A warning cry, and Eunike turned to see a horseman crest the hill, gray and vibrant green with turf and crumbling schist. Thwipthpthp . . . arrows took flight behind her, bodkin-tipped shafts arching toward the ridgeline. One arrow passed just overhead and she crouched to make herself small, balanced on her shepherd’s crook. Atop the hill the horseman reined his pony to reverse course, trying to get back below the ridge and out of sight. It was a mistake. A moving target was hard to hit, but to get his pony turned, the rider need stop entirely. The arrows fell on them both, and the rider slumped from the saddle, his pony toppling after. The bodies slid down from the ridge in a tumble of loose stone.
A whoop went up from the warriors in Eunike’s party, five men in leather cuirass and war kit mounted on ponies like the dead rider’s own. Short-legged, barrel-chested, with a shaggy piebald coat, the ponies were smart, hardy, and sometimes more headstrong than the freeholders themselves. The warriors walked their mounts forward, making a loose line facing the ridge where the dead rider had fallen. Behind them were Eunike, her fellow shepherd Rollo, and a flock of sheep, more than a hundred head kept in a tight herd by three vigilant dogs. The warriors nocked arrows against the strings of their recurve bows, ready to lose a second flight, and tense moments passed as everyone waited for more riders to appear. In the hushed silence the sheep bleated and the dogs growled low in their throats, the beasts picking up on their masters’ anxiety.
When no more horsemen crested the hill, two of the five warriors fell immediately to bickering. They were brothers, well-known to everyone, but even if strangers, their appearance left no doubt to their kinship. Both were stocky with round chins and broad faces topped by thin brown hair. Faded freckles on weathered skin spread across their flat noses and rawboned cheeks. Moreso, they had the same mannerisms—each emphasized a point with an angry cut of the hand, or cocked his head and grimaced when his brother said something that struck him as especially absurd. The three others kept an eye on the ridgeline, frowning at the brothers’ sharp words and rising voices. The enemy hunted them, the dead rider one of twenty or so men, and the warriors knew that now was the time to plan, not fight amongst themselves. But they also knew there was no help for it.
The Varranji was dead, and beyond the Peace of Ularn, in the far corner of the northern prairie called the Cravelands, two sons feuded over the old man’s estate and the family freehold. So alike in appearance, the brothers couldn’t have been more different in temperament. Tyrrn had an active vigor. He jumped to move decisively; sometimes this won the day, an advantage seized before any was the wiser. The younger Ystling had passive insight. He saw far and imagined consequence others were blind to; sometimes this prevented disaster, an unforeseen danger averted. Yet still, Tyrrn might be too reckless or his brother too lethargic. Born less than a year apart, they had never agreed and were always competing—for all their lives, but a short part of the elder’s infancy, this was true. Among the freeholders, though, family was sacred. And so, through the squalls and storms of their brotherhood, the loyalty of one to the other was unimpeachable. Then their dead father and his final testament put an injustice between them, and now the two were irreconcilable.
Eunike gave Rollo, the other shepherd, a friendly smile and asked in a whisper if this was how they’d been for the whole trip. The two brothers were traveling the freehold, dividing it between them according to their father’s last testament. Their aunt had explained how the Varranji wanted the pastures and ranges divided, and then told them that he hoped they would reach an accord so the holdings stayed whole. The brothers ignored their father’s dying wish. At Eunike’s question, Rollo frowned and shook his head, and she put a familiar hand on his forearm, he seemed so serious about the discord between the brothers. He had the same features as them, but patience abided in his dark brown eyes, a leashed desire that contrasted with Tyrrn’s and Ystling’s bold, entitled gazes. Rollo had only journeyed with them to this pasture, where he would take half the flock for Ystling, but for his time with them, he answered, “More often tense silence and glares. They hate each other now.”
As the brothers argued and shepherds gossiped, one of the warriors had dismounted and crawled up the slope of the hill, dropping to his belly as he neared the ridge. He peeked over, studying the glen beyond, and then popped up to his feet, jogging back to tell the group the enemy was nowhere to be seen. A day before, they had come across the party, twenty men in the colors of Oster, a freehold to the south; then managed to get away before being seen. Tyrrn believed the Oster men here to raid and rustle livestock, but Ystling wondered aloud if maybe they had a more significant prize in mind. The brothers disagreed about the enemy’s intent, but both agreed the Varranji’s death had incited the trespass, and there was no dispute that twenty men stood between them and safety. Putting Rollo on the back of a pony, the group had ridden hard for Eunike’s flock.
The brothers disagreed—loudly, vehemently—on every particular and reason why, but both agreed about what to do next. The solitary rider was a scout from the raiding party. (War party, one brother corrected. This is an invasion!) Killing the scout had bought them time. (How much? Not much, but maybe enough.) When the rider didn’t return, though, the rest of the party would search for him here. (Not searching. They’ll know he’s dead, but will come here looking for his killers nonetheless.)
They needed to take the flock to the high pasture. (No pasture, that—not even in our hold—only a wilderness of sparse forage and rocky soil.) The path into the hills was treacherous and narrow, a rough path that wound through rocky crags to a defensible hollow. (Path? Barely a deer trail.) If the Oster men found the trail, forced into single file to enter the hollow, it would eliminate the advantage of their numbers. (We should bait them into following—it would be a good ambush!) And if the enemy doesn’t find the trail, the flock is safely hidden away, leaving the brothers free to return to the freehold’s keep. (An ambush is too risky! We must survive to rally our men.) At the keep, they would gather men to punish this trespass; on this, the brothers agreed.
Tyrrn ordered the group to move out, and Eunike and Rollo got the flock moving. The shepherds spread their arms, holding out their crooks, to drive the sheep toward the path leading deeper into the hills and up to the high pasture. The three dogs trotted out to the flock’s flanks. Two were Eunike’s. The one named Lily was wholly white, rare for sheep dog whose thick shaggy coat was usually a mix of white, gray, and blue merle; the white was as pure as a wildflower’s petal, hence her name. The other she called Naggy, because he loved a routine and any deviation—late to wake, a delayed meal—caused him to stare at Eunike with hurt black eyes or push his wet black nose anxiously into her palm. The third dog was Rollo’s and he called him Rounder; when the dog wanted something he cantered in a circle instead of sitting pretty. Excited to be moving again, the dogs jumped to the task, driving the flock and keeping sheep from straying, and soon the party reached the trailhead.
The warriors dismounted then, to spare their mounts, and led the ponies across the uneven ground. Ystling and two warriors dropped back; Tyrrn and the remaining warrior went forward, scouting ahead. The brothers out of earshot, Eunike asked what had happened to make them so bitter and hateful. Rollo explained that four years ago Tyrrn and a small crew had drained a marsh to create a new pasture. By all accounts, it was back-breaking work: digging ditches to drain the water, levering boulders out of the clay with harnessed ponies to even the ground. The work had taken longer than expected, leaving Tyrrn and his crew to pass a hard winter in the wilderness. To balance the division of the Varranji holding, the father had given the new pasture to Ystling.
“A piece of land?” Eunike was skeptical. “They’ve argued for years without hating each other, and now a pasture puts this rancor between them? It seems so petty. They’re family.” She stressed family as only a freeholder would.
“Not the land,” Rollo corrected her. “The unfairness of giving away Tyrrn’s labor to his younger brother, who did nothing to earn the pasture. The injustice.” He said the last wholeheartedly, with conviction and sympathy, and then fell silent and thoughtful. He soon moved away, following after a sheep who lingered behind. He caught the sheep around its neck with the hook that topped his shepherd’s crook and guided it back to the flock, but didn’t return to Eunike’s side. She looked after him, wondering why he was so withdrawn, but let him have his solitude. Besides, the path had narrowed and demanded all her attention to navigate the flock safely along it.
The path wound away from the prairie, up through low green hills and then higher into rocky crags. At a cutback where the trail broke free of the enclosing heights, Eunike paused to look back at the Cravelands, and Rollo came up beside her. “A savanna of distant horizons that envy the heavens its infinity,” he said quietly. “So the Tellene called it in days of empire.”
“More like a song than a place,” Eunike said about the name, and Rollo explained that imperial custom was to name a significant geographical feature with a descriptive verse. In Tellene envy meant a combination of want and challenge for possession, Rollo continued, and so in the centuries since Taratellum abandoned the Far Shore, the verse had become the vulgar Cravelands. After he explained, she looked again to the prairie; now it seemed the land raced the darkening sky to the horizon, where the sun was setting.
Ystling came upon the pair, the rear guard catching up to the shepherds, and like Rollo before him, he quietly murmured the prairie’s old Tellene name at the sight of the vista. Then he said to Rollo, “Come, cousin, we must not let my brother get too far ahead, no matter the beauty of our just departed home.”
Before getting moving, the shepherds took horn lanterns from their packs. They lit the tallow candles inside from an ember Eunike for making fire and hung the lanterns from their crooks to cast a wavering light on the path. As she got back to work, her thoughts returned to the encounter. Ystling’s calling Rollo cousin, the shepherd’s scholarship—she hadn’t known he had such close kinship with the Varranji. His appearance marked him as having their blood, but the freehold was filled with bastards and distant relations, a mother sometimes throwing a child with a strong resemblance. To call him cousin was something else, a title of close kinship almost like an honorific. But Eunike hadn’t the opportunity to ask about it—nor was she certain Rollo would explain, he seemed so distant—as the work of guiding the flock along the path became still more difficult with nightfall.
The group traveled through the night, the land growing more mountainous in the faint light from the stars and the Far Shore’s broken moon, and for much of the next morning, too, before the path finally debouched into a hollow—the place Tyrrn called the high pasture, while Ystling described it as a wilderness. Enclosed by rocky slopes and granite outcroppings, inaccessible except by the path they’d followed, and with a tarn at one end to water the flock, the place was defensible but allowed for no retreat. No matter, though, for in the coming days the group would encounter no enemy but the one already in the hollow and the ones they brought themselves.
The Beast Between Us © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 1, 2090 words)
Adding this to my read list