A Sword from Red Ice (Book 3)

by J. V. Jones

  “Happens quick,” Addie said, following his gaze. “We won’t be able to continue much longer.”

  Raif took the lead from him. He did not want to stop. While his mind was occupied with walking he did not have to think about the look in Traggis Mole’s eyes as he died.

  Swear it.

  As the hour wore on the shadows disappeared, driven away by the mist. Islands of cloud rose from the Rift and drifted slowly in circles. The rocks underfoot slickened and the surface of the snow mounds turned to grease ice. Raif had to bend his head to see his feet, and after a while he could not see them at all. Sunset had taken place some time back, but the light remained strangely, quiveringly white. Behind him he could hear the steady pad of Addie’s thinly soled boots. The cragsman was not whistling anymore.

  “Lad.” Addie’s voice pierced the mist like an arrow. “I’m done here.”

  The words carried an authority that Raif had not expected. They did not mean I. They meant We. Raif put up no argument, and tracked Addie’s footfalls through the mist. The cragsman had in mind somewhere he meant to go.

  He and Stillborn had probably hunted these cliffs, Raif realized, stalking mule deer and wild goats. Addie slipped between a crack in the rock and into a pocket in the cliff wall. It was not a cave, for the clouds floated freely overhead, but it offered some protection against the mist. Addie set about making a camp. It was darker here than out in the open, but still not as dark as it should have been. Raif wondered if the moon had risen.

  He made a circuit of the small clearing, hiking up slabs of granite and leaping between boulders. When he came across a dried-up sage bush wedged into a depression in the rock, he hauled it up for kindling. It had surprisingly tenacious roots.

  Traveling light meant there were no tents, only sleep mats and blankets. Each man carried his own water and supplies and although they would not stray from the path to hunt they would keep an eye lively for game. Addie kept his supplies strapped to his torso in a series of tanned leather pouches that helped distribute the weight. This meant he took some unpacking, and Raif found himself smiling as he watched the cragsman struggle with an underarm pack.

  Raif did not offer to help, but he did set about making a fire. One thing he had learned from his short time raiding and hunting with Addie was that the cragsman was fanatical about his tea. The sage flared quickly and smelled like winter festivals and stuffed game birds. Raif placed a smooth rock into the center of the flames and went in search of willow. He had to squeeze through the gap in the cliff to find it, and by the time he had returned Addie had already boiled water for the tea.

  “When you’re short on fuel it’s always best to use water from the canteen instead of snowmelt,” he said, noting Raif’s surprise. “If it’s been wedged in your armpit all day it’ll be nice and warm.”

  Raif had no reply for that, and fed his willow sticks to the fire.

  “Tea?” Addie asked when the herbs had steeped.

  Raif surprised himself by saying, “Yes.”

  Huddling close to the flames they drank their tea from tin bowls. Addie had laid strips of smoked meat upon the stone to warm and now dropped two wrinkly apples in the pot containing the dregs of the tea. It was good to sit there and draw in the smells and heat from the fire, good also to be physically exhausted.

  And away from the hell of the Rift.

  “I smoke it with the fat on,” Addie said after a while. “It doesna keep as long but it’s juicier.”

  Raif agreed. He’d been on many longhunts in his time and knew the quiet rhythms of camp talk. After they’d eaten the meat, he asked, “Is there a moon up there?”

  Addie glanced up at the banks of mist. “Aye.”

  Stewed in the tea, the apples had plumped up and had to be cooled before eating. Raif mashed his in his bowl with a spoon. It tasted tart and honey-sweet. Earlier he had intended to ask the cragsman some questions, but now he decided to hold his peace. From where he sat he could neither see nor perceive the Rift, and it seemed no small blessing to spend a night free from the burdens he carried and the oaths he had spoken. When Addie stood and said, “I’m off to sleep,” it sounded like a good idea. Not bothering to find a flat stretch of rock to lie upon, Raif tugged the blankets from his bedroll and made his bed near the fire.

  He slept lightly. On the way back from gathering willow he had jammed some branches into the gap in the rock, and his ears listened for the sounds of rustling. None came. Addie snored. The mist began to fail, and the moon shone through gaps in the haze before setting. Nagging pain in Raif’s shoulder made it difficult to sleep on his back, and he rolled onto his side. Sound, dreamless sleep followed.

  When he awoke at dawn Addie was already up. The cragsman had two strengths of tea; the morning variety was darker and thicker. Today it tasted of apples. “Boiled it down from last night,” Addie said, frowning into the pot. “Has its good and bad points.”

  Raif took a cup and slipped through the crack and out onto the cliff. The rising sun shone silver through the filmy remains of the mist. Ahead the clanholds were washed in gray light, their hills and valleys and forests rendered in shades of gray. A hundred feet below, a pair of swallows were in flight. Raif drank his tea. Thinking of it as medicine helped. After he stretched out his shoulder and relieved himself he returned to the camp.

  Addie had killed the fire and packed. He was sitting on a saddle of rock, working a lump of goat fat into the belly of his bow. Thickly carved from a single plank of yew, the cragsman’s weapon fell a good foot short of a true longbow. “Are you set?” he asked, folding the remains of the fat into a small sheet of waxed hide.

  Raif gathered his blankets and waterskin. “Yes.”

  They ate their breakfast as they made their way east. Addie had stuffed strips of smoked meat with goat cheese and they held them in their fists like rolls. The cragsmen took the lead, setting the same unhurried pace as the night before. Raif was frustrated at first but after a while he came to understand that Addie was pacing the journey so they would need fewer rests. About an hour after they broke camp they were swooped by a pair of birds, little dun-colored creatures that dive-bombed their heads. Addie declared, “Eggs,” and waved Raif ahead while he searched the base of the cliff wall for nests.

  Raif struck a path that led him closer to the edge of the Rift. The split in the earth was perhaps four hundred feet across here, nearly half the distance it was in the city. If he looked straight down, he could see tiers of rock like giant steps below him. Rotting snow was sending needle-thin waterfalls trickling into the abyss. Watching them Raif wondered how deep the Rift really was. What happened to that water?

  “Look at these beauties,” Addie said, coming to join him on the edge. He was carrying a nest woven from willow and pine needles. It was not much bigger than his fist. Five speckled brown eggs lay in the center. “Take one.”

  Raif tilted his head up and cracked the egg into his mouth. It was creamy and thick, newly laid. When he was done he threw the shell into the abyss.

  “How deep is it, Addie?” he asked.

  The cragsman had taken one of the eggs himself, and was now packing the remaining three in his chest pouch, carefully spacing them between lumps of cheese. “I canna say, lad. In its own way it’s a mystery as big as the Great Want.” He glanced at Raif. “At least a few of the souls who enter the Want come back.”

  “No man’s ever tried to climb down and see?”

  Addie snorted. “Show me a rope long enough to lower a man into hell. You fall. And keep falling. Simple as that.”

  Raif thought of Traggis Mole’s body and shivered. Today at noon the Maimed Men would lower it into the Rift. Stillborn would be the one who touched the flame to the rope. The Robber Chief’s body would rock, suspended above the abyss, until the flames burned through the rope fibers and it plummeted into the depths.

  I will not slit your throat, Raif had told him. Instead he had put a blade through his heart.

  Raif glanced down at his
sealskin scabbard, where he now kept Traggis Mole’s two-foot longknife. Stillborn had attempted to lend him another sword—a pretty hand-and-a-halfer with a double guard—but Raif had declined. The Forsworn blade had failed on him, and now he would not trust another sword.

  Until . . .

  Raif set the thought aside. The Mole’s knife was wickedly double-edged and made from dense Vorish steel. It would do.

  “Snow’s coming again,” Addie declared, looking east. “I can smell it.” He fell silent, and Raif imagined him worrying about the lambs that would be born in the snowfall. “Best get off,” he said after a while.

  “Addie.” Raif stopped the cragsman from returning to the trail. Nodding toward the Rift, he asked, “How long before it closes?”

  The cragsman looked at him with some surprise showing in his gray eyes. “It never closes, not wholly. North of Bludd it narrows so that men can cross it, but it’s always there, a black crack running through the forests between here and the Night Sea.”

  Raif reached for his lore. Holding the hard piece of raven in his fist. He continued east with Addie Gunn.

  THIRTY-TWO

  A Lock of Hair

  “Cut me a lock of your hair,” Lan Fallstar said to her. “I would keep it. For luck.”

  Ash knelt by the lake, cupped its cold and green water in her palms, and splashed it against her face. The shock made her shiver and she scrubbed her cheeks, nose and forehead to warm them up. Briefly, she considered stripping off her clothes and tumbling into the water. She recalled that every winter in Mask Fortress a handful of aging grangelords would break through the ice in the Fountain of Bastard Lords and frolic—there was no other word for it—in the freezing water. She and Katia had watched them one year, giggling uncontrollably at their flabby, yet somehow slack, naked bodies. Katia had called them “insane old coots” and Ash had agreed, thinking it a fine assessment. Now she thought she understood the impulse. There was a kind of wild freedom to be had in being naked in defiance of winter. And it would certainly get some kind of reaction from the Far Rider.

  “Your hair,” he said again to her, his voice light but insistent. “If you will permit I will cut it for you.”

  Ash turned to face him. The bodice of her dress and the hair around her face were damp and cleaved to her skin. The snow was deep here and her booted feet were sunk into wells. It wasn’t snowing yet, but the air had that tingle to it and the sun had been missing for hours. They stood within a woodland of giant white spruce feathered with clubmoss, and cold cedars with corklike trunks. Swordferns and licorice ferns poked through the snow, brown and wiry after the long winter. Moss and silvery lichen grew on the rocks around the lake and on the north and west faces of the trees. The lake itself was small and darkly green. Much of its water was open, and Ash wondered if it was stirred by underground springs.

  She did not know what to make of Lan’s request. Part of her felt flattered. It seemed the kind of thing that warriors in epic poems would beg from their secret loves before heading off into battle and getting themselves horribly and unexpectedly killed. Ash remembered reading such poems to Katia, and them both agreeing it was all a bit silly. Then they’d go ahead and reenact them anyway. Because as well as being silly the poems were also dreamily appealing. What was never in doubt was the fact that a lady should count herself lucky to be asked for such a token. Yet it didn’t quite fit. Lan Fallstar never acknowledged what happened between them in the tent at night, not by day, and he had not proclaimed his everlasting love for her. She was still not sure he even liked her. Even now, as his gaze lighted on the pink swell of her breasts revealed by the damp fabric of her dress, he looked disapproving as well as interested. She had a notion that Lan Fallstar thought Ash March was beneath him. And the only time that changed, or seemed to change, was during their lovemaking in the tent.

  Perhaps things were changing for him. Perhaps his request revealed a growing, but reluctant, regard. The Far Rider’s gaze was level, his eyes inhumanly bright as they refracted light from the snow.

  Ash drew the mercy blade from her belt. Lan watched her intently as she separated a lock of hair from the damp sections surrounding her face. Drawing the blade close to her scalp she cut it off. The lock was two feet in length and about as wide as her little finger, and she wondered how many separate silver-blond hairs were within it. She knotted it, not gently, and handed it to him.

  He took it with a deeply formal bow, and for a moment she was reminded of the time when Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer had greeted her outside the Ice Trapper village. They had lain facedown in the snow, prostrating themselves before the Reach. Uneasy, she awaited the Far Rider’s response.

  Lan Fallstar touched the knot of hair to his lips. “A toll must be paid on such a gift.” The words seemed genuine, and Ash found herself relieved. Carefully he wound the hair around itself and tucked it into his weapon pouch. She was surprised when he unsheathed his letting knife; she had thought the words a gallantry.

  The knife was plain but beautifully made, as all Sull letting knives were. Handle and blade were formed from a single bar of alloy. The blade had been case-hardened with carbon and was darker than the handle. It had a single edge, and inky green and blue rings shimmered beneath its surface. Lan used the same arm that he had burned the first night they met, making a cut an inch below the black and crusted scar. Blood welled in a short line, and the Far Rider pumped his fist until the redness rolled down his arm and dripped into the snow. This was the first time she had watched him let blood, and Ash wondered why he hadn’t done the same that night by the Flow. Why burn himself so badly that even now, over ten days later, the skin still split open and wept watery blood? Did the birch way require that high a toll?

  Ash lifted her great lynx-fur cloak from the lakeshore and shook it free of snow. The temperature was dropping and her wet bits were getting cold. She could not watch Lan’s bare arm anymore; the sight of it was too confusing. Just visualizing his hand between her legs made her skin flush with heat. She had never imagined that a single finger sliding against wet skin could bring such pleasure. Every night as they made camp she felt filled with reckless need. Part of her knew that it wasn’t a wise thing to do, that she did not know Lan Fallstar and was not even sure that she trusted him, but her body ignored her doubts. She became intensely self-aware whenever he drew close to her to perform small tasks like help her mount or dismount her horse, or offer a hand as she jumped over logs and streams. Her body tensed, in anticipation of the slightest and most casual touch. She found herself disappointed if the imagined contact did not come, and fired up and dissatisfied if it did. Lan had to be aware of her heightened and confused state, yet he treated her coolly, and did not acknowledge in any way what they might have done the night before. Was he ashamed of their lovemaking? Should she be?

  It was all incredibly bewildering. And just when she thought she at least understood that he meant to keep their travels by day separate from their nights in the wolfskin tent, he went and asked her for a lock of hair. In daylight, with still an hour or two to go before sunset.

  Ash frowned with force, pushing her lips against her teeth and driving her eyebrows together. On impulse she decided to leave the Far Rider there with the horses and take a walk around the lake. As she walked she became aware of a pleasant soreness between her legs. She frowned harder.

  Rafts of transparent ice floated across the lake’s surface in no discernible pattern. Some spun slowly, turning on their axes like wheels, while others sailed right by. One triangular-shaped raft floated blithely in the opposite direction. On the other side of the lake she could see a great blue heron holding itself very still, and somewhere deep within the woods a hawk owl was screeching. The trees surrounding the shoreline looked as if they’d been thinned, for the spruces and cedars were well spaced and animal paths and thin rills of snowmelt led between them. Ash didn’t think she had ever been in a more unearthly place. The spruces were so big they looked as if they belonged in
a different, larger world. Did they mean she was close to the Heart of Sull?

  They had left the birch way two days after Lan had taken her virginity. It was snowing and the forest was very quiet. The fine black stallion, who always walked unleashed beside its master, had suddenly broken into a canter and raced ahead. Lan made no move to stop or chase it and after a moment Ash felt the gelding tug at its lead reins.

  “Let him go,” the Far Rider said to her. So she had.

  The gelding’s tail and ears went up in excitement and it bolted through the trees after the stallion. Ash watched the horse disappear and then said, “Will you tell me what you and the horses know and I do not?” She had meant to pitch the comment lightly, but she could hear the hurt in her voice.

  Lan replied, “Horses are always first to know when the birch way ends.”

  Mollified, Ash had fallen into silence. After a while she thought she heard the sound of running water. A few minutes later she picked out the shishing of evergreens moving on the breeze. Ahead she could see nothing but birches and whirling snow. Glancing at Lan Fallstar’s remote and golden face, she wished he would speak to her; explain how the horses knew the forest was changing, confide that he too was relieved the birches were coming to an end, dare her to a race to see who could escape first. Something. Instead he just faced forward, gaze ahead, and kept up the same pace he had maintained all day.

  When she couldn’t take it anymore she had burst into a run. She could see the hoofprints of both horses filling up with new snow and she followed them exactly, planting her heels into the holes. She thought that Lan might follow her and for a while was disappointed when she didn’t hear the sound of his footfalls. The breathless and crazy joy of running soon took over, though, and it began to seem like a much better idea simply to run away. And not come back.