The Stone of Farewell (21 page)

As it turned out, the sun had risen high in the gray sky before the final arrangements were finished—a span of time Simon was more than happy to spend sleeping.

Simon, his companions, and a large number of trolls trooped out onto the byways of Mintahoq, following the Herder and Huntress in the strangest parade Simon had ever seen. As they wound in and out through Mintahoq's most populous sections, hundreds of trolls stopped on the swinging bridges or came dashing out of their caves to watch the company pass, standing amazed beneath the swirling smokes of their cooking fires. Many clambered down the thong ladders and joined the procession.

Much of the journey was uphill, and the vast crowd strung out along the narrow track made the going slow. It seemed quite a long while before they made their way around to the northern face. As they trudged on, Simon found himself slipping into a kind of numbed dreaminess. Snow flurried in the gray void beyond the pathway; Yiqanuc's other peaks stood up along the valley's far side like teeth.

The march stopped at last on a long stone porch atop a promontory that stood out above the northern part of Yiqanuc's valley. Another path hugged the mountainside below them, then the rock walls of Mintahoq fell sharply away, down into white obscurity touched with patches of bright sunsplash. Staring down, Simon was stuck by a memory of dream, of a dim white tower lapped by flames. He turned away from the unsettling view to find the rocky ledge on which he stood dominated by the tall, egg-shaped snow-building he had seen his first day out of the cave. Closer this time, he could clearly see the marvelous care with which the triangular blocks of snow had been cut and fitted together, the bold carvings that seemed to slice down into the blocks themselves, so that the Ice House was as multifaceted as a cut diamond, its walls alive with hidden interior angles, prisms that reflected cyan and pink.

The row of armed trolls who guarded the Ice House stood respectfully to one side as Nunuuika and Uammanaq moved past them to stand between the pillars of tight-packed snow that framed the door. Simon could see nothing of the Ice House's interior but a blue-gray hole beyond the doorway. Binabik and Sisqi took places on the icy step below, mittened hands clasped. Qangolik the Spirit Caller clambered up beside them.

Though Qangolik's face was hidden by his ram-skull mask, Simon thought the muscular troll seemed rather subdued. The Spirit Caller, who had pranced like a courting bird before the judgment in Chidsik ub Lingit, now slumped like a weary harvest hand.

As the Herder lifted his crook-spear and spoke, Binabik translated for his lowlander companions.

‘Strange days are upon us.” Uammannaq's eyes were deep-shadowed.

“We have known that something was wrong. We live too closely with the mountain, which is of the bones of the earth, not to sense the unease in the lands around us. The Ice House is still here. It has not melted.” The wind rose, whistling, as if to underscore his words. “Winter will not leave. At first we blamed Binabik. The Singing Man or his apprentice has always sung the Rite of Quickening; Summer has always come. But now we are told that it is not failure to perform the Rite that keeps Summer hidden. Strange days. Things are different.” He shook his head heavily, his beard wagging.

“We must break with tradition,” Nunuuika the Huntress added. “The word of the wise should be law to those of less wisdom. Ookequk has spoken as if he were here among us. Now we know more of the thing that we feared, but could not name. My husband speaks truly: strange days are upon us. Tradition served us, but now it shackles us. Thus, Huntress and Herder declare that Binbinaqegabenik is free from his punishment. We would be fools to kill one who has been striving to protect us from the storm of which Ookequk spoke. We would be worse than fools, it is now clear, to kill the only one who knew Ookequk's heart.”

Nunuuika paused, waiting for Binabik to complete his reinterpretation, then continued, passing her hand across her forehead in some ritual gesture. “The Rimmersman Sludig is an even stranger problem. He is no Qanuc, so he was not guilty of oath-breaking, as we declared Binabik. But he is of an enemy people, and if the tales of our farthest-ranging hunters are true, Rimmersmen in the east have grown even more savage than before. However, Binabik assures us that this Sludig is different, that he fights the same fight as Ookequk. We are not sure, but in these days of madness we cannot say it is not so. Thus, Sludig is also declared freed from punishment and may leave Yiqanuc as he wishes—the first Croohok so pardoned since the Battle of Huhinka Valley in my great-grandmother's day, when the snows ran red with blood. We call on the spirits of high places, pale Sedda and Qinkipa of the Snows, Morag Eyeless, bold Chukku, and all the rest, to protect the people if our judgment is faulty.”

When the Huntress had finished, Uammannaq stood beside her and made a broad gesture, as though to break something in two and cast it away. The watching trolls chanted one sharp syllable, then lapsed into excited whispering.

Simon turned and clasped Sludig's hand. The northerner smiled tightly, jaw set behind his yellow beard. “The little people speak rightly,” he said. “Strange times indeed.”

Uammannaq raised his hand to still the murmur of conversation. “The lowlanders shall now leave. Binbinaqegabenik, who if he returns will be our next Singing Man, may go with them to take this strange, magical object—” he pointed to Thorn, which Haestan held propped on the ground before him, “—to the lowlanders, who he says can use it to frighten away the winter.

“We shall send with them a party of hunters, led by our daughter Sisqinanamook, who shall be their escort until they leave the lands of the Qanuc. The hunters will then go to the spring city by Blue Mud Lake and prepare for the coming of the rest of our clans.” Uammannaq made a gesture and one of the other trolls stepped forward with a skin bag that had been covered nearly completely in delicate tracings of colored embroidery. “We have gifts we wish to give you.”

Binabik brought his friends forward. The Huntress presented Simon with a sheath of supple hide, the leather subtly tooled and studded with stone beads the color of a spring moon. The Herder then gave him a knife to put in it, a beautiful pale blade made from a single piece of bone. The handle was wrought with smoothed carvings of birds.

“A magical lowlander sword is very good for fighting snow-worms,” Nunuuika told him, “but a humble Qanuc knife is easier to hide and easier to use in close quarters.”

Simon thanked them politely and stepped aside. Haestan was given a capacious drinking skin decorated with ribbons and stitchery, filled to the stopper with Qanuc liquor. The guardsman, who had drunk enough of the sour stuff during the previous evening to finally develop a bit of taste for it, bowed, mumbled some words of gratitude, then withdrew.

Sludig, who had come to Yiqanuc as a prisoner but was now leaving more or less as a guest, received a spear with a viciously sharp head hewn from shiny black stone. The haft was uncarved, since it had been hurriedly constructed—the trolls did not use spears of a length that would have been appropriate—but it was nicely balanced and could double as a walking stave.

“We hope you also appreciate the gift of your life,” Uammannaq said, “and will remember that the justice of the Qanuc is stern but not cruel.”

Sludig amazed them by dropping quickly to a knee. “I will remember,” was all he said.

“Binbinaqegabenik,” Nunuuika began, “you have already received the greatest gift it is in our capacity to bestow. If she will still have you, we renew our permission for you to marry our youngest daughter. When the Rite of Quickening can be performed next year, you will be joined.”

Binabik and Sisqi clasped hands and bowed on the step before the Herder and Huntress as words of blessing were said. The ram-faced Spirit Caller came forward. He chanted and sang as he daubed their foreheads with oil, but with what Simon thought was a very dissatisfied air. When Qangolik finished and stalked grumpily back down the steps of the Ice House, the betrothal had been reinstated.

The Huntress and Herder said a brief personal farewell to the company, Binabik interpreting. Though she smiled and touched his hand with her small, strong fingers, Nunuiika still seemed cold and hard as stone to Simon, sharp and dangerous as her own spearhead. He had to force himself to smile back and retreat slowly when she had finished.

 

Qantaqa was waiting for them, curled in a nest of snow outside of Chidsik ub Lingit. The noon sun had disappeared behind a spreading fog; the wind set Simon's teeth to chattering.

“Down the mountain we must now go, friend,” Binabik said to him. “I am wishing you and Haestan and Sludig were not so large, but there are no rams strong enough for your riding. It will make our going slower than I would wish.”

“But where are we going?” Simon asked. “Where is this Stone of Farewell?”

“All things in their season,” the troll replied. “I will look at my scrolls when we stop tonight, but we should leave now as soon as we can. The mountain passes will be treacherous. I smell more snow upon the wind.”

“More snow,” Simon repeated, shouldering his pack. More snow.

Maegwin sang,

Maegwin drew her hand over her eyes, shielding them from the stinging wind, then leaned forward to rearrange the flowers on her father's cairn. Already the wind had scattered the violets across the stones; only a few dried petals remained on Gwythinn's grave nearby. Where had the treacherous summer gone? And when would the flowers bloom again, so she could tend her loved ones' resting places as they deserved?

As the wind rattled the skeletal birch trees, she sang again.

She broke off, wondering absently if she had once known the rest of the words. She remembered her nurse singing it to her when she was young, a sad song about the Sithi-folk—“The Peaceful Ones,” as her ancestors had named them. Maegwin did not know the legend behind it. She doubted her old nurse had known, either. It was only that, a sad song from happier times, from her childhood in the Taig ... before her father and brother died.

She stood, brushing the dirt from the knees of her black skirt, and scattered a few last withered flowers among the slender spears of grass pushing up from Gwythinn's cairn. As she turned back up the path, clasping her cloak tight against the gnawing wind, she wondered once more why she should not join her brother and father Lluth here in peace on the mountainside. What did life hold for her?

She knew what Eolair would say. The Count of Nad Mullach would tell her that her people had no one else but Maegwin to inspire and guide them. “Hope,” Eolair often said, in that quiet but fox-clever way of his, “is like the belly-strap on a king's saddle—a slender thing, but if it snaps the world turns topside-down.”

Thinking of the count, she felt a rare flash of anger. What could he know—what could anyone know about death who was as alive as Eolair, to whom life seemed a gift from the gods? How could he understand the dreadful weight of waking up each day, knowing that the ones she loved most were gone, that her people were uprooted and friendless, doomed to a slow, humiliating extinction? What gift of the gods was worth the gray burden of pain, the unceasing rut of bleak thoughts?

Eolair of Nad Mullach came to her often these days, speaking to her as he would to a child. Once, long ago, Maegwin had fallen in love with him, but she had never been so foolish as to believe he might feel for her in turn. Tall as a man, clumsy and blunt in her words, far more like a farmer's daughter than a princess—who could ever love Maegwin? But now that she and her bewildered young stepmother Inahwen were all that remained of Lluth ubh-Llythinn's house, now Eolair was concerned.

Not out of any base motives, though. She laughed out loud and did not like the sound of it. Oh, gods, base motives? Not honorable Count Eolair. That was the thing she hated in him more than anything else: his unrelenting kindness and honor. She was sick to death of pity.