by J. V. Jones
Angus touched his arm. “Come on. Dawn’s cracking. We’d best be on our way.” With that, he led Moose and his own horse, a muscular bay with clever eyes, across the court. A light snow was falling, and Angus’ hood was up. The fur around the hood was dark and glossy, and Raif could not tell what animal it came from.
Raif turned to face Effie and Raina Blackhail one last time. Raina had worked through the night to get supplies together for the journey south. She hadn’t once asked why he was leaving, but she knew about the guidestone and had guessed that something other than a battle well fought had taken place on the Bluddroad. Like Inigar Stoop, she had refused to hear the details. Raif didn’t know why she was going out of her way to help him. It might be that Inigar had told her he was bad for the clan. Yet somehow Raif doubted that. Raina Blackhail wasn’t the kind of woman to act on someone else’s words.
Yet she had married Mace Blackhail that same day he had been made chief, with Dagro less than forty days dead. According to Anwyn, the ceremony had been short and joyless, and not one sworn clansman had come forth to dance above the swords. Raina herself had retired to the guidehouse straight after, and no one, not even Inigar, had been able to persuade her to come out and eat at her own bride’s feast. Anwyn said that Mace had been in a fury and would have broken down the door if the thought of missing the ambush hadn’t pulled him away.
Raif reached for the usual anger, but it wasn’t there. Mace Blackhail had won. He had everything: the clan, the clan chief’s wife, a successful ambush to boast of when he returned. All those who had questioned his leadership were either dead, muzzled, or gone.
“I will speak to Drey on your behalf,” Raina said, breaking into his thoughts. “My husband’s voice won’t be the only one he heeds.” She met Raif’s gaze, and in that instant he knew the real reason she had married Mace Blackhail.
Strangely, it made it easier for him to go. If she could marry a man she hated just to guard over the clan, then surely he could do this for Drey? Quietly he spoke his last words to Effie and then walked the short distance to where Angus Lok was waiting with his horse.
When he was mounted and ready in the saddle, the reins couched in the split in his thick dog’s-hide gloves, he spun his horse to face south. He did not look at Effie or the roundhouse again.
You are not good for this clan, Raif Sevrance.
Without another word, Raif kicked Moose hard and rode away.
Angus Lok caught up with him an hour later as Moose worked his way through the old snow on the outskirts of the graze. Raif guessed Angus had held back to talk privately with Raina, but he wasted no thoughts on what matters had passed between the two. He concentrated only on the way ahead.
Dawn was a slow process. Light came, but it had no direction or visible source. The ground snow stripped shadows of their depth, and the distance to the sandstone ridge and taiga beyond was hard to judge. Raif had hunted in the great pine forest more times that he could count. When he was a child he had imagined it went on forever; in all the rangings he had been on, he had never once made it to the other side.
Angus rode in silence. After an hour or so he spoke a word to the bay and took the lead. Guiding them down to the base of the ridge, he followed a hunting track Raif had little knowledge of or feel for. Clansmen seldom took the ridge to the east, preferring to walk their horses up the more gentle inclines to the west. The snow was thinner here, and Moose stepped on hard ground for the first time all day. Young hemlocks and stone pines glistened with rime ice like bodies emerging from water. Even with their outer bark and needles hard froze, their sharp, resinous smell still spored the air.
Raif kept an iron grip on his thoughts, blocking out everything but the little needed to get by.
Hours passed. The temperature rose along with the light. Ptarmigan shrieked from the cover of snow-laden ground birch, and far in the distance a black-tailed deer brayed like a mule.
“That’s a good horse you have there.”
Raif’s mind was so tightly locked on the many small adjustments necessary for riding up a rocky slope, it took him a long moment to realize that Angus had spoken. Glancing up, he saw Angus had pulled back so the bay was almost alongside Moose. Obviously Angus was well used to travel: Every part of his body was oiled, bound, waxed, hooded, and insulated against the cold. His face alone boasted separate areas of beeswax, elk fat, and neat’s-foot oil.
Seeing where Raif’s gaze lingered, Angus grinned. “My wife would have me heated in a dry pan and then trodden to death by donkeys if I let anything happen to this handsome face.”
Raif made a smile. He didn’t want to talk.
“’Course, when she sees you, I’m counting on her turning a blind eye to the odd broken vein. She should let me live . . . as long as I don’t lose half a nose to the ’bite.”
Even as he realized it was Angus’ intention to get him talking by any means he could, Raif couldn’t help but be interested in what he said. He knew almost nothing about his uncle’s family. Angus kept all the details close. “We’re going to your home?” He felt like a traitor as he spoke.
If Angus Lok was pleased that Raif had spoken, he did not show it, merely concentrated on keeping the bay’s coffin bones clear of the rocks. “Perhaps, when my business in the south is done. It’s been a long time since my wife last saw you and Drey, and she’s never once set eyes on Effie. She’d skewer my ears if she knew I had you with me and didn’t bring you home. Right fierce, she is. Especially in the cold months.”
Drey. How long would it take him to crush his brother’s swearstone to dust? Raif heard his voice say, “I don’t remember your wife ever coming to visit the roundhouse.”
“Aye, lad, well you wouldn’t. Wee bairn, you were. Drey was still in his pelts. Had the meatiest little calves I’ve ever seen on a boy his age. Knew how to kick with them, too—just like his da.” Angus Lok looked up. Bits of reddish blond stubble had already grown through the lard smeared on his chin, giving his face the fierce look of a stinging fish. His eyes were a different matter, shifting color from copper to dark amber as quickly as if pigment had been poured into his irises. “It’s for the best, you know. Effie and Drey will get by without you. Good people are watching out for them, don’t forget that. Mace Blackhail is just one man. He might lead the clan, but he isn’t the clan. Men and women like Corbie Meese, Anwyn Bird, and Orwin Shank are the clan. They will follow Mace only so far.”
Raif wanted to believe what Angus said, but Angus hadn’t been party to the ambush on the Bluddroad. He didn’t know what good people were capable of when a man like Mace Blackhail stood behind them. In the short time Angus had spent with the clan, he had uncovered a great deal of its business from the private conversations he’d had with Raina, Orwin Shank, and others, but he didn’t know Mace Blackhail. Raif set his lips in a hard line, tasting the frost that had formed there. No one but he knew the Wolf.
Angus said no more on the subject. Instead he concentrated on guiding the horses up the slope. The sandstone cliffs were slick with ice. Underground streams forced water through the soft, porous rock, creating a breaking ground of loose gravel and split stones. Ferns and bladdergrass lashed at the horses’ cannons as they climbed, and great beds of frozen moss made it difficult for even the bay to keep his footing. Angus dismounted and led the bay, and after a few minutes Raif did likewise.
In the three hours they had been traveling, Raif had seen no sign of Angus’ incoming path. Snow had been light for the past day, and up within the protected folds of the ridge wall there was little coverage, so Raif had expected to see some indication—flattened grass, broken ice, horse tracks—that his uncle had traveled this way less than two days earlier. He looked and looked, but there was nothing. As they crested the rise and Raif saw nothing but level snow stretching out toward the great black body of the taiga, he drew level with Angus and said, “Why aren’t we taking the same route out of the clanhold as you took coming in?”
Angus Lok’s eyes shifted c
olor for the second time that day, and Raif saw tiny flecks of green in the irises he had not noticed before. Pulling back his hood, he said, “You’ve got a good eye on you, lad.”
Raif took out a shammy and began cleaning ice and mucus from Moose’s nostrils as he waited for his uncle to say more. Angus turned out his hood to air it, then took his rabbit flask from his pack. He drank a good portion. When he was done he did not offer the flask to Raif.
“Ranging is my business. I’ve traveled the Territories for twenty years, and it’s my wont never to take the same route twice in a season.” Angus smiled, showing good straight teeth. “’Course, me being me, I took the easy way in, so now we’re stuck taking the bastard’s way out. I’m always doing that, lad. You’ll get used to it given time.”
Raif felt the force of his uncle’s charm and goodwill working to settle his mind. Before he’d had chance to frame a reply, Angus spoke to change the subject.
“What say I take out some of those calf livers Anwyn bled until they were dry as bone and then boiled until they were boot leather, and eat them in the saddle? I’d like to get to the pines before next snow.” He squinted into the dead whiteness of the sky. “Looks as if we’re in for some bad weather before dark. What do you think?”
Raif shrugged, letting the matter drop. His uncle’s evasions were more telling than any straight answer. Just a couple of sentences and Angus Lok had put the old subject to a quiet death while blithely introducing at least another two to block the way back. It was a clever feat, and one Raif made a mental note not to forget.
As he put his boot in the stirrup to mount Moose, the gelding turned and Raif was forced to swing round to keep his footing. Abruptly he found himself staring back over the ridge toward the roundhouse. He wasn’t prepared for it. All day and he had never once looked back. Muscles in his chest tightened.
The round, snow-covered roof of the roundhouse was clearly identifiable, floating within the moat of cleared ground that was the court. Smokestacks showed up as black rings against the white roof, and the steam and soot they belched looked like fumes venting from an underground fault. Dark dots moving through the graze told of a hunt party out to shoot wild boar, ptarmigan, and deer. Raif strained to hear the yelps of the setters. When his ears finally picked up the high, familiar braying, he suddenly wished he hadn’t heard it and turned.
He made a lot of noise settling himself in the saddle and kicking Moose forward. When that wasn’t enough, he spoke, saying the first thing that came into his mind. “How is your daughter? Is she wed yet?”
Angus had also mounted and was now sitting in the saddle, chewing on a liver. He seemed glad of an excuse to spit it out. “Cassy’s not wed. No.” He was silent a moment, his face thoughtful. After breaking the bay gently into the knee-high snow, he said, “’Course, you wouldn’t know about the other two, would you? There’s Beth now—my second girl—and my little one, Maribel. Though call her that and she won’t know who you’re talking to. Doesn’t even know her own name. Little Moo she is, and Little Moo she’ll stay.” Angus smiled softly to himself. “Can’t think what the young men will make of it when time comes for courting.”
Fearing silence just then, Raif said, “Tem said you live near Ille Glaive.”
“Aye, that we do. Couple of days away, nothing more.” Angus swung around in the saddle and unhooked his bowcase from the bay’s hipstrap. “Here,” he said, holding it out for Raif to take. “You carry it for a while. I see you haven’t one of your own, and it would be a shame to waste the only bow in the party on the man who’s least able to use it.”
Raif took the bow automatically, even though he knew his uncle was being modest. Tem was fond of telling the story of how Angus had once shot a wild boar through goosegrass at two hundred paces. “Twilight, it was,” Tem had said. “And even the shadows had shadows.”
Only when Raif had stripped off his outer gloves and was busy with dog hooks, fastening the bowcase to Moose’s leatherwear, did he realize that Angus had changed the subject yet again.
“Orwin Shank said that on the morning the party formed for the ambush, you returned to the roundhouse with a dozen heart-killed beasts. Quite a haul for a night’s work. Tem must have been a good teacher.”
“He was.”
Ignoring the hostile tone of Raif’s voice, Angus carried on. “I knew a man once who could heart-kill any beast he set his sights on. He could even do it in the dark. We shared a season’s hunting together, many years back now. Whenever we made camp, I’d sit around the cookfire facing in, and he’d sit facing out, bow on his lap, bowring on his finger, watching the darkness for game. Sooner or later some poor possum or shoat would always draw close to investigate the fire and the smell. That was when Mors would take them, clean as if it were day.”
Angus put his hand on his chest. “Never saw as much as a cleft foot or a red eye myself, and I’d sit by that fire thinking the man I’d chosen to camp with was as mad as a dog with a stick in its eye. Yet off he’d go, trekking into the darkness, and sure enough five minutes later we’d have fresh kill to roast. Took me quite a while to get accustomed to it, I can tell. And just between you and me heart-killed possum tastes like shit.”
Raif smiled.
Angus grinned, his eyes turning coppery again. “I used to say to him, Mors, can’t you hit them in the head or something? and he’d say, No. Only the heart.”
The quick, appraising look Angus gave him as he spoke sobered Raif completely. “Who was this Mors?”
“Oh Mors is still alive. Though he’s a bit different now than he was twenty years ago. Who knows, one day you may meet him.” Angus was silent as he guided the bay through a drift of snow that reached to the gelding’s chest. When they were free of the incline, he said, “I asked Mors once if he could kill men the same way as he killed beasts.”
“And?”
“Said it wasn’t the same. He’d tried, but couldn’t do it.”
Inside his fox hood, Raif’s neck and cheeks flushed hot. He saw the Bludd spearman tearing flesh from Rory Cleet’s thigh, remembered finding the man’s heart in his sights . . . then shooting him dead. Heart-killed. Suddenly feeling as if he couldn’t breathe, Raif pushed back the fox hood. All the sickness and weakness that had seized him after the killing came back with such clarity it was like feeling it over again, here, on the taiga’s edge.
“Here. Drink this.”
Raif looked up. Angus Lok was holding out his flask. Raif shook his head. How long had it been since he’d torn back his hood? Surely only a moment? Yet Angus had had enough time to find and uncork his flask.
Shrugging off Raif’s refusal, Angus took a swig from the flask himself. Smiling fondly at the flask as he corked it, he said, “We’ll rest a bit once we’re under cover of the trees. Feed the horses. The snow in the forest should be light enough for us to make a fair pace before dark.”
This time Raif was grateful for the change in subject. His heart was racing, and the taste of metal leaked through his mouth like blood from a sliced gum. Although he didn’t much feel like it, he forced himself to speak. “Will we travel north through the taiga until we reach Black Spill?”
Angus shook his head. “No. We’ll head north a bit, then east. There’s a few places I mean to visit along the way.”
“Stovehouses?”
“Aye. I have a habit of running out of good liquor in the most inconvenient of places, so I never miss the chance to top my load. Besides, the stovemaster’s wife at Duff’s has a way with needle and thread. And Darra would have my eyeballs for chewing curd if I passed that close and didn’t bring her back a length of cloth.”
Raif nodded, but not lightly. Stovehouses were the backbone of the clanholds. Any mud-and-hide mound, felt-covered dugout, log cabin, or ancient barn could be named one. All a stovehouse needed was a stove. Some of the larger ones like Duff’s were more like inns, with a stovemaster to keep the stove lit day and night, cots to sleep on, hot food, warm ale, and stalls to box the horse
s. Others were little more than deserted shacks, their walls plugged with wax against the wind, their stoves cold, a cord of logs stacked in the corner, and dried food packed high in the rafters, out of reach of bears. All clansmen traveling from one clanhold to another used them. They were a basic necessity in a land where storms could roll from the Great Want in less time than it took to skin an elk.
Stovehouses were no-man’s-land. Any man or woman from any clan had right of refuge in every stovehouse in the clanholds. Wars, border disputes, clan feuds, and hunting rivalries were all set aside once a clansman stepped within shadow of a stove.
Stove laws were sacred in the clanholds, and although many legendary fights and battles had taken place in the woods and balds directly surrounding the great stovehouses, no one ever bared weapons inside. To do so would bring shame and condemnation upon oneself and one’s clan.
As he rode through the thick, powdery snow, Raif worked out who he would be likely to meet at Duff’s. His mood darkened. Any number of clansmen could be there, hunting by day in the winter game runs east of the taiga, warming themselves around the great copper stove shaped like a brewer’s vat at night.
And then there would be Bluddsmen.
Raif felt for his raven lore for the first time that day, turning it in his hand like a game piece. He didn’t want to think about what would happen between Bluddsmen and Hailsmen once news of the Bluddroad slaying leaked out. Stove laws would be tested to breaking then.
“Have you got that bow of mine braced and ready?” Angus called from ahead. “I’ll be expecting a pair of ice hares in payment for the lending. Fat ones, mind. Not some skinny albino rats.”
Raif looked over Angus’ shoulder to the black wedge of forest they were about to enter. By turns scattered, dense, fire leveled, and wind stunted, the taiga stretched for hundreds of leagues south and west of the clanhold. A stand of old, perfectly straight black spruce formed the forest’s north wall, and Raif was aware of light and wind levels dropping as he approached. It was like entering a building. The snow underfoot became firmer and more shallow with each step. Noises fell away. Overhead, the limbs of the spruces created a ceiling of nursed snow.