Traveller's Unrest

"Ale's going off," he shouted into space across the empty inn. Beric swilled the last mouthful. There was a sickly sweet taste to it, and it was flat, almost syrupy.
Alinor didn't look down from her work. "You're still drinking it."
"That says more about me than it does the ale. It's off. You shouldn't sell it in this condition."
Alinor leant back on the ladder and stared down at Beric through the haze of the fire. The night sky was a patch of sheer dark through the hole in the roof. "When was the last time you paid for ale?"
Beric stared into his mug and murmured something indistinct. But it was too late. He had irked the innkeeper's daughter.
"When was the last time you paid for anything? By the divines, Beric, you know my struggles as well as I do, so why grouse and complain? Why not drag your silvered hide out into the cold and do something to help?" She stared at him, waiting for a response. None came. She shook her head and returned to patching the roof with salvaged shingles. "They're scared, Beric, they won't come. If they don't come, we don't get any coin. If we don't get any coin, we can't pay the brewers. It's a miracle we can get anything delivered out here, even if it's half-fermented by the time it arrives. If you have such a problem with the ale, maybe you should stop the necromancer."
"And maybe you should cough up some coin, give me a reason to leave this warm inn and traipse through the snow and ice." He heard his words as though from some other person. He didn't recognise himself in them. When did he become so jaded, so selfish?
But looking around the deserted inn, the answer was apparent. He closed his eyes and called upon his memories. They came to him in an instant, old friends called swiftly from some unseen place. Mighty Logan and subtle Hadric to one side, fearless Nyra beside him on the other, celebrating the night after a great victory, adventuring on royal warrant, sitting in their usual spot around the hearth, singing and drinking. Others came and went, friends and allies, enviers and hangers-on, and Beric saw their vague faces swim in and out of his memory. But it was those three, night after night, who made life worth living. It was those three he channeled now, the sharp edges of his memories softened by ale.
And Barabas. His dearest friend, his brother-in-arms, and the finest innkeeper this side of the Driftholme. Alinor's father. They had watched Barabas meet his end, the two of them, when the riots found the Traveller's Rest, when the starvation and the cold had driven the refugees to heinous acts. It had bound them together in some unspeakable way. He knew he would die for her. He wished he had already.
He would never tell Alinor, but this was why he drank, why he poured warm, stale beer down his gullet every night. So that he could remember, not the dates and details, but the feelings, the sound of laughter and song, the surge of battle and bloodlust, the warmth of soft flesh beneath thick hides.
Now there was only cold and silence. His friends were dead. The king was dead. All the kings were dead, and their great cities lay abandoned and half-buried beneath drifts of grey snow. The roads had fallen to ruin, the rivers had frozen, and the world had ground to a halt. Nine in ten had died when the storms swept over the land, more had perished after. The one in ten who remained were selfish, grizzled old fools. All the heroes had perished, and the bastards had inherited the world.
The door of the inn burst open, coughing a flurry of snow and wind into the smoky hall. Beric turned, slowly, and saw a small, ice-rimed figure shoulder the door closed behind him. Galen.
"Tell me you bring good news," Alinor called as she descended the ladder.
Galen strode stiffly across the hall and presented her with a handful of papers. Beric knew without looking. Forfeiture of lands, a doubling of the crown's taxes, a call to join the kingdom's defence, or else die at the executioner's hand. Empty words, with no-one to enforce them. The same letters every time.
"What do I owe you?"
"Nothing. This my last delivery," the small man said breathlessly, "I can't stay." To Beric's surprise, Galen turned on his heels and made straight for the door. It was absurd. Night was falling fast. It was at least half a day to the next inn, and Galen's breathlessness suggested he had been travelling hard.
Alinor voiced Beric's concern. "You'll freeze to death. Come, stay the night. We're not pressed for space."
"I can't," Galen replied. "They're withdrawing. The entire guard. If I don't leave now, I don't know that I'll make it back. They're abandoning the Stoneway and the river crossings, concentrating their forces together. They were stretched too thin as it was, but with the recent news... I shouldn't have come at all, but I owed you this much."
The recent news. Beric could guess. The necromancer was becoming a greater nuisance by the day.
Galen nodded a silent farewell as he levered open the door. A moment later and he was gone. Alinor stood staring at the closed door.
"Maybe they'll come back," Beric offered, "when the storms fade. They'll probably pool their forces together in the Southwold. When the weather breaks, they'll drive North again, up the Stoneway, and oust the necromancer. They'll need room and board, and the Traveller's Rest will provide, like days of old. They won't mind the ale, eh?"
Alinor turned from the door and stared at Beric. So like her father in expression. His words faltered under her gaze. She saw the emptiness in them. They both did. This was the end. The Stoneway would fall, like all the other great roads, swallowed by the circling darkness. And what good, an inn upon a road that no longer existed? What good, the innkeeper's daughter, or the spent mercenary who defended it? Alinor walked across the hall, took the ladder in the crook of her arm, and carried it to its hook upon the far wall. Without a backwards glance she mounted the stairs to her right and disappeared up to her quarters.

Beric woke in the night, driven from comforting dreams by the urgency of his bladder. He draped his thickest cloak about his shoulders and staggered down the corridor, past the silent kitchen and the empty trestles in the great hall. He worked the frozen iron of the deadbolt and stepped out into the storm. He cursed the necessity of these night-time excursions. Despite his cloak, the wind carved through his nightclothes without resistance, severing any lingering threads of sleep. He was awake, when all he wanted was to lapse back into the warm, familiar comfort of his dreams. The ale would help, he told himself. He would fill his tankard and sit by the embers of the hearth fire and drink until sleep reclaimed him.
He couldn't see them through the darkness but he nodded towards the four headstones at the rear of the inn. He began the slow, laborious process of pissing and cursed the snow-filled night, cursed the darkness and the cold, cursed himself and his old age.
The wind gusted then, violently, tearing a heavy slate from the hole Alinor had been patching from within. It cartwheeled unseen across the inn's roof, fell from the eaves and hammered Beric in the side of his head.
Sometime later he found himself laying prone in the snow, wracked with shivers and staring up at a sky of perfect black. His vision was smeared and indistinct from the blood that had frozen across his face, but as he blinked the world into focus, he saw a faint flicker of light from somewhere above. A candle in Alinor's room. He saw himself from her perspective, imagined her leaning out of the window to look down upon a bitter old man, laying beside the graves of his heroic companions, felled while taking a piss. He began to laugh. He'd never live it down, his eternal spirit strolling into the halls of his forefathers in a soiled nightgown, slain at the merciless hand of a roofing slate. Barabas would spend eternity mocking him.
An idea gripped him then, something firm and clear. Such clarity was rare in days clouded by drink. This would not be his end. There was good he could do still, good he could do for Alinor and her inn. He could earn his place beside his friends, be worthy of their friendship, instead of wasting away into nothingness in the shadowed corners of the inn. He levered himself to a seated position with frozen hands and stiff arms. The effort drained him terribly, but he persevered. He rested a moment against Barabas' headstone, before pushing himself upright and tottering across the frozen ground to the inn's cellar door.
The door was frozen shut and opened only with great effort. The rough-hewn stairs were slick with ice and Beric slipped and fell down the final flight. He was too cold to feel the pain. It took him an age to light the sconce. In the anaemic glow he cast aside crates of shrivelled root vegetables and rummaged beneath sheets of mildewed canvas. He found a cache of old trinkets and knew that he was close. He allowed himself a moment's reminiscence, opening the cobwebbed chest and turning the contents over in his hands, remembering from feel more than sight. A ragged arrowhead, pulled from Hadric's shoulder, a relic of the three-day battle of Hulsmuth. A wooden sword from his long training sessions with Logan and Nyra, chipped and shattered. A necklace emblazoned with precious stones, a reward from the bloody aftermath of the coup in Dunroyal. He shut the chest.
There, at last, tucked into an alcove. It was as he had left it, those long years ago. The metal head gleamed faintly in the torchlight. The walnut handle looked almost black. It spoke to him across time, conjured an image of that foul day, the callouses upon his hands, the blood across his clothes, his breathing ragged and thick in his chest. Now his callouses had softened and his clothes had worn and faded, but he knew it would serve him again, when it was needed. He was counting on it.

The necromancer wasn't hard to find. By sunrise Beric had come upon a column of the dead marching silently along the Stoneway. He hung back, out of sight, and followed their quiet procession away from the Driftholme and into the deep woods of the Greenbough. Beneath the canopy the frozen ground softened and became a slurry of snow and pine needles, flattened by the footfall of the uncountable dead. The forest was criss-crossed by hundreds of tracks, and through the gloom upon all sides, Beric could make out other groups of figures, forging deeper into the woods, converging upon its dark heart.
The figures he followed carried things in their twig-like arms: dead animals and supple hides, bushels of vegetables, cords of firewood, plundered from the countryside around the Greenbough.
Eventually the forest widened into a clearing. From his vantage point at the edge of the forest, Beric watched the horde march out into the open and add their plunder to a great mountain of food and supplies, ringed with torches and roofed with canvas to shelter it from the snow. With their delivery completed, they would turn and march straight back into the woods. The meagre sun was at its zenith, shining weakly through the snow and illuminating the dark stone of a ruined church that jutted from the forest floor to twice the height of the inn. The ground surrounding the church was strewn with rocks and pockmarked with holes and shallow impressions. It took Beric a moment to realise that they were graves, their headstones worn by time and the grave mouthes empty save for the snow that slowly filled them.
Eventually Beric crept out of cover and made his way amongst the empty graves. A handful of figures worked tirelessly on an old stone outhouse, filling it's myriad gaps with wedges carved delicately from old headstones. Deft work from dead hands. The corpses paid him no mind, attending to their task with perfect discipline. When he reached the church, he cleaned a frosted windowpane with the sleeve of his surcoat and saw a figure alone inside, bent to some task upon the church altar. There would be no better chance.
He circled the building and found the main doors open. He slipped into the building and found it somehow colder within than without. He marched silently across the ancient flagstones, beneath the arches and vaulted roof. The necromancer stood before him.

Beric stopped to wipe the sweat from his face. Two days hard labour, and he still hadn't finished. He was running out of time. He cursed the frozen earth. The metal edge of the shovel was bent and dulled, the walnut shaft slick with sweat and blood from the growing cracks in his skin, but he couldn't stop. Three graves had been exhumed, but still one remained. He would not fail Barnabas. Nor would the shovel. He bent to his task.
It was sunset when Alinor appeared at her window, looking out over the inn garden. "She's here."
She didn't understand, didn't approve. She had screamed and shouted at Beric upon his return from the Greenbough, but she hadn't left the inn. Nor would she, Beric thought. Not now.
Alinor lingered a moment, staring down at the open graves, looking as though she might say something. "She didn't come alone." She shut the window with a snap and retreated into her room.
Beric chipped at the last few chunks of frozen mud and shovelled the detritus clear from the grave, adding to the spoil heaps that surrounded him. It was enough. It had to be.
He was resting a moment upon the shovel when he heard the inn's rear door open. He looked up, his vision wavering with fatigue. The necromancer cast light blue eyes upon Beric. A kindly smile formed upon the old woman's face. She walked slowly through the garden to the graves, peering into each in turn, nodding silently at the plain wooden caskets. Around them the garden began to fill with dark figures, filtering through the spoil heaps and snow drifts to take their places beside the graves.
She took Beric's hands in hers. Beric closed his eyes and remembered their faces, as best as he could. Logan the mighty. Hadric the subtle. Nyra the fearless. Barnabas the loyal. He would see them again, he would save them one last time, and they would save him in turn.
The ritual began.