Kell's Legend

daughters…who came to hate me. Only Nienna has time for me, and for her love I am eternally grateful. Do you know why?”
    “Why?” said Saark, voice barely more than a croak.
    “Because she is the only thing that calms the savage beast in my soul,” said Kell, grasping Ilanna tight. “I try, Saark. I try so hard to be a good man. I try so hard to do the right thing. But it doesn’t always work. Deep down inside, at a basic level, I’m simply not a good person.”
    “Why so glum?” said Nienna, dumping a pile of wood on the ground. She glanced from Saark to Kell, and back, and Kat came up behind with her arms also laden with firewood. “Have you two been arguing again?”
    “No,” said Saark, and gave a broad, beaming smile. “We were just…going over a few things. Here, let me build a fire, Nienna. You help your grandfather with the soup. I think he needs a few warm words from the granddaughter he loves so dearly.”
    Kell threw him a dark look, then smiled down at Nienna, and ruffled her hair. “Hello monkey. You did well with the wood.”
    “Come on, we’re both starving.” And in torn silk dresses and ragged furs and blankets salvaged from dead soldiers’ saddlebags, the group worked together to make a pan of broth.
    It was an hour later as they came across a straggled line of refugees, who turned, fear on faces at the sound of striking hoof-beats. Several ran across the fields to the side of the Great North Road, until they saw the young girls who rode with Kell and Saark. They rode to the head of the column, and Kell dismounted beside a burly, gruff-looking man with massive arms and shoulders like a bull.
    “Where are you riding?” asked Kell.
    “Who wants to know?”
    “I am Kell. I ride to warn the king of the invading army.”
    The man relaxed a little, and eyed Kell’s axe and Svian nervously. “I am Brall, I was the smithy back at Tell’s Fold. Not any more. The bastard albinos took us in the night, two nights back, magick freezing people in the street. I can still hear their screams. A group of us,” he gestured with his eyes, “ran through the woods. And we’ll keep on running. Right to the sea if we have to.”
    A woman approached. “It was horrible,” she said, and her eyes were haunted. “They killed everybody. Men, women, little ones. Then these…ghosts, they drifted through the streets and drank the blood of the children.” She shuddered, and for a moment Kell thought she was going to be sick. “Turned them into sacks of skin and bone. You’ll kill me, won’t you,Brall? Before you let that happen?”
    “Aye, lass,” he said, and his thick arm encircled her shoulder.
    “Have you seen any Falanor men on the road?” asked Saark, dismounting.
    “No.” Brall shook his head. “Not for the last two weeks. Most of the battalions are south.”
    “Do you know where King Leanoric camps?”
    Brall shrugged. “I am only a smithy,” he said. “I would not be entrusted with such things.”
    “Thank you.” Saark turned to Kell. “I know what’s happening.”
    “What’s that?”
    “More than half of Leanoric’s men are paid volunteers; summer men. They go home for the winter. The Black Pike Mountains, much of Leanoric’s past angst, are now impassable with snow. So as winter heightens, spreads south, so he stands down most of the volunteers and they return to families. He’s been travelling through his divisions, reorganising command structures, deciding who can go home for the winter, that sort of thing.”
    “So as we stand here, he might even now be disbanding the very army he’s going to need?”
    “Precisely.”
    “That’s not good,” said Kell. “Let’s move out.”
    They cantered on, leaving behind the straggling line of survivors from Tell’s Fold.
    They rode all day, and as more snow fell and the light failed, so they headed away from the Great North Road, searching for a road shelter, as they wereknown. In previous decades, following work begun by his father, Leanoric had had shelters built at intervals up and down the huge highway to aid travellers and soldiers in times of need. The snow fell, heavier now, and Saark pointed to the distance where a long, low, timber building nestled in the lee of a hill, surrounded by a thick stand of pine.
    “Hard to defend,” muttered Kell.
    “We need to recharge,” said Saark, his cloak pulled tight, his eyes weary. “You might be as strong as an ox, but me and the girls…we need to eat, to