Blood Ties (3 page)

After supper she went out into the windy, cold dark and made her way unerringly to the black rock altar in the wood near the village. Not the deep forest, this, but a beech wood of skeleton branches, floor clear of everything but last year’s leaves and a frail flush of new ferns. The altar was close to the burial caves, as it should be, in a clearing surrounded by other trees: oak, ash, hawthorn bushes, rowan, and willows near the stream that provided the gods with music. Bramble came to the rock at moonrise. It was a thin sliver of moon, on the wane, with the evening star underneath the crescent: a bad-luck moon, but beautiful.

She knelt at the rock and felt the presence of the gods lift the hair on her neck, as it always did. She didn’t pray, or offer sacrifice. She had just come to ask a question.

“When?”

The wind stilled. The glade filled with the presence of the gods, like pressure, like swimming deep down into the quarry pool until she could feel the weight of the water begin to push against her chest and eyes, like being smothered in strength.

Soon
.

They spoke into her head, as they always did, and then left. The glade was now empty, the pressure was gone.

Soon.

What, she wondered, had changed?

She went home via Swith’s and massaged his hands, but she was so quiet he actually apologized for Aden’s crudity that afternoon. She laughed it off, but that night in her dreams she was a wild goose, flying forever across a gold-leafed forest.

The next morning she asked Gerda, the tanner, for advice about how to treat the hide, in case there was anything different about wolf skin from weasel and fox. There wasn’t, but she paid for the advice with a basket of tiny sweet strawberries that she’d collected from the deep glade where an old oak had fallen.

It was a lovely pelt, thick and glossy. Bramble slung it over the chair in her room and ran her hand over it every time she passed. The fur sprang back against her hand as though the living body had leaped and a small fillip of pleasure went through her each time she felt it. She didn’t want to flaunt it, but risked wearing it out anyway. Looking back, she was sorry she hadn’t hidden it in the forest and brought it back home after dark, sorry that she’d asked Gerda for advice.

The warlord’s man tracked her down in the clearing near the Springtree. She wasn’t gathering hawthorn, like the other girls were doing this day before the Springtree dance, but checking that the beehive she’d found last autumn had survived the winter. The hive was in the fork of a linden tree just breaking into leaf. The tree was one she’d climbed often as a child, playing a game with Maryrose where they had to get from village to home without touching the ground. It had been tricky but possible to jump from tree to tree to fence to tree all the way.

The hive was in good order, buzzing companionably. She sat on the limb a safe distance away, and talked to the bees awhile. She resolved to come back often enough through the summer so they’d get used to the sound of her voice, and not attack her when she came to smoke them and steal their honey.

A rider appeared from behind the big willow. It was the blond. Seen closer, he was a stocky, broad-shouldered man with the pale hair and blue eyes of Acton’s people, mounted on a powerful-looking roan gelding. She grew wary, but he was far enough off that she could be out of the tree before he could get to her. The linden boughs intermeshed with a big willow; she could be away and into the forest before he could get off his horse. She stood up on the bough, one hand on the trunk.

“Greetings, mistress,” he said, smiling the smile men so often used, the one that was meant to charm but never did. She nodded, not minded to give him any more than that until she knew what he wanted. Even smiling, he had a mean mouth and narrow eyes, for all that he was no older than her.

He was annoyed that she hadn’t given him greetings. He frowned, then she saw his frown soften as he looked at her breasts. She knew that look, too. It wasn’t desire, but lust, and took no account of what she thought or felt. Men who looked at you like that never met your eyes.

“Why not come down and talk?” He held out his hand invitingly.

“No, thank you.”

He looked at her face then and she saw him register her black hair and eyes, saw the contempt in his face. She could see it made him angrier that a Traveler was resisting him. He drew himself up in the saddle, puffed out his chest like a ten-year-old boy trying to impress. She nearly laughed, but he was no less dangerous for that.

“Stop playing games, missy. You know why I’m here. Give me the wolf skin and I’ll forget about your stealing it from me.”

“If you’ve got a claim on something of mine you can take it to the village voice and he’ll settle the dispute,” Bramble said.

A voice was elected by each village and made decisions in disputes between villagers, as well as representing them in dealings with the warlord. The warlord’s men never showed much respect to them. She didn’t think the man would like to submit to the voice’s ruling, but it was worth a try. The roan was fidgeting, ears back; Bramble could see it getting nervous as the man grew impatient. She refused to let her own nerves take over. It was better to be annoyed than afraid.

“We don’t ask favors of villagers,” he said with derision. “Where did you get it?”

“From a wolf.”

“From
my
wolf.” He swept a black-fletched arrow out of the quiver at his back and shook it at her. “It had a black arrow in it, didn’t it, when you found it?” He shot the arrow back into the quiver with a thump that made the roan flinch. Bramble felt a quick surge of fellow feeling for it. “You found the carcass and skinned it . . . well, there’s no harm in that. But it’s my skin and I want it.”

“Did you kill the wolf?” she asked quietly.

He hesitated. “I shot it.”

“But
I
killed it. If you won’t go to the village voice, perhaps the warlord should decide it?”

He didn’t like that idea, having to admit to his overlord that he’d failed to finish off the wolf. The roan jumped as he put in the spurs. It took a step forward, only to be reined in hard.

“Just give it here or you’ll be sorry.” He loosened his sword in his scabbard deliberately.

Her toes gripped the bark firmly. She was suddenly angry past common sense or reason at his arrogance. It was typical of the warlord’s men, of all the men who carried sword and shield. Typical that he hadn’t followed the wolf and finished him off, as any compassionate hunter would do. That wolf had looked at her with pleading in its eyes, and she knew enough of animals to know when it was for help, and when it was for a quick end to pain. She had done this man’s job for him, and she would keep the results.

“I think I’d rather go to the warlord.”

It had been a mistake to stand up. She saw him looking up at her legs, bare under her skirt. Her stomach turned over with revulsion at the thought of him touching her and there was a flutter of panic beneath her breastbone. She pushed it down. Men like him lived for the fear in others.

The intention to hurt was in his eyes and in the hands hard on the reins, but he hesitated. The warlord allowed his men great license, but there were limits. He couldn’t just beat her and take the skin. She might go to the warlord and say that she had been happy to accept his judgment on the matter. If the blond just took things into his own hands, he knew he’d be in trouble. The roan snorted and backed away a little. He curbed it savagely but otherwise ignored it. She could see the thoughts move behind his eyes, saw him looking for a way to discredit her before the warlord. It chilled her.

“Black hair and black eyes,” he sneered. “You’re a Traveler wench, aren’t you? Is it true what they say, that you’ll go with anyone?”

“No.” Her voice was as cold and firm as she could make it.

She saw some flicker of reaction on his face and the spark of warning inside her grew stronger. Old Ceouf was famed for allowing his men to get away with rape. If she complained to him later about the way his man had dealt with the wolf, the blond would deny it, and accuse her of trying to revenge her rape. And he’d be believed. She would have to give him the wolf skin and then go straight to the warlord and lay it all before him. It was her only chance. Her hand moved slowly to the skin, but he misinterpreted, thought she was taking hold of it in ownership.

“You’d better do as you’re told, girl. You don’t want anything to happen to your family, do you?” His hand moved again to his sword hilt.

Of course he would threaten like that, the coward. She felt the contempt take over her face and saw his reaction to it. But she wasn’t prepared for the speed with which he moved.

He kicked the horse forward and reached to pull her down. She drew back one foot, tough as an old boot from seasons of barefoot running, and kicked him in the head. Her heel connected with his face and he fell backward off the horse. She turned to run, but from the corner of her eye she saw that he lay very still. As still as death.

She looked back slowly. As the roan shifted uneasily sideways, she saw that he lay on his back, eyes wide, his face with a curious crumpled look. His long nose was shortened like a pig’s. She realized that she had kicked him flat on the nose, that the bone had gone back and entered his brain like a spear. She had killed him.

She’d meant to run, she’d
planned
to run. But in the moment when he reached for her, an instinct stronger than reason had taken over. Her leg had seemed to move of its own accord, but it had, she realized, been guided by some dark, bone-deep refusal to run: a rejection of fear, of the surrender that comes with fear, an inability to accept that he was worth her fear.

She hoped that when the warlord’s men found the body it would look as though he had ridden thoughtlessly fast under the low linden bough and been hit in the face, and the horse had ridden to the forest. Would it look like an accident? She didn’t know enough to predict their reaction, so she shrugged the worry away.

She’d killed a lot of things — the wolf, rabbits, weasels and stoats, fish and fawns. It was a job that had to be done. But she’d always meant to do it. To kill without meaning seemed . . . well, it seemed a waste. A waste of what, she wasn’t sure. Life? Purpose? Or something harder to name, though she could feel it. Her own soul? She couldn’t look away from his face. He seemed improved by death; his face had lost its scowl. It felt odd to have interrupted the life of someone she knew nothing about, to kill someone she had only just met, as though killing needed intimacy, deep knowledge of the other, to make it all right. She forced herself to look away from him, and immediately realized that she had better get away, and fast.

Her heart was racing, her stomach clenched, her skin was clammy. Fear or the exaltation of escape? She didn’t know. But although fear was as good a name as any, the same impulse that had sent her foot against his face now prevented her from naming her racing heart as fearful. Excitement, the need to get moving, were better reasons.

She slid onto the broad back of the roan and gathered up the reins with clumsy hands. She couldn’t reach the stirrups and it seemed somehow impolite to just kick the horse, so she clicked with her tongue, as plowmen did to draft horses, and the roan willingly moved off toward the trees. Even then, in the first moment of riding him, she wanted to keep him, felt that they had already become attached by fellow feeling against the man.

It was the first time Bramble had been on a horse since old Cuthbert, a Traveling tinker, had given her rides on his cart horse when she was six. It was a long way to the ground. She swallowed as the horse’s swaying walk seemed to poise her over a long drop twice at each stride. The stirrups thumped against his side as he moved and he quickened his pace to a bumpy trot, and then to a canter.

She grasped the pommel and held her breath, feeling for the first time the intoxicating sense of power under her, the sense of being extended, that the horse’s speed and strength and agility were all hers, even if only temporarily. It was an uncomfortable, unsteady passage, but by the end of it she was in love with riding.

She took him to a narrow gully in the depths of the wood, to her cave. It was less a cave than a cleft between two huge rocks that formed the end of the gully. She had come here since she was a child, whenever she wanted somewhere cool and quiet, somewhere to think or to pray. The rocks were covered with moss at the base and their cracked faces were shaded even in the middle of summer, since the trees around them were mostly evergreen, cedar and yew. It was a strange place, always quiet. Birds calling in the trees above sounded far away; water from a tiny spring where the two rock faces met trickled down gently, constantly, even when all the streams were frozen. It felt holy, but there were no gods here, just silence.

With a long tether made of strips of her underskirt, Bramble staked out the horse at the end of the cleft. It wouldn’t stop him if he wanted to run, but nothing she had could. The cleft was just big enough to hold him. If wolves came the horse could retreat into it and protect himself with his front hooves. He was safe enough. She unsaddled and unbridled him, wiped off his sweat with a bunch of grass then leaned her back against the cool rock and watched him graze all afternoon. She went home with the memory of the warlord’s man buried under thoughts of the roan.

The memory came back that night, though, in her dreams, where she endlessly kicked at his face, but he kept reaching for her anyway, over and over. She woke awash with sweat in the bed that she and Maryrose had shared, and wished that Maryrose was still here. If the warlord’s men came to arrest her, she would go with them quietly and they’d have no excuse to bully her mother or father. But no one came except Eril, the innkeeper, to pick up the blanket chest in his handcart. He was full of the news that one of the warlord’s men had been found dead.

“A riding accident,” he said, shaking his head. “One of these harum-scarum young lads, it was, rode right into a linden bough and — phut! — dead! The warlord’s not too pleased, they say, and the horse is missing, too, though that’s not a loss to him up yonder, for it was the lad’s own horse, they say. Keep an eye out for it, lassie,” he said. “You might get a reward.”