by J. V. Jones
He owed her a decent end. As he peered through the darkness toward the turn of the hill his spirits sank. They’d barely made any progress since sunset, simply retraced their steps from the chute. Glancing from his sword to Bear, he made a decision. One hour. No more.
He was gentle with her as they took their final climb.
Starlight lit the hillside, making the rocks glow blue. Raif thought about how he’d first met Bear—she’d been a replacement for the horse he’d lost in canyon country west of the Rift—and how she had carried him to the Fortress of Grey Ice. She had kept him sane, he knew that now. After the raid on the silver mine at Black Hole he was nearly lost. Bitty’s death had been too much to bear.
Raif girded himself for the memories. He would not fight them off or deny them: Bitty Shank, son of Orwin and sworn clansman of Blackhail, deserved better than that. He had not deserved to die at the hands of a fellow clansman.
Oathbreaker, Raif named himself, his lips moving. That morning on the greatcourt he had sworn to protect his clan . . . and he had not protected them.
He had killed them.
Raif sucked in air, welcoming the cold into cavities close to his heart. He was damned. And how should a damned man live his life?
A crunching sounding to his left brought him back. Swinging around, he saw that Bear had stumbled to her knees. Oh gods. He scrambled over to her, not caring where he placed his feet. Nightfall had sharpened the frost and walking through the gravel was like wading through sea ice. Bear was shivering intensely. Her eyes tracked him as he approached, and everything he saw in them told him he could not wait any longer.
“Little Bear,” he said softy. “My best girl.”
She was cool to the touch. Even now, she pushed her head toward his hand as he stroked her cheek. Kneeling, he moved his body alongside her, wanting to give her his heat. Her heart was beating out of time; he could feel it against his chest. Gently, he rubbed the ice from her nose. She was calm now; they both were.
“My best little Bear.”
Raif kissed her eyes closed and drew his sword. No one in the Known World could deliver a death blow with such accuracy and force, and for the first time in his eighteen-year life Raif Sevrance was grateful for that fact.
It was a mercy for both of them.
Curling himself around her cooling body, he lay and rested for a while in the Want.
TWO
The Sundering
Raina Blackhail ordered the halved pig’s carcass to be hauled from the dairy shed to the wetroom. Two days it had lain there, exposed to the warm and fragrant air, and the flies must have done their job by now. Besides, the smell was making her sick.
Jebb Onnacre, one of the stablehands and a Shank by marriage, was quick to nod. “Aye, lady. Couple of days in the wetroom and you’ll have some fine maggots to spare.”
Raina showed a brief smile. It was the best she could manage this cold midmorning. She liked Jebb, he was a good man and he bore his injuries stoically, but the night the Hailstone exploded, destroying the guidehouse, stable block, and east wall of the roundhouse, it seemed the weight of those structures had fallen upon her shoulders. And she had been bearing it now for a week.
“I’ll rig up a platform. Give it a little air along with the damp.” Jebb had lifted the carcass onto a sheet of oiled tarp in preparation for dragging it through the hay. Raina could tell from his hopeful expression that he wanted to please her, that by offering to do more than was necessary he was showing his support.
She was grateful for that. It gave her what she needed for a genuine smile. “Thank you, Jebb. I’d forgotten the maggots need good ventilation to grow.”
Jebb cinched the end of the tarp in his wrist. “Aye, lady. Makes you wonder what else we’ve forgotten as a clan.” With that, he jerked the carcass into motion and began dragging it toward the door.
Raina watched him go. His words had given her a little chill and she pulled her mohair shawl snug across her shoulders. The air in the shed was dusty with hay and the mites that fed on it made her throat itch. Gloomy gray light flooded the dimness as Jebb flung back the doors.
The stablehand’s head was still wrapped in bandages. Jebb had been sleeping on a box pallet in one of the horse stalls when the Sundering happened, and had ended up with a chunk of granite embedded in his skull. He’d bled for two whole days. Only the gods knew why he wasn’t dead. Laida Moon, the clan healer, had pronounced it to be a miracle of “the thick Onnacre head.” Jebb had embraced this diagnosis with such enthusiasm that he’d started referring to himself as “Old Thickey.”
Wearing one’s injuries with pride had become a way of life in the Hailhouse. Gat Murdock had lost an arm. Lansa Tanner was still abed with injuries too numerous to mention; it was likely she would lose an eye. Quiet, big-boned Hatty Hare had suffered burns on the right side of her face and shoulders. Duggen Harris, the little hay boy, had been burned even worse. Noddie Drook, whom everyone called the Noddler, had been slammed so hard against the wall of the Dry Run that he’d smashed six ribs and punctured a lung. And so the list went on: Stanner Hawk, Jamie Perch, Arlan Perch . . . Raina shook her head gently. There were too many injured to name.
The dead, though, they had to be named. She could not call herself chief’s wife if she did not catalogue the dead.
Bessie Flapp. Gone. The shock of the explosion had stopped her heart. The new luntman, Mornie Dabb, had been lighting torches in the tunnelway. His body was found three days later, blown all the way to the kaleyard. Mog Willey, Effie’s childhood friend. He’d been on his way to the guidehouse to deliver Inigar’s morning milk. His body was found in two pieces. Joshua Honeycut and Wilbur Peamouth, two stablehands like Jebb, only they were up and about that morning, preparing breakfast and scouring the workbenches for Jon Crickle, the stablemaster. Also dead. Craw Bannering’s head had been severed. Vernon Murdock, brother to Gat, hung on for four days before succumbing to his injuries. And it was a mercy the little milkmaid, Elsa Doe, had just lived out the day.
Inigar’s body had not been found, and Raina had an instinct that even when work crews cleared the rubble heap that had once been the guidehouse it would still be missing. Oh, he had died along with the Hailstone, she did not doubt it. But it would be just like Inigar to confound people in death. He had never been an easy man to get along with, and he was not going to be an easy corpse to find.
Stop it, Raina chided herself. What am I doing, making light of the dead?
Shamed, she continued to name the ones lost. It was a long list: thirty-nine clansmen and women as of this morning. Not counting the tied clansmen, those who farmed and worked their trades in the Hailhold but did not live in the roundhouse year-round and had not spoken oaths to defend it. Many of the tied clansmen who had died had been camped against the great fold’s eastern wall. Part of the floor above had collapsed upon them. Poor souls. They had come to the roundhouse seeking protection during the war.
And then there were the Scarpemen. Raina’s mouth tightened as she made her way toward the stable door. She was not going to count those. They had no business being here, had sworn oaths to a foreign clan. What was Mace thinking, to invite close to a thousand warriors and their families to stay indefinitely in the Hailhouse? True enough, Scarpe’s own roundhouse had been destroyed by fire, but let them build a new one—and stay within the Scarpehold while they did it.
Scarpe losses during the Sundering had been high. Many had taken to camping in the old grain store that lay hard against the eastern wall. The bell-shaped structure had been letting in rainwater for years, and the mortar was black and rotted. When the guidestone exploded, the walls and ceiling had caved in. Children had died; and perhaps if she looked deep enough inside herself she could find some sympathy for them.
But today she wasn’t going to try. Nodding her farewell to the new stablemaster, Cyril Blunt, she left the old dairy shed that was being used as a temporary stable. The cold of outside shocked her. Strange unseasonable winds wer
e blowing storm-clouds west. A wet snow had begun to fall and already the pines around the greatcourt were dusted white. People had begun to whisper that when the guidestone had exploded it had blasted away spring along with the roundhouse’s eastern wall. Normally Raina had no patience with such superstitious nonsense. But it had been unseasonably cold this past week, and if the gods could split a guidestone into a million separate pieces then they could surely rob a clanhold of its spring.
Raina Blackhail, take ahold of yourself. There are already enough doomsayers in this roundhouse. We don’t need one more.
Breaking into a run, she followed Jebb’s draglines toward the hole in the eastern wall. The sound of work crews hammering and sawing assaulted her ears. Nothing was more frightening to a clansman than a breach in his roundhouse wall and the rebuild went on day and night. After sunset, huge oil-burning torches were lit and the night crews took over. The night crews wore pot helms with candles fixed above their visors with blobs of wax. It was a strange thing to see. Strange and good. Every able-bodied Hailsman and Hailwife in the roundhouse—either with an oath or without—worked toward the reconstruction in some way. Longhead, who for as long as Raina could remember had been head keep of the Hailhold, had come into his own. The man was a wonder. Even with an inch of flesh missing from his left leg.
He came toward her now, hobbling with the aid of a bent stick. Never a man to waste words on greeting he got straight to the point. “Raina. I need to know when I can start clearing the guidehouse. We can’t seal the wall till it’s done.”
Raina took a breath to steady herself, then another to give herself more time. Dagro, her first husband, had taught her many things. Think before you speak was one of them. Seven days had passed since the Sundering. Seven days where the remains of the guidehouse had been left untouched. Raina could view the rubble from where she stood: a two-story heap of dust and jagged rock punctured by hunks of broken wall. Even though she’d seen it over a dozen times before, she still had to stop herself from reaching toward her measure of powdered guidestone for comfort. The Hailstone was dead.
As she looked on, the wind picked up, sending snow skirling and blowing plumes of dark gray powder from the rubble. Once men had treasured that powder; carried it into battle, borne it across continents, slipped it beneath their tongues as they spoke oaths, rubbed it on the bellies of their newborns, and sprinkled it over the closed eyes of their dead. It had been used as sparingly as gold. Now it was blowing in the wind.
Yet Longhead was right. Something had to be done about it. But what? And who was left to decide?
Raina studied Longhead’s face carefully. He was a man who had grown into his name, developing in his later years a high forehead and a long chin. Never married and seldom courted, he spent most of his time working alone and in silence. Raina wasn’t even sure if Longhead was his first name or last, or some nickname he’d picked up along the way. She wasn’t sure about much to do with the head keep, she realized. Including where his allegiances lay.
Looking into his bloodshot eyes she wondered if she detected some disapproval of her husband, Mace Blackhail. Above all else Longhead was a man who liked to get things done, and Mace’s failure to reach a decision about the remains of the guidestone was preventing Longhead from completing the most important task in the clanhold: rebuilding the eastern wall. Part of Raina couldn’t even blame Mace. He was clan chief, not clan guide. He guarded men’s bodies, not their souls.
Inigar Stoop was dead, and he had neither trained nor picked a successor. So who was left to save them?
It was a question that kept Raina awake at night, sweating and turning in her bed. The gods had abandoned Blackhail, and there was no clan guide to call them back.
Had Inigar realized the depth of his failure as the first splinters from the guidestone punctured his heart? Raina thought it likely that he had, and she felt some measure of pity for him. He had been a difficult man and she had not liked him, but during the last few years of their acquaintance she had found him worthy of respect.
Aware that Longhead was still awaiting her response, Raina made a decision. Gesturing toward the remains of the guidehouse, she said, “I will speak with my husband in due course.”
She could tell from the slight shrinking of his pupils that this answer did not satisfy him. She had chosen caution and spoken as a good wife, and she could see now he had expected more from her. He must have watched her this past week, she realized. Seen how she had taken charge of caring for the wounded, setting up a surgery in the dim and yeasty-smelling warmth of the oasthouse, and arranging to have potions, wound dressings and medicinal herbs brought in from every farmhouse within ten leagues. She had been the one to decide that the stables should be housed in the old dairy shed and that the horses be buried in the Wedge. When Anwyn had asked where the dispossessed Scarpemen should be housed, Raina had not deferred the decision to her husband; she was making arrangements for their shelter even now. The same with the relocation of the hayloft and a dozen other things. She had made all decisions herself.
The question of what to do about the remains of the guidestone was different. She had no expertise here. No one did. And although she recognized Longhead’s query as an opportunity to claim power, she did not want to gain it at the clan’s expense. There were matters here too important for that. The future would be set by the stone. Whatever became of its remains would be remembered by every man, woman and child in this clan. History would record it, rival clans would judge it, and scholars and holymen would mull over its significance for a thousand years. Nothing less than the pride and future of Blackhail was at stake.
So no. She would not decide the Hailstone’s fate single-handed, and if that disappointed Longhead then so be it. “Talk to me tomorrow,” Raina said to him, taking her leave. “I’ll know more then.” Stepping smartly around a cord of logs, she left him staring at the back of her head.
She felt a little breathless as she entered the smoky dimness of the roundhouse. It took some getting used to, this business of wielding power.
Two skunks and a handful of raccoons had been spotted in the roundhouse this past week, and Raina noticed the scent of animal musk as she made her way through the ruined east hall. It was cold too, and air switched back and forth as the wind moved through the wall. Oh, they had tarped and timbered it, but the outside still got in.
How could it not? Seven days ago the Hailstone had exploded and blown open the entire roundhouse. According to Hatty Hare, who had been up early, intending to ride out from the roundhouse to set traps, a giant fireball had rolled through the guide corridor and out along the stables. Hatty had been knocked off her feet. When she was found, three hours later, she was buried beneath a foot of dust and char. Ballic the Red, who’d been riding back from Duff’s stovehouse when it happened, told a story of seeing a flash of silver lightning split the northern sky. Raina herself had seen the great mushroom cloud of dust rising from the guidehouse, heard the whirr and snap of timbers as chunks of stone flooring collapsed. The hole punched in the eastern wall wasn’t that big really—about fifteen feet by twenty—yet the wall was three-feet-thick sandstone and the floor underneath had been unable to cope with the weight.
The roundhouse was still finding its level. Just last night part of the ceiling in the chief’s chamber had collapsed. Water was coming in from somewhere—Longhead pronounced it likely to be a broken well system—and the lower chambers were knee-deep in sludge. Countless cracks throughout the roundhouse were spilling dust, and some were growing longer. Crews of workmen and women were shoring holes, shoveling debris and bailing water.
Here, in the destroyed east hall, child-sized hunks of sandstone still lay strewn across the floor. Strange smelt lines radiated outward from the hole, and not for the first time Raina fought the desire to reach out and touch them. Gods did not leave quietly, without a trace. These were their footprints, she decided, these lines that sparkled like black ice and attracted metal so strongly that anyone w
ho walked through this chamber bearing a sword could feel it pull away from his skin. Raina’s own maiden’s helper, worn in a squirrel-fur sheath at her waist, jumped toward the wall as she passed the greatest concentration of lines.
Holding the knife against her hip, she made her way toward the entrance hall. Approaching the main stair, she spotted Jebb Onnacre, pig carcass still in tow, talking to Merritt Ganlow by the greatdoor. The stablehand was explaining how maggots were farmed. How the carcass needed to be exposed to the air for at least two days to enable flies to lay their eggs beneath the skin. The pig’s carcass was then stowed somewhere warm and damp to encourage the eggs to hatch and maggots develop. Done right, and within a week the carcass would be a mass of squirming yellow worms. Poor Merritt, gods love her, was doing her best to look interested whilst trying not to breathe in the stench. Raina decided to rescue her.
“Laida needs the maggots to clean out the wounds,” Jebb was saying, oblivious of the greenish tint spreading over Merritt’s face. “Eat the pus, they do. Leave the living flesh.”
“Merritt,” Raina called. “Have you a moment?”
“Raina!” Merritt exclaimed, her voice almost hysterical with relief. “Just the person I was looking for.”
Raina had never seen Merritt move so fast, and might have laughed out loud if it hadn’t been for the look of mild hurt showing in Jebb’s brown eyes.
“Jebb,” she said quickly to divert him. “Can you go and see Anwyn when you’re done? There’s some heavy lifting she needs a hand with.”
“Aye, lady.” Jebb nodded, all hurt over Merritt’s desertion forgotten. “I’ll be sure not to tell her who sent me.”
Raina did laugh then. She and Jebb were becoming co-conspirators, united in their mission to lighten the clan matron’s workload. No one worked harder than Anwyn Bird, no one was up earlier or went to bed later, or did as much good for the clan. Gods help you, though, if you even suggested that she might need a helping hand. Raina had taken so many scoldings over the matter that she now left Anwyn to herself. Well, almost. Anwyn Bird was her dearest, oldest friend and she could not stand by and watch her work herself to the bone.