by J. V. Jones
Ash breathed deeply and did not speak.
Raif spotted a line of men coming toward them, bearing spears pointed with volcanic glass and torches that burned with white-hot flames. Small and dark-skinned, they moved in the fluid and soundless manner of men accustomed to stalking large prey. Ribcages of walrus and seal were bound to their chests in armored plates, riding over layer upon layer of skins and strange furs. Forming a defensive half-circle behind the Naysayer, they thrust their spear butts deep into the snow.
Raif watched them watch him. He supposed he should be grateful that they at least considered him more of a threat than Ash, but the Sull’s words had stirred a fear within him, and he found little satisfaction in the wariness of other men.
Their rank parted, and a tiny old man stepped forward. His skin was the color and texture of cured wood, and his eyes were milky with snow blindness. On either side of his face, aligned with cheekbones as sharp as crab claws, two deep black scars bored into his skull in place of ears. A ruff of vulture feathers warmed the broken flesh, their quills rising upright from a collar of rolled bronze. Over his shoulders and across his back lay a coat of fur so dark and lustrous it was as if the soul of the slain beast still lived there.
“Inuku sana hanlik,” he said in a voice thin with age.
“The Listener of the Ice Trappers welcomes you to this place.”
Ark Veinsplitter came to stand at the old man’s back, his face grim and his eyes narrowing, as he translated the Listener’s words. He wore scale armor over padded silk, with a heavy fur mantle thrown back over his shoulders. His left arm was bared to the elbow, and a trickle of blood circled his wrist. He could have stanched the letting wound before he came to meet us, yet he wanted us to see the blood. Raif suddenly felt weary enough to lie down in the snow and fall asleep. He didn’t want to greet this old man, didn’t want to know who he was.
The Listener spoke again, and Raif realized that some shadow of sight still survived behind his eyes, for he looked directly at Raif as he said, “Mor Drakka.”
The wind rose, and the old man turned and walked away. Gritty bits of ice flew into Raif’s face, stinging the raw flesh beneath his nostrils where his breath continually froze and thawed. Without thought, his hand rose to his throat, searching for the hard piece of raven that was his lore. Nothing but cold skin and raw wool met his touch. He had forgotten he had given it to Ash.
“The Listener bids you follow him.” Ark Veinsplitter stepped aside to make a path. Raif watched the dark-haired warrior for a moment, noticing how the skin at the base of his neck was the only part of him that was untouched by the letting knife; and wondering why the Sull had chosen to translate the Listener’s gesture, not his words. Raif did not know what tongue the old man spoke in, but he knew his last words had been meant for him. And they were not some soft-spoken request to follow him home.
Ark Veinsplitter glowered at Raif as the two drew eye-to-eye. Something in Raif made him slow his pace and exhale in the warrior’s face. Something else made him lay a hand on Ash’s shoulder as they passed.
Almost, Ark Veinsplitter managed to hide his alarm at seeing the color of Ash’s eyes. Muscles tensed beneath the uncut skin on his neck, and his gaze sought and found his hass. Mal Naysayer’s shoulders bowed once in acknowledgment . . . and Raif knew that the blue in Ash’s eyes meant something to them.
He tightened his hold on her as they made their way to the farthest of the stone mounds. Men in walrus-bone armor lined the route, naked thumbs pressing against the kill notches on their spear shafts, faces dark with mistrust. They were not young, these men, Raif noticed, recognizing a careful show of force when he saw one. Briefly, he glanced westward to the sea ice, wondering if the younger warriors were out upon it, hunting seal.
Light spilled from the entrance to the Listener’s mound, shining on pits of ashen tar and frozen blood. The Listener stood in the shadows behind the light, beckoning Raif forward with the curled black fingers of a corpse.
Raif had lived so long without warmth that the heat of the chamber burned him. His vision dimmed as he raised his head after passing through the opening. A liquid queasiness in his stomach reminded him he had not eaten in two days. The piglike smell of walrus meat made him retch.
The Listener unclasped his fur and laid it upon a bench of plain black stone. He gestured that Ash and Raif should sit upon it, close to a little soapstone lamp that was the only source of light. The walls glittered weirdly. Plugs of hair and skin had been used to shore the chinks. Raif realized he must be experiencing what clansmen called “coming in from the cold madness” when he found himself wondering if the Listener’s missing earlobes had been stuffed between the cracks.
They waited in silence as Ark Veinsplitter entered, and closed the door. A raven swung upside down on a whalebone perch, making the soft chuffing noises of a bird whose vocal cords had felt the heat of a throat-iron upon hatching. Spying Raif, it righted itself and fixed him with its sharp black gaze. Unnerved, Raif found himself speaking when he had not planned to.
“We’ll be on our way in the morning. We need to head east while the calm still holds.”
“You do not know the way east, Clansman.” Ark Veinsplitter poured a line of water under the door, sealing the chamber with ice.
Blood rose in Raif’s cheeks. The Sull warrior was right. No clansmen knew this territory or the ways to and from it. He hardly knew what had made him say such a thing. Neither he nor Ash had spoken of what they would do once they arrived here, and both of them needed time to rest.
Now all he wanted to do was be gone.
“You could share knowledge of the eastern trails, Far Rider,” Ash said, and even though he was aware she had spoken to support him, Raif was not glad to hear her speak. Some insane, heat-fevered part of him wanted to believe that if she were quiet, barely moved, barely spoke, they would not notice her. Or want her.
The Sull warrior rose heavily, revealing the brace of knives strapped to his back. “Knowledge of Sull paths comes at great cost. Would you have me give them freely, as if they were nothing more than deer tracks through a wood?”
“I would have you tell me what’s happening here,” Raif fired back. “Why did the Naysayer drop to the ground when he saw us? And why is there blood on your wrists?”
“My blood is mine to spill, Clansman. Would you tell me when to piss and shit?”
Raif sucked in air to reply, but the little man with no ears hissed a word that could only mean Silence!
In the quiet that followed the Listener of the Ice Trappers poured steaming liquid into three horn bowls. Raif nodded thanks when the first was handed to him. He smelled the sharpness of sea salt and fermented flesh, watched as Ark Veinsplitter and Ash held bowl rims to their lips and sipped. The old man arranged himself on the chamber floor and waited for Raif to drink.
The liquid scalded Raif’s tongue. It was thick with invisible threads of sinew that floated between his teeth and then slid back into the bowl when he was done. Strangely, the heat seemed to null the taste, and although he had been expecting something acrid, he was left with only a vague sense of fishiness and a whiff of lead.
The Listener refilled Raif’s bowl. “Oolak.”
“Fermented shark skin,” explained Ark Veinsplitter. “The Listener brews it himself.”
Raif nodded. Bad home-brew was something he was familiar with. Tem’s brew had been so bad that no one but blood kin would drink it. It had been a point of honor with Raif and Drey, the enjoying of it, the laughing, the one-upmanship as each tried to outdo the other in lavishing the foul brew with praise. Tem would cuff them for their cockiness, then walk away grumbling about how a father could have too many sons.
Smiling, Raif drank deeply. When the Listener filled his cup a third time he drank more. He was hungry for its magic; the way it let him think of the things he had lost without the pain of losing them.
“Raif. Open the door and let out the smoke.” Ash’s voice seemed to come from a ver
y great distance. As Raif lifted his head to look at her, he caught a glance passing between the Listener and the Far Rider. Dimly, he realized many things—that Ark Veinsplitter had not answered any of his questions, that it was the old man, not the Far Rider, who held power here, and that it would serve a clansman well to be cautious in this place—but there was a heaviness settling within him. The fermented shark skin and the lamp smoke and the heat had slowed his thinking, along with his blood. He knew things yet could not act.
Slowly, he rose to his feet. A rim of ice had formed around the driftwood door, weeping where it touched the chamber’s heat. As he reached for the pull ring, Ark’s hand came down upon his arm.
“Mora irith. The ice fog rises this night.”
Raif pulled back. He knew about the ice fog, of how it had risen the night Cormac HalfBludd, first son of the River Chief, had been standing vigil on the banks of the Ebb, and how the old Croserman who found his body the next morning thought he was looking at a river wraith’s corpse, so inhumanly blue was Cormac’s skin.
Raif reclaimed his seat. The Listener refilled his bowl. As he accepted the steaming liquid, Raif felt Ash’s hand touch his thigh.
“Guard yourself,” she murmured.
He watched her face, saw her desire to say more stifled by the nearness of other men. Unable to name the emotion behind her eyes, Raif raised the cup to his lips and drank. Who was she to warn him? The ice fog was rising and the door was sealed against it, and a man could do worse than sit in the warmth and drink.
So that was what he did. Hours passed and the lamp smoke thickened and sea ice beyond the chamber boomed and cracked. No one spoke. The Listener paid attention to the lamp, tamping the wick ever lower into whale oil. Raif’s shoulders sought the hard comfort of the chamber wall as his head grew heavy with sleep. Soon it became increasingly hard to stay awake. And as his eyes closed and he drifted toward oblivion, he saw the Far Rider watching him with cold and knowing eyes.
“The Sull are not our people and they do not fear us.”
Raif heard the voice of his clan and knew to be afraid . . . but the alcohol was in him and sleep pulled hard upon him.
And when he woke two days later Ash was gone.
TWO
The Widows’ Wall
The only way to drink mares’ urine was quickly, so Raina closed her eyes, scrunched her face and downed it in one. It really was quite dreadful—sweet and pungent, still steaming from the horse’s bladder—yet she’d sampled worse in her time. Tem Sevrance’s home-brew, for one. And the taste of her own fear.
Besides, it had to be better than sheep dung . . . that and ground-up beetle parts set to stand in curdled milk. Anwyn Bird swore by sheep dung, but she was a ewe farmer’s daughter and heavily biased toward sheep. No. Better to be safe in this. The old family remedies were the best; the ones whispered by sisters and cousins and mother and aunts. How best to prevent conception of a child.
Letting the ladle drop to the bucket, Raina rose to her feet. She needed to be gone from here. A pale dawn was breaking, and Eadie Callow and the other dyers would be taking their places soon enough. A chief’s wife could not be seen here, not alone, not with the newly delivered mares stale from the horse-block. Eadie Callow might have the slow eyes and stained hands of a dyer, but a sharpness lived behind her dull gaze, and the black ink on her fingers concealed the pale white flesh of a Scarpe. All the dyers and fullers were Scarpemen. They had ways with potash and urine and fuller’s earth that other men lacked. It was said that no other clan in the clanholds could dye such a perfect shade of black.
Mace had brought Scarpemen by the hundred to the Hailhold. Every day more arrived: warriors mounted on Spire-bred horses, women pulled behind them in poison-pine carts. The Scarpehold had been torched. The silent white-winter warriors of Clan Orrl had sent a message of fire in the night, and flames from the Scarpehold’s sod-and-timber roof had been seen throughout the North. By many accounts only the stonework still stood, but even that had been cracked and blackened, and returning Hailsmen whispered that sleeping there was like spending a night in a scorched field. Stangs from the Scarpe Tree, the poison pine that grew nowhere else in the Clanholds except the hills surrounding Scarpe, had been used in construction of the roof. Many of them were still whole, but the deadly smoke given off during their charring caused more deaths than the most fiercely burning oak.
Raina’s mouth tightened as she closed the dyehouse door. She could find little sympathy for Scarpe.
Mace Blackhail’s birthclan was not her own. Yelma Scarpe, the Weasel chief, had brought the torching upon herself. She had unleashed her sharp little tongue upon Orrl, claiming land and strongwalls and hunting rights, and then, never short of clever talk and clever schemes, she had set the might of Blackhail upon them. Five warriors murdered in the frost-broken lands to the west, one the Orrl chief’s grandson; a dozen more Orrl warriors slain during a border skirmish when both Blackhail and Scarpe rode against them.
And then there was the killing of the Orrl chief himself.
Corbie Meese and his crew found the bodies, on the Old Dregg Trail, two days west of Dhoone. Eleven white-winter warriors and Spynie Orrl, their bodies clad in the strangely shifting cloth Orrl was known for, their heads forced so far down into their chest cavities that the scout who first came upon them thought the bodies beheaded. Corbie Meese knew the truth of it. Only a score of hammermen in the North, himself included, were capable of striking such a blow.
Shivering, Raina made her way toward the widow’s hearth that formed the uppermost chamber of the roundhouse.
No one knew who had ordered the Orrl chief’s slaying. Spynie and his men had been traveling a dangerous path between warring clans, and there were some who whispered that the Orrl chief had been returning from a secret parley with the Dog Lord at Dhoone. Raina set no store by that. She knew Spynie Orrl, had spent a summer at the Orrlhouse in her youth, and even though he had no liking for the Hail Wolf, he would not turn his back on his oath.
Old words and old loyalties ran deep here, in the westernmost reaches of the clanholds. Clans were older, the living was harder, and for a thousand winters the Hail chief had looked upon the Orrl chief as his man.
“Lady.”
Raina turned on the stair to see Lansa Tanner on the landing below. The young girl bobbed her head, setting golden curls dancing.
“The chief awaits you in his chamber.”
Raina could still see the blush on her cheeks. Foolish child, to let a conversation with Mace impress her so. “Tell my husband I will join him when my business with the widows is done.”
The girl waited for more, lips prettily parted, bars of light from the arrow slits slicing across her throat. No one dismissed a chief’s request out of hand; there had to be an apology or explanation. When none came the girl’s mouth closed and something less pretty happened to her face. Without another word she turned and descended the stair.
Oh gods. What is happening here? Resting her weight against the sandstone wall, Raina watched the girl go. She had woven birth cloths for all the Tanner girls, washed their soiled linens and combed their tangled hair. How had Mace managed to steal their loyalty from her?
The sounds and smells of early morning followed Raina as she climbed the little stair to the widows’ hearth. The crackle of newly lit fires and the sizzle of ham upon them competed with the clangor from the forge. Once her mouth would have watered at the aroma of blackening fat, and her pace would have quickened to meet the day, but here and now she felt nothing but the hard sense of duty that had become her life.
She was chief’s wife, first woman of the clan, and Mace Blackhail could not take that from her.
The door to the widows’ hearth was old and deeply carved, the wood a silvery gray. The lightest touch of Raina’s hand was all it took to set the quarter-ton of rootwood in motion. The steady clack of looms greeted her as she stepped into the room.
Merritt Ganlow, Biddie Byce and Moira Lull were at th
eir frames, weaving. Old Bessie Flapp, whose great dislike of her husband made her a widow by choosing if not fact, was carding raw wool with her liver-spotted hands. Others were at tables, sewing and embroidering, spinning, and stretching the warps. The light was good here, and all the heat generated by the countless hearths burning throughout the roundhouse rose through the timbers on its journey toward the roof. The ceiling was low and barrel-vaulted, the bloodwood stangs made bright by a wash of yellow ochre. As always upon entering the chamber, Raina’s gaze fell upon the hearthstone.
The Widows’ Wall, it was called, and the brown stain upon it was said to be Flora Blackhail’s blood. Wife to the Mole Chief, Mordrag Blackhail, Flora had gone mad with grief upon receiving word of her husband’s death. A messenger had arrived at the roundhouse in the dark of night, telling how Mordrag had been crushed by a collapsing cave wall in the Iron Caves to the south. Frantic and inconsolable, Flora had fled to the uppermost chamber of the roundhouse and stabbed herself with her carding shears.
Stupid woman, Raina thought. For the messenger who brought word was a stranger to the clan, and Mordrag still lived, though he had lost half a leg to gangrene. When news of his wife’s death reached him, Mordrag mourned for thirty days, and then took himself a new bride. And the chamber in which Flora had died became a home for the widows of the clan.
“Raina!” Merritt Ganlow spoke from behind her loom, her hands never losing contact with shuttle and thread. “Are you here as widow or wife?”
Raina nodded at the stout woolwife. “I’m here as friend, I hope.”
Merritt grunted. “Then as a friend I trust no words will find their way back to the Wolf.”
The widows had little love for Mace Blackhail. No Scarpewoman ever found her way to the Widows’ Wall, though there were plenty of widows amongst them. They knew they were not welcome, could see that their tattooed widows’ weals set them apart. Scarpe widows did not cut themselves, as Blackhail widows did, claiming the pain of loss was enough. Why should they cut their flesh and pain themselves more?
