A Cavern of Black Ice (75 page)

Out of the corner of her eye, Ash saw
Raif's hand come down to touch the silver-capped horn he wore at his
belt.
He's showing his respect
, she thought.

Perhaps Angus noticed the gesture too,
for he didn't speak anymore about the tower or the clans, simply
walked among the horses, bringing snowmelt and grain.

Ash worked the cramps from her legs by
stamping her feet in the snow. After a while Raif came over bearing
food. There was square-cut oatbread that Raif called bannock, crumbly
white cheese, cold black bacon, hard apples, and flat beer. They ate
it sitting on a storm-felled pine, and it tasted like a feast. Angus
joined them halfway, consuming everything with gusto except the beer.
"I canna do it," he cried, slapping a hand upon his heart.
"I'll drink warm beer, cold beer, beer thickened with oats, iron
filings, and eggs, but I canna drink a flat brew. A man must draw the
line somewhere."

It was good to laugh. Angus passed
around his rabbit flask, insisting that both Ash and Raif take a
mouthful of some "real warmth" instead. Ash drank, though
the contents tasted like lamp fuel and smelled of dead trees. "That's
the birch," Angus explained as Ash's eyes watered. "There's
a curl of bark in the bottom of the flask. It'll make you grow as
tall as a tree… or is it as thick as one? I canna remember
which."

Ash grinned. It was impossible not to
like Angus Lok. Handing back the flask, she stood and brushed the
snow from her skirt. "Just going to stretch my legs a bit."

"I'll come with you," Raif
said, making to stand.

Angus put a hand on his arm. "I
think our wee lassie of the ice needs a spot of privacy."

Raif look puzzled for a moment, then
understanding dawned on his face. Quickly he settled himself back on
the log.

Angus' copper eyes twinkled as he
turned to Ash and said, "Go ahead. We'll be here if you need
us."

Unable to decide if she was embarrassed
or amused, Ash walked away. Angus Lok knew a lot about girls.

Finding a sprawling tangle of dogwoods,
she relieved herself in the cover they created. The fastenings on her
new clothes caused her much irritation, and her fingers were
half-frozen and nearly useless. By the time she arrived back in the
clearing, both Raif and Angus were mounted and ready to move on.
Snufflebags and pigskin water buckets had been packed away, and all
that was left of the meal they had eaten was a handful of brown apple
cores in the snow.

Snowshoe showed no signs of weariness
and held herself still while Ash mounted. Determined not to let her
own exhaustion show, Ash made a point of sitting high in the saddle
as Angus took them north through the pines. Eventually they came upon
a game trail that led west, and Angus seemed content to follow where
it led. They rode for some time through the dark hours of night,
passing abandoned farm buildings, frozen streams, and forests
steaming with mist, then Angus surprised everyone by signaling a
halt.

Turning due east, he stood high in his
stirrups and looked back along the path they'd just traveled. Shaking
his head, he said, "It's not the finest ghost trail I've ever
set, but it'll just have to do." He kicked the bay forward. "As
it's high time we turned for home."

Finding Lost Things

Meeda Longwalker's dogs found the
raven's frozen corpse beneath two feet of glaciated snow. She was
minking in the new-fallen snow nineteen leagues east of the Heart,
when her team of terriers began excavation on a new set. Meeda had
been minking on the high plateau known as Old Man's Rib for fifty
years, and she knew the moment her dogs started digging that there
was nothing but hard rock beneath the snow.

She nearly called them off. Across the
empty streambed, on the thickly wooded bank where ten thousand years
of willow and spruce growth had broken down the bedrock into fine
powdery soil, had been her intended destination: soft land where she
knew a mother and her three cubs lived. Yet the dogs were excited
about something, and there was always a chance of a carcass. Meeda
had known bitches to tear limbs and genitals from male minks in a
frenzy of protective mothering, then leave the males for dead. A
frozen and bloody mink pelt was no good for a cloak or a coat, but it
could be washed and used as lining for gloves, game bags, and hoods.
It was worth the time and effort of pursuit. Barely.

Slipping a strip of inner birch bark
between loose lips long drained of pigment by age, Meeda stood back
and waited for her dogs to finish digging. Her terriers, much
maligned by male hunters for their small size, small brains, and
small muzzles, shredded the snow with claws so sharp and strong that
even now after fifty years of living with their breed, Meeda feared
to let them close to her face. The male hunters were right: They
did
have small brains. But Meeda Longwalker had long realized that
a
small brain acutely focused was often more effective than a large one
split by many thoughts.

When she caught her first glimpse of
the dark form beneath the snow, Meeda spat out the birch bark and
issued a few choice curses to the Lord of Creatures Hunted. Dark was
not what she wanted. Dark was not what Slygo Toothripper had promised
to trade her for a pair of good new boots and a metal spearhead.
Slygo wanted white. Dark mink pelts were worth double their weight in
arrowheads. White pelts were worth ten times that and more.

"
Mashi
!" Meeda cried
to the terriers, halting them instantly. She would waste no more time
digging a dark and bloody carcass from the snow.

The terriers feared Meeda even more
than they loved to dig flesh, and to a dog all stepped aside from the
excavation, allowing their mistress space to inspect their work.
Meeda prided herself on being the greatest living minker in the
Racklands. Fifty years of experience, eleven generations of dogs,
five thousand leagues walked and another ten thousand ridden, and
only twenty-eight days lost to childbirth, grief, and sickness. What
man could boast such a record? As always before she had bagged her
first catch of the day, Meeda was impatient with herself and her
dogs, but she knew that certain rituals had to be maintained.

Terriers were like children: When they
went to the trouble of excavating a den, a freshly killed carcass, or
even a set of old bones, they needed to be praised for their efforts.
Meeda looked down at four sets of dark eager eyes, and although she
didn't much feel like it she drew her icewood stick from her belt.

"What have we here?" she
said, prodding at the topsnow covering the dark, mink-size carcass.
Two sons she had birthed, yet their names had been spoken less than
those four words.

Muscles in the terriers' necks
strained. One, a young pup barely eight months old, sprayed the snow
with urine in his excitement. Meeda frowned. She would have to beat
that out of him: What if a perfect white mink had lain dead instead
of—

A raven.

Meeda Longwalker's face cooled beneath
her lynx hood as she upturned a clod of snow to reveal the blue gleam
of a raven's bill.
Ill tidings
. The thought came so swiftly,
it was as if a stranger had leaned over her bent back and whispered
the words in her ear. Meeda had half a mind to walk away, call her
dogs to heel, and walk as fast as her knee joints would permit toward
the empty streambed and the wooded bank. She was a minker, nothing
more. It was not her place to deal in messages and omens. Yet even as
she puffed herself up with excuses, she knew that it was her fate to
find the raven and her duty to bring it home.

There would be no mink trapped today.

Speaking more harshly than was her wont
to the terriers, she kept them at a distance while she finished the
excavation with her own gloved hands. The raven had been killed by a
pair of hawks. Its eyes had been plucked out, and the soft black down
on its throat was stiff with the shiny substance of dried blood. The
hawks had attacked it in midflight, and the impact of the fall had
severed its left wing and sent its rib cage smashing into its heart.
Meeda clucked softly as she scraped away the snow. Hawks had little
love for any predatory birds entering their territory, but seldom had
she witnessed the result of such a violent attack. Never had she
known them to take down a raven.

As she freed its lower body from the
snow, Meeda noticed something silver and scaled, like fishskin, flash
as it caught the winter light. Meeda Longwalker knew then that an ill
omen was not the only thing the raven had brought to the Racklands.
It had brought a message as well.

Stripping off her thick horseskin work
gloves to reveal hands crossed with the scars of dozens of sharp mink
teeth, Meeda dropped to her knees in the snow. Her knife was in her
hand before she knew it. A package the size of a child's little
finger was bound to the raven's left leg. The silver material was
pikeskin—her hunter's eyes could not help but pick out that one
detail even as her mind was intent on something else. Should she open
the package, read it?

The raven had come from a long way
away, Meeda knew that. No one in the Racklands used pikeskin to bind
messages to birds, and only two men in the Northern Territories used
ravens to send them. The first man she knew little about; he was one
of the Far Family and lived upon a distant western shore, where he
feasted on the fat of the great whales in summer and sat deep within
the ground, chewing sealskin, through the long winter nights. The
second man was her son.

This message was for him, could
only
be for him. And judging from the desiccation of the raven's corpse,
it was already eleven days late.

Meeda Longwalker cut the message free.
The dry, freezing winds had long robbed the bird of all its fluids,
yet even now she did not forsake her minker's caution: Never break
the skin. It was foolishness, she knew, but there it was. She was too
old to change her ways now.

Too old also to wait upon her son's
hands and eyes to open and read the message. It was for him—she
could not and would not pretend otherwise—but
her
dogs
had dug it from the snow. The find was hers. And in Meeda
Longwalker's adopted world of hunters, coursers, minkers, ferreters,
badgerers, and trappers, that meant she could do with it what she
wished.

With hands that were deceptively agile
despite their age and scarring, Meeda slit the pikeskin package down
the center where it had been fixed with fish glue. A piece of white
bark, not dissimilar to the strip she had spat into the snow earlier,
fell into her palm. It was soft, excellently worked with both saliva
and some kind of animal fat she did not recognize. The message was
burned into the wood.

Meeda read it slowly over minutes,
though in truth it was barely two sentences long. Her father had been
a learned man who believed in tutoring both his sons and his
daughters in letters, lore, and history, but for as long as she could
remember Meeda had valued freedom of her body more highly than
freedom of her mind. As a child she had run from her lessons, even in
full winter when her father and his High Speaker swore that the
temperature outside was cold enough to kill a soft-skinned girl
within minutes. Meeda had proven them all wrong, though now, in her
old age, she felt a portion of shame for having mocked and disobeyed
her father so completely and with such terrible joy. The High
Speaker, unlike her father, still lived. He was the oldest man in the
Racklands, second in power only to her son. He had no eyes, yet that
did not stop Meeda from avoiding his blind gaze even now.

Shivering, she folded the message and
slipped it into her game belt. The terriers, thinking she was
reaching for her treat bag, began to snap and jostle for position.
Meeda shook her head. No treats. Not today.

"Mis!" she told them. Home.

It was nineteen leagues back to the
Heart of the Sull. Meeda Long-walker walked them no more quickly or
slowly than normal, yet they cost her more and wore her more than any
other leagues in her life. As the path rose from the valley floor and
the white chalk cliffs of High Ground became visible above the Heart
Fires, she spotted two mounted figures in the distance.

Ark Veinsplitter and Mai Naysayer.

Far Riders, returning from whatever
journey her son had sent them on at Spring's End. Meeda dropped her
hand to the belt, felt the message carried there. The two men did not
know it, but they would barely have time to bleed their horses and
blacken their hands in the ashes of the Heart Fires. They would need
to travel north now. Meeda Long-walker, Daughter of the Sull, had
listened to her father's teaching long enough to know that Far Riders
responded to the silent summons of the gods.

*** They rode east through the night
and much of the next day. A new dawn brought more snow and the kind
of low, gusting winds that came from all directions and were
impossible to guard against. The farther they traveled from Ille
Glaive, the emptier the landscape became. Villages were rare
occurrences, and the land became peopled with back-breaking rocks,
frozen mudholes, and forests of tall, silent trees. Raif called it
taiga. He said that much of the clanholds was like this.

They rested during the evening of the
second day, making a cold camp some distance from a tiny village that
boasted an alehouse, a dry forge, and an ancient retaining wall built
to prevent snow and mud from sliding down the Bitter Hills and
overrunning livestock and farms. A pair of ewes and their yearlings
penned on a nearby slope were their only company as they slept
through the night.

Ash was woken by Angus. It was still
dark, but a blush of light on the southeast horizon told of imminent
dawn. Ash had slept on a mattress of piled snow, wrapped in two
layers of oilskins and wearing a mask of greased linen over her face.
Frostbite was a real and constant danger, and at various points in
the night she had been aware of hands touching her nose and cheeks
through the cloth, Angus insisted on checking her now, his rough
fingers feeling for any stiff or frozen skin. Raif saw to the horses,
then laid out a breakfast of cold store. The bannock, which one night
earlier had been soft and toasty, now had ice crystals at its heart.