Chapter Five
They found the remains of the boat.
Traveling in their vessel, smeared with mud and lines of charcoal above the waterline that was meant to make it blend in with the fog, the boat had traveled along the current for several weeks.
Following.
They knew that if they followed the currents, they would find her.
Drottningen.
The queen.
She had escaped them. At first, they’d kept her tightly locked in a cold, crumbling pele tower to ensure she would remain safe for always, a treasure to be proud of.
For certain, it had taken years of missives, skirmishes, and negotiations with the men who lived on the outer isles, not terribly far from those who lived on the island known as Mann.
The Manx lived there, descendants of the Northman raiders who still controlled some of the smaller islands and waterways on the west coast of Scotland.
But these men weren’t Manx.
They were different.
In fact, they were hardly men at all.
They lived on the northern tip of the island, amongst the scrubby forests, the dead and broken trees, down in the vales that had been carved away by the sea over the centuries.
They lived in rock cottages, half dug into the ground, and used branches and foliage as cover.
Dirt cloaked their skin, mud masked their hair, and they spoke a language that no one could understand.
The decent folk of the isle wouldn’t go to the northern tip where these men lived, fearful of being cursed by their very existence. Everyone feared the Ormsfolk.
The Serpent People.
The same people who had followed the Drottningen.
And they were going to find her.
But that had been a difficult task. In spite of the reclusive and odd ways of the Ormsfolk, part of their culture was fishing.
They had boats that they’d fashioned from wood from their forests and took to the seas easily.
It had been one of those boats that the queen had taken in the dead of night, under a full moon, and sailed away on the current, for she knew how to sail a ship.
She knew how to use currents. She was from a culture that lived on the sea, so the water was to her as land was to most men.
She thrived on it.
But the Serpent People knew the currents, too.
They simply followed the tides by day, stopping only at night to search for signs of the queen.
They were going on the assumption that the queen was a weak woman and would understandably need to stop at night to sleep.
That had been their logic, anyway. Therefore, they’d stopped often, searching for the woman, stealing what they could to survive, killing those who got in their way.
After almost two months of following the sea current through the Solway Firth and stopping every night to search for signs of her, they’d finally found evidence of the boat.
It was broken to pieces, and protruding out of the silt, but they recognized it.
The queen had come ashore here. It was the mouth of a great river, flowing north into Scotland, which gave the Serpent People pause.
Northern England was full of farmers and peasants, with a few great houses along the Scots border, but given that they were able to navigate by the stars, as their ancestors did, they knew they were in Scotland.
Venturing into clan territory was another matter because the Scots were fiercely protective of their lands.
But the queen was here, and the fact that the boat wasn’t completely covered by silt meant the tides hadn’t a chance to bury it.
That told them the queen had only just arrived, meaning she could not have gotten far.
Not far enough.
There were forty-six of them, spread out among five boats.
They were heavily armed, with spears smeared with human feces and short swords that had been in poison brewed from the death cap mushroom.
Perhaps they weren’t great in number like the clans tended to be, but they could do damage simply by nicking the skin.
But that didn’t have to happen if they could find their queen before some Scots clan took her in.
They had to find her, and quickly.
As the sun began to set and a storm rolled in from the east, a group of them headed north, along the river. The search for their queen had begun.
God help the Scots if they wouldn’t give her up.