Ember and Ash

by Pamela Freeman

  They spelled the horses every couple of hours, whenever they came to a clearing with enough sunlight in it to feel safe, although Ember was sure that feeling was an illusion. At least the clearings gave her something to do. She searched the ground for plants that the horses found edible and harvested as much as she could, stuffing it into a sack, knowing that in the mountains feed would be scarce. Tern helped her, while Ash and Cedar scouted for small game, and Holly and Curlew kept watch.

  “Don’t go far,” she said to her cousins, and Cedar grinned.

  “Yes, Mam,” he said mockingly, but when he looked out into the shifting shadows of the trees, his face clouded and his hand again went to his belt, as if to find something that wasn’t there.

  Most of the plants Martine had taught her to recognize, and she knew which to avoid: baneberry, nightshade, dogbane. But there were many others, like the heart-shaped twayblade and cow wheat, horsetail fern and bracken and even some sedges by the streams that she could cut with her belt knife and stash away. She came back triumphant from one sortie with a handful of tiny strawberries, sweet as honey in the mouth. Only one berry for each of them, and one over which she gave to Tern, who blushed.

  All the herbs were in blossom. She walked through them surrounded by butterflies and bees, busily harvesting too, finding the meagre drops of nectar in the heart of the tiny wildflowers.

  She looked up from collecting some fresh tight-curled fronds of bracken to find Ash staring at her, a dog on either side, also staring. Her red hair crinkled so much, it was impossible to keep tightly bound, and she was abruptly aware of the strands across her face and neck, of the sweat under her arms. She must look as mucky as a cowgirl. She grinned and shrugged at him and the corners of his mouth lifted in a small smile. Then Grip bayed once and was away, across the clearing, chasing the black ear tips of a hare above the grass.

  “Grip!” she called. “Not in the Forest!”

  Fast as thought, Ash grabbed his bow, nocked an arrow and let fly. The hare leaped once and lay still, the arrow quivering in its side. Grip happily collected it and brought it back to Ash, laying it at his feet and sitting back as he’d been trained.

  Ember looked at Ash wonderingly. She’d known he had talent with the bow, but nothing like that.

  “I couldn’t let him go off into the Forest,” Ash said, almost apologetically. “Besides, they need fresh meat.”

  He gutted and jointed the hare swiftly and fed the dogs. The hare’s fur was thick and full so close to winter, but it was in moult, changing from its white winter coat to its brown summer one, so it was less valuable.

  “No way of tanning it, anyway,” Ash said, throwing it to Holdfast to play with. She and Grip had a joyful game of tug-o’-war with it before they all set off again.

  Holly called camp when they came to a clearing with a running stream about an hour before sunset.

  They saw to the horses in a watchful silence. Birds were settling down in their nests and the quiet whispering of the trees was easier to hear as the evening breeze began. The mosses and small shrubs rustled as the night creatures emerged.

  Merry shivered under the curry as an owl called sleepily and was answered. Ember patted her.

  “Settle down, you’re all right,” she said, and the cheerful, familiar scolding tone worked. She stood placidly as Ember finished with the polishing rag and then combed her mane and tail free of the burrs and twigs they’d picked up. Not as many burrs as in mid-summer, thank the gods.

  Holly had stopped grooming her mare Simple, and was standing, brush in hand, her head cocked to listen.

  “Can you hear that?” she asked Curlew, but he shook his head.

  “Birds,” he said. Holly frowned.

  “No, something else,” she said. “Something calling.”

  “Calling what? Who?” Ember asked, but Holly shrugged.

  “It’s gone now. It sounded like… I don’t know. Like someone calling the cows home.”

  As they sat in the growing dusk to their hard bread and cheese and dried fenberries, Ash sat next to Ember and said quietly, “Don’t think about fire tonight.”

  “I’m not that stupid!” she flashed. The very idea of calling Fire within the Forest brought her out in a cold sweat. She had never realized how many ways there were to be afraid. At home there were, of course, lots of ways to die, most of them linked to the intensely cold winters: frostbite, the dry cough that turned to coughing blood, windbite, wolves, wolverines, snow blindness that led you over crevasses and into drifts, simply failing to make it home by nightfall. But they were known dangers, and there were methods to deal with all of them—mostly involving being home by nightfall.

  But here there was no home, and no shelter, and the dangers were so many and so different that there was nothing which could protect them. And that was without the Powers of Forest and Fire stalking them.

  Life was not easy in the Last Domain, so its people worked together, kept each other safe, stayed in groups. She had lived her life in a warlord’s fort, surrounded by people whose job it was to keep her safe and well. To be out here, with so few other humans, was deeply unsettling. It was like walking out onto the lake ice the first time in early winter, when you weren’t sure it would bear your weight. Every creak of the ice brought your heart to your mouth; every hint of danger here brought her out in a sweat.

  Remembering the dead they had already left behind, her eyes filled. A tear dropped onto her fenberries, and she wiped her eyes surreptitiously, but Ash saw.

  “I can’t tell you it will be all right,” he said.

  “I don’t need you to tell me that!” she snapped, getting up and moving away. “I’m not a child!” She was sorry a moment later, but when she turned back to look at him, his face was only a blur in the failing twilight and she couldn’t tell if she had hurt his feelings. She sat down again, a little nearer to him, feeling his warmth strike across the air between them, making her heart beat more strongly. She was achingly aware of his bare forearms where he had rolled up his shirt. A crescent of moon edged over the trees, the moonlight showing Ash’s muscles and tendons clearly, his big crafter’s hands… she shivered at the thought of those hands touching her and couldn’t remember what she should be saying.

  “I wish I were braver,” she said randomly. “Like Mam.”

  “Aye,” Holly said, “your mam’s brave all right. I saw her rebuild the compact and face down the wraiths. Saved us all, her and the other three.”

  The compact. The spell which allowed humans to go about their business without attack from wind wraiths, or water spirits, fire sprites or delvers, the dark beings who lived underground. Without that spell, existence would be terrifying and hand-to-mouth; every move out of doors fraught with danger, every hunting trip, every attempt to sow seed, an invitation to disaster. The compact had made the Domains possible. Sometimes it had seemed impossible to Ember that it was her mother, with three others, who had remade that spell when it began to fray twenty-one years ago. Her mother who had such trouble sewing or brewing or even ordering servants, though she did all those things because a warlord’s lady must, in the northern domains. But there were times when her mother cast the stones to predict when the Ice King’s men would attack. When she had sent men out to fight, and die. Then Ember had watched her with awe; her green eyes seemed like gateways to other places, other Powers, and Ember had been fervently glad that she had no Sight at all, that the gods had no interest in her, had given her no responsibility. Her mouth quirked, thinking of that unfounded relief.

  The night was growing darker, despite the thin moon which showed through the very tops of the trees around them but cast the clearing into deeper shadow.

  Holly lifted her head, on alert.

  “Hear it?” she asked. Ember shook her head. Cedar got up and went to the edge of the clearing.

  “There’s something…” he said.

  “Aye. A calling,” Holly said slowly.

  “I can’t hear anything,” Ash sa
id.

  “You’ve got about as much Sight as a rock,” Cedar said dismissively, although not unkindly. Ash nodded as though that were old news.

  “It’s gone now,” Holly said, almost regretfully.

  Ember slept with difficulty, aware of Ash’s warm bulk lying next to her, tormented by dreams where that warmth grew into an inferno of passion but never reached satisfaction.

  The Last Domain

  Poppy and Larch spent the night in a village even smaller than Acorn, where the Voice turfed his family out so they would have somewhere to sleep. Poppy would have protested, but Larch shook her head. “It’s the warlord’s dignity we uphold,” she whispered to Poppy. “He wouldn’t sleep in a barn, so we shouldn’t.”

  “I thought you were all Valuers around here?” Poppy whispered back. Valuers believed that all people were worth the same. The Last Domain was a stronghold for them, the place where the Valuers’ Plantation had been set up as a refuge for those running from injustice or for those who simply wanted to work toward equality.

  Larch laughed silently. “Still working on it.”

  Lord Arvid’s mother had been a Valuer, and Poppy knew that he respected those beliefs, even if he felt he still had to be the warlord. Why, he had set up a Domain Council even before the Resettlement. Grammer Martine was Valuer through and through, of course, although she wouldn’t say so. “I’m no respecter of rank,” was how she put it, which was funny because she was a warlord’s lady.

  The mattress on the cupboard bed was thick linen over gorse branches, and it smelled wonderful, like honey and nuts and apricots, but the gorse prickles worked their way through the linen and woke her in the middle of the night. Poppy wriggled them flat and lay, listening to the dark.

  The wind had risen and it was colder. She burrowed under the blankets and breathed the warm scented air, hoping the wind would drop before dawn.

  But in the morning it was still cold, with a steady breeze blowing from the north. Her family never came to visit Grammer without bringing the felt coats her Aunty Drema had made them, and Poppy was glad of it as she pulled on the bright blue and black warmth and fastened the toggles.

  “Nice,” Larch said as they mounted, and they talked clothes for a while as they rode further north, to Salt, a town in a low range of hills which owed its prosperity to a salt mine. They met the Salt Town Council in the Moot Hall, a big building for a town this size, with gilding on the doorframe that wouldn’t have disgraced a lady’s chamber.

  The council, including its Voice, a woman of about sixty with jet-black hair who reminded Poppy strongly of her grandmother, were shocked and afraid at their news, although since they had spent a whole night without fire they were more prepared to believe it.

  Then Poppy saw the Voice exchange a meaningful glance with another councillor, a younger man, and saw a small, acquisitive smile light his face. They would see this as an opportunity to make money, she realized. Salt would be the most sought-after commodity in the domain, the only sure way to cure raw meat and make it safe to eat.

  Larch saw the smile, too, and stepped forward, holding out a letter.

  “My lord Arvid knows that you will understand when he requests that you keep the price of salt to its normal level.”

  The Voice looked sour, but she took the letter.

  “Your trade will increase anyway,” Poppy ventured. It didn’t make them any happier, but then the Voice looked up from the letter and said, “He’s going to let us off taxes this year if we hold the price steady.”

  That was Granfer Arvid, all right, a trader to his bones. The council relaxed a little and variously grinned or smiled or sniffed in disparagement, but the atmosphere had shifted to acceptance.

  Outside the Moot Hall, the weather was sharper than ever. The Voice looked north, toward the higher hills, and shook her head.

  “Not seasonable, a north wind this time of spring,” she said. “But there you are—might as well spit at the stars as complain about the weather.” She brooded a little. “If this goes on, we’ll all end up sleeping in the mines. Won’t be the first time. Last blizzard the whole town was down there.”

  Poppy’s face must have displayed her puzzlement, because the Voice laughed, kindly. “Always the same down there, lass. Winter or summer, always a little bit cool but nothing more than that.”

  She stomped off, waving to a boy to go and get their horses.

  The wind picked up Poppy’s hair and flicked it painfully into her eyes. She blinked back tears, dug her coat’s matching hat out of her pocket and put it on, but she was still cold.

  Larch reached out to tuck a strand of hair back behind Poppy’s ear, her fingers chilly. Poppy blinked in surprise and Larch snatched her hand back and stuck it in her pocket, looking down at the ground with a red face.

  Oh, Poppy thought. Oh. Her body was swept with warmth. Looking at Larch’s face, she felt a sense of horizons widening, like taking the last few steps out of a valley and standing on a ridge, with all the world laid out before you.

  “Thanks,” she said softly. Larch shot her a look and then paused, both of them caught by the gaze, both slowly smiling. The boy came back with their horses and waited impatiently. It wasn’t good to keep the horses standing in this cold wind.

  “White Springs next, then Pine Hill, Shell Lake, and Timbertop,” Larch said, trying to sound businesslike.

  “Aye,” Poppy said. “Let’s go.”

  They rode off together as if they’d been doing it for years instead of days.

  The Great Forest

  The path narrowed between sharp black trunks like spears. Curlew went first, Holly last, with Ember safely in the middle position with Tern.

  Under the thick shade they were walking into silence. Bird calls fell behind them and they no longer even heard the warning kik-kik-kik of the woodpeckers. Ember looked up. There was a strip of sky above them, palest blue. It floated, looking unreal. Outside that strip, what was happening? Clouds? Storm? Sunlight streaming golden and hazy with the scent from the trees below? She wondered if the two guards who had turned back had reached home safely, and sent a prayer after them.

  “Halt!” Curlew called. Ember reined in Merry and stood in the stirrups for a better view, but Ash, ahead of her, was doing the same and she couldn’t see past his broad shoulders.

  Impatiently, she dismounted and tied Merry off to a nearby branch, then slid forward past Thatch with a “Good boy,” a reassuring hand on his rump so he wouldn’t kick. Ash followed her.

  There was an elk on the path, taller than any Ember had ever seen. Its antlers were in full summer growth even this early in the season, and it was unquestionably a bull. It stood broadside across the path, turning its head to stare at them impassively.

  Holly, Tern and Cedar arrived to stand behind them. The path was so crowded that even dismounted they could not all stand abreast.

  Cedar smiled.

  “So, do we just stand here until the world freezes again?”

  “We can’t go off the path,” Ash said.

  Ember shivered at the thought. No, she wasn’t going to leave the path.

  “It has to move sometime,” Holly said.

  Ash’s hand, as though moving without his conscious thought, went to his bow, but Cedar grabbed his wrist.

  “No, brother,” he said. “I really wouldn’t.”

  “May be it’s a messenger from the Forest,” Tern piped up.

  “But what’s the message?” Ash pondered.

  Ember walked forward, shrugging off Curlew’s cautionary hand. Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast, but if this was a messenger from the Forest, then she was the proper person to treat with it. She stopped a double arms’-length from the animal, so close she could smell it: musky and a little rank.

  “Greetings,” she said clearly, and gave her best formal bow, even allowing her head to tip flat as she bent, to indicate the respect given to those superior in office, although not in birth. “We entreat you, let us pass.”
>
  The elk turned its head and looked, not at her, but straight at Cedar. He stirred in surprise and came forward, and Ember ceded her place to him, easing past him and rejoining the others. Ash nodded approval at her, and she was thankful for the reassurance.

  Cedar stood on the balls of his feet, prepared for battle and then, as if realizing it, visibly forced his muscles to go lax until he was in his normal lounging posture.

  “I greet you,” he said, and bowed, but differently. Lower, to indicate respect, but with his head raised. It was a Valuer’s bow, and the elk snorted as though he found it funny, his brown eyes apparently amused.

  Then the elk turned his back on Cedar, raised his tail, and deposited a hot stream of dung at his feet. The elk looked back at Cedar as if inviting protest, but Cedar was laughing, laughing hard.

  “So that’s what the Forest thinks of us!” he gasped.

  It was infectious. Ember’s fear twisted into surprise and laughter, and the others were chuckling, too.

  “Thinks of you, my lad!” Ash said, smiling broadly.

  As if approving their mirth, the elk moved, threading its way through the narrow tree trunks, disappearing into the shadows surprisingly fast, and they were left with only a pile of fresh dung to say it had been there at all.

  The loose pat steamed. Cedar bowed mockingly to it.

  “I salute you, message from the Forest,” he said.

  Immediately, the dung shifted slightly. Curlew called, “Get back, lass!” and Ash took Ember by the elbows and swung her around behind him, lifting her clean off her feet.

  “Ash!” she protested, but he kept an arm out, preventing her from squirming back, so that she had to peer over the top of his elbow.

  A plant was growing out of the dung. Fast, too fast, it sprouted one leaf, then two, then the stem grew and grew until it was waist high. Not a plant she recognized: green and mottled brown, it kept the look and scent of its origin. Cedar stared at it with a mixture of astonishment and elation.