A Sword from Red Ice (Book 3)

by J. V. Jones

  Aware he was being reprimanded, Bram bowed his head.

  “Come, Bram Cormac,” Wrayan said. “Take a walk with me around the pool.” She did not wait for him, and began walking a circuit of the artificial lake.

  It was a perfect circle, about eighty feet in diameter. Only a three-foot grass verge separated the lake from the wall that enclosed it. Bram was nervous as he followed the chief’s footsteps, worried that some errant impulse might make him leap into the water.

  And that was one place he did not want to be.

  He could see the lead coffins, dozens of them, lying beneath nine feet of water. Round and encrusted with mussels, they looked like pale, ghostly boulders. Bram wondered how the bodies of the Castlemilk chiefs had been fitted inside them, and didn’t very much like the answer he came up with.

  “Skerro Castlemilk, the Winter chief, used to farm the mussels and eat them.” Wrayan came to a halt by the edge. “He went insane. Some say it was the lead.”

  Bram could think of no suitable response. He frowned at the water, hoping to look serious and alert.

  Wrayan Castlemilk did not appear to notice. “The milkstone silt at the bottom is nearly a foot deep. At one time it was custom to have a boy stir it every day with a paddle so it looked as if the caskets were submerged in milk.” She smiled flatly at Bram. Sunlight sparkling off the shoulders of her silver cloak threw a strange brightness upon her face. “My brother Alban lies here, though he swore every day of his life that he did not wish to end up in this pool. Once a chief is dead, though, he has no say over his clan, his body. His sister.”

  She had ordered her brother buried here against his wishes, Bram realized.

  Wrayan acknowledged Bram’s expression with a small nod. “Someone will do it to me one day, order my body cut and sunk. It is the Milk way, and a clan is nothing without its ways. Dhoone, Blackhail, Bludd: what do you think makes them different?” A tiny movement of her wrist indicated that Bram need not bother formulating an answer: the Milk chief would supply one for him. “Our customs are the only things that separate us from other clans. We worship the same gods, abide by the same laws, want the same thing. It is in the small details that we forge an identity as clan; boasts we speak, weapons we carry, the manner in which we dispose of our dead. Twenty-eight years ago, when given a choice between betraying Alban and betraying the customs of this clan, there was only one answer for me. I am chief. If I fail to uphold the old ways I diminish us.” She gave him a cold look, a warning, before continuing.

  “Castlemilk is an old and proud clan, Bram Cormac, and I am an old and proud chief. We dance the swords, and mix our guidestone with oil and water and drink it like milk. Our best warriors fight with two swords and name themselves the Cream, and our girl children are taught one new way how to kill a man every year until they reach sixteen. We have been sworn to Dhoone for four hundred years but before that we stood alone. If you believe you have come to a lesser clan you are mistaken and you can march yourself right back to Dhoone. I will have you only on one term: and that is absolute loyalty to Castlemilk. Drouse is in the guidehouse, waiting upon my word. He expects to hear an oath and so do I.”

  She paused, her chest rising and falling beneath the fine silver weave of her cloak. For the first time Bram noticed the elk lore, fastened to the cinch of her braid. A thick hoop of spine. “I will leave you now,” she said, her voice calm. “You have a quarter-hour, then you will either make your way to the guidehouse or collect your belongings and depart this clan.”

  Bram nodded once in understanding and she left him standing by the man-dug lake. A moment passed and then something—a fish or an eel—broke the surface of the water, flashed briefly, then was gone. Bram wasn’t sure but he thought he saw teeth.

  Clouds heading in from the north were moving swiftly toward the sun and he could tell it wouldn’t be long before they killed the sunlight. For no good reason whatsoever he drew his sword and stood on the grass and inspected it in the last of the full sun. Light on the watered steel moved upblade toward the point. He tried angling the sword in different directions but he could not get it to move the other way.

  “It won’t be so bad, Bram. We both know you were never really cut out for Dhoone.” Robbie’s parting words sounded in Bram’s head.

  No going back.

  Abruptly, he sheathed the sword and headed out of the walled enclosure. He had made his decision.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Birch Way

  It was the fourth day amongst the birches. The mist that had formed overnight rolled through the forest in breaking waves. It was a landscape of ghosts, pale and silvery, with nothing green or blue to be seen. The trees disappeared into the clouds, their straight white trunks the same thickness from base to crown. Hundreds of thousands of birches had seeded from a single mother tree, and the dark charcoal-colored scars where limbs had broken off were the only way of distinguishing one tree from another. Minute differences in spacing and light had produced branches at differing angles and heights, and the marks they’d left behind dappled the bark like pawprints. Lan Fallstar read these prints, and they appeared to provide him with enough information to navigate the unchanging landscape of the birch way.

  Ash March tracked the Far Rider’s gaze as it jumped from tree to tree, noting the birches it settled upon and attempting to discern a pattern in Lan’s choices.

  They were walking their horses through the mist. The sun was a diffused steel disk low in the east. The air was damply cold. Underfoot the snow was wet and uneven. Ash had learned it hid potholes and pools of standing water. She was cautious as she placed her feet. The birches had grown on low-lying saturated topsoil, not all of it frozen. Often brown water oozed from the snow as she stepped upon it. Other times her feet would sense give followed by traction followed by more give, as the soles of her boots pushed through sloppy layers of snow, sedge, water, mud and dead leaves. Today she could not see her feet and relied upon following Lan’s path as closely as possible.

  She had not realized it would be such a long journey through the trees. Nor had she imagined that walking through them could make her feel as if she were imprisoned. The birches were like iron bars. Fifty feet tall and stripped bare of leaves, they stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see.

  She could not escape them, not on her own. While she was here she was dependent upon Lan Fallstar. If the Far Rider were to walk away and leave her she could be lost forever in these trees. Every birch and square foot of land looked the same. She had tried to apply what little she knew of the Sull path lores, looking for chips in the bark two feet off the ground, double nailheads sunk into the wood that looked like beetle holes until you stopped and inspected them, and subtle yellow burns in the tree moss where flames had been brushed against them in curving motions to form moon-shapes, but she had yet to spot anything so far. Most blazes did not seem to apply here. She knew the Sull often selected a single branch on a tree, stripped it bare of twigs and leaves and used it as a signpost to point the way of a trail, but the spindly crowns of the birches were as good as bare to begin with. And the slim, branchless trunks would be almost impossible to climb without spiked boots or ladders. They offered no footholds or handholds to aid an ascent. Rock blazes, bush blazes and fallen log blazes did not seem to apply either, as there was not a single fallen log, bush or rock to be seen in the entire forest. Snow, sedge and trees: they were its only features.

  She had noticed osprey nests in some trees, big whirlwindshaped constructions built out of twigs and scraps of sedge, and had spotted frequent elk and bear tracks, but although she suspected there was something to be learned from their presence she was unsure what that might be. Ark Veinsplitter would have helped her if he’d lived, explained how it was possible to navigate this land of phantom trees. He had made her Sull, drained her human blood to make way for Sull blood. He would have trusted her with the secrets of the birch way.

  Lan Fallstar did not. She had asked him outright last nigh
t as they’d made a miserable and tentless camp in the mist. The fire had slowly reddened and died, suffocated by the film of mist that coated every log. “How do you find your way here?” she had said. “I should know in case anything happens to you.”

  The Far Rider had been rubbing clarified horse fat into the crusted and canyonlike burn on his left arm. He stopped and turned his deeply angled face toward her and said, “Nothing will happen.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  The horse grease was stowed in a horn of fossilized ivory and he sealed it before speaking, thumping a stopper into the opening with the heel of his hand. “This Sull does not believe he has need to answer questions.”

  She had not argued with him. The tone of his voice was clear enough. He believed her to be an outsider, and he was right. In a way she could not fault him. The one clear thing she understood about the Sull was that they believed themselves to be a people under threat. They had once claimed the vast continent to the south; glass deserts, warm seas, city ports, rain forests, salt flats, marble islands, grasslands, high steppes, vast snaking rivers and mountains so tall their peaks could only be seen on a handful of days each year. And then there were the places beyond this continent, places with names that sounded alien and threatening to Ash. The Unholy Sea. Sankang. The Spoiled Lands. Balgaras. The Ore Islands. All this and more had once belonged to the Sull. Now they were reduced to a strip of land in the Northern Territories, perhaps a third of a continent.

  And they lived in fear they would lose it. Ash had grown up hearing stories of the Sull’s ruthlessness. Tales of the bloody battle at Hell’s Core, where the Sull slaughtered the Vor king’s son and ten thousand of his men and then refused to allow Vorish priests onto the battlefield to collect the bodies; tales of the massacre of innocents at Clan Gray where eight hundred women and children were killed in under an hour for daring to set foot on Sull land; and tales of the great burning of ships on the Sea of Souls where thirty-one vessels went down with all hands. What she had not heard at Mask Fortress was the other side of the tale. Of Sull dispossession and defeats, and of their great and driving fear they would one day lose their home. Every slaughter they carried out was defensive.

  Ash raised a hand as she passed one of the trees and touched its flaking and silvery trunk. These birches were part of the Sull’s defenses. They were an impenetrable wall guarding a vulnerable portion of its western border, and it wasn’t surprising that Lan Fallstar would not share their secret with someone who claimed to be Sull, yet neither acted nor looked like Sull.

  Glancing at the Far Rider, she wondered why she hadn’t told him about Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer, about the mountain pool where she had been made Sull, and about her journey east across the margins of the Want. There was still a chance that the Naysayer was tracking both of them . . . and she hadn’t mentioned that either. Lan had not asked about how she had come to be in the Racklands south of the Flow, and she wondered about that also. What did he know or assume about her? She tried to think back to the moment she had given him her name. She had been so nervous, so determined to stand her ground, that she had not thought to read his reaction. Had it meant something to him? Had word of Ash March, the Reach, traveled ahead of her?

  Lan Fallstar was walking beside his fine black stallion and occasionally he would raise his hand to touch the horse’s neck. He was dressed in serviceable riding clothes, deerhide coat and pants, a cloak collared in marten, and stiff boar’s-hide boots. If he had been wearing a hat he might have passed at distance for a ranger or hunter. His black hair, gleaming with bone oil and part braided with lead clasps, gave him away. A bluish tint flashed when the sun hit it. That, together with the lead clasps that had weathered to a color and texture not unlike the surface of the moon, pronounced him as Sull. Only when you drew closer did you see the faint goldenness of his skin and the deep triangular shadows cast by his cheekbones upon his cheeks.

  He knew she was minding him, yet said nothing and did not turn. Ash wished she were the sort of person who found conversation easy, who could say the kind of interesting and clever things that left people wanting to reply. Right now she could think of nothing but trees. Trees and more trees. And as they all looked the same she could hardly say, Look at that one. Isn’t it unusual?

  Frowning she kicked up the mist and watched as it swirled like grease on water. She wondered why she didn’t trust him.

  And he didn’t trust her.

  “How long before we leave the birches?” she asked.

  Something about his shrug made Ash think he’d had it ready and waiting. “The birch way is long and not all paths are open. We travel as we must.”

  Snow squelched beneath Ash’s feet and she lifted the hem of her lynx fur off the ground. The Far Rider had told her nothing, and she doubted whether the subject was worth pursuing but went ahead and spoke anyway. “How long did it take you last time?”

  He turned to look at her, his expression cool. It took a moment before she realized that this look was to be his only reply.

  Just like her foster father. Penthero Iss seldom deigned to answer questions he judged beneath him. It was a fact she had realized early on. As a young girl she’d worked hard to ask her foster father intelligent questions. Why did the ambassador from Ille Glaive ask not to be seated next to the Whitehog at dinner? If the crop fails in the eastern bread plains where would the city buy its grain? She’d wanted to please him so badly, wanted desperately to hear those rare words of praise: Almost-daughter, you’re such a good girl.

  Halting memories of her foster father before they could hurt her, Ash rubbed the nose of her gelding. On a whim, she held the horse back, opening some space between herself and Lan Fallstar. Gray mist poured in to fill it.

  Why did she feel the need to talk to him? And why was she disappointed when he dismissed her? She didn’t understand it. His coldness should be repellent, but it wasn’t.

  Suddenly she missed Ark and Mal very much. While she was with them she felt as if she were part of something. Included. They might have only revealed a small portion of their knowledge and secrets, but it was enough to give her hope that over time she would learn more. Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer were the reason she had become Sull. The two Far Riders were honorable and full of purpose, and she had assumed that all Sull were the same. Lan Fallstar was different. He kept her on the outside, withholding information. Keeping secrets.

  She’d played this game before with Penthero Iss. Her foster father had been a master at keeping secrets. For seventeen years he’d concealed the true reason he’d adopted her as his daughter. Was something similar happening here? Did Lan know she was the Reach?

  Ash watched as Lan rode ahead of her into the mist. If he suspected she was more than she appeared, he was doing a fine job of feigning ignorance. He treated her as if she were a lesser being; someone just pretending to be Sull. Last night when she had asked Lan to raise the small wolfskin tent he carried in one of his saddlebags, he had told her they would sleep out in the open. “If you want to lie in this mist then go ahead,” she had replied. “I’ll sleep in the tent.”

  “No,” he had told her coldly. “Sull need no cover on a full moon.”

  It had felt like a slap in the face. If there was a custom here she was not familiar with, why could he not simply explain it? Why did he treat her with contempt? And why did she let it hurt her?

  She had spent a miserable night, rolled in her cloak and drowned in vapor. When she’d woken, her hair was glistening with thousands of tiny drops of moisture. The Far Rider was sitting on his saddlebag, facing southeast. Fingers of mist were curling past his blank and open eyes. As soon as she moved he stirred. His face was pale, the skin around the jaw oddly slack. He asked her to tend to the horses while he rebuilt the fire. She had been eager to do his bidding.

  By the time she’d returned from feeding, watering and brushing down the horses Lan was back to his normal self. He did not speak to her as they ate their breakfast of dr
ied horsemeat and raw and fertilized snipe eggs.

  Disappointed, Ash had looked out at the prison of trees and wondered when she would see the end of them. The first night she had met Lan Fallstar, he had warned her about the birches. What day had he said the insanity set in? She knew he had been referring to a person traveling alone and without knowledge, but she felt it anyway. He rarely spoke to her, and as she had no understanding of how the forest was laid out she was left with the dizzying sense that she was walking the same path over and over again. It was as if the birches were revolving in a great wheel around her. She had no way of gauging her progress.

  Today, with the mist swirling at knee height and the clouds low and hazy, the world had been reduced to a band of stakes. She couldn’t even carry out her normal job, which was to collect any stray branches that had snapped from the trees—she could not see the forest floor. From time to time, she would step on a branch, snapping it in two, and would pick it up and add it to the bundle on the gelding’s rump. She had a sense that by gathering the fallen branches she was doing more than merely collecting firewood. The task had the feeling of housekeeping about it. It was as if by removing any identifiable marks, she was maintaining the birch way. When she had asked Lan about this his only reply had been “It is forbidden to cut down the birches.”

  Ash wished she knew more about the Sull. Her lack of knowledge made her vulnerable. Right now she existed at Lan’s mercy, and she did not know enough about men and Sull to judge whether this made her safe or unsafe. She did not know her own worth.

  She knew he watched sometimes; when she slipped off her cloak and dress to wash and sleep, when she rubbed grease into her arms and legs, and loosened her hair. During her final year in Mask Fortress, she had grown accustomed to frank attention from men. Some had told her she was beautiful, others had whistled as she rode across the quad. She had not disliked the attention. Sometimes she had even invited more of it. It gave her an intoxicating little thrill of power.