Chapter Text
The fires could be seen for miles around, the flat fen country turning what had once been a village into a beacon that lit up the night like the coming of the last judgement. Houses, barns, farms, granaries…it didn’t matter. If it could burn, they had burnt it. If it could die, they had killed it. They’d even tried to set fire to the peat, though it was thick and waterlogged and would not burn for long. They’d have burnt the marsh itself if they could, Gríma thought, and shuddered. The only mercy was that he could not see the tree from which his parents’ bodies hung, side-by-side, his mother’s feet still kicking feebly as she twisted in the breeze that blew smoke into Gríma’s face, making him cough and leaving his weak eyes streaming. He could hear it, though, the irregular sounds of her breath hitching and wheezing, could see the twin black blurs of her feet as they twitched, just in front of his hiding-place in the undergrowth. The marsh water was soaking through his clothes now, but Gríma was used to that. He was a fen-lander born and bred, had never been entirely dry a day in his life.
“They are coming,” the water-snakes hissed in his ear as they twined about him, their forked tongues tickling at his ears, and he suppressed a sob as the memory of the last time he had hidden in this pond rose up in his mind, desperately trying to muffle his laughter so the other village kids wouldn’t catch him hiding among the reeds. Nelda had always managed to find him sooner or later, but then, she was the best of them at hide-and-seek, for all that she was the smallest child in the village after Gríma himself. Nelda was dead now. He’d heard her scream as they cut her down. Her mother had fair hauled her and Aethelred out of the village when they’d seen the torches coming, but it hadn’t made any difference in the end. The smell of roasting meat was thick in Gríma’s nostrils, mixing with the wood-smoke of the burning houses, the sour sting of the tar they’d used for water-proofing.
He could hear the waterlogged grass squelching under boots nearby and shrank back into the reeds, ducking under the water just low enough that he’d be able to hear their conversation and thanking every god he had ever heard worshipped that he was dark enough to disappear entirely among the weeds.
“That all of them?”
“All we could find. Right down to the spawn.”
“Wait until the last fires burn out and check what remains for survivors. No need to get sloppy now.”
“Aye- Here, Finnian, look there-” Gríma froze. The footsteps came closer.
“I’ll be. Damned frog-eaters practically live in the meres. I’d forgotten. Fish him out, then, let’s see what we’ve caught.”
And then there were hands, hard as iron on his arms and Gríma struggled against them with all the meagre strength he possessed, only for the hands to tighten with every feeble twist and kick and scratch. He raised wide green eyes to where the man’s face should be-
And there it was, not a blurred pink shape as other men’s were but real and clear and crisp as nothing ever had been, flat and snakelike and…terrible. Slit nostrils and eyes as red and gleaming as the fires behind him. A long, forked tongue flicked out over his teeth as he smiled.
“Kill the spare!”
Then there was nothing but high, cruel laughter and green light, and Gríma twisted away-
And a man with no name and a mind like a broken mirror awoke, panting, in a dungeon cell deep underground, a face he could put no name to still imprinted on his sightless eyes.