A Sword from Red Ice (Book 3)

by J. V. Jones

  As he slid the tray into one of the deep recesses in the walls, Bram heard a footfall on the stairs.

  “I see you are working hard,” Wrayan Castlemilk said, descending the final steps and entering the chill shadows of the cold room. Fine silver chains at her throat and wrists gleamed as she moved around the chamber. “I don’t believe I have been down since I was a girl. I imagined it bigger and more . . . frightful. My brother once told me they slaughtered cows here. He bolted that door on me one evening. Didn’t come back. The old dairyman Windle Hench found me here the next morning. Apparently I was sitting right where you stand now, calmly eating a wedge of cheese.”

  Bram could believe it. Wiping his hands on his pant legs, he said, “Lady.”

  This seemed to amuse her. Her dress was made from smooth blue wool and she wore a simple matching cloak. A pair of gloves were tucked into her bodice, and her brown leather boots had little piles of snow on the toes. Bram seemed to remember Mabb telling him once that the better the boot the longer the snow took to melt. “A messenger arrived from Dhoone last night,” she said, apparently in no hurry to head back up the steps. “Robbie sends his greetings.”

  Muscles in Bram’s chest did strange things. “He knows I am here?” He heard the hope in his voice and was surprised by it. He hadn’t known it was there.

  “Oh yes,” Wrayan said, looking at him very carefully. “I made sure he knew you had arrived safely and taken First Oath.”

  Bram understood that she had declared him out of bounds to his brother. Robbie Dun Dhoone could stake no claim on Bram Cormac for one year. It was hard not to imagine Robbie’s face when he received the news. He must have felt a moment’s misgiving. They were brothers. They’d shared breakfast, blankets, head colds, punishments, adventures, secrets, cloaks, boots. It had to mean something. Bram was sure it had to mean something.

  “Did he send any message?”

  “No.” The Milk chief’s voice was level. After she had delivered this answer she did Bram the kindness of walking over to the right wall and inspecting the rows of churns that stood there.

  He sent his greetings, Bram reminded himself. Surely that is a good message in itself? He took a breath, trying to force out the tightness in his chest.

  “Someone sent you a message, though,” Wrayan said, glancing at Bram over her shoulder. “Apparently Guy Morloch wants his horse back.”

  Bram hung his head. What could he possibly say to that?

  “I told him to go to hell. Formally seized the horse for Castlemilk—I am chief, I do things like that—and now I gift the stallion, without condition, to you.” She smiled, and it was such a lovely and unexpected thing it warmed the room. “I believe it’s got some godawful name, like Gilderhand or Girdlegloom. Guy Morloch always was a stuck-up little shit.”

  “Gaberil,” Bram said.

  They both laughed. Because Wrayan Castlemilk was chief and knew it, she took the lid off one of the vats and poked the setting cheese. If anyone in the dairy had done that they’d be on pat watch for a week.

  “So,” she said, wiping her finger on one of the cheesecloths. “I believe our swordmaster has taken your sword.”

  Bram could barely keep up with her. “Yes, lady.”

  “It’s quite a choice you have coming up.” Seeing his confusion she explained, “At Castlemilk when a swordmaster takes your sword it means he’s claiming you as an apprentice. Dalhousie believes you’re quick enough to be a first-rate swordsman.”

  This was so surprising, Bram had to go over the chief’s words one by one in his head. He felt as if he were a piece of cooling metal that she kept plunging into hot and cold water to temper. Dalhousie wanted him as an apprentice? He’d received only two pieces of praise from the swordmaster in all the weeks he’d trained under him—and one of them was today. You’re getting better on your feet.

  “Of course,” Wrayan said, preparing to leave, “training to become a master swordsman is a task that will take up the better part of each day. Just as a guide’s training would.” Another plunge into hot water. The Milk chief’s gaze assessed him shrewdly. “So you must choose which one you will be.”

  Waving a hand in farewell, Wrayan Castlemilk took the stairs and left.

  Bram felt as if he’d lived an entire life in the scant minutes she had been here. He had to stand for a while just to let it all sink in. Bram Cormac now possessed a very fine and slightly needy stallion. Dalhousie wanted him as an apprentice.

  And his older brother knew he had taken the Castlemilk oath. Robbie knew yet had sent no message of goodwill. He is busy, Bram told himself harshly. He has an entire clanhold to secure. Suddenly needing to get outside into the light, Bram righted the lid on the cheese vat—Wrayan Castlemilk had not replaced it—and then headed up the steps.

  Guide or master swordsman. He knew he was lucky to have such a choice. Yet he didn’t feel lucky, just confused. Was it ungrateful to want something more?

  The dairymaids were now busy with the churning and the steady thump and slop of the plungers competed with the sound of Millard Flag and Little Coll stacking vats against the far wall. The head dairyman looked up at Bram as he emerged from the cold room, a question on his small wrinkled face. Bram ignored it. He had to get out of the noise. He knew he was due to feed the boiler, which lay just outside the milk room so the heat from the fire wouldn’t spoil the churning, but he passed it right by.

  The dairy court was quiet except for a half dozen cows that had been walked onto the newly cleared ground and tossed a bale of hay. The dairymaid watching over them was keeping herself warm by hugging a hot stone wrapped in a blanket to her chest. She regarded Bram with some interest as he passed. Only minutes earlier the chief had visited the milk room and now here was Bram Cormac coming out. That would give the dairymaids something to talk about at second milking.

  Bram checked on the sun. It wouldn’t be long now before midday. Drouse Ogmore would expect him at the guidehouse at noon and there was no telling how long the guide would keep him—usually till well after dark. Ogmore was currently teaching him how to sift and grade the rock dust that shed from the stone during chiseling. An elaborate succession of hoop-shaped sieves was employed, and once the dust had been separated into particles of similar size, the larger pieces had to be sorted by hand. Stone chips, pieces of chalk, pyrite nuggets, fossils and pellets of hardened shale oil: all had to be separated and judged. It was the judging that was the difficult thing, the developing of an eye for pieces that were extraordinary and needed to be set aside for special use. Bram erred on the side of caution, and had been saving a lot of grit. Trouble was, if you stared at any piece of stone for long enough it began to look like it was special. There were always shadings and sparkly bits and veins.

  The fine powder that made it to the bottom of the sieving process was easy to deal with. It was packed in small purses and sent out to the farmers to use in the fields. The next level might be employed in the roundhouse—a small percentage of the sand overlaying the Churn Hall floor was guidestone—and it was custom to sprinkle a portion on all hearths that were newly lit. The level up from that was where the grit lay and it was here that things began to get tricky. Tiny pieces of guidestone, no bigger than pumpkin seeds, had to be sorted by hand. Ogmore could do it in a single movement, passing a flat palm over the chips as they lay atop the wire mesh. The action would turn the pieces over and it was this turning, this revelation of a second side, that was enough for Ogmore to pick out anything worthwhile. “The important pieces flash like diamonds,” he had said to Bram more than once. “When your eye is trained you will spot them straightaway.”

  Bram figured his eye needed more training. The day before yesterday he had picked out every shiny piece from the third layer—it had taken him more than two hours—only to have Ogmore come along and dump it all back in the sieve. “No. No. No,” he had cried. “All stones that shine are not precious and not all precious stones shine.” Bram had been deeply confused.

  O
gmore had picked a chip from the sieve. “This,” he had said, holding it between his index finger and thumb so Bram could take a look at it, “is what we look for. See how its lines of cleavage fall counter to its veins?” Bram nodded. It was a tiny thing but if you squinted hard you could just make out where the chip had split off from the guidestone on a plain counter to its weak points. Like a piece of meat cut across the grain. “That’s where the gods lie. There. They are not bound by the laws of nature. I chip one way, using the lines of cleavage to aid my work, and the gods are content for me to do so and remain passive within the stone. Every so often though they push against the natural order—that is how gods work. This push is what we look for in the stone chips. It gives us evidence the gods are nimble. And reminds us we suffer their tolerance. If they chose to they could sunder the entire stone—look at the Hailstone, blasted to nothing. That is why we must monitor what is shed from the stone. Vigilance is the first and greatest responsibility of all clan guides, and vigilance begins with sifting through the dust.”

  It had been a lot to take in. It was interesting, but it wasn’t enough. Bram wanted to learn about things larger than dust. Where did the Stone Gods come from? Had they existed as long as the Sull gods? What would happen if the Sull decided they wanted the clanholds back? Would the two sets of gods go to war?

  There was no fooling Ogmore; he knew when you weren’t paying attention. “Go,” he had said coldly after Bram had made a series of mistakes. “Perhaps tomorrow you will learn more.”

  Now, approaching the guidehouse, Bram wasn’t sure he had the mind-set necessary to spend the rest of the day sorting tiny pieces of stone. It all seemed very small.

  He kept thinking about Robbie, knowing he shouldn’t, yet going ahead and doing it anyway. It was like having a sore tooth that you couldn’t stop prodding. Why hadn’t Robbie sent a message? Did he no longer consider Bram kin?

  “Bram Cormac.”

  Startled Bram looked up. He had been walking through the uncleared snow just west of the guidehouse and had not thought anyone was in sight.

  The man with the yellow-green eyes who had taken the ferry crossing earlier stepped out from the shadows of the guidehouse’s northern wall. He was older than he looked from a distance, but age rested differently on him than other men. His face had hardened rather than slackened. Bone had grown in to replace fat, and decades of exposure to ice and sunlight had pulled the skin tight across the bridge of his nose and jaw. As he walked toward Bram his floor-length saddle coat left draglines in the snow.

  “I am Hew Mallin,” he said speaking in the kind of voice that was rarely ignored. “I am a ranger. And friend to Angus Lok.”

  Bram had a strong memory of Angus Lok’s visit to the Dhoonehouse. Yet he would not expect a stranger to know that . . . unless Angus Lok himself had told this man of their meeting.

  “Walk with me,” Hew Mallin said, assuming many things.

  The ranger struck a path northwest toward the woods. Bram saw that he was still carrying the item he’d held during the river crossing. It was a square of black bearskin. A flattened hat.

  The guidehouse door-within-a-door was closed and Bram looked at it for a long moment before following the ranger into the cover of the trees.

  The woods to the north of the Milkhouse were a dense, snarled cage of choke vines, oaks, elms, hemlocks, basswoods and blackstone pines. Roots, vine runners and thornbushes lurked beneath the snow like traps, ready to trip and stab. Bram thought about stopping for a moment to tuck his pants into his boots but Hew Mallin was walking with purpose and within seconds he would be out of sight. The ranger did not look back to check on Bram’s progress.

  He had to be armed, Bram reckoned, but any weapons he possessed were concealed beneath his coat. Had he presented himself to Wrayan Castlemilk or the head warrior Harald Mawl? Bram guessed that if the ranger had wanted to arrive in secret he would have come in from the north and not taken the river crossing. How long had he been waiting behind the guidehouse? Bram’s thoughts raced ahead of him, and he found himself remembering Jackdaw Thundy’s words. Hawk and spider, that was how the swordmaster had described the ranger Angus Lok.

  Reaching a clearing where hardwood saplings were fighting for territory with tiny, perfectly formed pines, Hew Mallin slowed and then stopped. “In Alban’s day they used to hold the old ghostwatches here,” he said, using the bearskin hat to brush snow from a felled log. “Twice a year, on the longest and shortest days. They’d build a twenty-foot pyramid of timber and light it as the sun set. It’s purpose was to ward off ghosts and other evil things. You might say it worked for the ghostwatch hasn’t been held since Wrayan took her brother’s place, and the ghosts are only now coming back.”

  Hew Mallin sat on the log. His face was deeply ice-tanned, yet his lips were pale. His brown and graying hair had been needle-braided and pulled back in a warrior’s knot. It was the kind of work that took an expert braider an entire day to achieve, yet once done it rendered any sort of care unnecessary for six months.

  “What of the forest?” Bram asked, the first words he had spoken. “With a fire that big it could have gone up in flames.”

  “That is the crux,” Mallin replied coolly, fixing Bram with his yellow eyes. “If one is serious about fighting ghosts there is always a cost.”

  Bram felt the world spinning on him. He had thought it spun earlier, in the cold room, but looking back now he realized that was just the first tug necessary to set a jammed wheel in motion. The Castlemilk guidestone had shown him this man: the bearskin hat, the fork in the path.

  “You have been marked, Bram Cormac son of Mabb. The rangers have observed you for five years. We have minded you on the practice court and in the scribes’ hall at Dhoone. We have asked others about matters concerning you and received answers that satisfied. Your part in Skinner Dhoone’s downfall has been noted. Your actions the night Vaylo Bludd was located on a hillside east of Dhoone are known to us. We see much that others do not, and we watch for others like us.” A small, weighted pause. “And that watching has brought me to you.”

  Bram swallowed. Who had told this man about the meeting with Vaylo Bludd? Guy Morloch? Jordie Sarson? The Dog Lord? And how did Mallin know that Bram had visited Skinner Dhoone all those months ago at the Old Round outside of Gnash? Did he know that Bram had looked into Skinner’s Dhoone-blue eyes that day and lied? A glance at the ranger’s hard, angular face gave Bram his answer. Yes, Hew Mallin knew. He knew and judged it satisfactory.

  The strange tightness that had seized Bram’s chest in the cold room gripped him again. What was happening here? Why did he feel under threat?

  “We are the Brotherhood of the Long Watch, the Phage, and we have stood guard against the Endlords for four thousand years. We watch in this land and many other lands, in the cities and in the clanholds, in the deserts and on the seas. Dark armies are massing and we stand ready at the gate. We are few against many, and while others on this continent fight wars, seize strongholds, kill, breed, sleep, we walk in the shadows and patrol against the darkness and the men and women who harbor it.” Hew Mallin shifted his position, revealing a lean sword housed in an intricately etched steel scabbard. “Our ways are subtle and the tasks we undertake are seldom pleasant. We know truth but do not always speak it. Enemies forestall us and we must act to wipe them out. We do not serve one man or one people, and our home is on the horse paths, animal tracks, dirt roads and riverways. As darkness moves so must we.

  “We are the Phage and we know the names of the creatures in the Blind and are afraid. The world lies on the brink, and the first question I bring you, Bram Cormac, is this: how long can it stay there unsupported?”

  Snapping his gaze away from Bram, the ranger began to walk the rough circle of the clearing.

  Bram looked at the sky. He was about an hour late for Drouse Ogmore. Every day since the guide had asked him to consider becoming his apprentice Bram had gone to the guidehouse thinking, Today will be the day Ogmore asks
for my decision. So far that day had not come. Now Dalhousie Selco wanted to make a master swordsman from him—and for a son of a swordsman that meant something. Bram had lost count of the times he had been told he was too small to wield the hammer, the ax and the big two-handed longswords that were favored by Dhoonesmen. Here at Castlemilk they preferred a smaller, fighting sword. And Dalhousie believed that given time Bram could wield such a weapon with skill.

  Already it was a wealth of choices. He had come here with nothing and now owned a horse. At Dhoone he possessed no worth save his kinship to Robbie. Now he had two trades to choose from, two ways to gain merit in this clan.

  Bram listened to the sound of the trees moving, the hemlocks shushing and the old oaks creaking like swinging doors. Leaves had budded on the elms too early and the frost was rotting them off.

  Not thinking any answer was required from him, Bram kept his silence. It seemed as if the world had sharpened. He could see the light in the snow as well as upon it, see the blues and greens that waited there like memories of water. The shadows were darker and more menacing, biding behind trees like coiled springs. When he saw his footprints had exposed earth as well as pine needles, he graded the stones. Nothing shiny or unusual. Nothing that went against the grain.

  When Hew Mallin’s circuit turned him back toward Bram, he spoke. “You have guessed what the second question is but I will ask it anyway. Formalities serve their purpose.” The ranger halted three feet from Bram and pinned him with a gaze so sharp Bram felt it cut like a wire through his head. “I, Hew Mallin of the Brotherhood of the Long Watch, ask you, Bram Cormac son of Mabb, to leave the clanholds with me this night and beginning training as a ranger for the Phage.”

  I cannot. Yet he was stirred beyond all sense. Hew Mallin was shaking. So was Bram. “Do you teach the histories?”

  “Knowledge is power.”