Byrthiri

There wasn’t much warning. Byrthiri didn’t have a warning system; no fires on the mountains or messengers at the gates to alert the region of catastrophe. The brothers whose spirits rested in the mountain could give no call of alarm.

The raids began in the north. There was a comparatively narrow area, only a few miles wide, between the mountains and the ocean on the northern region of Byrthiri; there was a similar region on the southern end of the mountain range. On each side, the people of Byrthiri had built the gates a century and a half ago. Those gates were meant to be a divider, but not a blockade, and the offered no protection.

From Utlagi the raiders came in masses, easily destroying the gates—their sheer number was enough to ensure the destruction of such a feeble barrier.

In Haugra we didn’t immediately know that anything was happening. Over the course of the first few weeks, travelers would come through in small numbers from the north saying that there was an attack, but Byrthiri had no long-standing conflicts with other regions of Tithind, and we could never have expected the full-scale war that was upon our horizons, filtering in around the mountains.

I was in the field cutting wood with my father when the first of them came through. There were six of them in the group, all wearing long, tattered, earth-colored cloaks. My father and I both at first thought them to merely be travelers, making their way south for farming or even for leisure, until we realized that one of them—a woman—had a babe in her arms. A mere infant would be far too young for such a journey in anything but dire circumstances.

“Hailthrif, brother,” one of the travelers called as he approached, using a centuries-old Byrthiri term of greeting and well-wishing. He began to come toward us alone, leaving the others standing at the edge of the field. He stopped after a few steps, out of respect for our property and ownership, and waited for an invitation to come nearer. My father set down his axe and beckoned the stranger to approach.

“Have you heard news?” the stranger asked. “Have any others come through?”

My father shook his head.

“There is an invasion,” the stranger told us. “From the north.” He seemed to want to say more, but his voice was already shaking. He opened his mouth a few times, but the words got caught in his throat, leaving nothing to come out but a small choking noise. He looked back at the group he had come with, then back to my father.

“We are trying to find safety. Most are staying to protect their land; many warriors are preparing to hold off the invaders. But I cannot fight. I am too old and frail.” Now that this stranger was standing directly in front of me with his face lit by the early-setting sun, I could see that indeed he was; there were deep lines etched in his face, and his long cloak couldn’t quite conceal his hunched over posture. “My wife, our grown son and his wife, our grown daughter and her husband and their newborn—” he gestured back toward the group that lingered several yards away—“I fear the worst for them.”

My father didn’t answer immediately. He watched the stranger’s eyes, which looked helpless and pleading, and his family, who were huddled together, whispering frantically and shooting anxious glances towards us.

After a long while, my father asked, “Who are they?”

“We’re not sure,” the stranger said, “but we believe it to be the Dragon-Folk.”

The “Dragon-Folk” was the name much of Tithind gave the inhabitants of the Utlagi region in the north, named both for the dragons that dwelt there in Tithind’s mythology, and for their dwelling in the caves and their hoarding of riches—but above all, named for their vicious lust for war. The Utlagi people had not been instigators of war for almost a century, but one did not have to search far back in history to discover attacks carried out by them on any population that had something to offer—or something to be taken.

It was precisely for that reason that I didn’t understand. Byrthiri had little, if anything, that would be worth taking by force. We had the farming and the fur and wool trade; we had builders scattered across the region; we had others that were learned in a specific trade. But we had nothing worth value. Those that had come before us had tried mining the mountains at one point, long ago, and surprisingly, nothing of value was to be found. Could the Utlagi people really feel it was worth violence against Byrthiri, just for a second chance to mine mountains that had thus far yielded nothing?

I could see the same questions written in my father’s face, but he didn’t respond immediately. Instead he beckoned for the stranger to come with him and walked to the edge of the field to greet the family of migrants.

“Where do you live?” he asked, without greeting them or waiting to be greeted. Concern and confusion seemed to make him forget his manners, but the strangers were in no better mindset and seemed not to notice.

“We lived in Glitran,” one of the men said. He put his arm around the woman carrying the infant. “We no longer call it home.”

Glitran was one of the northernmost cities in Byrthiri, settled where the space between ocean and mountain was narrowest. Indeed, if there were attacks from the north—or even from the east—Glitran would be one of the first villages affected.

The oldest of the group, the stranger who had initially approached us, appealed to my father. “Night is coming.” His eyes moved toward the sunset, seeming to slide out of focus in the direction of the horizon. “We have been walking all day, each day, for some time. We’ve gotten rides from strangers with horse-drawn carts at intervals, but much of the journey the last fortnight has been made on foot. The women cannot walk much longer,” he said, and for the first time I noticed that one of the women—the one who was not already carrying a child—had a growing belly, barely noticeable under her cloak. “And myself…” the stranger continued, and then trailed off, looking at his blistering feet. My father’s concern turned to pity.

“We don’t have much extra room, but we have blankets and can make you a place to sleep,” he said.

“My many thanks,” the stranger replied, his voice full of sincerity.

They followed us into our home where, indeed, there was not much room, but we fixed up the main room using blankets and straw from outside to create makeshift beds, and by the time that work was done, the sun was well set and my mother had finished preparing a hot meal for all of us.

“I should warn you,” one of the younger men said between mouthfuls of soup, “we will not be the last to ask for your hospitality. We were not the only ones to flee.”