A Cavern of Black Ice (96 page)

The metal was not sound. Rot had cut
deep into the untempered iron, and the blade refused to take an edge.
Raif removed all visible rust and sharpened the point as best he
could.

Ash came out as he was putting the
finishing touches to his fisher hood, stripping fur from the two
lengths of skin that would become the ties. Raif stopped what he was
doing to look at her. The kettle-burned cloak was a rich rust brown
and its hem skimmed snow as she walked. The wind was quick to bring
color to her cheeks and a bright film of moisture to her eyes. Wisps
of silver gold hair blew around the edge of her hood. The time she'd
spent in Ganmiddich had improved her, and her face had a softness to
it that he had not seen before.

"Did the Dog Lord treat you well?"
he asked, helping her into the saddle.

Her gray eyes darkened minutely. "He
couldn't wait to be rid of me."

They left the farmyard in silence. Raif
led the gelding through the maze of sheep runs, pens, stone walls,
and outbuildings, tasting the air as he walked. The clouds were full
of snow, yet that didn't worry him as much as the stench of glaciers.
When the air smelled of the Want this far south, it meant only one
thing.

Raif set a hard pace. The farther west
they were when the storm hit, the better. The Bitter Hills caught
storms, held them between HalfBludd in the east and Bannen in the
west. Their best hope was to reach the shelter of the western taiga
as soon as possible, let the stone pines and black spruce bear the
brunt of the storm for them.

As he padded alongside the horse, Raif
searched for signs of game amid the ground birch and dogwood. The
habit was deep within him. Last night had proven to him that he did
not need an arrow to kill an animal with a blow to its heart. A fist
of slate, heavy as iron and blue as Dhoone, was all it had taken to
bring down the fisher. The fisher had been snooping around one of the
sheep pens, drawn by the stench of slaughter that lingered there. It
had smelled Raif with its keen nose, heard his boot heels crunching
frozen mud with ears so sensitive, they could hear a red-backed vole
breathing beneath two feet of snow. Raif's eyes caught its retreat.
He plucked a rock from the mud, gaze still fixed upon the creature as
it ran along the base of the pen wall. He warmed the rock in his
fist. Ash needed food badly.

It wasn't the same as releasing an
arrow. There was only the crudest sense of calling the creature to
him. No moment of stillness joined him and his prey, no knowledge of
the creature passed through him. Suddenly the heart was
there
,
a glowing coal, in his sights. Speed was the only thing that mattered
then. Without the concentrated discipline of bow eye and bowhand
working in unison, he had nothing to bind the creature to him. Raif
hurled the rock. Even as it left his grip, his sense of the
creature's heart was fading.

He did not hear the impact. Sickness
washed over him as his throwing hand fell limp against his side.
Stomach juices bubbled in his throat, and he dropped to the mud to
retch and spit and clean his mouth. Minutes passed before he had
strength enough to rise and claim his prey. The sickness had passed
by the time he returned to the farmhouse, yet a sense of shame
remained. It was no way to kill a beast.

"Aren't we going to cross the
hills and enter the cityhold? I thought Angus meant to steer clear of
the clans."

Ash's voice broke Raif's thoughts. He
raised his head to look at her. The lanolin she wore on her face had
turned waxy and opaque in the freezing wind. "We'll make better
time if we keep heading west. We'd waste half a day in those hills."

"But Angus said—"

'Angus isn't here. I'm here. And I
don't claim knowledge of the Glaivehold. I know the clans as far west
as Orrl, and I know the route we must take to enter the Storm
Margin." He spoke harshly, yet he hardly knew why. He didn't
want to explain to Ash that the only reason Angus had chosen the
route through the Glaivehold was to save his nephew from encountering
Hailsmen. Ten days ago Raif had been glad of that consideration. Now
he did not care. Blackhail had hewn his memory from the stone. If he
crossed paths with a Hailsman now, he would have to kill him or be
killed. And strangely he found a hard sort of comfort in that. He
knew where he and his clan stood now. All dreams of homecoming were
dead.

"How did you escape from the
tower?"

Raif wondered why she had chosen to ask
her question now. He made no answer.

"I forced a promise from the Dog
Lord," she said after a moment. "He swore he would take no
action against you until I was gone." Her features moved through
a smile as she thought on the past. "He's a fierce man. Yet I
think he was more afraid of me than I of him."

"He did not take Dhoone alone."

Ash frowned. "What do you mean?"

'The Dhoonehouse is the most defensible
stone keep in the clanholds, built by the first Clan King, Thornie
Dhoone, with walls sixteen feet thick and a roof made of ironstone.
The night Vaylo Bludd took it, five hundred Dhoone warriors stood
within its walls, and countless more manned its borders and
strongwalls. Yet somehow the Dog Lord managed to breach Dhoone's
defenses, raise the Thistle Gate, and slaughter three hundred men."

"It doesn't mean he had help."

"It does when every Dhoonesman who
stomached a Bludd sword didn't even bleed enough to rust his plate."

"I don't understand."

"Sorcery was used on the
Dhoonesmen. It slowed their hearts, made it so they couldn't raise
their weapons and defend themselves. The Dog Lord rode to Dhoone
knowing the Dhoonesmen would not give him battle. He claimed victory,
but no honor." Raif made his voice hard. He saw the way Ash was
sitting forward on her horse, ready to defend the Dog Lord. He saw
and did not like it.

She looked at him as if he were
speaking lies. "If he did use sorcery, as you say, then how can
you be sure it came from outside? He might have had help from someone
within his clan."

"Clan do not use sorcery."

"What is your point?"

"The same person who helped the
Dog Lord take Dhoone killed my father, my chief, and ten other
members of my clan." A soft gasp escaped from Ash's lips.

Raif continued speaking, firming the
truth in his mind. "There were fifteen of us altogether. We were
camping in the badlands, along the old elk trails. Every year in the
first month of winter when the elk are moving southeast, we go there
to claim Blackhail's portion. This winter my brother and I were
chosen to ride with the party. It was a great honor. Dagro Blackhail
himself led the hunt; it was the first time he'd ridden the elk
trails in five years. The hunting wasn't good. Tern said the elk knew
a hard winter was coming and had moved south a month early to beat
it."

"Who's Tern?" Ash asked.

"My father." It almost didn't
hurt to say it. "He and Dagro Blackhail were close. Mace
Blackhail had been at his foster father's heels for weeks, trying to
persuade Dagro to ride north with him, but it was my father who
finally convinced him to go."
Let's you and I ride north one
last time, Dagro Blackhail. Let's sit our saddles until we're arse
sore, drink malt until we're head sore, and shoot elk until we drown
in blood
. Hearing his father's voice in his mind, Raif spoke
quickly to quiet it. "The day before we were due to return, Drey
and I broke bounds to shoot hares. We were having a contest to see
who could shoot the farthest and take down the most game when…
when I felt something."

'Sorcery?"

Raif nodded. Suddenly it was difficult
to speak. "We rushed back, but they were dead by the time we got
there. All of them. There was no blood on their weapons, not a drop
of it. Twelve men dead, and not one drew a sword to defend himself."

Ash made no attempt at sympathy; he was
grateful for that. They didn't speak any more about the past, and
that seemed like another thing to be grateful for. There were some
memories about the badlands camp he had no wish to share. In silence
they traveled west along the river valley and into the territory of
another clan.

At noon they came upon a stone marker,
sunk deep into the snow and carved with the crossed greatswords of
Bannen. Bannen was small but rich, with many well-stocked trout
lakes, a series of high meadows suitable for grazing sheep, and a run
of iron mines sunk hundreds of feet beneath the Bitter Hills. It was
sworn to Dhoone, but it was not a long-lived oath. Past chiefs had
declared themselves for Blackhail when it suited them, and Hawder
Bannen had fought with Ornfel Blackhail against the Dhoone King at
Mare's Rock. Bannen was known for its swordsmen. Tem had once told
Raif that Bansmen trained their swordarms by moving through their
positions while standing neck high in running water.

Raif glanced to the north. The Banhouse
was built on low ground, with its back against a sheer sandstone
cliff, and it could not be seen from the river. Raif guessed it was
about ten leagues north, as he could see smoke rising above the
treetops. Beyond the smoke, on the farthest reach of the horizon,
stormheads rolled south from the Want.

Suddenly anxious to be gone, Raif
touched Ash's boot. "Are you ready to take old Mule Ears here
for a run?"

"What about you?"

"I'll be taking myself for a run.
I want to reach those trees"—he pointed to the northwest,
where the headland sloped down to meet a forest of oldgrowth
pines—"within the hour. We'll need cover when the storm
hits." He slapped the gelding hard on the rump. "Go!"

Ash had little choice but to give the
mule-eared horse the reins. Snow sprayed Raif's chest as the horse
took off at a fair gallop. Raif watched for a moment, satisfying
himself that Ash could handle riding through snow at speed, then
broke into a run himself. His body was not prepared for the shock of
swift motion, and his legs trembled as they took his weight. Ribs
broken and then partially mended made creaking noises as he lurched
from step to step. His own weakness angered him, and he plowed
through the snow, kicking up showers of blue crystals and sods of
frozen earth.

Ash and the gelding pulled far ahead.
Winds were already working to shift loose snow southward, and snow
tails blew from ridges and high ground. Noise in the air increased,
and the howling, ripping lowing of the storm buffeted Raif's ears as
he ran. The Wolf River meandered due north here, where it ran
shallow, feeding a dozen salmon pools, wearing riverstone down into
green sand, and forming a defensible line around the Banhold's
southern reach. In a way, Raif was glad of the storm. Any other day
and clansmen, iron miners, and trappers would be moving back and
forth between the Banhouse and the hills.

Raif's hands and face burned as he
ran. Beneath the goatskin gloves, his fingers swelled in a steambath
of trapped sweat. By the time he caught up with Ash he'd bitten off
the gloves and tucked them under his belt. Every breath he took
pushed against his mending ribs as if it might snap them clean in
two.

Ash had dismounted and was leaning
against the spine of a thirty-year spruce. She'd reached the trees a
quarter ahead of him and had had enough time to brush down the horse,
shake the snow from her cloak, and hang her hood to air over the
bottommost limb of the tree. She grinned as he approached. "I
was found on a day like this," she said. "White weather
suits me well enough."

He could not disagree with her. Her
eyes sparkled like sea ice. Hunkering in the snow, he fought to catch
his breath. Ash had taken one of the tin bowls from the roundhouse
and packed it with fresh snow. The snow was half-melted, and he
wondered where she'd nursed it for the past fifteen minutes to warm
it so quickly.

"What now?" she asked.

Raif glanced through the towering
spires of black spruce, up toward the sky. "We keep moving west.
We can't afford to lose half a day to a storm."

She nodded briskly. "You need to
ride for a while."

He would have liked to protest, to tell
her that he was a clansman, and a clansman never rode when a woman
walked, but his ribs were creaking and his hands were on fire, and
even the
thought
of standing upright made his thighs ache.
To save his pride he gave her an order. "Pull some fisher meat
from the sack. We need to eat before we move on.

"I'm not hungry."

"I don't care. You can't rely on
what your stomach tells you from now on. Every time we rest, you eat.
You'll starve twice as quickly out here in the clanholds as you would
in the walled-and-shored haven of Spire Vanis."

Ash looked at him sharply, yet she did
as she was told, taking a strip of fisher meat and chewing it with
venom.

Raif almost laughed, but a patch of
fresh blood on the gelding's bandage caught his eye and he left her
to tend to it.

Mule Ears suffered Raif's ministrations
with the lethargy of an old horse who had seen and done everything
before. As Raif cleaned the wound and felt for frostbite, he found
himself thinking of Moose. He hoped the gray gelding was on his way
home to Blackhail and Orwin Shank, not traveling north to Dhoone with
the Dog Lord. He wanted that man to have nothing of his.

Ash wandered over to watch him as he
rewrapped the gelding's leg. The wind tugged at her cloak, making the
rust-colored wool stream behind her like a banner, A
Clan Frees
banner
, he thought senselessly.

"Earlier, when we were out in the
open, you said Mace Blackhail rode to the badlands with his father.
So why wasn't he killed along with the rest?"

It hadn't taken her very long to get to
the heart of the matter. Tying the final knot in the gelding's
bandage with double the force necessary, Raif said, "Mace
claimed he was off shooting a black bear when the raiders came. Said
he missed them by seconds, and that once he saw his foster father's
body lying in the snow, the only thing he could think of was riding
home to warn the clan." Raif was surprised at how easy it was to
tell it. "By the time Drey and I got back to the roundhouse, he
had everyone believing that Clan Bludd had carried out the raid.
Lies. All lies. He didn't know anything about the bodies, where they
lay, what wounds they'd taken. He left before the raid ever started.
Rode home on his foster father's horse."