“So?” Flax said eventually, running out of patience.
“Mmm,” Skink said. “He was on pitch.”
Ash gaped at him. The last thing he had expected was a critique. “I —”
“That’s a voice to make a man’s balls climb up into his gut. But the phrasing wasn’t bad. He was in tune, though it’s not an easy melody line.” Skink spoke as if Ash were any young singer, come to the Deep to learn the old songs. He had seen the older men do this, time and again — take a young singer and groom him. He had never expected it to happen to him. He felt a warm ball of gratitude to Skink grow in his belly.
Vine looked sour. “I don’t care if he can hit the highest note in the scale. He’s a child. He has no stake in the future and he shouldn’t be taught the songs. That’s the real issue.”
“He doesn’t even know his true self yet!” Snake added.
Ash could see what was happening. Better to keep things the way they always had been. Better to be in control; especially when the alternative was to give away power to someone strange, like him. Someone incalculable. What he had to do was to make himself unthreatening: to meet their demands in a way they could accept.
“I have a stake in the future,” he said softly.
They looked at him, puzzled.
“Got some girl pregnant in Turvite, did you?” Vine snapped. “Might have known.”
“No,” Ash said, controlling his impulse to slap Vine backward onto the hard rock. “No, not that. But friends of mine had a baby last winter. He’s being raised in Hidden Valley, and I have sworn to protect him and his family. He is my stake in the future.” He paused for a moment, trying to look them all in the eye, one by one, to convince them. “His name is Ash.”
Skink considered, pulling at his lip while he thought. “I will ask you some questions. If the answers are sufficient, then we will think about the next step.”
“What’s that?” Flax jumped in.
“No man may learn the songs unless he knows his true nature. If we accept that Ash has a stake in the future, he must find his true shape. Only if the River accepts him can he learn the songs.”
Ash breathed out, hard. Another step, and another step. Fighting was a lot easier.
“When the child was born, what did you feel?” Skink said. Ash knew by his tone that the question was more complicated than it appeared.
“Well . . .” he said, trying to give himself enough time to think it through, then realizing that all he could do was tell the truth. “Firstly, just thankfulness that everything was all right; that his mother was safe and he was well.”
The men nodded.
“Then, when I saw him, I felt . . .” Ash paused. What had he felt? “I was surprised, because he was so little and so… red and scrunched up.”
Some of the men laughed, but it was the laughter of recognition.
“Then he was named for me, and I held him for the first time and I felt… joy. But later, when I thought about it, I felt afraid. Afraid for him. Afraid of all the things that could happen to him. Like the ghosts. That was when I swore to protect him.”
His answer poured out of him, each emotion vividly alive again. He was still afraid for little Ash, and it showed, he knew from the looks on their faces. Rowan had tears in his eyes. But it wasn’t enough.
“Have you sung to him?” Skink asked, putting him in his place.
Ash felt his face harden. “No,” he said.
“And you have left him.” There was condemnation in Skink’s tone. Traveler children were few, and cherished. Rowan placed his hand on Ash’s shoulder in support and warning. Be calm, he meant. Ash could almost hear the words. He took a breath and let it out slowly, then answered.
“The gods willed it. Go to the Well of Secrets, they said, and she sent me to find the secret songs.”
“There is one last question. Is the child of the old blood?”
“His mother was a Traveler.”
“Was?”
“She has Settled.”
Skink, Vine and Snake exchanged glances. Vine shrugged, and the other two nodded.
“It is enough,” Skink said. “We declare that Ash, son of Rowan, has a stake in the future in the form of the boychild Ash.”
“When the time comes,” Vine added, “Ash, son of Ash, son of Rowan, will be admitted to the Deep and meet the River.”
“As you will do, tonight,” Skink said, “when you make your climb.”
Bramble
FOR A MOMENT, Bramble wondered whose body she was in. Whosever it was, it was achy and cold, with sleep-encrusted eyes. She wanted to open those eyes and see, and astonishingly, they opened as soon as she thought it. There were faces staring down at her that she knew, looking scared and relieved at the same time.
She was back.
Her eyes closed again for a heartbeat, in a mixture of thankfulness and loss, then opened again.
They weren’t on the island anymore, but under the trees. They were holding hands around her, which seemed strange. She was half-naked under a blanket. As she struggled to sit up, they sprang into life, supporting her, getting her water to drink, pulling up the blanket which threatened to slip down.
“Are you all right?” Martine asked.
Bramble nodded and swallowed more water. Her mouth was as dry as a Wind Cities’ river in the hot season. “I have to go to the Western Mountains near Actonston,” Bramble said. No sense wasting time. “That’s where he… where the bones are.” She turned her thoughts firmly away from Acton’s death to consider how she was going to get there. Forget him, she told herself. Think about it later.
“I need Zel,” Bramble continued. Her mind was crystal clear, as though she had thought through this plan for days. Perhaps she had. She had no idea how long it had been since she left Acton.
“I’d rather stay with Safred,” Zel said quietly.
“Maybe. But we’re going to the Western Mountains, and I am not going through Thegan’s territory to get there.”
Safred frowned, pleating the crown of her hat in her hands. “So? How will you go?”
“The sea ice will be breaking up about now. By the time we ride to Foreverfroze it should be free and we can take a ship for Turvite, then ride up the southern bank of the White River to Actonston.”
They were all silent, surprised.
“So I need Zel,” Bramble repeated. “She’s the only one of you who knows enough about horses to help me on board ship.”
Zel nodded slowly. “You’ll need help, sure enough, if we take those chestnuts. But why will you need more than your own horse?”
“Because I need Cael, too,” Bramble said.
Safred started to argue, but Cael held up one hand. “Why?” he asked.
Bramble hesitated. “The bones are in a cave; maybe thrown down a shaft, I’m not sure. We might need some muscle.”
“We’ll all go,” Safred said.
“How are we going to afford a trip like that?” Cael asked. “We don’t have enough for even Bramble and Zel, let alone all of us.”
“If we wait a day,” Safred said, her eyes unfocused, “we will meet someone on the Road who will help with that.”
Bramble thought it odd, that she could never feel the gods coming and going from Safred, the way she could with Baluch. Maybe they didn’t come and go. Maybe they were there all the time.
Then Cael moved away so she could put her breeches back on in privacy, and she became consumed with thoughts of food. She was starving.
In the middle of the night, after the moon had gone down, Bramble woke with a sudden jerk. Had she heard something? She drew her knife and rolled out of her blankets, glad to be disturbed from a sleep choked with dreams of Acton’s blood. It was a cloudy, flickering night, with a wind high in the sky sending the clouds streaming in tatters across the stars, so that the light varied from faint to none unpredictably. An unchancy night to meet something vicious in the dark.
The others had told her about the mist, although she
had a feeling they were leaving out the details. Since then, they had set a watch. She had thought it was Martine’s turn, but she could not see her anywhere on the perimeter of the camp, where she was supposed to be. She didn’t wake the others. Not yet. Just in case the noise she had heard was Martine making her rounds.
She prowled the border of the camp closest to the Forest, but heard nothing but the sough of the branches. Then she realized that something was moving down at the water. She paused, her heartbeat increasing. That mere… They could probably cope with wolf or bear, but a creature from the depths of the lake… She forced her imagination away from the thought.
She walked down toward the water, which was lying still even in the increasing wind. There was a figure at the water’s edge, pacing backward and forward — Zel. It must be later than she had thought, if it was Zel’s watch. She felt adrift in time, where before she had always been securely anchored.
“Sorry if I woke you,” Zel said. They moved closer together so they would not disturb the others.
Bramble shrugged. “No matter.” In the past, she would have just turned and gone back to bed, but in the moonlight she could clearly see the little telltale signs that Zel was worried, or upset, and somehow she didn’t want to just leave her to her troubles.
“Are you all right?” she asked, although it went against all her habits and felt like prying.
Zel fiddled with her belt and half-shook her head. “Just thinking about Flax.”
“Mmm.” Well, Bramble could understand that. When Maryrose had left for Carlion, Bramble had worried about her every day, too. I was right to worry, she thought, grief clutching her throat. She should say something comforting, like, “He’ll be all right,” but with Maryrose’s death so fresh she couldn’t bring herself to say a well-meaning lie. He was abroad in a world where ghosts killed the living. Who knew if he would be all right or not?
Zel looked down at the ground, and then out at the mere, then back, as if it were hard for her to talk. “Um… I wanted to ask… what was he like?” she said finally.
“Acton?”
Zel nodded.
Bramble shook her head, not to refuse the question, but to clear her thoughts. “He was very alive. It’s hard to believe he’s dead.”
“Are the songs true? Did he really laugh during battle? While he was killing people?”
Bramble hesitated, then shrugged. “Yes,” she said. “He laughed.”
“Did he really say, ‘Kill them all’?”
“Yes,” she said. “He said that.”
“And that they should keep the houses intact so his people could use them?”
“Yes.”
Bramble could see that Zel was somehow eased by the knowledge that Acton was as bad as she had imagined — that the songs didn’t lie. Bramble stared out at the lake. Her eyes filled with tears. Why did it feel like betrayal to tell the truth? Acton had done all those things. He had killed and massacred and taken this land for his own people, he had enjoyed battle. He had. But he was not what people thought he was. She thought that even now she didn’t really know what he was. No — what he had been. She mustn’t forget that he was dead, even though it seemed to her that she could take the brooch in her hand again and swim through the waters to find him; to watch him; to perhaps finally understand him.
“He was a man of his time,” she said, and blinked away the tears before they fell. She sat on a rock at the edge of the mere and stared at the still water, trying to find calmness in its serenity.
“Do you want company?” Zel said.
Bramble stiffened. “No. No, with thanks. I’ve slept too long, I think, and now my body doesn’t know when to rest. Go back to sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
“Good night, then,” Zel said.
Bramble watched all night by the mere, trying not to remember. The silent water should have been soothing, but it wasn’t. It reminded her too much of the waves that had risen up, over and over again, to take her away from Acton’s life. She knew she couldn’t sleep. She kept seeing Red’s arm — her arm, it had felt like — strike at Acton. Kept feeling the knife go in.
If she had been told, before she grasped the brooch, that she would have the chance to kill Acton, she would have rejoiced. But all she felt was horror. How could she be lamenting his death — the death of the invader?
It was because of the future that had been killed, she decided. The future where all towns would have been free towns, where every person, Travelers included, would have had a say in how things were done. The gods had stopped her from creating that future, and no doubt they had their reasons, but she mourned for that world, for the nation the Domains could have become, for the freedom lost.
She still had a chance to save this world. Maybe, afterward, there would be a way to create the future she had seen, if only briefly, in Acton’s eyes. She put that thought aside. There was no use thinking about it now. Now they had to stop Saker.
But walking by the lakeside, she kept wondering what she could have replied to Zel’s questions. “Yes, but he wasn’t that bad?” He was what Zel believed: a killer, an invader, a destroyer of too much. He had laughed as he killed, in the battle light-heartedness that all his people seemed to share. He had said, “Kill them all.” The provocation didn’t matter, did it? Had Hawk and his men deserved to die? Maybe. But their women and children? No. And yet, he had been upset about that… Oh, it was too much to think about, Bramble told herself. It was over, and she had to get on with things.
She went to the privy before she woke the others, and was returning to the camp when the trees shimmered in front of her eyes and her hunter appeared next to a huge oak, its gold eyes gleaming in the shadow as though reflecting light from some other place or time. She controlled her shock instinctively. Show no fear, she thought.
“Kill Reborn,” it said, “you are in haste.”
She didn’t care how it knew, only what it might be able to do.
“I need to get to the Western Mountains quickly,” she said. “Can you help me?”
It tilted its head as though listening to the Forest. Then it nodded.
“It will not be easy.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Trust me.”
Bramble laughed. This was better. No more discussions or plans or arguing. Just a leap of faith.
“I have to tell them, get my saddlebags.”
“Just come,” the hunter said. “Or not.”
She paused. Just walk away? Oh, that was tempting. She would have done it, too, except for Trine.
“I have to make sure my horse is looked after,” she said. “That’s my duty.”
The hunter understood duty, and the husbanding of animals, even if its way of husbanding was to cull. It nodded.
“Be quick,” it said. The hawks’ feathers in its hair caught the light as it shifted backward into the undergrowth and disappeared.
Bramble ran back to the camp. Her saddlebags were by her bedroll. She grabbed them. Her last memory of Maryrose was wound up with these bags, and she wasn’t going to leave them behind.
Zel woke immediately when she touched her shoulder.
“Look after Trine for me,” Bramble said softly. “I’ve found a quicker way. I’ll meet you in Sanctuary.”
Zel barely had time to nod and no time for questions, before Bramble was racing for the Forest.
She found her way back to the oak and stood on the same spot as before. “I’m ready,” she said.
The air shimmered and the hunter appeared.
“Then walk with me,” it said.
Martine
SAFRED WASN’T HAPPY, with Bramble or with Zel, and Martine felt increasingly annoyed with her as they rode single file back through the Forest and she maintained the sulk. Trine was sulking, too, lagging as much as she could on the leading rein Zel had secured to her own saddle. Zel already had bites on both hands from bridling her. Martine thought that Safred and Trine had the same expression, and the horse had more
cause.
Nothing happened to disturb them. They crossed the stream without incident; they weren’t even bothered by the strange panic that they had felt earlier. It was all easy — too easy, Martine felt, as though the Forest wanted to see the back of them and was urging them on.
At the point where the trail into the Forest crossed the northwest road, they dismounted so that Safred could heal Cael.
“Out of the Forest,” she said, smiling. She placed her hand on his chest confidently, and sang a high chant in her terrible voice. When she took her hand away the wound was as bad as ever. She tried twice more, with the same result, until her face was white with effort and she swayed on her feet.
“Enough,” Cael said. “Let it heal on its own.” His face was solemn and wary. “Don’t kill yourself for something impossible,” he added gently.
Safred’s eyes filled with tears. “I can heal everyone else, why not you?”
He shrugged and helped her to mount. They all settled back into their saddles, while Safred recovered a little. Martine could see that she was getting set for a long, involved discussion of why and why not and what could be done about it, and she was thankful, at first, when they were interrupted by a party of riders cantering down the northwest road. Then she saw they were a warlord’s men and she felt the familiar tightening in the gut that armed men always brought, anywhere in the Domains. But Safred smiled for the first time since she had woken to find Bramble gone.
“Arvid!” Her voice rang with pleasure. “It’s you!”
She was calling to a man with light brown hair, dressed as the others were in simple green uniforms without emblems. No crossed sword and spear here, as there was on Thegan’s uniforms. Arvid. The warlord himself. He was about forty, maybe a bit older, with a smiling, open countenance that invited trust. With very shrewd blue eyes. Martine felt another jolt in her gut, but this one brought heat with it, fire licking along her nerves and into her bones. She wanted to melt into her saddle, but she stiffened her back and kept her face impassive. The week after Equinox, she thought with resignation. All the body wants is to be satisfied, and it doesn’t care who does it.
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