by Sarah Driver
My eyelids grow heavy in the smoky warmth. Sweat weaves down my back. I try to untangle my thoughts. The Chieftain was Axe-Thrower’s father. That might explain how she ended up crewing with Stag.
The doors are flung open and a bulk of a man strides in, with oiled black hair and glaring grey eyes. A pipe hangs from the corner of his mouth.
Stag.
Even though he’d never reckon on me pitching up right under his nose, and I’m disguised the best I can be, I shrink deeper inside my hood.
He kneels at the feet of the old grandmother, and she strokes a wrinkled hand over his hair. Then he kisses her hands, rises and throws himself into a chair near the fire. He swigs from a tankard, lines of berry wine trailing into his beard, and chews rags of meat off a bone as he surveys the room from under hooded eyelids. Hidden storms flicker the muscles of his face.
His eyes swim restlessly in his head.
Then he throws the bone to the dogs, launches himself upright again and starts talking and laughing with a group of Tribesmen. It’s like he’s forced his mood to change – he’s holding court, charming them all. I wonder if I’m the only one seeing the craftiness of his look. Shudders lick through me like the fire of shame.
Stag slams the tankard down and yells for more, making me startle halfway out of my skin.
‘Boy,’ snarls the old grandmother, snapping her fingers at me.
Fangtooths don’t take orders from men in brass buckles. I send the Chieftain’s words up like a fierce prayer. Gods, I hope some of them remember that!
I pick up the flagon with trembling fingers and step to Stag’s side. He plucks a long, black terrodyl fang from his pocket and uses it to pick his teeth. With the other hand, he holds out his tankard without even turning to look at me.
I’m so close I could blow on his cheek. His stuffy smell of cedar and soap and something metallic slips into my lungs. The way he lets his spirit crawl all over every inch of the room makes my belly ache. Did my ma love this man, once?
I stare a beat too long. Wine begins to overflow from the tankard, down his wrist. He blinks out of his thoughts and springs to his feet, rage-slapped. Even without all his teeth, he’s all teeth.
I step back – but a polar dog snaps at my ankles, forcing me forwards again. I keep my head down and my eyes on the floor.
The old woman yanks the flagon away from me, sets it down and grabs me by the hand. She pushes me in the small of the back and sends me plunging out through the doors, into the saw-blade night. I fall into the snow. But fingers pinch the scruff of my neck, lifting me to my feet.
Axe-Thrower has been skulking around, waiting for me.
Someone steps from the tent, holding a whip. But Axe-Thrower tugs me away. ‘My slave, my discipline,’ she barks.
We hurry through the snow and howling winds. My questions are a flurry of arrows in my mind. ‘Where’s Sparrow?’
‘I’ll take you to him’ she hisses, from the corner of her mouth.
When we’re further away, I ask why her da’s body is lying in the tent like that.
‘His spirit will linger near his body, these early death-days. He must lie untouched and guarded for three sun and moon rises. Then his spirit will depart, and he can be buried.’
What if someone takes the Opal? Or – what if he’s buried with it? Stag wouldn’t let that happen, would he? ‘Is he always guarded?’ I risk the question, hoping she won’t notice anything too keen about it.
But she only nods. ‘Just as he was in life. And Grandmother would never risk grave-thieves.’
‘Why don’t the rest of Trianukka know about his dying?’
‘It will not be revealed until a new Chieftain is named, to avoid power squabbles and unrest. After the burial, it will be decided by combat.’
‘Will you fight to be the next Chieftain?’
‘Me?’ Mirth glimmers in her eyes. ‘Women cannot be Chieftain here. And if they could, it would never be me. A little rebel lives in my heart.’
I hurry after her, slipping in the snow. ‘Don’t you want to know how he died?’
She stares. Blinks. Then smiles – and it catches me off guard, cos it’s a smile of heart-sadness. ‘I wish it were so that I cared enough. Perhaps I did, once. I do not remember.’
Her words make my throat ache. ‘Why?’
‘He tormented me, as a child.’ Torchlight flickers in her eyes. ‘He planted a hunger for war in my heart.’
I grimace. I can’t imagine being treated like that by my own da, or not feeling safe in my own home. But if Stag had stuck around after my birth, maybe the same would’ve happened to me. ‘I reckon you should know the truth.’ I use my arms to balance as we move through the snow. ‘Stag – he’s my blood father.’
Her eyes sparkle with feeling. ‘I suspected a thing of that nature – I saw for myself how you were always plaguing his mind, and then I saw those silvery grey eyes you share. I wonder, which is worse? Having a father like Stag, or a father who would sell you to Stag?’
I gape at her. ‘What you on about?’
She squints into the distance. ‘Stag carved an agreement with my father. Riches, trade, defence.’ She swallows. ‘As part of the exchange, my father traded me like a tub of fish-grease.’ She stares into the distance, and I know in her head she’s still looking down on that coffin. ‘I was prised from my lands, from my sled, from my dogs. The sea-sickness was the least of my suffering, though it scraped the lining from my belly and burrowed into my bones like shipworm.’ Her eyes rest on my face.
I turn away, remembering what she did aboard my ship. This little one is spirited, she said, when she held me back while Grandma drowned. Aye. And I never want her forgetting it.
But she touches my arm. ‘After Stag first visited our lands, my father addressed the people. He said that Stag was a great leader, and that we should ally ourselves with him. But I learned too late what a true leader is. Stag will never know – he forgets that all leaders – kings, chieftains, captains – should serve their people, first and last.’
I resist pulling my arm away and force myself to look at her.
‘I know you can’t forgive the part I played. But know that I never chose to play it. And if I hadn’t, I would have ended the same way your captain did. I swear I will defy your enemy. I will help you defeat him.’
I nod, mind whirring with all that she’s said. Then I pull my arm away and we walk on in silence, past bone-keeled walrus-skin boats hanging from wood-and-bone racks, and lounging packs of polar dogs, their dirty white fur swept into frozen ridges by the wind. They touch noses, grunt questions up through their throats to the sky. Their breath steams in the torchlight.
End-days, all-darkness, a pack-leader growls, eyeing me. Frightfrightfright wrongness foul-stirrings. The others join in, and their panic strikes deep into my chest, rattling my ribs. The beast-chatter swells in the back of my throat like spew. It’s hard to swallow down but it’s just as hard to stomach. It makes me dizzy. I gulp breaths of blade-edge air, trying to stave off a faint.
Axe ushers me through the opening in another tent, into a cocooned world of shadows. I stumble down a short slope and falter before a fire in the middle, surrounded by reindeer skins.
I fall to my knees, holding my palms before the warmth, and stare around the tent. The flames dance and smoke tickles the air on its way out through the moon-shaped hole in the roof. Sparrow lies curled asleep under a pile of furs, the tip of my longbow poking through next to him.
Then I scuttle backwards as one of the reindeer skins shudders itself upright into the shape of a stooped, ancient Tribeswoman, with rings of loose flesh hanging from her neck.
The Tribeswoman’s head is almost bald. Her eyes are bright and sharp, nearly as black as my natural hair, and thick bone hooks swing from her ears. Her nose is long and bony, but her face is pudding-soft. Age has thieved the lines from her palms and pressed them into her face.
She shambles close, looking from me to Axe-Thrower. Then she jabs a quick s
tream of words at Axe-Thrower, the sounds gargling from the back of her throat. She ent got fangs. She’s got no teeth at all. As she grows more furious, a whale tooth thuds against her breastbone, making a hollow tapping sound. It’s hung from a length of sinew around her neck. She pushes up her cloak sleeves and her brown arms are strewn with tattoos of running polar dogs.
‘Stay with this squawker,’ hisses Axe-Thrower. ‘She is Old One.’ She turns on her heel and strides from the tent. I gape after her.
Old One hunches over two pails, beckoning me closer. One of her fingers is missing down to the knuckle. I don’t move, and she tuts loudly. She fumbles on a low oaken table for a whale rib, one end of it chiselled into a scoop. She uses it to stir a pail of glaring redness. Blood.
While I stand there watching her with folded arms, she tips some of the blood into the second pail and mixes it with the rib. She adds milk from a stone flask, then she lifts out lumps of bloody dough and sets them cooking over the fire. Soon the cakes are sizzling in pools of butter.
I breathe the butter in a stupor. Sparrow wakes up and stretches his arms up over his head. Thaw pops out from under his cloak and sits on his belly.
‘Who’re you?’ asks Sparrow sleepily.
Old One clucks over to him, sinking bony fingertips into his hair and gasping over the gold. He wriggles away.
I curl up on a skin and watch the fire. I’ll just calm my sails and wait for Axe. I grow drowsy. Old One pushes a plate of bloodcakes towards me but I just bare my teeth at her.
She throws me a husky laugh, drumming on her big belly. I sigh through my teeth. I came to find Leo and get the Opal. I try asking after the Protector but Old One just chuckles at me.
My eyes keep straying to the platter of bloodcakes. I reach out and take one. Before I get it to my mouth, Old One rushes forwards and dollops a spoonful of red berry jam on the cake. I eat the whole thing in two bites. The rich, salty-sweet, doughy taste flows through me and I feel my skin relax and my breath loosen.
Sparrow scampers over and starts tucking in. ‘Mmm,’ he says. He curls up again and falls into a doze.
Old One gruffs more unknown words to me and rips her whale-tooth pendant over her head, fixing me with her fierce black eyes. The white tooth is etched with runes I don’t know, though I do know why they’re there – to harness the whale-wisdom sleeping dormant in the tooth, like a winter root.
She puts her hand out above the flames, hanging the whale-tooth over them. She starts making a noise in the back of her throat. It’s a grunt-growl-hacking sound. I reckon she’s showing off, from the way she’s watching me with a glowing challenge in her eyes, ablaze with life against all the years pressing on her.
‘What? ’ I husk.
She shouts something and the polar dogs outside the tent utter a storm of swirling yips and human-sounding howls, as the flames plunge low like they’re frighted of her.
The smoke turns black and oily. Old One rubs her fingertips together and sticks out her tongue.
A thrill stamps against the wall of my chest.
Old One catches my eye and gives me the slyest grin I’ve ever seen. Then she breathes a crackly breath, picks up a thread of smoke and drags it from the fire. She flings it up into the air, the thread snaps and she whacks it with her whale-rib scoop. The smoke breaks into a crowd of black shapes and every time she smacks one of them with her rib, it shows me a different picture on the wall of the tent.
She calls up a picture-telling of her long life. I watch the times she lost fingers to dogs or cold, and I see how she birthed six babs and how only half of them lived and grew. Now the ones that lived have aged and died, while she herself still lives. I learn to see how she wears her pain proudly, like armour.
Old One bats more pictures through the air and I see
Screaming mouths
A black-haired man looming over a sleeping bab
A silver-haired captain falling into the sea and drifting down to the depths.
An armoured girl standing on a deck of a ship – but her sails are torn and her hull’s locked in ice . . .
Axe-Thrower calls for Old One through the mouth of the tent. The black shapes splinter apart, drifting through the air like dust. I gasp, feeling dizzy.
Thaw emerges from under a pile of skins and gifts me an outraged look. Whatthatwhatthatwhatthat?
No idea, Thaw, I say wearily.
Old One flabbles outside, gruffing something at Axe.
I follow them to the mouth of the tent and rake deep breaths of air, listening as their voices move away.
A raggedy black crow soars past my face and through the tent flap. It settles on a log and shakes out its wings.
‘Crow?’ I splutter, ducking back inside. ‘Thank the gods!’
Shiver-feather.
‘No, no, no. You ent supposed to have beast-chatter!’ I reach into the beast-world and feel for the edges of his spirit.
His feathers start to melt away, turning from real feathers on the floor of the tent to slippery black shadows, swallowed by the fire.
‘Gods of all that slither and crawl,’ he pants finally, eyes circled by dark shadows. I pass him a bloodcake and he wolfs it down. ‘This place !’
I fill him in on the Chieftain and Stag, and my plan to pose as a slave again to listen in on the talk in the Chieftain’s tent. ‘I need to keep an eye on that Opal and make sure Stag don’t run off with it!’
‘How do we get out when you’ve got the stone?’ he asks.
I wince. ‘I ent sure, but I’m starting to put my trust in Axe-Thrower.’
He cocks an eyebrow. ‘And you reckon that wise, why?’
‘What else can I do? We need her. And she told me her heart-truth.’
‘She’s coming back,’ warns Sparrow.
Crow gulps down another cake and reaches his arms through the space between worlds, becoming feathered and winged again. When the mouth of the tent gapes, letting in a blast of painful, icy air, he barrels past the Tribeswomen, making Old One stagger back. She winks at me.
Axe-Thrower sets herself the task of strengthening my disguise. She draws fake tattoos on my cheeks. ‘Your slave mark,’ she explains. She rubs something into my skin to darken it and I tell her my plan to work as a cupbearer.
‘Why?’ she rasps, eyes scorching my skin. ‘You heard what Grandmother said about your Protector of the Mountain. Now you must stay away from Stag while we work out which slavers she might have been sold to.’
I shake my head, preparing to take a risk there’s no return from. ‘There’s something else.’
Her eyes are solemn.
‘The jewel in the hollow of your father’s throat – we can’t let Stag take it.’
‘Why not?’ Her eyes search my face.
I set my jaw. ‘It’s a wild thing. It shouldn’t be trapped by the likes of him.’
‘I saw that jewel, aglow with wildness, like your eyes. It’s one of the Storm-stones, isn’t it?’
I nod, and pulls the gems out of my pocket, cradling them in my palms to show her.
She hisses her sigh between her teeth. ‘Very well. If this gem holds power Stag wants for himself, then I will do all in my power to help you claim it.’
Even inside the Chieftain’s tent, the cold is maddening. But still the smell of decay has threaded into the air.
After what feels like hours, the line of haggard folk paying their respects tails off, and Stag orders everyone gone but for three frowning warriors – the Chieftain’s appointed corpse-guards. The gold adornments shining on their cloaks speak loudly of their high rank. They take seats around the map table, Stag easing himself into the grandest chair, the one like a throne.
‘The old Chieftain-mother will not return until all the trouble we have created has passed,’ breathes a guard.
‘Excellent,’ purrs Stag.
‘What about the cupbearer?’ growls another, flinging spiteful looks at me.
‘The slave boy?’ says Stag in surprise. He c
laps the warrior on the back. ‘Even if he can understand us, he won’t betray us. Just imagine what we would do to him.’ He smiles, eyes empty of light. Then he leans towards me and seizes my arm, yanking me roughly to his side.
They all laugh. I force myself statue-still, aware that my spirit wants to bolt from my body. Stag blows a ring of smoke into my face and grins when I burst into a fit of coughing. I feel like a blade is poking around in my gut. I’ve never felt less safe.
Suddenly Stag’s coughing worse than me. He pulls a kerchief from his pocket and spits a mouthful of blood into it. Then he stares round at the men, voice ominous-quiet. ‘The plan is tightening. The Stony Raiders march closer. We must satisfy the men with fighting until they arrive. I do not want them sensing trouble.’
The warriors shift uneasily in their seats. ‘And they will honour the bargain?’ asks one.
‘Of course,’ purrs Stag. He snaps his fingers for wine and I pour it, biting my cheek while praying not to spill a drop. Then I shrink back into the shadows.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ drawls Stag, puffing on his pipe. ‘To the matter of the Opal.’
I press as far back against the wall of the tent as I can, thanking the gods I remembered to leave the other Opals in Old One’s tent with Sparrow to watch over them. A deathly silence settles over the room and the candles flicker as Stag steps towards the curtain that hangs between the main room and the death-chamber.
‘He must not be touched—’
‘You people!’ declares Stag, rumbling a belly-laugh that chills my marrow. ‘So superstitious. You do realise the treacherous beast stole the Opal from me in the first place? I should have had it back as soon as he died, but for the fact my servant failed so dismally.’ He grimaces.
‘If I may,’ grumbles a grey-bearded corpse-guard.
Stag glances at him. ‘Please.’
‘I sense there may be riots if the sacred rituals are violated.’ The grey-beard clears his throat.
Stag considers, eyes coldly sweeping the man. ‘Go on.’
‘Your power here depends on not disrupting the established order more than is needed. You must feign respect for our beliefs, even if you feel none.’ He lifts his eyes to Stag, and the two stare at each other steadily.