A Cavern of Black Ice (100 page)

Ash came out to join them sometime
later, huddled in every scrap of skin and wool she could find. The
harsh, shadowless light showed up the yellow tones in her skin and
made her lips look the same color as her face. She smiled weakly. "I
see now why they call this land the Storm Margin."

Raif hardly knew how he managed to
smile back. He didn't have the heart to tell her that the Storm
Margin didn't begin true until they'd crossed the mountains and
entered the strip of land that ran the length of the coast.

Ash motioned to the pile of clothes
tucked beneath the gelding's blanket. "You need to put on some
of those things, the ones you took from the…" She let her
words trail away.

Dead men
, he finished the
sentence for her in his mind. Ash shivered as if he had spoken the
words out loud. Raif felt like shivering too, but he turned and began
unloading the horse instead.

They fitted well, the dead men's
clothes, sitting over his back like garments tailored for him alone.
The Orrl cloak he had taken was the same white blue color of snow,
and Raif found some small measure of satisfaction in being rendered
invisible in the storm. Orrlsmen were famous white-weather hunters,
able to feast on fresh meat in the dead of winter when all other
clans were grinding their teeth on cured elk. Their badge was the ice
hare, and Tern said that no one moved as swiftly and silently through
snow as an Orrlsman. Raif touched the cap of his tine out of respect
for their skills. Orrl was a hard clan, with a hard clanhold, and it
had been loyal to Blackhail for a thousand years.

He pushed the thought away. What
Blackhail did, what any clan did, was not his business now. Forcing
his mind into the present, forcing his senses to deal with the storm,
he saddled the gelding and prepared for the journey west.

The dead men's clothes warmed his back.

A Night at Drover
Jack's

"That new girl of yours is a
witch," said Clyve Wheat. "No. An angel," corrected
Burdale Ruff. "The ability to know what a man wants before he
knows it himself comes from the heavens, not the twelve sheepless
hells." Burdale Ruff spoiled the eloquence of his words somewhat
by belching with great satisfaction at the end of them. With a smile
made sloppy by drink, the great hairy eweman apologized, then belched
again.

Gull Moler could appreciate the
compliment inherent in a goodly belch as much as the next man, but
the current subject of discussion was of too great an interest to him
to risk being diverted by one of Burdale Ruff's infamous after-supper
performances. Before blond-eyebrowed Clyve Wheat and little rat-faced
Silas Craw could spoil the conversation by snickering at Burdale's
antics, Gull said hotly, "I'd hardly call Maggy a girl. She's
long past the days of pink ribbons and shoes that pinch. She's a
widow, you know. A widow."

Clyve Wheat, who was not as drunk as
Burdale Ruff yet no cleverer for it, nudged Silas Craw with such
force that the little eweman nearly fell from the beer cask he had
taken to sitting upon in light of the shortage of chairs. "A
widow, he says! A widow! Well, all I can say to that is she must have
wed before she was weaned from the teat. Fortell you now that woman
is no older than my sister Bell."

Silas Craw, who had righted himself
with the quick, ferrety actior of a man well used to being pushed,
grunted in agreement. "Bell!" he said with feeling.
Everyone waited, but he said no more.

Gull Moler frowned as he looked from
man to man. They were blind stinking drunk, the lot of them. What did
they know about women and women's ages? With a sniff he judged
fitting to his position as owner-proprietor, Gull squeezed his
well-fed body between Burdale Ruff's and Clyve Wheat's chairs and
began rounding up the empty tankards, pitchers, and serving bowls
sitting on the table.

Burdale Ruff caught his arm as he
withdrew. "Taken a fancy to our Maggy, have ye, Gull?"

Having been owner and sole proprietor
of Drover Jack's for fourteen years, Gull Moler was well accustomed
to drunks and drunken talk. Experience told him the best way to deal
with a man who was overpotted and overopinionated was to purse your
lips in deep thought and then proclaim loudly, "Aye! You might
well be right." Nothing took the fight from a man like
agreement. Yet in this instance Gull could not bring himself to
agree. Not about Maggy. It just wasn't right.

He cleared his throat. "Maggy's a
decent woman, Burdale Ruff. Keeps herself to herself. I won't have
you upsetting her with drunken comments and low talk." As he
spoke, Gull tried to keep his voice low, but as always happened in
taverns when conflict between men erupted, wind of it passed from
patron to patron like the scent of a good pork pie. By the time he'd
finished his last sentence, he was speaking in a silent room. Gull
was suddenly aware he was hot. The three dozen patrons of Drover
Jack's, many of them still wet and steaming from exposure to the
storm that raged outside, waited to see what Burdale Ruff would do.

Burdale Ruff was not the largest man in
the Three Villages—that honor went to dim-witted Brod Haunch,
who broke rocks for a living—but by far he was the most feared.
He was an unpredictable drunk: the worst kind. He could switch from
jest to threat in less time than it took to draw a pint. Gull could
feel Burdale's big, sausage-shaped fingers pressing into his arm. The
eweman's small eyes shrank to pinpoints, and suddenly he did not look
drunk. Without releasing his grip on Gull's arm, he kicked out the
table to give himself space to stand.

Gull spared a thought for the table
legs; they would need to be sanded then polished. Burdale Ruff's wet,
peaty-smelling breath brushed Gull's cheeks. The knuckles on
Burdale's free hands cracked one by one as he curled a fist. Gull
feared broken chairs and broken tables. Blood on his fine oak floor.
Bent pewter. Spilled beer. Patrons who might leave without paying
full due. It was only as Burdale Ruff's right arm—muscled like
a bull's throat from the machinelike action of shearing sheep—made
the small retraction necessary for a big punch that it occurred to
Gull Moler to fear for himself.

He closed his eyes. Prayed to the
spirits of tavernkeepers past to save his chairs, his tankards, his
hide.

With eyes closed he did not see what
happened next. Footsteps tapped across the wood floor, their rhythm
coming to an abrupt end with a woman's cry of pain. A chair toppled
with a mighty crack. A clamor of noise followed as metal tankards
bounced off tables and hard objects dropped to the floor. Clyve Wheat
hissed loudly, "Damn it!"

Gull risked opening his eyes. Maggy Sea
stood to the side of him, bending over to rub her ankle, an empty
tray pressed to her chest. "Forgive me, gentle sirs," she
said in her most golden-toned voice. "I twisted my ankle on
Farmer's Lane this morning. I never thought it would betray me
tonight."

Gull followed her gaze to where Clyve
Wheat and Silas Craw sat at Burdale Ruffs table, soaked to their
skins and dripping ale. Their hair was plastered to their heads,
their eweman's mustaches dangled over their lips like limp bits of
rope, and puddles were forming where their elbows touched table wood.
Gull blinked in astonishment. Maggy Sea had flung a whole tray's
worth of beer at them. Miraculously, it would occur to him only
later, without spilling one drop on Burdale Ruff.

Gull's attention snapped back to
Burdale as a queer puff of sound exited the eweman's lips. Burdale
was not looking at Gull. Burdale was looking at his two drinking
companions. His fist was still clenched, but there was air between
his fingers. For one frozen moment all was still. None of the
thirty-six patrons in the tavern moved or spoke. Burdale Ruff stood,
breathed, deliberated.

Then laughed. It was like watching a
volcano erupt. Burdale's large mouth flew open, his nostrils flared,
his head came back, and a sound like rocks exploding from a summit
came forth from his lips. Most importantly to Gull, he released his
grip on Gull's arm and slapped his fist on his own large belly as he
rocked back and forth in merriment. Within seconds everyone in the
tavern was laughing. Tears came to one man's eyes. Another laughed
until he choked, and another still fell under the table, where he
laughed until his wife put her boot to his throat.

Gull Moler never laughed at customers;
it wasn't good for business. Instead he frowned at the puddles of ale
on the table and floor, while attempting to work out his losses. For
some reason, though, the sums that usually came so easily to him got
muddled in his head, and all he could think of was Burdale Ruff's
fist.

Maggy Sea wasn't laughing, either. She
had put down her tray and was now, very discreetly, mopping up the
mess. In the ten days she had worked at Drover Jack's, Gull had never
known her to spill as much as a thimble's worth of ale. Now this.
Gull looked at her more sharply. Had she done it on purpose to divert
Burdale Ruff's attention?

"Aye! Maggy," said Burdale
Ruff. "Let me give ye a hand with that. You need to rest that
ankle. I was on Farmer's Lane myself two days back, and it's as
potholed as my father's arse. It's a wonder you didn't break a leg."

Gull Moler watched in astonishment as
Burdale Ruff bent down on all fours and began collecting the pewter
tankards that had rolled to the floor. The small speech he had made
marked the end of the entertainment, and patrons turned back to their
own tables with the swiftness of rats bailing ship. Gull, suddenly
realizing he had been standing and staring for far too long, shook
himself and headed to the back to fetch towels.

Ten days Maggy Sea had been here. Ten
days without a single fight. Business had never been better or run
smoother. The beer taps were clean enough to pump mother's milk. The
oak floor shone like a serving platter, and the wick oil in the
lanterns had been forced through a wire cloth so fine that it burned
almost entirely free of smoke. All Maggy's doing. She had improved
the quality of food served, rising before dawn each day to cook fresh
beans, pea and bacon soup, and lamb shanks crusted with mint—she
even baked her own bread! She had cleaned and varnished the Drover
Jack's sign, unclogged the storm drains, located an old and
mysterious leak in the roof and mended it with cordage as a sailor
would a ship, and even taken to distilling the barrel dregs and
making a rough but surprisingly palatable wheat liquor from them that
she had christened Moler's Brew. All in all the woman was a wonder.

Why then did Gull feel an itch of
unease as he took the warm towels from the kettle and turned to face
the tavern once more?

She was so quiet; that was the thing.
The words she had spoken just now to Clyve Wheat and Silas Craw were
the most she'd said all night. And then there was the queer business
of her appearance. Fancy Clyve Wheat calling her a girl! Why, she was
at least as old as Clyve Wheat's mother and very probably older than
Gull himself. Or was she? It was so very hard to tell.

Her plain face inspired no male
admirers, but her skill at hearth and beer keg was becoming something
of a local myth. It was already drawing patrons from the Ewe's Feet.
Good ones, mind. Men with trades. The kind who brought their wives
and elder daughters with them and always paid in coin there and then.

Gull Moler only had to look around his
tavern to see the way things were changing for the better. Maggy was
a treasure. Just tonight she'd stopped a fight that had threatened
not only his tables and chairs, but his own good health as well. And
looking down upon the puddles of spilled ale, Gull saw that it was
yellow-oat: the least expensive brew that Drover Jack's offered.
Unease forgotten, Gull congratulated his own good luck. Maggy Sea
even spilled ale with good sense!

As he handed over warm towels to Clyve
Wheat and Silas Craw, he noticed that Maggy was speaking to a patron
who had just walked through the door. The fact that it was clearly
Maggy who was doing the talking, not the newcomer, took Gull by
surprise. A small twinge of possessiveness bent muscles in his chest
as he watched Maggy's lip graze the newcomer's ear.

A hand came down upon Gull's shoulder
with considerable force. "Gull! Friends, eh? I canna say what
came over me, great fool that I am. I wouldna hit ye, ye know that.
And if I had, I surely would've missed." Burdale Ruff stepped
into Gull's line of vision, grinning like
a
charming and
very naughty child. He pressed coins into Gull's hand. "For beer
lost, my friend. Better that than friendship, eh?"

Gull pulled himself together. Burdale
Ruff was a troublemaker, yet where he drank all the other ewemen in
the Three Villages drank, too. Gull made a show of refusing the coins
but ultimately accepted them: When a man offered you a gift it was an
insult not to accept it. Gull knew this. He also knew that Burdale
Ruff
would
have hit him and
would not
have missed.
Yet he was owner-proprietor of Drover Jack's and as such could afford
to bear no grudges. He made an effort. "Aye, Bear. You're a good
man to think of my loss. Step over to the counter wi' me and let's
share a dram of malt." The malt would cost him more than Burdale
Ruff's coins, but that was the way of things in tavern life.

Only when he had filled two wooden
thumb-cups with liquor did he remember Maggy and the man she had been
speaking with. He glanced toward the door. The man was sitting with a
crew. Now that his face was better situated to catch light, Gull
recognized him as one of the patrons newly come from the Ewe's Feet.
Thurlo Pike. Tradesman. A roofer, if Gull remembered rightly, one
with fat pockets and a mouth to match. Gull struck cups with Burdale
Ruff. Thurlo Pike was speaking with another of the Ewe's Feet crew,
laughing loudly at a jest of his own making.