by J. V. Jones
The bird watched Raif with cold black eyes ringed in yellow skin. Its breast feathers were lightly spotted and were plumped out in warning.
The Spinebreaker told Yiselle No Knife their names, and she spoke them back with bites of her teeth. Raif responded to the name “Deerhunter” and bowed.
She regarded him with a glimmer of disbelief. Her dress was formed from the skin of newborn calves that had been whitened with lead. The fabric was so fine he could see the individual outline of each breast. “Break bread with me,” she invited, indicating with her free hand they should sit.
Raif and Addie sat on silk mats. Beneath them was bare rock. To one side, a silver brazier containing rock fuel so pure it burned without smoke gave off light and heat. To the other side lay a thin silk mattress and a shoulder-high perch for the bird. The tent was full with four people. Raif could smell Yiselle No Knife’s scent, the faint alien pungency of Sull.
No one spoke while she sat the bird and retrieved a small lacquered box from the shadowy apron of the tent. The Spinebreaker stood in front of the tent flap, in a position almost exactly behind Raif, meaning to make him feel watched. Yiselle pulled off her gauntlet, revealing a right hand subtly different than her left one. The fingernails sat higher and the fingers were leaner and slightly webbed. Raif wondered if this was the reason behind her name.
Kneeling opposite him and Addie she placed the box on the ground, opened it, and took out a tablet of moistureless bread. Placing the tablet in her left palm, she used her strange lean right hand to break it into pieces. She offered it first to Addie, then to Raif, then to the Sull warrior. “May the moon that brings harvest never fail,” she said, and placed a crumb beneath her tongue.
Raif tried to swallow. The bread wouldn’t go down and he had to let it sit at the back of his throat until it softened. Yiselle No Knife offered no water. Rising, she threw the remaining crumbs on the fire. They crackled like iron filings.
“What brings you east?” she asked Addie.
“Hunting,” he said.
“It is not good. Perhaps you should turn back.”
The heat of the fire peeled sweat from Raif’s skin. Behind him he could hear the Spinebreaker’s sword harness creaking.
“Lady,” Addie said, “you seemed to have little trouble finding that fine bear draining above your campfire.”
The gyrfalcon shrieked, sidling from one end of its perch to the other. Yiselle No Knife closed the lid on the box. “Your friend is injured,” she told Addie. “The further you go the further you will have to return alone.”
The bread set like cement in Raif’s throat. At his side, Addie brushed a drop of moisture from the tip of his nose to give himself time to think. Raif wondered if it was icemelt from his eyebrows or sweat. “I’m keeping an eye on my friend. You need not trouble yourself on his behalf.”
“Do you know how to start a stopped heart?”
Addie stood. “Lady, a sheepman can always recognize a wolf. I thank you for the bread, but I’ll hear no more. Raif.” The moment he spoke the word Raif he sucked back air. Yiselle No Knife’s eyes glittered. Her gaze jumped to Raif.
“Come on, lad,” Addie said hurriedly. Raif stood. The gyrfalcon made a queer chuffing sound.
Yiselle looked straight at Raif, her gaze piercing the shimmers that rose from the amethyst flames, and mouthed the words Mor Drakka. His Sull name.
“Escort them to the borders of our camp,” she told the Spinebreaker. “They will never find Mish’al Nij.”
It was a relief to get out of the heat. The icy cold snapped Raif back to life, and he could not recall speaking a word in the tent. Ilya Spinebreaker marched them north, not east, across the ledge, and into the forest of crags and dwarfed spruce. The Sull warrior did not speak. When he reached whatever limit he found satisfactory he stopped walking. In a single breathtaking motion he drew his sword. Six feet of meteor steel sliced ice crystals forming in the air. The sound produced was like the crackle of the northern lights. Both Addie and Raif drew blades; Addie his thick-bladed hunter, and Raif the Mole’s longknife.
If the Sull warrior had meant to kill them at least one of them would have been too late. Instead Ilya Spinebreaker used his deadly, beautiful sword with its crosshilts as wide a child’s shoulders and its three-quarter moon pommel to point the way north.
They got the message. Addie led the way, scanning for a path that didn’t exist. The spruce formed a continuous waist deep mat, and they waded into it like water, getting scratched by bristles and poked by frozen twigs. Pine needles stuck to Raif’s cloak, pants and boots, glued on with sap and ice. Neither he nor Addie spoke. They knew each other well enough to agree on a basic plan: make their way onto the far side of the ridge where they would no longer be in sight or range of the Sull warrior, and then halt and speak.
The small white sun passed into the west as they made their way through the spruce forest. Once they saw the gyrfalcon, gliding high above them before swooping south to ride the thermals channeling along the Rift. Shadows lengthened and the air crisped. Raif swigged from his water bladder. He could hear Addie breathing. The ground had started rising and they were pushing themselves hard. Every step involved avoiding sharp branches likely to tear skin. The stench of pine sap was overpowering, and Raif could feel it working in his skull cavities like a drug.
By the time they crested the ridge the light was failing. Neither man looked back as they clambered over the limestone. The bottom two feet of Raif’s Orrl cloak were black with needles. Addie’s brown wool cowl looked worse. Muscles aching, breath whitening in explosive bursts, they descended the rocky bluff. It was growing too dark to see exactly what lay north, but Raif got the impression of black forests spreading over humpbacked ridges.
“We should stop,” he said quietly, realizing he could no longer make out the way ahead.
“A wee bit further,” Addie said, insistent. “There’ll be somewhere to camp at the base.”
The cragsman used his stick to feel the way. Raif followed, physically exhausted but filled with jittery mental energy. He wanted to grab Addie by the arm and cry, “Here is good.”
After some fussing and sidetracking, the cragsman finally decided on a spot. He wasn’t happy about it and he kicked several rocks aside and stamped down some low-growing spruce. As they walked Raif had been collecting cones and twigs for a fire, and now he squatted beneath the limestone undercut and built a loose fire. The pine boughs burned yellow, snapping and giving off thick smoke. Addie’s heart wasn’t in the tea-making and without ceremony he dumped the last of his herbs into the pot. As the water boiled he laid out the snipe eggs he’d found earlier, along with strips of smoked meat. The fat marbling the meat had started to turn green. “Eat,” he said, his gray eyes fierce.
They pulled out their blankets and ate in silence with their gloves on. When they had finished, Addie collected the eggshells and dumped them on the fire. He was waiting, Raif realized.
Cupping the hot tin cup under his chin so the steam rolled over his face, Raif said, “I’m sorry, Addie.”
Silence. The cragsman pulled a stick from the fire pile and started scraping pine needles from the sole of his boots. He did this for some time. Finally he said, “When a complete stranger knows more about my traveling companion than I do, that makes me look like a fool. I do not like looking like a fool.”
Raif nodded, accepting the rebuke. “What do you want to know?”
“No,” Addie shot back. “You tell me what I need to know. I’m not about to play question and answers. I’m too tired and too mad.” Frustrated with the glueyness of the pine needles he threw away the stick.
Raif swallowed a mouthful of watery tea. The Sull bread was no longer stuck in his throat, but he could feel where it had scraped his tissue. “First. She was right—I am injured. Something is lodged in the shoulder muscle at the back of my heart. It’s been there for a while, niggling. When the beast attacked me on the ledge I think its talons pushed it further in.” The
re. He had said to Addie what he hadn’t even been willing to admit to himself. Even as he spoke he could feel the tip of the Shatan Maer’s claw. A speck of blackest shadow hovering above his heart.
“Can we cut it out?” Addie asked.
Raif shook his head. “I showed it to the outlander. He said it should only be drawn out by someone with skill, like the Sull.”
Addie thought on this statement. “It’s a piece of . . . ” Words failed him.
“Claw from one of the shadow beasts.”
The cragsman’s hand hovered above the place where he once kept his portion of powdered guidestone. “Aye. Aye,” he said softly. Rousing himself to heartiness, he said, “Well you certainly won’t get any help from her ladyship back there. She’d more than likely poke it all the way through.”
Raif made himself smile. The tea had gone cold and the metal was now pulling heat from his hands through the gloves. He set it down. “The Sull do not love me. They call me Mor Drakka, Watcher of the Dead. It is told in their histories that one day a man bearing that name will bring about their extinction. They fear that man is me. Before I joined the Maimed Men I traveled the Storm Margin with . . . a friend. She was injured and two Sull Far Riders stepped in to save her life. They treated her well, helped her, but they could barely tolerate me. We parted from them, and then met up again later in Ice Trapper Territory. Someone drugged me. When I awoke in the morning my friend was gone. The Sull had taken her.”
He let out a long breath. For months he had kept the story of what had happened to Ash to himself and to speak it was a kind of release. Guard yourself, she had warned as the drugs pulled him under. Why had she not said more?
On the opposite side of the fire, Addie Gunn nodded slowly and continuously in understanding. “No love lost between you and the Sull.” A pinecone jumped from the fire and the cragsman rolled it back with the toe of his boot. Hot flames ignited it instantly. “But they need you, don’t they? What you did with that beast on the ledge, the heart-kill, that’s what they would have done. Only you do it different. Better.”
A cragsman watches his sheep, Raif realized. No small thing must pass him by. Unsure how to reply, Raif just looked at Addie.
Addie looked back. He was still nodding. “They won’t help you find what you’re looking for.”
“Not willingly. I search for a sword once wielded by their kings.”
This made Addie stop nodding. “Gods, lad. You’re walking a tricky path.”
“You walk it with me.”
The cragsman snorted. Air left his nostrils, froze, and then sizzled into mist when it hit the flames. “Where is this place we’re heading.”
We. Raif was glad in his heart to hear it. “It’s named the Lake of Red Ice and I do not know where it is save that it lies somewhere to the east.”
“That would explain why we were duck-marched north.”
“Yes it would.”
Both men grinned.
“She knew you by your name?” Addie asked, a question beneath the question.
“I made the mistake of telling the Far Riders my name. They also learned I was a clansman, from Blackhail.” Raif tried not to think of the look in Yiselle No Knife’s eyes as she had named him Mor Drakka. “Word must have spread.” Reading the worry on the cragsman’s face, he added, “She was close to guessing, Addie. She knew my name wasn’t Deerhunter, knew I was clan and heading east.”
Addie frowned. “Deerhunter. That was one god-awful name.”
Raif laughed and after a moment Addie joined in, and they laughed so hard their bellies ached, rocking back and forth by the fire.
Soon after, huddled in blankets, greased rags over their faces, they slept. Raif roused himself once in the night to feed the fire. The sky was ablaze with stars. When he next awoke they were gone, and gray clouds were heading out from the north. It was past dawn. A lone raven was kawing at the top of the ridge.
Addie prepared a breakfast of cold meat and boiled water. “Where to?” he asked as they ate.
Raif looked at the clouds. Without meaning to, Yiselle No Knife had given him information. “Find us a path east,” Raif said, standing, “any further north and we could lapse into the Want.”
Beating ice and pine needles from their gear, they prepared to break camp and head into land ruled by the Sull.
THIRTY-FIVE
Mistakes
“Has the bruise gone?” Raina Blackhail asked Anwyn Bird, angling her face toward the light.
The clan matron folded her arms over the chest and looked critically at all of Raina, not just the bruised section of skin on her cheek. “It’s yellow.”
Raina put out a hand toward her. “Do not say it, Anny. Who could I go running to?”
“Plenty. You could have started with Orwin Shank.”
“His son has just died. How can I put another burden upon him?”
“Corbie Meese then.”
“He has lost friends and comrades. His wife has still not risen from her confinement.”
Anwyn looked fit to explode. High color flooded her face. “You cannot let Stannig Beade get away with this. You must speak up.”
“And say what?” Raina cried. “The clan guide slapped me? He will deny it. He’ll bring that sly girl in as a witness and she will confirm his story that I fainted and hit my head against the door.” As she was speaking Raina thought she heard a sound coming from behind one of the loom tables, but was too agitated to fully register it. Probably a settling pedal. “I will not be believed. People will pity me. My word will no longer be relied upon. I will be lessened.”
“Better lessened than dead.”
The two women faced each other, shaking. They were standing in the widows’ wall alone. Anwyn had chased off everyone earlier and then gone to fetch Raina, pulling her away from the task of packing a war-supply cart alongside other clan wives.
The hearthstone the room was named for was black with creosote and soot. A meager fire burned deep in the grate, and if no one tended it soon it would go out. There were logs enough in the firepile that lay heaped against one side of the chimney wall, but no one had bothered to add any in several hours. Not all of the shutters had been opened either and the light was patchy and gray. Less than twenty days the Scarpes had occupied this hearth—in direct defiance of the widows’ wishes—and in that short time they had turned it from the prettiest and brightest chamber in the Hailhouse into a hovel. Handprints and filth on the distemper walls, ring-shaped burns on the floor-boards where they’d set their cookstoves, a shutter left open so the snow came in and rotted the plaster, dog shit, food spills, smoke damage: the list went on. Someone had even stolen the big iron candleholder that had been suspended on a chain from the ceiling. Women looming and carding needed good light to work by in the winter months, and Brog Widdie had wrought that candleholder to relieve their eyes. No wonder the widows were reluctant to come back. Beade had ordered the worktables, looms, racks, embroidery hoops, drum carders and benches returned to their original places but he could not order the widows to sit at them and work.
Not yet anyway. Raina pushed her lips together. She knew at some point she would have to arrange the proper cleanup and retempering of the chamber, but right now she didn’t have the strength necessary for issuing the dozens of orders needed to carry it out. Right now she wanted to keep her head low and exist in peace.
And she did not want Anwyn accosting her and trying to force her into action. It was easy for the clan matron; the weight she bore was less. She could retire to her kitchen, and have no one inspect, criticize, or challenge her as she carried out her work. Chief’s wife was different. Every time she, Raina Blackhail, walked through the roundhouse gazes followed her, judging her every move, storing mistakes for malicious gossip, disapproving, pleading, snooping.
Muscles beneath Anwyn’s large round face set into place as she regarded Raina. “I will give you until supper tonight,” she said, “to tell Orwin Shank in person what Stannig Beade did to you. If
that hour passes without him knowing, I will visit him myself and tell him what you told me.”
Raina inhaled sharply. Anwyn Bird could be hard as stone. Over twenty people worked in her kitchen and she was capable of bullying every one of them. Now she wants to bully me. Why did she push so much? What made her so sure she was right? Anwyn had not stood in front of the entire clan and watched as they willingly believed lies. All those months ago in the greathearth Mace Blackhail had spun the tale of how he and his foster mother had succumbed to mutual lust in the Oldwood. Five hundred warriors had drunk up this outrageous lie.
Truth. Untruth. Didn’t Anwyn know that the only thing that mattered in these circumstances was who could sound the most plausible? Stannig Beade was clan guide, practiced in the arts of oratory. He would know how to make his account seem reasonable. Poor Raina. She was upset and I offered her a cup of malt. She drank it a little too quickly—you know how women are around hard liquor—and when she rose to leave she cried out in grief and fainted right by the door. Her cheek caught the iron bolt on the way down, isn’t that so, Jani?
Raina gazed into Anwyn’s dark blue eyes and questioned why she did this. A memory of many moons back came to her, of a package slipped from Angus Lok’s hand into Anwyn’s belt while neither thought Raina was watching. It had happened in the little dairyshed at midwinter. Raina had known Angus Lok nearly as long as she had lived at Blackhail. Always when he came to visit he stirred things up. I will be chief, Raina had declared not long after he had last departed. He had told her things, she remembered. Stories of how Mace was treating his tied clansmen—things that only a Hailsman should have known.
Raina wondered if Anwyn was in cahoots with the ranger. Angus had not hidden his dislike of Mace Blackhail and Clan Scarpe. Perhaps he and Anwyn had grown weary of Raina’s inaction. Perhaps they hoped to force conflict and oust Beade.
Or perhaps Anwyn was just worried about a friend. Raina searched her face. “Do not push me, Anny. There’s no telling where it could lead.”