Dubh-Linn: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 2) by James L. Nelson

The marching men made no sound, and they carried no torches or light of any kind and they came through the gate to the road along the fort’s walls. Two men on horseback led the way. The horses shook their heads and one whinnied, sensing Thorgrim near, but its rider gave it a reassuring pat and Thorgrim remained motionless and horse and rider moved past.
      The riders swung off to the north and soon were lost in the dark and the rest of the men followed behind. It took some minutes for them all to make their way out, marching with shields on arms and spears held over shoulders. And then the big doors were swung closed behind, slamming shut with a sound that suggested strength and finality. Thorgrim kept to the low place and followed behind the marching column. The sea was south of them, he could smell it, a constant backdrop behind all the other, more ephemeral smells, but these men were not going in the direction of the sea. They were going in another direction entirely.
      Thorgrim followed, hidden by shadow along his track. The men marched, some limping hard with wounds suffered from the day’s fighting. The smells were pungent. Sweat and wool, leather, iron, horses. Anxious eyes glanced out into the dark. But they did not break their stride.
      Beyond the gate the column swung off, following a wide, rutted track, the chief road connecting Cloyne to the lands to the north. Thorgrim crouched and watched and then something else caught his attention. Two figures were moving along the edge of the ringfort, also watching the column marching off. They were not hiding; one was even carrying a torch. They paused for a moment, then turned toward the wall of the fort, a seemingly unbroken expanse of earth,
      The two men stopped and one banged against the wall with the hilt of his sword, the sound of iron on wood, not earth. He banged twice in rapid succession, paused, then once again. A small door, all but invisible in the wall, opened and a weak light spilled out. The two men ducked through, the door closed, and Thorgrim Night Wolf awoke.

Chapter Eight
     
     
     
     
     
     
    I’ve ended up the same way as the wolves –
    they devoured one another,
    and didn’t notice until they got down to the tail.
                                                                  The Saga of the Confederates
     
     
     
     
     
    Starri Deathless was still there. He was seated just as he had been when Thorgrim turned his back on the man, before Thorgrim fell asleep or lapsed into his wolf dream or whatever it was that he did. He himself did not know, had never known. One minute he was there, another he was elsewhere. The wound in his chest throbbed with pain.
      “You’re back,” Starri said in his conversational tone. Outside of battle, nothing seemed to move Starri to excitement.
      “Was I…” Thorgrim looked around. Overcast night, a dull light from above, points of light from the distant fort. He was back from a wolf dream. He did not think any man had ever sat as Starri Deathless had at his side during a wolf dream.
      “Was I…here?” Thorgrim asked. The wolf dreams let him see things, understand things, but he did not know how. If he was looking for some clarity, however, he was asking the wrong man. Starri just shrugged. “Whether Thorgrim was here or not, I could not say. But the Night Wolf, I think, was afield.”
      They sat in silence for a moment and Thorgrim looked out toward distant Cloyne. He felt an odd sense of peace, not the way he generally felt returning from a wolf dream. He wondered if Starri Deathless was the cause of that, if the man had some magic about him, something not of this world.
      “What did you see?” Starri asked in a soft voice.
      Thorgrim ran back over the dream-like images in his head. “They left. The men-at-arms at Cloyne. They left. They marched north.”
      Silence. “Why would they do that?” Starri asked.