Harold's boots hit the cobblestone outside his hall, and Bram walked beside him with one fist pressed flat to his chest like he meant to keep the heart in place by hand.
"You know it's not going anywhere; that's part of you now," Harold said.
Bram's eyes were red-rimmed, and he didn't care. "Three hundred years, lad. I'll thump it till they put me in the ground. I saw mine Gods lad. I thought they had forsaken us."
Below them, the hill had been transformed by the dwarves.
The Landing had poured up from the cobbles with kegs on their shoulders, and the dwarves who'd materialized onto bare grass that afternoon had fires going in pits they'd dug with their hands, racks of someone's pigs turning slow over the coals, and a smell of woodsmoke and roasting fat thick enough to lean on. Somewhere down in the middle of it a legionary and a dwarf the width of a doorframe were drinking out of the same overturned helmet, and the legionary was losing. Past them, a ring had opened around two of the Landing's loggers and four Gemheart dwarves taking turns hurling cut trunks end-over-end through the dusk, the logs landing with a thump that rolled up the slope on a half-second delay. Past that, an arm-wrestling contest had broken out across an upended barrel with a crowd six deep around it, and the cheer when one of them slammed the barrel down hard enough to crack the staves came up the hill before the shouting did. Coin was trading hands faster than the bets could be taken.
"Your folk move fast," Harold said.
"We dig fast, drink faster, and we hold a grudge." Bram caught a horn of beer off a passing tray without breaking stride, drained a third of it, and let a massive belch. "And we love stronger than anyone else. Years of half-feeling, lad, and now—" he gestured at the slope with the horn, slopping it "—now they'll burn it all out tonight if I let them. Gods. Even the beer tastes better than it did before. Whose is this?"
"Some of my adventurers brewed it. Probably not our best."
"I don't care. I want to meet that man." Bram thumped his chest once more, grinned through the beer dripping down his beard, and then his head came around at a sound from further down the slope — a hammer ringing twice on stone, and on the third stroke, the crowd yelled as the stone exploded.
"Stone-breaking." He said, Satisfied. "Hadn't heard one of ours strike like that in a hundred years. Lad — listen. That's a hammer that’s a dwarf that knows how to be used. Honest work, breaking stone." He shook his head once, slowly. "Watch them tonight. If the chanting starts and won't stop, they'll go into the Long Walk before it's done. We've not sung it at a feast in any life of ours. The clan has rules on when — a wedding where both hearths have failed, a child dying, the last hour before a road we may not come back from. Never at a feast. Tis not a happy song. But it's the one song that holds what we are, and tonight…" His fist thumped harder over his heart. "Tonight it's the only song that fits."
Harold made it four more steps before Margaret cut across the hill to reach him, moving faster than he'd ever seen her move, even her tea forgotten.
"Harold." She pulled up in front of him and didn't lower her voice. "The forum is a mess. I need you for ten minutes before this gets away from us — we have to settle our response tonight, not tomorrow."
Carter reached him from the other side, a half-step behind her, Jack at his shoulder, and both of them looked almost panicked.
"What is going on, Harold?" Carter's grin was absent. "Who were those dwarves? And then the sky shone golden for a moment. I've never seen this one move so fast."
Harold tipped his chin at Bram, already lost in a knot of his own people. "A couple of things happened." He pushed a breath out through his nose. "I committed us to an eternal war with the dwarves, for one."
Carter's hand left the sword. "You — what?"
"I suspect it won't be as bad as all that." Harold watched a Gemheart graybeard get hauled bodily off his feet by three of his cousins and thrown onto the back of a Tatanka. "Bram's people are royalty; the clans are going to take the news poorly." He turned back. "Right up until they work out that Bram's got the whole Dwarven pantheon standing behind him. I watched their gods accept his oath. That tends to cool an argument."
"Their gods," Jack said flatly. "That's what they were?"
"Yep, if my soul quivered in their presence, I know yours did too." Harold rubbed his temple. "And that's not the part I'm losing sleep over. The Grail quest I picked when I took the boon — I'm more worried about that. We're being fucked with again. Same as the trial." He held Margaret's eye, then Carter's. "I know the gods are real now. I watched six of them appear in front of us. So when something reaches into my quest log to make my road harder the instant I make it, I've stopped assuming it's the system being even-handed. I think it's one of them. Somebody up there does not want us succeeding."
"As below, so above," Jack said wonderingly.
"And whatever's leaning on the scale from the heavens, " Harold's mouth went flat " Must have actors down here as well."
Jack Churchill hadn't moved, hadn't reached for the horn of beer someone had pressed at him, and when he spoke, almost to himself.
"Where are our gods, then…"
Nobody answered that. Down the slope, a keg gave out a hollow boom as its bottom met someone's skull, and the cheer that followed rolled up the hill.
Harold let the quiet sit a beat longer than was comfortable, then turned on Margaret.
"That list of names I gave you. I need progress on it, and I need it ahead of all of this. Some of those people are going to be needed, and if they grow the way they grew last time — they will, if I can recruit them before another Lord does. Spend gold like water if you have to. I need those people."
Margaret's grip shifted on the ledger, and for the first time since she'd crossed the hill, she relaxed.
"That," she said, "is one of the things I came to tell you." She pulled the ledger out from under her arm and opened it. "I found several of them. I reached out through what's left of my network, the way you wanted. I have two of them already moving in this direction. I promised some things you'll need to approve, but I got them moving here." Then her voice clipped short again, and the urgency she'd come up the hill with came back into it. "But that isn't the thing I need an answer on tonight, Harold, and I'd be failing you if I let the party push it to morning."
Harold rubbed his brow. "Ok, what else?"
"I believe the raids have started." She held his eyes. "In the north. The Velthari. I organized a system in the north where Lords checked into a forum thread, and I offered a set number of healing potions each time they did so to motivate them. A few of them have been absent on the forum, no word from their people for a few days — exactly the way you told me it would look the first time." Her jaw tightened. "It's begun. And I need to know how you want to respond before the rest of the peninsula decides or even finds out."
Harold went still for a moment, and the firelight moved across his face while he turned it over.
"Release what we know of the Velthari." He said it calmly. "All of it. How they bond, how they raid, everything about their culture, every piece of it, goes on the forum tonight. Dress it however you have to. Put my name on it. I don't care how you explain how we know all of it, as long as not one word of it says I know what's coming because I've already lived through it. That part stays ours." He drew a breath. "I'm tired of hiding, Margaret. The hill is full of dwarves the world just watched me save, and there's no shadow left to stand in. So we stop pretending."
"And the towns?"
"The northern towns need to start fortifying tonight. Walls, stores, watch rotations, every lord between here and that border." His hand moved north over a map only he could see. "For now they need to hold. Tell them plainly — they are under siege as of now, and they will stay under siege until winter shuts the Velthari down. Let the cold do the work; no human army can do that season. Then when the thaw comes —" his eyes came back to her "— the Landing marches. A summer campaign, north, into them, with a coalition behind us. We don't get raided into the sea the way they did it last time. Organize forum trades to enforce cooperation amongst the lords until we lose it at the winter solstice and the system removes the function."
Margaret had the ledger open now, and her hand was already moving across it.
"Coalition first, then. I'll have the forum post drafted tonight." She closed the ledger with a small definite snap.
"Good." Harold looked at the three of them — Margaret already half-turned toward the keep, Carter's grin creeping back now that nobody was about to die in the next minute, Jack with the untouched beer still in his hand — and then his gaze slid off them and went down the hill, to the fires and the racks of pork.
The line of his shoulders came down a notch as he relaxed.
"Get all that done," he said, "and then come back down and join the party. Don't drag it out. You'll be sorry you missed a dwarven party, and god knows—" the corner of his mouth moved "— we have few enough of these as it is."
Bram's laugh carried up the slope, unbothered, and Carter snorted into the horn he'd finally claimed.
"Few enough nights," Jack agreed, and drank.
Harold left them and went down the hill toward the fires, and a dwarf the size of a hay bale shoved a horn into his hand before his boots hit level ground and the crowd folded over him.
He passed the arm-wrestling barrel just as a Gemheart smith with a beard braided in three rows put a Landing farrier's wrist down so hard the man's whole arm bounced off the wood; the farrier came up laughing, said something Harold didn't catch over the cheering, and the smith pulled him in for a hand-clasp that doubled as a heave to his feet. Past them, the log-throw had moved on to single throws for distance, and a logger from the mill — Harold thought his name was Berens — was rolling his shoulders for an attempt while a dwarven woman the width of an oak barrel watched with both arms crossed and her beard braided down to her waist. Berens hefted. The trunk went up and came down two strides short of where the dwarf's last throw had landed. She gave him a clap on the back that nearly took him to his knees, and Berens grinned up at her, infatuated.
Caldwell was three deep into a knot of Gemheart elders by one of the fires, his fine coat unbuttoned and his usually-tidy hair gone wild, both hands cupped around a horn nearly as long as his forearm. One of the elders said something low in a language Harold didn't know, and Caldwell, who didn't know it either, laughed so hard he had to set the horn down on the ground to keep from spilling it, and the elders pounded the dirt and the kegs and themselves and bellowed approval. The coin he usually rolled across his knuckles was nowhere to be seen. He caught Harold's eye across the fire, raised the horn in salute, mouthed help, and was dragged back into the circle before Harold could answer.
Closer to the cobblestone square, a different crowd had formed, quieter than the others by some margin, ringed around an unworked block of granite as tall as a man, set on a low cart, its underside blocked with wedges of stone. A dwarven matron stood at the block with a chisel in her left hand and a hammer in her right, the beard down her chest dusted white with stonechips, and she was working without a sketch and without a pause, the bell-clear ring of iron on stone keeping its own time under the noise of the feast. The shape coming out of the granite was a beard, and a fist, and the upper line of a brow — that was all of it so far, but Harold stood watching her swing for half a minute and could see the whole figure already underneath, waiting on her to dig it out. He moved on through the crowd, thoroughly enjoying being an anonymous face in the crowd.
A drum had started somewhere at the largest fire pit, and a chant had come up under it — not words, only a low pulse of voices, every dwarf nearest the fire pounding the heel of one hand against his own chest in time with the beat. Other dwarves picked it up as he passed. Within a dozen strides, the whole slope was thumping with it, a thousand chests under a thousand fists, and the legionaries and the loggers and the millhands who didn't know the rhythm were learning the beat.
He took a long pull of his drink when the first voice rose over the fires.
It came up out of the dark on the far side of the largest pit, low and slow and enormous, a quarry of a voice, and before it had finished its first line a second voice came in over the top of it, high and clear and aching, the two of them an octave apart and bending toward each other until the harmony between them hovered in the air.
The chanting died under it. The whole hill turned toward the singers. Conversations stopped mid-word, the hammer at the granite block went still, and the dwarfen woman took her hat slowly off her head, and her eyes began to tear up.
The singers were two of the greybeards, a man and a woman, standing close, their shoulders nearly touching and their eyes shut, and the man's hand kept time against his own chest while the woman carried the melody up into the cold air.
In the deep was a forge, and the forge was our own, and the heart of the world was our heart; we struck and it answered, we sang and it sang, and the dark never wanted for stars.
Then a brother in shadow, a knife in the black, and our hold and our heart torn away — and the stone that had sung to us all of our days went as quiet and as cold as stone.
A shout went up from somewhere in the Landing's half of the crowd, somebody bellowing for a drum — and it spread, and men were turning and pushing back toward the town and coming again with fiddles and a hand-drum and a set of pipes, and they fell in slow, one at a time, finding the melody none of them had ever heard until tonight and laying themselves carefully underneath it. The dwarves answered. Out came a flat skin drum struck with the heel of the hand, a stringed thing the size of a child held against a barrel chest, a low pipe that found the deep voice. The tune thickened. The fires popped, and thousands stood quiet under the haunting melody as it drifted over them.
So we walk, so we walk, down the long road, a hammer with no anvil to strike; we carry our dead, and we carry our names, and we lay them down nightly without light. And it's door after door that we come to and knock, and it's stranger on stranger we meet — for a people may wander a thousand long years with no heart in their chests as they weep.
Bram had frozen in the middle of his own clan. Harold watched him from across the fire — the horn forgotten in his hand, his head tipped back, the tears coming down into his beard, and no move from him to stop them. Around him, the Gemheart were the same, a thousand hard people standing open-faced in the firelight, some with their hands pressed flat to their chests in time with the drum.
We came to the Stonefist, we came to the Deep, we came with our hammers and song; we asked but for hearthroom, a corner to keep, and were turned to the road before long.
For who feeds a clan with no heart in its chest, and who weds to a line going cold? So they barred up their gates and they shuttered their holds and they left us our grief and the road.
Still we walked, still we searched, through the years going grey, through the high passes, under the sea; for a thrum in the dark, for a far-buried beat, for a deep that would answer our plea.
And the children came fewer, and the old went to sleep, and the song was the last fire we'd hold; so we sang it on roads that would not let us pass, and we sang it to no one at all.
The chorus came round again, and the whole hill had it now — humans and dwarves both, the Landing folk who'd never carried this grief a day in their lives feeling the sorrow in the song. Or perhaps they were thinking of their own lost home and how they could never return. Harold felt it go down his own spine. It might be the most beautiful melody he had ever heard.
Bram crossed to him, wiping his face with his beard as tears kept streaming.
"We sang that on every road that wouldn't have us," he said, wrecked and quiet under the music. "Every hold we came to that shut its gate. Every winter, we buried more than we birthed. It's the one thing we never set down." His hand found his chest again, over the heart that beat there now. "It kept the dream lit when there was nothing else to light it. A people forgets it's a people. The song's how we remembered we ever had a heart to lose. The star we always searched for."
Then the two singers shifted.
The melody held, but the woman's voice went up and then turned, and the man came under her with words Harold had not heard in the verses before — and the singers' eyes had come open. Both of them. The woman's mouth shaped the words a half-beat before her ears caught up; the man's hand stopped on his chest mid-beat and pressed there hard; and they sang on, glancing sideways at each other, the words escaping their throats, and it was obvious neither knew what they were singing.
But there came a strange lord to a strange far hold, and he walked where no kin dared to go; and he carried our heart up and out of the deep, and he laid it in hands gone cold.
Now the forge is alight, now the line is reborn, now the stone sings us home through the dark — O a people may wander a thousand long years, and still carry their heart back home.
Bram's mouth came open, and nothing came out of it. He turned on the singers, a man hearing the end of a story he'd been told all his life had no end.
"That's not—" His voice cracked clean in half. "There's no last verse. There was never a last verse. The song just stops, it stops on the road because that's where we were—" He pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes and held it there, and his shoulders shook, and when he dropped the hand the singers were already coming round to the new ending a second time — looking at each other now with their eyes wet and wide, the words still pulling themselves up out of their throats of their own will — and the whole of the Gemheart clan was learning it on the fly, a thousand voices climbing into a new verse, and Bram threw his head back and sang it with them at the top of a ruined voice, the heart hammering visible against his shirt.
Harold lifted the horn he'd been handed and downed his drink.