Ember and Ash

by Pamela Freeman

  “Aye, my lord,” Sandpiper said.

  The Prowman looked at him with a mixture of anger and pity, which just made him angrier.

  “She loves you,” he said. “She forsook everything she believed in to marry you.”

  “Not everything,” Arvid snarled. “She kept her secrets.”

  He strode out the door and slammed it behind him, with Sandpiper inside the workroom to ensure that his orders were carried out. Which was as it should be, because Valuer or not, sympathizer with the old bloods or not, he did not believe that the Prowman’s secrets were worth even a single one of his people’s lives.

  A scurry of workers surrounded the bonfire. Moss had the uprights in already, the thatchers were bundling reeds, Swan was cutting cross-beams and Cat was directing a team from the kitchen in setting up a permanent tripod over the flame.

  Good.

  Arvid went to see the blacksmith. Lily was a huge man, of course, as blacksmiths were—so huge and so black-tempered that no one had ever been known to make a joke about his name. Arvid had never seen him sit still. But when he walked into the smithy, Lily was slumped on the tree trunk he balanced his knee on when he hammered hard, staring at the empty fire pit.

  His tools were hung up neatly; the straight iron bars he used to make swords were leaning in a corner. There was the scent of dead smoke and ash. His two apprentices had made themselves scarce.

  “Lily. I need your help.”

  Lily slowly raised his head and stared at him blankly. His eyes were dead. He seemed to be having trouble focusing on Arvid’s face.

  “I need your help, Lily,” he repeated. Moving forward, he placed a hand on Lily’s shoulder. The muscles were slack under his hand. “I need you.”

  Slowly, slowly, Lily sat up. He put his big hands on his knees and pushed himself up.

  “I am useless,” he said. Without looking, he pointed back at the fire pit and the bellows.

  “No,” Arvid said. “You cannot ply your trade at present, but you are not useless. I need men I can trust—men who can stop panic, who can take command.”

  “I’m not an officer,” Lily said slowly.

  “My officers will be busy enough organizing their own estates. I have sent messengers everywhere—I have very few guards left here in the fort. Who else can I trust to protect us but the one who has armed us all?”

  Lily stood a little straighter. He was a fine swordsman, and if he’d been born an officer he’d have been a terror on the battlefield, if they could have found a horse big enough to hold him. But he was too good a smith to risk as a footsoldier.

  “You know the men who can use weapons. Find them. Bring them from other villages if you must. Promise them hot food if they balk. And garrison my fort.”

  “Aye, my lord,” Lily said. He strode out of the smithy without even waiting for Arvid to leave, energy renewed.

  Arvid stayed in the cool dark smithy for a moment longer, enjoying the brief respite from other people’s eyes. He wondered where Martine was, and then pushed the thought away. He had other people to see. Salt. That was organized. Water.

  The coopers weren’t as dispirited as Lily had been. They worked more as a team, although the head cooper, Linnet, was the kind of woman who brooked no insolence. She had the other three, her journeyer and her two apprentices, soaking barrel staves in water. Nearby were bags which slumped oddly. He stared at them.

  “Sandbags,” Linnet said briskly. “We can’t steam the staves, so we’re going to curve them with weights alone.” She stood back so he could see a set of staves already balanced between two trestles, bags of sand on their middles so that they dipped down.

  “Excellent,” Arvid said, his spirits lifting. One problem he didn’t have to solve. “We’ll need as many as you can make. Draft help if you need it. Well done.”

  The laundresses were cursing, as they often did, but they were resigned to their workload tripling without a copper of boiling water. He broke the news to them that there would be a troop of babies arriving soon, complete with dirty clouts, and fled as the curses rose to the treetops.

  He couldn’t see Martine anywhere.

  If she had left him…

  He stood in the middle of the muster yard, breaking out in a cold sweat. She would not. She could not. He was the warlord… but Martine had never cared about that. And any other lord would give her sanctuary. The Last Domain wasn’t important enough for them to be concerned about offending him, and Martine was not only the hero of the Compact Reweaving, she was the greatest stonecaster in the Domains. Arvid had used her skills too often to doubt that. The Ice King had almost stopped attacking them because they were always ready for each attack, since Martine’s predictions were so accurate. Any warlord would welcome her for that ability alone.

  That was the reason he went back to the hall, to his workroom, to her chamber, to search for her. He needed her skills to safeguard his domain, he told himself.

  She wasn’t there. In her chamber, he paused, and then, heart pounding, flung back the lids of the chests where she kept her clothes. They were there. His heart thudded harder than ever in relief. His hands were shaking. He dragged in breath after breath. His anger grew. Where was she?

  He stormed out into the hall and into the kitchen. The cooks were busy cutting meat into wafer-thin slices. They looked up, saw his face, and immediately looked down and concentrated on their hands.

  “Where is my lady?” he demanded.

  “She is helping my Lady Sigurd to prepare for the road,” the head cook said in surprise. “She has given us orders to prepare for the salt arriving.”

  Arvid froze.

  Merroc. Sigurd. Gods help him, in the rush to make his people safe, he had forgotten about them. He went back into the hall and climbed the stairs, dreading what he might find.

  The guest chamber door stood open, and inside there were women moving about, folding clothes, stowing them into the traveling bales which southerners used, big square oiled canvas bags which lashed tight.

  He couldn’t see Martine, or Sigurd, or Merroc. The women were mostly Sigurd’s servants, eager to go home, he guessed, from the brisk way they were packing.

  Martine’s parlor was the next door, and he approached it reluctantly. This was the only room in the fort which she had made her own—painted bright yellow as a southerner’s room might be, with big lambskin rugs on the floor and a frieze of stars around the top of the walls, near the high ceiling.

  “Stars are the Last Domain’s treasure,” she had said, as though he should understand something by that, and when he’d looked puzzled she’d explained that the friezes were an ancient enchantment, meant to bring prosperity and peace. He’d wanted sheaves of corn and ripe apples instead, but she’d laughed and said no, each place had its proper treasure and it was bad luck to use any other.

  Her parlor was where she cast the stones, and where she saw the few friends who would come to the fort—for most of her friends weren’t officers’ wives, and felt uncomfortable under his roof. A flash of irritation hit him. She had never really adjusted to being a warlord’s wife. He knew that was unfair, that she had learned all the duties expected of her and carried them out with unflinching efficiency and calm. But it was still duty to her, and there was no joy in it. She despised what she was.

  Which meant, surely, that she despised him.

  There was a desolation in that thought that he couldn’t face, so he pushed the door of the parlor open. Martine was sitting with Merroc at the small round table Arvid had made for her himself. Their hands were clasped.

  Casting. He paused in the doorway, not wanting to interrupt this. If they could learn anything…

  Martine cast. The five stones twisted and fell, seeming to Arvid to take forever to reach the table. Then she put out a long finger and touched them, one by one, that listening look on her face. He had seen that look so many times, as she cast for him, predicting attacks, droughts, blizzards, pestilence… she had saved his people twenty, thir
ty, fifty times over, because they had had time to prepare. To be there when the Ice King attacked. To stock the silos against the dry years and the woodpiles against the long, long storms which sometimes swept down out of the north.

  Woodpiles. He reflected bitterly, in the moment before she spoke, that the one thing he would not have to do was stock the woodpiles.

  “Death, Destiny, Chaos, face up,” Martine said clearly. Did she know he was there? Probably not. When she was casting she seemed to see and hear nothing but the stones. She turned the other stones over. “And hidden… Joy, and Rebirth.” She looked up at Merroc, compassion on her face. “He has gone on to rebirth already, Merroc.”

  Merroc shook his hand free of hers.

  “And that is supposed to comfort me?” he said harshly. “That I will not see him again, even in the darkness beyond death?”

  Sigurd’s voice came from a big wing chair by the window. It usually sat by the fireplace, but someone had moved it so that its back was to the hearth, and to the door.

  “Perhaps Lady Death will be merciful to us, and take us soon, so we may be reborn with him.”

  Martine said nothing. She picked up the stones and placed them back in her pouch, then looked up, straight at Arvid. She had known he was there. Merroc followed her gaze and his face darkened. He turned back to Martine.

  “How may I take my revenge?” Merroc demanded. He spat in his hand again and Martine took it. With reluctance, Arvid thought.

  She cast the stones.

  “Chaos,” she said. “Darkness. Danger. Death. Destiny. All face up.” A pause which seemed to lengthen beyond bearing. Merroc’s breathing was loud in the silence, and Arvid found his hands were clenched into fists. “I am sorry, my lord,” Martine said formally. “This casting says that revenge is closed to you on pain of death. That no good will come to you or yours by attempting it.”

  He loosened his hand slowly, staring at her.

  “But you would say that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Ask any stonecaster, my lord,” she said. “They will tell you the same.” A flicker of some strong emotion went across her face. “I would not lie to you. If I did, the stones would never speak to me again.”

  She hesitated, not looking at Arvid, but he knew that whatever she was going to say was for him too. Perhaps mainly for him.

  “There is something you do not know. It was the relationship the old bloods had with the Powers which made the compact possible.”

  A shudder went through Arvid. The compact. The spell which kept the wind wraiths, the water spirits, the fire wraiths, the delvers in the earth, from killing and eating and destroying humans. He followed that trail of thought and took an involuntary step forward.

  “Do you mean,” he demanded, “that the wraiths and spirits are creatures of the Powers?”

  Martine stared at him in shock, as if she’d never thought that through. But she must have. She must have known.

  “In a way,” she started, her tone placatory. “But not in the way you mean. The Powers don’t control them. They don’t use them.”

  “But these creatures come from the Powers? Are born from them, so to speak?”

  She hesitated.

  “Answer me,” he said coldly, in the tone he would use to a servant. It was a mistake. He saw her face close against him and her spine stiffen.

  “I have no knowledge of that,” she said. “You know as much as I, my lord.”

  “But you suspect it!” Merroc snapped.

  Her head moved sideways—not quite a denial, more a rejection. “I suspect that the Powers are not the creators of this world, and it may be that whatever created them also created the wraiths and spirits. That there may be other beings we have never heard of, and mysteries we will never clarify. That life and death and rebirth is all we can be sure of.”

  Merroc pushed himself back from the table with angry impatience.

  “Come, Sigurd,” he said. He went to the wing chair and gently lifted his wife up, his hands at odds with the scowl on his face. “Let us go home.”

  “No,” Sigurd said. It was a flat no, an absolute denial.

  Merroc blinked. “I’ve ordered them to pack—” he began.

  “Then they may unpack. I will not leave this place until my son has quickened, and I have said goodbye to him.”

  “She says Osfrid has gone on to rebirth already, my dear,” he said. The pain and love in his voice were terrible to hear, and Arvid’s throat tightened in sympathy.

  “I believe nothing that Traveler bitch says,” Sigurd said clearly. Calmly. As though she spoke honey instead of vitriol. The flat voice was on the edge of madness. “I will live in her house until I see my son, and then I will spit in her face and leave.”

  Arvid flushed with anger and took a step forward, but Martine shook her head at him, her face full of pity. She stood up, and bowed to Merroc, who was staring at her with a combination of anger and uncertainty.

  “Your lady is welcome in this house for as long as she chooses,” Martine said. “But I must warn her, Osfrid will not quicken. He has chosen the path of rebirth already, and the gods rejoice in him.”

  Sigurd thrust herself out of the chair so fast that it slid backward and teetered. She spun on Martine, her face contorted.

  “You will not use my son’s name, whore!” she shouted.

  Martine bowed, calmly, and turned and walked out past Arvid. He looked at Merroc.

  “I understand the pain of your lady,” he said formally, “but it will be better if she does not speak of my wife again in that fashion.”

  “Better if they don’t see each other again,” Merroc said. For a moment they were just men together, trying to deal with contrary women. Arvid nodded and went out.

  Martine was in the guest chamber, telling Sigurd’s women the unwelcome news. They protested, and she raised her voice.

  “Will you tell your mistress that she cannot attend the quickening of her son?” Silence fell. “I thought not,” Martine went on. “Ready everything here as she would like it. She may have the use of my parlor also. If anything is needed, see me or my lord’s steward.”

  There was a chorus of “Aye, my lady” and Martine came out, shutting the door behind her. She stopped when she saw Arvid, her back straight and her mouth firm. She had looked like that the first time he had seen her, near the Great Forest, sitting on a restive chestnut gelding. The gelding had died, long since. He noticed, as if for the first time, the gray in her hair.

  She waited with perfect composure, a wall of serenity between them.

  “How can you be so calm when she insults you like that?” It was all he could think of to say.

  A flicker of amusement went over her face.

  “I’m a Traveler,” she said. “I’ve spent my life being insulted. If I had objected, my lord, I would have been lashed or garrotted or hung or killed in the pressing box. It’s not so hard to swallow an insult when that is the alternative.”

  She stared at him across a gulf he realized they would never cross.

  “You are safe now,” he said.

  “Am I?” she asked dryly. “It did not seem so, earlier.”

  His anger came back. Why would she throw that up at him, when he was able for the first time to talk to her calmly? It was anger laced with that irritation all men felt at women, at times. She should not be able to be calm when his own emotions were churned so hard and so fast.

  “Safe from others, I meant,” he said, knowing it was vicious but unable to control himself.

  She flinched.

  “I am at your mercy, my Lord Arvid,” she said formally, and bowed, then waited.

  He turned on his heel and went downstairs, slamming the outside door as he left.

  Mountainside, the Ice King’s Country

  The king’s footsteps always boomed along the corridor as he returned. The boy who had been set to listen came running for the queen, so that when Ari, Hárugur King, pale as uncooked bread, stumbled out of the King’s Pa
ssage, it was into her waiting arms. Nyr was there, too, ready to lend a strong shoulder to support his father over to the throne.

  They said nothing. It was better not to talk to the king when he came back, until he had readjusted himself to the real world again. Halda put a mug of warm mead into Ari’s hand, and guided it to his lips. He drank, shuddered, and drank again, the color slowly coming back into his face. She could see Nyr wondering, not for the first time, whether he would have the necessary courage, when it was his time to confront the Ice King.

  Finally, Ari stood up. It was time to call the others in. Nyr went to the door of the Council Cave and announced: “Ari, Hárugur King, has returned!”

  A cheer went up. It was never certain that a king would come back sane and whole, and Ari was a respected and valued ruler. The council crowded through the door first, as was their right, but Ari waved them back out again and went to stand by the central hearth of the big hall, where everyone could see him.

  He basked in its warmth for a moment, then he said, “The Ice King sends his greetings to his people.”

  Halda and Nyr knelt on one knee, along with everyone else. It was always a moment of wonder, that the Power of Ice would deign to notice them. Ari went on, “I asked our king if we should send a trading party to the east, and He had no objection.”

  Another cheer went up, from the younger men who wanted to go with Nyr, and from their mothers and sweethearts, who would much rather they went trading than into battle. Except for some older women, who looked sour. They didn’t like any change, Halda thought.

  After the return feast and the dancing, Ari took Halda and Nyr aside privately in the Council Cave. “He didn’t care,” Ari said, frowning and puzzled. “It was like something else was holding his attention. He just didn’t care, one way or the other.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” Nyr asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ari said. “It may mean that the attempt at trading is doomed, and you will have to fight anyway. When you go, make sure you are fully armed.”

  Halda felt her heart clench. She couldn’t bear it if Nyr was taken from her, too.