by J. V. Jones
For the briefest moment Hammie Faa’s face went blank. Recovering quickly he nodded and mumbled, “Aye. Gods be with you on the road.” Placing a guiding hand on Aaron’s back, he struck a course due east.
Bram watched them leave. As man and boy disappeared beneath the curve of the hill, a wolf howled in the distance. A reminder from the Dog Lord. Set them free.
Shaking his sword hand to get the blood flowing, Bram hiked up the slope. His entire body felt battered and used up, and the thought of spending the night searching for Guy’s runaway stallion was almost too much to bear. Just to sit and drink some water would have been nice. When he saw that both Guy and Jordie were mounted, reins in hands and visors lowered, he guessed that he wouldn’t be sitting down any time soon.
Guy trotted Jordie’s stallion downhill. The left stirrup had been unbuckled and Guy’s bandaged foot dangled loose against the creature’s belly. Rainwater soaked into Guy’s cloak had stiffened to ice, freezing the badly rumpled fabric into lumps. When he spoke his breath whitened in word-length bursts. “You’ll have to make your own way from here on, Cormac. We’re heading for the Fly.”
The Fly was a shallow river that crossed the Dhoonehold two days southeast of the roundhouse. The old watchtower that defended the raised crossing was known as the Stonefly. One of the first orders Robbie had given upon seizing the Dhooneseat was concerning the regarrisoning of the tower. A score of hatchetmen—hammermen and axmen—now patrolled both the north and south rivershores and the forest beyond. If Guy and Jordie rode hard through the night it was possible they could reach the Fly by dawn. Guy intended to set the hatchetmen on the Dog Lord’s trail.
“We’re not breaking the agreement,” Jordie said quietly, drawing level on Bram’s mare. “We agreed to set them free and not pursue them, and . . . and . . . ” Frowning hard at the reins in his hands, Jordie stumbled to a halt.
“We’re not pursuing them,” Guy said firmly, some of his old haughter returning. “We’re alerting others to their presence.”
Bram could tell Jordie didn’t want to catch his eye. There was nothing that interesting about his reins. Jordie knew that although they were upholding the word of the agreement, they were still breaking faith. And then there was the matter of an earlier agreement, one concerning the safe delivery of Robbie’s brother to the Milkhouse. Both Jordie and Guy had promised to escort Bram on the journey southeast and protect him from the dangers that awaited lone travelers on the road. Maimed Men, city men, trappers, bandits, enemy clansmen and even enemy Dhoonesmen had been spotted on the Milkway. Not to mention the fact that a boy traveling alone might simply fall from his horse into a ditch, injuring himself so badly he couldn’t get up.
Well I’ll just have to be careful where I put my feet. Oddly enough Bram found himself too tired to care about being abandoned. “And my horse?”
Guy made an exasperated puffing sound as if the answer were glaringly obvious. “You’ll have the best mount in the party—mine.”
If I can find it. Bram considered mentioning the fact that Guy’s stallion had run loose over two hours ago and could be halfway to Blue Creek by now.
“It’s not a gift, mind. I’ll expect him to be returned within the month.” Guy expertly turned Jordie’s horse. “Jordie. We’re off. The sooner Tiny learns the Dog Lord is alive and on his way back to Bludd the better.”
Jordie shifted his weight forward in the saddle, preparing his mount for a swift start. “You can always follow us back, Bram,” he said gently. “You know, run and try to keep pace.”
Bram shook his head firmly. Even if such a thing were possible, Robbie would not want him back.
“Gods’ luck, Bram Cormac.” Jerking his head in farewell, Guy Morloch dug iron into horseflesh and sped off.
Jordie hesitated a moment and then gave the mare its head. The little horse raced down the slope, its hooves gouging divots from the mud in its eagerness to catch up with the stallion.
Bram sat down on his cloaktails and watched them. He was dead tired, and relieved to have them gone. After a time he began massaging his numbed hand. Strange tingles still persisted, and although he knew it was probably nothing he was a bit worried all the same. He very much liked his hand.
Part of him was still trying to figure out how Guy could have made such a big mistake. Hammie Faa had barely managed to cover his confusion when Bram wished him a safe journey to Bludd. The Dog Lord wasn’t heading home. He was heading north to the Dhoonewall. Guy had assumed that the Dog Lord was south of the roundhouse because he meant to follow the old Ruinwood trail east through Dregg. Where in fact the Bludd chief and his companions were circling the roundhouse before eventually turning north. The tunnel leading from the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes must have deposited them some distance south, leaving Vaylo with the difficult job of guiding his party through land overrun by enemies.
Bram decided the Dog Lord was more than up to the task.
Knowledge was interesting, Bram concluded, rising. Once you were in possession of it you could choose to pass it along or keep it to yourself. Power lived there just as surely as it lived in a swinging hammer. Only you didn’t need muscle to wield it.
Thoughtful, he headed uphill. His throat was raw with thirst. Luckily Jordie had thought to unbuckle the saddlebags from the mare, and Bram found a waterskin and other supplies. As he drank he began planning for the night ahead. It occurred to him that it would be a good idea to spread feed around his bedroll. That way if Guy’s stallion decided to return while he slept it would likely stick around until morning. Unable to locate horse feed, he used porridge oats instead.
When he was done, he pushed a wedge of rye bread between his teeth and chewed. It tasted like wood. Swallowing forcefully, he drew the watered steel from its sheath. The edge needed oiling. Jackdaw Thundy, the old swordmaster at Dhoone, would whack a boy with the flat of his blade if he dared leave a sword untended after rainfall. Even the pride of Dhoone—hard and lustrous, twice-fired watered steel—was not immune to canker.
Frowning, Bram watched as moonlight flowed along the whorls and ripples in the blade. Robbie had given him the lesser of the two swords. The one he’d kept for himself was known as a horsestopper. A full-size battle sword with a two-handed grip that had the length and heft necessary to impale an armored warhorse, it was forged from the highest grade of watered steel, known as mirror blue. A blade made of mirror blue was paler and more glassy than one forged from traditional watered steel. Light shone through its point.
No light shone through the point of Bram’s blade, but that didn’t bother him. Truth was he preferred the smaller, lighter footsword with its simple cruciform handguard and the hare head surmounted on its pommel. His father had commissioned the ice-hare pommel as a tribute to his wife upon her death. Tilda Cormac had been the best wire-trapper in Dhoone, and when her husband was away for the winter on long patrols she had kept her family fed.
It was Robbie who had benefited the most. Tilda had always given her stepson the choicest cuts of meat: the fatty loin from the rabbit’s back, the coon liver, the porcupine’s heart. Robbie had been born to her husband’s first wife yet she had reared him as her own. Bram often wondered what she had received in return. Robbie had treated her like a servant, never showing her the respect due to a stepmother. “Elena Dhoone is my mother. Not you,” he would scream when she wouldn’t let him have his way. “You’re just a rabbit-trapper from Gnash.”
Even though he didn’t much feel like it, Bram unhooked the weapon care pouch from his belt and began working yellow tung oil into the sword. Tilda’s sword. Robbie had been set to hand it over to the Milk chief in payment for the Castlemen, and Bram wondered how his brother had managed to get it back. His memories of what happened that night in the Brume Hall after Robbie sold him to Wrayan Castlemilk were not clear. Perhaps Robbie had renegotiated the gift of swords, but Bram doubted it. A dozen watered-steel swords had been promised. A dozen had been delivered. Bram had a shadowy memory of Robbie kneelin
g quietly by the sword pile and sliding out Tilda’s sword. If the memory was true he would have had to replace it with another blade. Why he had gone to such trouble was hard to know.
Bram decided not to think about it. Nerve endings in his fingers had begun to fire randomly as his hand came back to life, and he flexed the muscles to keep blood pumping.
He found himself imaging Guy and Jordie arriving at the Stonefly. Tired and breathless, they’d hasten through the garrison eager to speak with the head hatchetman, Tiny Pitt. Search parties would be dispatched. Messengers would be sent north to Dhoone: the Dog Lord was in the Dhoonewilds, heading east. The knowledge that Guy and Jordie would soon send a company of hatchetmen east when the Dog Lord was heading north should have made Bram feel something as a Dhoonesman. Yet it didn’t.
Instead he felt a small stirring of something else. It was good to have knowledge that no one else but you possessed.
“Castlemilk.” Bram spoke the word out loud, testing.
His allegiances were shifting and he no longer knew which clan he owed loyalty to anymore.
FIVE
The Racklands
A night heron shrieked in the distance as Ash March crouched by the shore and drank. Moonlight had transformed the Flow into a river of mercury, silver-black and shiny as metal. Hopefully not dangerous to drink. Ash tasted the river as she swallowed; oily and strange, not quite water anymore.
Standing, she wrapped her lynx-fur coat around her chest and shivered, though she wasn’t really cold. It was an hour after sunset and the sky glowed dimly in the west. In the east a half-moon hung low between sentinel cedars. The moon was closer here, she’d noticed. Stars too. The night itself was blacker, richer, as if darkness had been distilled to its highest proof. Ash could feel it settling against her skin and siphoning through the lenses in her eyes. The land she stood in was ruled by the Sull: night and day had irrevocably changed.
A breeze set the cedar boughs swaying as she hiked up the shore. The sharp, spicy scent of their needles was released in a sudden burst, like a seedpod ejecting it spores. The smell reminded Ash of Mask Fortress, of closed boxes, locked chests. Secrets. She had never seen such massive trees. Their boughs swept wide in vast shaggy circles that claimed the space of a dozen lesser trees. None of their needles were green. Silver and blue and a shade of dusky purple she had no name for, they had abandoned the colors of normal growing things.
Switching her path to avoid the ice-dried remains of something that might have been a fox, Ash returned to her makeshift camp. She was muscle-tired but restless, and she did not want to sleep. Seven days had passed since the stand at Floating Bridge and not an hour, awake or sleeping, had gone by where she had not relived the events of that night in her mind. In a way the nightmares were easier. There was something to be said for watching everything unfold in painstaking detail in her dreams. At least she was asleep. At least her dream self wasn’t constantly asking: What could I have done to save Ark’s life?
Ash inhaled deeply, found herself glancing back at the fox. Ark Veinsplitter, Son of the Sull and Chosen Far Rider, was dead. Brought down by unmade pack wolves, torn limb from limb by creatures who no longer had red blood pumping through their hearts or warm flesh coddling their bones. Daughter, he had called her. She would never hear him say that word again.
Deep within the overhang of her coat sleeves, Ash’s hands made fists. I should never have stepped onto the bridge.
The memory of that night was as clear and sharp as a splinter of glass. Their party of three—Ark, Mal Naysayer and she herself—had been pursued by creatures from the Blind. From the moment she had become Sull in the mountain cavern they had chased her, and two hours south of Hell’s Town they finally brought her to ground. It might have been possible to outrun them if it hadn’t been for the river. The wolves had cornered them on the north bank of the Flow, where the road met the Floating Bridge. Horses could not be ridden at a gallop across the four-foot-wide boards, so Ark and Mal had turned to make a stand. Her mistake had been to ride onto the bridge ahead of them. She could see it all: the wolves closing in, the Naysayer drawing his six-foot longsword and stepping forward; and Ark . . . Ark pulling the linchpin from the Floating Bridge, and telling her how she had made him proud as the bridge began to float away. She and her horse had sailed east on powerful river currents, buoyed by pontoons that bounced like fishing floats in the water, unable to do anything but watch as Ark and the Naysayer battled the Unmade.
Ark had fallen. Two she-wolves had brought him down as the pack leader sprang for his throat. The battle had lasted mere seconds after that. The Naysayer finished it. Ash had grown up in Mask Fortress, and for ten years her sole view was of the brothers-in-the-watch weapons courts, which lay below her bedroom window. Not once in all that time had she seen a man wield a sword like the Naysayer. He ended the battle in just four sword strokes, and then dropped to his knees by his hass. Ash had no longer been able to see clearly by then—the current had carried the bridge close to the river’s south bank—but she had understood the motions performed by the distant shape that was Mal Naysayer.
The Far Rider had executed Dras Morthu. The final cut. With Ark hemorrhaging from mortal wounds, his strength failing and the light dimming in his dark brown eyes, the Naysayer had made a decision. Ark Veinsplitter might have been brought down by unmade wolves, but it was Mal Naysayer, his fellow Far Rider and hass, who had ended his life.
The Sull were deeply proud. Never let an enemy take a life.
Ash raised her face toward the night sky and inhaled. The wolves were hunting me. That was something she would have to live with, the absolute certainty that Ark had died protecting her life.
Exhaling, she closed her eyes. The blackness was absolute.
Daughter.
Where was the other man who had called her by that name? Where was the Naysayer? Was he standing grave watch by his hass’s corpse? Had he crossed the Flow? Was he searching for her? Or had Ark’s death altered his path, causing him to focus attention elsewhere? Perhaps there was family to inform? Or—more likely—missions of greater urgency to undertake? Mal Naysayer lived by the sword. He might have judged the task of escorting Ash March to the Heart Fires too passive.
She had turned her back on him that night on the Flow. A strong sense of invading his privacy had made her walk the gelding along the Floating Bridge to its anchorage on the southern shore. Even in darkness, across the width of a river, she could feel the weight of his loss. Mal Naysayer was close to seven feet tall, with densely muscled shoulders and a back as straight as a lodgepole pine. To see him bend was to see his grief.
I am on Sull territory now, she had told herself as she stepped from the bridge onto the road of crushed quartz. Surely I can make it to the Heart Fires on my own? It had made sense to leave him; that way he would not be burdened with the task of bringing her to his home. The decision whether or not to follow her would be his own. Perhaps he might come after her, but she could not rely on it. The first person to call her daughter had taught her that men could not be relied upon.
So where was Penthero Iss, Surlord of Spire Vanis, this night? Was he deep within the Blackvault plotting to kill those who would take his place? Did he miss the daughter he’d found as a newborn and adopted? Or did he miss controlling the Reach?
Ash opened her eyes. The stars were cold and blue.
Crushing layers of pine needles and old, yellow snow beneath her boot heels, she returned to the dry camp. The Sull horse watched her with anticipation, his tail raised, his ears forward, standing on the exact patch of ground where she’d unsaddled him. Ark and Mal had used him as a packhorse and a spare, and he had muscular legs and a deep chest. Stony white and dappled, with shaggy patches on his neck and withers, he wasn’t nearly as elegant as the Far Riders’ mounts. Yet all Sull horses were beautiful. It had something to do with the intelligence biding in the center of their eyes.
Ash felt a rush of pleasure as he snuffled her bare palm. It made t
hinking about her foster father easier. Would he have really gone through with his plans to imprison her? Surely not. She was his daughter. All she’d ever wanted to do was please him.
Leaning against the gelding, Ash tried to warm away the hurt. Iss had never loved her, she had to remember that. He had adopted her because she satisfied the requirements of a prophecy foretelling the birth of a Reach: a newborn left to perish in the snow outside Vaingate. Your little hands were blue, Iss had been fond of telling her. And when I picked you up and tucked you under my cloak you barely made a sound.
Why had her foster father wanted her so badly? If she hadn’t run away from Mask Fortress what would have become of her? She knew Iss had planned to imprison her, but how had he intended to use her?
What had Heritas Cant told her in Ille Glaive? “You will be able to walk the borderlands at will, hear and sense the creatures that live there, and your flesh will become rakhar dan, reach-flesh, which is held sacred by the Sull.” It made about as much sense now as it did then. Yet she did not think Cant’s words were false. Mistaken perhaps, but not false.
And why had Ark insisted she become Sull? “If you are not with us you are against us, and as such no living, breathing Sull will let you live.” What did she possess that filled them with such fear?
Thoughtful, Ash rocked her weight back onto her feet. She was a Reach, and she did not know what that meant.
Leading the Sull horse by the cheek strap, she guided him toward the section of riverbank where rye and wild carrot had seeded between the scree. He deserved a treat. Once he’d eaten his fill he would head straight back to the camp. He would not stray, and if he heard anything that alarmed him he would immediately return to her side.
