by J. V. Jones
He stood and let the sun warm him and the snow cool him. And when he was ready he looked down into the Rift.
For the first time ever, Raif was aware of beating hearts deep within its depths.
TWENTY-SEVEN
A Castleman for a Year
Dalhousie Selco, the swordmaster at Castlemilk, kept an hourglass slung around his neck on a chain and used it as a torture device. If you as much as glanced at it he’d grab the chain and twist it, turning the hourglass from vertical to horizontal. Stopping time. Only when he was satisfied that you and the other young men he was training had been suitably punished did he twist the chain back and let time run.
Bram was learning fast: best not even to look at the swordmaster, let alone his glass. That path led to double trouble. Trouble from Dalhousie now. Trouble from the other boys later. You made him give us an extra fifteen minutes—in the snow.
It was true enough. They were training on the smallest of the three swordcourts at the rear of the roundhouse, and when they’d trudged out before noon and Dalhousie had directed them to the only court that had not been cleared of snow they all thought he’d made a mistake. No one had dared say so. Though Enoch had whispered to Bram, “Either Housie’s off his nut or he’s going to make us shovel snow.” Whispering was a grave error in the swordmaster’s presence. If he heard you he would whack your shoulder with his wooden scabbard. Luckily for Enoch there was snow: five pairs of feet crunching through it on their way to the swordcourt had provided sufficient noise to camouflage his offense.
Even when it had become obvious that Dalhousie had not made a mistake and did indeed intend to put them through their forms while making them stand in two feet of snow, the full extent of his evil plan had yet to be revealed. Bram had trained with Jackdaw Thundy, the old swordmaster at Dhoone, and he knew that any swordmaster worth his salt was tough and demanding. He hadn’t known they were capable of torture.
“Castlemen,” Dalhousie had shouted when they were all assembled on the court. “Pull off your left boots and let’s get moving.”
Bram Cormac, Enoch Odkin, Trotty Pickering and Shamie Weese, known as Beesweese, had looked at each other, round-eyed and blinking.
“Now!” roared Dalhousie.
At first Bram had been glad he had his socks on—tubeshaped sheaths of rabbit skin rendered bald by constant use—but after five minutes of plunging his foot in and out of the snow the material had become wet and icy and he ended up pulling it off. At least the bare skin could dry off a bit between dunkings. Dalhousie had set them in pairs—Bram against Enoch, Trotty against Beesweese—and made them stand opposite each other while they took turns executing and defending forms.
“Swan’s neck! Bluddsmen’s farewell! Hammer cut! Harking’s needle!” Dalhousie Selco marched from one end of the court to the other, shouting out the forms. Every so often he would explode into motion, and his chosen victim would have to defend himself against a series of attack forms while screaming out their names. Occasionally Dalhousie would throw in a new form, and Gods help you if you mistook it for something else.
“If you don’t know it cover you body and step back!”
It left Bram’s ears ringing. Dalhousie had the loudest voice he had ever heard.
“Cormac. What’s the difference between a swordsman and a man with a sword?”
Bram had been moving through a series of high blocks, defending against Enoch’s head blows, while trying to keep his bare foot out of the snow. He was still not accustomed to being called Cormac and it took him a moment to realize that Dalhousie was addressing him. The rule on the swordcourt was that you never broke away from an engagement to answer questions. You shouted out as you fought.
“Training,” screamed Bram.
“No,” Dalhousie bellowed. “Experience. A man knows nothing until he’s been in a genuine blood-spurting, puke-making, knuckle-bursting sword brawl. You can train every day between here and damnation and you’ll still be a fool with a sword. You have to get out there and fight, see a man’s eyes and know he’s scared shitless, and realize he’s seeing the exact same thing staring back.” With that, Dalhousie launched himself at Bram.
Sword high from countering head blows, Bram was forced into an awkward lower-body block. Elbow up and extended, wrist pivoting inward, he lost control of his sword the instant the first blow hit. Metal screeched as Dalhousie used Bram’s sinking blade as a fulcrum to turn his sword point into the center of Bram’s gut. As Bram felt the hard jab of blunted steel against his navel, a second blow cut him on the side of the neck. Enoch Odkin.
“Good work,” Dalhousie told the lanky Castleboy. He had nothing to say to Bram.
Enoch gave Bram a little shrug when the swordmaster’s back was turned. He was older than Bram, probably sixteen or seventeen, with blue-black hair and thick downy eyebrows that met in the middle. He’d rolled his left pant leg up to the knee, revealing stupendously hairy legs and the kind of scars that stableboys got from being kicked by unfamiliar horses. His foot was bright pink with cold.
Bram decided he held no grudge against him. He also decided he’d had enough of defending and went on the attack. Enoch raised his sword and stepped back, sending his tender pink toes into the snow. Bram cut sideways with his sword, forcing Enoch to set down his entire foot. A second cut, a perfect mirror of the first, caused Enoch to shift his weight to the side. His bare foot lost traction for the briefest instant; Bram knew this because he saw the momentary loss of control register in Enoch’s eyes. It was a small thing then to slide under his guard and stick him in the ribs.
That was when Bram had made the mistake of looking at Dalhousie and his hourglass. He wanted to see if the swordmaster had watched the exchange between him and Enoch, and unfortunately his gaze fell short of Dalhousie’s head. They were, at that point, well into the last third of sand and probably had less than a quarter to go before they could pull on their boots and defrost their feet. Yet when Dalhousie saw Bram looking in the direction of the glass, he smacked his lips and stopped time. Trotty and Beesweese slowed their sword strikes to look over at Enoch and Bram. Enoch put his eyebrows to work, raising them up and sideways in the direction of Bram Cormac.
“Fight on,” Dalhousie warned. He didn’t start time again for fifteen minutes.
By the end of the session Bram’s toes were so numb that he could no longer tell when they touched the ground. He had to look. The pain in his heel where chilblains were forming felt strangely unrelated to the cold. It was as if someone had taken a razor to his foot and chopped it into squares. When it came time to put his boot on, he couldn’t do it, and just sat in the snow and looked at it.
“Put it on,” Dalhousie said approaching, his voice pitched at a volume below loud. “I know it’s only a wee walk back to the house, but do it. A swordsman never neglects his body.”
Bram wrung out the rabbit sock and pulled it on. It felt like slime, but he didn’t think he’d get the boot on without it.
“Good. Do you know why I made you take it off?”
“No.”
Dalhousie squatted on the flattened snow. He wasn’t a big man, but it was easy to forget that. His hair was short, and so thick and curly it seemed to have muscles. Unlike his beard, it showed no gray. “You never know what you’re going to get in a melee; mad men not caring if they get ripped to pieces as they come at you, a one-to-oner turning into a one-to-three, acid thrown on your back, pants falling around your ankles, blood in your eyes, open wounds, frostbite. Me facing you and politely exchanging blows is not how it happens. A good swordsman knows how to fight through surprises. He’s prepared to be unprepared.”
Bram nodded.
Dalhousie had upended the hourglass around his neck and yellow sand was running through the globes. “You’re quick, I’ll give you that. And you can make your size work for you. Come see me in the Churn Hall at dawn and I’ll show you a couple of knee stickers.”
Bram eased on his boot as he watched the swordmaster cross o
ver to Beesweese, exchange a few words on his technique, and then head off to the house. He was tired and beaten up and he knew he would get a big bruise on his neck where Enoch Odkin had sneaked him. It would go with the others he’d gotten over the past days. And then it would simply go.
Hauling himself up from the snow, he realized his pant seat was soaked through. This, together with his half-numb foot, didn’t make for a pleasant walk back. The sun was behind clouds and the air hovered just above freezing. The kitchen gardens, walled garden, stable court, playground and cattle standing were lumpy with new snow. Two grooms were trying to force the stable doors open through thick drifts. A big white dog was barking at them.
A Castleman for a year. Bram reached into his tunic and slipped his new, alien guidestone from its hidden pouch. The gray liquid was suspended in water, and held in a stoppered vial made of cloudy glass. At one time Bram had believed that only the head warrior wore his Milkstone in this manner, but now he knew that all Castlemen and women wore theirs in much the same way. The difference was that Harald Mawl was allowed the privilege of display. All others, including the Milk chief herself, must show discretion when wearing their portion of powdered guidestone. It was a small thing, but Wrayan Castlemilk had been right when she said such small things made a clan.
Bram had seen her little since that day by the gravepool. She had attended the swearing of his First Oath, causing no small ripple of surprise when she stepped forward to accept Bram’s swearstone and act as second to his oath. Bram had at first been relieved. Every yearman worried about that moment—who, if anyone, would step forward and back him? No one wanted to stand before his clan, alone and in silence, unclaimed. Yet afterward Bram had thought about it and wondered if he really wanted a chief holding the stone that was under his tongue as he spoke the Castlemilk oath.
“I will keep the Castlewatch between the Milk and the Flow and stand ready to fight for one year.” It was a simple oath, unlike Dhoone’s, and it did not claim that extra day.
The ceremony had taken place outside the guidehouse, in view of the Milk River, with the sun setting between ships of crimson cloud. It was the first oath Bram Cormac, brother to the Dhoone king, had spoken. He was a clansman: it would not be his last.
His days had been busy since then, filled with names and customs in need of learning, and the three separate and distinct pursuits that filled his day. Pol Burmish, the warrior who had greeted Bram at the door on that first night, had taken him to meet the swordmaster the morning after First Oath, and his training had begun in earnest. Swordfighting was taken more seriously here than at Dhoone and the level of swordcraft was higher. Bram had thought himself proficient with the longsword. He was wrong. At Dhoone he had been judged too small to train for the hammer and ax, and had taken up the sword instead. He was Mabb Cormac’s son and people said he had some of his father’s skill. It was a confusing time. Mabb promised to train him, then died. Jackdaw Thundy, the old swordmaster, had a stroke and retired, and was replaced by Ewall Meal, who had been Mabb Cormac’s old rival. Ewall had liked the son little better than the father, and the training sessions had not gone well. “You’re too small, boy. Step aside and let the next man have a go.” Bram had stopped attending the sessions. After that he trained alone. Sometimes Mabb’s old comrade-in-swords, Walter Hoole, would spend an hour or two with him in the evenings, putting him through his forms as he retold old stories about the glory days of Mabb and Walter. Often he was drunk. Bram had no way to gauge his progress, and had no longer been sure that he wanted to continue training. And then the Dog Lord invaded Dhoone.
Bram let himself in to the creamy maze of the Milkhouse. He had worked out the orientation of most of its corridors and doors and no longer had to figure direction by sunlight. Which was good. It meant he could get around on overcast days, and at night. But he had noticed things, absences where there should be chambers, or rather a lack of access to those chambers. He saw the ground floor of the roundhouse clearly in his mind’s eye and knew there were spaces he had yet to enter.
Those spaces played on his mind. Rumor had it that histories were kept there; secrets about the clanholds and the Sull that had been hidden for hundreds of years. Bram had worked out the location of one of the secret chambers—it was located behind the west stairwell and adjacent to the women’s solar—but a sense of honor kept him from searching for the entrance. Still, he would dearly have liked to see what lay inside it. And sometimes he thought that honor was a sham.
Realizing that he was hungry and late for his work in the guidehouse, Bram glanced toward the kitchen. Breakfast had been fried apples and veined cheese, but that had been half a day ago. He could smell baking, and frying—Castlemilk’s cook worked frequently with boiling oil—and decided not to resist. Limping at full speed, he made his way through the roundhouse and out the other side.
The kitchen was bustling. The benches were filled with women, children, seasoned warriors and old-timers taking their noonday meal. The noise was close to deafening. Cook and his helpers were clanging pots and trivets, pitchforking sides of venison from vats of sizzling fat and stoking the ovens with giant pokers. Heat and steam and cooking smells combined to form a force that pushed through the air like wind. Bram hurried to the food tables, glad to see that no full-sworn warriors were waiting to be served. Men with lifetime oaths to their clans were always fed first. Pol waved a greeting from the back, and the head dairyman, little crotchety Millard Flag, shouted something about the skimming needing to be redone by the end of the day. Bram nodded an acknowledgment. There was no fooling Millard: do a hasty job and he knew it. Grabbing a fried pastie filled with lamb and onions, Bram tucked his head low and prayed to make it to the guidehouse without anyone stopping him to give orders.
The pastie was hot and juicy and it burned his tongue when he bit into it. Once he’d made his way through kitchen’s east door and outside, he scooped a handful of snow from the ground and packed it into his mouth. His numbed toes were just beginning to come alive in his boot and they felt grossly swollen, like they could split the leather. His limp got worse and he had to slow down to manage the short climb up the embankment to the guidehouse.
Castlemilk’s guidestone was housed in a separate building two hundred feet east of the roundhouse situated on a raised bank above the Milk. It was a large timber-framed structure that looked like a barn, and had the same double-size two-story doors as most barns. And a door within the door. A brick chimney had been built against the north-facing wall and Bram could see black smoke rising above the tarred wood roof. A single set of footsteps stamped lightly into the snow led from the roundhouse to the guidehouse. None led back. Finishing off the last of his pastie, Bram followed the footsteps like a path.
The door set within the door was closed but unlocked, and Bram lifted the polished pewter latch and entered. Dimness and smokiness enveloped him. It was like entering a building after a fire. The smell of charring seedpods and river weed was sharp and throat constricting, and Bram had to fight the impulse to cough. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he marked the red glows of smokefires placed at regular intervals around the perimeter of the room. This was the stone chamber, yet he could not yet see the stone.
“You are late.” Drouse Ogmore, clan guide of Castlemilk, stepped from behind a wall of smoke. Dressed in unfinished pigskins with the hairs still attached and the worm rings and slaughter scars visible, he looked like a member of the wild clans. Short and powerfully built, with black hair and dark skin, he was holding a shovel as if he meant to harm someone with it.
“Take it,” he said to Bram, thrusting it toward him. “Clear the area outside the door.”
“The small door?”
Drouse Ogmore answered this question with a single, withering look.
Both big barn doors then. As Bram’s hand closed around the handle of the shovel and began to move back, Drouse Ogmore pulled in the opposite direction. “The past two days you have been late. You will respect this st
one. You will not be late again.”
Bram nodded, and Ogmore released his grip on the shovel.
“Come and see me when you’re done.”
As he moved toward the door, Bram saw two green eyes watching him from the shadow of the guidestone. Nathaniel Shayrac, Drouse Ogmore’s assistant, and the one who had made the footsteps in the snow, stepped forward and opened the door for Bram. And then shut it hard against his back.
Bram frowned at the snow. He felt bad about what Drouse Ogmore had said and wished he hadn’t stopped at the kitchen for food. Ogmore had taken his oath and offered him occupation in the guidehouse. “When your brother wins back Dhoone come and see me. The future might not be as dire as you think.” Those were the words Ogmore had said to him all those weeks ago on the Milkshore when had they laid Iago Sake to rest in the manner of the Old Clans. Ogmore had acted as guide for Dhoone that day, floating the oil and igniting it, incinerating Sake’s corpse. Bram had not spared the meeting a thought while he was at Dhoone, but the Castlemilk guide had not forgotten him.
Eight days ago after Bram had spoken First Oath, Ogmore had invited him back to the guidehouse. “Come view the stone,” he had said, “and I will prepare your yearman’s portion.”
Bram had only ever seen one guidestone before and that was Dhoone’s. The Dhoonestone was less than forty years old and its edges were quarry-sharp. Vaylo Bludd had stolen the old stone, and Sumner Dhoone, the Dhoone chief, had moved swiftly to replace it. Bram had not known what an old stone looked like, the scars, the cavities, the oil and mineral stains, the fissures, and cutting faces, and molds. The Milkstone was an ugly chunk of skarn mottled with iron pyrites and flawed with chalk. It was not level and its west face was braced with a scaffold made from bloodwood logs. Bram had stood and looked at it, astonished that a stone could look so . . . used.
“Approach it,” Ogmore had said. “You’ve earned that right.”