She spread out her flat map. “Look. You must pretend that you are a bird, so that you see all of the countryside spread out below you. But instead of mountains, you see these marks here, these peaks. Where they pull away from each other is a valley. This is a river, here. And this, this is a road.”
He bent his head over the map, his hair almost touching her sleeve. The wind spoke into their quiet and his finger moved over the inked lines. She waited, remembering how hard it had been to jump from the knowing that comes from telling or direct seeing, to the seeing that comes from map symbols on paper.
“What is this?” His finger hovered above the map.
“That is Three Crossings. These marks mean houses—can you see the roofs?”
“I—yes!” He bent closer and his cheek pressed her sleeve. “It’s not all of Three Crossings, is it? It’s just supposed to mean a village. Because you couldn’t fit all of Three Crossings on this paper. Because we couldn’t see it.”
She smiled. “And I cannot write that small. Can you find Minst?”
He started at the closeness of her voice and jerked back. After a moment his curiosity overcame his caution and he bent over the map again.
“When the sheep go to Three Crossings they go down the mountain, with the sunrise on the left. So they go—south, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So Minst is north of Three Crossings. And on this map...”
She touched the image of a circle just above a straight line. “This is the sun rising, this is east. And here,” she moved her finger across the map and touched a semi-circle bisected by a straight line, “this is the sun setting. So this is west.”
He sat back a little to look at the entire map. After a moment he put his finger on the symbol for the star called The Eye. “This is an eye, yes? So this is north, then, because The Eye is always north. And so,” he said, not giving her a chance to reply, “and so if this is Three Crossings, and since Minst is north, then this, this must be Minst. And this mountain is Gryffon behind it. And we are—we are—here?”
He pointed at the blank space on the map and looked at her, his eyes bright. “We are here, aren’t we? Because you said that Stormbringer wasn’t on the map, and he’s not.”
She nodded and touched the blank space. “When this map is finished, anyone will be able to use it to find this place right here, where we’re sitting, and learn how to get here. They’ll know the route I take to get to Abermorat, and the one you take to get back home.”
A silence grew. She looked at him, puzzled by the quiet, and found him staring at the map.
“I don’t want to go back,” he said.
“No?” She rocked back, surprised.
“Rider, listen,” he said, leaning forward. “You took me and I’m your responsibility now and it wouldn’t be very responsible of you to take me this far and just leave me in the mountains, would it?”
“It’s a day’s ride. You’ll leave in the morning. You can follow your own trail back. I will write a note to Unig—”
“Besides,” he added, “they’re not my people. Someone sold me to Unig just like you bought me from him. So I’m your property now.”
“I don’t understand this,” she said. “You hate Riders and you hate me. Why do you want to come with me?”
He turned his face from her, and mumbled.
“Say that louder,” she said.
“I don’t want to live in Minst,” he said. “There’s no place for me to be there. I’m just a, I’m a bondslave. Even if I can earn my way free, no guild will take me. And I’ll be stuck in Unig’s kitchen forever.” He raised his chin. “If you don’t want to keep me, you can sell me to somebody in the city. But I won’t want to go back.”
Kieve looked away from him.
“You know about Lord Cadoc,” she said. “Does anyone in Minst like him?” When he didn’t answer she looked over at him. “Do they?”
He shook his head.
“I’m Lord Cadoc’s Herald Rider. He holds my oath.” She paused. “Do you still want to come with me?”
The silence stretched, then he said, “Yes. Yes. I do.”
She shook her head and packed away the remains of the meal.
* * * *
The wind strengthened through the afternoon; by evening Kieve was glad to put away her instruments and search for a place to spend the night. She found it within a tall circle of stones. Together she and the boy cared for the horses. She handed him her flints and he built a fire while she prepared the vedsuppe. Outside the ring of stones, the evening crackled with cold. A swift wind picked ice from the face of Stormbringer’s glacier and flung it through the air.
She put the pot to heat above the fire and thought about the boy’s Taken parents, and about her own dead father, and about Jenci, who might be at the castle by now, drawn by Cadoc’s dying to watch the lord reach the Mountain, and to see her. Mapmaker himself, he had pushed her away from that section of the guild. More honor to be a Herald Rider, most honor to be Rider to a lord. And soon, he claimed, the Mapmakers would only copy and illuminate and perhaps update, for soon all of Cherek would lie disclosed in the vasty maprooms of the Riders Guild Hall in Koerstadt, but the Herald Riders would persist.
There were unmapped lands beyond Cherek’s northern borders, the Trapper country where, nine years ago, Jenci had forbidden her to go. Other Riders, the Explorers, were sent into the outlands to survey and map, so why not Kieve, who knew the language, knew the customs, had some claim to a tribal connection in the Inguruki lands? Instead Jenci sent her first to the holdings of a minor land baron whose life was raising wheat and playing at the bones, and then to Dalmorat’s despotic, Riderless lord; afraid, she thought, that if she rode north she would not ride back again.
Love and anger, Bredda had told her, is a lethal combination. Frowning, Kieve ladled out the vedsuppe.
“Rider?”
She looked at him.
“What happens when Cadoc dies?”
“I ride to Koerstadt with the news.”
He considered this. “They’ll know already, won’t they? By the semaphore telegraph?”
“Yes.” She scooped a piece of rabbit bone from the soup and sucked on it. “But they won’t enter it in the Koerstadt records until I deliver the Deathnote.”
“Is it a long ride, in winter?”
“At any time. I’ll take the Water Road.”
“I remember that,” the boy said after a moment. “The iceboats with big sails all different colors, and the runners. I wasn’t allowed onto the Water Road because of the runners.”
“Where was this?” she said.
“I don’t know. Before I came to Minst.” His face hardened into an expressionless mask and he looked away. They cleared the remains of their meal in silence. A baker’s boy, Welfred had said of him. Helpful in the kitchen. He was as resentful, Kieve thought, as she herself had been.
They lay on opposite sides of the banked fire. Stars coated the sky.
“They’re beautiful,” the boy said. She couldn’t see his face for the sides of the hood.
“The Inguruki, the Trappers say ... “
“What do they say?” he said when she didn’t go on. “About the stars?”
She stared upward, remembering. “In the first time, there were only Snow Wolf and Raven. One day as they trekked through the Great Empty, Snow Wolf grew bored so Raven made him a toy. She scooped ice and snow and fashioned the ball of the world, but it fell apart in her hands. So she breathed on the world and the warmth of her breath sank deep into the heart of the ball, and it turned brown and green and white and stayed together.”
“Go on,” the boy said.
Snow Wolf liked his new toy, Kieve told him. After he played with it, he demanded that Raven carry the world back to their lodge, their kamak, while he took a nap.
Raven took the world up in her beak, but on the way she dropped it. The warm heart of the world splintered into a million small, sharp pieces that sprayed up into
the Great Empty and hung there, glowing. Raven didn’t have time to gather them all, so she dipped out a single beak-full and re-built the world’s shell around that small scoop of frozen stars. Then she flew on to their kamak.
“Snow Wolf would notice, wouldn’t he?” The question was almost lost in a yawn. “That the world was broken and then fixed?”
“Raven is clever, and Snow Wolf is not very smart,” Kieve replied. “But he was furious that there were shining things in the Great Empty and wanted a light to see them by. So while Snow Wolf slept, Raven rolled all the stars together into a big glowing ball, which lit all of the Big Empty. Snow Wolf held the ball high and searched from one side of the Big Empty to the other but didn’t find a single star. Disgusted, he threw the ball away. When it landed it shattered into a million stars again. Snow Wolf was furious.
“He demanded that Raven make the light again, which she did,” Kieve said. “She does it each morning so that Snow Wolf can come search through the Big Empty for the truth. But he never finds it, because although he is Snow Wolf, Raven is cleverer than he.”
The boy didn’t respond. She came up on one elbow to look at him. He was asleep, his face barely visible in the dim light of the stars. She grimaced, rolled onto her side, and pulled her cloak over her face. When had she first heard of Raven making the world and sun and stars? It must have been the winter after her father brought them to Uruk, because this story always came at the year’s beginning when the Inguruki settled into their kamaks, ready to spend the cold season trapping and telling the long stories that shaped their world.
The last time she heard the story had been the winter before her father was killed. She remembered leaning against him in the sleepy warmth of the kamak-inguruki, the tribe’s gathering lodge, while the elders sent the story around the room so that all the voices told the stories and all the stories spoke in the collective voice of the tribe itself. That year even Kieve’s voice shaped the story, for when Snow Wolf broke the sun into stars, the Eldest nodded to her and she was so surprised that she spoke Snow Wolf’s cry in a squeak and the tribe laughed.
Remembering, she felt hollowed by longing. She turned her face more deeply into the warm fur of her hood and waited for the rescue of sleep.
* * * *
At dawn a hard, flat wind sprang up, snatching the tops from banks of snow and shivering the few trees that grew at this altitude. The boy tried to argue her out of sending him back to Minst but she mixed more ink and re-filled her leather bottle and sharpened her pens, and refused to discuss it. The paper, when she wrote on it to rescind her promissory note, flapped and tried to escape, and she held it down with her elbow.
“You must give this to Unig when you return,” she said. “It clears my debt with him. It is important. Do you understand me?”
He turned his face away from her. Angry, she jerked him around, opened his shortcoat, and thrust the folded paper, and his bond, into the pocket of his shirt. He made no move to stop her; he made no move to do anything at all. She cursed as she closed his shortcoat and turned back to the horses. She was well rid of him, she thought. It would take a little longer, but she could complete the open traverse by herself.
They came out of the stone circle into the face of the wind and a harsh, unpleasant light. Traveler and Myla lowered their heads and Kieve fumbled in a bag for the snow masks. She slipped one set over her wrist and turned to the boy. Wind tore the words from her lips but he stood still while she settled the narrow wooden strip over his face, adjusting it until his eyes blinked at her through the thin slits. She fastened his hood under his chin.
As she lifted her own mask a gust of wind jerked splinters of ice from the rock above her and slapped her face, filling her eyes before she could blink. She gasped and clapped her hands to her face. Pain stabbed and burned and her tears froze, cementing her lashes together. It hurt so much she could barely breathe.
Hands tugged at her wrists. She tried to jerk away.
“Stop that,” the boy yelled. “Rider, stop that.”
He pulled her arm and she stumbled after him. The wind died down and she knew they were back in the stone circle. She heard the horses move in behind them. He guided her to a low rock. She sat and he took her head in his hands and covered her left eye with his mouth. Ice melted from her lashes. He put a cloth over the eye and moved his mouth to her right eye.
“Close your hood,” he said. “Let your face get warm.”
“I know what to do,” she muttered, but let him pull the hood over her face. Her hands shook; it took all her will power not to claw at her eyes.
She heard him tether the horses and come back.
“Can you see?” he said after a moment.
She pulled the hood open and raised her lids. They rasped against her eyes and she clenched her jaw. The world blurred into shapeless patches of dark and light. He blotted her cheekbones with her scarf. She took it from him and touched her eyelids and shouted with pain. Outside the rock circle the wind howled.
“Rider,” the boy said. She ignored him. “Rider,” he said again, louder. She felt his hand on her arm.
“What is it? What do you want?”
“You can’t send me away now. You’re blind.”
“I am not blind!” she screamed, pushing him away. “I am not blind!”
She scrubbed at her cheeks and tried to squint again. Her eyes throbbed. She couldn’t see. She pulled her hood closed and held the soft fur near her eyes, and rocked.
The wind lessened and in the quiet she heard nothing. Panicked, she pulled open her hood.
“Boy! Where are you?”
“Here, Rider.” His voice sounded close. She reached for him and grabbed a handful of his cloak.
“We must go forward, to the city,” she said. “Bredda can fix my eyes.”
The moment stretched, then the boy said, “No. I won’t take you.”
She turned her head toward him, not believing.
“Not unless you promise,” he said, and even through her panic she could hear the strain in his voice.
“Promise what?” she snapped.
“That you won’t send me back,” he said in a rush. “That you’ll find a place for me, a guild. That—that’s all.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “But you have to promise, Rider. You have to promise me that.”
“And if I don’t,” she said, “if I don’t, you leave me here to die.”
He didn’t answer. She sat in darkness, his cloak still bunched in her fist, closing doors in her mind against panic and fury and pain.
After a long time, she opened her fingers and let the fabric of his cloak fall free.
“I have no choice,” she said. “Very well. Let’s go.”
“No. You have to swear it, Rider.”
“My word is not enough?” she shouted, and he shouted back.
“Nobody’s word is enough! No! Swear it, Rider! Swear it on your oath!”
She sucked in air until it filled her lungs and pushed the anger down, and then she said, “I swear to you, Pyrs bondchild, that I will take you with me to Sterk, and I will help you to find a place.”
“Not just help, you have to swear to find it,” he insisted.
“Don’t press me, boy.”
He was silent again. The wind picked up, screaming through the rocks.
She felt his hand on her arm.
“Here is your horse,” he said. “You must give me your map. I will lead.”
She put her hand into her pocket and wrapped her fingers around the map for a moment, then held it out to him. He pulled it away, and she clenched her hands to keep from snatching it back.
Chapter 2
Even light hurt. She rode with her hood seamed shut, hiding from it, but could only stand the darkness for a short while before she had to open her hood again and try to see. When she did, her eyes burned and tears froze on her cheeks. Blinking was agony. Everything was agony.
She had told him they would go through the pass. Beyond that he
didn’t know their destination or route, and she didn’t know how well he could travel in the snow, whether he could read the shades of whiteness, whether he could even tell their direction. She thought this and pulled the hood open, but she could not see and pain drove her back into darkness, sweating and chilled. They picked their way as through a field of knives.
In mid-morning she heard the voice of the Master of Apprentices, as clearly as if she sat in the circle around him in the Koerstadt guild hall. Remember to breathe, he had said. Remember to breathe, to think it through, think of what you can do and then do it. Realize what you can’t do and put those things aside. And remember to breathe.
She breathed and breathed again, and put her hand in her pocket.
“Boy. Wait.” Traveler stopped moving.
“What is it?”
Her fingers touched the leather ink bottle and the pens.
“A moment. One moment.”
There, the cool roundness of the compass. She brought it out and held it in her palm.
“A compass. I used it yesterday. Do you know what it is?”
“No, Rider.” His voice was close beside her.
“Here. Look.” She opened the instrument’s lid and held her cupped hand out toward his voice. “The needle in the circle—you see it?”
“Yes, Rider.”
“Good. And The Eye on the paper below the needle? It is north. The tip of the needle always points north.”
A moment of silence, then he said, “If I turn the compass so that the needle points to The Eye, I can tell where the directions are. Is that right?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling the relief in her stomach. “Yes. We need to go east and a little north, I think. Where is the map? Give it to me.”
It pressed on the back of her hand. She snatched at it and pulled it open and could not see it and pushed the panic down again. “Wait. Wait. You must put the compass on the map. And turn it, so that The Eye on the compass and The Eye on the map are together, are in the same direction. Do you see it?”
Mapping Winter Page 4
