Ember and Ash

by Pamela Freeman

  “Wondrous!” he muttered.

  On his word, it put forth a flower, black as pitch, black as the endless night sky, four-petaled like a briar rose, with deep purple stamens. It seemed to wait, poised at the moment of full display. Then a breeze lifted its head, stirred the pollen from its stamens, spreading it across the face of the flower. The petals withered and fell, velvet black turning to gray ash-like fragments, and the seed pod at the center swelled.

  Ember held her breath, and she could see that Cedar was doing the same. He stared at the plant with a ferocious intensity, as though all he had ever wanted was there before him, as a man hanging onto the side of a cliff might stare at the rope that will save him as it spirals down.

  The pod opened silently.

  Inside, it was bright orange, and in the middle lay a blackness, round as the full moon, about the size of a man’s thumbnail. Slowly, Cedar put out his hand.

  “Careful!” Holly called.

  “It’s singing!” Cedar said. “Can’t you hear it?”

  He put his palm below the seed pod, hoping whatever this was would fall into it, but the blackness stayed resolutely where it was. Cedar swallowed and took a breath so big Ember could see it lift his shoulders.

  “I thank you for this gift,” he said, and plucked the darkness from its bright home.

  The plant withered in a heartbeat, and the dried dung blew away in a quick wind, leaving only the empty path, and Cedar standing there, holding—

  “It’s a casting stone,” he said wonderingly. “The Evenness stone.”

  They crowded forward to look as he turned and held it out to them. Black, round, perfect as the full moon.

  “It sings to me!” he said, his face full of joy, more open than Ember had ever seen him. And then he reverted to his normal manner and laughed. “Typical, isn’t it? Other people get given their stones in a pouch—mine comes from a pile of dung!”

  “If Evenness comes out of dung,” Ash said, chuckling, “gods help us when you get Chaos!”

  “Ah,” said Cedar. “Chaos was much easier.”

  He pulled a kerchief from his pocket. It was tied up around what had to be a pile of stones. Cedar crouched and laid it on the ground, spreading it so they could see the collection—all casting stones.

  “I’ve been finding them for months,” he said. “This is the last one.” He hesitated. “This is where I find out if I’m a stonemaker or a stonecaster. If they all sing for me, I’m a caster.”

  Ember fished in her petticoat pocket for her coinpouch and emptied the coins into her hand. She handed the pale yellow pouch to Cedar.

  “You’ll need this, I think.”

  Cedar smiled at her, acknowledging his own excitement and her generosity, but with that twist to his mouth that she was coming to understand. Not meanness, but a deep appreciation of how ridiculous life could be.

  He put the stones from the kerchief inside the pouch and then slowly slid the Evenness stone in on top of them. Ember held her breath. Would they all hear the stones sing, or only him? She had never seen a caster receive his stone set before.

  Cedar’s head bowed toward the pouch. Oh, no, Ember thought, but then he raised his head and his eyes were alight, shining with unshed tears.

  “They sing like a choir of water spirits,” he said unsteadily.

  “So, you’re a caster after all,” Ash said, beaming.

  “You can earn a good living, casting,” Curlew said approvingly, and somehow the prosaic comment was what they all needed to return them from the realm of the extraordinary to ordinary life.

  Cedar laughed and said, “Aye, I hope so!” He drew the pouch strings tight, then tied it at his belt and rested his hand on it, in that spot Ember had seen him touch so many times.

  Ember piled her coins onto Cedar’s kerchief and tied it up. When she slipped it back into her pocket, it banged uncomfortably against her knee, so she handed it to Ash. “Put that inside your jerkin,” she said. “Or in your own pouch.”

  “Mine’s not big enough for this much coin!” he teased her.

  They were all in good spirits. Perhaps the Forest had decided to welcome them, Ember thought happily, although a deep part of her wondered what would have happened if Cedar had not done everything exactly right, from greeting the dung to thanking the Forest for the gift. Without the right response… the Forest, the old saying went, had no mercy and gave no second chances.

  Which seemed to be true of all the Powers.

  “Why is She helping us?” Cedar mused as they set up their sleeping pockets on the driest piece of ground they could find, a high bank beside the stream.

  “She? Why do you think the Forest is a She?” Ember asked. The Lake People had always referred to the Lake as “She,” but the Great Forest had never been spoken of in the same way. Cedar paused, his sleeping pocket hanging loosely from his hands.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It feels female to me.”

  “Feels male to me,” Holly said firmly. Ember let her mind reach out to the Forest in the way she imagined those with Sight did. She was Sight-blind, of course, but still… in her imagination she coursed through the trees, whispering in the night breeze, new growth reaching for the stars and roots covered with rotting needles, flicked past the owls waking, the voles and shrews hiding in their burrows with their tiny blind young, the woodpeckers, the cuckoos, the nuthatches settling into their nests… and other presences: bear, wolf, wolverine, elk and deer, weasel and hare. She had no sense of male or female, just of predator and prey. Life and death. Growth and decay.

  “Both,” she said. “The Forest is both.”

  Ash had been watching her as she stood there, and now he came over to help her lay out her sleeping pocket.

  “Both and everything,” he suggested quietly. “Like some trees only need themselves to set fruit.”

  Ember nodded.

  “So why is It helping us?” Cedar demanded, taking his boots off. He slid into his pocket and propped himself on one elbow to stare at Ash and Ember.

  “Maybe It’s not,” Ash said.

  “But—”

  Ash smiled, his mouth twisting in the teasing grin he only gave his brothers and sisters. “You said Evenness sang—maybe the singing was driving the Forest crazy and it just wanted to get rid of the bloody stone!”

  Ember began to laugh, but then felt the Forest grow quiet around them. The breeze dropped. The owls fell silent. Even the stream seemed to pause in its song.

  “I ask forgiveness if I misspoke,” Ash said. Ember could see the pulse beating at the side of his throat—fast and strong. He was wary, but not afraid. She wished she could be like him. Her own heart, as always, was leaping and jumping in fear.

  With a sound like an avalanche so far off it was invisible, a giant sigh went through the trees and the noises of the Forest began again. They prepared for bed in silence, Holly, Curlew and Tern sleeping this time and Ash taking first watch, Holdfast at his side.

  “I’ll wake you at midnight,” Ash murmured to Ember. She nodded, pleased that he wasn’t trying to exclude her from responsibility. But it took her a long time to sleep. Part of her was waiting. Waiting for the avalanche to hit.

  Ember woke at midnight to find Ash gone. She scrambled into her boots and stood up, scanning the edges of the tiny clearing. The moon was up, a little larger, and the trees cast steel-sharp shadows across the ground, making it hard to see anything else. Then she spotted him, by one of the larches, standing with his bow where a long bough had broken off and made a cleft in the skirt of branches that swept the ground. His back was to the tree and he was staring across the open space, but not at her.

  She turned slowly. A wolf. On the other side of the stream, a wolf silver in the moonlight, muzzle lifted as if howling, but silent, silent as a ghost. Cedar was standing on their side of the water, staring at it.

  Ash had an arrow nocked, but his bow hung in his hands, ready to be raised if the wolf leaped the stream, but not threatening. N
ot hunting. The two dogs were with him, alert, ears pricked, on point, but not antagonistic. Interested.

  Then Ember heard the wolf’s howl. She was expecting the familiar ululation that she had heard all her life, when the winters were fierce and the wolves came down from the north to feed on the Last Domain flocks, on anything they could find or scavenge around human settlements—including children.

  She knew that howl, that salute to the moon, as all northern children did. Wolf howls were loud, meant to carry across the silent night woods, across the hard-packed snow, claiming territory, gathering the pack, seeking a mate.

  But this wolf howled almost silently; a thin thread of sound that raised the hairs on her neck, crept like ice down her spine, curled her fingers into claws. A silver crooning, barely heard over the stream, spiraling up into the sky on a long, rising single note. It took her breath and her heart with it, and she looked up, too, following the wolf’s gaze to the clear moon above them, to the milk-pale curve of moon breast, the silver tipping cradle, and the stars beyond it.

  Cedar began singing in response, starting low and rising, climbing, as if the tone could take his heart and his soul higher and higher, as if they could together reach the sky.

  The wolf’s tone changed to meet his, as wolf howls do when a pack mate joins the salute. Ash took a step forward, the dogs following, and Cedar’s attention turned to them for a second, and so did the wolf’s. Their song faltered. Then their gazes locked and the wolf started the note again, its eyes fixed on Cedar’s as if asking, “Are you pack or not-pack?” Among wolves, such a look was a challenge to a subordinate. He began to sing again, at first deliberately matching its tone, then as it tilted its head back to again watch the sky, he looked up too.

  Ember felt his song free itself from deliberation, felt it soar, matched and matching with the wolf’s, yearning, longing, rising and falling, rising again, and from every part of the Forest she could hear the fragile, slender howl go up, from pack after pack, throat after throat…

  Time fell away. She did not feel cold, or frightened, or even excited. She was simply there, listening, and the moon above her was cold and silver and white and out of reach, all the things Fire was not, and she yearned toward the peace it promised, toward the idea of silence and peace beyond the confines of the world.

  When the moon’s lower tip touched the edge of the highest trees, the wolf fell silent, and a heartbeat later so did Cedar. Ember looked back down at it and bowed a little in respect. It met her eyes for a brief moment only and then looked away, as wolves do with their pack mates; then it was gone into the dense shadow. Cedar stood, swaying.

  While he had sung, Ash had come forward and now stood beside her, his bow still strung but his arrow back in its quiver. The others were awake, sitting up with their furs around them; she was aware for the first time that Ash had draped her with his sleeping pocket to keep her warm.

  Holly stared at Cedar consideringly.

  “I think that was well done,” she said. “But I don’t pretend to understand why you did it.”

  Cedar smiled at her, exalted but obviously tired.

  “My turn to watch,” Holly said. “After all that, I think you both need some sleep.”

  Ember was tired. Yes. Exhausted. But she felt light, as though Cedar had sung out her weaknesses, as though he had twined a bridge across a chasm with that singing, and she could walk out over empty air without fear.

  “Go to sleep, princess,” Ash said, but his voice was gentle. He turned to Cedar. “Little wolf, go to sleep.”

  She gave Ash back his pocket and slid down into her own, not even bothering to take off her boots. From down on the ground, only the very edge of the moon showed over the treetops, and as she watched it disappeared, leaving a halo of light around the highest branches.

  Ember fell asleep, and did not dream.

  In the morning, she was relieved to see paw prints in the bank on the other side of the stream. Not a vision, then, or a sending of the Forest, but a real wolf.

  She supposed that was good.

  Palisade Fort, the Last Domain

  Arvid spent the next day organizing. The first women with babies were arriving from the nearby villages, and Cat was billeting them within the fort where possible, and then in Two Springs, the village which surrounded the fort. By tomorrow, Moss would have the first of the shelters ready. Rough and no doubt drafty, but it was spring and they would cope well enough. He sent boys to the shallow lake a few miles away to harvest reeds and put another group to weeding and stamping down the ground where the shelters would go. They were losing some of the ground where the milk cows grazed, but they could be tethered in one of the open areas near the coppice.

  They had taken the barrels and salt they already had and begun to pickle the meat on hand. The butchers had been told that a large slaughter would be needed as soon as the salt arrived. They had to give the meat time to cure, unfortunately. Brine was faster than dry curing, but it didn’t happen overnight, although slicing the meat first would hasten things.

  “A week,” the cook had said. “A week to be really sure it’s safe.”

  At least they had plenty of workers. Cat had drafted all the people whose trades had been disrupted—and it was astonishing how many of them there were. The smiths, of course, black and gold and silver, the potters, candlemakers, even the fletchers had spread their hands at him and shrugged. “Glue, my lord,” the fletcher had said. “I can’t make glue without fire. I can make shafts, but I can’t fletch them.”

  “Make the shafts,” he had ordered, a vague sense of anxiety sitting in his belly. They were weak, at the moment, and when a domain was weak it was likely to be attacked. If the Ice King chose this moment to assault their defenses, things would go badly. They had to be prepared as far as they could be. Even an unfletched shaft would cause damage. It wouldn’t be accurate, but if there was a wide enough target to shoot at… he remembered an assault by the Ice King’s men, thirty or forty of them, storming down a mountainside in the north of the domain. They hadn’t needed accuracy that day, they had just shot and shot and shot until the attack reached them and then it had been sword and knife and pike and blood.

  He needed a stonecaster.

  For a moment he stood in the fletcher’s doorway, irresolute. He could not humble himself to ask her… but it was the safety of his domain at stake.

  “Are there no glues which do not need fire?” he asked.

  The fletcher shrugged, her shoulders rising almost to her ears. “Egg, maybe. Mixed with blood… It won’t last longer than a single flight, my lord, if that.”

  “Try it,” he said. “If we need these arrows, the first shot will be the most important.”

  She had blanched and nodded, then started snapping orders to her apprentices, her three sons, lanky and pimpled and completely cowed by their mother. They ran to obey while Arvid walked back through the increasingly full muster yard to the hall.

  Martine was not there.

  He found her in his workroom, reading the report the Prowman had written. But the man himself was nowhere to be seen. Arvid said to Sandpiper, “I told you—”

  The man was shaking. Already shaking, before Arvid had spoken to him. His people did not fear him to that degree. Surely.

  “My lord, I couldn’t stop him! Truly, truly, I didn’t even know what he was going to do—”

  “True, my lord,” Martine said. “Sandpiper couldn’t have stopped it.”

  Arvid felt the calm of battle come over him, that sense of time slowing down to allow the time to do what must be done.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “He finished the report and then he asked to see the lady, so I sent one of the girls for her and she came.”

  Arvid looked at Martine, but there was nothing to see except that calm, impersonal front she had assumed earlier.

  “He handed her the report and then he, he, he just disappeared!”

  Sandpiper was shaking harder as he spoke. Thi
s was what he feared. The demonstration of a power far greater than a warlord’s. Arvid ignored him. “Where has he gone?” he demanded. Martine spread her hands, exactly as the fletcher had done.

  “Wherever She has sent him,” she said. “I doubt he knew himself.”

  “How?”

  “The Lake’s secrets are Her own,” she said. “I know he has moved in time. Whether She can move him across country as well, I don’t know.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “Not in words,” she said. And then, as if to pay him back for what he had said upstairs, she added, “If you do not have the Sight you will not understand.”

  “Tell me what he said,” Arvid replied, low and dangerous. He could hear the growl in his voice, and he didn’t care that Sandpiper could hear it too. Let them gossip.

  “He offered me refuge, if I needed it,” she said.

  That was a punch in the guts. He needed a moment to recover from it, and in that moment she walked past him. He grabbed at her arm and she froze. Ignore the Prowman, his instinct said. Ignore everything except your duty.

  “I need a stonecaster,” he said. “Cast for me.” It wasn’t a request, but it wasn’t quite an order. She flicked a glance at Sandpiper and turned back, sitting not at Arvid’s worktable but at Reed’s desk. She took the linen square from her belt and spread it carefully, then put her pouch—red leather, he had given it to her when her old one split from long usage—on the edge of the linen.

  “I am ready, my lord,” she said.

  “You can go, Sandpiper.”

  Arvid waited until the guard had shut the door behind him, and then brought a stool and sat across from her.

  “Ask your question,” she said.

  “Is the Ice King preparing an attack?”

  She waited, sitting absolutely still. Reluctantly, he spat in his hand and stretched it to her. The first time they had touched since… All the other times they had done this together ran through his mind. Winter, summer, night, day… a ritual that was as much a part of their lives as lovemaking. He tore his thoughts from that and clasped her hand, the smooth fingers cool in his.