Steelflower in Snow

by Lilith Saintcrow

Seems we’ve one now in all but name, he growled in response, and said no more.

  Consolidating power is always a tricksome business. The Shainakh, conquerors grown fat and custom-bound, took large swathes of the Danhai grassland almost at will, but they could not hold it. The freetowns along the Rim squabbled too much to be a proper empire, but if one were threatened by larger neighbors they stood together, knowing full well the risks otherwise. Pesh raided the hills for fresh slaves; their neighbors the Bha-gra of the deserts could not seem to unite though they had once been a horde under a veiled woman claimed to be half goddess. Tar-Amyarat had married into their conquerors, and Clau’s voracious island gods had absorbed theirs too. Even the Pensari had fallen, but in their day, when they came cold and raving from the Breaking Pillars, those who knelt survived. To build an empire one must have cunning and foresight as well as power, not to mention deep coffers and the means to instill fear.

  It seemed this Dunkast had deep coffers, for he now owned many of the mines that produced their pale gold. And, given by the way they whispered the man in the North instead of his name, he had fear at his command. Cunning and foresight?

  Well, time and again Redfist would ask of one clan or another, one name or another, sometimes casually, sometimes wonderingly. The answer was always the same: either said man had bowed to the Ferulaine…or an accident had occurred. The tolls paid to the Crae had been merely custom, and traditionally, any who demanded much else were swiftly replaced.

  But now, when the man in the North asked, a Skaialan was forced to give or to die. Or to become a bandit.

  A long tale, yes, but must be told in order to understand the almost-daily attacks, sometimes even coming from the deep forest after the nooning. If not for the clumsiness of their bows, we might all have bled into the snows. Daylight attacks began with a deep-throated yell, and whatever ragged band of hungry ghost-giants had spotted us wending our slow creaking way along the slice of road they laid claim to would burst from the trees. The torkascruagh would begin to bellow, and it would be time to earn our coin and our meals.

  The waggon-hands were handy enough with staves, but their concern was the goods piled in their wooden boats upon the snowy sea. During day attacks, the four Skaialan outriders circled, and I went wherever I was needed, Darik at my back like a shadow, our torkascruagh bellowing and tossing their heads as the attackers, on foot, did their best.

  Very few of the bandits rode in order to trouble us. The wild torkascruagh are not very amenable, and the beasts needed more forage than threadbare, starving ruffians can procure. More often, attackers crept in with darkness, sometimes under the cover of white winds, and it was night-fighting in the deadly cold. Except for the forest drawing close, it was like the plains again, nerves pulled taut at each moment, even while you pissed. Wells of darkness between massive trees holding their soft green fragrant needles can hide all manner of danger. The Skaialan greased their faces and calves with fat to keep the grayrot-freeze from eating their flesh. My ear-tips were perpetually numb, my stomach always unhappy, the warming breath second nature by now, and whatever warmth I could gather huddled against Darik in our shell-tent was not enough for more than fitful rest.

  When it warmed slightly the snow came and became a cold wet weight against every struggling movement. When the sky cleared, the temperature plunged, and a gobbet of spit could crackle into ice mid-air. If not for the taih-adai and Janaire’s careful tutelage, I might have frozen to death more than once; if not for D’ri at my back, I might have had to kill more than one of the outriders and no few of the waggon-hands as well.

  Just when it seemed we had slid into an ice-bound hellish afterlife, doomed to an eternity of hauling ourselves forward by painful increments, we eased down three days’ worth of a long incline and arrived at a valley that, while still cold as one of the Hain ideas of hell, was not under multiple armlengths of killing white. The sky was still iron-colored, but there was long sere winter grass and tough, spiny green bushes loaded with tart, pungent, small black fruit. The torkascruagh stopped wheezing and pricked their tasseled ears, smelling the reek of settlement.

  One thing about riding the beasts: I could draw one leg up, hooking it around the cantle, and ride for a long while without splitting like a Rijiin acrobat. The stretching was no doubt good for me—every knife-fighter needs flexibility in the hips—but not for twelve candlemarks at a time.

  Far away, at the end of a gently curving mud-track, smoke rose from a walled town with a high-stretched cube of stone rising in its center. I eyed the terrain—broken mountains lay shattered to the west, curving slightly around the north. The valley was large, more properly a plain cupped among the earth-gods’ smashed plates. Steam vented from relatively small fissures—heat from below the earth, I realized, the breath and boiling blood of the great wingwyrm coiled at the world’s core. The city was old enough to have sprawled outside its original, eminently defensible walls in every direction, giants laying claim to space the same way any other folk do.

  Since we approached Kalburn from the south, we did not see the Standing Stones. They tell tales of their highgod Kroth striking the valley with his hammer, calling forth the fires at the heart of the world in his battle with a wolf made of darkness. The Stones, milky columns alight with blushing veins, stand in an irregular circle a half-candlemark ride from Kalburn’s northern edge, and tis said that to wind a horn in their center will make it heard throughout the Highlands. That is, if you can reach the center of their stony floor, and if you do not wish to strike the altar at its center with the great hammer—but that came later.

  We reached the fringes of the settlement before nightfall, and took our pay from the relieved Salden, who would realize a hefty profit from all goods arriving intact.

  Salden also tried to pay me half the promised price, after he had already paid Redfist and D’ri. He relented when I laid hand to hilt, and the greasy surprise on his face when Darik did not move to restrain me filled me with weary revulsion.

  “Outlander whore,” he snarled, through the ice drip-melting from his beard.

  “May you be hanged,” I retorted, in passable Skaialan. It is a great insult to them, to die suspended rather than on the battlefield. I do not know which of us was more maligned, but I had my coil of silver Northern tradewire and left him in the long chilly shed of a counting-house where his goods would be unloaded and weighed before his clients came to take possession of them. He would find more cargo and leave with his waggon-hands and his three Skaialan outriders, and I wished him joy of his further journeys.

  Joy, and many a bandit raid.

  A King Now

  Redfist chose the largest inn outside the walls of Kalburn’s Old City, a throbbing stone-and-timber heap full of outriders, caravaneers, and other flotsam with enough coin to shelter in some comfort. His impatience might have dragged us directly into trouble the next morning, had not a curious bit of news filtered into the commonroom.

  “Every gate to Kalburn is watched. And all the roads going south. North, not so much.” Redfist frowned, his chin almost touching his chest, making his teeth shy white ponies behind ruddy bushes. He still wore his southron clothing, though he had added a great brown furred cloak to keep the wind away. “They search each caravan as it leaves.”

  “Who does?” I poked at the bowl of thick, toothrot-sweet gruel that mimicked breakfast here. It was passable, if one crumbled some pungent white cheese into its gray depths, but it could not be eaten with picks. I was loath to use my fingers, and the implements they used were a extremely awkward. The small flattened ladles—spoons—used to shovel the glop into their faces were nowhere near as cleanly as picks. You had to put the whole bowl in your mouth, heaped high with the thick bits of porridge, and suck it clean.

  That was disconcerting enough, and the glances and whispers when I appeared were too. I had not felt so ill-placed since my first trip across the Lan’ai. At least with my braids hiding my ear-tips I could pass for a mixture of some sort a
long the Rim, but here among the pale giants, copper skin and slightness of stature made me an oddity. D’ri they also watched, but not nearly as closely.

  “Ferulaine toll-takers.” It might as well have been an obscenity, the way his face turned sour. He added a few terms in Skaialan I was pleased to be able to decipher. “Tis worse than I thought.”

  “How?” I had largely mastered the accents in his language, and he often looked gratified for a moment or so at my careful study before repeating stray terms with the correct pronunciation. Now that I heard his tongue spoken all around me, much of how he weighted his tradetongue was explained.

  He now salted his tradetongue with as much Skaialan as it could bear, too. “None of the Crae ha’ ever set tolls before. Tis not the Highland way. I was in the marketplace before sunup, and the news is whispered instead of shouted as it should be. Tis as if they think he can hear them.”

  “Is he here?” I managed my own Skaialan creditably well. It would take a while, but their tongue is direct and much less complex than G’mai. It was a good thing I had learned my Shainakh and my tradetongue so assiduously. Each language one manages to store in one’s head is an insurance, and makes the learning of others easier.

  “No. At Ferulaine. He’s claimed a space far North and built a keep there, too.” Redfist’s blue eyes glittered. He had lost the air of grudging delicacy he practiced with smaller southron tables, chairs, and other implements, and was no doubt relieved to have done so. “Been gone too long, I have. Tis as if he is daring me to come for him.”

  I glanced at the stairs at the far end of the commonroom—Darik’s familiar tread upon them was a relief. He looked just as cold as I felt, the tips of his ears reddened and his bladed nose pink, and when he settled beside me I did not mind him moving close enough for our hips to touch. It was dangerous not to leave a space to bring a blade free, but worth it to feel his warmth. He thanked the inngirl who brought him a bowl of the gruel with quiet courtesy in tradetongue, and her cheeks flushed. Perhaps it was because of his strangeness, though I should think they would call him handsome enough in any land.

  “What manner of keep?” I traced an outline upon the tabletop, the shape of the city I had seen so far. Karnaugh is a fastness merely from the south, its wall placed both to discourage banditry and break some of the force of the Pass’s howling. Kalburn was otherwise—the ancient wall held mayhap a quarter of the city, the rest spreading along road-arteries according to the dictates of trade. The Keep here was well-built of a single block of stone thrust from the earth by some titanic convulsion, but relatively small for all it dominates that part of the valley-plain.

  “A fine one, they say, and there are stories of the blocks quarried for it dancing into place of their own accord.” Redfist glowered afresh at his breakfast, a pastry pocket of something smelling suspiciously like heavily spiced torkascruagh innards.

  D’ri tested porridge with his own spoon and glanced at me. “Using Power to shift stones is not uncommon in our land.”

  “Well, this is the North, boyo.” Redfist took another large bite, barely chewing before washing the mess down with a draft of weak, chunky-thick morning-ale. “And tis damn unnatural for a bastard clan to build a keep to surpass all others in a single season.”

  I considered this new tale. “He did this within a summer? A single summer?”

  “Aye.” Redfist’s glower deepened, and he made a sweeping motion, catching the eye of the slow-moving inngirl, for another mug of the heavy, yeasty almost-bread they drank with their morning meal. “Five years I’ve been gone, and Corran did not tell me the half of it.”

  “He was not paid to,” I pointed out. But softly, for I did not wish to argue or distract. “So, he has a keep in the north and is collecting tolls. Kingly business indeed.”

  “A curst business, instead.” He shouted something at the inngirl, who replied in kind. “There’s none of yer kafi here, Kaia, nor your chai, but I’ve something better.”

  “Tis hard to see how chai could be improved upon. And your country-fellows, do you think they are pleased to have a ruler?” I dragged my spoon through porridge, a channel dug in silty mud. “Try it with the cheese,” I told D’ri, whose look suggested I had perhaps lost my senses, but he reached for the bowl full of crumbling, pungent curds.

  I did not see many cattle, but the weather was such I did not wonder much at it. And if they milked the torkascruagh, I did not wish to know.

  “I know what they are.” Redfist paused as the inngirl, hissing an imprecation, brought three high, wide mugs to the table. He laughed and reached to slap at her hindquarters, but she was light on her feet for such a tall ample-hipped woman. I swallowed a disgusted sigh. Twas a good thing I was not an inngirl, I would have lopped a few hands from their bearers by now.

  And—useless to deny it—the Redfist within Skaialan borders was not the same man as the Redfist outside. I had called him barbarian all this time, and now that we were in his homeland, he seemed determined to be one. I found myself longing for civilization, for a long hot bath, and for less bloodshed and better weather. Not for the first time, I might add.

  Definitely not for the last, either.

  “And what is that?” D’ri took a mouthful of his porridge, and a curious look crossed his face. I banished a small smile, knowing from the way his eyebrows rose that he found the taste strange but not unpleasant.

  Redfist did not smile. He did not even manage to look happy at the new addition to our breakfast. “Afraid.”

  “Of whatever witchery this Dunka-est found?” My pronunciation had grown better. At least, I hoped it had.

  “That, and more.” He pushed his ale-mug aside, which was a relief. Or table was much quieter than many others, and tucked into a corner besides. “I like not the sound of this, lass, and it seems entering Kalburn will be difficult. We’ve come this far, but—”

  “Entering a city is never too difficult, friend Redfist.” I blew across the top of the bubbling white liquid in the mug, took a cautious sniff. It smelled…spicy, and oddly sweet. “What on earth is this?”

  “Sofin,” he said, and repeated it until I found the right pronunciation. Then he sighed, and took a large pull of his own mug, despite the heat of the beverage. “And how do you crack a walled city in winter, with guards and toll-takers at every gate, hm? We only escaped search because Salden is known to pay handsomely to avoid such things.”

  “You chose well.” I might have liked him more, had I known as much. “And aye, walls are a problem. But a small one for a thief. A much larger one is the rumor of your presence drawing more blackened blades. I cannot kill every assassin in the world at once.”

  Whatever reply he might have made was lost in a swelling tide of whispers and low whistles as someone stamped in the entryway, a quick light habitual double-tap to rid boots of snow. The heavy strips of cloth hung at the inner end of the entry-chamber swayed gently as cold from outside moved the air in unsteady eddies. A fair-haired Skaialan woman appeared between the felted strips, sweeping them aside with one pale hand, and Redfist stiffened as if struck.

  The woman had creamy cheeks and a proud nose, wide gray eyes and sun-yellow hair; she wore a voluminous blue cloak trimmed with fine fur. A fillet of silver kept that hair back; two thick fair braids dipped over her shoulders and swayed gently as she moved. She looked nervous; her ear-drops—pretty, but not worth stealing—had glittering blue stones and swung as she scanned the commonroom.

  Redfist gained his feet with a lunge. I had rarely seen him move so quickly even in battle, and he threaded between the sparsely inhabited commonroom tables rather like an iron splinter following a lodestone. D’ri’s left hand rested on a knifehilt, and I was about to rise when the woman’s face went through several changes, settling into a paradoxical mixture of recognition and wondering surprise.

  “Rainak—” Her lips shaped his name. She looked altogether too warm for the weather’s chill fingers, and too clean for the mud coating even the cobb
led ways of this place.

  Our barbarian bore down upon her, caught her by the shoulders, and kissed her hard enough to bend her backward.

  Emrath

  “I thought it a lie, but I had to see.” Her tradetongue was stilted, but fair enough. She stood near the fireplace in our room, first glancing at Redfist and then, curiously, at D’ri, who had brought his bowl—and the strange spoon—with him; she jabbed a fingertip at my s’tarei. “You, susnach, you great walloping idiot. Why have you brought Rainak here?”

  D’ri glanced at me. I contented myself with locking the door and leaning against it with my ears pricked for any undue noises in the hallway, cupping my heavy earthenware mug of the queer white sofin. She had not given me much scrutiny, but I did otherwise.

  This woman did not wear the low white blouse and high-laced vest of the inngirls, baring her flour-pale breasts as they did. Instead, her dress was high-necked, made of fine soft blue cloth, and the multicolored skirts were divided unless I missed my guess, a form of wrapped and pleated material mimicking the mens’ costume. Her cloak had sleeves, and its lining was plush-thick and delicate at the same time, some kind of spotted fur. Redfist’s hands had left grease-marks upon her shoulders, but she did not seem to mind. Felted underboots and curious overshoes tied with crosslaces peeped out from under her skirts, and both feet and skirts were too clean. Wherever she housed, she had not walked here.

  Interesting. I took a sip, and found the beverage burned all the way down, a pleasant fire reminding one of sweetened chai. So far, the drink was the best thing in this icy hell.

  The woman all but stamped her large shapely feet, still addressing Darik. “Why did you bring him back, susnach? Answer me!”

  My s’tarei inclined his head slightly, glanced at me. I shook my head a fraction—let her see what rudeness gained her, this Northern woman—and he instead settled at the small table near the fireplace with his bowl. He could not ignore her more pointedly.