Fate's Needle by Jerry Autieri

trees.

Eleven
    Black smoke coiling in the clear sky—Ulfrik and his men knew what that meant. They had been making progress in the forest, held back only by a night of cold and heavy rain, which they cursed as they trudged through it. When they turned east to join the northern track, the trees thinned to reveal smoke where Auden’s hall should have been. On the track, scores of jumbled, blurred footprints in the mud marked the passage of an army. Grim’s army.
    Ulfrik ran the last few furlongs, charging ahead of the others. Black fingers of despair climbed into the clouds above Auden’s hall, and as he approached Ulfrik heard the fluttering and cawing of crows, arguing over their spoils. He did not slow his run, rushing past the burned remains to where the hall door still held, three spear hafts laced into the handles to trap the victims while the hall burned. Where windows were intact, charred corpses draped over the sills. Some were affixed to the wood by spears, impaled as they attempted to escape the firestorm. The hall burning had been well planned; it seemed no one had escaped.
    His mind’s eye saw the hall as it was: wide and warm, filled with boastful songs and roasting meats. Auden and his wife at the head table, raising their horns to toast a warrior’s exploits. Auden asking the riddles he loved; everyone else groaning that they had been heard too many times. His aunt smiling patiently as Auden questioned their guests. Then, warriors banging their tankards on the tables, calling for a song, drinking themselves into a stupor.
    Now the tables were corrugated black embers. Ulfrik went around the door, jumping into the ashes and sending the crows screaming. The drinking horns and tankards were lost amid the ash and the hands that once gripped them now clawed from beneath scorched and fallen beams. The white leg of a girl jutted from beneath the debris. Ulfrik thought of his cousins, and his stomach churned. The stench of burnt wood and the tang of burnt flesh seemed to thicken in his nostrils as he began to sift through the ruins, his heart pounding. Perhaps Auden has escaped. Maybe he burst through the burning walls, sword in hand, bellowing curses, and hacked a path out of the men who ringed his hall , Ulfrik thought. Or hoped.
    But the more he searched, the more the vision paled. He found mail coats fused into useless clumps, weapons melted in their sheaths—all abandoned as their terrorized owners struggled to escape. Corpses strewn close to the hall were skewered by arrows, archers having picked off those who escaped or who came to extinguish the fire. There had been no bold escape, only panic and death. Beneath the cinders, Ulfrik knew Auden’s bones mingled with the ashes of his men and his family.
    Yngvar and Magnus stood apart, their heads bowed, their countenances inscrutable. All stood in silence amid the blowing ash, listening to the crow’s gleeful caws belying the bright afternoon sun. Ulfrik watched as the place he had called home for decades, the people he had loved and defended, blew away on the wind.
    “I will not die until I have avenged Grim’s crimes. All of them,” Ulfrik said, strangely calm. “I swear this by Odin’s one eye.”
    Yngvar and Magnus nodded in somber agreement. For long moments, Ulfrik anticipated the hot tears that threatened his eyes. But they did not flow. They would not, although he did not understand why. The two men held his gaze and tacitly assured him they would pledge their swords to the deed.
    Suddenly disturbed, the crows and ravens scattered with angry shrieks, and the three men instinctively gripped their sword hilts as someone stepped from the forest and crossed the cleared field before them.
    Runa!
    Ulfrik relaxed his stance. A breeze puffed out her ragged shift as she neared and he noticed she clutched something to her chest, something that shone and sparkled green in the glaring light—Fate’s Needle. At last, the tears washed the ash and grit from