by J. V. Jones
“On certain days if you look northeast, you can see a light above the hills. Ganmiddich has a tower, though I can’t say as they built it, and they light fires in the topmost chamber so the blaze can be seen throughout the North.”
Ash glanced at Raif. He was down from Moose, busy tending to the gelding’s nose and mouth. He gave no indication of having heard what Angus said, yet sound traveled well in the makeshift hall of pines.
Angus began filling snufflebags with oats. “Last time I saw the tower lit was when the old chief Ork Ganmiddich died. They doused the timbers with milk of magna to make the flames burn white.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Ash saw Raif’s hand come down to touch the silver-capped horn he wore at his belt. He’s showing his respect, she thought.
Perhaps Angus noticed the gesture too, for he didn’t speak anymore about the tower or the clans, simply walked among the horses, bringing snowmelt and grain.
Ash worked the cramps from her legs by stamping her feet in the snow. After a while Raif came over bearing food. There was square-cut oatbread that Raif called bannock, crumbly white cheese, cold black bacon, hard apples, and flat beer. They ate it sitting on a storm-felled pine, and it tasted like a feast. Angus joined them halfway, consuming everything with gusto except the beer. “I canna do it,” he cried, slapping a hand upon his heart. “I’ll drink warm beer, cold beer, beer thickened with oats, iron filings, and eggs, but I canna drink a flat brew. A man must draw the line somewhere.”
It was good to laugh. Angus passed around his rabbit flask, insisting that both Ash and Raif take a mouthful of some “real warmth” instead. Ash drank, though the contents tasted like lamp fuel and smelled of dead trees. “That’s the birch,” Angus explained as Ash’s eyes watered. “There’s a curl of bark in the bottom of the flask. It’ll make you grow as tall as a tree . . . or is it as thick as one? I canna remember which.”
Ash grinned. It was impossible not to like Angus Lok. Handing back the flask, she stood and brushed the snow from her skirt. “Just going to stretch my legs a bit.”
“I’ll come with you,” Raif said, making to stand.
Angus put a hand on his arm. “I think our wee lassie of the ice needs a spot of privacy.”
Raif look puzzled for a moment, then understanding dawned on his face. Quickly he settled himself back on the log.
Angus’ copper eyes twinkled as he turned to Ash and said, “Go ahead. We’ll be here if you need us.”
Unable to decide if she was embarrassed or amused, Ash walked away. Angus Lok knew a lot about girls.
Finding a sprawling tangle of dogwoods, she relieved herself in the cover they created. The fastenings on her new clothes caused her much irritation, and her fingers were half-frozen and nearly useless. By the time she arrived back in the clearing, both Raif and Angus were mounted and ready to move on. Snufflebags and pigskin water buckets had been packed away, and all that was left of the meal they had eaten was a handful of brown apple cores in the snow.
Snowshoe showed no signs of weariness and held herself still while Ash mounted. Determined not to let her own exhaustion show, Ash made a point of sitting high in the saddle as Angus took them north through the pines. Eventually they came upon a game trail that led west, and Angus seemed content to follow where it led. They rode for some time through the dark hours of night, passing abandoned farm buildings, frozen streams, and forests steaming with mist, then Angus surprised everyone by signaling a halt.
Turning due east, he stood high in his stirrups and looked back along the path they’d just traveled. Shaking his head, he said, “It’s not the finest ghost trail I’ve ever set, but it’ll just have to do.” He kicked the bay forward. “As it’s high time we turned for home.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Finding Lost Things
Meeda Longwalker’s dogs found the raven’s frozen corpse beneath two foot of glaciated snow. She was minking in the new-fallen snow nineteen leagues east of the Heart, when her team of terriers began excavation on a new set. Meeda had been minking on the high plateau known as Old Man’s Rib for fifty years, and she knew the moment her dogs started digging that there was nothing but hard rock beneath the snow.
She nearly called them off. Across the empty streambed, on the thickly wooded bank where ten thousand years of willow and spruce growth had broken down the bedrock into fine powdery soil, had been her intended destination: soft land where she knew a mother and her three cubs lived. Yet the dogs were excited about something, and there was always a chance of a carcass. Meeda had known mink bitches to tear limbs and genitals from male mink babies in a frenzy of protective mothering, then leave them for dead. A frozen and bloody mink pelt was no good for a cloak or a coat, but it could be washed and used as lining for gloves, game bags, and hoods. It was worth the time and effort of pursuit. Barely.
Slipping a strip of inner birch bark between loose lips long drained of pigment by age, Meeda stood back and waited for her dogs to finish digging. Her terriers, much maligned by male hunters for their small size, small brains, and small muzzles, shredded the snow with claws so sharp and strong that even now after fifty years of living with their breed, Meeda feared to let them close to her face. The male hunters were right: They did have small brains. But Meeda Longwalker had long realized that a small brain acutely focused was often more effective than a large one split by many thoughts.
When she caught her first glimpse of the dark form beneath the snow, Meeda spat out the birch bark and issued a few choice curses to the Lord of Creatures Hunted. Dark was not what she wanted. Dark was not what Slygo Toothripper had promised to trade her for a pair of good new boots and a metal spearhead. Slygo wanted white. Dark mink pelts were worth double their weight in arrowheads. White pelts were worth ten times that and more.
“Mashi!” Meeda cried to the terriers, halting them instantly. She would waste no more time digging a dark and bloody carcass from the snow.
The terriers feared Meeda even more than they loved to dig flesh, and to a dog all stepped aside from the excavation, allowing their mistress space to inspect their work. Meeda prided herself on being the greatest living minker in the Racklands. Fifty years of experience, eleven generations of dogs, five thousand leagues walked and another ten thousand ridden, and only twenty-eight days lost to childbirth, grief, and sickness. What man could boast such a record? As always before she had bagged her first catch of the day, Meeda was impatient with herself and her dogs, but she knew that certain rituals had to be maintained.
Terriers were like children: When they went to the trouble of excavating a den, a freshly killed carcass, or even a set of old bones, they needed to be praised for their efforts. Meeda looked down at four sets of dark eager eyes, and although she didn’t much feel like it she drew her icewood stick from her belt.
“What have we here?” she said, prodding at the topsnow covering the dark, mink-size carcass. Two sons she had birthed, yet their names had been spoken less than those four words.
Muscles in the terriers’ necks strained. One, a young pup barely eight months old, sprayed the snow with urine in his excitement. Meeda frowned. She would have to beat that out of him: What if a perfect white mink had lain dead instead of—
A raven.
Meeda Longwalker’s face cooled beneath her lynx hood as she upturned a clod of snow to reveal the blue gleam of a raven’s bill. Ill tidings. The thought came so swiftly, it was as if a stranger had leaned over her bent back and whispered the words in her ear. Meeda had half a mind to walk away, call her dogs to heel, and walk as fast as her knee joints would permit toward the empty streambed and the wooded bank. She was a minker, nothing more. It was not her place to deal in messages and omens. Yet even as she puffed herself up with excuses, she knew that it was her fate to find the raven and her duty to bring it home.
There would be no mink trapped today.
Speaking more harshly than was her wont to the terriers, she kept them at a distance while she finished the excavation
with her own gloved hands. The raven had been killed by a pair of hawks. Its eyes had been plucked out, and the soft black down on its throat was stiff with the shiny substance of dried blood. The hawks had attacked it in midflight, and the impact of the fall had severed its left wing and sent its rib cage smashing into its heart. Meeda clucked softly as she scraped away the snow. Hawks had little love for any predatory birds entering their territory, but seldom had she witnessed the result of such a violent attack. Never had she known them to take down a raven.
As she freed its lower body from the snow, Meeda noticed something silver and scaled, like fishskin, flash as it caught the winter light. Meeda Longwalker knew then that an ill omen was not the only thing the raven had brought to the Racklands. It had brought a message as well.
Stripping off her thick horseskin work gloves to reveal hands crossed with the scars of dozens of sharp mink teeth, Meeda dropped to her knees in the snow. Her knife was in her hand before she knew it. A package the size of a child’s little finger was bound to the raven’s left leg. The silver material was pikeskin—her hunter’s eyes could not help but pick out that one detail even as her mind was intent on something else. Should she open the package, read it?
The raven had come from a long way away, Meeda knew that. No one in the Racklands used pikeskin to bind messages to birds, and only two men in the Northern Territories used ravens to send them. The first man she knew little about; he was one of the Far Family and lived upon a distant western shore, where he feasted on the fat of the great whales in summer and sat deep within the ground, chewing sealskin, through the long winter nights. The second man was her son.
This message was for him, could only be for him. And judging from the desiccation of the raven’s corpse, it was already eleven days late.
Meeda Longwalker cut the message free. The dry, freezing winds had long robbed the bird of all its fluids, yet even now she did not forsake her minker’s caution: Never break the skin. It was foolishness, she knew, but there it was. She was too old to change her ways now.
Too old also to wait upon her son’s hands and eyes to open and read the message. It was for him—she could not and would not pretend otherwise—but her dogs had dug it from the snow. The find was hers. And in Meeda Longwalker’s adopted world of hunters, coursers, minkers, ferreters, badgerers, and trappers, that meant she could do with it what she wished.
With hands that were deceptively agile despite their age and scarring, Meeda slit the pikeskin package down the center where it had been fixed with fish glue. A piece of white bark, not dissimilar to the strip she had spat into the snow earlier, fell into her palm. It was soft, excellently worked with both saliva and some kind of animal fat she did not recognize. The message was burned into the wood.
Meeda read it slowly over minutes, though in truth it was barely two sentences long. Her father had been a learned man who believed in tutoring both his sons and his daughters in letters, lore, and history, but for as long as she could remember Meeda had valued freedom of her body more highly than freedom of her mind. As a child she had run from her lessons, even in full winter when her father and his High Speaker swore that the temperature outside was cold enough to kill a soft-skinned girl within minutes. Meeda had proven them all wrong, though now, in her old age, she felt a portion of shame for having mocked and disobeyed her father so completely and with such terrible joy. The High Speaker, unlike her father, still lived. He was the oldest man in the Racklands, second in power only to her son. He had no eyes, yet that did not stop Meeda from avoiding his blind gaze even now.
Shivering, she folded the message and slipped it into her game belt. The terriers, thinking she was reaching for her treat bag, began to snap and jostle for position. Meeda shook her head. No treats. Not today.
“Mis!” she told them. Home.
It was nineteen leagues back to the Heart of the Sull. Meeda Longwalker walked them no more quickly or slowly than normal, yet they cost her more and wore her more than any other leagues in her life. As the path rose from the valley floor and the white chalk cliffs of High Ground became visible above the Heart Fires, she spotted two mounted figures in the distance.
Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer.
Far Riders, returning from whatever journey her son had sent them on at Spring’s End. Meeda dropped her hand to the belt, felt the message carried there. The two men did not know it, but they would barely have time to bleed their horses and blacken their hands in the ashes of the Heart Fires. They would need to travel north now. Meeda Longwalker, Daughter of the Sull, had listened to her father’s teaching long enough to know that Far Riders responded to the silent summons of the gods.
They rode east through the night and much of the next day. A new dawn brought more snow and the kind of low, gusting winds that came from all directions and were impossible to guard against. The farther they traveled from Ille Glaive, the emptier the landscape became. Villages were rare occurrences, and the land became peopled with backbreaking rocks, frozen mudholes, and forests of tall, silent trees. Raif called it taiga. He said that much of the clanholds was like this.
They rested during the evening of the second day, making a cold camp some distance from a tiny village that boasted an alehouse, a dry forge, and an ancient retaining wall built to prevent snow and mud from sliding down the Bitter Hills and overrunning livestock and farms. A pair of ewes and their yearlings penned on a nearby slope were their only company as they slept through the night.
Ash was woken by Angus. It was still dark, but a blush of light on the southeast horizon told of imminent dawn. Ash had slept on a mattress of piled snow, wrapped in two layers of oilskins and wearing a mask of greased linen over her face. Frostbite was a real and constant danger, and at various points in the night she had been aware of hands touching her nose and cheeks through the cloth. Angus insisted on checking her now, his rough fingers feeling for any stiff or frozen skin. Raif saw to the horses, then laid out a breakfast of cold store. The bannock, which one night earlier had been soft and toasty, now had ice crystals at its heart.
While Ash and Raif filled the waterskins with snow, Angus hiked onto high ground and surveyed the surrounding land. Now, finally, Ash knew the reason behind his constant watchfulness: He didn’t want any uninvited guests following him home.
He hadn’t trusted Heritas Cant, not fully. Ash clearly remembered him telling Cant that they would travel north and then west. Only he’d never had any intention of doing such a thing. As soon as he’d judged it safe he had turned east instead. “Just a wee visit,” he had said last night. “It’ll only slow us down by three days—a day there, a day back, and one in the middle for some decent rest under a safe roof and a spot of scolding from my wife.”
Ash had accepted his decision without question. She could not stop Angus and Raif from visiting their family. How could she argue against the wish of two men to see their kin—she, who knew nothing of fathers and daughters and cousins and aunts? Cant’s wardings would stretch the extra days. They had to.
The tail end of the storm had passed in the night, and the snow underfoot was still finding its level. The going was hard, but sunlight broke through the clouds at midmorning, creating a world of sparkling blue frost. Everyone’s spirits lifted. Angus hummed a selection of tunes as he rode; Ash recognized one of them as “Badger in the Hole.” Raif remained silent, but his hands were lighter on the reins and he often leaned forward to scratch Moose’s neck and say some bit of nonsense to the horse. Watching the men’s obvious excitement about the homecoming, Ash felt herself growing nervous. The thought of Angus’ daughters knotted her stomach.
“Raif,” Angus said as the snowbound roofs of a small village appeared on the horizon, “what say you take out that borrowed bow of yours and bring down something fitting for Darra’s pot. She’d have my hamstrings for slingshots if I brought her two extra guests and no extra food.”
Cords rose in Raif’s neck as his uncle spoke, and Ash thought he might refuse. Yet after a
moment he reached back over Moose’s quarters and unfastened the bow from its case. The bow was one of the few things that had not been lost by the lake. It was a thing of beauty, horn and wood fitted together and then worked to a high sheen. Raif stripped down to bare hands to brace it. He worked quickly, tying knots, warming the wax-coated string, kneading the belly of the bow as he curved it. The bowcase now boasted a dozen straight, well-tilled arrows, and Raif drew one at random and put its head to the bow.
Something in his face changed as he scanned the surrounding territory for game. Ash saw nothing, only blackstone pines, hemlocks, bladdergrass, and snow, yet Raif’s gaze focused on the spaces between things, and his eyes flickered as if they were tracking invisible beasts. Minutes passed. Angus busied himself by scraping the dirt from his fingernails with the tip of his belt knife. Ash could not take her eyes from Raif. He became something else when he had a bow in his hands, something she tried but could find no name for.
Thuc! The bow thwacked back, rattling as Raif’s hand absorbed the recoil. Ash followed Raif’s gaze but could see nothing. No creature cried out in pain or shock. A smell, like sulfur or copper, filled her nose and mouth. By the time she swallowed it was gone.
Angus, who Ash guessed hadn’t really been interested in cleaning his nails at all, turned the bay toward the shot. Even as the bay’s hooves sent snow flying, Raif released a second arrow.
“A pair of ptarmigan should be enough,” he said softly, after a moment.
Ash did not know how to reply. She nodded quickly.
He turned to look at her. His drawhand was free of the bow, and she could see the pink, herringbone flesh of a recently healed injury on his palm. “You look frightened.”
She tried a smile but failed. “I’ve seen you shoot things before.”
“That’s no answer.”
