by J. V. Jones
He was silent for a while, guiding his bay around a thicket of frozen thorns. Just when Raif had given up hope of an answer, he spoke again, his voice lower than the wind. “There came a point when I knew you couldn’t be stopped, just knew it in my old Lok bones. To carry on fighting would have only brought Duff and myself more harm. Yet it was more than that.” Angus sighed heavily. Bits of ice on his saddle coat slid into his lap. “I have a trace of the old skill in me, Raif. Just a wee bit, enough to sense when others around me use sorcery, and a few small things like that. I’m not a magic user, don’t hear me wrong. I couldna shift air and light if me own life depended on it—and if we’re ever in a situation where that sort of thing is called for, then remember Angus Lok isn’t your man. As I said, though, I can sense things when I have a mind to. And that night when you kept fighting and fighting, butting old Duff in the teeth and kneeing me in the knackers, I felt something—”
“Sorcery?”
“No. Fate.” Angus held the word a long moment, then shrugged. “Call it an old ranger’s fancy if you like. Call it bloody delirium brought on by having my balls disbanded. All I know is there came a moment when I thought to myself, As terrible as this is, it’s meant to be.”
Raif took a breath. Pain from his stitches and blistered hand made him wince. Fate. He wanted none of it. Yet even as his thoughts pounced, ready to attack the idea, fragments of memory slipped through his mind. A red lake, frozen, a forest of silver blue trees, and a lightless city without people: The places the guidestone had showed him.
“Fate pushes,” Angus said, breaking through Raif’s thoughts. “Sometimes, if you lie under the stars at night, you can feel it. Children sense it—that’s why they always get so excited at the thought of camping out. They know, yet can never put it into words. As for myself, I’ve felt fate only a few times in my life, and always it made me change my course. The stovehouse was one such push.”
“Yet I might have died.”
“Aye. And I canna say if I would have stepped in to save you.” Angus turned and looked at Raif, his coppery eyes flecked with green. “You know that word of what you did will reach every corner of the clanholds. To slay three Bluddsmen single-handed is a feat not long forgotten.”
Raif shook his head. He hated what he had become when he’d walked through the stovehouse door. There was no pride in slaying men so; he had been little more than a wolf tearing out throats. It sickened him to think of it. He had a memory of the snow outside of Duff’s saturated with blood. “Blackhail will sing no songs in remembrance of me.”
“Maybe not. But thirty pairs of eyes saw what you did, and songs don’t always need to be sung to be heard.” Angus stared hard at Raif a moment, then kicked the bay forward onto ground that had once been marshy and wet and was now fast with ice.
Raif followed after. Soon they came upon a frozen stream and took the cleared and frozen path it offered them through the hills and ravines of the taiga’s edge. By the time they left the ice to make camp for the night, the trees surrounding them had stopped being a forest and become a loose collection of woodland instead. A quarter moon rode low on the horizon, making the stream ice glow like blue fire.
“What will happen now between Blackhail and Bludd?” Raif asked, banking snow against the base of the tent to weigh it against the wind. His hands ached as he worked, yet the pain was a small thing. This was the first night there had been no stovehouse to stop at . . . the clanholds were coming to an end.
Angus had peeled off his gloves and was busy stripping wood. His knife never stopped dancing as he spoke. “You know what will happen, Raif. War. It’s in the clanholds’ nature to make battle. Look at your clan boast: We do not hide and we do not cower. And we will have our revenge. And Dhoone’s: We are Dhoone, Clan Kings and clan warriors alike. War is our mother. Steel is our father. And peace is but a thorn in our side. Bludd claims that death is their companion, Castlemilk swears they’ll be fighting the day the Stone Gods shatter the world, and even cursed Clan Gray holds that loss is something they know and do not fear.” Angus sniffed. “Quite brings a tear to a man’s eye.”
Raif frowned at him, yet he seemed not to notice. Resting his blade, he said, “The point is, the clanholds have been at each other’s throats for three thousand years—probably more if you count the time before Irgar drove them north across the Ranges. Clan Withy and Clan Haddo keep the histories, and believe me, those histories are grim. Grim. You’ve fought yourselves, the Sull, the city men, the Forsworn, Trenchlanders—anything you could see and shake a stick at and a few things you could not. The past forty years have been different, and you have the old Dhoone chief Airy Dhoone and Dagro Blackhail’s father, Ewan, to thank for that. Both grew up during the River Wars, both lost kin on the banks of the Wolf and the Easterly Flow. Airy lost his sister Anne, whom he loved above all others, and Ewan lost two of his three sons. Such losses shape men. Airy rode the thirty leagues from the Flow to the Dhoonehouse with Anne’s body laid over the back of his mare. Her death fell hard upon him. Some even say it turned him mad, and that he kept Anne’s dried-up corpse on a chair made of willow wood next to his bed.”
Angus smiled softly, reached for another log to strip. “With chiefs, who will ever know the truth? But both Airy Dhoone and Ewan Blackhail did withdraw to their roundhouses, ordered their clansmen to retreat, turned their backs on their gains, and left their war-sworn clans to battle amongst themselves. Gullit Bludd did well by them, as did Roy Ganmiddich and Adalyn Croser. All got the land and water they wanted.
“Five seasons went by where Ewan Blackhail and Airy Dhoone watched as their war-sworn clans pushed north against their borders. By this time Dagro had grown to manhood and taken his first yearman’s oath, and Vaylo Bludd had put a dagger to his father’s heart and taken over the lording of that clan. That was when Ewan and Airy began to see a future where the clanholds were ruled by Clan Bludd. They knew what sort of man Vaylo Bludd was, that early, even before he started calling himself the Dog Lord and braiding his hair in the manner of the Dhoone Kings.
“Vaylo Bludd shook Airy Dhoone and Ewan Blackhail from their mourning. Both chiefs took command of their war-sworn clans. They met at the House on the Flow, with the river brown as mud beneath them, and brought an end to the war by speaking a treaty there. They met only the once, yet both men spent the rest of their chiefships building bonds of fosterage between their clans that have stayed in place to this day.”
Raif nodded. He knew this well enough. Only two winters earlier Drey had been set to leave for a year’s fosterage at Dhoone. Mannie Dhoone, nephew to the Dhoone chief, Maggis Dhoone, had been set to come to Blackhail in Drey’s stead. But Mannie was thrown by his horse while out hunting in the blue thorngrass south of the Dhoonehold, and both his legs were broken, and the fosterage had never gone through.
Standing and brushing ice from his oilskin, Raif said, “Dhoone will join with Blackhail to defeat Clan Bludd, won’t they?”
Angus let the last of the logs fall to the snow, then reached inside his coat for his rabbit flask. In no hurry to drink, he simply turned the flask in his hand. “I canna say, Raif. Dhoone is scattered and broken. Maggis and his sons are dead, and no one knows when a new chief will be named. They lost three hundred clansmen and yearmen in that raid. They lost their forge, their stockpile of pig iron, their livestock.” Angus shook his head. “Dhoone is as close to being lost as Clan Morrow was on the eve of Burnie Dhoone’s wedding.”
Raif touched his measure of powdered guidestone, as all clansmen did when the name of the Lost Clan was spoken. Clan Morrow had once stood east of the Dhoonehold, rivaling Bludd and Blackhail in size. The Dark King, Burnie Dhoone, spent thirty years destroying the clan when his young wife, Maida, left him for Shann Morrow, eldest son of the Morrow chief. Only outsiders such as Angus ever called Clan Morrow by its name. To clansmen it was always the Lost Clan. Raif remembered Tem telling him once how he and Dagro Blackhail had come upon the ground where the Morrowhouse had
once stood. Nothing remains, Raif, not even a cairnstone, and no plants but white heather will root there.
Angus took a swig from his flask, swallowed, then took one more. “Blackhail will fight alone. Dhoone has battles and demons of its own. The war-sworn clans may help, yet I have a feeling that they’ll be too busy saving their own necks to worry about Blackhail and Dhoone.”
Raif looked hard at Angus. The wind had dropped, and the hard frost turned each of his uncle’s breaths into a spell of ice and light. “What do you mean?”
“Naught except that in all wars it’s every man for himself.” Slipping the flask beneath his coat, Angus stooped to pick up the stripped logs. “I’d better get a fire started or we’ll be eating cold kidneys tonight. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve a fancy that once a kidney’s been left to cool overnight, it makes a better weapon than it does a meal.” He grinned. “Put one of them in a slingshot and I’m sure we could bring down a bird. A big one, mind. Maybe even a goose.”
Raif watched as Angus built the fire close to the tent’s entrance. It wasn’t worth restating the question. Angus Lok said nothing he had no mind to. He knew more about the coming war, that was certain, but he would speak it only in his own good time. Bringing his hands to his face, Raif blew on his cold, aching fingers. It had been full dark for several hours, yet he was still careful not to turn his gaze north. Clan was behind him, and that was the way it had to be.
After a time, he made his way to the tent. As he crawled through the flap, he felt the stitches on his chest pull at his skin. It took him a moment to deal with the pain. He stripped off his oilskin and eased himself down amid the blankets and elkhides. He had no desire for food, neither hot nor cold, and settled his body into the position that caused the least hurt and waited for sleep to come.
Blackhail will fight alone.
He did not rest easy, but he slept.
The next morning when he woke and crawled from the tent to relieve himself, he caught a glimpse of a new landscape far below the southern rise. A massive, partially frozen lake stretched as far as he could see into the distance. Its shore was gray with grease ice, yet its center was black, oily, and steaming with frost smoke.
“The Black Spill,” murmured Angus, coming to stand at Raif’s side. “The deepest lake in the Territories. Ille Glaive claims its shore to the east. We’ll be heading around its western shore, toward the Ranges.”
Raif nodded, suddenly acutely aware of how far he was from home. He had never been this far south, never before stepped upon soil that did not belong to a clan.
Effie, Drey . . .
Abruptly he turned and went to feed and water Moose. They broke camp soon after, heading southwest and then south toward the towering peaks of Spire Vanis. The weather warmed and the winds quickened and storm clouds began to gather in the north.
TWENTY-THREE
Vaingate
Ash scratched her scalp. Mites, she thought as she watched the distant arch of Vaingate, got everywhere. And no amount of wind and frost could kill them. She supposed she should be horrified at the idea of things living on her body, but she hadn’t eaten in over three days and she was seriously beginning to consider them as a meal.
That thought made her smile in a grim way, and that made the ice sore on her lip crack open. Seconds later she tasted her own blood, warm and briny like salt water. Eating snow wasn’t a good idea. She wished someone had told her that before her mouth had gotten sore. Still, it did have its advantages. Ash couldn’t imagine anyone recognizing her now, not even Penthero Iss. Her hair was dark and greasy, her clothes were stiff with mud, and her skin felt like something a carpenter might use to sand a chair. Heaven only knew what she looked like. She hadn’t seen her reflection in days and had now reached the point where she was quite sure she didn’t want to.
Her stomach rumbled noisily, pulling her thoughts back to Vaingate. It was early morning and the rising sun had turned the gate’s three-story arch into a bridge of golden light. Just watching the sunlight flow across the bias-cut limestone filled Ash with such longing, it stopped her hunger dead.
Reach, mistressss.
So cold here, so dark. Reach.
The voices jumped her, beating against her mind like a flock of dark birds. Ash fought, as she always did, yet more and more these days she had less and less to fight with. A razor’s edge of darkness cut her thoughts, splitting and resplitting until there was nothing but a thin line left.
She blinked awake. Sunlight streamed into her eyes, dazzling and making her feel sick. Pain squeezed along her forehead as she rolled sideways and vomited onto the snow. Wiping her mouth clean, she forgot about the ice sore and winced as the edge of her hand knocked the scab. When she was ready, she looked at the sky again. The sun was now high in the south. It was midday. She had lost four hours. Four.
Frightened, she sat upright. It’s all right, she told herself. No one could have spotted me up here.
She was sitting on the flat roof of a broken-down and abandoned tannery. Ever since she had discovered the building a week ago, it had become her favorite place in all the city. The area around Vaingate was crowded with disused buildings, but all were carefully chained and boarded to prevent anyone in need of shelter from breaking in. The tannery’s windows were nailed shut, and it had enough chains around its doors to contain a prison full of thieves, yet at some point the weight of snow on the roof had caused a portion of the upper floor to collapse. A season of floods, frosts, and thaws had gone on to break the walls, and it hadn’t been difficult at all to find a way in.
Unlike most other buildings in the city that were built with sloping roofs to shunt snow, the tannery roof was mostly flat. Ash supposed the flat sections had been used for pegging out tanned skins to dry. She could still see some of the remaining pegs, poking up from the rooftop like stone weeds.
It wasn’t a very high building, yet its position a quarter league north of the city wall afforded it a good view of Vaingate. It soothed Ash to come here and just look. Yet now, glancing at the boarded-up buildings across the way and the lifeless streets below, she knew she couldn’t risk coming here again. This wasn’t the first time the voices had made her black out, and it wouldn’t be the last. They were getting stronger . . . and they had learned ways to reach her while she was awake.
Ash shivered. Four hours. What if she had not woken? What if she had lain here, unseen and undiscovered, all day? One night spent outside would kill her. Last night it had been so cold that she had felt the saliva freeze against her teeth.
A sound halfway between a grunt and a sob puffed from her lips. She desperately needed to drink, but the thought of eating more snow made her mouth curl. Slowly she struggled to her feet. She tried not to look at her body as she brushed the snow from her cloak, but bony edges kept catching her eye. Stupidly, ridiculously, it was her breasts that worried her the most. Just two weeks ago they had been heavy and round, growing so quickly they ached. Now they were small again, barely there. It was as if her body had reverted to childhood, leaving only her hands and face to age.
Straightening her back, she turned into the wind and pulled the odors of the city through her nostrils. Saliva pooled in her mouth as she tasted the scents of woodsmoke and charred fat. She was fiercely hungry. Money had run out five days ago, and unless she sold her cloak and boots she had no chance of getting more. Stealing scraps of food from the charcoal burners who stood on street corners day and night, grilling bacon and goose sausages over their dark-fires, was becoming increasingly tempting to Ash. Yet she knew from watching children quicker and cleverer than she that being caught was another horror, every bit as dreadful as starvation. Whenever a charcoal burner caught a child robbing, he would hold their hands over his grill and sear their skin like a piece of meat. At first when Ash had seen this happen, she’d wondered why the children took the risk. Now she knew. The smell of grilled fat and onions was enough to drive a starving child insane.
Walking a little bit to tes
t the strength of her legs, she felt her gaze returning to Vaingate. The gate tower looked so quiet—only one brother-in-the-watch that she could see—and the portcullis itself was up. It would be so easy to walk over there and slip through. No one would recognize her; that much was certain. And she knew from watching the gate for the past few days that no special arrangements were in place: just one sworn brother, occasionally two at changing watches. Even the beggars and street vendors never changed. Surely it would be safe?
Ash’s stomach growled as she reached the roof wall. Soft cramps had begun to sound in her lower abdomen, and she wondered if her second menses were due. She had to take the gate now. The voices might come back at any time, and she didn’t know how much longer she could fight them, didn’t know if she could survive blacking out another time. Two hours yesterday. Four today.
Ash shook her head. It was now or never.
Decision made, she felt herself filling up with a splintery, last-stand kind of strength. Once she had been through the gate and seen the place where she had been found, everything would change. She would be free to leave the city and go where she pleased. She could read and write; those skills had their uses. Perhaps she could find a position as a ladies’ maid or traveling companion or even a maiden scribe. Maybe she could travel east to the Cloistress Tower at Owl’s Reach and ask the green-robed sisters for asylum. If only it wasn’t winter . . . and so cold that the wind blew your breath back as ice.
Ash drew her cloak close as she made her way down through the treacherous landscape of the tannery. She was Ash March, Foundling, left outside Vaingate to die.
“Er . . . nay, lad. I think we’ll be taking the back door in.” Angus grinned at Raif in the way he always did when he was about to do something that made no sense. “A wee hike around the back of the city will do the horses a power of good. Work the colic from their bellies.”
