Steelflower in Snow

by Lilith Saintcrow

  I studied him while I cleaned my spoon of fruit syrup. “He calls me that too.” I tilted my head at the dais, indicating Redfist, who appeared not to have noticed my arrival or departure. “Is it a compliment?” My Skaialan was careful, but correct enough.

  Or the new arrival pretended it was. “Oh, aye.” Fine teeth peeped cheerfully from the dark brush covering the lower half of his face. His nose was straight and proud, perhaps never broken. “We do not see the Blest People much in the Highlands, but we have tales. Ye be Gemerh, then?”

  No. There was no denying it. “Yes.” A flawed child, and a flawed adai. Though that would mean nothing to him.

  “And you have traveled this far to help Rainak Redfist retake his clan-seat?” Those dark, thoughtful eyes were well on their way to swallowing me whole.

  “We met over-the-sea.” I watched him in return.

  He did not let it halt his absorption of breakfast. “It must be quite a tale.” His brooch, the crescent with the pin through it, marked him as one of Emrath’s guard. The tain, a lord’s retainers. Later, I learned that a woman has no tain unless she is the last of her chieftain-family, or she is the Lady of Kalburn.

  If I was alone among my kind, Emrath Needleslay was likewise among her own. I did not know, then, if she counted it a curse.

  “Perhaps Redfist will tell it to you, my lord…?” I let the end of the sentence trail upwards, question clearly audible. It is not inflected as Hain, the language of giants, but around the Rim and everywhere else I have traveled, a question is spoken uphill.

  “Jorak Blacknose, at your service, walkir.” Hunching his shoulders gave the impression of a bowing torkascruagh; his smile widened and was, for a giant barbarian, charming. His eyebrows met over his nose, a shelf of vigorous black bramble. “You are Kaia Steelflower.” He handled the foreign slurry of tradetongue passable well. “And it is a pleasure to exchange names with ye.”

  I changed to tradetongue too. “May the Sun shine upon you.” It was a Shainakh greeting, but an appropriate wish for this hideous place. The entire stone pile reeked of their strange spices, their heavy fur, and the oil they used to lift dirt away. Would the smell wash out when I returned to Antai?

  If I returned to civilization again, I would need many, many baths.

  My new eating companion used a spear-spoon to bring slices of gutmeat to his mobile mouth. “Did your…companions tell ye of the news?”

  “Not yet. I have had a busy morn.” And a sleepless night.

  “Ah.” Bright interest, reined but sharp, filled his dark gaze. It was a relief to find one among the giants who was not bleached by the cold. “Well, the Ferulaine—ye know who he is?”

  His eyebrows, I finally realized, reminded me of the caterpillars the Hain use to make a raw cloth, soft, strong, and highly prized. The Skaialan hold all their body hair in high esteem, unlike the Rijiin and their perpetual shaving.

  It either irritated or pleased me that he did not take my knowledge of the Ferulaine for granted. I could not decide which. “I am told he wishes to kill Redfist. And that the thing last night was of his making.” My feet barely touched the floor if I stretched my boot-toes. Would I eventually have the urge to swing them, like a child at a feast? I hoped not.

  “Oh, aye.” Jorak Blacknose nodded. “Then ye have been told aright, lady Iron-Bloom. Tis said he has been seen on the Highroad, approaching Kalburn.”

  Emrath said as much. Good. Then Redfist may kill him and I shall return to Antai. The thought was powerfully attractive. “Is that so?”

  “Tis said, but the truth of it, who knows?” A wide, startlingly liquid shrug, heavy shoulders lifting, dropping. He wore the Needleslay’s clan-colors, but there was a broad bar of yellow stripe up one edge of his kelta—for so they call the huge rectangle of fabric that makes their skirts and wraps about their upper bodies. “If yon Conniaght Crae wishes to lead, there is much to be done.”

  “And your interest in those deeds would be?” In other words, show me your dice, barbarian, and I shall consider showing you mine.

  “I am a bard, lady Kaia.” Again, that smile, and those flashing dark eyes. He was dangerous, this one, using honey where a knife would not do. The quick intelligence in his gaze would whet more than one edge, and those he turned against would not feel the blade until he twisted it. “Many a song shall be sung of this, no matter how it ends. I intend to make certain of as much.”

  Another lutebanger. For a moment, I almost wish we had carried Gavrin along. To hear him put this Skaialan giant in his place with a song or two might have been satisfying, had I any illusions that he could do so. “That is very well,” I said. “You may also do me a favor.”

  “Ah, now there is a request from a lady, and one I cannot refuse.”

  I found the attempt at flattery as bleakly amusing as any other I have been subjected to. “Good. Leave me out of the songs, Blacknose.” What a name. “I had a lutebanger trailing me before we came North, and have only just managed to shake him from my keel.”

  With that, I bent myself to my porridge, and the Skaialan, perhaps wisely, said nothing more. He ate steadily, and he did not stare at me.

  Darik, at the high table, did.

  Risk Wherever We Land

  Kalburn Keep’s battlements were well-crafted, and if not for the wind cutting through every layer of cloth or fur in its way, they might even have been pleasant to stroll upon. My first compass of their rectangle course I spent looking outward, over the city and distant shatter-mountains, imagining an army determined to crack this stone nut. How would they approach? Of course, the outer city and the tentacles along the trade-roads would be put to the torch, the stone buildings blackened, timbered roofs and internal walls probably well-seasoned and capable of great blazing. The slum-quarters held a great deal more stone than, say, Antai, for earth-bones were probably cheaper to build with, here. The great forests meant wood was not virtually unknown, though, as it is on the Danhai plains or in the great bowl of the desert Pesh lays claim to. Trade routes over that baking expanse follow hidden watercourses, the lands beyond full of fable and strangeness.

  One day, I had thought to wander that far. There had always seemed time enough later. I could have used a measure of that baking heat now.

  My second circling of the battlements was much slower, my gaze directed over the shorter inner wall. I studied the hills and valleys of the keep’s roofs, occasionally peering over the edge to check the map I was building inside my skull. I am not overly troubled by heights, but looking down that dizzying drop into a bailey or collection of other buildings clustering the rock-chunk like chicks under a hen was faintly uncomfortable. In a ship’s rigging, at least you have a chance of landing in the sea.

  Falling onto stone is a different proposition indeed.

  To siege this place would be a drawn-out affair; the keep had two wells driven deep enough that the water was drawn unfrozen, the skaunas and the deep fires of earth to provide at least some measure of heat, and the only trouble would be the defenders running out of firewood and resorting to furniture—the cold would be worse outside the keep, and even worse in the wasteland outside the old city walls once the siege-burning was done. Great vaults were tunneled into the roots of the keep-rock for beast and human fodder alike; a few could hold here against many.

  If they had to.

  I had almost finished my second survey when Darik found me. My hood pulled close, I was a statue gaze-mapping routes over the rooftop’s pitches and noting each place that looked slick or tenuous. The great expanses of slate tile were full of hidden dells, and there would be small life clinging in protected places. Moss and its cousins, maybe more, ready to turn a foot or cause a slide. It would take time to learn that terrain, and the map seen from above sometimes bore little relation to the difficulty of actual traversing. Once I had the Keep’s roofs inside my head, I could turn my attention to the city’s.

  Darik’s arrival changed the tenor of the wind’s cry, a s’tarei’s fierce s
ilence blunting all else. He settled against the inner wall, his face turned to the opposite side of the archer’s path. Looking outward, as I gazed in. We stood like that for some while, my hands turned to knots under my cloak and the warming breath melting through me, a stove in my belly and twin flares upon my cheeks. Banners, as the Hain rise when they march to war.

  Finally, I took a step, but not away. No, I moved toward him, and our shoulders, both padded with heat-conserving layers, touched. “I dislike this place,” I said, finally, softly. If he chose to, he could take it as the salute before a duel, or he could treat it as a bare statement of fact.

  I did not know which direction he would turn, and hoped it was not the former.

  “As do I.” Equally quiet, and his weight shifted a fraction, just enough to lean into mine. Was it forgiveness, or did he crave the contact? I could not decide which it was for me, either.

  Eye-walking the rooftop roads meant I did not have to look at him. Yet I did, studying his wind-mussed hair, the tips of his ears poking through dark silk, his eyes half-closed against the wind’s stinging.

  Finally, I spoke again. “We cannot leave him to face this alone.” Again, the words could open a duel, or end one. Did he notice the we, instead of I? Did it please him?

  It was not a submission, I told myself. It was a mark of respect for a s’tarei too fine for me.

  He was still, a rock facing the keening wind. “I am unwilling to risk my adai.”

  “It is no risk.” It was not quite a lie, but I still felt the inward pinch of conscience. “Or very little of one. Misfortune strides through every part of the world, D’ri. There is danger wherever we may land.”

  “True.” He exhaled sharply, his hair stripped from his face, blue-black strands lifting and dancing. His dotanii hilts, riding his shoulders, glittered sharply in the grey light. More sleet was coming, the wind carried water in its mineral breath. “If we face another of those unclean things, you must not seek to strike it. They are dangerous to adai.”

  If he would not duel, perhaps we could discuss this calmly. “Even one with little Power?” I shifted further, leaning into him. “Possessing her own dotani, and well acquainted with its use?”

  His answering pressure was a balm, tension draining from his frame. “Any adai, Kaialitaa.” Small sharp thing, a play on my name. “Were I the s’tarei I should be, I would take you from here, whether you willed or no.”

  “Were you ruthless enough to strike me unconscious, you might succeed.” The cut escaped before I could halt it. My breath plumed before the wind snatched the words free. “I will not be dragged, D’ri. I have charted my own course for years, and I do not leave my friends to suffer alone.”

  At least he did not take much offense. “Not until they betray you.” He moved, a half-turn, and was behind me, his hands at my waist. The wind pushed his back, and the sudden cessation of its bite against my shoulders was welcome. “Is that what will loosen your stubbornness?”

  That, or damage to you. Did he hear the thought? The taih’adai was a painful weight between us, space he was perhaps learning to leave me. Once he managed that skill, I could let him approach. “I do not think Redfist would betray me.”

  “You did not think your friend Rikyat would, either.”

  I winced, and shifted to tradetongue, an old proverb from the Freetowns. “I am sure of nothing, save steel.”

  “Then I am as steel, for you.” He rested his chin atop my head, and his intonation was intimate again, s’tarei to adai. He did not play upon the word for sword, merely chose the term for a large chunk of ore that threatens to break the smith’s hammer. “And I will not ask you to turn aside.”

  A tightness I had not known I carried loosened a fraction inside my chest, then a fraction more. “I am sorry.” Perhaps he would not hear me, over the wind. “I do not mean to wound you.”

  “Likewise.” His hands tightened, arms sliding around me as far as he could reach over the bulk of borrowed skins. “If I were ruthless enough to drag you, Kaia, would you forgive me?”

  “I do not know,” I replied, and there the matter lay. Perhaps it was wisdom that he did not ask further, and perhaps it was mercy that I did not offer more explanation. Eventually, it was too cold to remain still even with the warming breath, and when I moved to finish my second circuit of the walls, he followed.

  I Can Be No Less

  The Highland’s valley-plains, in winter, bear some resemblance to a great desert. Their great forests, smothered under snow, nevertheless bear life in their depths, and trade from their fringes supports the plainsdwellers. In summer, the crops from the flatter land and terraced hills spread into the forests, and thus it has been since Redfist’s kind moved into those lands.

  The Standing Stones, the jewel in the richest navel of farmland that rests under snow and ice during the brutal winters, are held to predate Skaialan arrival. There are five, rough, milky, rose-shot pillars, spirals etched into their surfaces by some craft now lost to time or murder. The stone floor they stand sentinel over is also not native to these parts, a slab of gray flecked like a speckled egg, polished smooth. In the middle of this rises a blackened stone weeping reddish traces—skymetal, driven deep into the earth, its edges meeting the speckle-stone seamlessly. I would have suspected the Pensari had spread this far, given the cream-skin of the giants and the paleness of the five pillars, but the Standing Stones do not exhale the chill retained by everything those white worshippers of cold death touched.

  The top of the skymetal chunk is flattened, and chained to its bulk with heavy, flat, spiral-carved links is the hammer, its massive head chased with running, knotted runes. The Skaialan say it is not Kroth’s, but his father Gurath’s, that giant god who ate most of his progeny before his son returned from hanging on a massive tree at the world’s core, bleeding and furious, and crushed his father’s godly skull.

  It sounds bizarre, but no less so than any other god-story. Nothing that went into Gurath’s stomach ever returned, but stray creeping fleas who had hidden among his ear and nose hairs are held to be the first humans.

  The hammer is of stone, with its highly chased skymetal head. It is exceeding large, its haft requiring a double-grip from even the most massive of Redfist’s countrymen. Only those with the permission of the Lady of Kalburn may lift it, and even if one is permitted he may be struck down if any of their gods, much less Kroth their chieftain, does not agree that the wielder is fit for it. Dunkast of the Ferulaine was indeed approaching along the snowy roads to attempt the feat, but it was Rainak Redfist who accompanied the Keeper of the Stones, her golden hair wound with blue and green ribbons, to the stone floor and the milk-colored pillars that afternoon.

  I shivered my way along, a few steps behind Redfist, Darik to my left. The crowd, red-nosed, bright-eyed, and braving a freshening wind and an iron-grey sky pregnant with still-threatening sleet, lined the streets, oddly subdued. We walked from Kalburn’s keep’s eastern gate to the wall of the Old City and through the Needle Gate, then down a long slope of stone-paved road twitching back and forth to take advantage of hummocks swept clean by the north gale’s howling. They are cunning in how they lay their roads, the Skaialan, and if the path under your feet takes a sudden turn, tis best to follow it rather than seeking a shortcut. The more hurry, the less speed, they say, and plenty of the wise in other countries agree.

  It was a long journey, and a miserable one despite the warming breath and the bundle of furs I huddled in. Porridge was not enough to keep me warm through this, but the alternative was the heavy-spiced casing-meat. It did not seem clean to eat something carried about in guts, even if the bowels are washed and soaked and washed again. I concentrated on Redfist’s broad back, moving at a steady clip. His kelta was his clan’s colors; apparently Emrath had either kept the length of cloth hidden since before her marriage of convenience…or she had produced it in secret afterward.

  Which gave me much food for thought.

  D’ri was quiet, the fierc
e silence of a s’tarei, and his uneasy awareness of the crowd in our wake matched my own. Once his left boot slipped upon a rimed cobble, and my hand shot out, closing about his wrist. Unnecessary, since he had not lost his balance, and he did not pull away. Instead, he turned his hand, mine slid down, and our half-gloved fingers meshed. If he had to draw, it would be his left-hand blade, but he did not let go.

  Nor did I. For the first time, we walked linked, the motif repeated over and over in G’mai art. Sculpture, painting, tapestry all have their conventions, and the twinning echoes through them all.

  The warming breath became easier, and my shivers eased. Perhaps his did, as well. Well past noon, we reached the Standing Stones, cupped in their dell that nonetheless does not hold the snows or a great deal of ice. Somehow, falling water of any kind avoids the five-cornered cup, and the closer we drew to it, the more uncomfortable I became. A pressure along the throat, bulging behind my eyes, a half-heard snatch of melody forcing the ears to strain.

  Power. Here, in this cold, benighted place. My hand tightened in Darik’s, and he glanced at me, dark eyes fathomless.

  Emrath Needleslay, wrapped in an ell of blue-green, striped, and cross-hatched cloth, halted at the edge of the speckled floor. The tallest Stone, towering at her left, held a faint reflection of her bright hair, a ghost in its carved depths. A rusting staple driven deep into the side of the strange rock and a similarly rusting ring depended from it, creaking slightly as the wind pushed with greedy invisible fingers.

  The crowd crunched through ice-crust and and hardened mud to spread out, children bundled to roundness, men and women in blue-and-green or dun cloth, pale uncooked-dough cheeks and bushy beards running from gold to ruddiness, with a sprinkling of dark heads here and there. Emrath’s tain had not followed her closely, mixing with the onlookers instead; later, I learned that the Lady of Kalburn walks alone to the Stones, and while she is upon the path, to strike or offer insult to her is a crime against Kroth himself.