A Cavern Of Black Ice (Book 1)

by J. V. Jones

  His eyes stung, part snow abrasion and part snow blindness. Everything he’d looked at for the past two days had been blurred. The others probably had the sense to sit out the worst days of the storm, raise camp hard against a leeward slope, and cover their tents in snow. Raif forced his wind-cracked lips to stretch to a hard line. He wouldn’t think about the others. They would come back, perhaps two or three days later than he, but they would return, and when they did his life in the clan would be over. Mace Blackhail would see to that.

  Raif Sevrance ran from battle, he would say. The yearman broke his oath.

  Raif raised a fist and ground his raven lore into his chest. He had done Mace Blackhail’s work for him! And, if time could be turned and he could go back to the Bluddroad and the ambush, he couldn’t say if he would do it again. The horror of killing women and children had seemed so clear then. Riding alone for the past five days had dulled it.

  Pulling the filly from her path to one of his own choosing, Raif steeled himself against doubts. The past was the past, and wishing it different never brought anyone relief.

  As he cut across the graze, a line of blue smoke rising from the near side of the roundhouse caught his attention. He rubbed his sore eyes, making them worse. When the stinging subsided, he concentrated upon the smoke, tracing its source to the blue stone roof of the guidehouse. Uneasy, he kicked a better pace from the filly. The guidehouse had no hearth or chimney, only a smoke hole for letting out lamp fumes, yet from the volume of smoke escaping from the roof, it looked as if someone had built and lit a fire.

  Everything else about the roundhouse seemed normal. Longhead and his crew had cleared the snow from the court, and a handful of young boys were out taking advantage of the cart-size snow piles that had been shoveled aside. The boys stopped playing and turned to watch as Raif approached. Berry Lye, a great turnip-headed youth with red ears who was younger brother to Banron, brushed the snow from his buckskins and ran forward to greet Raif. He wanted to know what had happened at the ambush. How many Bluddsmen had Banron unseated with his hammer? How had his new armor stood up to the fight? Raif silenced him with a single look. He was in no mood to talk to children. Berry’s face reddened to match his ears, and for a moment he looked just like his brother. Raif turned away, suddenly ashamed. He didn’t even know if Banron was alive or dead.

  Berry ran for the roundhouse, eager to be first with the news that at least one of the ambush party had made it back alive.

  Raif slid from his horse and led it to the stables. He felt sick to his stomach. What was he going to say? How could he tell the clansmen and women with due respect what he had done?

  Pretty, copper-haired Hailly Tanner emerged from the stables to take his horse. She actually blushed as their hands touched over the reins. Raif, like many young men in the clan, had wasted hours dreaming about Hailly’s pale, lightly freckled skin and perfect strawberry mouth. Until today she had never deigned to notice him, let alone gone out of her way to tend his horse. Now she stood before him, asking quite coyly if the filly needed hay or oats. Raif showed a grim smile. He was a yearman now; that was the difference. Before he had been nothing, a lad with a borrowed bow and no oath, unworthy in every way of her attentions. He gave her his instructions and left.

  Ignoring the small crowd of women and children who had begun to gather at the main entrance, Raif headed for the side door instead. Before he did or said anything, he needed to visit the guidehouse. Alone.

  Anwyn Bird stood in the entryway, arms folded, watching him. Raif thought he might be in for a grilling, but something must have been showing on his face, for the gray-haired matron let him pass unchallenged. As he headed along the stone passage to the guidehouse, he heard her calling for a keg of warm beer and a platter of fried bread. Despite everything, Raif felt his mouth watering. He had trail meat in his pack, but if he had eaten any on the way home, he had no memory of it.

  The door to the guidehouse was open. Tattered scraps of smoke and burned matter sailed from the doorway as he passed inside. He thought for a moment, then shut the door behind him, taking time to ensure it was firmly closed.

  The interior was as dark and suffocating as a smokehouse. Raif’s eyes stung fiercely. He couldn’t see anything at first except the massive blocky outline of the guidestone. Gradually he became accustomed to the darkness and began to pick out details in the room. He was standing at the foot of the guidestone. The granite was slick with graphite oil. Pockmarks in the age-old stone were crusted with hard, milky mineral deposits that glinted like exposed sections of bone. The stone itself seemed darker than he remembered. Perhaps it was the smoke.

  A small fire was burning in the west corner, its densely packed timbers wetted with hog’s blood to stop the wood from burning with a hot, fast flame. Directly above, the smoke hole had been newly enlarged, and fresh tar had been painted around its edges. No tallow or oil lamps were lit. The guidehouse floor was littered with debris, and bits of rock crunched beneath Raif’s boots as he stepped toward the stone. Despite the fire, it was deathly cold, and a harsh acrid stench rose above the gamy aroma of cooked blood.

  Uneasy, Raif stripped off his soft inner gloves and dropped to his knees by the guidestone. He wasn’t good at prayers. Tem had taught both his sons that it wasn’t right to ask the Stone Gods for anything for oneself. They were hard gods, not easily moved by suffering. A man’s life and his problems were nothing to them. They watched over the clanholds and the clans, demanding their proper place in each roundhouse and around each clansman’s and clanswoman’s waist. Yet they gave little back . . . and they answered no small prayers.

  Raif’s fingers hooked around the tine that hung from his belt. Weighing the antler tip in his fist, he suddenly realized there was no need to pray: The Stone Gods had been at his side through the ambush and long journey home. They were here in the powdered guidestone at his waist. They knew all he had come to say.

  Not knowing if that thought gave him comfort or made him afraid, Raif reached forward and laid his palms on the guidestone.

  The stone was as hard and cold as a frozen carcass. Raif had to fight the desire to withdraw his touch, knowing that to do so would be a kind of defeat. Forcing his jaw together, he pressed his flesh harder against the stone. Numbness took his fingertips, then knuckles, as blood vessels carried the stone coldness toward his heart. A dull pain sounded in his upper left arm. The light entering his pupils wavered, and his vision flickered and dimmed.

  The numbness crept across his palms, tingling like alcohol evaporating from his skin as it spread. After a few minutes he could feel nothing of the guidestone’s surface. The pain in his arm throbbed like a pump drawing up water. For the briefest of instances, Raif was taken with the idea that he was siphoning something from the guidestone, pulling it inward toward himself. He felt a moment of utter stillness, heavy as the deepest sleep, where he understood that if he could just reach beyond the stone’s surface, everything would become known to him.

  “What makes you think you can heal the stone?”

  The voice snapped the thread. The pain and the pulling stopped. The stillness collapsed inward, creating a rush of light and darkness that formed images as it slid back into the stone. Raif saw a forest of high trees, their foliage rippling from blue to silver like the sea; a lake of frozen blood, its surface hard as hammered metal, its depths dark with distorted shapes trapped within the ice. Other things came and went, moving too quickly for him to capture or understand: a city with no name or people, a pair of gray eyes, frightened, and a raven flying north in winter when all other birds flew south.

  Before he could commit it all to memory, someone tugged at his wrists, pulling his hands from the stone. Raif’s hands peeled away slowly, making sucking noises as his skin fought to keep hold. He felt no pain, only a vague sensation of loss. Turning, he found himself looking into the black eyes of Inigar Stoop.

  “You should not have touched the stone, Raif Sevrance,” he said quietly. “Did you not see
that it is broken?”

  Raif’s heart was still racing from all the guidestone had showed him, and it took him a few seconds to decipher what Inigar had said. He shook his head. “Broken? I . . . I don’t understand what you mean.”

  The guide held out a hand dark and twisted with age. “Then I shall show you.”

  When Raif gave Inigar his hand he did not expect to need the guide’s help standing, but his legs buckled as they took his weight and he stumbled against the stone. Surprisingly, Inigar pulled him up, steadied and held him until he had regained enough of his strength to stand alone. Looking at the small, sunken-chested guide with his white old man’s hair and his dark, membrane-thin skin, Raif wondered how he could manage such a feat.

  Inigar smiled, not kindly. “Follow me.” Disappearing into the smoky darkness, he gave Raif little choice but to do as he said.

  Coming to a halt at the opposite side of the guidestone, Inigar wagged his head and said, “This is why I burn the smoke fire. This.”

  Raif followed Inigar’s gaze. A deep fissure ran from the top edge of the stone halfway to the floor, exposing the wet and glistening interior of the rock and gathering shadows like a fault line in the earth. Graphite oil oozed from the cleft like blood.

  “It happened five days ago.” Inigar looked at Raif sharply. “At dawn.”

  Knowing there was a question in the guide’s words, yet unwilling to answer it, Raif said, “The ambush went well. The others will be back within a day or two.”

  Inigar ignored his words completely. Running a hand along the crack, he said, “The Stone Gods watch over all clans. Despite the claims of each and every clan chief since the Great Settling, they have no favorites. Blackhail, Dhoone, Scarpe, Ganmiddich: They are all one and the same to those who live within the stone. If Scarpe wins a victory over Gnash, they are not displeased. If Ganmiddich takes the Croser roundhouse and makes it their own, they find no reason to be enraged. The Stone Gods created the clans, they put the craving for land and battle within us, so they do not grieve when clans make war and lives are shed. It is their nature as well as our own.

  “However, when something happens that goes against all they have taught and bred within us, threatening the very existence of the clanholds themselves, then the gods get angry.” Inigar punched the cracked guidestone with the heel of his fist. “And this is how they show it!”

  Raif stepped back.

  “Yes, Raif Sevrance. Perhaps you had better step back, for all our sakes.”

  Feeling his face grow hot, Raif began to shake his head. He couldn’t bear to look at the crack in the stone. “I . . . I . . .”

  “Silence! I don’t want to be told what happened from your lips. Some news can come too soon, when a man is not ready or able to chew it.” Inigar Stoop looked straight into Raif’s eyes. “Like oaths.”

  Raif winced. The pain returned to his arm, soft and sickening like a pulled muscle.

  “We three knew, didn’t we? Eleven days ago on the court. Me, you, and the raven.” The guide grabbed Raif’s elkskin, tore the ties apart to reveal the raven lore beneath. He plucked the piece of horn from Raif’s neck, snapping the twine. Closing his fist around the lore, he said, “I was not the one who gave you this—that shame is not mine—and perhaps it is as much the old guide’s fault as it is yours. Either way, you are not good for this clan, Raif Sevrance. You are raven born, chosen to watch the dead. And I fear that if you stay amongst us, you will watch us all die before your eyes have had their fill.

  “Already you have watched the deaths of your father, ten of our best warriors, and our chief. Yet that still wasn’t enough, was it? You had to watch the death of Shor Gormalin, too. Shor. The finest man in this clan. An eagle, he was. Tell me, what right has a raven to watch over an eagle’s death?”

  Raif looked down. He had no answer.

  Still Inigar Stoop wasn’t finished. “And what of your brother, Raif Sevrance? Who seconded your oath and took possession of your swearstone. What new shame have you brought him? If I had such a brother, who loved me with all the fierceness of his bear lore, who spoke up for me when no one else would, and linked his fate to mine without a moment’s hesitation, I would count myself blessed. I would revere and obey him and spend all my days repaying his trust. I would not shame him with my words or my deeds.”

  Raif covered his face with his hands. He had spent the last five days pushing all thoughts of Drey from his mind. Now the guide was pushing them back. And Raif knew he spoke the truth.

  Inigar opened his fist and let the raven lore drop to the floor. “You came here to seek the Stone Gods’ guidance. So look hard upon the guidestone and see if it does not offer the answer you need.” He glanced once at the fissure in the stone, just long enough to ensure that Raif understood his meaning, then turned and walked into the smoke. “When you are done, go and join those gathered to greet you on the court. A visitor awaits you there.”

  Raif closed his eyes. He stood and did not move, fearing to touch the stone again. It was a long time before he scooped up his lore and left.

  “Leave him alone! All of you!” Anwyn Bird broke through the crowd of people on the court, laden tray held out before her like a battering ram. “Can’t you see the yearman needs food and drink before you go bothering him with questions?” The clan matron favored Raif with a smile so gentle and proud, it made him ashamed. “Here, lad. It’s the best dark beer I have. Drink it.”

  Raif took the horn from her, grateful to have something to focus his attention upon. The sunlight reflecting off the snow was dazzling after the darkness of the guidehouse, and the river of faces before him, all chattering and asking questions at once, made him want to run away. He stood his ground. These people were his clan, and they had a right to know of their kin. He held the horn to his lips, inhaled the rich, woodsy aroma of beer aged in oak barrels and then warmed slowly over the hearth for three days. Anwyn was right: It was the best she had. And that was why he chose not to drink it.

  Resting the horn against his chest, he tried to pick out the faces of Raina and Effie in the crowd. He couldn’t spot them. A small group of people stood in darkness behind the greatdoor; perhaps they were among them.

  “We must know what happened, lad.” It was Orwin Shank, his big red face grave and worried. “Take your time, tell us as you see fit.”

  Raif nodded slowly. Why was everyone treating him so kindly? It only made things worse. Forcing himself to meet Orwin Shank’s eyes, he said, “Bitty is alive and well. He fought bravely, and his blade took at least two Bluddsmen that I counted.”

  Orwin Shank reached out and clamped a hand over Raif’s shoulder. Tears sparkled in his light blue eyes. “You always bring news to ease a father’s heart, Raif Sevrance. You’re a good lad, and I thank you for it.”

  Orwin Shank’s words were in such contrast with those he had heard earlier from Inigar Stoop that Raif felt his eyes stinging. He didn’t deserve them. Glancing around, he addressed the crowd, fearing that if he didn’t get it over and done with soon, he would lose his nerve. “The ambush was a success. All went as planned. Corbie Meese led a crew from the north of the road, Ballic the Red from the south. My brother was chosen to lead the rear. The battle was fierce, and the Bluddsmen fought hard, but we wore them down and forced them into the snow, and then took victory for ourselves.” Raif’s gaze sought out Sarolyn Meese, Corbie’s plump, sweet-natured wife. “Corbie fought like a Stone God. He was beautiful to watch.”

  “Is he hurt?” Sarolyn touched Raif’s arm as she waited for his reply.

  “No. A few nicks, perhaps. Nothing more.”

  “And what of Ballic?”

  Raif couldn’t tell whom the question came from, but he answered it as well as he could. Other questions followed, everyone wanting to know of their loved ones and kin. Raif found himself relaxing as he spoke. It was surprisingly easy to avoid speaking of what came later in the clearing. All that mattered to the clansfolk was if their sons, husbands, and brothers were al
ive and well and had fought bravely. Raif was relieved to find himself telling truths that hurt neither himself nor any member of the ambush party.

  When Jenna Walker stepped forward and asked about her son, Raif’s relief left him as quickly as if it had never been there at all.

  “Toady was badly injured. He may be dead.”

  Jenna Walker shook off the people who moved swiftly to support and comfort her. Green eyes, sharp with anger, pinned Raif to the spot. “Why do you not know for sure? Why are you here before the rest? What happened after the raid?”

  Raif took a breath. He had feared this moment for five days.

  “What happened to Banron?” It was big, turnip-headed Berry Lye, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. “How many Bluddsmen’s skulls did he crack open with his hammer?”

  “Tell us why you’re here, Raif Sevrance.” Jenna Walker’s body shook as she spoke. “Tell us.”

  Raif looked from Berry to Jenna Walker. He opened his mouth to speak.

  “Enough!” Raina Blackhail stepped from the shadows behind the greatdoor. Dressed in soft beaten leathers and fine black wool, she looked every bit a clan chief’s wife. Sable fur at her throat and cuffs rippled with every breath she took, and a silver knife slung at her hip caught the light. The crowd parted for her as she made her way forward. “The yearman has had a hard journey through new snow. Let him name those he believes wounded or dead, then allow him time to rest and eat.”

  Despite all her finery, Raina’s eyes were dull, and her face had lost all its fat. Raif was shocked to see her widow’s weals still bleeding. “Tell Berry of his elder brother.”

  It was a command, and he obeyed it, seeing in his mind Banron Lye’s body lying in a ditch being worried by dogs as he spoke. He gave Berry and his kin little hope, telling them that Banron had not moved even after the dogs had been shot. The belief that his clansman was dead grew in Raif’s mind as he spoke. He remembered standing across the Bluddroad from Banron. Watching . . .