The woman didn’t struggle more than a creek-carried branch. She stared up without seeing anything that was there, probably calling on her god to help her. But even gods that ain’t false don’t oft help the living or the dying.

Like most Valforians, the woman had small hands, the kind that ain’t accustomed to holding knives or fighting off coywolves in the night. Those hands were shaking now, grasping at the weeping wound run through her. Blood slipped from between her lips and leaked down her chin. She came back to herself a little at the end and looked at Knalc—in one eye sat Sister Hatred and in the other was Brother Longing. Her mouth moved, failing to form more than brief, bloody bubbles.

Knalc watched and only moved again when he felt the weight of her life flutter away.

He spat, brushing his hand over the bite on his shoulder. She was Valforian, which meant there was no risk of foam-fever. She was young for a Valforian, like as not she had been in her thirties. Valforians made sure to preserve themselves well in life and it’s always harder to read age once Death has done his work.

Knalc snatched up his stabber and cleaned it of the woman’s blood. He started to leave, but something in his innards seized him.

Knowing his guts had always told him true, he turned around to retrieve the woman’s knife, tossing out the one already on his belt and replacing it with his new trophy. He didn’t even bother to clean his blood from the prize as he stepped from the wagon.

The fighting was beginning to fade. Those who were not laying broken and bloodied had fled into the Wilderlands. As Knalc walked the battlefield, he breathed blood-fumes and burning wood.

“Knalc!”

He turned and found loyal Giemar running toward him through a veil of ash and smoke.

“Knalc,” Giemar repeated. “Come, there’s something you won’t believe.”

Knalc grunted like a man who believes quite a bit.

Giemar knew that sound. “You doubt too much. Come!”

Knalc’s vision roved about, searching for the excuse of Valforian soldiers lurking in either soot or shadow who he could kill instead. Those that he found were in Death’s lap and would be poor sport, so he sighed and followed Giemar.

Giemar spoke again as they walked. “What did you find in the wagon?”

“Same thing we always find,” he paused before adding. “And a woman.”

With a laugh as buxom as a boar’s howl, Giemar roared. “You? A woman? I was beginning to think—”

“That’s not what happened.”

“As you say,” said Giemar, though he still chuckled in the back of his throat.

“What is it you wanted me to see?”

Giemar nodded ahead for they had already arrived. “Look unto it yourself.”

A pack of their tribesmen had gathered ‘round one of the overturned wagons, cheering and shouting like they were watching coywolves fight. As Knalc came closer, he saw a Valforian man at the center of this congregation—dressed in a red as dark and gorish as the inside of a man. He brandished a thin blade made of tricksy Valforian steel. At his feet lay the soul-drained shells of two of Knalc’s tribesmen.

Knalc was less amused than the congregation. “What’s there to see? Someone kill the bastard and be done with him.”

“Watch,” Giemar urged.

Eventually, one of Knalc’s tribesmen came forward with enough bravery in his chest to face the man in red. He hefted an ax of healthy size as he prepared to fight. The dirt rumbled to the cheering and chanting of the crowd. We can’t know what name they chanted for their tribesman—if he had lived—I would tell you about him rather than Red.

The tribesman began to walk circles ‘round the red warrior. His fingers tightening and loosening at his ax handle while the man in red followed him with a keen eye.

The tribesman charged.

Red moved so light-like, Knalc almost didn’t see what happened.

The tribesman was two bounds away from him when the Valforian steel snicked him.

The tribesman lost his name then as he fell to the ground, neck spitting blood.

It ain’t often you hear of Valforians being honored by Wilderfolk, but the cheers that went up would have bolstered Red into legend even if he weren’t in the tale I tell you now.

The tribesman lay on the ground, forgotten at the feet of his butcher.

“Come on!” A voice jeered from the crowd. “Can no one kill this man in single combat?”

“See? I told you true.” Giemar said. “I bet you’ve never seen a Valforian who could hold his own against a Kharian.”

“Much less three,” Knalc muttered.

“Who do you think is going next?”

Knalc already knew. He pushed his way through the crowd toward the man in red. As Knalc stepped into the arena he was surrounded by howls of encouragement, a handful even meant to bolster him.

The man in red remained unmoved, blue eyes staring at Knalc whose heavy browns blinked back.

A heartbeat passed and the cheers were choked to murmurs.

Careful as a fox footing through first snow, Knalc lifted his sword. He waved his blade, baiting Red to come to him. The man in red had done this dance thrice before that day and many times afore then. He knew better than to take bait freely given.

Knalc took a breath …

And dropped his sword—

And charged.

Red had not expected this. He looked at the abandoned blade and lost one precious battle-beat.

When he looked back to Knalc, what had before been merely the mind of a man’s muscles became a mad attempt to salvage a single lost breath.

The Valforian steel stabbed at the spot Knalc’s neck had been, but Knalc knew Valforian steel and how to outsmart it. He rolled to the ground, under the man’s guard.

All the blade did was leave a cold, thin scar on Knalc’s clay-heart.

Red had no time to react before Knalc seized his sword-arm and snapped it in a single practiced motion

The man in red fell to the ground, shouting at the unnatural bend of his limb and the battle.

Cheers sprang from the crowd as Knalc found his feet again, a small smile hidden by his untamed beard. He reached for the knife on his belt, unsheathing the smaller Valforian weapon that had come within inches of his own life.

He bent over, held Red, and thrust the blade heart-ward—

“Hold!”

Only his honor-urge allowed Knalc to divert the knife into the blood dyed ground next to the man.

The order to hold came from Gamak Tols, the Gor of the Khar tribe. He, I tell you, was a Gor among Gor.

Knalc bowed.

Gamak raised his hairy hand in acknowledgment. “You were going to kill this man—”

“That was the purpose of the knife.”

The gaze of Gamak stabbed at Knalc with all the intent of the spoken of weapon. Some legends say when Gamak was young and lily-cheeked he’d managed to kill the silver tip whose skin he wore with no more than the strength of his arms and the violent gaze of his own eyes. Bah, heed those tales not. Embellished legends that stretch beyond belief, I say.

"Do not interrupt me again. You were going to kill this man. But I have decided to delay his death. He has killed more of our tribe than any other single Valforian. It would be an insult to kill him in the same manner his brethren died.”

“Gor Gamak,” Knalc said. “The soldiers we fought died warriors’ deaths.”

“Yet this man is made of more than any of them. It is only fitting that we acknowledge this when administering his death.”

A high scream came from under the wagon. The kind of scream you hear when a babe is shrieking for her mother.

A girl of no more than sixteen summers burst from under the wagon. Behind her, she dragged a small crying boy, whose feet didn’t even have the sense to move while his sister dragged him.

Tears seeped from her face as she knelt next to the man in red.

The man—teeth clenched—looked up at her and whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Knalc didn’t move, waiting for the scene to end. Waiting for the girl to throw herself onto the man in red and beg for her life or his life or both.

The girl did no such thing.

Abandoning the boy, she reached out with slender fingers and pulled the knife from the ground. Fire reflected in the polished blade as she silently examined it.

She looked up at Knalc.

He was surprised when he couldn’t spot distress or fear in her eyes. As it was, the look in her pupils struck a dreadful note in his own heart. In her eyes burned a bubbling, molten hatred.

“This is my mother’s knife.”

***

The Wilderlands is available now for pre-order on Kindle here, on Nook here, on Kobo here, and on Apple here. More formats, digital and physical, will be available for purchase and pre-order soon. The Wilderlands is scheduled to release on Oct. 29, 2024.