by J. V. Jones
Iss shivered. Averting his gaze, he looked out across the expanse of the borderlands. The leads Asarhia had opened stretched inward toward the center of the grayness. Iss searched the visible horizon, straining to see some detail of the Blindwall beyond. How far did you reach, almost-daughter? There is not a sorcerer in the North who did not feel your power yesterday at dawn. No one can stand against you, I know that now, not the Phage or the Sull or the First Gods themselves. For sixteen years I kept you from them, treasuring and protecting you, and now you think you can run away and leave Spire Vanis behind. Yet know this, Asarhia March. No matter how quickly you run and how far you travel, when you reach you will be doing my work.
As Iss spoke the word work, a gust of wind sliced deep into the grayness. Smoke parted. For one instant his eyes focused upon a solid form. It was huge, towering, the wall of an ancient fortress, completely smooth, and dark as night . . .
Iss gasped. Back in the apex tower, his body slumped forward as the Bound One’s power wavered sharply. Iss forced his jaws together, sucking the caul fly dry. He had the Blindwall in his sights. It was vast, breathtaking, but had he seen a tiny flaw at its base? He had to know.
The Bound One screamed, higher and higher, as if he might shatter glass. Iss crushed the head of the caul fly with his teeth, releasing a broth of blood and curds. A rush of air and light stripped away all he could see. The Blindwall was gone. The borderlands were gone. The power released was not enough to hold him in place, and his flesh pulled him back.
He entered his body with a jolt. A clumsy limb banged against the wall. Teeth bit through tongue meat. The nausea that always came when he returned to his flesh hit him hard, and he spat out a wad of saliva speckled with fly parts. For some time he could do nothing but sit with his head slumped over his knees. Minutes passed before he could look up. With a gaze slower and more ungainly than the one he’d left behind, Iss contemplated the Bound One.
He lay lifeless in the iron apex, his body bathed in sweat. His eyes were open, yet his eyeballs were rolled back and nothing but white showed. Pressure sores from the manacles around his wrists were slick with blood, and the metal walls of the apex were streaked with claw marks. His chest moved . . . barely.
Iss struggled to his feet. The stench of his own body was unbearable to him. He smelled like an old man. The apex chamber reeked of urine and shit. Always when he returned to his body and took command of his five senses, it was the smells that appalled him the most. How could people live with them? Anger and disgust made him drive his fist hard into the Bound One’s chest. The Bound One jerked reflexively, sliding farther down into the apex. A series of quick breaths animated his face for a few short seconds, and then he fell back into oblivion.
Iss watched him closely. What had happened here? The Bound One’s power did not usually drain so quickly—even in the borderlands where such things counted for less. Iss considered aiming a second blow to test him. Could he be faking his insensibility? Had he withdrawn his power on purpose? Was it possible that he had seen the Blindwall, too? Yet what if he was sickening? He was old now, his body yellow and stiff. It was natural that his power should weaken over time. Still.
Iss returned to his sorcerer’s seat and sat and watched and waited. Only when an hour had passed without the Bound One moving as much as his little finger did Iss feel satisfied enough to take his leave.
For the first time ever, the Bound One did not grieve as Iss removed the light.
FORTY-SIX
A Journey Begins
Raif woke in the freezing darkness before dawn. He knew he would not return to sleep, so he rose and took himself outside. He urinated against the barn wall, then scooped up a handful of snow and scoured his face. The shock of coldness passed quickly. Overhead the sky was black, but far on the eastern horizon, above the tree line and slate crags of Ganmiddich, the ice mist glowed pink with dawn.
Raif turned away. He made himself busy, binding a nick on the gelding’s foreleg and then tending his own stripped and bloody skin. His hands smelled like raw beef. They burned like hot coals as he thrust them into the snow to clean and numb them before he bandaged them tightly against the cold. In winter the worst danger to broken skin was frostbite. Gat Murdock had lost his bowfinger to a dog bite no deeper than a pockmark just because he’d not thought to bandage it one night when it was icy cold. And last winter Arlec Byce had spent Godsfest with pig lard slathered over his face because he’d ridden out to the Oldwood within an hour of taking a close shave.
Hard frosts worried Raif. Ash needed to be well protected. She was underweight, and a diet of ice hares and fishers wouldn’t be enough to help her fight off the cold. A person could starve on lean meat. Two summers ago Drey and Rory Cleet had returned from a ten-day hunting trip to the balds doubled up with cramps and indigestion. The hunting had been poor, and they’d lived on nothing but flat ale and rabbit meat for a week. Raif remembered standing outside the outhouse with Bitty Shank and Tull Melon, singing, Nothing runs faster than a man with rabbit runs, at the tops of their voices while Drey and Rory relieved themselves inside.
Raif smiled at the memory . . . and somehow, as he did so, the freezing wind brought tears to his eyes.
Drey had not waited.
Yesterday, when Raif had walked away from the shore of the Wolf River, the final thing he did before the path veered north and hid him from sight was to turn and look at his brother one last time. Only Drey wasn’t there. Drey had already moved on. Raif had caught a glimpse of his slow-moving shadow slipping eastward through the rocks, on his way to meet with the Hail Wolf.
Raif stood in the snow and breathed and did not think. After a while he turned and made his way back to the farmhouse, filling his mind with the dozens of things that needed to be done before he and Ash could begin the journey west.
Ash was awake, sitting tending the fire and rewarming the remains of last night’s meal. She smiled shyly at him as he entered, and he did not have the heart to tell her that he had wanted last night’s stock left cold so he could skim the congealed fat from the top and use it to protect their faces from the wind. The fisher meat had been cut into strips and left to dry overnight, yet Raif could tell from the look of it that it was only partially cured. It would have to do. The pelt was stiff, but there was no time to soften it with urine, so he showed Ash how to roll it on the hearth as if it were a long piece of dough and work the stiffness out with her fists.
He left her doing that while he searched the house for clothes, knives, and food. It was bitterly cold. The few rugs and blankets he found in the storm cellar were stiff and shaggy with ice. He picked the best two blankets and beat them until they were dry. In the bottom of an old bloodwood chest he found a pair of goatskin gloves. They’d been packed away while still wet and were mottled with blue black mold, yet Raif pulled them on all the same. They were barely wearable and smelled of mange, but they fitted well enough.
By the time he returned to Ash he’d found an ancient wool cloak with a kettle burn close to the shoulder, a child’s sheepskin hood, a tin cup filled with lanolin and beeswax, and a handknife with a corroded iron blade. The farmhouse had been looted with great care, possibly by both Bludd and Hailsmen, and anything of use or value had been taken. No foodstuff of any sort remained.
Raif watched as Ash pulled on the cloak and hood. She’d been busy in his absence, wrapping the fisher meat in dock leaves, melting a new batch of snow, and airing her boots and stockings above the fire. “You haven’t got a cloak for yourself,” she said.
“I’ll make do with a blanket. Once I put an edge to this knife, I’ll cut the fisher pelt down to a hood.”
Ash frowned. “I should have taken the supplies from the camp. All the saddlebags were there, scattered in the snow. I could have had whatever I wanted.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and meant it.
Her gray eyes regarded him for a short moment and then looked away.
Raif wanted to say, If anyone touches
you again, I will tear them apart with my bare hands. Instead he said, “Pour the snowmelt on the flames and kill the fire. I’ll be outside saddling the horse.”
It was full light now. The rising wind smelled of glaciers. The snow underfoot was rotten in places, part melted by a midseason thaw. Raif laid the blankets over the gelding’s back, then strapped the saddle in place. His hands felt big and awkward. When he gripped the handle of the knife to sharpen it against the rise of the step, pain made him gnaw his cheek.
The metal was not sound. Rot had cut deep into the untempered iron, and the blade refused to take an edge. Raif removed all visible rust and sharpened the point as best he could.
Ash came out as he was putting the finishing touches to his fisher hood, stripping fur from the two lengths of skin that would become the ties. Raif stopped what he was doing to look at her. The kettle-burned cloak was a rich rust brown and its hem skimmed snow as she walked. The wind was quick to bring color to her cheeks and a bright film of moisture to her eyes. Wisps of silver gold hair blew around the edge of her hood. The time she’d spent in Ganmiddich had improved her, and her face had a softness to it that he had not seen before.
“Did the Dog Lord treat you well?” he asked, helping her into the saddle.
Her gray eyes darkened minutely. “He couldn’t wait to be rid of me.”
They left the farmyard in silence. Raif led the gelding through the maze of sheep runs, pens, stone walls, and outbuildings, tasting the air as he walked. The clouds were full of snow, yet that didn’t worry him as much as the stench of glaciers. When the air smelled of the Want this far south, it meant only one thing.
Raif set a hard pace. The farther west they were when the storm hit, the better. The Bitter Hills caught storms, held them between Half-Bludd in the east and Bannen in the west. Their best hope was to reach the shelter of the western taiga as soon as possible, let the stone pines and black spruce bear the brunt of the storm for them.
As he padded alongside the horse, Raif searched for signs of game amid the ground birch and dogwood. The habit was deep within him. Last night had proven to him that he did not need an arrow to kill an animal with a blow to its heart. A fist of slate, heavy as iron and blue as Dhoone, was all it had taken to bring down the fisher. The fisher had been snooping around one of the sheep pens, drawn by the stench of slaughter that lingered there. It had smelled Raif with its keen nose, heard his boot heels crunching frozen mud with ears so sensitive they could hear a red-backed vole breathing beneath two feet of snow. Raif’s eyes caught its retreat. He plucked a rock from the mud, gaze still fixed upon the creature as it ran along the base of the pen wall. He warmed the rock in his fist. Ash needed food badly.
It wasn’t the same as releasing an arrow. There was only the crudest sense of calling the creature to him. No moment of stillness joined him and his prey, no knowledge of the creature passed through him. Suddenly the heart was there, a glowing coal, in his sights. Speed was the only thing that mattered then. Without the concentrated discipline of bow eye and bow hand working in unison, he had nothing to bind the creature to him. Raif hurled the rock. Even as it left his grip, his sense of the creature’s heart was fading.
He did not hear the impact. Sickness washed over him as his throwing hand fell limp against his side. Stomach juices bubbled in his throat, and he dropped to the mud to retch and spit and clean his mouth. Minutes passed before he had strength enough to rise and claim his prey. The sickness had passed by the time he returned to the farmhouse, yet a sense of shame remained. It was no way to kill a beast.
“Aren’t we going to cross the hills and enter the cityhold? I thought Angus meant to steer clear of the clans.”
Ash’s voice broke Raif’s thoughts. He raised his head to look at her. The lanolin she wore on her face had turned waxy and opaque in the freezing wind. “We’ll make better time if we keep heading west. We’d waste half a day in those hills.”
“But Angus said—”
“Angus isn’t here. I’m here. And I don’t claim knowledge of the Glaivehold. I know the clans as far west as Orrl, and I know the route we must take to enter the Storm Margin.” He spoke harshly, yet he hardly knew why. He didn’t want to explain to Ash that the only reason Angus had chosen the route through the Glaivehold was to save his nephew from encountering Hailsmen. Ten days ago Raif had been glad of that consideration. Now he did not care. Blackhail had hewn his memory from the stone. If he crossed paths with a Hailsman now, he would have to kill him or be killed. And strangely he found a hard sort of comfort in that. He knew where he and his clan stood now. All dreams of homecoming were dead.
“How did you escape from the tower?”
Raif wondered why she had chosen to ask her question now. He made no answer.
“I forced a promise from the Dog Lord,” she said after a moment. “He swore he would take no action against you until I was gone.” Her features moved through a smile as she thought on the past. “He’s a fierce man. Yet I think he was more afraid of me than I of him.”
“He did not take Dhoone alone.”
Ash frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The Dhoonehouse is the most defensible stone keep in the clanholds, built by the first Clan King, Thornie Dhoone, with walls sixteen feet thick and a roof made of ironstone. The night Vaylo Bludd took it, five hundred Dhoone warriors stood within its walls, and countless more manned its borders and strongwalls. Yet somehow the Dog Lord managed to breach Dhoone’s defenses, raise the Thistle Gate, and slaughter three hundred men.”
“It doesn’t mean he had help.”
“It does when every Dhoonesman who stomached a Bludd sword didn’t even bleed enough to rust his plate.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sorcery was used on the Dhoonesmen. It slowed their hearts, made it so they couldn’t raise their weapons and defend themselves. The Dog Lord rode to Dhoone knowing the Dhoonesmen would not give him battle. He claimed victory, but no honor.” Raif made his voice hard. He saw the way Ash was sitting forward on her horse, ready to defend the Dog Lord. He saw and did not like it.
She looked at him as if he were speaking lies. “If he did use sorcery, as you say, then how can you be sure it came from outside? He might have had help from someone within his clan.”
“Clan do not use sorcery.”
“What is your point?”
“The same person who helped the Dog Lord take Dhoone killed my father, my chief, and ten other members of my clan.”
A soft gasp escaped from Ash’s lips.
Raif continued speaking, firming the truth in his mind. “There were fifteen of us altogether. We were camping in the badlands, along the old elk trails. Every year in the first month of winter when the elk are moving southeast, we go there to claim Blackhail’s portion. This winter my brother and I were chosen to ride with the party. It was a great honor. Dagro Blackhail himself led the hunt; it was the first time he’d ridden the elk trails in five years. The hunting wasn’t good. Tem said the elk knew a hard winter was coming and had moved south a month early to beat it.”
“Who’s Tem?” Ash asked.
“My father.” It almost didn’t hurt to say it. “He and Dagro Blackhail were close. Mace Blackhail had been at his foster father’s heels for weeks, trying to persuade Dagro to ride north with him, but it was my father who finally convinced him to go.” Let’s you and I ride north one last time, Dagro Blackhail. Let’s sit our saddles until we’re arse sore, drink malt until we’re head sore, and shoot elk until we drown in blood. Hearing his father’s voice in his mind, Raif spoke quickly to quiet it. “The day before we were due to return, Drey and I broke bounds to shoot hares. We were having a contest to see who could shoot the farthest and take down the most game when . . . when I felt something.”
“Sorcery?”
Raif nodded. Suddenly it was difficult to speak. “We rushed back, but they were dead by the time we got there. All of them. There was no blood on their weapons, not a drop of it.
Twelve men dead, and not one drew a sword to defend himself.”
Ash made no attempt at sympathy; he was grateful for that. They didn’t speak any more about the past, and that seemed like another thing to be grateful for. There were some memories about the badlands camp he had no wish to share. In silence they traveled west along the river valley and into the territory of another clan.
At noon they came upon a stone marker, sunk deep into the snow and carved with the crossed greatswords of Bannen. Bannen was small but rich, with many well-stocked trout lakes, a series of high meadows suitable for grazing sheep, and a run of iron mines sunk hundreds of feet beneath the Bitter Hills. It was sworn to Dhoone, but it was not a long-lived oath. Past chiefs had declared themselves for Blackhail when it suited them, and Hawder Bannen had fought with Ornfel Blackhail against the Dhoone King at Mare’s Rock. Bannen was known for its swordsmen. Tem had once told Raif that Bansmen trained their swordarms by moving through their positions while standing neck high in running water.
Raif glanced to the north. The Banhouse was built on low ground, with its back against a sheer sandstone cliff, and it could not be seen from the river. Raif guessed it was about ten leagues north, as he could see smoke rising above the treetops. Beyond the smoke, on the farthest reach of the horizon, stormheads rolled south from the Want.
Suddenly anxious to be gone, Raif touched Ash’s boot. “Are you ready to take old Mule Ears here for a run?”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be taking myself for a run. I want to reach those trees”—he pointed to the northwest, where the headland sloped down to meet a forest of oldgrowth pines—“within the hour. We’ll need cover when the storm hits.” He slapped the gelding hard on the rump. “Go!”