by J. V. Jones
It was time to leave this place. The worst of the white weather had passed, and the unclouded sky promised stillness for the first time in many days. Ash had a good head start on him; their paths were unlikely to cross. He needed supplies, warm clothing. A weapon. Guidance to set him on the right track. Too much to ask from strangers, yet he had no other choice. He could not stay here. He had seen the way the Ice Trapper hunters looked at him; he needed to find a place where men would not fear or distrust him.
He needed to be amongst clan.
“The Gods Lights burn this night.”
Raif turned at the sound of the voice and saw the Listener, well wrapped in several shaggy furs, standing behind him on the ice.
“You look the wrong way, Clansman. The Gods Lights always show in the north.”
Raif could find no answer to that, other than to turn his face north. He didn’t see the Lights at first, so slowly did they move, rising behind the mountains like green smoke. Then the horizon itself began to glow. It was easy to believe that a forest fire in some distant and unreachable valley had to be raging to give off such light. Even in the clanholds, where the lights were rarely seen, it was known that strange unclannish gods sent them at times of change. Raif didn’t want to think of it. He said, “When did you return, Listener?”
“Last night.”
Raif should have been surprised, but wasn’t. The little old man was full of tricks. “Did you listen for the seals?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“They did not come.” The Listener moved forward so he stood alongside Raif. His hard, wrinkled face glowed green as the Gods Lights brightened. “They swim west, away from the land, and the fish and krill go with them.”
Sensing an accusation there, Raif said, “I leave tomorrow.”
“Good.”
“I’ll need to be shown the path east.”
“You cannot follow her.”
“I know . . . but I can’t return to my clan.”
“So you head to the badlands?”
Raif nodded. “I go in search of the Maimed Men.”
The sea ice groaned and lifted, as the sea beneath swelled. Somewhere far in the distance two plates ground together, making a sound like the sawing of wood. It did not occur to Raif that the Listener had not heard of the Maimed Men; the set of the old man’s jaw spoke for itself. The Maimed Men were clansmen, most of them. Tem said they had first come into being the year Burnie Dhoone destroyed Clan Morrow out of jealousy for his wife, Fair Maida. Hundreds of unhoused clansmen had nowhere to go, and no clan would take them in for fear of the Dark King’s anger. They headed north, legend said, to the vast bleak spaces of the badlands where time and hardness changed them. No man amongst them was whole; the terrible dry cold and fierce badlands predators saw to that. Every clansman knew they had no honor, for they raided villages, outlying farms, guard posts and hunt parties, and they had no guidestone to offer shelter to the gods. The living was hard, and little was known of them, and Raif thought they would suit him well enough. Traitors and outcasts had few choices.
Raif thought the Listener would say something, some caution, but after many minutes of silence Sadaluk turned for home. “Come,” he said. “The lights burn red and it disturbs an old man to stand beneath them.”
Raif hesitated.
“The girl has gone. I sent her home with the last of the meat.”
Oh gods. Remembering made Raif want her as strongly as before. His face heated as he wondered how much the Listener knew.
The old man could read thoughts, Raif swore it, for the Listener frowned deeply and shook his head. Unspeaking, they returned to the warmth and the heat of the Listener’s ground.
The first thing Raif noticed was that the mute raven had been returned to its whalebone perch. The big black bird made a retching sound at Raif’s entrance, throwing its head back and forth as if it were a jester playing sick. Raif took it for an insult and scowled. Insolent bird. The soapstone lamp Sila had diligently tended for two days was now smoking from lack of care. Raif thought he would try and adjust it, but the Listener brushed him away. “Sit,” he said, pointing to the bench against the wall. “Perhaps the next gifts I offer will not be so willfully refused.”
The old man crouched in the center of the chamber and began pulling away the blankets and grass mats that covered the floor. Clawlike hands pried up four stones that concealed a cache hole. Out of a sense of honor Raif did not watch as the Listener pulled out a long chest and struggled with its metal latches. After a minute of watching shadows, the Listener complained to him, “Can you not see when an old man needs your help?” Chastised, Raif moved quickly to aid him.
The chest was not Ice Trapper-made. Fine wood had been carved and steamed into curves, and filigreed ironwork protected the corners and was mounted as latches on the lid. The latches were badly corroded, and Raif had to take a knife to them to pry them open. At once the smell of dust and age hit him; old parchment, old metal and mold. The Listener drove his hands deep into the opened chest, scattering clumps of parched brown moss that had been used for packing and for keeping the contents dry. “Two things, Clansman. Tell me which is the greater, the arrow or the sword?”
Raif replied without thinking. “The arrow. You can kill at distance without endangering yourself or your companions.”
“So you do not want to look into the eyes of the man you kill?”
Feeling tricked, Raif said, “I would prefer not to kill at all.”
“A wistful sentiment from a man named Watcher of the Dead.” The Listener raised his gaze to meet Raif’s. “Do not look at me that way, Clansman. I’m old enough to have earned the right to speak my mind. You, on the other hand, are at an age when it would serve you well to listen and speak not at all. Now, what if I were to tell you I have an arrow that would be wasted if you used it to kill a man?” The Listener did not wait for an answer. “You would ask what is it for. And I would give the only answer I have: Not many arrows have names, no blacksmith toils months over their making, no jeweler mounts stones upon their hilts, and no fine clansman lovingly oils them each night. Swords have names—Daybreaker, Fear Me, Taker of Lives, Ghostfriend, other such foolishness as that—arrows do not. Well, very few. I possess one of them.”
The Listener’s hand closed around an object in the chest, drew it up through the layers of moss. “Here she is: Divining Rod.”
Bright metal caught the light. Silver, Raif thought. No steel, or white gold force-hardened with arsenic and nickel like the arrows loosed by the Dhoone Kings. Then he looked more closely, and saw he was wrong. It was the hard, white-blue metal of the Sull. Clans did not know its name or where to mine it. Some whispered that it fell from the stars in great rocks that had to be cracked open like eggs. The arrowhead was three-bladed, slender as if for hitting targets, not game, and held to the shaft not by thread or metal wire like clannish arrows, but socketed by a banded ferrule so expertly tooled that it made Raif’s breath catch to see it. A skeleton ferrule: he’d heard tell of them from Ballic the Red, but never until now had he seen one. Such a socket added stability and accuracy to the arrow, holding shaft and point more surely than a bobbin’s worth of twine. He couldn’t help himself—he had to reach out to touch it.
“Ha!” gloated the Listener, offering it up. “I see you are capable of wanting something without guilt.”
Raif accepted the reprimand; he deserved it. He had acted like a fool and treated Sila badly, and he wouldn’t blame her if she hated him. Yet he hoped she didn’t. For a reason he couldn’t understand her good opinion was important to him.
The Listener pressed the arrow into Raif’s palm. “Take it.”
The instincts of a bowman overcame Raif, and he weighed the arrow in his hand, reading it for draw and height. It was surprisingly light; a windcatcher, Ballic would say, needing little height to aim it. The shaft was strangely made—bone, it looked like, with the kind of inlay work Raif was accustomed to seeing on bows, no
t arrows. Such tooling, if wrongly done, could greatly affect the arrow’s flight, for any flaw in the shaft would create drag. Yet when Raif ran his fingers over the bone he felt only perfect smoothness. It had once been stained red, for traces of color hid within minute striations in the bone. The arrow’s flights spiraled along the bottommost third of the shaft, and as Raif traced their course he felt his excitement growing. A spinner. This arrow would rotate in flight, spinning the moment it left the plate, protecting itself against the random buffeting of air and the gradual curving trajectory of all thrown missiles by its own spiraling motion. He wanted to loose it now, set its point against the riser and release the string. No arrow he’d ever held had been so exquisite.
“I see you’ve marked the spiral course of the flights,” the Listener said in an unusually quiet voice. “Yet have you also marked their substance?”
Raif had not. Turning the arrow, he studied the pale, translucent hairs that had been set into the bone and trimmed to an inch in length. “Ice-wolf hair,” he guessed. Then, seeing the Listener still waiting, “Lynx . . . snow tiger.” Still the old man waited and as he did the answer came. “Human hair.”
“Not quite human, no, but close.” The old man studied Raif in the silence that followed, seeming to judge his readiness . . . for what? With a small shrug, he finally spoke. “Have you heard tell of the Old Ones who once walked this land before Men? Some say they were like us, in that they had eyes and mouths and stood on two feet, and were as beautiful in their way as the Sull. This land wasn’t always hard froze, you must remember that. In ages past the Great Want was green with trees, and blue water flowed there along riverbeds so broad and deep that entire villages could be tossed into their centers and sink without a trace. The riverbeds are still there, if you know where to look for them, and many other things lie abandoned too. There are halls in the heart of the Want, raised from ancient timbers that take an Age to rot. The Old Ones built them, and some say their skills grew at great cost to their defenses, and they built a beautiful but flawed fortress where the Last Battle was fought and lost. Ben Horo, the Sull call it. The Time Before. The Sull think they are the only ones who honor and remember the Old Ones, but they can be blind in their arrogance and they forget that old men such as me can hear many things that they cannot.”
Pride shone briefly in the Listener’s eyes and then was gone. Raif turned the named arrow in his hand as Sadaluk continued speaking, and it seemed as though the night turned too, spinning like the arrow in flight toward a point the old man had long since set in his sights.
“Mor Drakka, Watcher of the Dead, I name you. I saw you long before you knew yourself and took your first life. The Sull see you as a threat and a curse, for it is written that one day Mor Drakka will bring their doom. They are a proud and ancient race and their numbers have been declining for ten thousand years, and they fear you are the one who will watch their end. You live only because they need as well as fear you. And because when you loose an arrow it finds a heart.
“No, do not gainsay me, Clansman. You forget who I am.” Again, the pride was there, flashing bright like lightning before dimming to nothing at all. “Take this arrow named Divining Rod that has been fletched with the Old Ones’ hair, take it and use it to find what you must. It seeks—what, I cannot tell you for the echoes from things so old are weak. I have guarded it for sixty years and Lootavek for a hundred before me, and before him Kullahuk, and before him the great Tungis himself. Many hands have touched it. None have set it to a plate and drawn power behind it. Wait, they said. One day someone will come and we will know from his hands and his spirit that he will use the arrow well.”
The Listener returned his attention to the chest, pushing his hands once again through the moss. “I cannot say I was glad to see you come here, and I fear that even when you leave the seal will not return. Yet how can I change such things? What choices do we have, you and I?”
Raif held the old man’s gaze. He felt sad and weary, and suddenly the arrow seemed less like a treasure than a debt. Quietly, he slipped it into one of the many game pouches sewn within the seal coat.
“Grow wide shoulders, Clansman—you’ll need them for all your burdens.” The Listener pulled something out of the chest, something heavy and long and wrapped in old skins. The old man looked up, and there was a twinkle of mischief newly come to his eyes. “You might think I’d give you a bow to match that fine arrow of yours. You might think it, but you’d be wrong. I’m old and contrary and have a fancy to give you a sword. And, as there’s no one but gods here to stop me, I will.” He handed it to Raif. “Unwrap it. It’s time you learned how to kill someone and look them in the eye.”
Raif winced at the insult. He had drawn a sword against men before today. Three had died by his hand outside Duff’s . . . and yet he had no memory of that night; all his knowledge came secondhand from Angus Lok. Perhaps the Listener was right: he had taken refuge behind the bow, distancing himself from his heart-kills, and denying his enemies the simple grace of being able to look into the eyes of the man who killed them. Ayan Blackhail had learned that lesson at the loss of both hands. An arrow is no way to kill a king. You should have used your sword or naught at all.
Raif unwrapped the sword. Could he heart-kill a man with this? And if he did, would the death be more honorable for it?
The old man watched in silence as Raif inspected the sword. It was foreign-made of fine blued steel, neither clannish nor Sull-like in design. A span short of a true longsword, double-edged with a hand-and-a-half grip, it was forged for close combat on foot. Raif held the weapon up to the lamp, watched as the patterning of the blade scattered the light. Taking the unpadded wire grip in his hand he tested for the sword’s balance, then touched the wooden chest with its point to proof its temper. The blade was well fitted and sound, though its edges needed grinding. The sword’s hilt formed a plain cross, and its pommel was surmounted by a faceted chunk of rock crystal as big as a child’s eye. Holding it, Raif thought of Tem, of Tem’s humble halfsword that Drey had given him after Da’s death, and that had been taken by Cluff Drybannock on the slopes of the Bitter Hills. Da would have loved this.
“You’ll have to make yourself a scabbard for it, find a skin to wrap around the grip. It should serve you well enough until you find a better one.”
Raif looked up.
“What, Clansman? Did you really think this will be the sword that makes you?”
“No. I . . . I don’t know . . .” Raif heard himself stumbling. “Thank you. It is a fine sword.”
“It should be. I took it from a knight’s corpse. Don’t worry, I didn’t kill him. Poor soul was on a pilgrimage to the Lake of Lost Men, got lost himself and died.” The old man sealed the chest and then stood. “Quite useful, really, the Forsworn. At least one of them gets lost here each season. We Ice Trappers depend upon it.” Pushing the chest back into the cache hole, he said, “I’ll see you receive clothes and provisions in the morning. Tonight, I promised a certain widow I would visit her for the benefit of our mutual health. Sleep well and remember what I said: learn to use your gift through the sword. It will be better for you in the end.” With that Sadaluk sealed the cache and made his way toward the door. “I do not envy you, Clansman, though I find myself wishing I could join you on your journey. I could eat many suppers on the tales you will spin.”
Raif bowed his head, unable to find words to reply.
The Listener took his leave, and Raif closed the door behind him. He found himself hesitating to seal the cracks around the doorframe, though he did not want to admit why. The sword lay on the stone bench; he picked it up and began to polish it with a scrap of skin. The raven watched him, wings tucked behind its back, mimicking the motion of a skater in time to Raif’s strokes. Raif balled the skin in his fist and threw it at the bird. He was beginning to hate the thing.
A sword, he learned, was poor company at night. He polished and waited, yet Sila did not return. He told himself it was for the best, bu
t his body was restless with need and longing and dawn could not come too soon.
When morning finally came, he rose early and set off east in search of the Maimed Men.
EIGHT
The Thorn King
The forest south of Bludd was dark and ancient, with oaks slithery with moss and basswoods roped with ivy, and great white willows grown weak from the effort of surviving in stagnant water, eaten alive by spongy growths and rotting slowly from the roots up. Ruins stood here; a pale footstone half sunk into the loam, a section of standing wall protecting nothing but trees, a crumbling arch grown over with rapevines, a stretch of man-laid road running parallel to the path.
Bram noticed these things while most in the raid party did not. Or perhaps they saw but looked away; if a man had war and fighting on his mind it was better not to think too closely about those who had died before. Bram could not help himself, though. His brother said he had been born in the wrong place, and instead of being birthed amongst the thistle fields of Dhoone he should have been brought into the world in the Far South where a man could grow to be a warrior monk or a soldier scribe. Robbie Dhoone liked to tell men what they should be and where they should have been born, and although Bram was reluctant to admit it his brother was often right. Take their great-uncle, Skinner Dhoone. Robbie said the man should have been born on Topaz Island in the Warm Sea, where men owned slaves and kept concubines, for all Skinner was good for was controlling loose women and men in chains. Skinner had been furious when the insult had been relayed back to him, supposedly shaking so hard veins broke open in his face. In response he had named Robbie the Thorn King, claiming anyone who offered him loyalty would be torn to bloody shreds. Unfortunately for Skinner, Robbie had taken a liking to the name and had since claimed it for his own. And it hadn’t taken long for Skinner to realize the full breadth of his mistake: he’d been the first man alive to name Robbie Dun Dhoone a king.
