Sword of Shadows 02 – Jones, JV

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Book Information:

Genre: Epic Fantasy

Author: J.V. Jones

Name: A Fortress of Grey Ice

Series: Sword of Shadows 2

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PROLOGUE

 

Diamonds and Ice

 

The diamond pipe was hot and stinking, and when the water hit the walls the rock exploded, spraying the diggers with a cloud of dust and steam. Scurvy Pine swore with venom. Hard blisters of sweat rose on his forehead and he wiped them away with a greasy rag. “Fires have only been out an hour. What do those bastards think we are? Crabs to be steamed for the pot?”

    Crope made no reply. He and Scurvy had been working the pipes together for eight years, and they’d been scalded worse in their time. A lot worse. Besides, speaking took up space for remembering, and Crope had important things to remember today. “Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. You be ready when I give the word.”

    Placing the empty bucket down on the blue mud of the pipe floor, Crope watched the rock wall as it continued to crack and pop. The fire set by the free miners heated the rock, making it split and break. Water hauled up from the Drowned Lake cooled the walls so quickly, boulders the size of war carts shattered to dust. “Softening,” the free miners called it, making the pipe ready for the diggers’ picks. Crope could see nothing soft about it. Mannie Dun had broken his back pickaxing a seam last spring. Crope remembered carrying the old digger away. Mannie’s legs jerked against his belly as the wasn’t for safety’s sake; Crope didn’t know much but he knew that. The sealing was to keep the diggers away. Before Mannie’s spine had twisted and popped, the tip of his ax had lodged in a rock wall speckled with flecks of red stone. Red Eyes, the miners called them. Red Eyes meant diamonds. .. and diamonds were the business of free men, not slaves.

    “Pick to the wall, giant man. Don’t go giving me good reason to spread my whip.”

    Crope knew better than to look at the man who spoke. The guards in the pipe were known as Bull Hands, on account of their oiled and flame-hardened whips. Scurvy said they could take the hands off a man before he even heard the sound of bullhide moving through air. Crope dreamed of that sometimes; of hands not attached to any living man, clutching his neck and face.

    Diamond rock split and crumbled to nothing as Crope took his pick to the wall. Water still warm from contact with the heated stone ran through the cracks at his feet. Above, the pipe twisted up and up, its walls gashed by stairs and pathways hewn from the live rock. Tunnels and caves pitted the sides, marking seams long run dry or walls overmined to collapse. The entrances to the older tunnels had been plugged with a makeshift mortar of horsehair and clay, for there were some in the pipe who feared shadow things rising from the depths.

    Rope bridges spanned the pipe’s breadth, their wooden treads warped by steam, their fibers ticking as the wind moved a thousand feet above. The sky seemed far away, and the sun farther still. Even on a clear day in midwinter, little light found its way into the pipe.

    Down below, in the lower tier of the pipe, where a ring of pitch lamps burned with white-hot flames, the hags were at work with their baskets and claws. Scratch, scratch, scratch, as they raked the new-broke ground for the hard clear stone that was valued above gold. The hags were slaves too, but they were old and weak, bent-backed and stiff-fingered, and the Bull Hands did not fear to let them near the lode.

    Crope thought he spied Hadda the Crone, in line with the other clawed and sorted. Hadda scared Crope. She had long, sunken breasts shaped like spades that she bared to any digger who looked her way. Scurvy, Bitterbean and the rest looked her way often, but Crope did not like Hadda, and he would not look at her breasts.

    When the lash came he was half expecting it. The sting was cold, cold, and it took the breath from him like a punch to the gut. The tip of the whip curled around his ear, licking flesh hard with scars. Tears of blood welled in a line around his neck, and he felt their hot-ness trickle down his shoulders to his back. The salt burn would come later, when the gray crystals of sea salt that the Bull Hands soaked into their whips worked their way into the wound.

    “It’s not enough that they whip us,” Scurvy always said. “They have to make us burn.”

    “I can smell you, giant man.” The Bull Hand pulled back the whip with practiced slowness, drawing the leather through his half-closed fist. He was a big man, hardmouthed and fair-skinned, with broken veins in the whites of his eyes and the shineless teeth of a diamond miner. Although Crope had seen him many times, he couldn’t remember his name. That was Scurvy’s job, the remembering. Scurvy knew the names of every man in Pipe Town; knew what they were called and what they were.

    The Bull Hand thrust the whip into his belt. “You stink like the slop pots when your mind’s not on the wall.”

    Crope kept his head down and continued to break rock. He was aware of many eyes upon him, of Bitterbean and Iron Toe and Soft Aggie down the line. And of Scurvy Pine beyond them, watching the Bull Hand, yet not seeming to, his eyes so cold and hard they might have been mined in the pipe.

    Scurvy’s gaze flicked to the chains at Crope’s feet. Iron they were, black with tar and dead skin, and they ran from ankle to ankle, from digger to digger, joining every man in the line. “Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. You be ready when I give the word.”

    Crope felt Scurvy’s will working upon him, warning him to keep swinging his ax. Eight years ago they’d met, in the tin pits west of Trance Vor. Crope never wanted to go back there again. He hated the low ceilings of the tin caves, the darkness, the stench of bad eggs, and the drip, drip, drip of the walls. Spineless, that’s what everyone had called him, before Scurvy had made them stop. Scurvy had picked no fight nor raised a weapon; he had simply told the other tin men how it was going to be. “He carved the eyes out of an ice master who cheated him at dice,” Bitterbean had once told Crope. “But that’s not the reason they ‘prisoned him.”

    Out of the corner of his eye, Crope thought he saw Scurvy nod minutely to Hadda the Crone.

    Time passed. The diggers continued breaking the wall and the hags kept sifting through the dust. Crope’s lash wound began to burn with the hot sting of salt. Softly, so softly that he wasn’t even sure when the sound began, Hadda the Crone began to sing. It was like no song Crope had ever heard, high and wavering and strange to the ear. It made the hairs around his wound stand upright. Other diggers felt it too. At Crope’s side, Soft Aggie’s chains rattled as he stamped his feet in the mud. Bitterbean and the others slowed their strikes, and the sound of breaking rock lessened as Hadda’s song began to rise.

    If she sang in words Crope did not recognize them, yet fear entered him all the same. High and higher, her song rose, keening and wailing, her voice disappearing for brief moments as she reached pitches that only dogs could hear. Other hags joined in, chanting low where Hadda soared high, rough where she was as clear as glass.

    Crope felt a queer coldness steal into the pipe. He watched as the shadow cast by .his ax lengthened and darkened, until the shadow seemed more real than the ax. One of the pitch lamps blew out, and then another. And then one of the Bull Hands cracked his whip and shouted, “Stop that fucking wailing, bitch.”

    Crope risked a glance at Scurvy. Wait, his eyes said. Be ready when I give the word.

    Hadda’s song turned shrill. The diamond drilled into her front tooth was the only thing that glinted in the darkening pipe. Crope felt sweat slide along his fingers as he raised his ax for another strike. A memory of a time long ago possessed him, a night roaring with flames. People burning alive, precious stones popping from their jewelry in the heat, smoke curling from their mouths as they screamed. Bad memories, and Crope did not want to think of them. Driving his ax deep into diamond rock, he sent them smashing against the wall.

    Two Bull Hands jumped down into the lower tier, where the hags squatted as they sifted dust. A tongue of black leather came down upon a thigh, opening skin stained blue with mud. A woman screamed. A basket full of rubble dropped to the floor, sending stones the size of rat skulls bouncing into the hole at the center of the pipe. “That’s where the diamonds come from, that hole,” Scurvy had once told Crope, “leads right down to the center of the earth. And the gods that live there shit them.”

    Fear quieted the hags. Hadda’s song rose alone and defiant, beating against the walls like a sparrow trapped in the pipe. As the Bull Hand moved toward her, the Crone set down her basket, straightened her back and looked into the blackness at the bottom of the pipe.

    “Rath Maer!” she murmured, and although Crope had no book learning or knowledge of foreign tongues, he felt the words pull on the fluid in his eyes and groin, and he knew she was calling something forth. “Rath Maer!

    “RATH MAER!”

    One by one the pitch lamps blew out. Crope smelled the dark, wet odor of night, caught a glimpse of something rising from the center of the pipe . . . and then Scurvy Pine gave the word.

    “To the wall!”

    Men moved in the shadows with a great rattling of chains. Quickly, and with perfect violence, Scurvy sent the tip of his pickax smashing into the nearest Bull Hand’s face. The guard jerked fiercely as he dropped to the floor, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching as he worked on a scream that would never be heard. Bitterbean moved quickly to finish the job off, the pale flesh on his arms and many chins quivering as he stamped the life from the Bull Hand’s lungs.

    In the lower tier of the pipe all was chaos. The Bull Hands were lashing the hags, sending up sprays of blood and pipe water to spatter against the wall. Hadda was still standing, but as Crope looked on, a hard leather edge snapped against her temple, pulling off her cap, and revealing her scarred and shaven scalp. A second edge found her robe, and another found her legs, and the Bull Hands stripped her bare, and lashed her sagging flesh.

    All around, diggers were attacking Bull Hands and the few free miners who remained in the pipe. Iron Toe had gotten hold of a whip and was forcing the leather butt down a Bull Hand’s throat. The tiny cragsman was speaking to the Bull Hand as he choked him, asking him, quite softly, how it felt to eat the whip. Soft Aggie was sitting propped against a wall, blood sheeting down his chest from a lash wound so deep that Crope could see the bones at the back of Aggie’s throat. Jesiah Mump was kneeling at his side, his mud-caked fingers sliding in his pipe brother’s blood as he struggled to close the wound. Down the line, Sully Straw was frozen in place, unable to move because of the tension in the chain that connected him to Jesiah Mump. Giant man!

    Crope swung his head when he heard Scurvy’s call. A single tooth was embedded in the gore on Scurvy Pine’s ax, and he drove it deep into the spine of a free miner as he screamed, “The chains! Break the damn chains.”

    Crope felt heat come to his face. “Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. When we start attacking the Bull Hands it’s your job to brea’t the chains“

    Putting all his-weight behind the drop of his ax, Crope severed the links that connected him to Old Bone. Half-wit, the bad voice said. Can’t even remember to brea’t the chains. His was the only ax crowned with a blade broad enough to chop metal; and his were the only shoulders capable of delivering such a blow. Scurvy had made him practice on the iron staves that bound the water buckets. “Chop, chop, chop,” he’d say. “Like you did when you cut the leg-irons from Mannie Dun.“

    Crope didn’t remember cutting any iron the day that Mannie broke his back. He remembered only that Mannie was hurt and his body was twitching and all the Bull Hands cared about was sealing the lode. It was later, when Scurvy pulled him aside and told him that he, Crope, had broken Mannie’s chains with his ax, that he realized what he had done. “Say nothing, giant man,” Scurvy had warned. “The Hands are so busy pissing themselves over the Red Eyes, that they don’t know who did what.”

    Crope brought his ax down on another chain, splitting the iron as if it were wood. Mannie was dead now. One of the free miners had given him some of the black. The black was poison, Bitterbean said, and the free miner had given it to Mannie as a mercy, for everyone knew that a digger with a broken back was as good as dead.

    Shaking off his leg-irons, Crope crossed to where Jesiah Mump was speaking some last words to his pipe brother. Soft Aggie was already gone—Crope had been around death often enough to read it on any man’s face—but Jesiah spoke to him all the same, telling him how they’d raft up the Innerway in high summer and gorge themselves stupid on raw leeks and fried trout. Crope severed the chains that connected them, though he did not expect them to pull apart.

    He knew what it was to love someone wholly.

    “Here, giant man! Cut me free!”

    Responding to Bitterbean’s voice, the giant digger moved along the ranks, chopping metal. A blackness lay upon the pipe, and men fought in the darkness, grunting and cursing, killing in violent spurts, then leaning against the wall to catch their breath and hack up dust. Crope watched as some diggers continued to beat the Bull Hands even after they were dead. He understood little of their need, for dead was dead to him, yet he made no effort to stay them. Men did what men would do, and he’d learned long and hard that nothing good ever came from interference.

    Keep your eyes and hands to yourself, half-wit, for loo’ts start fights and touches set women to screaming rape. The old words could raise the fear in him even now. He was big and he was dangerous, and so he must make himself small and unassuming in other ways.

    He was careful as he stepped around the corpses.

    As he raised his ax to break Scurvy Pine’s chains, the last glimmers of light faded. The cold deepened, and the air began to move.

    Crope felt it swelling against his back like icy water. Men ceased fighting. Scurvy rattled his leg and hissed, “Cut the chains,” but Crope could no longer see Scurvy and he feared to drop the ax lest he bite into Scurvy’s leg.

    A sound rose from the center of the pipe. Crope had heard the cries of many beasts, of lambs torn apart by dogs and mares split open during foaling, yet he’d never heard a call like this: cold and wanting and alive with pain. The urge came upon him to flee, for he had lived long and seen many things, and knew something of the darkness that lived within the night. Not all things that cast man shadows were men.

    One of the hags screamed. A great whumf of air shook the pipe, sending the rope bridges creaking and lifting the hair on Crope’s scalp. Men began running; he couldn’t see them, but he heard the clatter of their chains against the rock.

    Scurvy pressed something sharp against Crope’s leg. “Cut me free, giant man. I won’t be taken alive in this pipe.”

    Crope heard the urgency in Scurvy’s voice. The Bull Hands had ways of killing ringleaders. John Dram had been fed a meal of diamonds—chips and splinters and gray and cloudy stones—and then he’d been thrown alive into the crowd at Frozen Square. They’d torn him apart, Bitterbean said, their hands steaming with blood as they plunged into John Dram’s guts.

    Crope listened for the chin’t of Scurvy’s chains before dropping the ax. The digger grunted as he pulled his ankle free. “You bled me, giant man,” he murmured. “Sweet blood, and I’ll hold no grudges for it. Take my arm and let’s begone from this pipe.”

    “But—”

    “But what? There are others still in chains? Would you stay and free their corpses once they’re dead?” A gleam of light caught Scurvy’s pale gray eyes. “Nine of us came from the tin pits, that winter when the Drowned Lake froze. Who’s left, giant man? Mannie’s gone. Will’s gone. All gone. All dead, except you and me.”

    Crope remembered Will. He was one who knew all the words to the old songs, and could sleep standing up. It was hard to think of him as dead. He said stubbornly, “I’m going to fetch Hadda.”

    Scurvy seized Crope’s arm. “Forget her. She’s just a hag. There’s nothing left to save.”

    With gentle firmness, Crope broke free of Scurvy’s grip. He didn’t like Hadda, but she had sung the song that brought the darkness. And without darkness they’d still be in chains.

    Scurvy cursed in disgust. He went to turn away, but something stopped him. Reaching into his torn and ragged tunic, he muttered, “Let no man say Scurvy Pine doesn’t pay his debts. Here. Take this.” He held out a small round object. “Show it in any thieves’ den north of the mountains and you’ll find protection in my name.”

    Crope’s big fingers closed around a metal band, a ring, light and very fine. Not a man’s ring, not even a woman’s, something made for a child. He looked up to find Scurvy watching him.

    “Take care of yourself, giant man. I’ll not forget who broke my chains.” With that Scurvy was gone, slipping through the darkness and the snarl of panicking men, a shadow amongst the shadows, moving swiftly toward the light.

    Crope carefully tucked the ring into the seam of his boot, and then went looking for Hadda the Crone.

    It was cold and dark in the diamond well, and no one human was moving. The rock was sticky underfoot and the smell of blood rose from it. Crope went unchallenged as he walked amongst the bodies. It was hard to tell the hags apart. All their hair had been shaved so they’d have one less place to conceal stones. He wouldn’t have recognized Hadda if it hadn’t been for the diamond in her tooth. Bitter-bean said the pipe lord himself had given it to her the day she found a stone as big as a wren.

    Hadda was barely breathing, but he picked her up all the same. There were wounds across her legs and belly, lash marks that ran straight and deep. She was so light it was like carrying twigs for the fire, and he was overcome with a sense of shame. Everyone who helped him ended up hurt. You’re good for nothing, you misshapen monster. Should have been drowned at birth.

    Crope shook the bad voice away. Something dark and full of shadow was moving at the corner of his vision, and he knew it was time to leave. He heard the blistering crackle of charged air, the swift snicf{ of something with an edge severing limbs. And screams; screams of diggers he knew. It was hard to hear them, and harder still to turn his back. But he had Hadda, and his chains were gone, and it was time to find the man who owned his soul.

    Sixteen years without his lord was too long.

    Bearing the dying woman up through the pipe, Crope began to plan his search.

    The ice on the lake creaked and rumbled as it cooled, its surface growing colder and drier as the quarter moon passed overhead. There was no wind, yet the ancient hemlocks surrounding the lake moved, their limbs rising and falling in air that was perfectly still. Meeda Longwalker had made camp on a plate of shorefast ice, three foot thick and hard as iron. It was the coldest night she could remember, so cold the shale oil in her lamp had frozen to thick yellow grease and she had been forced to burn a candle for light. Smoke rising from the candle’s flame cooled so quickly it floated back down to the ice, and Meeda had to keep pushing it away with her gloved and mitted hands so it wouldn’t accumulate and kill the light.

    She should have returned to the Heart. It wasn’t a night to be out alone on the ice, yet she had something in her that had always rebelled against good sense. She was a Heartborn Daughter of the Sull, mother to He Who Leads, and it seemed to her that any wisdom she had a claim to had come on nights such as this.

    Besides, she had her dogs; they would warn her of any danger. Warn, but not protect. Meeda Longwalker was no fool. She wasn’t like some trappers who drank themselves stupid on green elk milk turned sour and then passed out around their darkfires, sure in the knowledge that their dogs would save them if …

    If what? Meeda pulled her lynx cloak closer, wishing for a moment she had bare hands so she could feel the sweet softness of the fur beneath her fingers. Almost it was like touching a living thing, and Meeda Longwalker knew some men who claimed it was better. Trappers knew little of women and a lot about whores, and a scraped and combed lynx fur had a warmth to it that couldn’t be bought in Hell’s Town for any amount of gold.

    As she watched the fur ripple beneath her horsehair mitts a cry sounded in the forest beyond the ice. Low and hollow, like the wind moving down a well shaft, it made the skin on Meeda’s shoulders pucker and pull tight. The flame above the candle dimmed from yellow to red, and then twitched upon its wick as the sound passed into the ice. Meeda felt its vibrations in her old and rotted bones. . . and knew then that the creature who made it was no living thing.

    “Raaks!” she called. Dogs!

    Meeda’s hand shot onto the ice to feel for her stick as she waited for her terriers to heel. Damn dogs. She should never have let them go after that elk cow. Yet they had smelled age and weakness and the festering of a wolf-made wound, and such scents were irresistible to any animal trained to hunt. It was either let them go or drive a stake into the ice and leash them to it. And much though Meeda Longwalker hated to admit it this night, her hands had trouble forming the shape needed to hold a hammer.

    As her finger groped for her stick a new sound rose from the edge of the ice. Fifty years she had coursed these headlands, fifty years of setting traps, snapping necks and peeling skin, and not a day without a dog at her heels. She had heard her terriers moan and yelp in childbirth and pain, heard them scrap amongst themselves over the weeping remains of a skinned fox. Yet never until now had she heard them scream.

    High it was, high and terrible and so close to human that it might have been children instead. Meeda’s fist closed around the three foot of icewood that had been her walking stick for a hundred seasons. The wood was pale as milk, and so smooth it ran with moonlight like live steel. Icewood, from the heart of the tree; no earthly cold could warp it, and none but master Sull craftsmen could shape it to their will. It dulled saws, people said. Made bows so powerful that they defied air and wind. Only the Sull king and his mordreth, the twelve sworn men who guarded him and were known as the Walking Dead, were allowed to carry bows of its making. A single tree had to grow for a thousand years and its timber age for fifty more before a master bowyer would dare cut a stave from the dann, the latewood that was laid down in the sacred months of summer and late spring.

    Meeda hefted the stick across her chest, taking comfort from its familiar weight and hand. It was a hard life she had chosen to live, and she had not reached such an age by being easily cowed. The night was alive with noises, with black lynx and horned owls, moon snakes and old ghosts, and she had long since realized that none of them liked the smell of living men. Rising to her feet, she called once more to her dogs.

    As she waited for them to respond, something crunched softly on the frozen snow beyond the shoreline. Water swelled beneath the ice. The dogs fell silent one by one.

    Meeda bit off her outer mitts and spit them onto the ice. The sky was dark, darker than it ought to be when a quarter of the moon hung there for all to see. There were no stars, or if there were they shone black like volcanic glass. Moon and night sky. No Sull prayer was complete without those words, and Meeda found herself mouthing them as she stepped toward the shore.

    Damn her eyes! Why couldn’t she see anything? Her hard old lenses were slow to focus in the biting air, and she felt the anger come to her as quick as if it had been hiding beneath her fear all along. She hated her old woman’s body with its humps and slack pouches and dry bloodless bones. Some nights she dreamed Thay Blackdragon, the Night King, came to her offering youth in return for her soul. Some times she dreamed she said yes.

    Frost smoke steamed above the ice margin, churning from blue to gray. Meeda felt its coldness in her mouth, stinging her gums and numbing her tongue until it felt like a piece of meat against her teeth. Underfoot the ice was black and transparent, swept clean of snow by northern winds. It ticked as Meeda’s weight came down upon it. As she stepped beyond the candle’s light, something red broke through the trees, something broken and limping and not right. Meeda braced her stick with both hands, and then recognized the bloody shape of one of her dogs. Marrow. Its rear left leg was gone, and the skin on its rump and belly had been torn away, revealing glistening muscle and coils of gut.

    Meeda feared to call to it. She knew the look of wolf- and lynx-made wounds. She knew what wolverines could do to creatures twice their size and what a coven of moon snakes was capable of when they hadn’t fed in a week. Yet this didn’t smell like wolf or cat or snake. This smelled like night.

    The dog had caught its mistress’s scent, and it dragged its lower torso across the ice to reach her, trailing blood and viscera from its great black wound. Meeda barely breathed as she waited for the creature to heel. She did not think, knew better than to think, just raised her stick to the height she needed, waited to feel the push of the dog’s snout against her leg, then drove the butt through its heart.

    “Good dog,” she said quietly, as she pulled the stick free of its ribs.

    Blood and bits of bone were already freezing to the wood by the time she turned to face the shore. “Come for me, shadows,” she said, “for I stand ready in the light of the moon.” The words were old and she did not know where they came from, yet they were Sull words and she felt something fill her as she spoke them. She thought at first it was courage, for her heart quickened and her grip tightened, and something hard and excited came alive in her chest.

    Then the ice around the shore began to crack. White splinters shot along the surface in a footstep pattern toward where she stood. Crack}. Crack}. Crack}. The air rippled like water, and suddenly it was cold enough to turn her breath to grains of ice. Meeda’s hands ached as she adjusted her grip on her stick. Her eyes burned as she tried to see. Something glinted. Moonlight caught an edge and ran along its length. A man-shape shimmered into existence, dark and silvered, like no man at all. Its eyes were two holes that held no soul. Its hand gripped a blade that drank the light. Meeda watched as the cutting edge came up and up, saw how moonlight outlined the thing’s arm and mailed fist, yet found no purchase in the black and voided steel. It was like looking at a distilled piece of night.

    Meeda knew then that what she felt wasn’t courage. The fear was in her, twisting her bowels, speaking to her in a voice that sounded like her own, warning her to run for the thin ice at the lake’s center and find for herself an easy painless death. Yet something older stopped her.

    Not courage, she told herself; she would not lie about that. Remembrance. The old memories were coming back.

    Ice shattered and exploded as the thing came for her. Fracture lines raced across the lake’s surface like lightning branching in a storm. Meeda saw shadows and gleaming edges of light, smelled the dark odor of another world. Eyes that held nothing met her own. She braced her stick to meet that cold black blade. And then, as the sword hummed toward her, burning a mark in the air that hung there long after the blade had passed, she noticed the shadow man’s chest. Rising and falling like a living thing.

    A heart lay somewhere within the darkly weighted substance of its flesh. It was beating. And it made Meeda’s mouth water like a meal of ham and wine.

    Icewood and voided steel met with a crac’t that sounded the beginning of an age. White pain shot up Meeda’s arms, and it took all she had to hold her ground. Three foot of ice bowed under the mass of the shadowed thing. Yet still she did not loose her footing. She was Sull. Every hair on her body and drop of blood in her veins demanded that she fight.

    CHAPTER

    The Ice Fog Rises

    They found blood on the trail on the seventh day, five spots, red against the grey of old snow. It wasn’t new-spilt, but it might look like it to someone who was unfamiliar with killing game in midwinter. Blood began darkening to black the moment it left the body, thickening and distilling until there was nothing but copper and iron left. It was different when the air crackled with ice. Blood could freeze in perfect red drops in the time it took to drip from an elk’s collarbone to the taiga below. Raif remembered how he and Drey would scoop up frozen beads of elk blood after a kill and let them melt upon their tongues; sweet as fresh grass and salty as sweat. The taste of winter and clan.

    But this wasn’t elk’s blood before them.

    Raif glanced ahead to the top of the rise, where towers of white smoke rose straight in the still air. The trail had been rising all day and they still hadn’t found the source of the smoke. The ground was hard and brittle here, formed from basalt and black chert. Cliffs soared to the east, high and straight as fortress walls, guarding knife-edged mountains beyond. To the west lay the farthest tip of the Storm Margin, its rocky draws and moraines disguised as rolling hills by a thick layer of snow. Beyond there lay the sea ice, and beyond that lay the sea. Stormheads gathering on the westernmost horizon had begun to silver the floes.

    “What happened here?” asked Ash, who was standing above Raif as he crouched over the blood. Her voice was clear, but there was too much space between her words. “One of the Sull breathed a vein.”

    “How can you be sure?”

    Raif faked a shrug. “Even a clean kill leaves more blood.” He fingered the red spots, remembering frozen carcasses, ice-bent blades, Tern Sevrance laughing at his sons as they strained to push an elk kill down a slope only to have it crash into the lake ice at the bottom and sink. When Raif continued speaking his voice was low. “And the blood wasn’t sprayed. It dripped.”

    “How do you know it’s human?”

    Abruptly, Raif stood. He felt an irrational anger toward Ash and her questions. They both knew the answer here. Why did she force him to speak it? “Listen,” he said.

    Standing side by side on the headland, their breath whitening in the freezing air, Raif Sevrance and Ash March listened to the sound they had been heading toward all day: a crackling hiss, as if lightning touched down upon water.

    Raif counted the columns of smoke as he said, “They were here, Mai Naysayer and Ark Veinsplitter, they heard what we hear. They saw the smoke.” And knew it was something to be feared, so they let blood to still their gods.

    Ash nodded, as if she had heard what he had not spoken. “Should we make payment too?“

    Raif shook his head and started forward. “This is not our land and not our business. There are no debts here for us to pay.”

    He hoped it was the truth.

    They had been following the Sull warriors’ trail for nine days. It had led them north and west from the Hollow River, across land Raif would never have dared to cross if it hadn’t been for the telltale markings in the snow. Horse casts buried shallow, human hair snagged on the bark of a dead pine, a footprint stamped on new ice. The Sull had left “Such a trail as can be followed by a clansman” Raif’s shoulders stiffened as he walked, aware of the insult in Ark Veinsplitter’s words. “We travel without leaving any trail” they boasted, “but will make effort to leave one for you.” Even as Raif had resented the Sull’s arrogance, he knew to be thankful for their skills. No clansman would cross a green-froze lake, nor scale an unknown ice sheet in the hope of finding a pass.

    The journey had not been easy. The days had been short and the nights long and full of silence. What could he and Ash say to each other? Raif wondered as he stripped bark for the watchfire each night. They could not talk about the Cavern of Black Ice, nor what had happened later, when they emerged from river and something, something, came with them. All Raif saw was a shadow, but shadows don’t make pine needles crack beneath them . . . and shadows can’t scream.

    Raif shivered. Whatever it was, it was gone now. Fled. And even though they had seen nothing since, it had changed everything.

    Ten days ago, in the cavern beneath the frozen river, he and Ash had spoken of returning to the clanholds, of finding Angus and journeying with him to Hie Glaive and visiting the Broken Man one last time. Heritas Cant had a promise to keep. “Return safely from the Cavern ofBlac’t Ice and I will tell you the names of the beasts,” he had said. But now the word safely seemed an impossibly high standard to keep. They were not safe. Raif did not count himself a clansman anymore, but the old instincts had not left him. He knew when to fear. A deep unease had settled upon him, making him watchful and ready. The ice pick he counted as his only weapon lay cooling the skin at his waist.

    He could not say whose decision it was to follow the Sull north. It was something else he and Ash didn’t speak of, the need to learn more. The two Sull warriors knew what Ash was. She was a Reach, born to release the Endlords and their Taken from their thousand-year confinement in the Blind. Ark Veinsplitter and Mai Naysayer could provide proof that Ash had released her power safely, leaving the Blindwall intact, and the Endlords imprisoned in their own breed of hell. The Sull were the only ones who could tell them it was safe to return home.

    Home. Raif took a breath and held it. He could not return to his birthclan. Raif Sevrance had been judged an oathbreaker and traitor. There was no place for him at any hearth in the clanholds. He had no family or home … only Ash.

    As he glanced toward her their gazes met. Eyes that had once been gray regarded him levelly. Before he and Ash had reached the Cavern of Black Ice her eyes had been the color of silver and hailstones. Now they were the color of the sky at midnight. A perfect Sull blue. If he thought about it too long he knew it would undo him. He and Ash had been through so much together. They had journeyed long and far, learned the many different ways to live with fear and weariness, and the only way to live with loss: simply to carry on. His arms knew what it felt like to bear her weight. She had leaned on him countless times, put her safekeeping willingly in his hands. Yet what she didn’t know was that his safekeeping was in her hands. Ash March held the power to destroy him. All his dreams about the future centered around her. When everything was done and the nightmare that had become their lives had ended he hoped to take her somewhere new and begin again.

    Digging his heels into the snow, Raif began the slow climb toward the ridge. Her eyes, that was the thing. Their blueness filled him with fear. Ash March had changed, and a small, insistent voice inside him warned that things could never be the same between them. A shift had taken place. Ash might be pale, and too thin for a girl of seventeen winters, yet strength lay in the set of her mouth and the determined tilt of her chin. Something new and vital had come alive within her, and Raif found himself waking in the darkest, coldest hours of each night, hoping that it wasn’t something Sull.

    It took them an hour to top the rise. Ash pushed ahead, and Raif was content to follow the shadow she cast against the full moon. Neither spoke as they surveyed the valley below. Twelve geysers of steam erupted from the ice and rubble of a dry glacier bed. A ring of blue fire blazed at the base of each column, leaping up from a crater of ash and melted stone that had formed around the burn. The roar was deafening: the crack of exploding rocks, the hiss of melting snow, and the constant rip of igniting gas.

    The quickening wind brought the stench of char and lightning to Raif. He had no words for what he saw. To find fire and smoke here, at the frozen edge of the Storm Margin, seemed as impossible as finding breath in a corpse.

    “Is this where the trail leads?” Ash asked, turning her face toward him.

    He found he could not look into her eyes. “The trail cuts through the valley, toward the coast.”

    “So we must cross here?” As Ash spoke the ground moved beneath them, and rocks and snow spewed forth as a new column of smoke rent the valley floor Thirteen, Raif counted, feeling the heat of the explosion puff against his face. He remembered the tale of Murdo Blackhail, the Warrior Chief, who had led his men to war across the Stairlands. On the final day of their descent, the mountain had erupted above them, and a spray of molten rock burst forth. Murdo had been riding at the head of the party, high atop his stallion, Black Burr. His breastplate had burst into flame with the heat, and later when his armsman pulled it from him, Murdo’s skin and muscle came with it. In the two days it took him to die, Murdo Blackhail directed his men to victory over Clan Thrall and took his wife to his bed, fathering their only son. Bessa, his wife, was led to her husband blindfold and with plugs of wax within each nostril, for the sight and stench of his burned flesh was said to be terrible to behold.

    Raif grimaced. “We travel through the valley,” he said.

    The gas vents glowed blue in the failing light. Ash had little fear of them and picked a path through their center, once drawing close enough to a crater to drink water from its moat of melted snow. Raif spoke no word of warning, though he saw the danger clear enough. The entire valley floor was under pressure, its ancient rock buckled and twisted by whatever forces lay below. It might have been beautiful, this corridor of burning gas and rising smoke, but all the tales of hell he had listened to as a child had begun with an approach such as this.

    They walked well into the night, Raif postponing making camp until the gas vents were far behind them. The next day the sun barely rose above the horizon, and what light it gave could hardly be called daylight at all. The following day was darker still, and the trail left by the Sull became more difficult to follow. As the afternoon wore on Raif began to spot signs of other men. Ice-bleached bones and sled tracks, dog fur and slicks of green whale oil pitted the path. The snow itself was hard and frozen, the air so dry and clear that even the finest specks of dust were revealed.

    They came across the Whale Gate at some time during the long night. Formed from the jawbone of a massive bow whale, the ancient archway rose as high as two men and as wide as four. It stood alone on a headland of frost-cracked rocks and graying weeds, marking entrance into the territory beyond. Raif bit off his mitts and touched it with bare hands. The ivory was stained and scaling, its edges jagged with the stumps of baleen combs. Designs had been burned into the bone. Dolphins chasing stars had been seared atop an older, darker design of beasts slaying men.

    Raif took his hands away. In the sheltered valley below the gate, the faintest possible lights twinkled, and above them a white haze of exhaled breaths shifted in the air like sleeping ghosts.

    “The trail ends here.” Raif couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken, and his voice sounded strange and rough. He looked down upon the village, if village were what it was. Stone mounds, rising mere feet above the ground, formed a circle around a smoking firepit. The mounds were built of obsidian and basalt and other black things, and their edges glowed faintly in the starlight. They reminded Raif of the barrows of Dhoone’s Core. Twelve thousand clansmen dead, each corpse interred in a stone tomb of its own. For three thousand years they’d lain there, rotting to bone dust and hollow teeth. Withy and Wellhouse kept no history of the massacre. Raif had once heard Inigar Stoop name it “the Price of Settlement,” but warriors and chiefs gave it another name, whispered around campfires in the deep of night. The Field of Stone.

    Suddenly Raif wanted very much to turn back, to grab Ash’s hand and take her .. . where? No land that he knew of was safe.

    Abruptly, Ash stepped through the gate, leaving Raif no choice but to follow her into the village below.

    Dogs began barking as they approached. Yet even before the first growl of warning caused lights to brighten and stir, a figure stood in waiting at the first of the stone mounds. Raif recognized the pale bulk of Mai Naysayer, his cloak of wolverine fur stirring in the wind, the haft of his great two-handed longsword rising above his back. As Raif and Ash approached, the warrior stood unmoving, silent and terrible against a field of burning stars.

    “The Sull are not our people and they do not fear us.” The old clan words came to Raif as he raised a hand in greeting, yet they were old words and often said and men who knew nothing about the Sull spoke them, and they fell from his mind when the warrior began to kneel.

    Mai Naysayer, Son of the Sull and chosen Far Rider, dropped to his knees as they drew near. He held his position until Ash and Raif passed within speaking distance and then laid himself down upon the snow.

    Oh gods. So it begins.

    Muscles in the warrior’s back moved beneath his cloak as he spread his arms wide to form a cross. Raif could see dozens of white letting scars on his knuckles as he dug bare fingers into ice. Not for me, Raif knew with certainty. No Sull would prostrate himself before a clansman without a clan.

    Ash stood silent above the Sull, wrapped in lynx fur and boiled wool, her hair lifting and falling in the changing air. Nothing showed on her face, not exhaustion or fear … or surprise. “Rise, Mai Naysayer of the Sull, for we are old friends met in far lands and I would speak to your face, not your back.”

    Raif felt a tremor pass through him as she spoke. How could I have come so far with her and not realize she has been leading the way all along?

    In silence, Mai Naysayer pulled himself to his feet. The silver chains and brain hooks at his waist chimed softly as he brushed snow from his mouth. Raif watched his eyes. Pale as ice and colder still, they spared no glance for the clansman. The warrior looked ,

    only at Ash.

    “Snow burns,” he said.

    A chill went through Raif … and for one brief instant he almost knew why. He saw thirteen columns of smoke rising from a valley thick with snow, heard the old guide chanting a fragment of a cradle song, long forgot: Snow burns, the Age turns, and Lost Men shall wal’t the earth.

    Ash breathed deeply and did not speak.

    Raif spotted a line of men coming toward them, bearing spears pointed with volcanic glass and torches that burned with white-hot flames. Small and dark-skinned, they moved in the fluid and soundless manner of men accustomed to stalking large prey. Rib cages of walrus and seal were bound to their chests in armored plates, riding over layer upon layer of skins and strange furs. Forming a defensive half-circle behind the Naysayer, they thrust their spear butts deep into the snow.

    Raif watched them watch him. He supposed he should be grateful that they at least considered him more of a threat than Ash, but the Sull’s words had stirred a fear within him, and he found little satisfaction in the wariness of other men.

    Their rank parted, and a tiny old man stepped forward. His skin was the color and texture of cured wood, and his eyes were milky with snowblindness. On either side of his face, aligned with cheekbones as sharp as crab claws, two deep black scars bored into his skull in place of ears. A ruff of vulture feathers warmed the broken flesh, their quills rising upright from a collar of rolled bronze. Over his shoulders and across his back lay a coat of fur so dark and lustrous it was as if the soul of the slain beast still lived there.

    “Inuf{u sana hanli’t” he said in a voice thin with age. “The Listener of the Ice Trappers welcomes you to this place.”

    Ark Veinsplitter came to stand at the old man’s back, his face grim and his eyes narrowing, as he translated the Listener’s words. He wore scale armor over padded silk, with a heavy fur mantle thrown back over his shoulders. His left arm was bared to the elbow,

    and a trickle of blood circled his wrist. He could have stanched the letting wound before he came to meet us, yet he wanted us to see the blood. Raif suddenly felt weary enough to lie down in the snow and fall asleep. He didn’t want to greet this old man, didn’t want to know who he was.

    The Listener spoke again, and Raif realized that some shadow of sight still survived behind his eyes, for he looked directly at Raif as he said, “Mor Drak^aT The wind rose, and the old man turned and walked away. Gritty bits of ice flew into Raif’s face, stinging the raw flesh beneath his nostrils where his breath continually froze and thawed. Without thought, his hand rose to his throat, searching for the hard piece of raven that was his lore. Nothing but cold skin and raw wool met his touch. He had forgotten he had given it to Ash.

    “The Listener bids you follow him.” Ark Veinsplitter stepped aside to make a path. Raif watched the dark-haired warrior for a moment, noticing how the skin at the base of his neck was the only part of him untouched by the letting knife; and wondering why the Sull had chosen to translate the Listener’s gesture, not his words. Raif did not know in what tongue the old man spoke, but he knew his last words were meant for him. And they were not some soft-spoken request to follow him home.

    Ark Veinsplitter glowered at Raif as the two drew eye-to-eye. Something in Raif made him slow his pace and exhale in the warrior’s face. Something else made him lay a hand on Ash’s shoulder as they passed.

    Almost, Ark Veinsplitter managed to hide his alarm at seeing the color of Ash’s eyes. Muscles tensed beneath the uncut skin on his neck, and his gaze sought and found his hass. Mai Naysayer’s shoulders bowed once in acknowledgment. . . and Raif knew with certainty that the blue in Ash’s eyes meant something to them.

    He tightened his hold on her as they made their way to the farthest of the stone mounds. Men in walrus-bone armor lined the route, naked thumbs pressing against the kill notches on their spear shafts, faces dark with mistrust. These men were not young, Raif noticed, recognizing a careful show of force when he saw one.

    Briefly, he glanced westward to the sea ice, wondering if the younger warriors were upon it, hunting seal. ,

    Light spilled from the entrance to the Listener’s mound, shining on pits of ashen tar and frozen blood. The Listener stood in the shadows behind the light, beckoning Raif forward with the curled black fingers of a corpse.

    Raif had lived so long without warmth that the heat of the chamber burned him. As he raised his head after passing through the opening, his vision dimmed. A liquid queasiness in his stomach reminded him he had not eaten in two days. The piglike smell of walrus meat nearly made him retch.

    The Listener unclasped his fur and laid it upon a bench of plain black stone. He gestured Ash and Raif to sit upon it, close to a little soapstone lamp that was the only source of light. The walls glittered weirdly. Plugs of hair and skin had been used to shore the chinks. When Raif found himself wondering if the Listener’s missing ear-lobes had been stuffed between the cracks, he realized he must be experiencing what clansmen called‘’come-in-from-the-cold madness.“ They waited in silence as Ark Veinsplitter entered and sealed the door. A raven swung upside down on a whalebone perch, making the soft chuffing noises of a bird whose vocal cords had felt the heat of a throat-iron upon hatching. Spying Raif, it righted itself and fixed him with its sharp black gaze. Unnerved, Raif found himself speaking when he had not planned to.

    “We’ll be on our way in the morning. We need to head east while the calm still holds.“

    “You do not know the way east, Clansman.” Ark Veinsplitter poured a line of water under the door, sealing the chamber with ice.

    Blood rose in Raif’s cheeks. The Sull warrior was right. No clansman knew this territory or the ways to and from it. He hardly knew what had made him say such a thing. Neither he nor Ash had spoken of what they would do once they arrived here, and both of them needed time to rest.

    Now all he wanted to do was be gone.

    “You could share knowledge of the eastern trails, Far Rider,” Ash said, and even though he was aware she had spoken to support him,

    Raif was not glad to hear her speak. Some insane, heat-fevered part of him wanted to believe that if she were quiet, barely moved, barely spoke, they would not notice her. Or want her.

    The Sull warrior rose heavily, revealing the brace of knives strapped to his back. “Knowledge of Sull paths comes at great cost. Would you have me give them freely, as if they were nothing more than deer tracks through a wood?”

    “I would have you tell me what’s happening here,” Raif fired back. “Why did the Naysayer drop to the ground when he saw us? And why is there blood on your wrists?”

    “My blood is mine to spill, Clansman. Would you tell me when to piss and shit?”

    Raif sucked in air to reply, but the little man with no ears hissed a word that could only mean Silence!

    In the quiet that followed, the Listener of the Ice Trappers poured steaming liquid into three horn bowls. Raif nodded thanks when the first was handed to him. He smelled the sharpness of sea salt and fermented flesh, watched as Ark Veinsplitter and Ash held bowl rims to their lips and sipped. The old man arranged himself on the chamber floor and waited for Raif to drink.

    The liquid scalded Raif’s tongue. It was thick with invisible threads of sinew that floated between his teeth and then slid back into the bowl when he was done. Strangely, the heat seemed to null the taste, and although he had been expecting something acrid, he was left with only a vague sense of fishiness and a whiff of lead.

    The Listener refilled Raif’s bowl. “OolakJ‘

    “Fermented sharkskin,” explained Ark Veinsplitter. “The Listener brews it himself.”

    Raif nodded. Bad homebrew was something he was familiar with. Tern’s brew had been so bad that no one but blood kin would drink it. It had been a point of honor with Raif and Drey, the enjoying of it, the laughing, the one-upmanship as each tried to outdo the other in lavishing the foul brew with praise. Tem would cuff them for their cockiness, then walk away grumbling about how a father could have too many sons.

    Smiling, Raif drank deeply. When the Listener filled his cup a third time he drank more. He was hungry for its magic; the way it let him think of the things he had lost without the pain of losing them. “Raif. Open the door and let out the smoke.” Ash’s voice seemed to come from a very great distance. As Raif lifted his head to look at her, he caught a glance passing between the Listener and the Far Rider. Dimly, he realized many things—that Ark Veinsplitter had not answered any of his questions, that it was the old man, not the Far Rider, who held power here, and that it would serve a clansman well to be cautious in this place—but there was a heaviness settling within him. The fermented sharkskin and the lamp smoke and the heat had slowed his thinking along with his blood. He knew things yet could not act.

    Slowly, he rose to his feet. A rim of ice had formed around the driftwood door, weeping where it touched the chamber’s heat. As he reached for the pull ring, Ark’s hand came down upon his arm. “Mora irith. The ice fog rises this night.”

    Raif pulled back. He knew about the ice fog, of how it had risen the night Cormac HalfBludd, first son of the River chief, was standing vigil on the banks of the Ebb, and how the old Croserman who found his body the next morning thought he was looking at a river wraith’s corpse, so inhumanly blue was Cormac’s skin.

    Raif reclaimed his seat. The Listener refilled his bowl. As he accepted the steaming liquid, Raif felt Ash’s hand touch his thigh. “Guard yourself,” she murmured.

    He watched her face, saw her desire to say more stifled by the nearness of other men. She was beautiful in the lamplight, her skin flushed with warmth, her eyes unnaturally bright. The oola’t made it possible to believe that they were the only people present, and that their lives had reverted to a simpler time. Just you and me, he wanted to say to her. Remember how it was that night in the abandoned sheep farm near Ganmiddich?

    Smiling, he recalled the rabbit he had killed and skinned for her. She was a surlord’s daughter, accustomed to silver forks and embroidered table linens, yet she had eaten that rabbit with her fingers; tearing the meat off the bone with her teeth, and then holding her hand out for more.

    “You take good care of me,” she had said when she was done. He had not trusted himself to reply. Speak and he knew he would reveal too much. She had been named a Reach by Heritas Cant, and although Raif could not begin to understand what that meant he guessed it foretold a troubled life. Ash March had battles to fight— battles she had not chosen and were not her own. Yet even that night, when he knew that great dangers lay ahead and that to place himself at Ash’s side meant standing in harm’s way, all he could think of was / have to stay with her.

    He had sworn as much in the oath he gave her. “You’re not alone in this, Ash March. Know that. We will make it to the Cavern of Blacky Ice, and we will bring an end to this nightmare. I swear that on the faces of nine gods”

    Now the terror of the Cavern of Black Ice was behind them he should have felt that his duty was done, but uncertainty persisted. Ash had sealed the prison walls of the Blind, confining the Endlords and their Unmade to their own kind of hell. So why did his fears live on?

    Thickheaded from the oolak^, Raif felt his thoughts begin to float away from him. It was difficult to concentrate in the smoky haze of the chamber, increasingly harder to discern what was important from what didn’t matter at all. Unable to fight the lassitude, Raif raised his cup to his lips and drank.

    As he swallowed the final drop he became aware of Ash’s gaze upon him. A single tear shivered in the corner of her eye. A distant warning sounded, a dim light in the murkiness that filled his head. Ash’s features were perfectly controlled, her breathing even. Yet when Raif’s gaze dropped to the cup she held, he saw tiny ripples disrupting the surface of the oola’t. Quietly, almost imperceptibly, Ash March was shaking.

    He should have acted. The instinct was there, but it was becoming impossible to retain his thoughts. A blink was all it took to return to the murk. Time drifted. When it occured to Raif that his cup was empty he held it out to be filled. The ice fog was rising and the door was sealed against it, and a man could do worse than sit in the warmth and drink.

    So that was what he did. Hours passed and the lamp smoke thickened and sea ice beyond the chamber boomed and cracked. No one spoke. The Listener paid attention to the lamp, tamping the wick ever lower into whale oil. Raif’s shoulders sought the hard comfort of the chamber wall as his head grew heavy with sleep. Soon it became increasingly hard to stay awake. And as his eyes closed and he drifted toward oblivion, he saw the Far Rider watching him with cold and knowing eyes.

    “The Sull are not our people and they do not fear us.”

    Raif heard the voice of his clan and knew to be afraid … but the alcohol was in him and sleep pulled hard upon him.

    And when he woke two days later Ash was gone.

    CHAPTER

    The Widows’ Wall

    The only way to drink mare’s urine was quickly, so Raina closed her eyes, scrunched her face and downed it in one. It really was quite dreadful, sweet and pungent, still steaming from the horse’s bladder, yet she’d sampled worse in her time. Tern Sevrance’s homebrew, for one. And the taste of her own fear.

    Besides, it had to be better than sheep dung . .. that and ground-up beetle parts set to stand in curdled milk. Anwyn Bird swore by sheep dung, but she was a ewe farmer’s daughter and heavily biased toward sheep. No. Better to be safe in this. The old family remedies were the best; the ones whispered by sisters and cousins and mother and aunts. How best to prevent conception of a child.

    Letting the ladle drop to the bucket, Raina rose to her feet. She needed to be gone from here. A pale dawn was breaking, and Eadie Callow and the other dyers would be taking their places soon enough. A chief’s wife could not be seen here, not alone, not with the newly delivered mare’s stale from the horseblock. Eadie Callow might have the slow eyes and stained hands of a dyer, but a sharpness lived behind her dull gaze, and the black ink on her fingers concealed the pale white flesh of a Scarpe. All the dyers and fullers were Scarpemen. They had ways with potash and urine and fuller’s earth that other men lacked. It was said that no other clan in the clanholds could dye such a perfect shade of black.

    Mace had brought Scarpemen by the hundred to the Hailhold. Every day more arrived; warriors mounted on Spire-bred horses, women pulled behind them in poison-pine carts. The Scarpehold had been torched. The silent white-winter warriors of Clan Orrl had sent a message of fire in the night, and flames from the Scarpe-hold’s sod-and-timber roof had been seen throughout the North. By many accounts only the stonework still stood, but even that had been cracked and blackened, and returning Hailsmen whispered that sleeping there was like spending a night in a scorched field. Stangs from the Scarpe Tree, the poison pine that grew nowhere else in the clanholds except the hills surrounding Scarpe, had been used in construction of the roof. Many of them were still whole, but the deadly smoke given off during their charring caused more deaths than the most fiercely burning oak.

    Raina’s mouth tightened as she closed the dyehouse door. She could find little sympathy for Scarpe.

    Mace Blackhail’s birthclan was not her own. Yelma Scarpe, the Weasel chief, had brought the torching upon herself. She had unleashed her sharp little tongue upon Orrl, claiming land and strongwalls and hunting rights, and then, never short of clever talk and clever schemes, she had set the might of Blackhail upon them. Five warriors murdered in the frostbroken lands to the west, one the Orrl chief’s grandson; a dozen more Orrl warriors slain during a border skirmish when both Blackhail and Scarpe rode against them.

    And then there was the killing of the Orrl chief himself.

    Corbie Meese and his crew found the bodies, on the Old Dregg Trail, two days west of Dhoone. Eleven white-winter warriors and Spynie Orrl, their bodies clad in the strangely shifting cloth Orrl was known for, their heads forced so far down into their chest cavities that the scout who first came upon them thought the bodies beheaded. Corbie Meese knew the truth of it. Only a score of hammermen in the North, himself included, were capable of striking such a blow.

    Shivering, Raina made her way toward the widows’ hearth, which formed the uppermost chamber of the roundhouse.

    No one knew who had ordered the Orrl chief’s slaying. Spynie and his men had been traveling a dangerous path between warring clans, and there were some who whispered that the Orrl chief had been returning from a secret parley with the Dog Lord at Dhoone. Raina set no store by that. She knew Spynie Orrl, had spent a summer at the Orrlhouse in her youth, and even though he had no liking for the Hail Wolf, he would not turn his back on his oath.

    Old words and old loyalties ran deep here, in the westernmost reaches of the clanholds. Clans were older, the living was harder, and for a thousand winters the Hail chief had looked upon the Orrl chief as his man.

    Yet the Hail chief was new to his name and clan. Raina could clearly remember the time when Mace had first arrived from Scarpe. He was to be her fostered son, a skinny youth mounted on a big-eared stallion trapped with the weasel fur and black leathers of Scarpe. All that first year he had made a point of calling himself a Scarpeman. He had continued to sheathe his longsword in a braided scabbard—although he knew very well that Hailsmen considered such a housing fussy and impractical—and had stuck stubbornly to Scarpe’s many other peculiarities of dress. It had been a full eighteen months before Mace had succumbed to clan pressure to cut his waist-length hair, and a year after that before he finally exchanged his measure of powdered Scarpestone for one from the Hailstone instead.

    Raina sighed deeply as she took the stair leading up to the widows’ hearth. Too often these days she found herself wondering just where her husband’s allegiances lay. He might have given his oath to Blackhail and proclaimed himself its chief, but he continued to favor his birth clan over his adopted one. Dagro would never have placed Scarpe above Orrl, or invited dispossessed Scarpemen to rest their swords in his roundhouse.

    Oh gods. What does it matter, what Dagro would have done? Dagro was gone. Dead. And the boy he had taken as a son was now married to his wife.

    “Lady.”

    Raina turned on the stair to see Lansa Tanner on the landing below. The young girl bobbed her head, setting golden curls dancing. “The chief awaits you in his chamber.”

    Raina could still see the blush on her cheeks. Foolish child, to let a conversation with Mace impress her so. “Tell my husband I will join him when my business with the widows is done.”

    The girl waited for more, lips prettily parted, bars of light from the arrow slits slicing across her throat. No one dismissed a chief’s request out of hand; there had to be an apology or explanation. When none came the girl’s mouth closed and something less pretty happened to her face. Without another word she turned and descended the stair.

    What is happening here? Resting her weight against the sandstone wall, Raina watched the girl go. She had woven birth cloths for all the Tanner girls, washed their soiled linens and combed their tangled hair. How had Mace managed to steal their loyalty from her?

    The sounds and smells of early morning followed Raina as she climbed the little stair to the widows’ hearth. The crackle of newly lit fires and the sizzle of ham upon them competed with the clangor from the forge. Once her mouth would have watered at the aroma of blackening fat, and her pace would have quickened to meet the day, but here and now she felt nothing but the hard sense of duty that had become her life.

    She was chief’s wife, first woman of the clan, and Mace Blackhail could not take that from her.

    The door to the widows’ hearth was old and deeply carved, the wood a silvery grey. The lightest touch of Raina’s hand was all it took to set the quarter ton of rootwood in motion. The steady clack of looms greeted her as she stepped into the room.

    Merritt Ganlow, Biddie Byce and Moira Lull were at their frames, weaving. Old Bessie Flapp, whose great dislike of her husband made her a widow by choosing if not fact, was carding raw wool with her liver-spotted hands. Others were at tables, sewing and embroidering, spinning, and stretching the warps. The light was good here, and all the heat generated by the countless hearths burning throughout the roundhouse rose through the timbers on its journey toward the roof. The ceiling was low and barrel-vaulted, the bloodwood stangs made bright by a wash of yellow ocher. As it always did when she entered the chamber, Raina’s gaze fell upon the hearthstone.

    The widows’ wall, it was called, and the brown stain upon it was said to be Flora Blackhail’s blood. Wife to the Mole chief Mordrag Blackhail, Flora had gone mad with grief upon receiving word of her husband’s death. A messenger had arrived at the roundhouse in the dark of night, telling how Mordrag had been crushed by a collapsing cave wall in the Iron Caves to the south. Frantic and inconsolable, Flora had fled to the uppermost chamber of the roundhouse and stabbed herself with her carding shears.

    Stupid woman, Raina thought. For the messenger who brought word was a stranger to the clan, and Mordrag still lived, though he had lost half a leg to gangrene. When news of his wife’s death reached him, Mordrag mourned for thirty days, and then took himself a new bride. And the chamber Flora died in became a home for the widows of the clan.

    “Raina!” Merritt Ganlow spoke from behind her loom, her hands never losing contact with shuttle and thread. “Are you here as widow or wife?”

    Raina nodded at the stout woolwife. “I’m here as friend, I hope.” Merritt grunted. “Then as a friend I trust no words will find their way back to the Wolf.”

    The widows had little love for Mace Blackhail. No Scarpewomen ever found their way to the widows’ wall, though there were plenty of widows amongst them. They knew they were not welcome, could see that their tattooed widows’ weals set them apart. Scarpe widows did not cut themselves, as Blackhail widows did, claiming the pain of loss was enough. Why should they cut their flesh and pain themselves more?

    Pushing back her sleeves so the raised skin around her wrists showed, Raina said, “You and I both lost husbands in the Badlands, Merritt Ganlow. Would that their deaths generated kinship, not distrust.”

    “You found yourself a new husband quick enough.” Other women looked up at Merritt’s words and nodded. Someone at the back whispered, “Quic’t as a bitch in heat!‘

    Oh Dagro. Why did you leave me alone to bear this? Steeling herself against emotion, Raina said, “Life goes on, Merritt, and the clan needs strong women to guide it. Perhaps your place is here, with the widows weaving cloth, but mine is not. I have been too long at the fore of things to retire to a life of wool and stitching. Losing a husband does not change who I am. And it’s not within me to claim the widow’s privilege of sitting near the fire and growing old.”

    The shuttle in Merritt’s hand slowed. “Aye, you always were a hard one, Raina Blackhail.”

    “Hardness in a man is called strength.”

    “Aye, and strength, as you would have it, isn’t solely the preserve of those who lead. There’s strength to be found here, in the act of weaving quietly and carrying on.”

    “I know it, Merritt. That is why I have come.” For the first time since she had entered the widows’ hearth, Raina felt a lessening of the tension. Slender and lovely Moira Lull cleared the space beside Merritt on the bench. The women at the back returned to their tasks and Merritt took both hands from her loom and turned to face Raina full on. “You’re looking thin,” she said. Raina sat. “Food is scarce.”

    “Not for a chief’s wife.”

    “I’m busy.” Raina shrugged. “There’s little time to stop and eat.”

    “Anwyn says you’re wearing yourself out.”

    “Anwyn should look to herself.”

    That got a smile from Merritt. No one worked harder or longer than Anwyn Bird. When the grand matron of the roundhouse wasn’t cooking-or butchering, she was down in the armory, tilling bows.

    Merritt pushed a flagon of sheep’s-milk ale Raina’s way. “So, what brings you here this early?“

    Raina drank from the jug, savoring the milky coolness and the bite of malt liquor buried deep beneath the cream. As she wiped the froth from her lips, she wondered how best to approach this. Guile failed her, so she came straight to the point. “You have kin at the Orrlhouse?” Merritt’s nod was guarded. “And your son travels back and forth, trading skins and winter meat?”

    “Only Orrlsmen can bring home fresh meat from a deep-winter hunt.”

    “Aye.” There wasn’t a Hailsman in the roundhouse who wasn’t in awe of Orrl’s white-winter hunters. No one could track game across snow and ice like the men of Orrl. “So your son must have knowledge of what’s happening at the Orrlhouse?”

    This time Merritt’s nod was slow in coming. Her clever hands tied off a length of thread. “What’s it to you what my son knows, Raina Blackhail? Don’t you learn enough of Orrl’s business abed with your husband at night?”

    Careful, Raina cautioned herself. Thin’t what Dagro would have done here. “I learn only what Mace chooses to tell me.”

    Merritt sucked air between her teeth. “So you come here seeking what he will not?”

    “I come here seeking the truth.” Raina met and held Merritt’s gaze. “We go back a long time, you and I. You and Meth danced swords at my first wedding, and when Dagro went hunting that last time it was Meth who shared his tent. I might be married to Mace Blackhail but my loyalty lies with this clan. You might think I gained much upon marrying him, but you cannot know all I have lost. What I’m asking for is information when you have it. I know the steadfastness of this hearth. None here will go running to my husband with tales of his wife’s deeds.”

    “He watches you.” Ancient turkey-necked Bessie Flapp did not look up from her carding as she spoke. Skeletal fingers combed and stretched, combed and stretched, as a chill crept upon Raina. “Eyes everywhere. Little mice and little telltales. Meetings by the dog cotes and the stoke holes. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Who goes where? Who does what? Little mice with weasels’ tails.”

    Raina took a breath. She had not known it was as bad as this.

    “Biddie. Fetch Raina some of the griddle cakes from the hearth. And bring honey to sweeten the ale.” There was mothering in Merritt’s voice and Raina wondered what was showing on her face to change the woolwife so.

    Biddie Byce’s long blond braids whipped the air as she went about Merritt’s bidding. She was too young to be a widow, barely nineteen winters old. Cull had wed her the spring before he was slain on Ban-nen Field. Now Cull’s twin, Arlec, had begun to pay her court in small and unassuming ways. After the taking of Ganmiddich he had returned home with a necklace strung with green marble beads. Shyly, he had pressed it into Raina’s hands. “See Biddie gets it. She need not know it’s from me.”

    Raina smiled as Biddie returned with cake and honey. She didn’t want the girl to see the envy stabbing softly in her chest. It was only a few months past when Shor Gormalin had presented such a token to her. He had given her the broken tip from his first sword, polished by his own hand, set with an uncut garnet, and mounted as a broach. Thinking of it, Raina tried to hold her smile but failed. “Wed me, Raina,” he had said. “And I’ll cherish you and keep you safe.”

    Shor. Such a strong and thoughtful man. He should have been her second husband and Blackhail’s chief.

    Not Mace. Not the man who had raped her. “Here. Pull this round you. Your skin’s as blue as Dhoone.” Mer-ritt arranged a fine wool shawl across Raina’s shoulders, pulling it here and there until it covered all bare skin. “Hatty. Bring one of the pieces you and your sisters are working on—Raina needs to see it.”

    Silent and big-boned Hatty Hare snapped a thread with her teeth. Slowly she rose from her embroiderer’s stool to place a fist-sized panel in Raina’s hand.

    The Hail Wolf, worked in silver against a black ground. The Blackhail badge—only no clansman since Ayan Blackhail had worn it.

    “All the needlewomen have been set to work on them, under order of the chief himself.” Merritt poured honey into the milk ale. “We were warned to sew in silence and let none but the silversmiths know it, as they’re needed to stretch the wire.”

    Raina’s fingers traced the line of the wolf’s jaw, expertly worked in silver wire so fine it moved as if it were thread. Almost she knew Merritt’s next words before she spoke them, for it took a fool not to see what this meant.

    “This is how he keeps them loyal, this man whom it pleases you to call husband. He gives our clansmen back their pride. Five hundred years ago in the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes, all the chiefs in the clanholds met to strip Blackhail of its badge. Ayan Blackhail slew a king, they said. A coward’s shot to the throat. No Hail chief has challenged that judgment since; not Ornfel, or Mordrag, or Uthan … not even Dagro himself. Yet along comes a Scarpe-born fosterling, winning wars and gaining territory, daring to wear the Hail Wolf at his breast. And that’s not all. He wants every warrior in the clan to wear it; a whole army of Hailsmen bearing their badges with pride.

    “He’s a subtle man, Mace Blackhail, I’ll give him that. And he knows the value of small things. For five hundred years our warriors have ridden into battle without badge or banner. We are women, and we cannot know the shame they endured.”

    Raina hung her head. She felt Mace’s cunning as a weight upon her. Was there nothing he could not arrange? A chiefship. Loyalty.

    Marriage.

    Do not thin’t of it, a hard voice inside her warned. Put the day in the Oldwood behind you. Hate is all it will bring, and hate is like acid; it only burns the vessel that holds it. Raina raised her head. She would not be burned.

    “I’ll be on my way now, but I thank you for your straight words. I’d like to visit you from time to time, to talk and exchange news.” She waited for Merritt to nod before standing. “It’s good to find a hearth free of my husband’s sway.”

    “Squeak, squeak, squeak,” croaked Bessie Flapp. “Little mice with weasels’ tails.”

    Merritt frowned at the old battle-ax. “Come,” she beckoned Raina, “I’ll walk with you to the stair.” When they were out of earshot, she said, “What is it you sought to know about Orrl?”

    “Who is chief now? How are they coping with our hostilities?”

    “Stallis stood Chief Watch ten days since. By all accounts he’s a sharp one, Spynie’s sixth grandson, the white-winter warrior with the most kills.”

    “Does he hold Blackhail in favor?”

    Merritt made an odd sound, almost a laugh. “Come now, Raina. Do you honestly think Stallis will forgive Mace for ordering his grandfather’s slaying?”

    “But—”

    “But what? No one can say for certain who sent the hammer into Spynie Orrl’s brain? Tis said in the Orrlhouse that the Scarpe hammerman Mansal Stygo did the killing, and that the marks of Mansal’s hammer were stamped on Spynie’s skull.” Raina went to speak, but Merritt forestalled her again. “And it is also said that a burned-out campfire was found east of where the bodies lay, and amidst the campfire’s ashes lay tokens of Blackhail and Scarpe.”

    “Stone Gods.” Raina touched the horn of powdered guidestone at her waist. She wanted to deny it, but it sounded like the truth. Orris-men were not given to wild stories and swift conclusions. They were stoic men, preferring to save their energies for hunting, not loose talk. “None of this looks good, Raina. Orrl against Blackhail. War on more war.” Merritt Ganlow’s ice green eyes studied her. “Best be gone now. Keep the shawl about you. It’s cold in this roundhouse .. . and days darker than night lie ahead.”

    Tiny hairs on Raina’s arms rose. Merritt’s words were old and she did not know where they came from, but they stirred something within her. Unnerved, she turned to go.

    Merritt caught her wrist. “You are welcome in this hearth, Raina Blackhail. Remember that when you return to your world of husbands and wives.”

    Raina nodded. She could not speak to thank her. The journey down through the roundhouse was long and tiring, and she found herself making stops along the way. She saw the casual glances from charwomen and alewives differently now. Were they watching her for him?

    Lost in thought, she almost missed the broad and misshapen form of Corbie Meese, crossing the entrance hall with enough firewood strapped to his back to build or burn a house.

    “Corbie.”

    The soft word made the hammerman turn. A frown had started upon his face, but upon seeing Raina he grinned. “Are ye mad woman? To halt a man whilst he’s toting a ton of logs?” Bending his back as he spoke, he resettled the load upon him. Leather straps whitened with the strain.

    Raina grinned back at him. “That old load? Why there’s more air in there than wood.”

    Corbie laughed. “By the Stones, woman! You’d drive a man hard if ye could.”

    Now he had Raina laughing along with him, and it felt good. Good. It was suddenly difficult to talk of other things. “Corbie. Can I ask something of you?”

    “Aye. If I can ask something of you.”

    “You can.”

    Serious now, the hammerman put a hand against the stairwall to brace the weight of his load. The great dint in his head where a training hammer had clipped him as a boy showed up starkly in the torchlight. “It’s Sarolyn. She’s near her time now … and …” His gaze dropped to his feet.

    Raina nodded quickly, knowing full well what he meant to say and knowing also that mannish reticence kept him from it. “I’ll watch her day and night, Corbie. And both me and Anwyn will be there during her confinement.”

    Relief showed itself plainly on Corbie’s face. “I thank you for that, Raina Blackhail. It does a man’s heart good to know that his wife will be well cared for whilst he’s riding far from home.”

    Such a good man. He does not speah^ of his own death, but the thought is there inside him.

    “Name what ye would have of me.”

    She met Corbie’s light brown eyes, feeling as if she had trapped him. “It’s said that only a dozen hammermen in the North are capable of the blow that killed Spynie Orrl. Is Mansal Stygo one of them?”

    Corbie’s whole body stiffened at the question. To ask a hammerman to speak against a fellow hammerman, even one from a foreign clan, was calling for blood. There was a close honor amongst them. Hammer and ax had been wielded in the clanholds before the first sword blade was forged, before even there was metal, just stone and wood and bone. And neither Corbie nor Raina could pretend this was a casual question about a man’s skill.

    The chief’s wife asked much of the hammerman, but the hammer-

    man had given his word and he was bound by honor to answer her … even though he knew he named a murderer as he spoke. “Mansal trained for a season with the Griefbringer, here in this house.”

    Naznarri Drac. The Griefbringer. Exiled from the Far South, granted asylum by Ewan Blackhail, victor of Middlegorge, trainer of Corbie Meese. Naznarri was six years dead now, and the last man he’d trained was Bullhammer, the strongest hammerman in the North. Knowing she had her answer, Raina bowed her head. Corbie watched Raina for a moment, then shouldered his burden of quartered logs, turned and walked away.

    Raina stared at the great slate blocks that tiled the entrance hall, letting the knowledge settle inside her. It was a complicated world, these clanholds in which she lived, and when one clan was aggrieved it unsettled all. Blackhail, Dhoone and Bludd might be the mightiest amongst the clans, but that didn’t mean the lesser ones had no power. Orrl could turn on Blackhail and declare itself for Dhoone, or ally with Dregg and Harkness and act in concert to remove the Hail chief from power. It was the same with Bludd and Dhoone: no mighty chief could afford to alienate his sworn clans. Yet by sanctioning the murder of Spynie Orrl, Mace Blackhail had done just that.

    With a tired shake of her head, Raina moved across the entrance hall. Two meetings, both good and bad. Would that somehow she could avoid the third. There was nothing for it, though. Mace Blackhail had summoned her and she would be a fool to defy him. Gathering Merritt’s cloak about her, she made for the Hail chief’s chamber.

    The crooked stair was narrow and poorly lit. Once Raina had rushed down the steps, eager to be with Dagro to talk about her day. Now she moved slowly, noticing the mold on the walls and the defensive capstones overhead. Too soon she was there. The tar coating the chief’s door seemed to ooze from the wood in the torchlight, and she did not want to put a hand upon it. Mace saved her the trouble by pushing from the other side.

    “Wife,” he greeted her, a smile flashing oddly upon his face. “I had expected you sooner.“

    He did not make way to let her enter and she was forced to reply standing at the door like a child. “Did the girl not tell you I had business elsewhere?”

    “She was sent to fetch you, not your excuses.”

    “Then that’s her failing, not mine.”

    Almost she thought that he would hit her. The anger was there in his eyes, but it shifted as quickly as it was born, leaving nothing but the hardness around his mouth. Turning, he bid her enter with a crook of his wrist.

    She watched him move. The leathers he wore were as fluid as cloth and they curved to his spine as he walked. Wolves’ eyeteeth had been mounted around the hem of his greatcloak to weight it, and the fist-size brooch that held it to his throat was fashioned as a wolf pup, carved and silvered and packed with lead. Coming to stand behind the block of sandstone known as the Chief’s Cairn, he bid her seal the door.

    Even now, after fourteen weeks of marriage, she feared to be alone with him. But she could not let him know that, so she closed the door and drew the bolt.

    “I see you have discovered one of my schemes.” He nodded toward her left hand. “I take it you approve?”

    Feeling like a fool, Raina glanced down at her hand. The badge. She had not realized she had brought it with her. Feigning casual-ness, she tossed it onto the Chief’s Cairn. “A pretty plan.”

    Mace’s strong, blade-bitten fingers closed around the badge. “I thought so.” He observed her coolly, and she knew he had seen through her bluff.

    She spoke to dampen the gleam of knowing in his yellow-black eyes. “So, what would you have of me?”

    “A wife.”

    His words seemed to stop the air itself. Dust and heat and lamp smoke ceased rising. Mace’s gaze held hers, and for the first time since he had returned from the Badlands she saw the man behind the wolf.

    “You were a partner to Dagro,” he murmured, reaching for her hand. “Be one to me.”

    Raina closed her eyes. Sweet gods, how can he say this to me? Does he not remember what happened in the Oldwood? Yet she saw in his eyes that he did, and that, given chance, he would speak soft words to reverse it. / was desperate, I acted rashly, I thought you wanted it too. She shuddered, unable to find her voice.

    Mace watched her closely. When she made no reply he spoke again. “This clan grows large, Raina. Dhoone is weak, and Bludd’s Dog Lord has bitten off more than he can chew. There is much to be gained here. Blackhail can be remade as something greater, and you and I can rule it. Think of it. The Scarpe fosterling and the Dregg fosterling: the Lord of the Clans and his wife.”

    As Raina listened to Mace speak she realized he still thought of himself as an outsider. He’s still nursing old hurts. What had the clan children called him when he first arrived here? Weasel Boy, that was it. Ten years ago, and he hadn’t forgotten.

    Some light of understanding must have been showing in her face, for Mace lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I want you at my side, Raina. Join me on the journey as my wife.”

    It took all her concentration to keep standing. The smell of his sweat brought back memories she could not bear. The Oldwood .. . his hand clamping over her mouth as he drove her head into the snow …

    As she stood shaking quietly Mace waited. When he realized she would not speak he released her hand. “I have my answer then.”

    She drew in breath. There was no anger in her, just sickness. She thought that she might faint. “I’ve done my duty by you.”

    A hard sound issued from his throat, and suddenly he was beside her, his hands on the small of her back. “Do you think I am grateful for your duties?” Sliding his fingers across her breast, he turned the word into something obscene. “Don’t flatter yourself, Raina. There’s more warmth to be had in the heart of the Want than in your bed.” Abruptly, he let her go. “Have no fear, I shall make no call upon your duty again.“

    Blood burned in her cheeks. She turned to leave.

    But he had not done with her. Returning to his place behind the Chief’s Cairn, he said, “We have matters yet to discuss.”

    She kept moving toward the door. “Such as?”

    “Such as what’s to be done with the Sevrance girl. All who saw her that night by the dog cotes swear she’s witched.”

    He knew he had her. She had to turn and face him.

    Casually, Mace rested his hand upon the Clansword that was pegged low upon the wall. Wielded by Murdo Blackhail and Mad Gregor before him, forged from the crown of the Dhoone kings, and symbol of Blackhail power, the unsheathed sword shone blackly in the torchlight.

    “I’ve protected the girl as best I can, but tempers show little sign of cooling. You know how superstitious the old clansmen are. Turby Flapp would see her stoned. Gat Murdock thinks she should walk the coals. All seek her gone.” Mace shrugged. “I cannot set aside the will of the clan.”

    You bring Scarpemen into this house, she wanted to say. No Hails-man wills that. She said, “Not all in the clan condemn her. Orwin says the Moss woman deserved what she got, and that his dogs attacked her of their own free will.”

    “It’s hardly surprising that Orwin defends the girl. All know he does so out of love and loyalty for Drey.”

    Raina felt the net closing. He was too clever, this husband of hers; she didn’t have the words to best him. Still, she could not let Effie go undefended. “Cutty Moss was trying to kill her. No one can deny that. You’ve seen her wounds.”

    Mace sighed. “Yes, but there are those who whisper that Cutty only sought to bring an end to her witching.”

    “He stole her lore.”

    “And look what she did to get it back.” Mace shook his head sadly. “Come now, Raina, don’t let your love for the girl blind you. Even if she didn’t witch those dogs into attacking the luntwoman and her son, most believe she did. I would change that if I could, but I’m chief, not shaman. And as chief it is my duty to becalm the clan.”

    He wanted Effie harmed, she could hear it in the softness of his voice. Effie knew what he had done in the Oldwood . . . and possibly more. There was no telling what the girl could learn through her lore.

    Mace spread his ringers wide across the pocked surface of the Chief’s Cairn. “She must be tried.”

    Raina held herself still. She knew how such trials had ways of getting out of hand, how supposedly sane and rational clansmen could flash to anger in an instant, stoked by nothing more than their own ignorance and fears. Effie Sevrance, with her watching eyes and silent ways, wouldn’t stand a hope against them. Delay, that was the only thing to be done now. Delay.

    “It would be wise to save your decision until her brother returns from Gnash. Drey would not thank you for trying his sister in haste.” She saw she had made him think. Drey Sevrance was a chief’s man. When the Ganmiddich roundhouse needed to be held for the returning Crab chief, Mace had chosen Drey to watch its high green walls. And when the Dhoone chief-in-exile had called the Hail Wolf to a parley, it had been Drey whom Mace sent in his stead. Indeed, Drey hadn’t set foot in the roundhouse for five weeks, and Raina found herself wondering if his absence wasn’t what Mace had wanted all along. Mace said, “Wait, and I risk the possibility that clansmen will take matters into their own hands, and that’s something we both might regret.” He favored Raina with a husband’s smile. “But I’ll see what I can do.“

    It was no answer, and they both knew it. He would see Effie harmed either by trial or delay. And that meant she was no longer safe in this roundhouse. Raina pulled Merritt Ganlow’s shawl about her. Suddenly she wanted very much to be gone.

    “Be about your business,” he said, dismissing her. “And take comfort in the fact that I’ll be keeping Effie close.”

    His voice was so soft and reassuring it barely sounded like a threat.

    CHAPTER

    In the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes

    The Tomb of the Dhoone Princes was located a hundred yards north of the Dhoonehouse, sunk to a depth of eighty feet. A single passageway, cut out of the hard blue sandstone on which Dhoone was built, connected the tomb to the great barrel-vaulted guidehouse where kings and princes had once lain in state. Vaylo Bludd walked that passageway now, his bulk heavy upon him, his sword clad in dogskin at his thigh.

    He told himself he was old and jaded and hard to impress, yet he couldn’t help but marvel at the blue-gray light that shone upon him, filtered down through man-size blocks of cyanide quartz sunk deep into the earth. Only light the color of the Dhoone kings’ eyes was allowed entry into their grave.

    A nice fancy, Vaylo thought. But it was probably just as well no one had ever thought to do such a thing for Bludd, for the Bludd chiefs were a hard-drinking, hard-fighting lot and their eyes always burned red. Vaylo grinned. Stone Gods! But the Bludd chiefs were ugly! No one would have raised fancy tombs for them, that was for sure. Old Gullit’s nose had been split so many times by brawling and hammer blows that it looked just like a burst plum . . . and as for Thrago before him, well, men said it wasn’t for nothing that he was known as the Horse Lord.

    Vaylo’s smile faded as the corridor widened before him and he entered the coldness of the vault. The same blue light that spotted the corridor lay soft upon the standing tombs of Dhoone. They lined the great circle of the vault wall, stone coffins the size of men, with the likenesses of kings carved deep upon them, each one raised upright, as if they bore living, standing flesh, not dust. It made Vaylo’s hair rise to see them. The clanholds had been settled for three thousand years and the Dhoone kings had reigned for a third of that. One thousand years of kings, sealed within the silence of stone.

    Now, at last, he realized the weight of Ayan Blackhail’s sin. To bring an end to this with a Hailish arrow, carelessly loosed to the throat.

    The Dog Lord shook his grizzled head, feeling the weight of his braids at his back. He wasn’t one for wonder, and could recall having felt it only twice in his life. The first time was at Cedarlode, when the mist parted before him to reveal the mounted might of the Sull.

    The second was here, in this tomb.

    The air was dry and it moved strangely in the lungs. Vaylo could taste the age of it. It made him feel young and unimportant, a fish inside a whale. There before him, dominating the center of the space, stood the stone table that Jamie Roy had brought across the mountains during the Great Settlement. It had taken an army of men to move it, had occupied ancient roundhouses that no longer stood, spent a hundred years rotting at the bottom of the Flow, and now it lived here, with the bones of the Dhoone kings. Vaylo had no desire to touch it, yet his hand moved toward it all the same.

    “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Dog Lord. Last I heard that table was cursed.“

    Vaylo stayed his hand and turned to face the man who had entered the vault.

    Angus Lok shrugged. “Of course, if you have a fancy for your hair falling out and your manhood falling off, go ahead and stroke it. Just be sure to step into the shadows if you do, as I imagine it’s not a pretty sight.“

    Vaylo huffed .. . yet he did not touch the stone.

    The ranger ignored him and began looking around the vault. “So these are the famous standing tombs of Dhoone? I see a few of them have gone to their knees.” It was true enough. Some of the older coffins had crumbled and fallen open, revealing nothing but blackness inside.

    Vaylo said, “Only your first time here, ranger? I’d have thought you’d have skulked your way in before now.”

    “Skulk?” Angus Lok showed his teeth. “That’s a fancy word, Dog Lord. How long have you been saving it for?”

    Vaylo showed teeth of his own. “Since I caught you and the clansman at Ganmiddich.”

    If Angus Lok was stirred by Vaylo’s anger he did not show it, merely moved across the vault to inspect one of the more hideously carved tombs. The eight weeks of his confinement had gone easy upon him, and he looked little changed from the day Vaylo had seen him sealed in the pit cell beneath the chief’s chamber at Ganmiddich. His kind always prospered. He had the gift of turning enemies into friends, could coax extra rations from the most heartless of jailers, draw information from the most tight-lipped of guards. Even when Ganmiddich had been beset by Blackhail and retaken, the ranger had managed to talk Hammie Faa, his jailer, into letting him take up a sword. Angus had given his word that he would make no attempt to escape, merely defend himself against attack. He had kept it too, Vaylo had to give him that. And Hammie swore that the ranger had kept open the retreat at the Crab Gate, whilst the old Bludd retainers rode through. Vaylo himself had seen none of it, though he never doubted a Faa man’s word.

    Now Angus was here, at the Dhoonehouse, held in one of the strange and echoing mole holes under Dhoone. The Dog Lord had considered calling for him many times, yet had only today decided firm.

    Slapping his side in search of the small leather pouch that held his chewing curd, he said, “Since we’re talking of words, Angus Lok, mayhap you can help me with the meaning of one of them.”

    If I can. The Dog Lord softened a cube of black curd in his fist. “You can tell me what exactly it is that a ranger does.“

    Angus was inspecting the stone likeness of some ancient and unknowable king, and did not turn as he said, “A ranger ranges, Dog Lord. Surely you know that.” Admiring the curve of the king’s intricately carved greatshield, he crouched and ran a finger across the boss. “We ride wide and far, bearing messages and small goods where we can, spinning tales for our supper and trading news for our keep. We take day labor where we find it, trap game if we’re so inclined. I even knew one man who made his living teaching clan-wives how to dance like city bawds.” Angus straightened his spine. “As for myself, well I’m no dancer, and the last thing I trapped with a wire was my own left foot, so I mostly rely on trade.”

    An easy smile warmed the ranger’s handsome face. “Why, you wouldn’t happen to have a proposition for me, Dog Lord?”

    Indeed he did, but he’d be damned if he’d let this clever-spoken dog trick him into speaking before he was ready. Crossing the vault, Vaylo made his way toward the effigy of the Dark King, Burnie Dhoone.

    The man who had destroyed Clan Morrow had been carved without eyes. The stonework on his greathelm was so fine that Vaylo could see the join where the nosepiece had been welded to the crown, yet on either side of the smoothly planed stone, the carving gave way to sockets of jagged rock.

    Vaylo touched the powdered guidestone at his waist. Who had ordered him carved so, and why?

    “The Thistle Blood ran thick within him,” murmured Angus, coming to stand at the Dog Lord’s back. “It’s said that he got it from both sides.“

    Vaylo had never heard such a thing before. “How so?”

    “His mother was raped by her father, the king.”

    “Stone Gods.” Vaylo suddenly wished for the company of his dogs, yet they were close to the heart of the matter now: how a ranger came to know more about the clanholds than a clan chief himself. So he said, “I remember the summer I turned seventeen. It was hot enough to bake mud, and the sky had that haze to it that only comes with long days of sun. I couldna keep myself in the roundhouse, so hot and restless was I, so I’d ride out every day at dawn to cool myself in the forests south of Bludd. There’s old trees in that forest, and man-cut stones and ruins amongst them. When it got too hot to hunt I’d take my stick and fish for trout. I was not a patient fisherman, and doubtless scared more fishes than I caught, yet I liked it well enough. There was green water, and it was cool, and some ancient bit of archway shaded me, and one day when I came to my secret place I met a ranger there.”

    Angus Lok didn’t stir, though Vaylo knew he had the man’s attention in full. So he took his time with the telling; let no one say the Dog Lord couldn’t spin a tale when he chose to.

    “He called himself Hew Mallin, though I learned later he was known by many names. Sitting right on my spot, he was. Bold as brass, with a line in the water. Greeted me by my name, and told me that I’d best pick another hole next time as I’d never pull anything bigger than sticklebacks from this. Why do you fish here then? I challenged him. And he looked me right in the eye, cool as milk, and said, Because I’m here to hoo’t men, not fish.

    “Well I was young and suspicious and hard to impress, yet I still felt a thrill all the same. He knew about me, this man. Knew what kind of bastard I was, and what kind of father had begot me. There’s no love for you in that roundhouse, he said. Come south with me and I’ll show you a place where your strengths won’t go unrewarded. There are fights to be fought and a world that needs watching, for even as we spea’t the enemy masses at the gateT Vaylo turned to face the ranger full on. “Aye, Angus Lok. Your fine, secret brotherhood thought to have me in their fold.”

    A moment passed, and then Angus said quietly, “I can see why.” It was not the response he had expected. He had been prepared for derision or disbelief.. . but not grace. It lightened something within him to receive it.

    Angus watched him closely. “How did you answer them?” Vaylo waved his fist. “I told Hew that I might be a bastard but I was a Bluddsman to the core, and that I’d shrivel and dry to nothing the moment I stepped on land that wasn’t clan. Oh, don’t think I wasn’t tempted—bastards dream of little except grabbing glory far from home—but the desire was already in me to make myself Lord of the Clans.“ He shrugged. ”Besides, I had a small idea to steal the Dhoonestone from Dhoone.“

    Angus nodded. “Fishing will do that to a man—give him ideas.”

    “Aye, I’ve learned so.”

    Silence grew then, as the ranger waited for the clan chief to name the terms of his deal. Vaylo did not fool himself about who was the cleverer man here: Angus Lok had him pegged from the start. You could see it in the blandness of his face. Old Ockish Bull had looked as bland as that, and no one had ever risen early enough or stayed out late enough to put anything by him.

    Outside it was growing dark, and the filtered light dimmed to the deepest blue. Sull blue, Vaylo thought. Gone was the light, grayish thistle-blue of Dhoone. The Dhoone kings were probably spinning in their graves.

    But if they were you couldn’t hear them.

    Vaylo spoke into the silence they created. “You know Spynie Orrl was killed after visiting me, here, in the Dhoonehouse.” A nod from Angus; no surprises there. “And did you know what he came to tell me? This old man who was no one’s fool, and knew exactly what he risked to come here?“

    Angus did not nod this time, but Vaylo saw awareness in his copper green eyes.

    “He came to warn me. The Sull are preparing for war.” The words did not rest easy in the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes; cold currents caught them and blew them against the walls, creating sharp little echoes that hissed, Sull. Sull. Sull.

    Vaylo sucked on his black and aching teeth. He could not rid himself of Spynie Orrl. The old goat haunted him, he was sure of it, whispering words in the black of night as if he hardly knew he was dead. There are outside forces at wor’t here, Bludd chief. I know it. You know it. And the question that now remains is, are you content to let it be?

    Suddenly tired of games, Vaylo cried, “What is going on here,

    ranger? There’s secrets beneath secrets, plots inside plots. I’m not a scholar or a seer. I look at the sky and see only sky. How am I to protect my clan against dangers I cannot see?“

    “You already know the answer to that, Dog Lord,” Angus said, his voice soft and dark as the shadows that gathered about him. “Return to Bludd and marshal your forces and wait for the Long Night to come. Forget about Dhoone and this roundhouse, and your fancy of naming yourself Lord of the Clans. Days darker than night lie ahead, and no amount of land or titles will stop the shadows when they come. Chiefs die as easily as pig herders, yet they’re nowhere near as blameless. Men look to you to lead them. So lead. Leave this place, set aside your battles.” Angus’ gaze flicked to the fifty stone coffins lining the walls. “It’s all small purchase in the end.”

    Vaylo had his hand on the wire grip of his sword. Anger was hot within him, and he thought of many things to say to this man, but in the end there was only one. “I will not relinquish Dhoone.”

    The ranger nodded. “Aye, I had an inkling you’d say that.”

    The anger puffed out of Vaylo, leaving him feeling weary and very old. By rights he should call Hammie Faa or Dry bone and have them take the ranger away—and not gently at that. Yet he feared Angus Lok, feared the knowledge he held and the counsels he kept. Feared them, and wanted them for himself.

    Resting his weight against the tomb wall, Vaylo said, “You know the Surlord offered a sow’s weight in gold for your head?”

    “What, only one of them?” Angus scratched the stubble on his jaw. “I’d have thought the chin alone was worth more than two.”

    Vaylo did not take the bait. “And the Lord Rising of Morning Star sent one of his White Helms to bid for you. I daresay I could make a pretty profit if I chose to, auctioning you off for the highest price.”

    “Yet you choose to do something else.” The humor left Angus now, quick as if it had never been there at all. Vaylo reminded himself that this man was one of the best longswordsmen in the North, marksman and assassin, expert horseman and field surgeon. Friend of the Sull.

    He thought carefully before speaking his next words. Pride was at stake here, both the ranger’s and his own. “I choose to offer you a deal. The Mountain Lords are no friends of mine, and if I thought so once then I was a fool. I’m old enough now that I can admit my mistakes, but not so old that they cannot shame me. The clanholds are at war, and I will not deny my part in that, nor will I surrender my gains, but I canna say that I sleep well at night. I have lived too long on the edge of things not to recognize when those edges change. Bludd is a border clan and I am a border chief. You know our boast. We are Clan Bludd, chosen by the Stone Gods to guard their borders. Death is our companion. A hard life long lived is our reward.“

    Vaylo looked carefully at Angus Lok. The moon was rising now, silvering the standing tombs so they looked like men of ice. The ranger’s face was deeply shadowed, and looked leaner and hungrier for it. He wants this, Vaylo thought, and so he spoke his deal.

    “Help me guard my borders. I don’t need might or swords or warriors—Bludd has them in numbers—I need knowledge from a man I can trust. I know you will not name the brotherhood that claims you, and can guess well enough what breed of oath they made you speak. Yet there is middleground here, between a chief’s oath and a ranger’s oath, and though our wars may be different our enemies may one day prove the same.”

    Angus stood silent and unmoving, his weight held evenly between his feet. Time passed, and then he said, “And in return?”

    “I’ll see you released.”

    The two watched each other, each mindful of what was at stake. Angus Lok might be a clever and amiable prisoner, well able to coax information and favors from any man who guarded him, yet he had to know that no Bluddsman would ever set him free. Sixty days of captivity had taught him that.

    “I know you travel these lands,” Vaylo said, “speaking with clansmen and city men alike. What I ask is that you share your knowledge of the clanholds with me.”

    The ranger’s eyes glittered cold. Any other man and the deal would be done by now, for talk was cheap and confidences easily betrayed. Yet Angus Lok was not any man . .. and he had lived twenty years with the Phage. He said, “I am no petty traitor, Dog Lord, and I go running to no man with news given to me in confidence. Nor would I speak a word that endangered friends or kin.“ A pause, while the ranger allowed Vaylo time to remember that the man standing before him was kin to Raif Sevrance, murderer of Vaylo’s own grandchildren. ”Yet there are matters where our interests meet,“ a dangerous smile, ”not least of which is setting me free.“

    Vaylo inclined his head. The deal was done. Neither man would insult the other by haggling over terms.

    “So,” Angus continued briskly. “You would have information from me. Well, much though I hate to come courting with swords, I should warn you to watch your back.”

    “Blackhail?”

    “No. Dhoone.”

    The word seemed to warm the vault, Vaylo swore it. All about stonework creaked and settled, sending spores of blue sandstone to seed the air. “How so?”

    Angus shrugged. “The battle for the chiefship is coming to a head. On one side you have Skinner Dhoone, brother to the slain chief Maggis. He names himself chief-in-exile and gathers men about him at the Old Round outside of Gnash.”

    “Aye.” The Dog Lord nodded. He had Skinner’s measure. The Dhoone chief-in-exile put no fear into Vaylo Bludd. Skinner had a high temper and he blew hard and long, but he had lived too many years in the shadow of his brother and no longer had his jaw. Any other man would have tried to retake Dhoone by now. A month ago he might have seized it if he’d had the balls, for Vaylo and Drybone were housed at Ganmiddich, and the Dhoonehouse held by Pengo Bludd. Vaylo snorted air. He had nothing but contempt for a man who had a chance but failed to seize it.

    “And on the other side you have Robbie Dhoone,” Angus continued. “The golden boy of the Dhoone warriors, who claims chiefship through some questionable second-cousining and the Thistle Blood through his dam.”

    Vaylo pushed himself off from the wall with force. “A young pretender, nothing more.”

    “Not from what I’ve heard, Dog Lord.” Angus’ voice was strangely light. “Then again, perhaps you have better intelligence than I. After all there’s limits to what a man can hear in a cell.”

    Put in his place, Vaylo had nothing to say other than “Go on.” They both knew who was master of secrets here.

    “Robbie Dhoone has the golden hair and fair eyes of the Dhoone kings, and he knows how to cut a figure with them. They say he’s born to the sword, but the weapon he draws in battle is the great ax, much loved of the old kings. By all accounts the Thistle Blood runs true within him, and he can trace his line back to Weeping Moira. And I’ve heard it said by more than one man that he signs his name Dun Dhoone.“

    Dun. “Thistle” in the Old Tongue, the name the Dhoone kings took as their own.

    Unease must have shown itself on Vaylo’s face, for Angus said, “Aye, Dog Lord. You see the way the lake drains now. He’s young and ambitious and well loved in Castlemilk, and he’s puffing himself up to be a king.”

    “He quarters in Castlemilk?” Angus nodded. “He raises an army there.”

    Vaylo turned his back on the ranger to give himself time to think. The likenesses of the Dhoone kings watched him, stone eyes alive with moonlight. The pretender will try to retake this place, he thought. That is the warning Angus Lo’t would have me heed. All tal’t of kingship is hollow unless a king holds the land he claims.

    Behind him, Vaylo heard the sound of Angus crossing to the far side of the vault“. Shadows lay deep there, amongst the oldest of the standing tombs. All edges had been worn to curves by nothing more than air. ”And there’s more, Dog Lord.“ Angus said softly, causing Vaylo to turn. ”The border clans best ready themselves against raids from the Mountain Lords.“

    Vaylo grunted. There was always more. “The Surlord and the King on the Lake have long had an eye for the green hills and black mines of Bannen and Croser. Spring raids are nothing new. Heron Cutler led a sortie five years back, and took a blade in the kidneys for his trouble.”

    Angus squatted to inspect the cap stones surrounding the effigy of an ancient and faceless king. As he spoke he ran a finger along the mortar lines, testing. “If I were you, Dog Lord, I’d watch the clans nearer home. The Lord Rising of Morning Star stands close enough to HalfBludd to smell the staleness there.”

    This was news. “Cawdor Burns plans to strike against the Blud-dsworn clans?”

    The ranger did not look up from inspecting the wall as he said, “Who can say? The Lord Rising is no man’s fool. He’ll sit and watch the clanholds crumble from the safe haven of his Burned Fortress, and as soon as he spies a weakness he’ll move. HalfBludd is past her glory. She’s been in decline since Thrago HalfBludd deserted his birthclan to name himself chief of Bludd.”

    Vaylo found himself nodding. It was so. Thrago HalfBludd was his grandfather, the Horse Lord who brought back glory to the Bluddhouse after the defeat at Crumbling Wall. Yet whilst Thrago was in the field winning victories for Bludd, his birthclan suffered for want of a strong chief, and Bludd’s gain was HalfBludd’s loss. “I’ll send word to Quarro at the Bluddhouse, get him to send a crew of hammermen to HalfBludd’s southern reach.”

    “Do that. But be sure to keep your watch.”

    Vaylo bristled. He did not care for advice from any man, let alone some cocksure, trusty runner for the Phage. He was the Dog Lord, and he had lorded his clan for thirty-five years, and a chief did not hold his place that long by being anybody’s fool. Resting his hand on the hilt of his sword, he said, “When I was seventeen my brothers drew their knives and tried to slay me. When I was twenty-two Broddic Haddo crossed swords with me for the chief-ship of Bludd. Five months back I took Dhoone by force, and twelve weeks later I fought for my life on the banks of the Wolf. Every day I ask myself the question, ‘Which one of my sons will betray me first?’ And every night I lie awake in the darkness and watch the slaughter of my grandchildren by Hailsmen play out before my eyes.

    “Still I am here. I’ve won and lost more than you can imagine, ranger, yet here I stand, lord and chief. Do you really think I need counsel from one of my captives on how best to watch my back?”

    Angus bowed his head in acknowledgment. “I’m sorry for that. The habit of caution lies deep within me.”

    “That is why you are a ranger, not a chief.” Once again, Angus nodded. They both knew that caution would take a man only so far.

    “Get up,” Vaylo commanded him, suddenly wanting this meeting to be done. “Go and present yourself to Drybone and tell him the nature of the deal we have struck. He’ll return your arms and provision your drypack and see you on your way.” Still Angus did not rise. “And my horse?”

    The magnificent bay gelding. As soon as Vaylo had set eyes upon it he had known it for a Sull horse. “It will be returned.”

    “I thank you for that, Dog Lord.” The ranger stood and faced him. His fingertips were white with mortar dust, and Angus saw Vaylo’s gaze upon them. “ ‘Tis nothing,” he said with a small shrug. “I heard once that a tunnel led from this tomb all the way north to the Copper Hills. It’s said that it was dug so long ago that not even the Dhoonesmen can remember it.”

    “Yet you and your brotherhood do.”

    The ranger brushed the dust from his fingers. “We remember the old words and the old rhymes, nothing more. In the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes there be, a bolt-hole for those who canna loo/{ nor see.” He grimaced. “Poetry was never a Dhoonish art.”

    “Nor patience a Bluddish one.”

    Angus accepted the reprimand with a bow. “Well, I’d best be on my way. Let no one say Angus Lok outstayed his welcome in the Dhoone-house.” He offered the Dog Lord his arm, and after a moment Vaylo stepped forward to clasp it. “I shall call back when I have more news. Expect me when the wind blows cold and from the North.”

    “That’s near every day in the clanholds.” Angus grinned. “Then I’ll be sure to pick an especially stormy one.“

    Vaylo released his arm. “Aye, I’m sure you will.” He made himself wait until the ranger was long gone before following him out of the tomb.

    CHAPTER

    The Beast Beneath the Ice

    Raif pushed the sealskins from him and swung his feet onto the floor. The band of ice sealing the door glowed blue and milky in the growing light. The little soapstone lamp was dead, the whale oil in its chamber long congealed to a wedge of fat. A fur of hoarfrost had grown on the ceiling above where he had slept, each rising breath adding crystals to the mass. It was bitterly cold. And he was alone.

    Ash was gone.

    He waited, but the panic didn’t come. He would go after her, that was all. Wherever she was, wherever they had taken her, he would find her and bring her back.

    His head hurt when he moved his eyes, and the skin on his face was tight and numb. Something dry and scaly coated his tongue, and he remembered the oola’t the Listener had bid him drink. Strong brew, and like a fool I dran’t myself into oblivion. I should have known what Ar’t Veinsplitter wanted. The truth was in his eyes.

    Raif pressed his fingers into his face, trying to banish the numbness. They’d had it all planned, the two Far Riders and the Ice Trapper. Make him drink until he’d passed out and then steal away with Ash. From the look of the hoarfrost over the bench, he’d slept longer than one night. . . and that meant that Ash could be leagues away by now. No one could travel farther in white weather than the Sull. But a clansman could always try.

    Standing, Raif tested his body for aches. There seemed too many to count, so he ignored them and concentrated on his thirst instead. A small copper pot stood beside the lamp, its rim caked with caribou hairs and frozen soot. Snapping surface ice with his knuckles, he discovered liquid water beneath. The water was so cold it smoked from his mouth as he drank, and he could feel it sliding down to his gut. The horn bowls and the stone warming basin that had contained the oola’t were gone. The only evidence that Ash had been here was the footsteps stamped in rime on the floor. How could I have let them take her?

    A soft chuffing sound broke his thoughts. The raven. The Listener’s great black bird stood to attention on its bone perch, its wings tucked and folded, its sharp eyes upon Raif. Raif thought he would like to swipe it with his fist, but seriously doubted if he was faster than the bird, and didn’t think it would be dignified to miss. So he turned his back instead. He was sick of ravens and their omens. And he didn’t want to think about his lore. Ash had it, that was enough. The last time he’d seen the hard piece of bird ivory, it had been suspended from twine at her throat.

    Suddenly eager to be gone, Raif kicked the driftwood door. The ice seal cracked, and the thick sea-salt-cured planking swung back to reveal a twilight landscape of day-burning stars and ice. The sun was somewhere north of the horizon, unseen, but sending out rays of red light that stretched across the floes toward the sea. The air smelled of a coldness beyond frost. When Raif exhaled his breath whitened so violently it seemed to ignite.

    “Sila. Uta’t” The small hunched figure of the Listener was heading toward him, leaning heavily on a staff of twisted horn as he made his way across the cleared space at the center of the stone mounds. His words sent a young girl racing off to do his bidding, and made two older hunters who were hacking frozen meat by a cache hole stand alert.

    Raif stepped forward to meet him. The man’s finery and tokens of power were gone, replaced by grubby sealskin and stiff furs, yet he appeared no smaller for it… and he did not look repentant.

    Anger sparked within Raif. “Where have they taken Ash?”

    Close now, the Listener shook off Raif’s question as if it were nothing more than snow on his back. Coming to a halt, he repeated the words he had spoken to Raif when first he saw him. “Mor Dra^a.”

    Raif felt the same strange thrill, almost as if he were hearing a god speak his name, yet he would not let himself be distracted. “The girl. Where is she?”

    The Listener crooked his mitted fist and turned. Slowly, he walked away, heading for the hills and frost boils that rose sharply to the north of the village. A low wind buffeted the snow and set the sea ice creaking. Raif did not want to follow. He’d been trapped once in this place. How difficult could a second entrapment be? He was a stranger here. An outsider, and without warmth and food and knowledge of the land, he’d be a dead man within a day.

    Reluctantly, he grabbed his Orrlsman’s cloak from the ground and followed the Listener north. There were no choices at the edge of the world, and a clansman would do well to remember that. The Stone Gods’ power was stretched thin here; the earth and rock they lived in was buried deep beneath the ice.

    The Listener led him north across treacherous ground. Ice fog had frozen the top snow to glass, and it shattered with tiny explosions underfoot. The cold made Raif weary, and the bleak whiteness of the landscape drained the willpower from him. It was hard to imagine journeying alone in this place.

    Frost boils broke through the ground like shrunken volcanoes, their stone rims too sharp and narrow to bear snow. The Listener stepped around them with ease, prodding at drifts and suspect ice with his staff. When the land began to rise he slowed his pace, yet Raif still found it difficult to keep up. He could barely hide his relief when the old man came to a halt by the leeward edge of a frost boil. Raif clambered up the slope to reach him.

    “Turn around, Clansman. Tell me what you see.”

    It took Raif a moment to realize that the Listener had spoken in Common Tongue. How could this be? What had happened to the old man who had not understood a word he’d said the other night, and needed Ark Veinsplitter as a translator?

    Seeing Raif’s surprise, the Listener’s eyes glinted with satisfaction. “Never assume you know your enemy until he is dead.”

    Feeling heat come to his face, Raif said, “You can’t learn anything from a corpse.”

    “You can learn that only a dead man cannot surprise you.” Something hard and ancient shifted behind the Listener’s eyes, and Raif knew he had been told a truth worth remembering. Yet it didn’t mean he had to like him for it. Turning to face the way they had come, Raif looked out across the Ice Trappers’ territory and the frozen sea. His gaze traveled to the stone grounds of the village, then toward the shore, where a second village, built of wood and whalebone and mounded earth, stood abandoned close to the ice.

    “Our summer life,” said the Listener, following his gaze. “Soon it will be eaten by the ice. A storm will move the sea, and the shore ice will break its mooring and come crashing onto the beach. Much will be destroyed. So we gathered our lamps and harnessed our dogs and took refuge in the old places.” His eyes flicked to Raif. “It’s a foolish man who thinks he can stand in the way of fate or moving ice.”

    “How can you know this?”

    “I listen while others sleep.” The Listener poked a mitted finger at the remains of his left ear. “Gods and things older than gods whisper in the darkness, telling the tale of what has been and what is to come. If you are l.ucky you cannot hear them. You grow, you hunt, you enter a woman, and the world you live in is a knowable place where a man can make his own way and find his own death.

    “If you are unlucky you learn more. Oh, men will honor you for it, send the women with the best cuts of meat and their daughters with skins beaten till they run through your fingers like grains of sand. And all the while they fear you. And though they need the knowledge you bring them, they do not love you for it. For you have heard whispers from the beginning of the world, and no man can listen to those echoes and remain unchanged.”

    The Listener rested his weight on the yellow and twisted ivory of his staff. His face was dark and knowing, lit by the farthest edge of the sun. When he spoke again there was anger in his voice, and his breath crackled in air that was suddenly still. “Days darker than night lie ahead; that is the truth here. That is the answer to your question. The girl has gone and you cannot follow her. How can you track someone in utter darkness? What good would it do to find her, when you can no longer see her face?”

    “Where have they taken her?” Raif heard the stubbornness in his voice. He could not let this man’s words distract him. It was a trap, like the oolah^. Fine drink. Fine words. He just wished they sounded less like the truth.

    “Better ask why, not where, Clansman. Follow me.” The Listener raised his staff to the hummock wall and began the final ascent to the rim. He moved like a spider, light and skittering, stepping sideways more often than forward. Raif envied his technique. The little tribesman was full of surprises.

    The frost boil was a crater of raised rock, forced upward by earth that had expanded as it froze. Raif had seen its like in the Badlands. They were good places to set camp by, and Tern said that clansmen used to fight duels in their hollows, as they were reckoned a worthy place to die. When Raif gained the rim he saw that the crater’s basin was filled with snow-crusted ice. Hard black basalt ringed the core.

    The Listener wagged his head toward the ice. “Drop down and scrape off the snow.”

    Raif had half a mind to tell the Listener to go to one of the nine spiraling hells. He was getting tired of games. And he feared another trap.

    “I am an old man,” snapped the Listener, “and the women tell me I must save my strength for winter’s end. So if I had a mind to kill you I’d have done so closer to home.” He bared tiny brown teeth. “Save myself the trouble of hauling back your body for the dogs.”

    Raif let out a breath. Why was it that all holymen thought they had a right to taunt him? Inigar Stoop had been no different—but at least he was clan. Laying a mitted hand on the crater’s rim, he vaulted onto the ice. He landed hard, ten paces below the Listener, on a basin of ancient water that was frozen to the core.

    “Here. Use this.” The Listener dropped a flat-bladed knife onto the ice. “Ulu. Woman’s knife. Should serve a clansman well.”

    Raif stabbed at the snow. The top layer was hard and brittle, but softer grains lay beneath. The little knife, with its center tang, had been designed for scraping skins, and it made good progress toward the ice. Raif decided it wasn’t worth thinking about why he was being made to do this. The Listener reminded him of one of those spiteful little imps who always guarded bridges in crib tales; they’d never let you cross until they’d humbled you first.

    Fumes rose from the ice as he worked, smoking blue in the clear air. When he reached the final layer of snow, a chill went through him. Something was casting a shadow on the ice. Turning, he looked up at the Listener and the twilight sky beyond. Neither the sun nor the moon had risen high enough to cast shadows. Yet it was there, a darkness upon the ice.

    “Finish what you started, Clansman.” The Listener’s voice was thin and hostile. “You wanted answers; dig for them.”

    It occurred to Raif that he could kill the man standing above him. He was armed now, and though the Listener possessed a wily sort of strength, he would be no match for a fitter, younger man. A blow to the heart would finish him. Not sure if he was comforted or unnerved by the thought, Raif turned back to the ice and resumed scraping. The final layer of snow was hard and frozen, stuck fast to the ice by frequent thaws. The knife blade bent as he worked, and he could feel the sweat trickling between his shoulder blades as he put the force of his body behind each blow. The area he was clearing was roughly circular, the size of a man’s chest. When he’d chipped away enough of the surface crust he set down the blade and brushed off the loosened snow.

    Something deep inside his spine, the nerve that Tern said was the first thing of a man’s to grow within the womb, sent him a warning of pure fear.

    The darkness was not upon the ice, it was within it.

    Instinctively, his hand rose to his waist. Only the tine containing his measure of powdered guidestone wasn’t there. He experienced a moment of panic as he slapped his hip, searching for the hardness of elk horn, before remembering he had used his last portion on Ash. It had summoned the Sull for her.

    Oh gods.

    Raif bit off his mitts and spat them away. Holding his hands to his face, he blew warm air upon them. He was aware of the Listener standing above him, perfectly still now, his breaths coming slow and silent. Raif put his hands upon the ice. He felt the coldness leap toward his fingers, questing for fluids to freeze. Quick ice fastened to his skin, but he pushed against it, dragging his palms across the clearing, turning opaque ice transparent.

    He saw the teeth first. A dark mouth gaped wide beneath the surface, lips pulled back to reveal a jaw of broken teeth. Raif recoiled. Something lay dead and frozen beneath him, something that could not be named a man.

    Slowly, he returned his hands to the ice. He was shaking now, and there was little heat in him, yet he had no choice but to carry on. He would not let the Listener see his fear.

    An eye socket was revealed next, the skin black and mummified, the eyeball long exploded with the pressure of the ice. Evil was frozen in the densely layered muscles of the face. The shadowy mass of the creature’s body was buried deep beneath the surface, its shoulders and chest receding into grotesquely twisted shapes. Raif told himself the distortions were due to ripples in the ice; he almost believed it until the Listener spoke.

    “ThaalSithu’t” the Listener said, his voice soft with hunter’s awe. “From the War of Shadows. Xaluku of the Nine Fingers killed it with a spear thrust to the heart.”

    Raif struggled to find his voice. Beneath his fingers, the last portion of darkness waited to be revealed beneath a crust of white snow. “How long has it been here?”

    “Five thousand years.”

    Raif closed his eyes. The time seemed too vast to comprehend.

    The Listener waited until Raif’s gaze returned to him before saying, “There are many things more terrible hidden beneath the ice.”

    / don’t want to know, Raif thought. I just want to find Ash. “Men and kings, and weapons they forged and cities they built and beasts they slew in the darkness. Ages have passed and most think only the legends remain … yet most never look beyond the surface of the ice. All things that die fall upon the earth. The musk ox is eaten by the wolf, the shored whale is plucked apart by gulls, the warrior is found and burned or thrust deep within a tomb. Yet sometimes the ice finds them before the hands of scavengers or men. Sometimes the ice claims them and bears their bodies away.”

    Raif pushed his hands across the snow, clearing the last of the crust. He didn’t want to hear this. His fingers ached, and patches of skin around his knuckles had started to yellow with frostbite. He wanted clan, and Drey and Effie .. . and Ash. Yet even as he wanted them, he polished the ice before him so he could see what lay beneath.

    A hand, with thick black talons that ended in razor points, reached out toward the light, its fist packed with ice. It was so close to the surface Raif could see the fine dark hairs that ran along the skin. Suddenly cold, he said, “Why are you showing me this?”

    The Listener jabbed the point of his staff into the snow. “Because telling the truth is seldom enough. A man must see it with his own eyes. The shadows are rising, and beasts and taken men will walk this earth once more. Now is no time to be chasing after things you cannot have. The girl has gone. The Sull have taken her, and what the Sull take they never give back. She’s theirs now. Let her be. Save your strength for the battles you can win. The Long Night has come, and those who thrive in darkness must step forward to fight.” Raif felt his face stiffen at the Listener’s words. He wanted to deny them, but the little tribesman thrust out a hand to stay his reply. “Yes, Clansman. I know who you are. I have seen the raven riding on your back. I have heard the sound of footsteps at your heels. Death follows you. She named you. Watcher of the Dead. Yes, you are cursed. But you are young and whole, and I am old and have no ears and can find little sympathy for you. We cannot choose our skills. A boy with a gift for nets and lines must fish. A man with a hunter’s eye must hunt. If you’re born to the darkness, claim it. Find yourself a weapon and fight.“

    Raif pushed himself upright. He was stirred, but didn’t want to be. This was not his world, this place of shadows and darkness and beasts held in ice. He had no weapon, no training. How could you banish shadows except with light? Kicking the mound of snow at his feet, he scattered dry crystals across the clear and gleaming ice. “Why me?”

    “Why not?” The Listener’s expression was hard. “Be glad of the gifts you have been given. They will be needed, and there are many things worse in life than being needed.”

    Tired of the Listener’s scoldings, Raif forced the subject further. “Why can I heart-kill, old man? Do your gods whisper the answer to that?”

    A dangerous smile stretched skin on the Listener’s face. “Men stronger and wiser than you have tried to force me to speak when I would not. None suceeded. I speak only at my own choosing. And I choose to tell you this: Yours is a double-edged gift. You can bring death, but you can also bring peace.”

    Raif shook his head, frustrated. He would get nowhere with this.

    And what did any of it matter with Ash gone? Where was she now? Had they harmed her? Was she waiting for him to come?

    He said simply, “Where are they taking her?”

    The Listener watched him closely before answering. “They will carry her east to the Heart of the Sull.”

    “Then I’ll go east.”

    “Men have died searching for the Heart of the Sull. The ways are long and twisting, and there are forests where every tree looks the same. Some say time itself is woven into the paths, but the Ice Trappers know little of that. We know the legends, some of them. And I can tell you that although Bluddsmen have been known to cross the borders of the Sull Racklands no clansman has ever entered the Heart.”

    “Then I’ll be the first.” The Listener seemed almost to smile. “You are young, and your arrogance becomes you, so I won’t tell you all the reasons why you are wrong. Know this. I have walked this land for a hundred years, from Wrecking Sea to Endsea, from the Ice Horn to the Lake of Lost Men, and not once in that time have I found the Sull ways. They ride for the mountains—I know because I have watched them, even followed them in my youth—but as soon as they pass into the foothills they cease to be. Now, your eyes may be good, but mine were better, and I never discovered where they went.“

    Raif bowed his head. He couldn’t argue with the Listener’s words; he knew all about Sull ways. He wouldn’t be here if the two Far Riders hadn’t deigned to leave a trail. Still. He could make his own way east. Softly, almost to himself, he said, “I will find her.”

    “What makes you think she wants to be found ?” Raif glanced up at the hard ice-tanned face of the Listener. What he saw made him wary. “She was taken against her will. Drugged, snatched away in the night, forced to ride east to gods know where. Of course she wants to be found.”

    The Listener tapped snow from the tip of his staff. “Oolal{ is bitter and stringy, and stinks like dead fish. Only men are fool enough to drink it.“

    Again, Raif felt a stab of wariness. “Why are you telling me this?”

    “Your friend was not drugged. She only took one sip of the oola’t.

    She went of her own free will.“

    “No.”

    “They did not force her. She is the One with Reaching Arms. She knew she had to go.“

    Raif shook his head savagely. She wouldn’t leave him without saying a word, not after all they’d been through. Not after the Cavern of Black Ice. He said coldly, “You lie, old man.”

    The Listener nodded. “Often, about many things. The kind of truths I know destroy men. Mothers do not want to know that the child they carry will be born dead, or that their sons will die before they do, and their husbands will be maimed during the hunt. You cannot be a Listener without knowing how to lie.” As he spoke, the old man reached into the soft inner furs that lay beneath his sealskins and pulled something out. “But to you I speak the truth.”

    Opening his fist, the Listener let something small and dark fall upon the ice. “She asked me to return this.”

    Raif stared at the object by his feet. Black and hooked, as long as a child’s finger, with a hole bored through the bridge for threading string. Raven lore. Here it is, Raif Sevrance. One day you may be glad of it. No matter how hard he tried to lose it, it always came back.

    It changed everything, and both he and the Listener knew it.

    “No.”

    Quite suddenly he remembered the single tear in Ash’s eye. She had known then that she was leaving him. Calmly, because there was nothing else to do, Raif bent and picked up his lore. It felt thin and brittle, like something he could crush in his fist. Instead he pulled a tie from the Orrl cloak around his shoulders and fastened the lore to his throat. It was his and he would wear it… and he would not think of what Ash had done.

    “She made her choice,” the Listener said. “Now it’s time you made yours.”

    Raif found himself looking at the ice, at the dark and monstrous shape rippling beneath him. Guard yourself, she had said, her last words. How could he do that when the things that cut the deepest couldn’t be fought? After a moment he crossed to the crater wall and began to pull himself up. His choice was made.

    H A P T E R

    Into the Fire

    Effie Sevrance crouched behind the great copper distilling vat and watched as Gat Murdock sampled the low wines. The low wines were the halfway point in the distillation, Longhead said; too weak to be named a full malt, but strong enough to send a man to his knees if he sampled too often and too long. Effie wished Gat Murdock would drop to his knees .. . soon. It was hot and dark in the distilling well, and vapors bubbling from the cauldron made everything clammy and damp. Effie could feel the heavy wool of her dress sticking to her back like wet oats. Stupid thing. Why hadn’t she thought to wear her linen shift instead ?

    Gat Murdock closed the spill hole on the bell-shaped vat and held his final sample up to the lamp. The seaglass cup glowed green, revealing liquid still cloudy with dregs. Effie willed him to swallow and be done. She was on a mission for Bullhammer and Grim Shank, and she didn’t want to disappoint them. They’d chosen her to brew the iron juice. There were a score of boys in the roundhouse, all doing nothing more than waiting around the Great Hearth each day in the hope of sanding the rust from a hammerman’s chains or mending the shearling that couched the hammer itself. Yet when it came to the matter of the stain for the hammermen’s teeth, Bull-

    hammer had decided that Effie Sevrance would do a better, quieter job than every one of them.

    “Effie’s your girl,” Bitty Shank had said to his older brother Grim, last night as they stood in the dry and dusty shadows of the stable block. “She’s clever with her hands, knows how to keep a secret, and she’s sister to a hammerman herself.” Bullhammer and Grim had nodded gravely, the dim glow from the safe lamp sparking strangely off their tarnished plate. A hammerman’s sister was good enough for them.

    Iron juice, Bullhammer had explained, was as black as the Stone Gods’ tears and only a little less likely to kill you. It had to be strong enough to stain a hammerman’s teeth, and keep them good and black for a season. “It’s no good using lampblack or ashes—the stain barely takes for a week. And as soon as a man sets to frothing at the mouth his spittle’s likely to run black.” Effie had nodded in understanding. If you were going to stain your teeth so you looked fierce in battle then it would be better if the stain didn’t wash off halfway through. Else you might end up looking foolish instead.

    The problem was that Blackhail hammermen hadn’t stained their teeth since Mad Gregor had led three hundred to their death in the fast-rising waters of the Flow. All but a dozen of their number had been hammermen. Their bodies had been dragged downstream b) the spring rush, across the rocky shallows known as Dead Man‘: Ribs and over the towering, misty drop of Moon Falls. Effie hac heard it said that the river rock had peeled the flesh from their bones and the only things left for the widows to wrap were white skull with grinning black teeth.

    Effie frowned. It seemed to her that there were far too many clai stories involving skulls and violent deaths. Still, it was interestin; how afterward no Blackhail hammerman would stain his teeth fo fear of riling the gods, and the recipe for iron juice had been lost.

    “Sour as piss,” Gat Murdock pronounced to the now-empty sam pling cup. “Good enough for a tied clansman—or his wife.” Satis fied, he upended the cup onto a basswood rack and spat to clean h mouth. Like many older clansmen he was missing fingers, yet r moved no slower for it, and sealed the taps and dimmed the lamp ;

    quick as if he had ten fingers, not eight. Effie watched as he moved to leave then stopped himself short of the stair. Turning to face the very corner that concealed her, he sent his gaze darting this way and that, checking if he were being watched. Effie held her breath, imagining herself still as the very stone the well was built from.

    Long seconds passed before the clansman’s pale eyes passed her by. Satisfied that no one was looking, Gat Murdock reached for the high shelf where Anwyn Bird kept her twenty-year malt, and slipped one of the precious wax-sealed flasks under his coat. Effie forgot she was being still as a stone and let her mouth fall open in amazement. Anwyn’s twenty-year malt! Wasn’t there a curse upon it? Anwyn swore that any clansman who drank her malt without her blessing would find himself short of his man parts within a week. Effie closed her mouth. She had learned all about man parts from Letty Shank. Any man who lost them was bound to be sorely displeased.

    Uttering a small grunt of satisfaction, Gat Murdock put his foot to the stair and began the short climb from the well. Effie forced herself to listen for the sound of his feet treading the floor above before emerging from her place behind the vat.

    Her arm was stiff and she rubbed it gently as she squeezed past copper pipes. Other parts hurt too; places where Cutty Moss’ knife had sunk deep, opening ragged hard-to-heal wounds that still wept water at night. She wouldn’t think about those now, though. She was a clanswoman of nearly nine winters, and men returning from the clanwars had worse hurts to bear.

    She just wished Cutty’s knife had spared her face. Effie stopped her treacherous hand from rising to touch her cheek. Wouldn’t have been a beauty even without the scars, Mace Blackfiail said so.

    Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t stop the memory of the day in the Oldwood from forming in her head. It was just there, all of a sudden. Mace on top of Raina, forcing her down into the snow. Effie wished very hard she hadn’t seen them. What Mace had done was a bad thing, but when she tried to tell that to her brother Drey he hadn’t understood. Instead he’d gone straight to Mace to demand an explanation . . . and somehow Mace had twisted it all around and made it seem as if she, Effie Sevrance, had made a childish mis The clan chief had caused her a bit of trouble after that, sendin Cutty Moss to harm her with his knife.

    Effie attempted a scowl that very nearly worked. Swiftly, scanned her brain for something to distract her. Clan Gray, that it! She was grateful she hadn’t been born into that small, cursed c Half the newborns died within a week, and the rest were held t disformed.

    Unsure if that had actually helped, Effie quickly turned thoughts back to iron juice. She needed good strong liquor to pr the potion. Anwyn’s twenty-year malt was too mellow—and cursed. She needed something that could burn a man’s gums, and p sibly his tooth enamel as well. Thoughtful, she scanned the flasks the highest shelf. Will Hawk’s Dhooneshine in its odd sparkly fk stood beside Dagro Blackhail’s Chief’s Malt, and Shor Gormali Gutbreaker with its crossed swords burned into the wood. So ma dead men’s brews. Then she saw it, in the darkest corner, its leath flask hairy with cobwebs, its wood stopper near forced-out with a| Tem Sevrance’s Special Brew. Da must have distilled it himself.

    It was late and the roundhouse had grown quiet and Effie kne she’d better hurry, yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself from read ing for Da’s flask. It smelled like him, leathery and horsy. And whe she pulled the stopper out she nearly laughed. This would do the jot It surely couldn’t kill anyone, not after this long, and Da had been ;

    hammerman himself. He’d help her with blackening his compan ions’ teeth.

    Something behind Effie’s eyes began to hurt, and she recorked the flask with a hard thump and began the short climb from the well.

    It was an odd night in the roundhouse, dark and still with only half the torches lit in preparation for the Feast of Breaking. It had seemed like a good idea to gather the ingredients for the iron juice tonight, for few liked to travel the halls on the night the Stone Gods walked the earth. Now, though, as she wound her way through the roundhouse’s crumbling lower reaches, she began to feel little prickles of unease. Her lore began to cool against her skin.

    The small granite stone was suspended around her neck once more,

    heavy as a new-laid egg. Inigar Stoop had found it, clutched in a severed hand. It had been the clan guide’s job to gather the remains of Cutty and Nelly Moss. Back bent double against the wind, wicker basket in hand, he had pried their frozen flesh from the snow. Effie had heard it whispered that nothing whole remained, that the dogs had eaten Nelly’s eyes and tongue, and torn out Cutty’s spleen. She supposed she was lucky no dog had swallowed her lore. Inigar would not let her wear it at first. Instead he had taken the lore to the guidehouse, where he’d spoken words of power over it, and then laid it atop the guidestone, where it could draw strength and be renewed.

    It felt different now. Older. Harder. Inigar said lores changed and grew with their wearers; so did that mean she was older and harder too?

    Nearing the oil-blackened stair that spiraled up to the clan forge, Effie slowed her pace. Normally she liked this part of the roundhouse, with its low ceilings and narrow ways. It was darker than normal, but she didn’t mind that. No Sevrance had ever been afraid of the dark. Still. There was something else , . . something watchful and waiting. And her lore didn’t move, didn’t push, but something inside it shifted as if a drop of liquid mercury had flash-hardened in its core. She stopped. Listened. Almost she heard something, but it was probably just a fancy. You couldn’t hear the sound of a man holding his breath.

    Go bact{, Effie, said a little voice inside her. Run to your room and

    locf{ the door.

    No. She was on a mission for Bullhammer and Grim Shank. And she wouldn’t bolt like a rabbit every time she was afraid. Besides, things were different now she was armed. Bitty Shank had given her a knife. A maiden’s helper, he called it. “As nice a piece of flint as you’ll find strapped to a goodwife’s thigh.” He taught her how to use it, too. It wasn’t like stabbing someone with a sword. A flint knife’s strength was in its blade, not its tip, and unless you fancied the tip breaking off as soon as you hit bone it was wiser to slash than stab. Effie had practiced slashing moldy and worm-holed sheepskins in the tannery, reducing the thick useless ram’s hides to strips. The knife’s edge had been knapped to a sharpness beyond steel, so thin in parts that light shone through the stone. It was spoils, Bitty said, seized from a group of Ille Glaive trappers caught setting wires on Ganmiddich soil.

    Effie touched her waist, feeling for the smooth horn sheath that held her knife. She loved Bitty Shank. He and his brothers would hear no talk of her being a witch.

    Careful to let her thoughts go no farther, Effie started up the stair. All was quiet except for the groaning of ancient timbers and stone. Normally the clan forge was kept busy through the night, and although Brog Widdie, master smith and exiled Dhoonesman, would allow no man without an oath to work with hot iron, unsworn smiths and wireworkers would be busy socketing arrowheads and riveting coats of mail.

    Tonight was different, though. The Eve of Breaking. All clansmen, sworn and unsworn, were gathered close around the Great Hearth, chanting the old songs. The Breaking was sacred to the Stone Gods. If they were not given their due this night they might send a frost so hard and so long that ice would grow in the heart of all guidestones, and the clanholds would shatter to dust. Castlemilk’s guidestone had taken the frost nearly two thousand years earlier, and that ancient and venerable clan—which had once been great enough to challenge Dhoone to the kingship—had been in decline ever since. Many tales of the clanholds had been lost, even to Withy and Wellhouse, which kept the histories, but the story of the Milkstone shattering, of how the Milkwives gathered the broken shards in their skirts and carried them to a place their menfolk would never know, sent chills down every clansman’s spine. All knew that if the women hadn’t hidden the fragments the men would have used them to cut out their own hearts.

    Effie touched her little pouch of powdered guidestone, giving the Stone Gods their due. Too much bad stuff had already happened to Blackhail. The clan chief, Dagro, was dead, Da was dead: both killed in the Badlands by Bludd raiders. Her brother Raif had been branded a traitor and forced to leave. Now the only family she had left was Drey . . . and she didn’t think it would hurt to touch her pouch a second time and ask the Stone Gods to keep him safe.

    Beneath her feet the stone steps were slippery, greased by graphite and calf’s-brain oil from the smiths’ feet. The air grew warm and dry, thick with the stench of sweat and sulfur and smelted ore. Ahead, the great lead-plated doors were drawn closed. Water casks stowed to either side of the threshold told of the clan’s great fear of fire. The forge bulged out from the north face of the roundhouse, shielded from the core stonework by a dark, airless tunnel called the Dry Run. The main entrance to the forge was cut from the exterior north wall, a towering arch as tall as two men, guarded by doors force-hardened with saltwater, and studded with steel heads to turn blades. A clan’s forge was its wealth and its strength. Raw metals were stored here, swords and arrowheads were forged here, and war spoils awaiting refiring and refitting were piled in great stacks along the walls.

    Effie walked the length of the Dry Run then put her hand to the lead door. It was neither locked nor bolted—she hadn’t expected it to be—and half a ton of wood swung easily on hinges that Brog Wid-die had tooled himself. The orange glow of the furnace lit the cavernous space of the forge. A circle of anvils dominated the room; horned and blocked and mouseholed, they sent strange shadows to flicker at Effie’s feet. Tempering baths filled with brine and refined tallow stood warming close to the furnace. Beyond them lay the worktables and work blocks piled with striking hammers and bow tongs and other vicious-looking tools. Beyond those lay the stores: tubs of oil and slack and pig’s blood, sacks of charcoal, sand and raw ore. Iron rods were stacked as carefully as if they were gold, and cords of quartered lumber were piled like a bonfire to the rafters.

    Effie took a step forward, hesitated, then called softly, “Message for Brog Widdie.” No one answered. Something in the far corner, next to the redsmith bench where Mungo Kale worked copper and bronze, rustled and then was still. Rat after tallow, she thought, feeling braver by the minute. Letty Shank and Florrie Horn might scream at the very thought of rodents, but Effie could find nothing within her that was afraid of things so small. Quietly, she crossed the circle of anvils and headed toward the stores. One of the tallow baths had claimed a rat. As the temperature from the furnace dropped and the tallow congealed, the rodent had been set in fat. Tomorrow morning one of the Scarpemen would likely scoop it up, roast it in the furnace, and eat it. Everyone knew Scarpes feasted on rats.

    As she passed one of the nail-punching benches, she paused to empty a supply of nails from a brass bowl. As the little iron spikes tumbled onto the wood she thought she heard something creak in the Dry Run behind her, but when she turned to look all was still. Probably just a beam settling, yet she moved a little quicker because of it.

    The sacks of charcoal were easy to identify, as the pallet they were set upon was furry with soot. The charcoal burner’s mark was a tree above a flame; Effie noticed it as she unsheathed her knife and set flint to the hemp. The sack split easily and a thick stream of charcoal spilled to the floor. She moved quickly to catch the fine powder in the bowl, marveling at the richness of the charcoal. .. surely the darkest, blackest thing that ever was. If this didn’t stain the hammermen’s teeth then she might as well try to bottle the night sky, for nothing else was darker.

    When the bowl was half full she drew it back and let the sack spill until it found its level. Her lore shifted uneasily against her skin, but she was too excited to pay heed. What if she tested a potion now? Did iron juice need iron? Or was it just a name? Yes, she probably needed acid to etch the charcoal into the hammermen’s teeth, but it wouldn’t hurt to try without it first.. . and it might save somebody’s gums. And, she thought, becoming even more excited, I’ll test it on one of the shanl^shounds tonight. Old Scratch won’t mind. His teeth are so yellow and chipped that it really might be an improvement.

    Grinning at the thought of a dog with black-stained teeth, Effie set down her knife. She pulled out Da’s flask, uncorked it, and then poured half its measure into the bowl. Crouching by the charcoal sacks, she stirred the mixture with a chip of wood she found on the floor. Da’s special brew darkened in an instant, and a fine black dust rose from the bowl like the opposite of steam. As she stirred she had visions of rank upon rank of Blackhail hammermen, armed and mounted, their hammer chains rattling in a quickening wind, their lips pulled back to reveal night-black teeth. Drey would be one of them too. And perhaps if she made the iron juice dark enough and he looked fierce enough he wouldn’t have to fight. Perhaps the Blud-dsmen would turn and flee rather than raise their axes against him. The men seemed to come from nowhere. A harsh cry raised Effie’s head, a lead door was sent cracking against a wall, and then clansmen burst into the forge. Breathing hard, glittering with drawn steel, they moved to circle the room. Effie had once witnessed a group of hunters circling a wounded boar before a kill, and she recognized the same nervous excitement; the sucked-in cheeks and wet lips. The fear of drawing too close to their prey. “Stay your ground, witch.”

    Effie recognized the speaker as Stanner Hawk, brother to Will and uncle to Bron, who had both been slain in the snow outside of Duff’s. Tall and pale like his brother, Stanner bore no love for anyone bearing the Sevrance name. Something hardened within Effie as he looked upon her. Raif had fought to save the lives of Will and Bron, yet that one fact had been twisted and ground down, and now all that could be remembered about the night outside of Duffs was that Raif Sevrance had spoken out against his clan. And been branded a traitor for life.

    Effie raised her chin. This was a coward before her. They all were. Two dozen men to capture an unblooded girl. They didn’t even have the jaw to do it in full daylight on open ground; instead they had watched and sneaked and waited. Like weasels after eggs.

    There was not a hammerman amongst them. No man who bore a hammer would raise a hand to harm his own. Instead there were Mace Blackhail’s cronies: old and hard Turby Flapp bearing a sword so badly weighted he couldn’t keep the point off the floor, lean and dark Craw Bannering clad in the cured hides and swan feathers of Clan Harkness, known as the Half Clan, his long tattooed fingers resting easily on a blade. The longswordsmen Arlan Perch and Ichor Roe moved with practiced stealth to take positions behind Effie’s back. Many of the men were older Hailsmen, too long cooped up in a roundhouse at war and eager for any kind of blood.

    And then there were the Scarpemen. Uriah Scarpe and Wracker Fox and others she did not know. Lean men, dressed in the black leatherwork and weasel pelts of Scarpe, watching her as if they had something to fear. They really believe I’m a witch. The thought came quickly and with it another: This trap was carefully set. No Shanks or hammermen had been told, no one who was friend to Drey.

    “Stand up, witch.” Stanner Hawk’s voice was cold, and for the first time Effie wondered if he had something more than capture on his mind. With his sword fist he made a gesture to Craw Bannering. The dark bowman moved toward the woodstack and selected a cord of wood.

    “I said stand up, witch.” Stanner Hawk lashed out with his foot, sending a tub of brine crashing to the floor. Saltwater splashed Effie’s face.

    Effie felt the calm leaving her. Her lore began to twitch against her skin, and she noticed sharp-eyed Uriah Scarpe glance at the wool at her throat. Looking away from him, her gaze came to rest on her flint knife, there on the stone floor beside the pallet, only three paces away from her foot. Uriah Scarpe was still watching her, so she quickly turned her gaze. Slowly she rose to standing, setting the bowl of iron juice on the floor.

    Craw Bannering had drawn on the thick cowhide gloves of a hot metalworker. The cord of wood now lay unbound beside the furnace, and the yearman was using both hands to pull back the cast-iron door that guarded the charging hole. Heat from the furnace leapt into the room as air was sucked into the hole. Craw fed the fire below it, choosing only the driest, densest wood.

    Old men shifted their weights, whether with unease or excitement Effie didn’t know. One of the Scarpemen said, “Pump the bellows, Crawman.”

    Stanner Hawk’s eyes glinted orange in the growing blaze. “You are charged with being a witch, Effie Sevrance. Confess now and receive the swift judgment of my blade.”

    Someone at her back whispered, “It’ll be a mercy for you, lass, in the end.”

    Twenty-four pairs of eyes watched her. Turby Flapp took a hand from his poorly made sword to wipe the saliva off his lips. Effie looked at every one of them, Hailsmen and Scarpemen and strangers alike. She was shaking, and she couldn’t seem to speak, so all she could do to show her innocence was look them in their faces and meet their eyes. One or two had the decency to look away. Arlan Perch found something to study on the knuckleguard of his sword.

    “Speak, witch.” Stanner Hawk was playing to the room now, his back turned toward her as he walked the circle of anvils. “I’ll hear something from you before I put your feet to the fire.”

    Effie heard the belch of popping mud bubbles as the mud trough surrounding the furnace began to boil. Ridiculously, she thought of the shankshounds. They made sounds like that whenever they were given greens instead of meat. Thoughts of shankshounds helped, and she suddenly found her voice. “Stanner Hawk, my da said you once cheated him out of a kill, swapping his spear for yours so you could claim the she-bear as your own. My da never lied, and nor will 1.1 am not a witch. The shankshounds saved me out of love and loyalty, not sorcery. They’d do the same for their master Orwin Shank, just as Mace Blackhail’s hellhounds would save him.”

    Several grunts of agreement echoed around the forge. Many men here kept hounds, and all took pride in their dogs’ fierceness and loyalty.

    Stanner Hawk’s face had lost what little color it had been blessed with. Two points of anger burned in his eyes, and Effie knew she had made a mistake attacking his honor. He would see her burned for it.

    In three quick strides he was before her, the point of his sword pressing against the plump flesh of her lower lip. “Open your mouth, witch. Let me see the tongue that lies so easily. I’d heard witches could charm the sword from a man’s hand, but I never thought to see such a thing myself.” His last words were directed at the gathered clansmen, and to a man they straightened and raised their swords. No clever-speaking witch was going to fool them.

    “Your father was a good man, Effie Sevrance,” cried hard-eyed Turby Flapp. “You do him a disservice by defending yourself at his expense. What man here hasn’t clashed with another over kills? It’s not something you bring home to the women. Let them tend to their traps, not the hunt.”

    Cries of “Aye!” circled the room. Turby Flapp was old and shak-

    ing, yet Effie could still see the triumph in his eyes. He’d insulted her and her father, and fired the men with righteous rage.

    Mace Blackhail had chosen well.

    Oh, she knew why he wasn’t here, in this room. His hands must be seen to be clean. When Drey came to him, as Drey certainly would, Mace could say, Drey, if I’d been there I would have stopped it. I was holding vigil around the Great Hearth. I had no idea what these men would do.

    Effie felt the bite of Stanner’s sword as it split her lip, sending a line of blood trickling down her chin. Immediately a shift took place in the room. Breaths came hard and fast as sweating palms made it necessary to alter grips. Blood had been spilled. All hope of mercy was lost.

    Stanner Hawk’s mouth tightened in satisfaction, and with a kingly gesture he withdrew his sword. “Wracker,” he said to one of the Scarpe swordsmen. “Feed the hound through the hole.”

    Wracker Fox was powerful in the way Shor Gormalin had been powerful; small and lean and so swift to movement that it was like watching a hare bolt from a set. In an instant he was gone from the forge. What seemed like seconds later he was back, something wrapped in a blanket held fast against his chest.

    Effie thought her heart would stop when she heard the first frightened whimper. They had caught and bound one of the shankshounds.

    Wracker Fox dropped the dog onto the floor to free it from the blanket. The dog’s legs and snout had been tightly hobbled with tarred rope, and the creature landed badly on its side. Effie flinched. It was Old Scratch, the gentle, dignified elder of the pack. Wounds around his eyes and jaw told he hadn’t been taken without a fight.

    Stanner Hawk said, “Put him in feet first, like we will the girl.”

    A sound left Effie’s throat, a sound so soft and powerless that no man in the room paid it heed … but it was enough for Old Scratch to hear her and know that she was there. Slowly and at great cost, he turned his large amber eyes upon her.

    Never, ever, if she lived for a thousand years would Effie Sevrance forget that look. Terror and love touched her with such force it was as if she were inside the dog’s head. Suddenly it was hard to breathe. The shankshounds had saved her life.

    “Stop,” she murmured to Stanner Hawk. “Set the dog free and I’ll give you what you want.”

    Stanner ran a pale hand over his dark beard, and then exchanged a small satisfied glance with Turby Flapp. Turning his back on her once more, he said, “So you admit you are a witch as charged. And that you aided Clan Bludd in the attack upon Dagro Blackhail in the Badlands, and the assassination of Shor Gormalin in the Wedge. You admit also that you helped your brother Raif Sevrance desert this clan, and heard him confess that cowardice drove him from the ambush on the Bluddroad. Lastly you confess that you bewitched Orwin Shank’s hounds, and forced them to attack an innocent man and woman for no other reason that you feared they knew you for a witch.” Stanner Hawk was suddenly there, in front of her face, his smile so cold it chilled her. “Do you admit these sins, Effie Sevrance, before the faces of nine gods?”

    Da, I didn’t do them. Effie looked at Old Scratch, then quickly looked away. She found she couldn’t face the dog and lie. Stanner Hawk was something different and she tilted her chin and raised her gaze and looked him full in the eye. “I admit I am a witch before the faces of nine gods.”

    Breath was sucked in around the room. Some of the older clansmen touched their tines. One man, ancient and stoop-backed, Ezan-der Straw, began to name the nine gods. Ganolith, Hammada, lone, Loss, Uthred, Oban, Larannyde, Malweg, Behathmus.

    Flames from the furnace leapt high, sending waves of heat switching wildly around the room. The mud in the trough boiled madly, slapping and sucking as the water within it turned to steam. Stanner Hawk’s pale lips twitched. His knuckles were white where they curled around his sword. Still holding Effie’s gaze he said, “Craw, send the dog to the fire.”

    “No,” she breathed. Then louder, “NO!”