Watcher of the Dead

by J. V. Jones

  “I am not your father,” the ranger had warned early on. “Do not expect me to rule you.”

  Bram had nodded, though he had not fully understood what the ranger was telling him. He wasn’t sure he understood now, but he was learning. Rangers were not clan. They did not function as caretakers for one another. You were allowed freedoms and the right to hang yourself with them. It was a new concept to Bram, this lawlessness. He felt as if he’d been plunged into deep water with no place to rest his feet.

  He had traveled with Mallin for twenty days now, entering a world of margins and shadow. Bram thought he had known the clanholds. He was wrong. He knew the well-traveled paths, the long-standing stovehouses, the clan-maintained bridges and crossings. Hew Mallin knew the ways through the darkest woods, the secret entrances to sealed mines, the natural bridges across waterways and the caves beneath the hills. Mallin’s world was peopled with men and women who lived on the ragged edge of clan: illegal settlers, bear trappers, fugitives, malcontents, prospectors, prostitutes and wild men. They lived in shanties, reed villages, clearings in the woods, abandoned buildings, mineshafts and wells: everywhere, if you knew where to look

  Hew Mallin knew where to look.

  “Take it.”

  Mallin spoke quietly but with force. With his right hand, he pushed his half-finished malt toward Bram. With his left he slid a slim package under the table. Bram accepted both simultaneously. To cover himself while he concealed the package, he slugged the malt. Pleased with his own quick thinking, he glanced to Mallin for approval.

  Hew Mallin wasn’t looking his way. After a few seconds the ranger nodded and Bram nodded back, relieved. At first he didn’t realize that Mallin’s signal wasn’t intended for him. It was directed toward the younger of the two women across the room. The woman turned her head slowly in response, appraising the ranger. Her dress was more modest than her companion’s and to Bram’s mind less interesting because of it. She was pretty though, with patches of high color on her cheeks and dozens of tiny copper hooks in her ears.

  “I’ll catch up with you on the south road,” Mallin said to Bram rising, “in the morning.”

  Bram stared at the back of his head.

  Reaching the women, Mallin introduced himself and began a softly spoken conversation. Within seconds, he was invited to sit down. Within a minute his hand was resting on the younger woman’s thigh.

  It took a while for Bram to understand the ranger wasn’t coming back. That was it? No help? No warning? A package to be delivered—a letter, by the feel of it—and no instruction on how to get it done.

  Stealth or candor: take your pick.

  Bram sat and blinked. Smoke leaking from the stove burned his eyes. Or perhaps it was the malt. The sun had set an hour back and outside it would be full dark. And wet. Bram was warm and dry and comfortably hazy-in-the-head and the thought of trekking through damp fields in the darkness held absolutely no appeal.

  Nor did delivering the letter.

  Soft laughter tinkled from Hew Mallin and the women. Bram stood. His hip banged against the table and knocked over the two thumb cups. The sound wasn’t especially loud, but the room was small and men were armed and wary. All turned to look at him. Hew Mallin touched his lips to the older woman’s ear and whispered a single word. She gasped and slapped him across the face. Instantly the attention of the room shifted, and much though Bram would have liked to watch what happened next he recognized his cue to slip away.

  He was careful as he slid between the benches. For some reason his body was overresponding. His steps had more kick than they needed and his hands applied unnecessary force to the door, making it ricochet against its hinges. He was relieved when he was finally outside. For a few moments he leaned against the exterior wall and breathed. It was hard to not to think that leaving Castlemilk had been a mistake.

  The air smelled ripe and rainy, and the tail end of the storm pushed wind gusts against Bram’s face. First things first, he told himself. Ride or walk? Walk, definitely walk. If it all went horribly wrong he didn’t want Guy Morloch reclaiming his horse.

  Despite everything Bram grinned. Two months ago Guy Morloch had abandoned him on a hillside east of Dhoone. Guy’s stallion had done a runner, and as the horse’s chances of coming back seemed low, Guy had commandeered Bram’s mount as a replacement. For a wonder Guy’s stallion, Gabbie, had returned the next morning. A few weeks later Wrayan Castlemilk had gifted Gabbie to Bram, which meant that Gabbie was now the property of Bram Cormac. Still. Bram wouldn’t bet good money on either Wrayan Castlemilk or Guy Morloch honoring the settlement.

  The thought of Wrayan Castlemilk heated Bram’s face. The Milk chief had welcomed him to her clan, seconding his yearman’s oath, and just like Robbie, he’d betrayed her. Dhoone was no good for Milk.

  Bram thrust himself off from the stovehouse wall and sprinted west. Who was he fooling? He wasn’t Dhoone. “You can’t claim my name, Bram,” Robbie had always been fond of pointing out. “We may share the same father, but my mother was a descendant of kings. Yours was a rabbit trapper from Gnash.”

  Reaching the road, Bram cut north toward the woods. The sky was a dark ceiling barely tall enough to contain the trees. Rain had stopped falling but the groundcover was wet. Sword ferns soaked Bram’s pant legs and boots. His cloak was goat wool, dark brown and closely spun. Its slippery lining repelled damp. Hew Mallin had given him the cloak on the night they left Castlemilk as they camped on the banks of the White. The following morning Bram had decided to burn his old cloak, yet when he crossed to the fire with the Dhoone-blue garment, the ranger halted him.

  “Keep it,” Mallin had said quietly. “It might prove useful.”

  Bram could not outrun the chill of those words. He was Phage now. Old loyalties no longer existed, but tokens of those loyalties were fair game. They might come in handy for disguise or defense. The cloak was in the stovehouse lean-to, a closely rolled cylinder claiming space in the bottom of his pack. Bram wondered if Mallin had intended him to wear it tonight.

  With the ranger you could not be sure. He was lawless in ways Bram was still discovering. Mallin had walked right up to Wrayan Castlemilk’s door and stolen one of her sworn men in broad daylight. Later he’d had the nerve to enter the Castlemilk stables and order the stablemaster to saddle Bram’s horse. Mallin did not care how things were done, just that they were done.

  Stealth or candor: take your pick.

  Bram slowed to a walk. He was sweating heavily. His head was banging and he thought he might be sick. Shouldn’t have finished the malt. He tugged a fern from the ground and mashed it into his face. It seemed to help. Now how was he going to get the letter to Rob?

  “What I give you must be delivered to Dun Dhoone tonight,” Mallin had said an hour earlier as they entered the stovehouse. “He leaves for Withy at dawn.”

  Bram dropped the fern. Tiny hooks in the stem had pierced his palm and his hand stung as air and nerve endings met. He had not imagined he would return to Dhoone. He had assumed that walking away from Castlemilk was the same as walking away from Robbie and clan.

  The woods were quiet as he headed west. Cover thinned as hemlock and blackstone pine gave way to oak and ironwood. Something had been trapped just beyond the path. Bram smelled fresh urine and fear. He knew this area. His mother had set traps here. Wires mostly. Sometimes drop cages. Her secret was to acid-burn the metal so no telltale gleam of light could give away a tripwire. Bram was careful where he put his feet.

  When he passed the Stagpost, a tree trunk carved in the shape of antlers marking the end of trapping territory and the beginning of hunting grounds, he turned north again. His hand was still stinging so he slipped it under his cloak. The package blocked his way, preventing his fingers from reaching the heat of his chest. Inside lay a message from the Phage to the Dhoone chief. Bram wondered what it said.

  He wondered a long time.

  An hour passed as he ghosted through woods. When the moon slid across a break in t
he clouds, he received his first glimpse of the Dhoonehouse. Viewed from south, the largest roundhouse in the clanholds was a blind hill of stone. Dozens of recessed chimneys punctured the vast arch of the dome, making the roundhouse smoke like a coal kicked from the fire. At its southern apex, the twin Thistle Towers stood lean and still. Men stationed there lit no lamps nor set fires, under direct order from Robbie Dun Dhoone. Bram could not say with certainty the reason behind the order, but he knew his brother. He could guess.

  Bram drifted west along the treeline, delaying the time when he crossed open ground. He had spent hours in the Thistle Towers as a boy, playing defend the fortress and then later keeping watch. The stairs were slippery and cut strangely high and the air stank of mice. Even before Robbie’s chiefship, guards were allowed few comforts. Some ancient, hard-nosed chief had ordered chairs carved from stone to be placed in the uppermost chamber. “Wood’s too soft,” he was supposed to have said. “Once a man’s arse goes to sleep his head’s not far behind.”

  Bram didn’t think discomfort was the reason Robbie allowed no fires, though. Robbie Dun Dhoone liked to catch his intruders unaware. Light from fires and lamps acted as a deterrent: Guards here, keep away. Robbie preferred to let his enemies approach and pick them off one by one.

  Bram suspected the effects of the malt were wearing off. It was becoming easier to sustain panic. Rob would kill him. He’d see him and kill him. Bram Cormac was a traitor to his clan. He’d forsaken his oath to Castlemilk and broken the bargain struck between the Dhoone chief and the Milk chief. Even worse, he’d brought shame upon his brother, the man who wanted to be king.

  Oh gods. What was Mallin thinking? Why couldn’t the ranger deliver the letter himself? The least he could have done was trained his helper.

  Right now training would be good.

  Bram ducked from the trees into open ground. The timing was right. Light swinging in a narrow arc at the base of the east tower meant the door had just opened and closed. The watch was changing. Attention would be diverted. A sixteen-year-old boy with good eyes might slip by undetected.

  Rain had turned the graze to sludge. Mud rivers oozed toward Blue Dhoone Lake, carrying frost-split seeds to the water and sucking at Bram’s boots. Trees that no longer existed were on his mind. As long as he could remember, a stand of ornamental willows had grown at the lake’s north shore. The willows were gone. As he moved closer he corrected himself: the willows’ crowns had gone, but their stumps remained. Someone had done a brutal job with the felling. Decapitation was a word that sprung to Bram’s mind.

  And stuck there.

  Bram made himself move forward. He would use the stumps anyway, crouch down and wait until he had some kind of plan. He knew every entrance to the Dhoonehouse and rated his chances of sneaking in as low. The stables would have been his best bet for stealth, but they’d been torched in the retaking. There was a secret entrance in the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes—the Dog Lord had used it during his escape—but Rob had ordered the entrance sealed with roof nails. Bram supposed that a man with a sledgehammer could rip open the door. He didn’t have a sledgehammer though, and even if he did, it would hardly be stealthy. Or healthy. A sledgehammer could tear off a man’s head.

  Bram tried to stay calm as he shadowed the lake. This close you could see the water rippling. Glass eels skimmed below the surface, hunting prey. They were trapped, Bram reckoned. Unable to leave the Dhoonehold without skipping over leagues of mud. They needed a way out. He needed one in.

  Reaching the willow stumps, he squatted for cover. An impulse he wasn’t proud of made him reach for the package. Ideas were suddenly there in his head and he acted before he could outthink them. A small tug was all it took to break the seal. A single sheet of vellum, folded in two, lay inside. Bram centered the letter on his kneecap and ran a fist down the crease, flattening the page. Moonlight filtering through rainclouds made the animal hide glow. Its message was short and unsigned. Bram read.

  You could stop your lungs from racing but not your heart, Bram realized as he threw the outer package in the lake. It floated, seal up, on the surface until an eel snatched it from sight.

  Bram stood. He could smell the sweet scent of burning alder drifting from the house. “We both know you were never cut out to be a Dhoone.” Robbie’s words, spoken three months ago, repeated in Bram’s head. They had a different shape to them now, like a new tooth that had punched through a gum. Robbie might as well have said clan. Never cut out to be clan.

  The walk toward the west Thistle Tower took seconds. Bram’s arm was already in motion as he closed distance toward the door. Rain had soaked the wood. Thumping it with the heel of his hand produced a dull rumble. Almost immediately, light and noise touched off within the tower.

  “Who goes there?” came the shouted challenge from the other side of the door.

  “Bram Cormac to see his brother.”

  The door did not open; Bram had not expected it to. Tower guards were no fools. Moments passed as he was inspected through a series of finger holes drilled at eye height. Bram kept himself still. Chances were high that his inspector knew him.

  “Tell Robbie I await him by the lake.”

  Hearing a grunt of acknowledgment, Bram turned and headed back to the shore.

  The temperature was dropping and the lake began to steam. Something close to self-destruction kept Bram’s mind still as he waited. Right here, on the north bank of Blue Dhoone, things were changing for him. Think and he might stop them. Think and it might be possible to hold on to the Bram Cormac who was just a bad Dhoonesman and bad clansman.

  And not yet a bad man.

  It didn’t take long for Robbie Dun Dhoone to emerge from his house. Bram recognized his brother’s silhouette. Rob carried muscle high in his shoulders as all hammermen did, but there was balance in his legs and hips, a perfection of proportion that singled him out. Hammer strokes that other men strove to execute were effortless to him, so he didn’t need extra bulk in his upper body. Early exposure to swordcraft had helped him devise new ways to wield blunt and heavy blades.

  He was dressed in a Dhoone-blue wool cloak edged with fisher fur, gray moleskin pants and tunic, and thick-soled leather boots. He was armed but not armored. Da’s longsword, the horse-stopper forged from mirror steel, dissected the lines of his back. It had to weigh over a stone, but Robbie moved lightly, without burden, as he crossed the hard standing of the bluecourt.

  Bram picked his moment and then made the small adjustment that angled his body toward the light. He experienced a stab of satisfaction as his brother jerked in surprise. Until then, Robbie Dhoone had not realized how close his half-brother stood to him.

  He covered it well. “Bram,” he said smoothly, asserting force with the word.

  “Rob.”

  Robbie waited. So did Bram. He watched as Robbie appraised him. The golden charm, which Rob worked like a muscle, relaxed. No point in expending energy here.

  “What do you have for me?”

  “Information if you want it.”

  Robbie’s eyes glittered. “Wrayan Castlemilk said you’d joined them.”

  The Milk chief’s name was all it took for Bram to lose hold of his calm. Pinpricks from the fern became hot stabs of pain as blood pumped at force through his face and palms.

  Robbie nodded, satisfied by evidence of Bram’s shame. “Say what you came to and leave.”

  “Strike the Withyhouse tomorrow and you’ll fail.”

  “Unless.”

  The instinct was swift and unmistakable: Bargain here. Tit for tat. Bram considered what he wanted. His hastily assembled plan had been to bargain for safe passage from the Dhoonehold—I give you information and you allow me to leave, unharmed—but the same instinct that told him to bargain told him he was selling himself short. The information was worth more. It would make Robbie Dun Dhoone a king—and that’s what he’d wanted for twenty years, ever since his mother had told him he could trace his ancestry back to the warrior queen, Weepi
ng Moira. So what did he, Bram Cormac, want from his brother? Mallin had ordered him to deliver the letter, not profit from it. Yet hadn’t Mallin allowed him free rein? Stealth or candor: take your pick? Wasn’t that the same as saying, Do anything you see fit? Bram decided it was. He also decided what he wanted.

  “Two things.”

  Robbie Dun Dhoone was no one’s fool. His smile was knowing. “And they would be?”

  “Your guarantee of safe passage from the Dhoonehold.”

  “You have it.”

  Bram hesitated. Water plinked as an eel broke the surface of the lake.

  “And?”

  “Da’s sword.”

  Two words and the air cooled. All was known now. Resentment. Jealousy. Anger. That sword, one of the two their father Mabb Cormac had owned, meant everything between them. The day Da died, Robbie had taken possession of both swords. His plan had been to trade the lesser of the two to Wrayan Castlemilk in return for manpower to help retake Dhoone. Guilt had halted Robbie’s hand though. Traded your brother instead. Gave him the sword to soften the blow. Bram held Robbie’s gaze. This man had sold him to Castlemilk. He, Bram Cormac, deserved that second sword.

  Rob looked away first. When he spoke his voice was soft with contempt. “You’re too small. You’ll never be able to wield it.”

  “Maybe I’ll grow.”

  “Maybe I’ll order your killing. Go back on my word.” Like you.

  Bram heard what hadn’t been said. Maybe he was going insane, but it didn’t hurt. Decapitation unnecessary. Already lost my head.

  “If anyone’s going to hunt me down and kill me it should be Wrayan Castlemilk. It was her oath I broke. Not yours.” Bram didn’t know where the words came from—couldn’t even be sure if they were true—but they sounded right. His voice was strong and he’d caught some of Robbie’s contempt and given it back to him. “A king doesn’t do a chief’s work.”

  Seconds passed and then Robbie snapped open his sword holster. “Here,” he said, handing the sheathed sword, blade out, to Bram. “Careful how you wear it—it might knife you in the back.”