With Eirik, there were four. Little, far too little.
There were the horses as well, but they would be of little help, hitched to the wagon as they were, more useful for bearing the weight of the load than for any escape.
"How sure are you about this road?" Eirik asked.
He tried to sound merely irritated. The anxiety slipped through anyway.
"If I say this is the road," Yrsa answered without looking back, "then this is the road."
"Coward" Sten said, clearing his throat atop the load. "Maybe if you talked less, you wouldn't drag bad luck behind you."
Up front, Haldor let out a sound of approval, hands firm on the reins.
But Eirik did not feel any better. Too many things had already gone wrong.
"Damn the Hird," Haldor grumbled. "With the coin they charge for using the roads, what profit is left?"
They all shared the same anger. That was why they had agreed to Yrsa's plan when she spoke of a smuggler's path. Old, forgotten, safe enough. No toll, no inspection, no salt.
A good risk, they had thought. Too good.
They had gotten so excited by the idea that they filled two wagons with goods. Barrels, cloth, tools, cheap metal, everything that would fetch twice the coin in Vardheim.
They lashed one behind the other and packed both to the limit. The load rose so high that Eirik and Sten had to perch on top while Yrsa and Haldor guided the horses.
Yrsa had sworn it was an old road. Dead land, she had said. Little life, little to interest the night.
It would be safe.
Eirik was no longer so sure.
Greed had exacted its price. The coupling between the wagons had broken halfway through the journey, and they had lost the day improvising a repair. Now they pushed on into the night, when they should already have arrived.
"Less tongue, more focus," Yrsa said. "The dark is around us."
She was right. There was a limit to how low a man could speak and still be heard. But Haldor did not like her tone. Partly because he liked very little. Partly because he believed orders ought to come from him.
For a few seconds the two of them stared at each other in hard silence.
In the end, Haldor lowered his head, surrendering more to necessity than obedience.
For the hours that followed there was only the hollow sound of leather striking leather.
It was Eirik.
Nervous as he was, he tapped his fingers against his belt, the straps, the sheaths, any bit of leather within reach. The sound distracted him, brought a little relief.
It was not his first journey. But he had never gone beyond the walls with a group so small, nor had he ever left the sacred roads behind.
He was a lucky man. The night had never shown him its teeth.
Even so, he had grown up on stories about the creatures that lived in the dark. Ancient things, hungry things.
"Fuck's sake, stop that, idiot," Haldor growled, turning halfway around. "You'll call the whole woods down on us."
Eirik knew the man had never liked him. None of them did, really, but he needed the coin.
He thought about answering, about cursing back, telling Haldor to go fuck himself.
But then he saw, on the horizon, the first signs of the Star rising. It would take time still, but it would rise.
The relief was so great that he swallowed the retort.
"C-crows," Sten murmured. The tone of his voice tore the newfound peace out of Eirik.
"Speak clearly," Haldor said, annoyed at not having heard. "Weak little man."
"Weapons," Yrsa ordered.
Haldor drew his hatchets without hesitation, without even asking why. That was why they accepted him; when it came to violence, he knew what he was doing.
Eirik was not so decisive.
He turned first to where Sten was looking.
There was a flock of crows among the trees, keeping pace with the group along the side. More arrived every instant, perching on branches without a sound, crossing the air without a beat of wings to be heard.
A bad feeling coiled inside him.
The horses stopped. Yrsa tried to force them onward, toward the light that would rise.
The animal did not respond.
"What the-"
"Quiet," Yrsa warned, climbing down from the wagon.
She looked toward the woods as if afraid the dark itself might hear her.
"Walk slowly and make no noise." Then she added, "The Star is rising."
The reminder brought some relief to the group. Yrsa had always known what to say to her own.
"Do you know what they are?" Sten whispered to Haldor.
"They sure as hell aren't just crows," he answered.
No one heard anything but cautious footsteps, the cold breath of night's end, and the sound of their own hearts hammering against their ribs.
They swallowed hard at every step. Their hands were cold. Sweat ran down their foreheads, their backs, their spines.
They watched the crows, but the birds did not seem interested in them. They merely watched, motionless, waiting.
Then the movement came.
But not from the crows.
"I... I'm sorry," Sten babbled.
Before Eirik understood what he was hearing, Sten drove his dagger into the back of Haldor's throat.
"I'm sorry," he repeated, his voice already undone.
Haldor dropped to his knees clutching at his own neck, blood spilling between his fingers. He tried to say something, but the bubbling gargle of blood would not let him.
"What the fu-," Eirik tried to say, still trapped in shock.
Yrsa's blade went through his guts from behind before he could finish.
The pain was so deep it barely felt like pain. First came the shock, a brutal heat opening inside him. Then the feeling of the sword being pulled sideways, ripping through his entrails, spilling his life onto the cold earth.
What came next would terrify him even in death.
Collapsed in the mud and his own blood, Eirik saw Yrsa slowly draw the sword across her own throat, smiling as she did it.
Sten drove the dagger into himself. Into the belly. Again. And again. And again. As if he wanted to dig something out of his own body. He kept at it in muffled sounds, each strike weaker than the last, until the strength left his arm and his hand grew slow, dark, soaked in his own blood.
And the silence that followed their end was filled by the cawing of the crows.
The sound flooded the woods, harsh, jubilant, almost human in its cruelty.
As if they were laughing at them and at their misery.