A Cavern of Black Ice (41 page)

Yet she had married Mace Blackhail that
same day he had been made chief, with Dagro less than forty days
dead. According to Anwyn, the ceremony had been short and joyless,
and not one sworn clansman had come forth to dance above the swords.
Raina herself had retired to the guidehouse straight after, and no
one, not even Inigar, had been able to persuade her to come out and
eat at her own bride's feast. Anwyn said that Mace had been in a fury
and would have broken down the door if the thought of missing the
ambush hadn't pulled him away.

Raif reached for the usual anger, but
it wasn't there. Mace Blackhail had won. He had everything: the clan,
the clan chief's wife, a successful ambush to boast of when he
returned. All those who had questioned his leadership were either
dead, muzzled, or gone.

"I will speak to Drey on your
behalf," Raina said, breaking into his thoughts. "My
husband's voice won't be the only one he heeds." She met Raif's
gaze, and in that instant he knew the real reason she had married
Mace Blackhail.

Strangely, it made it easier for him to
go. If she could marry a man she hated just to guard over the clan,
then surely he could do this for Drey? Quietly he spoke his last
words to Effie and then walked the short distance to where Angus Lok
was waiting with his horse.

When he was mounted and ready in the
saddle, the reins couched in the split in his thick dog's-hide
gloves, he spun his horse to face south. He did not look at Effie or
the roundhouse again.

You
are not good for this clan,
Raif Sevrance
.

Without another word, Raif kicked Moose
hard and rode away.

Angus Lok caught up with him an hour
later as Moose worked his way through the old snow on the outskirts
of the graze. Raif guessed Angus had held back to talk privately with
Raina, but he wasted no thoughts on what matters had passed between
the two. He concentrated only on the way ahead.

Dawn was a slow process. Light came,
but it had no direction or visible source. The ground snow stripped
shadows of their depth, and the distance to the sandstone ridge and
taiga beyond was hard to judge. Raif had hunted in the great pine
forest more times that he could count. When he was a child he had
imagined it went on forever; in all the rangings he had been on, he
had never once made it to the other side.

Angus rode in silence. After an hour or
so he spoke a word to the bay and took the lead. Guiding them down to
the base of the ridge, he followed a hunting track Raif had little
knowledge of or feel for. Clansmen seldom took the ridge to the east,
preferring to walk their horses up the more gentle inclines to the
west. The snow was thinner here, and Moose stepped on hard ground for
the first time all day. Young hemlocks and stone pines glistened with
rime ice like bodies emerging from water. Even with their outer bark
and needles hard froze, their sharp, resinous smell still spored the
air.

Raif kept an iron grip on his thoughts,
blocking out everything but the little needed to get by.

Hours passed. The temperature rose
along with the light. Ptarmigan shrieked from the cover of snow-laden
ground birch, and far in the distance a black-tailed deer brayed like
a mule.

"That's a good horse you have
there."

Raif's mind was so tightly locked on
the many small adjustments necessary for riding up a rocky slope, it
took him a long moment to realize that Angus had spoken. Glancing up,
he saw Angus had pulled back so the bay was almost alongside Moose.
Obviously Angus was well used to travel: Every part of his body was
oiled, bound, waxed, hooded, and insulated against the cold. His face
alone boasted separate areas of beeswax, elk fat, and neat's-foot
oil.

Seeing where Raif's gaze lingered,
Angus grinned. "My wife would have me heated in a dry pan and
then trodden to death by donkeys if I let anything happen to this
handsome face."

Raif made a smile. He didn't want to
talk.

"Course, when she sees you, I'm
counting on her turning a blind eye to the odd broken vein. She
should let me live… as long as I don't lose half a nose to the
'bite."

Even as he realized it was Angus'
intention to get him talking by any means he could, Raif couldn't
help but be interested in what he said. He knew almost nothing about
his uncle's family. Angus kept all the details close. "We're
going to your home?" He felt like a traitor as he spoke.

If Angus Lok was pleased that Raif had
spoken, he did not show it, merely concentrated on keeping the bay's
coffin bones clear of the rocks. "Perhaps, when my business in
the south is done. It's been a long time since my wife last saw you
and Drey, and she's never once set eyes on Effie. She'd skewer my
ears if she knew I had you with me and didn't bring you home. Right
fierce, she is. Especially in the cold months."

Drey
. How long would it take
him to crush his brother's swearstone to dust? Raif heard his voice
say, "I don't remember your wife ever coming to visit the
roundhouse."

"Aye, lad, well you wouldn't. Wee
bairn, you were. Drey was still in his pelts. Had the meatiest little
calves I've ever seen on
a
boy his age. Knew how to kick
with them, too—just like his da." Angus Lok looked up.
Bits of reddish blond stubble had already grown through the lard
smeared on his chin, giving his face the fierce look of a stinging
fish. His eyes were a different matter, shifting color from copper to
dark amber as quickly as if pigment had been poured into his irises.
"It's for the best, you know. Effie and Drey will get by without
you. Good people are watching out for them, don't forget that. Mace
Blackhail is just one man. He might lead the clan, but he
isn't
the clan. Men and women like Corbie Meese, Anwyn Bird, and Orwin
Shank are the clan. They will follow Mace only so far."

Raif wanted to believe what Angus said,
but Angus hadn't been party to the ambush on the Bluddroad. He didn't
know what good people were capable of when a man like Mace Blackhail
stood behind them. In the short time Angus had spent with the clan,
he had uncovered a great deal of its business from the private
conversations he'd had with Raina, Orwin Shank, and others, but he
didn't know Mace Black. Raif set his lips in a hard line, tasting the
frost that had formed there. No one but he knew the Wolf.

Angus said no more on the subject.
Instead he concentrated on guiding the horses up the slope. The
sandstone cliffs were slick with ice. Underground streams forced
water through the soft, porous rock, creating a breaking ground of
loose gravel and split stones. Ferns and bladdergrass lashed at the
horses' cannons as they climbed, and great beds of frozen moss made
it difficult for even the bay to keep his footing. Angus dismounted
and led the bay, and after a few minutes Raif did likewise.

In the three hours they had been
traveling, Raif had seen no sign of Angus' incoming path. Snow had
been light for the past day, and up within the protected folds of the
ridge wall there was little coverage, so Raif had expected to see
some indication—flattened grass, broken ice, horse tracks—that
his uncle had traveled this way less than two days earlier. He looked
and looked, but there was nothing. As they crested the rise and Raif
saw nothing but level snow stretching out toward the great black body
of the taiga, he drew level with Angus and said, "Why aren't we
taking the same route out of the clanhold as you took coming in?"

Angus Lok's eyes shifted color for the
second time that day, and Raif saw tiny flecks of green in the irises
he had not noticed before. Pulling back his hood, he said, "You've
got a good eye on you, lad."

Raif took out a shammy and began
cleaning ice and mucus from Moose's nostrils as he waited for his
uncle to say more. Angus turned out his hood to air it, then took his
rabbit flask from his pack. He drank a good portion. When he was done
he did not offer the flask to Raif.

"Ranging is my business. I've
traveled the Territories for twenty years, and it's my wont never to
take the same route twice in a season." Angus smiled, showing
good straight teeth. " 'Course, me being me, I took the easy way
in, so now we're stuck taking the bastard's way out. I'm always doing
that, lad. You'll get used to it given time."

Raif felt the force of his uncle's
charm and goodwill working to settle his mind. Before he'd had chance
to frame a reply, Angus spoke to change the subject.

"What say I take out some of those
calf livers Anwyn bled until they were dry as bone and then boiled
until they were boot leather, and eat them in the saddle? I'd like to
get to the pines before next snow." He squinted into the dead
whiteness of the sky. "Looks as if we're in for some bad weather
before dark. What do you think?"

Raif shrugged, letting the matter drop.
His uncle's evasions were more telling than any straight answer. Just
a couple of sentences and Angus Lok had put the old subject to a
quiet death while blithely introducing at least another two to block
the way back. It was a clever feat, and one Raif made a mental note
not to forget.

As he put his boot in the stirrup to
mount Moose, the gelding turned and Raif was forced to swing round to
keep his footing. Abruptly he found himself staring back over the
ridge toward the roundhouse. He wasn't prepared for it. All day and
he had never once looked back. Muscles in his chest tightened.

The round, snow-covered roof of the
roundhouse was clearly identifiable, floating within the moat of
cleared ground that was the court. Smokestacks showed up as black
rings against the white roof, and the steam and soot they belched
looked like fumes venting from an underground fault. Dark dots moving
through the graze told of a hunt party out to shoot wild boar,
ptarmigan, and deer. Raif strained to hear the yelps of the setters.
When his ears finally picked up the high, familiar braying, he
suddenly wished he hadn't heard it and turned.

He made a lot of noise settling himself
in the saddle and kicking Moose forward. When that wasn't enough, he
spoke, saying the first thing that came into his mind. "How is
your daughter? Is she wed yet?" Angus had also mounted and was
now sitting in the saddle, chewing on a liver. He seemed glad of an
excuse to spit it out. "Cassy's not wed. No." He was silent
a moment, his face thoughtful. After breaking the bay gently into the
knee-high snow, he said, " 'Course, you wouldn't know about the
other two, would you? There's Beth now—my second girl—and
my little one, Maribel. Though call her that and she won't know who
you're talking to. Doesn't even know her own name. Little Moo she is,
and Little Moo she'll stay." Angus smiled softly to himself.
"Can't think what the young men will make of it when time comes
for courting."

Fearing silence just then, Raif said,
"Tern said you live near Hie Glaive."

"Aye, that we do. Couple of days
away, nothing more." Angus swung around in the saddle and
unhooked his bowcase from the bay's hipstrap. "Here," he
said, holding it out for Raif to take. "You carry it for a
while. I see you haven't one of your own, and it would be a shame to
waste the only bow in the party on the man who's least able to use
it."

Raif took the bow automatically, even
though he knew his uncle was being modest. Tern was fond of telling
the story of how Angus had once shot a wild boar through goosegrass
at two hundred paces. "Twilight, it was," Tern had said.
"And even the shadows had shadows."

Only when Raif had stripped off his
outer gloves and was busy with dog hooks, fastening the bowcase to
Moose's leatherwear, did he realize that Angus had changed the
subject yet again.

"Orwin Shank said that on the
morning the party formed for the ambush, you returned to the
roundhouse with a dozen heart-killed beasts. Quite a haul for a
night's work. Tern must have been a good teacher."

"He was."

Ignoring the hostile tone of Raif's
voice, Angus carried on. "I knew a man once who could heart-kill
any beast he set his sights on. He could even do it in the dark. We
shared a season's hunting together, many years back now. Whenever we
made camp, I'd sit around the cookfire facing in, and he'd sit facing
out, bow on his lap, bowring on his finger, watching the darkness for
game. Sooner or later some poor possum or shoat would always draw
close to investigate the fire and the smell. That was when Mors would
take them, clean as if it were day."

Angus put his hand on his chest. "Never
saw as much as a cleft foot or a red eye myself, and I'd sit by that
fire thinking the man I'd chosen to camp with was as mad as a dog
with a stick in its eye. Yet off he'd go, trekking into the darkness,
and sure enough five minutes later we'd have fresh kill to roast.
Took me quite a while to get accustomed to it, I can tell. And just
between you and me heart-killed possum tastes like shit."

Raif smiled.

Angus grinned, his eyes turning coppery
again. "I used to say to him,
Mors, can't you hit them in
the head or something
? and he'd say,
No. Only the heart
."

The quick, appraising look Angus gave
him as he spoke sobered Raif completely. "Who was this Mors?"

"Oh Mors is still alive. Though
he's a bit different now than he was twenty years ago. Who knows, one
day you may meet him." Angus was silent as he guided the bay
through a drift of snow that reached to the gelding's chest. When
they were free of the incline, he said, "I asked Mors once if he
could kill men the same way as he killed beasts."

"And?"

"Said it wasn't the same. He'd
tried, but couldn't do it."

Inside his fox hood, Raif's neck and
cheeks flushed hot. He saw the Bludd spearman tearing flesh from Rory
Gleet's thigh, remembered finding the man's heart in his sights…
then shooting him dead. Heart-killed. Suddenly feeling as if he
couldn't breathe, Raif pushed back the fox hood. All the sickness and
weakness that had seized him after the killing came back with such
clarity it was like feeling it over again, here, on the taiga's edge.