by J. V. Jones
Raif spared no time wondering if she considered his actions cruel. It was too cold for thought. Any clansman would butcher a fallen animal in the same conditions. There was tragedy in eating one’s own horse, but no shame.
Pulling his mitts over the hard chilblained flesh of his hands, he watched as Ash moved around the gelding. The voices might take her at any time. Twice in the night he’d had to shake her until bones in her neck cracked. It was becoming harder to wake her, and he lived in fear of the day when no amount of shaking would bring her back.
Stooping as he walked into the wind, he went to reclaim his belt from the horse. Ash was sitting in the snow. She had begun the work of unleashing the blankets but had stopped short of pulling them free. When he approached her she smiled like a sleepy child. Gently he helped her to stand. In a soft voice he bade her stamp her feet until he was done with the horse. His face betrayed no worry to her, yet he recognized the first symptoms of cold sickness. The smile she had given him was one of contentment. Left on her own, she would have curled up by the horse’s corpse and slept.
Keeping an ear to the sound of her stamping feet, he rethreaded his belt and hung his antler tine in place.
Cold sickness could kill a man as surely as a fall through broken ice yet keep a smile on his face as it did so. Sleep, it said. Rest for a bit, just here in this soft bank of snow, and I promise all your hurts will pass. With the sickness upon him a man could swear to the Stone Gods that he was warm, believe it so completely that he loosened his collar and tugged down his hood. And all the while his heart was slowing like a failing clock and his feet were turning yellow with ice. “Cold sickness is like a whore with a knife,” Gat Murdock was fond of saying. “Drugs you with sweet words and sweet feelings and then stabs you with her knife.”
Raif stayed at Ash’s side during the descent from the high meadow. He asked her questions about her life in Mask Fortress, the city itself, Penthero Iss. She was too tired to speak for long on any subject, yet he pressed her for details, forced her to remember, think. He considered laying one of the horse blankets over her back for extra warmth, but he wasn’t sure she could bear the weight. Many times she slowed and asked to rest, yet he shook his head and told her, “Just a little more.”
Whenever they came upon a wide expanse of snow, Raif tested its depth with his willow staff. One fall and they would both be done.
The ascent to the pass had been easy up to a point. The Wolf River retained walkable gravel banks for a fair portion of the way, until a hundred-foot wall of granite rose from its waters, sheer as the tallest cliff. They had been forced to climb for half a day to reach the top of the wind-carved bluff and take the pass. The west side of the pass was a breaking ground of split rock, frozen waterfalls, gravel beds, and drifted snow. Most surfaces were stippled with hoarfrost. All edges had been scoured by the wind.
Raif fought hard to keep his mind in the now. Ash was weaker than he; the sickness that poisoned her blood and robbed the color from her skin made her more susceptible to the altitude and the cold. But that did not mean he was immune. Several times he caught himself drifting away from the present on the wave of a collapsing thought. So far he had managed to pull himself back, but the fear of lethargy was present and real. He could not afford to let his mind drift.
Ash was what mattered. Keeping Ash safe.
A path of sorts, a game track used by horned sheep in high summer, wound down through the cliff to the river and the Storm Margin below. Through chinks in the clouds, Raif spotted the dark body of a bloodwood forest far to the south. The mighty red-barked trees were the tallest living things in the Territories, and they grew only in the wet, foggy slopes of the southern margin. Every summer men and women from the clanholds made the journey west and then south to purchase timber from the Cold Axes who lived in their high timber halls amid the trees. Croser was the only clan that had riverboats capable of hauling the raw timber upstream. All other clans paid freightage to the Master of Ille Glaive.
When Raif turned his gaze north, he saw nothing but white snow clouds. Mount Flood and the Hollow River were out there, yet he could not be sure where either of them lay. Clan knowledge ended here.
“I miss Angus,” Ash said. “I wish he were here with us.”
Raif dragged his hand over his face. Her words robbed a portion of his strength. “We’ve come so far without him. We’ll manage the rest of the way.”
“He will be all right, won’t he?”
Raif forced himself to reassure her. How could she know that the mention of Angus’ name cut him—she who had no kin?
The last hour of the descent was undertaken during a long bloody sunset that turned the surrounding mist pink and made west-facing snowbanks look like killing fields. The Wolf River ran dark and silent, unaffected by the failing light. The wind died and the air cooled, and the first wolf cries rose above the grinding of the ice. Raif wondered how long it would take the pack to find the horse.
He and Ash did not speak much after the words about Angus. They were a good two hundred feet below the high meadow, and the risk of cold and altitude sickness was now less, despite the drop in the temperature. Besides, the final descent was tricky, pitted with bog holes and wet ice, and concentrating on avoiding falls seemed mental exercise enough.
Raif watched Ash every second. Her cloak was weighted with frost, and the fur around her hood was stiff and white. Every so often she swayed with the wind, and Raif would reach over and steady her, disguising the gesture as a casual touch or a gentle reminder to stay on the path. Toward the end of the descent her legs began to buckle and she started missing steps, and it seemed natural to put his arm around her shoulder and take her weight as his own.
By the time they reached the river, ice smoke steaming off the surface made it difficult to see more than a few feet ahead. The air was colder than the black, oily water, and the river would steam through the night. Raif could not find the will to search for a proper campsite and settled upon the first bluff that afforded shelter from the wind. Ash slipped in and out of consciousness as he hacked at the resin-preserved remains of a frost-killed willow. The only thing that kept him from stopping what he was doing and tending her was the cold certainty that she needed heat from the fire more than any words of comfort from him.
It took forever for the fire to catch. Raif couldn’t stop his hands from shaking as he cupped and blew on the pine needle kindling. When the fire finally took and bright little fingers of light shivered around the wood, he set snow to melt over the hottest part of the flames, then turned his attention to Ash. She had fallen fast asleep, bundled up in the roughest horse blanket, her hooded head resting against the smooth belly of a basalt boulder. He meant to wake her; she needed to drink, to eat, to take off her boots and beat the ice from her stockings and the inside of her collar and hood. Yet somehow he didn’t. She was resting easy, and for the first time that day the muscles in her face were fully relaxed. Quietly he set about securing the camp for the night. The fire would warm her soon enough.
After a portion of the night had passed, he wrapped himself in the second blanket and slept.
When he awoke Ash the next morning, she did not know who he was. Her eyes were as dull as gray clay. Skin around her mouth was shedding, and the yellowing of her flesh had spread to her tongue and gums.
Raif felt the fear rise within him. He shook her. “Ash!”
Her eyes flickered at the sound of her name. Raif fought the desire to shake her harder. Instead he pulled her up by her shoulders and spoke in a firm voice. “You must ready yourself to leave now. We have to make our way north, to Mount Flood.”
Lips shrunk by dehydration mouthed the word, “Flood.”
Raif’s breath drained out of him. She was standing, that would have to be enough. Holding on to her with one hand, he reached back until his fingers found the warmth of the tin bowl that contained the snowmelt. “Drink this.”
She took the bowl from him and drank it dry. Water spilled down
her chin, but she didn’t seem to notice and made no effort to wipe it away when she was done.
“Stay here while I roll the blankets and store my pack.” Raif guided her back to the basalt boulder where she’d slept. He could feel the heat of her body through a double layer of wool. “If you need to relieve yourself, do it here in the warmth . . .” Heat of a different kind burned his face. “I won’t look.”
He did not know if she understood him. Her eyes were focused somewhere else.
When all was done and the fire was kicked cold, its remains buried beneath the snow, he came for her again. She was sitting with her chin slumped against her chest. Her hands were dropped against her thighs, mitted fingers curled tight. He took her arm. “Ash. We’ve got to go now. Remember?”
It was like leading a ghost from the grave.
The day began like the last one had ended: with ice mist peeling off the river and the hidden sun turning everything red. The wind was sharp but not unbearable, breaking up grease ice on the river’s surface and shifting drifts back and forth between the trees and raised ground. The air stank of snow. Raif kept an eye to the thick featureless clouds as he traveled: This was no time for a storm.
Ash walked, in a manner. She shivered uncontrollably, her body too weak to counter the reflex action, yet somehow she retained the will to keep moving. Raif wrapped an arm around her waist and took as much of her weight as he could, but it was her own determination that placed one foot in front of the other and made her walk.
Raif wondered how much she was aware of. He spoke to her, but she made no reply. He looked into her eyes, but the shadows he saw living there soon made him look away.
Within an hour of breaking camp, they parted company with the river that had led them this far. The great channel of black water headed west toward the sea, where choked ice in its channel formed a delta each spring. Raif was sorry to leave its banks, but his route took him northward, and there was no time to spare on sentiment for the river that was known throughout the clanholds as the Sum of All Streams.
Mist lifted over the course of the morning to reveal a landscape of black basalt spires, sheared cliffs, valleys pocked with frost boils and hummocks, floodways blocked with ice rubble, and dead and calcified pines sunk half into the ground like beached whales. No bloodwoods grew this far north, or if they did they were no longer recognizable as the sure and towering trees that were more highly valued than livestock in the clanholds. The trees that did grow were beaten to their knees by the wind, their trunks smooth as polished stone, their limbs webbed with mistletoe, whose pale fruits shone like opals and were poisonous to man.
Hard granite mountains rode the east and northern horizons, and Raif’s gaze traveled from peak to peak, looking for the glacier-pressed form of Mount Flood. The wind stung tears from his eyes, and inside his gloves his hands hurt like all the hells. According to Angus and Heritas Cant, the Hollow River lay at the base of Mount Flood, fed each spring by a flow of snow and glacier melt so great that it broke mountains. Raif wasn’t sure what state the river would be in now. Rivers fed by a single source often froze or ran dry by midwinter, but nothing was certain this far north. Sudden changes in the weather, hot springs, or swift currents could keep a river flowing through to spring.
Raif stripped off his gloves and massaged his hands. The cold made his eyes slow to change focus from the distant mountains to the nearness of his fingers. Weariness tugged him down. If he could just rest for a little while . . . sleep . . .
He snapped back with a start, suddenly aware that Ash’s weight was no longer upon him. She had slid to the ground and was now kneeling in the snow. Raif cursed his own weakness. How could he have been stupid enough to close his eyes for even a moment? Anger made him rough with himself, and he thrust his gloves over fingers that were shadowed yellow and gray with early frostbite.
“Ash.” His throat was raw as he spoke her name. Crouching, he touched flesh as cold and rigid as tent hide pegged out in a storm. A chill took him, and he placed a hand upon the back of her neck and drew her head against his. Her eyes were closed, and her throat muscles were pumping, and he smelled the sorcery upon her like liquor.
The coolness of her skin was slowly replaced with something else. Raif heard the murmur of voices. Reach, mistressss, they whispered. So dark here, so cold. Reach.
He could not help but pull back. Clan had no word for the sound of those voices. They were the hissings of insane things. What sort of men where they, these creatures who lived in the Blind? Heritas Cant had spoken about shadows and other vague things, but it seemed to Raif that he’d left too much unsaid. Shadows could not hold a sword and kill a man, yet why did he think these things could?
Raif let the thought go. He could not think about that now. Forcing numb hands to grapple with his pack, he searched for something to use as a gag. Wind howled, rushing under Ash’s cloak and whipping it hard against her back. Suddenly rocks and trees grew shadows, gliding across the snow like living things. Ash’s lips parted, and the power massed upon her tongue turned day into night.
No. Raif moved so quickly he crashed into her, sending them both falling back into the snow. He had a whole blanket in his hand, and he pushed what he could of it into her mouth, shoving the pool of blackness back. When he could no longer fit any more wool into her mouth, he spread his weight full out upon her, pinning her arms and legs.
Raif did not know how long they lay there, their bodies forming a cross in the snow. He knew only that his breath slowed and his body cooled, and when the first snowflakes fell upon his eyelids they roused him to a world where day and night had merged into the grayness of a false dawn. Ash’s hood had slipped during the fall, and pale strands of hair blew around her face. Raif spoke her name, knowing that she would not respond yet unable to stop himself. He rolled off her, brushing ice crystals from his shoulders and elbows. Working cold cramps from his muscles, he fixed his pack to his back, jammed his willow staff under his belt, and settled his dead man’s cloak in place. A lone wolf howled beyond the horizon.
When he was ready, Raif knelt in the snow and lifted Ash to his chest . . . then continued the journey north.
Magdalena Crouch waited in shadows the color of slate. Thurlo Pike had told her to meet him inside the Ewe’s Feet, not outside in the storm-darkened street, but for reasons of her own she chose not to enter the tavern at this time. Besides, no one ever told the Crouching Maiden what to do.
She knew him from his footsteps. The man spent money on clothes, not shoes, and the uneven tread of mismatched soles, poorly mended, gave him away before he turned into the street. The maiden was ready for him with a soft word sure to please: “Thurlo.”
All men liked the sound of their own names, but some especially so. Thurlo Pike was one of the latter, and turned his head so quickly that for a moment the pale skin around his neck was bared, ready to take a knife. The maiden smacked her lips so softly it sounded like a kiss. She waited a moment, for she knew nothing interested a man more than mystery, then stepped into the light. “Over here.” A slim finger, closely sheathed in leather so highly polished it looked wet, beckoned him forth.
Thurlo Pike, roofer, joiner, and rogue, recognized Maggy Sea, then frowned. “Get inside, Maggy. It’s cold enough to freeze arse hair.”
Magdalena took a step forward, but only because she wanted to. “I can’t go in there, Thurlo. Gull would send me packing if I did. You saw what he’s like.”
Though in fact all Thurlo Pike had seen of Gull Moler was a man mildly affronted when the good name of his tavern was brought into question, he was quick to nod his head. Men always made monsters of their enemies; Magdalena knew that. It was one of her tricks. Thurlo snorted air. “All right. All right. But you’d better make this quick. If you had balls swinging beneath that skirt of yours, not fresh air, you wouldn’t be so quick to do business outside on a day like this.”
The maiden smiled, but it did not reach her eyes. As the roofer approached she moved farther bac
k into the dark space between buildings. The walls of the Ewe’s Feet were dry-laid flint, and it was a testament to the man who’d built them that even without aid of mortar or sand he’d managed to construct such flat, ice-resistant plains. Magdalena Crouch appreciated good workmanship, no matter what the trade. She continued edging back until Thurlo Pike’s beaver pelt mitts caught and held her arm.
“What you playing at? I’m not going no further than this.”
Magdalena Crouch had killed many times, but only once out of anger. It was something she wished never to do again. With a quick, almost powerless movement, she moved her arm toward the roofer’s chest, causing his wrist to twist to such a degree that he was forced to let her go. After he released her, she continued flaying her arms in panic, as if unaware of what she had done. “Very well,” she said. “Tell me your secrets here.”
As she spoke, she glanced into the street. All was quiet. The hour of gray light that occurred before a storm was in some ways better than true darkness itself. Smugglers, thieves, prostitutes, unfaithful husbands, and procurers all came out at night. No one ventured out in a storm.
“Have you got the means?”
The maiden tapped a bulge in her loom-woven coat. “Tell me what you’ve found out.”
Thurlo Pike’s eyes ranged from the bulge, to the storm clouds, to Magdalena’s face. He was dressed in a brown wool coat edged with beaver fur and fastened with pewter buckles. Sweat and dirt had caused the fur around the collar to clump and shed, and it looked as if a mangy cat had the roofer by the throat. “There’s four of them all right. The mother. A daughter about sixteen—all plump and ready for splitting. ’Nother girl, young. No tits. Then the baby.”
A single droplet of saliva wetted the dark desert of the maiden’s mouth. “Did you catch their names?”
“Real close, they were. The mother bundled the children into a back room the moment she saw me coming. ’Course you know what children are. Specially young-uns. The baby starts crying for its mother, and the oldest daughter tries to hush it. Then the middle daughter starts up. Well, all the while I’m talking to the mother about stone struts and what backing she’d prefer on the flue, I’m listening to this wi’ my second ear. Then I hear the middle daughter cry out as plain as day. Calls her sister Cassy. You’re hurting me, Cassy. Let me go!” Thurlo Pike wagged his head. “Should have seen the mother’s face. Couldn’t wait to be rid of me. In her haste she agreed to two layers of baked brick on the stack. Two layers! That’ll cost her a master’s penny.” The roofer showed his teeth. “And who’s to say what’s beneath that first layer of brick.”