by J. V. Jones
“Trenchlander,” Addie murmured. “Poor cousins of the Sull.”
They were crouching amidst a small copse of cedar saplings about ninety feet behind the camp. Raif watched the axman carefully, reassuring himself that the man’s rhythm hadn’t changed and that his focus remained on his work. Raif wondered about the location of horses and pack animals, but then decided the A-frame was large enough to hold livestock.
“Bear pelts fetch a tidy sum in Hell’s Town,” Addie whispered, “and they sell the gall bladders to traders from the south.”
Raif nodded, barely listening. He was fairly sure now that the axman was unaware of their presence. That was good. It meant he lacked the exquisite senses of purebred Sull. “He’s probably not alone,” Raif said quietly.
“Aye. Maybe his friends’re off walking the trap rounds. Shall we?”
Raif felt a sudden twinge in his shoulder, but ignored it. “Lead the way.”
To disguise the fact they had sneaked up on the Trenchlanders’ camp, they made their way partway to the front and then created a great deal of noise stomping through the remaining trees and snow. Addie began talking in a loud voice, telling some story about the time he’d got drunk in a stove-house and singed off most of his hair. Abruptly, he halted the tale midway and hailed, “Friend! Good day to you!”
The axman had stopped chopping but he still held his ax. He had sunken cheeks and there was slack skin around his jaw. Frostbite had rotted the tips of both his ears. Like Ilya Spinebreaker before him, he inspected Raif’s cloak and bow. Addie put up his hands, elbowing Raif along the way to do the same. Raif briefly showed the man his bare palms. “Trade,” Addie proclaimed loudly, rubbing his thumbs and fingers together. “Fair exchange of goods.”
Finally the man reacted. Thumping the flat of the ax in his free hand, he said, “Tree. Over there.” He waited for them to locate it with their gazes. “Tall man. Stick sword. Then talk trade.”
His accent was heavy and his command of Common incomplete, but Raif understood him well enough. Leaving Addie’s side Raif crossed over to the tree and drew Traggis Mole’s longknife. With a light jab he embedded the point in the bark. At eye level. Turning on his heel he locked gazes with the Trenchlander.
“Done,” Addie declared.
The Trenchlander did not allow them the fellowship of the tent and indicated they sit by the fire on sawn-off logs. Addie was offended by this lack of hospitality, but Raif preferred it. This way he could keep an eye on his blade. As the Trenchlander unhooked the pot suspended above the flames, Raif heard the sound of braying coming from inside the A-frame. Possibly a donkey or a mule. Once the lidded pot was at the Trenchlander’s feet, he deftly tossed three iron thumb cups into the fire. After a few seconds he fished them out one by one with his notched stick. When he poured broth into them it sizzled and spat, shooting out the aroma of meat and peppery herbs. The Trenchlander looked from Addie to Raif as the cups cooled.
Realizing he was expecting some courtesy from them, Raif said, “We are grateful for the hospitality of your hearth.”
It was sufficient. The Trenchlander nodded, placed the cups inside larger, leather cups and handed them to Addie and Raif. As was custom in such encounters, the guests drank first. Whatever it was—broth, tea, ale—it was good and spicy. Addie drank his quickly and then studied the dregs.
“Trade,” the Trenchlander said.
A moment passed where Raif realized he possessed nothing he would give in trade. The Orrl cloak. The Sull bow. The stormglass. Traggis Mole’s longknife. A man would have to kill him to get their hands on any one of them. Addie however seemed prepared for this and slid out one of his spare hareskin socks from his gear belt. A single swinging motion was sufficient to produce the clink of coins.
The Trenchlander waited. He was dressed in cut deerhide that had been sewn together with crude black stitches and an overtunic of black curly-haired sheepskin that was so stiff it hung from his shoulders like a piece of steamed wood. He was not young, and he had several broken veins in his eyes, and his facial hair was showing gray. The Sull blood showed through in the deep cavities beneath his cheekbones and the faint metallic sheen to his red skin.
“Foxglove,” Addie said, speaking very precisely. “Lily of the valley. Motherwort. Broom.”
He was asking for heart medicines, Raif realized. Before tea herbs. The clanholds had lost a good man when they cast out Addie Gunn.
The Trenchlander immediately nodded at the words foxglove and broom but the other two did not move him. He tapped his chest, indicating that he knew the herbs’ uses, and said, “Flylessi.” A nod toward the trees suggested that this might be the name of his trapping companion.
Addie nodded right back. The two were getting along like a house on fire. Raising his cup-within-a-cup, the cragsman said, “Did a fine job with the brewing.”
For a wonder the Trenchlander smiled. He had big teeth that showed yellow around the roots. He spoke the name of some herbs in Sull and a few minutes of engaged conversation followed where the two men sorted out their Common equivalents. Raif picked out the words wintergreen and chicory as he looked around the camp. Something had been skinned recently in the butcher’s circle and clumps of fat with the bristles still attached lay amidst the red snow. A piece of steel as thin as a cheesewire was resting atop a nearby stump. A flensing knife, and Raif thought it might have a design of quarter-moons burned into its haft.
Growing up at Blackhail he’d had no contact with Trenchlanders; Blackhail lay far to the west of the Sull Racklands and the two peoples rarely met or traded. Since then he’d learned little. He knew that many Trenchlanders made their livings from the woods—trapping, hunting, logging—but beyond that he had only vague ideas about who they were. They lived in Sull territories and possessed portions of Sull blood, but the pure Sull seemed to tolerate, more than welcome, them.
Feeling some pain in his shoulder, Raif stood. As long as he didn’t walk toward the tree holding Traggis Mole’s longknife, the Trenchlander shouldn’t object to him stretching his muscles around the camp. Best to avoid the flensing knife too. It didn’t leave much ground, but he could take a look at the woodpile and inspect the big skins stretched on the racks. Behind him, he heard the conversation waiver as the Trenchlanders’ concentration shifted toward the stranger walking between his possessions. Addie’s voice soon piped up with a question guaranteed to distract him. “What have your traps been yielding?”
Talk resumed. Raif crossed to the stretching racks. A large silver-backed grizzly pelt with the head still attached was pegged across the frame. Eyes and brain had been picked out of the skull cavity, but Raif saw that pink flesh still moldered in the nostrils.
Swear to me you will fetch the sword that can stop them. Swear you will bring it back and protect my people. Swear it.
Raif shivered. At the last moment Traggis Mole’s wooden nose had been gone. A hole in his face sucked in air.
Turning, he asked the Trenchlander, “Have you heard of the Red Ice?”
The two men were enjoying a second drink of broth and they both rested their cups and looked up at him. Addie frowned as if to say, So much for subtlety, lad. The Trenchlander was quiet, his eyes taking on the glazed look of a man who was thinking. Calculating.
A noise from the south of the camp distracted everyone, the crunch of tree bark being driven into snow. Raif glanced toward it, and saw an old man walking a white horse toward the camp. A beautiful, thickly maned Sull horse.
And then the world went black.
THIRTY-SEVEN
A Gift Horse
Dalhousie Selco inspected Bram’s sword, squinting at the watered-steel blade as if it was a document he was deciphering. He switched the blade over like a man turning a page. “Took some damage here. See?” Dalhousie glanced up at Bram. “Nicely fixed though. Looks like Brog Widdie’s work—must have been afore he fell head-over-heels for some Hailsgirl and left Dhoone.” Bram had never heard of Brog Widdie, and Dalhousie saw thi
s in his face. “Used to be a smith at Dhoone in your da’s time. Youngest master in the clanholds, known for his work with watered steel. Course Blackhail doesn’t have any such fancy stuff. Word is that Widdie spends his days making pots.”
Flicking the midway point in the blade with his index finger, Dalhousie made the steel ring. “It’s a bonnie weapon, no doubt about it. Maybe in a year I’ll let you use it.” With that, the swordmaster at Castlemilk sheathed the blade in the empty wooden scabbard at his waist.
Bram stared at the scabbard, his mouth slightly open. Dalhousie raised his eyebrows, urging him to spit out any objections so they could both get on to other business. The swordmaster was dressed in a short cloak of glazed nut-brown leather and a pair of heavy-duty wool pants bloused into black boots. The hourglass hanging from its chain around his neck was still. Time had ended.
They were standing in the Churn Hall which was the primary second-floor chamber in the Milkhouse. The fifteen-foot ceilings were hung with ironwork: cranes, cages, hoists, meat hooks and trammels. Emergency supplies such as hay, sacks of grain, quartered logs, barrels of oil and ale and cured sides of ox were suspended high in the vaults for safekeeping. Wooden pickets, loosely held together with leather straps, were piled against two of the four walls. Enoch Odkin said they would be used as makeshift cattle pens if the Milkhouse was ever attacked and cattle had to be brought inside. Crates, rolls of felt, a huge net crowded with caltraps that looked like iron starfish, shelves packed with boxes and scrolls, and an entire fully-assembled ballista lay against the chamber’s other walls. The large central space was clear, and used for weapons practice, banquets, warrior parleys and other gatherings. The milkstone floor had been overlaid with packed river sand, and four giant fox-head windows set deep into the hall’s external wall let in bleak northern light.
Dalhousie had trained Bram hard for an hour before ordering him to go fetch his personal sword. Up until now Bram had fought with a workmanlike iron chopper that the swordmaster had assigned to him on the first day. When Bram returned to the Churn Hall with Mabb’s watered steel sword he had been expecting to use it. Not have it commandeered by Dalhousie Selco.
“What you waiting for, Cormac? We’re done here. Tomorrow at dawn on the court.”
It was a dismissal. Bram looked at the hare’s head pommel of Mabb’s sword, now sticking out from Dalhousie’s hard-sided scabbard. It had cost him a lot to own that sword. And though he hadn’t much wanted it when it had been given to him as a parting gift from his brother Robbie, he couldn’t very well give it up without a fight. “That’s mine.”
“Aye,” agreed Dalhousie, kneeling as he wrapped his own sword in a sleeve of felt. “I never said it wasn’t.”
There seemed to be something in these words that Bram couldn’t understand. For a man stealing a weapon in broad daylight Dalhousie looked remarkably bullish. “Go,” he said.
Bram considered his options. None seemed good. He was sweating fiercely from the training session, and he’d been bashed so many times around the head that he wasn’t certain he was capable of rational thought. He did know that you didn’t pick a fight with a swordmaster unless you were pretty sure you could beat him. And then there was Millard Flag to consider. The head dairyman was awaiting his presence in the dairy, and after yesterday’s bawling-out Bram didn’t think it would be a good idea to be late.
As he turned to leave, Dalhousie said to him, “You’re getting better on your feet, but you need to work on blocking. Fifty bull rings by tomorrow.”
Bram nodded. A bull ring was a training sequence where you moved through a full circle while swinging your sword on its blade axis. Fifty would take some time.
Pol Burmish was entering the Churn Hall as Bram left. The tattooed and gray-haired warrior had drawn his sword in anticipation of a fight. He and Dalhousie often sparred together, keeping one another on their toes, and it was custom for a small crowd to gather and watch as they went through their paces. “Day to you, Cormac,” Pol said, as he passed.
Bram nodded an acknowledgment and headed downstairs. Cormac. He was getting used to the name now and it no longer caught him off guard. Bram Cormac, son of Mabb: that was how he was known here. Pretty much everyone in the roundhouse was aware he was Robbie Dun Dhoone’s brother, but apart from a few clan maids who teased him about it and Nathaniel Shayrac, the guide’s assistant, who seemed to think it gave Bram an unfair advantage, no one ever mentioned it. Mabb Cormac was known and respected as a fine swordsman, and it was he who people named when commenting on Bram’s kin. It felt strange but also good. At Dhoone he had been constantly measured against Robbie; his skin judged too dark, his shoulders too narrow, his height insufficient. Every time he had been introduced to someone as Robbie’s brother he had seen disappointment in their eyes. At Castlemilk he was just another yearman, expected to work long hours, stay out of trouble, and keep up with his weapons training.
It was something Bram had not expected, this everyday acceptance. After he had spoken First Oath on the banks of the Milk, Wrayan Castlemilk had stood with her skirt hem floating in the water and said to him, “Now you are a Castleman for a year.” Bram was only now beginning to realize the power of those words.
Reaching the ground floor, Bram decided not to risk the temptation of the kitchens and headed out the main door instead. Yesterday Millard Flagg had caught him pouring fresh milk into a vat that hadn’t been submerged for sufficient time in the boiler. The punishment for this gross violation of dairy law had consisted of something the head dairyman liked to call “pat watch,” which involved a lot more forking than watching, and left a man smelling so bad that afterward he had to roll in the snow. Besides, there was usually food in the dairy. Cheese, curds, yogurt: you could scrounge something milky most days.
It had snowed a couple of inches in the night and Enoch Odkin and Beesweese were on shovel duty, clearing the front court of snow. Enoch waved to him, and Bram considered asking the yearman about Dalhousie’s strange behavior with the sword, but decided he didn’t have time.
Hunching up his shoulders against the cold, he rushed down the Milkhouse steps. Directly ahead, the bargeman was pulling a man and his horse across the river. The horse’s dark brown coat was so glossy it looked varnished. Its owner, who was standing talking to the bargeman as he cranked the rope, was dressed in a long wheat-colored saddle coat that was belted at the waist. He was holding something dark in his hand; it might have been a pair of gloves or daypack. As Bram watched, the stranger’s gaze turned toward him. It seemed a deliberate thing, as if the man had known Bram was there yet had delayed looking at him until he was good and ready. His eyes were yellow-green.
Bram turned away. A sharp breeze was channeling east along the Milk and it made him shiver. The dairy was situated to the rear of the roundhouse so he broke into a run to keep warm. It was two hours before noon and the sun was as small and pale as a chip of bone.
Last night’s snow squeaked under his feet as he neared the first dairyshed. The hard standing would need to be shoveled so the cows who were due to calf could be walked, and Bram thought he might just as well get to it. Popping his head around the door, he called out a greeting. It was between milking times and the dairymaids were standing about eating fancies topped with dried cherries, and supping on watery mead they brewed themselves. They all swore they never drank milk.
“Bramee,” they cried in chorus, teasing. There were five of them, dressed in stiff white aprons over blue dresses, and dainty caps that were worn in defiance of Millard Flag. The head dairyman would have preferred something bigger. “Bramee.”
Every morning without fail this greeting accomplished two things: made the girls giggle uncontrollably at their own wit, and caused Bram’s face to turn red. He couldn’t work out why, after nearly a month, this continued to happen.
As soon as he’d unhooked the snow shovel from its peg behind the door, he went back outside. This morning’s training session with Dalhousie had concentrated on the tech
niques necessary to block blows aimed at the head and chest, and Bram’s ribs had taken a beating. He thought he might have blocked one in ten. Dalhousie was fast and he had countless subtle ways of varying an attack. They looked the same, but when they hit you each one felt different. Bram had given up worrying about bruises and now dealt with them the same way as Enoch Odkin, Beesweese and Trotty Pickering did: covered them in pig’s lard and boasted about them. It seemed to work.
The new snow was fluffy and only a quarter-foot deep, and it didn’t pain his ribs much to shift it. As he was finishing off, Millard Flag came out and informed him he was needed for heavy lifting in the milk room. “Boiler and count to ten a dozen times,” he said wagging a finger.
That was the number of seconds that you had to count off before you could remove the churns and steel pails from the hot-water bath and reuse them. Yesterday Bram had stopped count at eighty-four.
The milk room was large and noisy. Worktables lined the space, and both sets of double doors—front and back—were kept open throughout the day. Two dairymaids were skimming the cream from the new pails and a third was pouring milk through a wire strainer. Millard Flag and his apprentice, Little Coll, were tilting one of the big cheese vats to pour off the brine. Bram was told to carry various items—two sealed churns, some trays of newly blocked butter wrapped in cloths, and a stack of cheese in tin molds—down to the cold room which lay directly beneath the milk room. After that he was to head outside and feed the boiler fire.
Bram was on his third run down the ancient stone steps when Millard called his name. Hands full with a tray of butter, Bram called out he would be up in a minute. The cold room was dark and low-ceilinged, with crumbly stone walls and a limewashed floor. It smelled like fat and raw earth. None of the dairymaids liked to come here, and they usually sent for Bram or Little Coll if they needed something brought aboveground.
