Tide of Shadows and Other Stories Read Free Page A

smile. He's as lost as we are. Without a leader. Without a purpose.
    He kills because the man who filled his purse told him to kill. It's not personal. He kills because it is what he excels at.
    Just like me, Tahir thinks. Hell will welcome us both with open arms.
    Tahir dies on the blade, a final thrust through his heart.
     
    3

    Snow fell—heaven wept frozen tears for my fallen friends.
    I had laughed at heaven with them once as we tipped back mugs of warm ale. We roared raucously at the thought of an afterlife, at the idea that there was more to our existence than fighting, than killing those weaker and more cowardly than ourselves.
    We all laughed, but I think we all secretly believed, too, in our own way. My father's spirit hid in the shadows of every pub in every foreign land. He watched me with sallow eyes as I stuffed that pain deep into the darkest corners of myself, drowned it in liquor and melancholic laughter.
    They were my friends. I realized this as I buried them. I would not have said so before, when I was the whipping boy in the small crew of mercenaries. I wanted to kill them, to see the look of terror in their eyes as my blade slid through their heart. I dreamed of them scattered about the forest, as they were now, paying penance for embarrassing me, for making me the butt of a joke, even in the shadow of the Massacre.
    But camaraderie has a funny way of rearing its head. I thought I hated them—I thought they hated me—but they were my only family now, my only friends in the wide expanse of the world. And they were dead, buried one by one at the hands of the ridiculed squire.
    Then there was the Northman; what to do with him?
    He was a friend like the others, though it seemed queer to think of him in such terms. We shared no language but still had formed a bond, a kinship shaped by shared hardship.
    He saved my life when my countrymen couldn't. I had tried desperately to return the favour but was too slow and lacked the necessary killer instinct. Useless, guilty of hesitating, I was scared—and now his blood stained my hands as surely as the man who had put his blade through Eyvindur’s heart.
    I will not lie—I agonized about him, about burying one from the north, preparing his body in the way of my people. Where would he go now? Would his soul be trapped within the grave I dug, unable to find its way to whatever afterlife these Northmen expected? Would he feast among my people, rewarded for his valiance? Or would he rot, nothing more than compost in the ground?
    In the end, I honoured him as I would any friend. I dug a grave, larger than the rest, my chipped and broken blade tearing at the ground. The snow a never-ending reminder that the world went on, ignorant of what happened in one small clearing among many in this vast forest. Ignorant or uncaring. What is the difference?
    I rolled the Northman into the grave. He slumped at the bottom, staring with open eyes. I'd seen drunkards like that, nearly dead in the alleys of Chard. Snowflakes soon settled on him, covering his bloodstained chest. One landed on his unblinking eye. There was no life left there, but the dead can speak through their eyes. His eyes whispered of weary resignation and sorrow.
    The first clump of dirt landed on his chest, covering the thin layer of snow. The second covered his face and so on until he was buried under dirt and stone.

    Wrapped in a heavy cloak, Eyvindur fights desperately to keep the cold at bay. He cannot sleep. Not since his band was massacred by the dark-skinned warriors from the south—the same warriors who now sleep next to him, the only companions he has left. He hates them though they'd saved his life, proved good friends. Trust was hard to find in this frozen land, but death stalks the lonely.
    What else could he have done? He had little choice but to throw his stones in with those he'd called his enemy just days before. He could have ignored the boy on the outskirts of the Massacre, continued his