by J. V. Jones
“Take her from me, will you?” Raina asked him, dismounting. “I don’t want to be late for supper.”
Coming forward to take the reins, he said something Raina did not understand. “Supper’s already late.”
Assuming it was the grumble of a hungry boy who had gone too long between meals, she ignored it. Dashing across to the east wall, she waved brief acknowledgments to the two men who were spreading burlap sheets over the timber piles and lime barrels. They must be expecting snow in the night. Always when you walked through the east hall there was that jump of metal next to your skin. Raina was expecting it, and had her hand ready on her knife.
It was only when she reached the entrance hall that she began to suspect something was wrong. A roundhouse had an atmosphere, you could read it in the way people sat and stood, the number of torches burning, the doors left open, the smells, the smoke, the noise. It was early evening and it took Raina a few moments to understand and then catalog the absences. The luntman had skimped on his rounds and only a quarter of the torches were burning. Too many doors were open and there was an unfamiliar crosscurrent of drafts. It was too quiet for suppertime when normally the great clangor from the kitchen rang through the house, drowning out the noise of the forge.
And there was no supper smell.
The world spun on that one simple fact, passing from light into darkness as it moved beneath Raina’s feet.
Raina broke into a run.
She knew.
People tried to stop her, but she slapped them away and hissed at them. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t, she warned, not knowing if she said the words out loud. When she entered the kitchen Corbie Meese came forward to intercept her, but she would not have it. How she stopped him from halting her progress was something she would never know. Down the little steps she went, hesitating only for a moment when she reached the bottom. Two ways led from the stairs: one toward the game-room, and the other to the cells and supply rooms. Orwin Shank stood guard outside Anwyn’s chamber. When he saw her he shook his head and told her, “No, my sweet lamb, come no further.”
But she could not stop moving and he did not possess the might necessary to halt her and she entered the room where Anwyn Bird lay dead.
THIRTY-SIX
A Bear Trap
Snow fell as they worked their way east. On the first day it fell lightly, a shimmer of crystals in the air in the late afternoon before dark. The day after it did much the same, but the next morning it began more heavily. A persistent wind blew from the east and it was hard to keep warm, but at least it was not bleakly cold. On the fourth day it was warm enough that the ground snow melted . . . but still it managed to snow. The fifth day was different, colder. The snow had come down in hard, glassy pellets; Raif imagined the name for them was “ice.” Walking on them was like walking on marbles and they’d headed north into the spruce forest to avoid them. The next day had passed without snow, but Addie said it couldn’t reliably be trusted and it was either snowing somewhere very close or would spring upon them while they slept. He was right, for when they woke this morning a steady snow was falling, and half a foot had accumulated overnight.
They were growing accustomed to sleeping through it. Though it had been strange not to be able to find the fire let alone relight it. Addie had been stoic. “Next time we’ll set it on a stone to keep the heat in.” The good thing was the trees were no longer stunted and could be bivouacked for shelter so at least they had some protection from the weather. It meant that camp took longer to set up so they had to stop earlier in the day but they both agreed it was a worthwhile trade. Being snowed on while you slept was an experience not unlike being buried alive. In ice.
Food was growing scarce and the low grade hunting afforded by being constantly afoot rendered little beyond ptarmigan and molting hares. Snow had driven anything larger into hiding. Given time Addie could prepare a decent bird, but he didn’t have any love for plucking and usually assigned feather duty to Raif. Raif seemed to recall that Tem had known a couple of ingenious ways to pluck birds, but couldn’t for the life of him remember any of them—one might have had something to do with mud. Oddly enough it was the lack of tea that was felt the most. The ritual of boiling water and steeping the herbs was something they both missed. Addie still insisted on boiling and serving water, and had collected various twigs and leaves along the journey in an attempt to conjure up new kinds of tea. So far saxifrage, goatsbeard, hagberry and dead nettle had delivered various watery, yellowy weed-tasting teas. Addie was still hopeful. Legend had it that a plant existed called trapper’s tea that bloomed with white flowers in high summer and could be found growing amidst rocks. The drink produced from crushing and then steeping its leaves was said to be so delicious that Addie could only talk about in a whisper. “Day we find it there’ll be some fine drinking,” he’d murmured more than once.
Addie had grown chilblains on his nose and hands and was having a spot of bother with his feet. Every night he would dry livermoss on a stick above the fire and every morning he would stuff the springy filaments into the toes of his boots. The cragsman moved no slower for his troubles, but Raif had seen him hesitate a few times before starting a sharp descent, and then lean heavily on his stick. Raif’s own feet were holding up. Both he and Addie wore double layers of hareskin socks that kept out all but the worst of the cold, and Raif’s ancient hand-me-down boots fitted him so well that there was little chafing. When he touched his face he felt patches of hard and tender skin and he thought there might be some frost damage, but as long as it didn’t hurt he didn’t spare it much thought.
It was the shoulder that bothered him. Slowly, steadily, over the course of the past seven days Raif had felt it burning a hole in his chest. He’d once watched as Brog Widdie proofed the temperature on a batch of blister steel he had been firing. With his long, crab-craw tongs the master smith had formed a small portion of the red hot metal into a ball, and then pulled it from the fire. Immediately he dropped the ball onto his proofing block and watched how quickly the molten metal burned through the green wood. The ball would blacken and hiss, igniting a ring of flames as it burned a hole through the wood. That’s what the Shatan Maer’s claw had begun to feel like to Raif; a piece of molten metal incinerating his flesh.
“Do you know how to start a stopped heart?” Yiselle No Knife had asked Addie Gunn in the Sull camp by the Rift. The words haunted Raif, the tone of them, the lightness yet certainty in her voice. She had meant to shock both of them, him and Addie, and she succeeded better than she realized. Until she spoke Raif had managed to squash it into the back of his thoughts. The shoulder hurt. It had grown worse since the creature on the rimrock had smashed him in the back. It ached, sometimes a lot. That was it. Now it loomed constantly in his thoughts, and he couldn’t tell if he was imagining that it was growing worse, or if it really was growing worse. Either way Yiselle No Knife had won a victory. She hadn’t prevented them from heading east as she had intended, but she had intimidated them. The Sull were experts at that.
“Let’s head a mite south,” Addie mumbled, surprising Raif by speaking for the first time since they’d broken camp earlier that morning. “After those icestones we drifted too far north.”
Raif nodded his agreement. They were both wearing face masks roughly shaped from hareskins, and as it was difficult to talk they’d taken to signing basic instructions and requests. It was snowing in big flakes that were as light and airy as dandelion fluff. The clouds were thickly gray and did not appear to be moving. Underfoot the snow formed complicated layers, by turns mushy, grainy, gravelly and plain hard. Some drifts were as deep as Addie’s waist, but generally the cover lay between one and one and a half feet. They’d been lucky with the afternoon thaw two days back: it had prevented the snow from becoming too deep.
Neither Addie nor Raif no longer had much idea of where they were. Most mornings they would align themselves with the rising sun, pick a point far in the distance—a stand of big trees, a ridge, a hummock,
a frozen pond—and head toward it. If they reached it before dark they’d pick something else, correcting either north or south depending on how Addie felt about the going. This morning Addie had picked a knoll that stuck out above the forest canopy and glinted with blue-green lenses of ice. Now they slowed their pace while the cragsman chose a second target farther south.
Hiking onto a rock, Addie surveyed the land ahead. His brown wool cloak was deeply ringed with pine sap and his boots had been poked so many times by rocks and branches that the leather looked like it had been chewed on by dogs. Never one to waste much time, the cragsman made his decision, and then carefully lowered himself onto the floor of the slope. “Stream. This way,” he said, striking a new path that took them down into the trees.
The cedar forests to the south formed a green lake on the valley floor, leaving the slopes and ridges free for other, scrap-pier trees. Spruce and white pines took the ground the cedars did not want, but even they stayed clear of the higher slopes. Forest fires and bog rot had killed successive generations of trees and there were many fallen logs and standing deadwoods. For the past day and a half Raif and Addie had walked above the northern treeline, following a goat path along the rocks, but now they entered woodland.
Light dimmed and the air grew colder. The snow underfoot was patchy, but you could hear the great weight of it in the trees. Boughs creaked and whirred as they strained to hold their loads. No decent wind in several days meant the trees had been given little relief. Some pines had bent in the middle, forming white humps that looked like bridges. Branches had failed and snapped. Entire trunks had split in two. Raif suggested they pick up their pace. Addie grumbled but agreed.
It was hard to know exactly where they lay in relation to Bludd. At some point in the east, Bludd forests melted into forests claimed and patrolled by the Sull. Bludd was a huge clanhold, and its northeastern reaches were wild and barely populated. Occasionally Raif and Addie saw smoke, but after the encounter with Yiselle No Knife and the Spinebreaker, neither had managed to work up sufficient desire to investigate. Raif assumed they were still above Bludd’s borders, but couldn’t be sure. Addie had an understandable fear of traveling too far north—the Want lay that way and you might simply blink and find yourself in the middle of it, unable to get out—and tended to steer them due east and southeast.
The Rift no longer existed as an unmissable marker that divided the continent into the clanholds and the lands of the barren north. The great fissure in the earth had narrowed to a canyon filled with debris, then a gulch choked with willow, then a simple gash in the rock. “It’s still there,” Addie had said, wagging his head at the ground when Raif asked, “but now you have to look for it. With all this snow we could be standing right upon it and wouldn’t even know.”
Whenever Raif thought of Addie’s words he couldn’t help looking at his feet. He glanced down now as they made their way through a stand of hundred-year cedar. Nothing underfoot only pine needles and snow.
“Whoa, laddie,” Addie said, gripping his arm.
Raif looked at him, startled.
“Nearly lost your footing then.” Above the face mask, Addie’s gray eyes searched Raif’s. “Probably hit a tree root.”
A question lay behind the statement. Raif blinked. He felt as if he’d missed something. He’d been looking down at his feet and then . . . then . . . Addie had spoken.
“Rest a minute,” Addie said, clenching Raif’s elbow like a vise. “Take a mouthful of water.”
Considering Addie had him in an arm lock, Raif didn’t have much choice. His chest felt strange. Tight. Inside his boarskin glove all five fingers of his left hand were numb. When he held the water bladder above his head to drink, strange tingles passed along his arm to his shoulder.
Addie watched him. Raif knew what the cragsman was thinking. He tried to formulate a reply to the inevitable questions but couldn’t think of anything reassuring that wouldn’t be a lie.
Snow sifted down to the forest floor as they stood facing each other, silent. Last year’s ferns poked through the ground cover like rusted iron bars. Finally Addie said, “Dead men don’t fulfill oaths.” Angry, he set off along the path on his own.
Raif bit off his glove, swiveled his arm back and rubbed his shoulder with numb fingers. A point deep in his chest felt hollow. Walking back along the course of his and Addie’s footsteps, he searched for the exact spot where he’d looked down to check for the Rift. After a minute or two he thought he found it. His footsteps had been steady, evenly paced and all pointing in the same direction, and then one—just one—went awry. The toe of his left boot had made contact at a slightly different angle to the previous steps and the outside edge that led from it formed a wedge shape as if Raif had been in the process of making a sudden turn. There was no heel mark.
That lack of contact turned Raif cold. It was the difference between life and death.
Was that what a heart-kill felt like?
Nothing.
Springing into motion, Raif followed Addie along the path.
They traveled in silence for the rest of the day, stopping once to eat the remains of last night’s ptarmigan and search a likely patch of undergrowth for eggs. The cragsman made a point of not watching over Raif, though if it was possible to keep an eye on someone without looking at them that was what Addie was doing. Raif felt odd. Light and not quite sane. He kept seeing the failed footstep and hearing Traggis Mole say, Swear it.
They reached the stream about an hour before dark. Snowmelt was running in its middle, skirling over rocks and jammed pine cones. They could have jumped it easily—it wouldn’t have even needed a run up—but Addie set about walking upstream. The snow was thicker here and there were more dead trees. Raif thought he caught a whiff of woodsmoke, but when he looked to Addie to confirm it the cragsman’s face gave nothing away.
“Here,” Addie said, coming to a halt a few minutes later. “It’s as good a place as any to set camp.”
Three big cedars formed a thick triangle of cover hard along the bank. A root from the largest tree cut right across the stream, forming a spillway where the water widened and slowed before tipping over the root branch and continuing on its way. Addie’s gaze dared Raif to find fault. Raif did not. Squatting by the spillway, he stripped off his gloves, scooped up two handfuls of water and threw them over his face. The iciness was startling but it didn’t alter the lightness in his head.
That night he did not sleep. He suspected Addie didn’t get much rest either, for the cragsman had made himself a bed out of pine boughs that crunched every time he rolled over—and they crunched a lot. They were both short-tempered as they took their morning drink of boiled water. Addie told Raif to fill the waterskins with stream water and when Raif didn’t jump to the task quick enough for his liking he found fault. Raif dropped the skins in the snow and went for a piss. How was it his fault that he had ended up with a piece of shadow lodged next to his heart?
Addie’s spirits improved as the morning wore on. For once it didn’t snow and it looked as if the wind might break up the clouds. After they crossed the stream they decided to head out of the trees. Snow dumps were beginning to happen and the thought of being caught under a tree shedding a half-ton of snow was not comforting. Occasionally Addie would dart from the path, checking ground cover, snowbanks and rock piles for nests.
“Raif. Take a look at this.”
Raif had gone on ahead while Addie investigated the area surrounding a recently fallen cedar, and Raif had to backtrack to join him. He found the cragsman staring at one of the grounded cedar bows, holding his stick above the foliage like a spear. Only when Raif drew abreast of him did he see it: a cast iron tooth-jawed bow trap built to spring a bear.
“Nearly stepped on the paddle. It was hidden in the branches.” Addie shook his head at it. “Fetch me a log. I’m going to trigger it.”
Raif pried off one of the thick lower branches of the fallen cedar, and then watched as Addie jabbed it against the padd
le. Crack. The branch was crushed to wood chips as the jaws snapped shut.
“Bastards,” Addie said quietly. “Lost two sheep to traps like this.” Shaking his head, he picked up his walking stick and turned to Raif. “At least now we know we can head to the smoke.”
“It’s not Sull?”
“They wouldn’t insult big game by trapping it. It’s not clannish by the looks of it either, though you never know. Could have been traded. What I can say is that men who set this—and it was recently set, see how there’s no snow between the coils—are cowards and varmints. And I’ll take them over Sull any day.”
Raif opened his mouth to speak, but Addie halted him by raising his stick.
“No. We need some medicine for that . . . that thing in your back. And so help me Gods I’m going to trade for some tea.”
Raif didn’t have the heart to tell him that he didn’t think medicine would work.
It didn’t take Addie long to find the trappers’ path, and they followed it south and a little west through the trees. A cube of spat chewing curd, an apple core, and a ragged piece of leather fringe were duly noted by the cragsman along the way. After holding the trail for the better part of an hour they knew they were getting close. The smell of woodsmoke was so strong you could taste it in your mouth, and the chunk of logs being split with an ax rang through the woods.
Addie wanted to continue down the path, but Raif stopped him. “Let’s approach the camp from the back.”
“Ain’t neighborly,” Addie said, by way of agreement.
The trappers’ camp consisted of a large A-frame tent overhung with moose felts, two large wooden stretching frames for big game, a log pile and chopping block, a firepit hung with cookirons and a smoking rack, two cross sections of tree trunk that looked like they were used as seats, various cache bags strung from the nearest cedar and a butchering circle where the snow was trampled with blood. The man who was quartering logs with a small hand ax was tall and rangy. His skin was the color of red clay.