The Carrion Throne

Chapter 1: The Bondswoman's Count

Revna Oddmund kept a tally on the inside of her shield. Forty-seven marks, each one carved with the tip of her belt knife on nights when the warband camped and the fires burned low. Forty-seven days closer to the end of her service-oath. Seven hundred and thirty days total, minus the forty-seven already served, which left six hundred and eighty-three. She could do the arithmetic in her sleep. She often did.

The shield was battered elm, rimmed in iron that had gone the color of dried blood. It had belonged to a woman named Solveig who had caught a spear through the throat at the ford-crossing near Hekla's Teeth. Revna had picked it up because her own shield had split in half against a horseman's axe, and dead Solveig had no further use for hers. That was the economy of Jarl Gunhild Torvald's warband: the living inherited from the dead, and the dead inherited nothing.

Revna marched in the middle column, surrounded by six hundred men and women who smelled of sweat, leather, and the particular sourness of people who had been campaigning for weeks without proper shelter. The Vástmark stretched around them in every direction—a vast, treeless plateau of gray-green scrub and black volcanic rock, swept by winds that never fully stopped. It was a land that looked like it had been scoured by something angry and then abandoned.

"You're counting again," said Halvar, who marched beside her. He was a thick-necked man with a beard that grew in unfortunate patches, leaving him looking perpetually moth-eaten. He had been bonded three years longer than Revna and had stopped counting long ago. "I can see your lips moving."

"Six hundred and eighty-three," Revna said.

"Days?"

"Days."

Halvar grunted. "Could be fewer, if the Jarl takes the Throne. She's promised manumission to every bondswoman and bondsman in the warband if she succeeds."

"She promised that last campaign too. And the one before."

"Third time's the charm."

Revna said nothing. She had learned, in her twenty-six years, that hope was a currency best hoarded. You spent it carefully, on things you could control—the next meal, the next night's sleep, the next sunrise. You did not spend it on the ambitions of jarls.

The column crested a low ridge, and the wind hit them full in the face, carrying with it a smell that made Revna's stomach clench. It was not the smell of rot, exactly. It was older than rot, deeper than decay. It was the smell of something that should have decomposed centuries ago but had somehow refused.

"There," someone said, and six hundred heads turned.

The Throne of Ruin sat on the horizon like a tumor on the land. It was a mound—that was the simple description, and the most dishonest. It was perhaps three hundred feet high and half a mile across at its base, and it was made entirely of the dead. Three hundred years of weather and settling had compressed the lowest layers into something almost geological, but the upper reaches still showed the shapes of what lay beneath: the suggestion of limbs, the curve of ribcages, the occasional glint of ancient armor. The twelve god-kings had died at each other's hands in a final, apocalyptic battle, and their armies had died with them. The corpses had been heaped by the survivors—those few who crawled away from the carnage—into this monument of flesh and bone.

Three centuries. The mound should have been nothing but soil and scattered bones by now. Instead, it endured, and the smell that rolled off it was the smell of meat that would neither cure nor spoil.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" said a voice from behind.

Revna turned. Jarl Gunhild Torvald rode a gray horse at the head of her personal guard, and she was smiling. She was a tall woman, lean as a whip, with iron-gray hair cropped short and a face that had been broken and reassembled so many times it looked like a clay mask shaped by impatient hands. Her left eye was milky-white, blinded by a sword-cut years ago, but her right eye was sharp enough for two.

"It's a pile of corpses, my Jarl," Revna said.

"It's a pile of gods," Gunhild corrected. "And we're going to climb it."

She rode on, and her personal guard followed, and the warband resumed its march. Revna looked at the mound again. The wind shifted, and for a moment—just a moment—she thought she heard something beneath its howl. A sound like a voice, thin and distant, twisted by pain into something barely recognizable as human.

She shook her head and marched on.

---

That night, they camped two miles from the mound, in the shelter of a rocky depression that cut the worst of the wind. Fires were lit, rations distributed, and the warband settled into the grim routine of soldiers who knew they were close to their objective. Some sharpened weapons. Some prayed. Some drank from skins of birch-sap wine that had gone slightly vinegary, which was the only kind available this far into the Vástmark.

Revna sat near one of the smaller fires, away from the loudest of the warriors, and carved her forty-eighth mark into the shield. The knife bit into the elm with a satisfying sound. Six hundred and eighty-two days.

"Oddmund."

She looked up. Vigdis Keld stood over her—a broad-shouldered woman with a shaved head and ritual scars running from her temples to her jaw. She was Gunhild's second-in-command, and she had a talent for appearing silently despite being built like a siege engine.

"The Jarl wants you," Vigdis said.

"What for?"

"Didn't ask. Don't care. Move."

Revna sheathed her knife, set down her shield, and followed Vigdis through the camp. Gunhild's tent was the largest in the warband—not luxurious, but spacious enough for a war-table and the maps that the Jarl had been collecting for years. Maps of the Vástmark, maps of the mound, maps of the tunnel systems that were rumored to run beneath it.

Gunhild was standing over the war-table when Revna entered, studying a piece of vellum so old it looked like it might crumble at a harsh word. Two oil lamps threw wavering light across the tent, making the shadows jump.

"Oddmund," Gunhild said without looking up. "You were a tunnel-fighter before you were bonded, yes?"

"I worked the copper mines at Dalvik, my Jarl. There was a collapse, and I helped dig survivors out."

"Close enough. I need someone who can move underground without panicking." Gunhild finally looked up, and her one good eye fixed on Revna with an intensity that made the younger woman want to step back. "There are tunnels beneath the mound. Old ones. I need them scouted before we make our approach."

"Scouted for what?"

"Structural stability. Enemy presence. Anything unusual." The Jarl paused. "And I want to know what's down there. The old texts say the god-kings were buried in a chamber beneath the mound, not on it. I want to know if that's true."

Revna considered this. A scouting mission into tunnels beneath a three-hundred-year-old pile of corpses that killed everyone who got too close to its summit. Six hundred and eighty-two days on her oath.

"I'll need a partner," she said. "And good rope."

"Take Halvar. And Oddmund—" Gunhild's voice dropped. "Whatever you find down there, you report to me. Not Vigdis, not the camp, not anyone. Me. Understood?"

"Understood, my Jarl."

Revna left the tent and stood in the cold wind for a moment, looking toward the mound. It was invisible in the darkness, but she could feel it there, a heaviness on the horizon, like a storm that refused to break.

Six hundred and eighty-two days. She could survive anything for six hundred and eighty-two days.

She went to find Halvar.