"Oh," Vick said. "When you put it like that, it makes sense enough."
"But not why Narashtovik gives a sheep's shit," Raye said.
"We sympathize over common suffering," Dante said. The faces of the baronets were cowlike, slump-jawed. He clenched his teeth and let a long breath through his nose. "I'm from Mallon. A few years ago, I hardly knew a thing about Arawn, except that he'd scythe off your head if you spoke his name over open water. Because anyone who did talk about him—the real Arawn, the Arawn of Narashtovik and Gask—got their head hacked off. Whipped, at the very least. Which is funny, because that's exactly what happens to any norren slave who decides he doesn't want to be a slave anymore. Why does Narashtovik support the norren? Because Setteven is full of shitheads. Maybe they'll march. Maybe they won't. But if they do, we want to be there to pick the norren back up as soon as the king's done stamping on their backs."
That drew a few wry chuckles. Brant smiled and scratched his neck. "None of us are too happy about those tax-mad shitheads, either. They could cut our levies in half if they weren't so obsessed with clinging to every scrap of their creaky empire." Brant leaned back, chin inclined. "I'd be happy to sell whatever wheat I can part with. But it won't be as much as you want."
"Why's that?" Blays said.
"Everyone needs bread when the swords come out," Vick said. "And when food's needed, farmers need it most of all. They're the first ones the men with swords come running for."
Dante gazed at his plate. "Leaving you with little left over to sell."
"That's the shape of it," Brant said.
"Of course," Mourn piped up, "the bandits don't help."
At some point during the dinner, Mourn had left his satellite table to stand against the curved wall, being careful not to lean against its tapestry of a deer silhouetted on a ridgeline. As a result, he was directly behind some of the lords, who had to turn their heads like owls in order to join the others in staring at him.
"Bandits, you say?" Brant said.
Mourn nodded. "The norren bandits. Unless they are human bandits doing a very clever job of pretending to be norren."
"You know that how?" Raye said slowly. "You running with them?"
If Mourn was insulted, he didn't let it show. "They've left signs all over your roads and fields." He nodded at Vick. "If you're who they mean by 'the fat one,' they're going to take your eastbound caravan this weekend."
Vick bolted up, knocking back his chair. "You are running with them!"
"He's been with us for weeks," Dante said. "Before that, he belonged to a clan that lives a hundred miles from here."
Brant gestured Vick back into his seat. "There anything you can do about this? Or just tell us things we already know?"
Mourn glanced between Dante and Blays. "That's up to my chiefs."
"How much have you been losing?" Blays said.
"Between guards, payment, and product?" Brant shook his head at the ceiling. "All told, a tenth of what I take out of the ground."
Blays drank the rest of his beer to hide his grin. "Here's the deal. We take out the bandits, you sell that ten percent to us. At half market rate."
Raye scowled. "Two-thirds."
"Half."
"Sixty per—"
"Raye, you're missing sixty percent of your brain," Brant said. "Half's a whole lot better than none." He extended his hand to Dante, then shook with Blays and Mourn as well. "You clear the roads, you got your grain."
That settled the matter. With the business of business complete, the assembly turned to the business of getting drunk. By the time Dante got to bed, head spinning, he had all but forgotten they'd pledged to rid Tantonnen of an entire clan of norren.
Hangovers made the morning slow to materialize. Dante picked over his breakfast of toast and eggs and sweet soppy cheese. Blays joined him, took one look at his plate, and set his head down on the table.
"What did we commit to?" Dante said.
Blays didn't move. "Ask that shaggy mountain of ours."
"Are we going to have to kill a bunch of norren, Mourn? Because that doesn't strike me as a very productive way of helping them."
Mourn looked up from window where he sat reading one of the manor's books. "I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"I mean in a very literal sense—I don't even know whether Blays is going to vomit in the next five minutes. How should I know how it will go with a gang of violent bandits?"
Dante rolled his eyes. "How were you thinking it would go when you butted in last night?"
The norren shrugged his heavy shoulders. "That depends on the clan. I'd listen if someone told me we'd be overrun and butchered unless I stopped stealing."
"Then all we have to do is find them."
"Not hard. Not if you know how to read their signs. Which I do."
Blays nibbled a corner of Dante's toast. "Why would they leave big old directions all over the road?"
Mourn stared at his oversized hands. "Because if you are a clan in a hostile land, that makes you a thing that is a threat. A horde of bandits. An army. But if the clan splits up, a person sees one norren. Three norren. They don't think much. If you're a chief, how do you bring your scattered clan back together when it is time to act or move? You can shout very loudly. You can set signal fires that can be seen by everyone with working eyes. Or you can leave signs so small your enemies will never know you're there."
Dante sipped his tea. "But you can find the signs to find them, too."
Mourn shook his head. "I don't need wildsigns to find a clan."
After breakfast, Dante found Brant and informed him they'd set out shortly. Brant sent a man to prep their horses. Dante located Fann, who was holding a lively conversation with the farrier, and waited for a break in the talk.
"I was thinking you might find it more comfortable to stay here."
Fann smiled slyly. "What a polite way of saying I might get myself killed."
"You don't mind?"
"Not at all." Fann doffed his round black cap. "As you pursue the art of war, I will once more turn to the art of speech."
The horses' manes and tails had been clipped and combed. Mourn led the way down the path to the main road, scanning the ruts and weedy shoulders, clinging to the saddle of his plowhorse. Wind stirred the long grass.
"See anything?" Blays said after a mile of travel.
"Hmm." Mourn leaned forward, peering into the grass. "They say the young blond one is very homely."
"And the norren wonder why everyone hates them."
Mourn twisted in his saddle, giving Blays a stony look that soon softened into a smile. "It's a good thing I know you."
Blays tipped his head to one side. "I wouldn't go that far."
They reached the road into town by early afternoon. Mourn led them east at a casual walk. A few times an hour, he pulled up, dismounted clumsily, and crouched beside a stick or sprig of grass. His examination of bits of plants and dirt reminded Dante of divination, of reading the guts of unfortunate turkeys, but Mourn moved with a stolid purpose. Mid-afternoon, he cut south from the road into an unplowed reach of crumbling hills with grassy heads and dense thorny trees in their folds.
"They're around," Mourn said. "But unless we are better at this than I think we are, we probably won't see them until they want us to."
"Why would they want us to see them?" Lira said.
"Because there is a certain joy in revealing yourself to the thing you are about to kill."
Mourn rode cautiously and inexpertly through the grass and rocks. Snows hid in the deep shadows between hills. Blue-throated birds perched on bare twigs, peeping questions back and forth. They left the last of the carefully-tilled fields behind. Here and there, huge boulders stood alone in the flatlands, as if dropped there by a forgetful god.
When people spoke of the oldest places, they often mentioned mountains. Forbidding mists and unclimbable spires. What they really meant was that mountains were pristine; no one h
ad any business in the icy peaks except for hermits and the insane. But people could live in this undulating prairie. To Dante, the fact they chose not to—or once had, but abandoned the place long ago—made the silence and wind more primordial and unknown than the most remote crags.
Mourn got down from his horse to proceed on foot. He mumbled to himself, gazing at flattened grass, his words stolen by the wind.
"What's that?" Dante said.
Mourn glanced up. "I said they know we're here."
"Send you a letter, did they?" Blays said.
"Sort of." The norren bent down and pointed to a branch of a jagged shrub. Two of the thorns were snapped at the base, dangling by narrow fibers. "This says 'hello.' That they used thorns means it is not a pleasant hello. Although maybe they only used them because that's all that seems to grow out here."
Dante shrugged. "At least they're breaking thorns and not our arms."
He dismounted to better read the trail for himself. Except for the clan's deliberate wildsigns, which Mourn mostly had to point out himself, the usual markers were in short supply—a scuffed rock here, a stomped leaf there. The day dwindled. When Mourn shook his head at the dusk, they descended to a crease between hills and set up camp.
"Build a fire if you like," Mourn said. "If they want to find us, they will."
"That's comforting," Blays said. "Well, if we're going to be stabbed in our sleep, I'd prefer to die in a warm bed."
He and Lira stoked a small fire. Dante pan-cooked potatoes to go with their bread and jerky. He pulled second watch. When Mourn woke him to change shifts, Dante found a dead rabbit and sent it to circle the hills, but he didn't see a single norren during his watch.
Throughout the morning, the wildsigns drew Mourn further and further east. The day was a bust. After an identical dinner to their previous supper, Dante twiddled his brooch. A moment later, Cally's disembodied voice spoke into his ear.
"So where are you right now?"
Dante smiled at the old man's tangible excitement. "Chasing wild geese through the plains of Tantonnen."
Cally laughed. "This is incredible, you know. I've had to resist summoning you up every night to find out the latest."
"Same here." Dante filled him in on the negotiations with the baronets and their as-yet fruitless hunt for the norren bandits. He could almost see Cally nodding along.
"If anything big is stirring in Gask, it's so large no one knows what they're looking at yet. I'll let you know if anything changes. For now, I advise continuing your search."
"Will do."
"I bet it's cold there, isn't it? We've had the most wonderful inland breeze. Not that I've noticed in my warm little tower."
"Goodnight, Cally." Dante cut off the link. That night, the wind felt as cold as wet iron.
Wind and birds and grass and stones. Despite Cally's reassurance, the relentless landscape wore at Dante's resolve. Days in and he still hadn't seen a single norren. Besides Mourn, of course, who read tracks too subtle for Dante to notice. High gray clouds carpeted the sky. If it rained or snowed, even Mourn might not be able to continue the trail.
On the other hand, rain would mean a chance to refill their waterskins. They hadn't seen a stream since the morning before. The grass, meanwhile, had gone notably more yellow. They could always turn to the shaded snows, but even those had grown mean, shallow patches gritty with dirt. Dante sipped miserishly.
He needn't have worried. They crested a ridge. A shallow, bowl-like valley bottomed out in a deep blue lake whose octopoidal arms extended into the crannies of the intersecting hills. They led their horses through the pines and birches gathered around the shore. The waters were murky and green, but this place was so far removed from human stains Dante didn't even think about boiling his water before drinking it. The horses appeared to have no such worries either, slurping away at the algal shore.
"I don't feel like we're making progress," Dante said after they'd all had a drink and a bite of bread. "If we don't see anything in the next couple days, I think we should move on."
Mourn smiled faintly. "We won't have to wait that long."
"You sound awfully sure of yourself," Blays said.
"It's a feeling I have."
"That sounds very scientific."
"Specifically, the feeling of being watched."
"Funny you say that." Blays rolled his neck. "Because I have the feeling of a stiff back. And a sore ass. And that scraped-up feel your mouth gets from eating crusty old bread. All of which points to the greater feeling of tromping around an empty wilderness with no hope of finding anything more substantial than dried-up deer turds and—"
"Shut up." The voice came behind them, soft and faintly accented. Blays whirled to his feet. Dante dropped his water. Three norren stood among the white-barked birches, bows in hand. The foremost gazed steadily at Mourn with one eye, his other a scarred-up hole. "This has gone on long enough."
"You're the ones who dragged it out," Mourn said mildly.
"Dragged what out?" the man said. "This is our land. We do as we please."
"And apparently it pleases you to treat the humans who live here as prey."
The one-eyed man shrugged. "It's our land. So why are you in it?"
"Are you the chief?"
"I'm the one in front of you."
Mourn shook his head. "I need the chief."
"I need a new wife," the man said. "I have the one I've got."
"Then attack us now. That's the only way you'll stop us. Assuming you win. If you don't, your clan will have three less men between us and its head."
The man glanced at his two clansmen. They maintained their silence. He shook his head at Mourn. "Come with me."
Mourn rose. Dante followed behind, reins in one hand, nether in the other. The clansmen led them around the foot of the next hill. There, beside the wind-rippled waters, three dozen norren joked and lounged and carved and weaved.
"Did you know how close we were?" Dante said.
Mourn glanced over his shoulder. "I had an idea. The last few wildsigns have been lies. Unless they are so dumb they actually don't know east from west, they were trying to throw me off."
At the camp, chatter ceased. Half the men and women reached for bows and swords and spears. The one-eyed norren gestured Mourn to stop, then joined his clansmen. He approached and spoke with a seated woman in her mid-30s. After a minute, the pair walked across the springy grass and stood in front of Mourn.
"I don't know you," she said. Her braids were brown with strands of red and black.
"I'm Mourn of the Clan of the Nine Pines."
The woman nodded. "Waill. Chieftain of the Clan of the Golden Field. What do you want?"
"For you to stop attacking the farmers here."
"You're not going to get what you want."
Mourn gazed at the lake. "Why prey on men?"
"It's simpler," Waill said. "What's simplest is best."
"There's nothing best about the norren who'll starve if war comes to the Territories. If you stop your raids, we'll have the grain to save many of our people's lives."
She smiled with half her mouth, eyes lit with something much older than her years. "That's many ifs. If war comes, why not take the grain and dole it out ourselves? Who are you?" Her smile deepened. "Who says we're not already fighting a war of our own?"
"The humans with me are from Narashtovik." He gestured to Dante and the others. "This is part of their plan to help us."
"I don't know them. I don't know any humans who help norren."
"Then I think I'm finished." Mourn turned to her clansman. "Are you unswayed by my words?"
The man didn't hesitate. "I'm unswayed."
Mourn smiled at Waill. "I don't sense any sway from you."
"I am unswayed," she said.
"Damn. I hoped I was wrong." Mourn smiled. He gazed at the lake, his eyes as distant as whatever force had dumped the stray boulders across the empty lands. "Then I request sollunat."
Waill'
s smile broke like ice. "You're not from the Golden Fields. You have no right to succeed me."
"Not for your place. For this one boon."
Waill glanced quickly at her one-eyed clansman. He met her gaze. She turned back to Mourn, eyes smoldering. "What weapons?"
"Bow," Mourn said.
"You challenged. I shoot first."
"I know."
"Prepare." She strode back toward her clan, many of whom stood as she approached, sensing the moment. The one-eyed man went with her.
Blays gaped after her. "Is this some kind of duel?"
Mourn shrugged. "She's going to shoot at me. If I'm still alive, I'll shoot back. This continues until one of us decides to stop. Or can't voice an opinion either way. Which is taken as implied concession of defeat."
"Are you serious?" Dante said. "I thought you settled things with rhetoric!"
"Yes, but we didn't start doing that until all our best leaders kept getting shot, stabbed, and clubbed to death."
"Well, you can't just let her shoot at you," Blays said. "You might get shot!"
Mourn sighed. "This is the only way to stop them. Without killing them all. Or doing something else I haven't thought about. But this is the only way I know."
"Why would you do this?" Dante said.
Lira cocked her head. "Because he believes."
Dante bared his teeth. "You don't have to do this, Mourn. The war won't hinge on a few wagons of wheat."
"I get the impression we'll need every resource we can get," Mourn said. "Besides, this isn't Narashtovik. You can't tell me what I can't do." He gave Dante a small smile. "Well, you can. But guess how much it will matter?"
Dante had no argument. He couldn't see the future. Not well enough to know whether the grain of Tantonnen would wind up making any difference to the norren. He could see that if they wanted to do any real good, they'd all have to do things they didn't want along the way. To put their lives on the line. Right now, he need Mourn to take his turn.
"Good luck, then. And thank you."
"Can you even shoot a bow?" Blays said.
"Of course," Mourn said. "The real question is whether she can."
The one-eyed norren returned with a quiver and a bow taller than Dante. "This way."
The Great Rift Page 26
