A Sword From Red Ice (61 page)

Bram decided he held no grudge against him. He
also decided he'd had enough of defending and went on the attack.
Enoch raised his sword and stepped back, sending his tender pink toes
into the snow. Bram cut sideways with his sword, forcing Enoch to set
down his entire foot. A second cut, a perfect mirror of the first,
caused Enoch to shift his weight to the side. His bare foot lost
traction for the briefest instant; Bram knew this because he saw the
momentary loss of control register in Enoch's eyes. It was a small
thing then to slide under his guard and stick him in the ribs.

That was when Bram had made the mistake of looking
at Dalhousie and his hourglass. He wanted to see if the swordmaster
had watched the exchange between him and Enoch, and unfortunately his
gaze fell short of Dalhousie's head. They were, at that point, well
into the last third of sand and probably had less than a quarter to
go before they could pull on their boots and defrost their feet. Yet
when Dalhousie saw Bram looking in the direction of the glass, he
smacked his lips and stopped time. Trotty and Beesweese slowed their
sword strikes to look over at Enoch and Bram. Enoch put his eyebrows
to work, raising them up and sideways in the direction of Bram
Cormac.

"Fight on," Dalhousie warned. He didn't
start time again for fifteen minutes. By the end of the session
Bram's toes were so numb that he could no longer tell when they
touched the ground. He had to look. The pain in his heel where
chilblains were forming felt strangely unrelated to the cold. It was
as if someone had taken a razor to his foot and chopped it into
squares. When it came time to put his boot on, he couldn't do it, and
just sat in the snow and looked at it.

"Put it on," Dalhousie said approaching,
his voice pitched at a volume below loud. "I know it's only a
wee walk back to the house, but do it. A swordsman never neglects his
body."

Bram wrung out the rabbit sock and pulled it on.
It felt like slime, but he didn't think he'd get the boot on without
it.

"Good. Do you know why I made you take it
off?"

"No."

Dalhousie squatted on the flattened snow. He
wasn't a big man, but it was easy to forget that. His hair was short,
and so thick and curly it seemed to have muscles. Unlike his beard,
it showed no gray. "You never know what you're going to get in a
melee; mad men not caring if they get ripped to pieces as they come
at you, a one-to-oner turning into a one-to-three, acid thrown on
your back, pants falling around your ankles, blood in your eyes, open
wounds, frostbite. Me facing you and politely exchanging blows is not
how it happens. A good swordsman knows how to fight through
surprises. He's prepared to be unprepared."

Bram nodded.

Dalhousie had upended the hourglass around his
neck and yellow sand was running through the globes. "You're
quick, I'll give you that. And you can make your size work for you.
Come see me in the Churn Hall at dawn and I'll show you a couple of
knee stickers."

Bram eased on his boot as he watched the
swordmaster cross over to Beesweese, exchange a few words on his
technique, and then head off to the house. He was tired and beaten up
and he knew he would get a big bruise on his neck where Enoch Odkin
had sneaked him. It would go with the others he'd gotten over the
past days. And then it would simply go.

Hauling himself up from the snow, he realized his
pant seat was soaked through. This, together with his half-numb foot,
didn't make for a pleasant walk back. The sun was behind clouds and
the air hovered just above freezing. The kitchen gardens, walled
garden, stable court, playground and cattle standing were lumpy with
new snow. Two grooms were trying to force the stable doors open
through thick drifts. A big white dog was barking at them.

A Castleman for a year. Bram reached into his
tunic and slipped his new, alien guidestone from its hidden pouch.
The gray liquid was suspended in water, and held in a stoppered vial
made of cloudy gills. At one time Bram had believed that only the
head warrior wore his Milkstone in this manner, but now he knew that
all Castlemen and women wore theirs in much the same way. The
difference was that Harald Mawl was allowed the privilege of display.
All others, including the Milk chief herself, must show discretion
when wearing their portion of powdered guidestone. It was a small
thing, but Wrayan Castlemilk had been right when she said such small
things made a clan.

Bram had seen her little since that day by the
gravepool. She had attended the swearing of his First Oath, causing
no small ripple of surprise when she stepped forward to accept
Bram's swearstone and act as second to his oath. Bram had at first
been relieved. Every yearman worried about that moment—who, if
anyone, would step forward and back him? No one wanted to stand
before his clan, alone and in silence, unclaimed. Yet afterward Bram
had thought about it and wondered if he really wanted a chief
holding the stone that was under his tongue as he spoke the
Castlemilk oath.

"I will keep the Castlewalk between the Milk
and the Flow and stand ready to fight for one year." It was a
simple oath, unlike Dhoone's, and it did not claim that extra day.

The ceremony had taken place outside the
guidehouse, in view of the Milk River, with the sun setting between
ships of crimson cloud. It was the first oath Bram Cormac, brother to
the Dhoone king, had spoken. He was a clansman: it would not be his
last.

His days had been busy since then, filled with
names and customs in need of learning, and the three separate and
distinct pursuits that filled his day. Pol Burmish, the warrior who
had greeted Bram at the door on that first night, had taken him to
meet the swordmaster the morning after First Oath, and his training
had begun in earnest. Swordfighting was taken more seriously here
than at Dhoone and the level of swordcraft was higher. Bram had
thought himself proficient with the longsword. He was wrong. At
Dhoone he had been judged too small to train for the hammer and ax,
and had taken up the sword instead. He was Mabb Cormac's son and
people said he had some of his father's skill. It was a confusing
time, Mabb promised to train him, then died. Jackdaw Thundy, the old
swordmaster, had a stroke and retired, and was replaced by Ewall
Meal, who had been Mabb Cormac's old rival. Ewall had liked the son
little better than the father, and the training sessions had not gone
well. "You're too small, boy. Step aside and let the next man
have a go." Bram had stopped attending the sessions. After that
he trained alone. Sometimes Mabb's old comrade-in-swords, Walter
Hoole, would spend an hour or two with him in the evenings, putting
him through his forms as he retold old stories about the glory days
of Mabb and Walter. Often he was drunk. Bram had no way to gauge his
progress, and had no longer been sure that he wanted to continue
training. And then the Dog Lord invaded Dhoone.

Bram let himself in to the creamy maze of the
Milkhouse. He had worked out the orientation of most of its corridors
and doors and no longer had to figure direction by sunlight. Which
was good. It meant he could get around on overcast days, and at
night. But he had noticed things, absences where there should be
chambers, or rather a lack of access to those chambers. He saw the
ground floor of the roundhouse clearly in his mind's eye and knew
there were spaces he had yet to enter.

Those spaces played on his mind. Rumor had it that
histories were kept there; secrets about the clanholds and the Sull
that had been hidden for hundreds of years. Bram had worked out the
location of one of the secret chambers—it was located behind
the west stairwell and adjacent to the women's solar—but a
sense of honor kept him from searching for the entrance. Still, he
would dearly have liked to see what lay inside it. And sometimes he
thought that honor was a sham.

Realizing that he was hungry and late for his work
in the guidehouse, Bram glanced toward the kitchen. Breakfast had
been fried apples and veined cheese, but that had been half a day
ago. He could smell baking, and frying—Castlemilk's cook worked
frequently with boiling oil—and decided not to resist. Limping
at full speed, he made his way through the roundhouse and out the
other side.

The kitchen was bustling. The benches were filled
with women, children, seasoned warriors and old-timers taking their
noonday meal. The noise was close to deafening. Cook and his helpers
were clanging pots and trivets, pitchforking sides of venison from
vats of sizzling fat and stoking the ovens with giant pokers. Heat
and steam and cooking smells combined to form a force that pushed
through the air like wind. Bram hurried to the food tables, glad to
see that no full-sworn warriors were waiting to be served. Men with
lifetime oaths to their clans were always fed first. Pol waved a
greeting from the back, and the head dairyman, little crotchety
Millard Flag, shouted something about the skimming needing to be
redone by the end of the day. Bram nodded an acknowledgment. There
was no fooling Millard: do a hasty job and he knew it. Grabbing a
fried pastie filled with lamb and onions, Bram tucked his head low
and prayed to make it to the guidehouse without anyone stopping him
to give orders.

The pastie was hot and juicy and it burned his
tongue when he bit into it. Once he'd made his way through kitchen's
east door and outside, he scooped a handful of snow from the ground
and packed it into his mouth. His numbed toes were just beginning to
come alive in his boot and they felt grossly swollen, like they could
split the leather. His limp got worse and he had to slow down to
manage the short climb up the embankment to the guidehouse.

Castlemilk's guidestone was housed in a separate
building two hundred feet east of the roundhouse situated on a raised
bank above the Milk. It was a large timber-framed structure that
looked like a barn, and had the same double-size two-story doors as
most barns. And a door within the door. A brick chimney had been
built against the north-facing wall and Bram could see black smoke
rising above the tarred wood roof. A single set of footsteps stamped
lightly into the snow led from the roundhouse to the guidehouse. None
led back. Finishing off the last of his pastie, Bram followed the
footsteps like a path.

The door set within the door was closed but
unlocked, and Bram lifted the polished pewter latch and entered.
Dimness and smokiness enveloped him. It was like entering a building
after a fire. The smell of charring seedpods and river weed was sharp
and throat-constricting, and Bram had to fight the impulse to cough.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he marked the red glows of
smokefires placed at regular intervals around the perimeter of the
room. This was the stone chamber, yet he could not yet see the stone.

"You are late." Drouse Ogmore, clan
guide of Castlemilk, stepped from behind a wall of smoke. Dressed in
unfinished pigskins with the hairs still attached and the worm rings
and slaughter scars visible, he looked like a member of the wild
clans. Short and powerfully built, with black hair and dark skin, he
was holding a shovel as if he meant to harm someone with it.

"Take it," he said to Bram, thrusting it
toward him. "Clear the area outside the door."

"The small door?"

Drouse Ogmore answered this question with a
single, withering look.

Both big barn doors then. As Bram's hand closed
around the handle of the shovel and began to move back, Drouse Ogmore
pulled in the opposite direction. "The past two days you have
been late. You will respect this stone. You will not be late again."

Bram nodded, and Ogmore released his grip on the
shovel.

"Come and see me when you're done."

As he moved toward the door, Bram saw two green
eyes watching him from the shadow of the guidestone. Nathaniel
Shayrac, Drouse Ogmore's assistant, and the one who had made the
footsteps in the snow, stepped forward and opened the door for Bram.
And then shut it hard against his back.

Bram frowned at the snow. He felt bad about what
Drouse Ogmore had said and wished he hadn't stopped at the kitchen
for food. Ogmore had taken his oath and offered him occupation in the
guidehouse. "When your brother wins back Dhoone come and see me.
The future might not he as dire as you think." Those were the
words Ogmore had said to him all those weeks ago on the Milkshore
when had they laid Iago Sake to rest in the manner of the Old Clans.
Ogmore had acted as guide for Dhoone that day, floating the oil and
igniting it, incinerating Sake's corpse. Bram had not spared the
meeting a thought while he was at Dhoone, but the Castlemilk guide
had not forgotten him.

Eight days ago after Bram had spoken First Oath,
Ogmore had invited him back to the guidehouse. "Come view the
stone," he had said, "and I will prepare your yearman's
portion."

Bram had only ever seen one guidestone before and
that was Dhoone's. The Dhoonestone was less than forty years old and
its edges were quarry-sharp. Vaylo Bludd had stolen the old stone,
and Sumner Dhoone, the Dhoone chief, had moved swiftly to replace it.
Bram had not known what an old stone looked like, the scars, the
cavities, the oil and mineral stains, the fissures, and cutting
faces, and molds. The Milkstone was an ugly chunk of skarn mottled
with iron pyrites and flawed with chalk. It was not level and its
west face was braced with a scaffold made from bloodwood logs. Bram
had stood and looked at it, astonished that a stone could look so . .
. used.

"Approach it," Ogmore had said. "You've
earned that right."

By speaking the oath? Bram wondered. He had
stepped toward it, immediately feeling the coolness it cast on the
surrounding air. Up close he could see the rasp marks and drill holes
and he had the sense that this was a living, working stone. The
Dhoonestone lay like a fossil in the guidehouse; ill regarded and
barely viewed. It was the shame of it, he believed. No Dhoonesman
could look upon it without knowing they'd been bested by a
seventeen-year-old boy from Bludd. The Milkstone was different, proud
and aging, no longer steady on its feet but still useful, still
aware.