Mapping Winter

by Marta Randall

  She had never broken an oath before, not even for the most inconsequential thing, not even an oath extracted in ignorance and given to a monster. The details did not matter: her word was her word, and she had broken it.

  I do not control this filthy scheme. She put the thought away from her and paused to note the copse in her book. The boy’s horse stamped in the cold.

  Soon after, the sun touched the distant peaks and the small light of dusk filled the mountains. The land rose again while Kieve searched for a place to spend the night. They crested a rise and she turned to the boy. He shivered in the saddle, his lips blue and his jaw clenched hard. She made him stop while she rummaged in a saddlebag and brought out her spare cloak.

  “D-don’t need it,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Liar. Survival is the first law.” She threw the cloak over his shoulders and fastened it beneath his chin. It fell well past his heels and trailed over Myla’s rump. He looked, she thought, like a bundle of laundry propped on a horse. She turned to look over the shallow valley before them.

  “What is this?”

  “Su-summer pasture. F-for the sheep.”

  “There should be a shepherd’s hut. Do you know where?”

  He urged Myla forward and she followed him down the slope of the hill. The hut was boarded closed for the winter. She pried wood away from the entrance while he tended the horses. Someone had left a pile of kindling and small logs inside. She layered them and opened her tinderbox. By the time the boy was finished she had a fire built near the door of the hut. Smoke rose straight up in the still air.

  He hesitated at the door, came around the fire, and sat on the far side. The borrowed cloak puddled on the packed dirt floor. She hung her largest pot over the fire. When the water in it boiled she made a cup of tea. He wrapped his hands around the cup and breathed the steam. She took dried meat from her bag and sliced it with her belt knife, added it to the pot, and tossed in a handful of roasted grains. A pinch of salt and spices followed, and the hut filled with the scent of vedsuppe. At her order, he pulled the rest of his clothes from the saddlebag and put it all on, struggling and muttering inside the borrowed cloak.

  She mixed some ink and opened her notebook. While the vedsuppe cooked she closed her eyes, watching the day’s trip move across her eyelids, before adding to her notes. Most of what she wrote simply confirmed what the Mapmakers House of her guild already knew, but she made her notes anyway. When the vedsuppe was done she poured some of it into the cup so that she could drink it while she worked, and gave the rest in the cooking pot to the boy. He blew into it while she took one of the scroll maps out of its case and spread it over her knees. Consulting both notes and memory, she went over the silhouette of the southern mountain crests from Minst to this valley, revising or punctuating the flowing line with coded notes: forest, the cleft of a small river, a farmhouse. Fields here, pasture lands there, another flowing line for the hills that skirted the mountains through Minst’s valley. The result looked almost like musical notation: curving, dancing lines on which hung the cryptic icons of her calling.

  When she reached for the second scroll to note the northern side of the trip, the boy put his finger on the map, stopping her.

  “That’s Sadik’s winter pasture,” he said.

  She frowned at him. “How do you know that’s a pasture?”

  “This must be Gryffon, the mountain behind Minst. It is, isn’t it? Because of the way the top looks. And if it is, then this is Little Top, and this dip, here, that must be Sadik’s pasture. It’s like a picture of how they look, when you look up from by the river.”

  She nodded, watching him look at the map. “What else?”

  “There’s a second brook, just before these trees. It’s big in the springtime but by autumn it’s hardly there at all.”

  She looked at him. “How did you know that marks a brook?”

  “There’s one coming out along Sadik’s pasture, right here where you show the woods. And you made this sign for it. So you need to put in another mark like this one.”

  “Yes.” She inked in the icon for the brook and blew on the ink to dry it. “Who is Sadik?” she said.

  “He was there last night, and this morning, too.” He hesitated. His lips were pink again. “He’s probably going to the council instead of Birgig Weaver. He talked to you this morning.”

  She remembered brown hair and a thin face. “Ah.” The mountain gallant. “Think he’ll make it?”

  “Sadik’s the best shepherd in Minst, in all the mountains,” the boy said with some heat. “He can climb anything and he always knows where everything is. He’s the best.”

  “Yes?”

  The boy bristled. “He takes me with him sometimes. I’ve seen how good he is. Nobody’s better than Sadik.”

  “Very well.”

  He looked at her with suspicion. She turned away. The ink had dried. She rolled up the southern map and worked on the northern one. When she finished she wrapped herself in her cloak and walked to the makeshift corral. Ice cracked amid the branches of a small woods nearby. The boy had hobbled the horses in a circle of bare trees and bushes mounded with snow, relatively protected from any wind. The animals bent their heads to the feed he’d given them. She put her hand out and called. Traveler snorted and returned to his meal, and she walked into the valley. The night was still and cloudless, the cold striking straight down from the stars. Overhead, the moon was a pale yellow circle above the trees.

  Kieve closed her eyes, visualizing this valley on her flat map, and made a rough calculation of her position. She should be due west of Abermorat, give or take a bit. Her breath formed ice clouds that clung to the edges of her hood. Her eyes felt sandy. Sleep, yes, unbroken by night alarms, and the next morning she’d send the boy and the horse back to Minst. If Unig Innkeeper came for his promised money, she would take him to law. She wondered where Pyrs had been born. It was so quiet that she heard the beat of an owl’s wings as it flew hunting across the meadow, and beyond it the icy music of the mountain itself, wind on snow, the quietude of starlight, a twining of melodies well beneath sound. Mountains.

  When she returned to the hut the pots had been cleaned and put aside, ashes banked over the embers in the firepit, and the boy slept in the folds of the cloak, his golden head cradled on his arms. She pulled the cloak’s hood up around his head and tucked the hems together, creating a warm bag for his sleep. He mumbled but did not waken. She’d have to hunt tomorrow; their rations would not last without some supplement. She rolled into her cloak, pulled the hood well over her head, and thought about catching rabbits until she fell asleep.

  * * * *

  In the dim light before sunrise, in the copse skirting the scarp that defined the valley’s eastern end, Kieve surprised a rabbit at its morning business. Soon it dangled from her hand, gutted and skinned. She wiped her belt knife clean on the snow.

  The copse edged the foot of a granite scarp. The sky brightened although the sun was not yet over the eastern mountains. She stood and stretched, the rabbit dangling from one hand, and, curious, looked around the break in the scarp.

  The alpine valley ended as sharply as though sheared away, leaving in its place a chasm falling in shattered steps into blackness before the land leaped up again in the distance, and up further to the head of a massive peak to the north-west. Flat sunlight struck the shoulders of the peak, flaring from snow and ice-fields; it seemed in that moment that another world had opened before her, one so new that the colors had not yet been added. She breathed and could not breathe deeply enough and she felt that her head would burst.

  It was not on the map.

  She swung back around the scarp, grabbed the scarf from her neck, and knotted it through a bush visible from the shepherd’s hut. Then she flew down the slope to the hut. The boy leaped out of her way. He had awakened the fire. She threw the skinned rabbit and the willow switch beside it.

  “Cook that,” she said, ripping open her saddlebag. She snatc
hed out her map case, fumbled deeper, and pulled out her ink bottle. “There’s a mountain out there—”

  “Stormbringer,” the boy said, watching her. “He’s always been there.”

  “Of course it’s always been there,” she shouted at him. “But it’s not on the map!”

  He shrank against the wall of the hut, eyes wide. She stopped, holding the packet of ink and a small leather bottle in her hands, and let her breath out in a rush.

  “It’s not on the map,” she said again. “I will put it there.” His look of incomprehension didn’t change, and she added, “And you will help me do it.” She picked up the switch and pressed it into his palms. After a moment his hand closed around it and he reached for the rabbit.

  She pulled the rest of her equipment from the saddlebag before re-packing what she wouldn’t need. The flat map she carried showed something where that huge mountain might be, but it was annotated with uncertainty and of the chasm there was not a trace. She mixed ink and decanted a measure of it into the small leather bottle and pinned it on the inside of her tunic and slid her pens into their pocket in her cloak.

  The boy was quick. The rabbit already turned above the embers, dripping juice. He sat across the firepit from her, tending the spit and watching her work with frank curiosity. She ignored him.

  There were plenty of blank pages left in her notebook. She lined four columns on a number of them. She always carried the compass near her skin to keep it from freezing. Now she took it out, opened it, and checked it with care. Finally she took the tiny abacus from its pocket and slid the beads along it. They clicked as they moved over the catches in the wires. Each made a separate and distinct music: a clear, bell-like tone for the ones, deeper for the tens, deeper still for the hundreds, and a dark resonance for the thousands. This would be an open traverse, she thought as the scent of roast rabbit filled the little hut. Not the best surveying method, but the only one open to her at the moment, given where she was, and that she was late already, and that she was not authorized to take this route, let alone map it.

  When her equipment had been checked and stowed in various pockets in her tunic or cloak, she saw to the horses, saddling both and strapping the saddlebags in place. By the time she finished the rabbit was cooked. It was tough and skinny but flavorful. They ate most of it. The boy boarded the hut while Kieve wrapped what remained into two packets and put one in his saddlebag and one in her own.

  He could help her with the traverse, she thought. One day for this, no more. The Mapmakers would send a party to measure and map in detail, in the summer after she had long since gone, riding Lord Cadoc’s death down the valley of the Morat to Koerstadt. But any map of the mountain would carry the sign that meant her, Kieve Rider, the first one to chart the abyss and the peak.

  She would spend one day here and then she would send him back. If he repeated her angry words, nobody in Minst would believe them, or him. Besides, he would be in a flyspeck village hidden in Dalmorat’s mountains. It would matter to no one, except herself, and she would be gone from Dalmorat as soon as Cadoc’s breath stilled. She would pen a threat to Unig strong enough to make him feed her promissory note to the fire at once.

  Once they had eaten, Kieve told him what he needed to do. She sighted on the scarf she had tied to the bush and noted the compass direction. That became her first entry, at the bottom of her first page. Nothing else in this valley needed noting, she thought: it was sufficiently mapped. They rode toward the small woods and around the edge of the scarp. With each of Traveler’s steps her fingers, deep in a pocket, moved a bead along a wire.

  The land had come into color now. Beyond the still-dark fissure the mountains soared, peak upon peak of grey rock and white snowfield still pinked with dawn and purpling with distance, the farthest peaks backed by the darker grey and white of storm clouds, a sight to still the breath and make the heart ache. No wonder the mountain sang.

  The chasm stretched north before them and to the west, to their left, but a wide ledge curved to the east. Squinting, Kieve followed the ledge until it disappeared through a pass. She guessed that the pass was the one marked on the flat map, bordering the blank space on the west. If so, it led to a finger valley that fell into the large, flat valley of the Morat. One day here, two days on the road; she’d be back on Sterk in three days, four at the most. For all that it was not long enough, it was far too long.

  She turned her back to the chasm and took the compass bearing of her scarf, then sent the boy back for it while she noted the bearing and the paces she had clicked off on the abacus. She had trained Traveler to pace evenly and to stand with patient stillness while she sat him and wrote. Now she turned in the saddle and noted the features to her left and right in their appropriate columns. She sighted on Stormbringer’s peak and took the heading, quelling a moment of anger that she was not allowed a quadrant. “You are neither a Mapmaker nor an Explorer,” Jenci had written in response to her request. “You are a Herald Rider, a Lord’s Rider, the best of what we are. Be glad for it.”

  Now she noted the peak’s direction and sat still for a moment, letting the rhythm of her breathing clear her mind. By the time the boy returned she had chosen a place along the ledge for her next station, a bright granite outcrop by the lip of the drop. The boy and Myla stayed behind until she and Traveler had paced off the distance to the outcrop and she had taken the bearing on a line back to them. Then, at her shout, the boy rode toward her while she noted the direction and the distance in her notebook. Abacus, compass, a notebook, a well-trained horse. Her own eyes and fingers. Not even Jenci could object to those and Lord Cadoc didn’t care what she did, so long as she also obeyed him. She turned right and looked and wrote it down, and turned left and looked and wrote that down too, and noted the compass bearings.

  After the first set of measurements she didn’t have to tell the boy what to do, and the morning passed in a cleanliness of bright wind and concentration and the flash of her compass in the sun. It was so cold that her hands in the fingerless undergloves grew numb and she kept them tucked into her armpits as often as she could. She found a neck scarf for the boy, who wore it under and over the hood of his borrowed cloak.

  They worked their way along the ledge, measuring and sighting while the sun rose to its winter peak. It was well past noon when Kieve realized that she was hungry. The wind now blew steadily, a frigid blast from the north.

  The ledge had narrowed to a shelf just wide enough for one horse; overhead the rock leaned forward, forming a grey roof. The stations here came close together, for she needed to move in a straight line between them, and the ledge twisted and veered along the drop. At the overhang’s deepest point the ledge widened and the wind abated. The boy tethered the horses while Kieve dug out the flask of cold tea left over from breakfast, and some of Welfred’s way-meal. They sat near the lip of the cliff watching winter hawks circling below them through the liquid air, dark spots dancing an infinity away. Kieve filled her lungs, remembering other places. The tea was strong and chill, and her mind felt clean.

  “It looks like the outlands north of Myned Province,” she said after a while, wishing she had time to sketch the scene and knowing that she did not. “Canyons like this, but deeper. Tall straight mountains with clouds around their tops, falling all the way down to their roots and coming up again. Sometimes you find meadows high up in the mountains, so cold and distant that only goats and eagles live there. Or valleys so deep that the sun shines only at noon, and the rest of the time it’s either night or twilight.”

  The boy looked at her. “Higher than Minst?”

  She laughed. “High enough to make you dizzy just thinking about them.”

  “That’s Trapper country,” he said. “You were there?”

  “Yes. A long time ago.”

  “You saw Trappers? Real ones?”

  “Yes.” She leaned back against the rock. “The Inguruki. Pale folk, most of them. The ones with Cherek ancestors are a bit darker, but not by much. Most
of Constain’s people intermarried.”

  “I know about him. He was a tyrant and a murderer and he tried to conquer all of Cherek but he was defeated and kicked out and he escaped to the Trappers before he could be killed.” It sounded like a lesson recital. “It happened a long, long time ago.”

  Kieve nodded. “In summer the Inguruki live in skin tents and fish the rivers, and gather grains and fruit. In winter they live in villages and trap for furs. Dark ones, deep and warm, and pale ones so white they make your eyes hurt.” She touched the deep fur lining of her cloak. “These are Trapper furs. The guild buys all the black ones they can provide.”

  He put out his hand and touched the edge of her cloak. “They use magic,” he said. “They make themselves invisible.”

  “No.”

  “Yes they do,” the boy insisted. “And they have white hair and red eyes. The seminarian told us so.”

  “No,” she said again. “Some look a lot like me. Most look a lot like you.”

  “No, they don’t,” he muttered.

  She took another piece of meat from the packet and bit into it, ignoring him. After a while he put down his cheese and said, “What were we doing today?”

  “Surveying. Measuring the land for a map.”

  He rocked back and looked at her. Bright hair tumbled in the wind. “That’s why we came this way? To explore the pass?”

  She nodded. “There is a blank space on the map. I wanted to see what was there, and this is what I found.” She gestured at the chasm and the mountains beyond.

  “It was there already,” he said, as he had said that morning, and she replied again, “But it isn’t on the map. Until it’s on a map, how can we tell anyone else that it’s here, or what it’s like?”

  He looked at her in silence, then said, “Is that different from the scroll you had last night?” She nodded. “How does that work?”

  She was speechless for a moment before remembering her own bewilderment the first time Jenci had spread a flat map open for her. The boy looked away, distancing himself from his own request, and that too she remembered, not from herself but from the year she had spent helping the map master teach the younger children.