by J. V. Jones
Ash accepted this, unsure of what it meant. She thought Ark looked ill-rested, and said, “Those things you laid on the ground last night, what are they?”
The look he gave her was not friendly. He stood. “Your travel clothes are warming by the fire. Be ready by the time I’ve fed the horses.”
Ash felt his brusqueness as a slight. It hurt her to realize there were some secrets the Sull warrior wasn’t ready to tell. Raising the bowl, she let the steam rise across her face. Somewhere on the slopes below a snowcock was whistling in the dawn. The wind was restless, and rising, and there was a wetness to it that promised sleet.
Standing, she worked the stiffness from her muscles and tried to decide if she felt stronger than the day before. A bit, perhaps. Her gaze traveled to the pile of furs and clothing warming beside the remains of the kicked-in fire.
Something bright and silvery flashed atop her woolen dress. A hair ring. Ash moved quickly to retrieve it. The metal was white and gleaming, smooth as a wedding band and cool as ice. She had seen the same kind of rings in the Far Riders’ hair, and marked how they flashed more brightly in moonlight than sunlight. Now one had been given to her. She searched her belongings for a comb, eager to dress her hair. As she threaded the thumb-sized ring through her pale locks, Ark approached, leading the horses.
He was dressed in full armor beneath a wolverine cloak, his weapons arrayed ready for drawing in a many-chaneled harness upon his back. Ash counted two swords, a recurve longbow, a dagger and a hatchet. A six-foot spear was mounted on the blue’s saddle strap, its butt secured in a shoe of yellow horn. Motioning toward the hair ring, he said, “The Naysayer thought to make you a gift. He wanted you to know that after the First Gods created the moon they made this metal to catch its light.”
Moved, Ash fitted the soft ring around her ponytail.
“It disappears in your hair.” Ark’s voice was low. Abruptly, he mounted the blue. “I’ll await you at the streambed.”
Ash dressed quickly, and packed the Naysayer’s exquisite gray stallion with her blankets and meager supplies. Buckles on the gray’s bardings shone bright as mirrors, and Ash caught a glimpse of herself in one of them. She started. Why had no one mentioned her eyes were now blue?
Dawn light was showing on the horizon as she and Ark broke camp. The path led them east and then south down the mountain, past frozen gullies, matted ground-willow and meadows of ice-killed grass. To Ash’s eyes the trail was all but invisible, yet Ark told her the Naysayer had freshened it, and directed her to look for his sign in the hoarfrost. Ash looked at the underbellies of granite boulders and the boles of dead trees, but saw nothing. Just when she was growing impatient with the game, she spied something—a pale thumbprint, barely perceptible and easily mistaken for a natural variation in the frost—pressed into the north-pointing branch of a prostrate pine. Ark nodded, pleased. “He tells us there is running water to the north if we choose to break the trail.”
Ash was intent on guiding the gray down a difficult rock stair, yet she still managed to throw Ark a disbelieving look.
The Far Rider saw it and grew cold. “The path lores make us vulnerable. If an enemy learned to read them he could track us. Ways known only to us would be revealed to him; sacred sites and waystones, paths laid down by the first Mayji and the Old Ones in the Time Before. When I show you the most basic workings of the lore it may seem a small thing, but small things can grow quickly and become much. Once I teach you the inner workings of the path lores I arm you with a weapon to destroy us.”
Ash bowed her head, chastened. Ark rode on ahead of her, his spine stiff with Sull pride. She knew better than to draw abreast with him, and instead settled into place at the rear. She felt she was no closer to knowing these people than she had been when she first encountered them . . . but she would learn and grow wiser. And become one of them.
The morning passed slowly, as mist gave way to sleet, and gray stormlight darkened the snow. Ash only realized it was midday when Ark called a halt. They were riding through a narrow valley that sheltered the first upright trees they’d seen all day, and Ark rested the horses while he waited for the Naysayer to join them. They lit no fire and cut no meat, and Ash was forced to search her pack for waybread. She was hungry and tired, and her thighs ached from sitting astride the gray. The Far Rider barely noticed her. He walked the length of the valley, his gaze traveling along the tree line, his cloak of gray wolverine shedding sleet.
Time passed, and still there was no sign of the Naysayer. Ash felt rather than saw Ark Veinsplitter’s growing apprehension. The Far Rider stood still now, a booted foot resting on a spur of basalt, his hands clasped around the six-foot spear he used as a staff. When a dark shape broke through the tree line, Ark hefted the spear from the snow. There was a moment when Ash thought he would loose it, but he recognized his hass and let the butt drop to the ground.
The Naysayer moved swiftly through the swirling sleet. Ash saw he’d drawn the longsword with its raven-head pommel, and she knew something was wrong. When Ark stepped forward to meet him so did she. The Naysayer’s ice-cold eyes looked only at his hass. “We must take another path east. A maeraith guarded the entrance to the Rift Road.”
Ash glanced at his sword, and saw something black as night trickle down the edge and drop like acid into the snow.
FIFTEEN
Stillborn
Raif crouched behind the ridgewall and picked out his prey. It was mid-morning, dry and bitterly cold, with a wind blowing that sucked all the moisture from the snow and sent it sweeping across the tundra as dry as salt. He was lucky to encounter a herd here this late in the season. Luckier still that he had spent the night three days back whittling a spear. The spear was a six-footer, cut from white holly he’d found growing in the shelter of a dry canyon, its point hardened by fire. Clansmen called such spears “whore sticks” as they were only good for one shot and if you missed you’d go to bed starved. Raif wasn’t starved yet, but he was weary of dried seal tongue and rendered lard. He was hungry for fresh meat.
And even hungrier for the hunt. He’d traveled too long without a kill.
East, always east, along the hard, rocky margin that lay between the badlands and the Want. This was canyon country, east of Blackhail and north of the Copper Hills: the land hideously buckled by some ancient calamity, raised into rocky bluffs and windswept ridges, and sunk deep into dry riverbeds, canyons and things deeper than canyons. All sharp and desolate and shimmering with a layer of hoarfrost that collected on everything like limescale. Raif had no firsthand knowledge of this land, and little but sparse rumor to go on. Dhoonesmen mounted longhunts here in autumn to claim their portion of the vast herds of elk and moose that moved south with winter. From where he crouched on the ridge, Raif could see the Copper Hills rise to the south, their bald peaks hazy with distance and purple with heather, their slopes scored with dark lines that might mark game tracks or the ancient masonry of the Dhoonewall.
Raif had lost count of the days he had traveled. He did not like to think about what had happened at the Forsworn redoubt, and his memories of the days after were not good ones. Passing through the Blackhail badlands was not something he ever wished to do again. He had tried to avoid the campsite, had walked leagues out of his way, swerving northward into the great ice desert of the Want, yet he had still known when he passed it. The place his father died.
He seldom slept well now, and woke from dreams unsettled and ill-rested. His pace had slowed, and he knew he was riding the ragged edge of energy—swinging between moments of extreme alertness and complete lapses of thought—that came with lack of sleep.
He was alert now, focused upon the herd as it snuffled for pine bark and willow in the gorge below. Elk, sixty head of them, led by an ancient and scarred bull with a rack of antlers as wide and darkly stained as a hangman’s gibbet. They were moving north, and some of the cows were heavy with calf. Others were old and ribby, their cheeks hollow and their coats fouled by running wounds. Raif
picked a young dun cow, barely out of her calf-spots, who had found a fallen trunk to strip bare and lingered behind the herd. The wind was with him, driving his man scent east. The cow was almost directly below the ridge, lipping bark from the log.
Raif eased his pack to the ground, freeing his hands to loft the spear. The dead man’s cloak lay flat across his back like a layer of virgin snow. Orrlsmen were white-winter hunters without peer, and their cloaks were things of wonder in the clanholds. Some said they were cut from the tanned hides of rare white aurochs, their leather lacquered with a secret glaze that shifted color with the wind. Strange that he’d possessed one for so long and yet never hunted beneath it until now.
The head bull lowed as he began the climb out of the gorge, warning stragglers to pick up their pace. The little dun cow hesitated. Raif began his move forward, gliding over the ridge top, mimicking the movement of sliding snow. The dun’s head came up, alerted by the sound of a single tumbling piece of scree. Raif stilled. He felt a breeze pass over his Orrl cloak, watched as the dun’s gaze passed over it too, her dark eye focusing instead upon the stone he’d dislodged in his descent. Seconds passed. The dun finished chewing the strip of bark she’d pulled from the log. Raif waited. Wary now, the dun didn’t return to the log and turned instead to the north to check the progress of the herd. Raif moved as she turned, rippling down the ridge face like the wind. Almost without thought, his eyes focused on the dun’s breast, searching out the pale underfur that concealed the ribs.
As the dun’s ears twitched in response to some subhuman sound, Raif locked on to her heart. Bigger than a man’s and beating more quickly, the dun’s heart filled his sights like a torch held to his face. Elk heat enveloped him, and knowledge of her fear took his breath.
The dun bolted. Raif sprang. The downslope sped his acceleration, and for a brief moment he found himself moving faster than the deer. He hefted the spear, leapt. Air passed beneath him as he closed the distance between man and beast. The spear tip found the space between the third and fourth rib, and with eyes focused on a point beyond seeing, he drove the spear home. To the heart.
The elk dropped, and he tumbled forward with her, the spear cracking in two as his weight came down upon it. Blood fountained over his face. The herd panicked, tramping up the north face of the gorge, ripping out bushes and tumbling rocks as they stampeded. A cloud of snow and dust rose around their hooves. Raif slumped over the dun, exhaustion hitting him hard. For several minutes all he could do was breathe. There was a tang of metal in his mouth, but he didn’t have the strength to spit.
Eventually his breathing calmed, and he lifted himself up from the dun. His furs and cloak were soaked in blood that was rapidly cooling. He felt light-headed and not at all ready to butcher a three-hundred-pound carcass, but he heard his father’s voice utter an old warning—If you kill it and don’t eat it, then it’s a shameful waste of life—and his hunter’s instincts took over.
In no mood to preserve the hide, Raif made a cut from throat to groin to spill the guts. The heart slid out atop the lungs, a hunk of muscle with his spear tip still attached. Raif tried not to look at it as he freed the liver and dragged the carcass away from the offal.
Glancing up at the gorge wall, he knew he didn’t have the energy to carry the elk to the ridge, so he decided to follow the dry riverbed south until he found a protected area to camp. He ate the liver as he worked, unable to find the usual hunter’s joy in savoring the bloody and highly flavored flesh. When he came upon a crop of rocks choking what had once been a tributary of the dead river, he halted. This would do.
It was noon, and the sun was low and very small, almost white in a bone-pale sky. Raif collected firewood with haste, not bothering to search out finer-burning deadwood when greenwood was closer to hand. He knew he shouldn’t be making camp so early, but he told himself it made sense. There was a carcass to quarter and meat to cook and cure; slowing himself down for half a day would make little difference.
His knight’s sword made short work of the butchering, though it lacked the finesse to winkle meat from between ribs and was as good as useless for skinning. Once he’d built a makeshift firepit of mounded stones, he placed a leg on the fire to roast, and hung strips of meat on willow poles downwind to catch the smoke. That done, he found he had a mind to drink something other than plain water, and filled his only pot with scraps of birch bark, dried berries and springwater and set it upon a warming stone to steep.
Next he set to cleaning his sword. The rituals of hunting were familiar and oddly comforting. Kill. Butcher. Clean. He had carried them out so often he could do them without thought, and that suited him. Or at least he thought it did, until his mind began wandering back to other hunts. He remembered the summer when Dagro Blackhail and his ten best men had ridden south on the rumor of a thirty-stone sow and her sixteen piglets. It was a giant among boars, they said, marked black and silver like the Hailstone itself. Raif grinned at the memory of himself and Drey riding concealed in the hunt party’s wake, determined not to miss out on the excitement of bringing down such a beast, and thinking themselves undetectable. By the Stones! They caused mayhem when the sow was finally flushed. Dagro himself drove the beast . . . straight toward the very spot where Raif and Drey were hiding in the wood. Raif learned more curse words that day than in an entire year at his father’s hearth. Both their horses bolted, but Drey, all of twelve and still awaiting his man growth, had the presence of mind to fling his spear.
That spear saved their hides. For a mercy it found the sow’s throat, and the pain of impact and the shock of bolting horses drove the creature back the way she’d come.
Later, when the kill was made and the great quantity of hog’s blood turned the forest loam into mud, Drey and Raif were called into the chief’s presence. Raif could still remember Dagro Blackhail’s fearsome face, the way the skin on his nose was bubbled with sun blisters and sweat. “Which of you threw this spear?” he demanded, putting his foot to the sow’s neck and yanking the Sevrance-marked shaft from sow flesh. “Speak,” he roared, when no answer was forthcoming. “If the truth’s not given freely I’ll whip it from you.” Raif clearly recalled Drey touching him then, a brush of fingers against his hip, a warning to stay silent come what may. Then Drey stepped forward.
“Lord Chief,” he said, his thin boyish voice making the words sound oddly formal, “the spear was thrown by two hands. My brother’s and mine.”
Dagro’s eyes had narrowed. A full minute passed, and then he grunted. “Aye. ’Tis well said, lad. Here. Take my knife. Cut you and your brother the hunter’s portion.”
Raif realized many things as he watched Dagro Blackhail watch Drey open the carcass. Dagro knew Drey had thrown the spear, and he also knew that Drey had shared the credit to prevent any punishment falling on his younger brother. Drey had won himself immunity from the terrible act of interfering with the chief’s hunt. But Raif had not. The full force of Dagro’s wrath would have fallen upon him if Drey had not protected him. And Dagro saw that act of protection and was moved by it.
The sow’s liver was the sweetest thing Raif had ever eaten. He could still taste it now; the taste of sugar and acorns and love.
Raif felt a prick of pain in the exact center of his spine. Hairs on his scalp rose as a voice said, “Hmm. Legmeat. I think I’ll have me some of that. Cut me a portion, boy, and cut it slow as your mam squatting for a leak.”
The voice was rough and soft, and it came with a breath foul with salt meat. The sun was in Raif’s face, and the man stood behind him so Raif didn’t have the benefit of a shadow to gauge his size. He had approached from behind, doubtless drawn by the smoke and scent of fresh meat roasting on the fire. Raif cursed himself for a fool. He’d been so caught up in thinking about Drey he’d lost himself in the past and forgotten that he was camping alone in a place on the farthest edge of clan. Even so, he had ears. And any man who could move along a dry gorge bed and draw a weapon without sound was dangerous.
S
till looking dead ahead, Raif said, “Stranger, why don’t you put your weapon down and join me? I’d be glad to share my food.”
He felt the point of a sword touch his backbone a second time. “So the wee clansman would be glad to share, would he? After he’s taken down one of me own elk and scared the rest so witless that they won’t come back in a month. Well, excuse me while I piss myself with gratitude. Now cut, boy, before I get tired of holding my sword just so and decide to run you through instead.”
Raif leant forward slowly, his mind racing. The stranger had been watching him take down the elk. He sounded like a clansman. Almost. But no sane clansman would lay claim to a herd of elk; they ranged too widely and traveled too swiftly for anyone to own them.
At least he was alone. I can’t let him master me.
“Not the sword, Clansman. Use your knife.”
Raif’s hand hovered above the rock-crystal pommel of his sword. “I don’t own a knife.”
“Well, that’s a pretty state of affairs. A fine cloak, a fine sword, and no knife. Why’s that, I wonder? Haven’t had a chance to steal one yet?”
“No. I lost it in a man’s throat.” With that Raif grabbed the sword and spun to standing. He found himself facing the ugliest man he had ever seen. Middle height, but grossly broad, with thick shoulders and a fat neck. His upper arms were so wide they stood out from his body like sacks of grain. He was dressed in armor cobbled together from metal pieces and once-living things. Turtle and oyster shells were mounted alongside steel discs and copper rings on a coat of boiled hide. His lower arms were squeezed like sausages into spiraling bullhorns, and his legs were clad in fleece pants beneath a fleece kilt.
But it was his face that made him who he was. He had very black hair, and it was shocking to see it growing in a line down the middle of his face. The tissue of his forehead, nose and left cheek was deeply folded, and scalp hair and lumps of flesh grew from the face-length cleft.
