As if sensing her gaze, Zosia abruptly ceased her struggles and her laughter, staring Ji-hyeon in the puffy eyes.
“I won, Princess,” she croaked, blood running down her chin. “I won! And that means you grant my wish. You grant my wish!”
Ji-hyeon wanted to say something smart, wanted to say anything at all, but her head was as empty as Cold Zosia’s wild stare. Instead she just shook her head, closing her eyes and trying to shut out Zosia’s screams as the woman started up again, the words no longer making sense—Ji-hyeon’s name was mentioned, but so was that of Queen Indsorith, the sole link between the two being the mantra of granting Zosia’s wish.
When Ji-hyeon finally gained her feet, buoyed by something vinegary from Choi’s flask, she opened her eyes again and saw that a ring of people were all watching her. Her bodyguards, the prisoners and their guards, Choi and Purna and Diggelby, and, lying at their feet, trussed up in somebody’s repurposed reins, a finally silent Zosia. Ji-hyeon stared back at them, worrying a loose tooth with her coppery tongue. What the fuck did they expect her to do, give a speech?
“Ji-hyeon, we must return to camp,” Choi whispered, taking her sore elbow and steering her toward her horse, the wavering smoke and falling snow transforming the dismal valley into some ethereal cloud-kissed summit. “Meeting the Thaoans must wait until you—”
“Fuck that,” Ji-hyeon rasped, startled by how hard it was to speak above a whisper. She spat out another mouthful of mucusy blood. Hard as it was to talk, to even breathe, she was so, so, so relieved this was finally taken care of and she could get on with her day. “We flinch from a meet with those clowns, they come back with lances lowered. Help me on my horse.”
“General—” one of her bodyguards began, but she waved him silent with her contorted, two-fingered hand. It was almost certainly broken now, which was just brilliant.
“Let’s do this shit,” she said, her voice sounding funny even to her own ear. “And bring along these prisoners—since we apparently can’t keep a few captured cavalry safe long enough to negotiate their ransom, we’re handing them back to the Thaoans now.”
Surveying the shell-shocked line of captives who had survived Zosia’s madness, Ji-hyeon saw a white-haired old man in the center nod approvingly, and then he took advantage of the slack in the chain to raise his fist. When his fellows didn’t follow suit he barked something at them in High Azgarothian, and one by one arms raised until the whole chain saluted her. Zosia spluttered unintelligibly, and Choi whispered an immensely tempting proposition in Ji-hyeon’s ear… but looking down at the former Queen of Samoth, she decided against it.
“No, Captain Zosia returns to camp. To the stockade. She’s just lucky I’m not as insane as she, otherwise she’d already be in the Gate.”
Zosia glared up at Ji-hyeon, and spit a tooth in her direction. Ji-hyeon wished her own was loose enough that she could return fire, but settled for something almost as good. She turned her back on Zosia, and limped down the line of Imperial prisoners, meeting each one’s salute with a bump of her fist.
Appealing as Choi’s suggestion had been, it would be a warm winter in the Frozen Savannahs when Ji-hyeon let Zosia off with something as easy as being turned over to the Thaoan regiment as a peace offering.
CHAPTER
10
The Frozen Savannahs were melting beneath the Horned Wolves’ feet, and it didn’t take a poison oracle or a song-singer to guess why.
Best held the sea otter fur–lined helmet in her hands, debating. Then she swung it onto her head, twisting it about until it stopped pinching her braids, and buckled it under her chin. It would raise some brows, wearing her high-horned helm before the council, but when had her presence not? She knew why they summoned her, and what they must expect—she who left her gear behind on the morning of a hunt was no true hunter, and so Best had prepared herself for the longest chase of her life.
The last item to go into her pack was the blanket she had stripped from the cot and tucked into the rafters the morning she awoke to find both her father and her son missing. It was not a sentimental gesture, but a practical one; her brother had told her tales of Samothan hounds so wise of snout they could track a single mortal’s scent across a thousand leagues, and with nothing more substantial than an old skirt or comb to get them started. Once she entered the Crimson Empire she would seek out one of these mystical beasts, knowing that even as good a huntress as she would need help pursuing quarry nearly a year ahead of her.
Best didn’t need to give her hut a once-over before leaving, everything she required already in her heavy pack or hands, but all the same she looked a final time. Then she quickly stepped back into the center of the room and stabbed her spear through her father’s mat, then pierced her son’s, and with a flick of the wrist deposited both of them in the smoldering firepit. She should have burned them right away, as she had her brother’s when he had similarly fled in the night so many years before. Instead she’d foolishly left Father and Sullen’s mats there where anyone could see, quietly announcing to the clan her hope that the disgraced Horned Wolves would return to her hut. The woven grass pads caught quickly, and where once five seats sat in a close ring around the fire now only hers remained. It hurt, watching the mats writhe in the flames she had let burn very low in the unnaturally warm night, and she quietly prayed to the Fallen Mother for serenity. Most mortals would have succumbed to the curse that gripped her family, potent as it had proven, but Best would overcome it, for all of them, and when she finally reached the Fallen Mother’s Meadhall she would beg her leave to go and retrieve her damned family from the Hell of the Coward Dead.
First she had to send them there, though.
Going to the bed, Best knelt down and lifted the edge, sweeping her head under the dusty cot. Teeth nipped her fingers, and she withdrew the snow lion–tooth necklace Sullen had made her from his first kill. She had never taken it off, showing the troubled boy that his mother still believed he could be saved, but when he’d run away with his grandfather she had snapped the cord and stuffed it under the bed, hiding it there like a sorcerer’s fetish bag planted under its victim’s doorstep. A spell to keep a mother’s heart bleeding every night as she lay alone with her shame, and that of her family.
Outside, the afternoon sun was burning even hotter than it had the day before, icicles as wide as walrus tusks snapping off the eaves of huts, the whole village flooded in ankle-deep slush. She was sweating even before the first of her neighbors turned his back from her, the way they always had from Sullen when he carried Father out on his constitutionals. Oh, how they had fought, she and her father, when he’d come back in griping about the clan treating him so shabbily, and though she had always lectured him and Sullen both that there was no reason to provoke the village by strutting about, now she knew that sometimes it couldn’t be helped. Sometimes you just had to walk proud through the place you were born, even when none understood your need.
As she crossed the close-knit village of old sod huts, newer longhouses, and muddy paddocks, Best saw the situation was even more dire than she’d thought: the walls of the church were melting, blocks of ice meant to keep the faithful warm until the arrival of the summer sun shrinking so that gaps could be seen around the posts and at the edge of the shingled roof. Not wishing to hunker down in what must be a drizzly mess, the council had pulled their benches outside and arranged them in front of the thorn tree, just as they had in Father’s heyday. Another rough chunk of sorrow caught in Best’s throat at the sight of the elders sitting beneath the barren tree like a coven of pagan witches. Above them, the murder of blackbirds that resided in the tree announced her arrival with their cry. None of the council looked up, and Best quietly dropped to her knees before them, the icy slurry splashing her ghost bear cape and banded leather armor.
“—flee the apiary even as we hold summit,” the poison oracle was saying from her perch in the tree’s lowest branch, her woad-smeared cheeks dripping blue in the blazing sunshine, t
he web of woven sinew and knotted bone that crisscrossed the boughs beside her dribbling snowmelt. “Convinced of summer, they migrate north, and even with my magics may never return to this cursed land. The dead gods rise from the Bitter Gulf, beleaguering us with their hell-breath, and all know the cause!”
A great harrumphing from the council avowed this, Father Turisa and his novice offering some amens from the red bench set off a few paces from the rest of the council. Best repeated their solemn confirmations in her heart, but kept her lips as still as her spear. The elders carried on for a little longer, debating which devils exactly had contributed to their current misery, and which ancestors were most wroth at the development, and all the while Best stayed as still as the effigy of Old Black carved into the living face of the tree, the ancient carving but recently anointed with painted wings and crown of daggers to signify her function as Fallen Mother. There had initially been some confusion as to whether the Allmother had come to Flintland in the guise of the moon goddess Silvereye or her niece Old Black, but under increasing pressure from the poison oracle, a recent revelation by Father Turisa revealed that in her inscrutable wisdom the Fallen Mother had assumed both roles, and that of half a dozen other ancestors besides.
“And lo, less than a full day and night since this plague has befallen us, She With the Blood of the Apocalypse answers our summons,” the poison oracle cried after no small period of blustery proclamation, and it took Best a moment to realize that she herself was the wretched creature in question. The older woman shifted in her perch, spitting down further disrespect. “Tell us, oh Daughter of Ruthless, Sister of Craven, and Mother of Sullen, will you admit freely to the witchery of your kin, or must I force the truth from your lips?”
More grunts and murmurs from the council, but Best was relieved to hear that not all of the elders approved of the oracle’s assessment of her character. Neither Father Turisa nor his boy issued an amen, which further calmed her fury at being spoken to in such a way. Finally raising her head, she launched her gaze like a sun-knife at the poison oracle’s heart.
“I will not speak for cowards or witches!” Best shouted, but kept her voice free of the emotion that she felt, knowing the oracle might seize such a snarl and use it to upend her. “I speak only for myself, as a named huntress of the Horned Wolves.”
“And what do you say, oh named huntress?” The oracle was not using her name, and Best’s heart beat faster at the snub. “You must be a wise woman, with many thaws beneath your pelt and a close kinship with the accused, so what say you of our current calamity?”
“I say only the Fallen Mother and the rest of our ancestors truly know the cause of this evil sun,” said Best, but only Father Turisa and the novice nodded at her words. Before the oracle could exploit this, she added, “But I can see as plain as any that this is our first winter since two traitors turned their back on the Horned Wolves, and murdered our clanfolk in their escape. If the council believes their betrayal has angered the ancestors and brought this heat upon us—”
“If!” cried Hammerfist, the youngest member of the council, evidently still furious with Best for refusing to take him as a husband two years past, though in point of fact she had only rejected him when he insisted she cast out her crippled father and devil-touched son before he would move into her hut. “If, she says, but I say now, and say proud, that we do believe this, we do know this, because it is true! Unlike you, oh mother of devils, who—”
“I believe Best spoke thusly to avoid putting words in our mouths, a courtesy which you seem unwilling to extend to her,” said Saltgrinder. The old woman wasn’t looking at her, but Best gave silent thanks to the one elder who had not voted to cast Father off the council… for all the difference her dissent had made, and for all the gratitude the old man had ever extended to her afterward. “I will remind you, Brother Hammerfist, that Daughter Best has proven herself time and again to this clan, to this council, and she is called before us not as an accused but as a witness. Do not slander her again, lest she rightly request you prove your allegations in the Honor Circle.”
Of all the outcomes of this meeting, battling one of the elders in the Honor Circle had never crossed Best’s mind… but having one of the council stand up for her was even less expected, and far more welcome. Before Hammerfist could force the issue—and force her to kill his fool arse in front of everyone—Best said, “Forgive me, oh just and noble council, for I am not as precise with words as I am with spear and knife. I simply meant to agree that something terrible has come upon our lands—when dawn broke yesterday, grey and chill as it ought, I never suspected that come nightfall I should be sweating in my hut, shed of every skin but my own. That today burns yet brighter speaks of evil forces set loose upon us, and if my blood be the cause then my blood shall also be the balm.”
“That remains to be seen,” said Father Turisa, his apprentice issuing a quavering amen beside him. “An early thaw is not unheard of, surely, and—”
“And this is not an early thaw!” crowed the poison oracle, shaking her clattering web at the priest. “In all the years of our clan, never has the sun of summer struck us on the eve of winter!”
“True, true,” the council hummed in place of amens, but Saltgrinder said, “Warmth comes out of season for a day or more every year in six, and while I grant that never in my life has it come so hot so fast, that does not prove it will remain so. A week from now the tundra may be as hard as it was two nights past.”
“It will not,” said the oracle solemnly. “The icebees do not quit their hives for a heat spell, nor do the oryx herds return from the coasts as hunters have attested. This is not a hiccup in winter’s heavy breath, this is the catastrophe our ancestors warned of, the calamity sung of by both ancient songs and Canticle of Chains. Is it not so, Father Turisa?”
“I did have troubled dreams last night…” said the old priest reflectively, as if trying to recall whether he had nibbled on some cheese before lying down to bed. “But if it is the event foretold in the Song of Queens, it is not a calamity per se…”
“Enough!” cried the poison oracle. “Daughter Best, was your son Sullen not born in this season? And was not the Proudest Shedding of Jackal Blood also of the late autumn, that fatal battle where both your progeny and progenitor proved their scorn for our ways? Was this not also the season of Craven’s final betrayal? Is this not the season where Ruthless was cast from the council?”
“It is,” she said quietly, the reddish cast of the too-big and too-bright sun glistening on the dripping thorns of the oracle’s tree. “It is.”
“There it is!” Hammerfist shouted, rising from his seat. “Proof! Proof that her wicked blood is the cause of all our sorrows!”
“Hardly,” said Saltgrinder, but her voice was lost in a chorus of amens and harrumphs.
“What do you have to say on the curse your people have brought upon us?” the poison oracle asked, leaning forward on her bough. “Today you claim crudeness of tongue, but you forget that while but an apprentice at the time I was present for your previous petitions to the council. Eloquent was the huntress who came before her betters to beg mercy for her brother after his ignoble return, and for her father and son after theirs. What song do you sing now that all three have shamed us twice, Daughter Best, now that you have yet again steered us foul with cries for clemency, and all the Savannahs weep at the cost of keeping cowards safe from ancient justice?”
“Hear me now!” Best cried, her voice thick as snowmead with regret. “I beg, O council, hear me! I was wrong to speak on behalf of my brother when he slunk back to us! And I was wrong to speak on behalf of my son! Wrong to speak on behalf of my father! Wrong to let this curse grow in my very hut! Wrong! But I will make it right!”
“How?” asked Hammerfist. The idiot. Everyone else knew enough to wait for her to continue in her own time, Best squeezing her son’s necklace in her hand until the teeth bit her palm and fingers and blood welled between them.
“Justice,”
she said evenly, raising her head high even as she remained kneeling, and shook her bloody fist. Her eyes were dry as she met the suspicious glares of the council, but her hand wept for her, crimson drops mixing with the slush around her knees. “Grant me leave to hunt those who were known as Ruthless and Sullen, and if he still lives, the one you named Craven. Grant me leave to track them, to dig them out from whatever burrow they hide in. Grant me leave to show the Fallen Mother and the rest of our ancestors what mercy a Horned Wolf offers those who would betray our laws. I swear on my life and the honor of my ancestors that I will not rest until justice is served!”
Hammerfist didn’t look happy but at last the harrumphs were for her, and the amens as well. Even the poison oracle seemed impressed, strumming her bone web like a harp. Father Turisa stood from his bench and, clearing his throat, began to speak. Only the poison oracle seemed perturbed by his talking out of turn, though soon enough Best was chewing her cheek and praying for patience of her own.
“Daughter Best is a brave and worthy child of the Fallen Mother,” said the priest, tottering over and tapping her bloody fist with his chain-wrapped one, the inverted cross of his iron rosary nicking her thumb. “Which is why I solicit the council’s approval for her to escort Brother Rýt to Diadem as the first leg in her righteous quest. Of all the Crimson Empire, the Holy City is closest to the Horned Wolves’ borders, and lest this curse require more than the sacrifice Daughter Best promises to deliver I should like to have my novice bring word of our calamity to the Holy See. The Burnished Chain must know that strange portents stir the wind, and while the Frozen Savannahs may be the first to feel this infernal heat it shall not be long before all the Star falls under its sway.”
A few harrumphs, though not many, and Brother Rýt seemed incapable of summoning a single amen, staring in shock at his superior. Best did not relish the prospect of babysitting a pimple-faced foreign boy who had never earned his name, but the ways of the Fallen Mother were inscrutable. Not even Hammerfist was gainsaying the proposal, though, and with the council’s unvoiced approval all eyes now turned to the poison oracle, who closed her eyes and muttered to herself as everyone sweated under the thorn tree, waiting in respectful silence.
A Blade of Black Steel Page 12
