Authors: Pamela Freeman
Ash remembered his father teaching him the history of these lands as they walked through. “I say ‘people of the old blood,’” his father had said, “because we never had a name for ourselves, not one that suited everyone. We were not a nation, just a collection of villages and towns, each independent but dealing with the others in peace — mostly.
My
father told me that we thought of ourselves as ‘Turviters’ or ‘Plessans’ first, and only secondly, loosely, did we see any connection between us and those from other towns. That was one of the reasons Acton succeeded so well — there was no way of bringing the men of the towns together to fight. The towns fell, one by one, to the fair-haired warriors.”
That last phrase, Ash remembered, was from one of the long Traveler ballads in the old tongue. He had learned that ballad, and countless others, as his father had learned them, by word of mouth. The people of the old blood had no tradition of writing, just the runes, which were too powerful to be used for anything other than stonecasting.
“Tell me another history ballad,” Martine said as they walked.
Ash grimaced. “They’re all depressing,” he said. “All about death and beheadings and villages put to the sword.”
“There must be some lighthearted songs! Something not death. Traveler songs. I know there are . . .”
“Oh, there’s plenty about how wonderful it all was before Acton came. If you can believe the songs, our culture was complex and exquisite — our artisans produced the most beautiful of objects, all that was good was shared, no one went hungry, our poets sang songs of such beauty that no one could listen dry-eyed . . .”
Martine’s mouth made a quirk. “You don’t believe them?”
“Well . . . There are a few songs from that time that survived. They’re good songs — that’s why they survived, and a couple are beautiful.” He paused, remembering his mother’s voice soaring into the descant of “Falling Water.” “Yes, very beautiful. But they are human songs, after all, not songs from water sprites, whose songs are so beautiful they can steal your soul away.
“It seems to me . . .” he said with a sudden release of a long-held belief, one he hadn’t even known was there, “it seems to
me
that old people always say everything was better in the past. Maybe it was, but what difference does it make now?”
Martine thought for a moment. “Maybe it gives us something to aspire to?”
“Maybe. And maybe it gives us an excuse not to aspire.”
She nodded. “Likely. Very likely.”
They spent a night camping in a copse of pine trees near the track, and made it to the ford toward the end of the next day.
T
HE GLADE
was ringed with scraggly pine trees, untidy, like the raven nests that crowned them. It was not like most of the gods’ places, which tended to be beautiful, peaceful, lush. This was just a scrubby glade in the middle of a large pine copse, with brown winter grass waiting for the first snowfall, and a few rabbit burrows at the edges, well away from the black rock at its center.
They were all the same, those rocks, cold even in the summer sun and differing only in size. The gods, it was said, had sent them all to Earth at the same time, at the birth of life. Some said the stones had brought the first life, or they were what remained of the gods’ sweat from laboring to create the living world. No matter how they had come, they belonged, everywhere, to the gods.
Saker knelt before the rock and bowed, waiting for the itch under the skin that meant the gods were with him. He felt nothing. Astonished, and a little alarmed, he prayed.
“Gods of field and stream, hear your son. Gods of sky and wind, hear your son. Gods of earth and stone, hear your son. Gods of fire and storm, hear your son.”
Nothing.
He sat back on his heels, thinking hard. Did the gods disapprove of his plan? Surely not. Perhaps they had removed themselves so their presence would not interfere with his spell. Yes!
Of course.
His human magic might not work in their holy sphere, so they had left to allow him free rein.
“Thy son thanks you, gods of all.”
He began to dig at the far north side of the glade, where Rowan’s song had said the bones of the Spritford victims had been casually buried.
He found them easily, for bedrock was only a few feet down. The brittle bones of human skeletons, brown with age and dirt, mingled together; the skulls, with gaping holes, missing jaws, and empty eyes, willed him to work faster. The song had said forty-seven, men and women and children. He found twenty-nine skulls in three hours, and was satisfied. He placed the children’s skulls to one side, cradling a baby’s tiny head in his palm. He had to stop for a moment, to acknowledge the waste, the crushed bone, the toothless mouth. He laid it down, gently, and returned to the adult bones strengthened in purpose. They would pay. They would pay in blood every part of their debt.
He stood over the skulls, took out his knife, and began the spell.
I am Saker, son of Alder and Linnet of the village of Cliffhaven.
I seek justice. Justice for Wren, for Jay, for Lark, for Sparrow —
There was a little
flick
in his mind at the name Sparrow, and he said it again, but the sensation didn’t come again, so he continued.
I seek justice for Falcon, for Owl —
There it was, a strong response this time: his Sight was coming alive and showing him, in his mind’s eye, a small man with beautiful hands and angry eyes. He continued with new zeal.
I seek justice for Owl and all of his comrades, unjustly slain and buried in this place.
He could feel that the one name was enough. The bones were singing to him now, not all of them, but many. The spirits of the dead were listening, finally. The rest of the spell wasn’t in words, but images in his mind, complex and distressing: colors, phrases of music, the memory of a particular scent, the sound of a scream . . .
He paused and looked down at the skulls. They seemed to shout silently for him to hurry. He pressed the knife to his palm and drew it down hard. The blood surged out in time with his heart and splashed in gouts on the lifeless bones.
“Arise, Owl and all his comrades,” he commanded. “Take your revenge.”
A
SH HAD ALWAYS
wondered why the river was called Sharp. When the road reached the ford, it was easy to see why.
They came down a ridge into a strange world. It was as though the land had been picked up and turned upside down, so that layers of rocks stuck up straight into the air, instead of lying flat under the ground. The wind had worn them into a maze of razor edges all the way to the water. The road picked its way between them, zigzagging wildly to find the safest way. It was hard on foot, Ash thought; taking a cart through would have been close to impossible.
Ash was nervous. It was an unchancy place, and the ghost’s warning still troubled him. He made Martine follow him, and he kept his hand on his dagger as they made their way through the labyrinth. At every turn he expected Death herself to jump out at them, but other than startling some ravens picking over a rabbit’s corpse, nothing happened. It darkened as they moved into the valley, and when the sun finally disappeared between one step and the next, his unease grew.
Only the wind’s moan through the rocks followed them; only the river’s rush awaited. The ford was at a wide, hence calm, stretch of the river, but it was still dangerous: just a series of stepping-stones joined the banks across the turbulent stream. Ash went first, testing each rock to make sure it would bear his weight, careful on the slick, worn granite. He was almost to the other side when he saw the water sprite, lying between the last rock and the bank, staring up at him with malice and a smile.
“Ware, Ash,” Martine called at the same moment.
“I see it,” he said, hesitating.
The water sprite couldn’t hurt him if he stayed on land. In air, their flesh melted away into smoke. But if he stumbled and fell into the water, or even lost balance for a moment and dipped his foot in, she could pull him under. No one knew what happened to those who were taken by the sprites: no trace was ever found.
But he had a pretty good idea, looking at those long clawed hands and the sharp teeth that smiled at him. Suddenly Doronit’s voice came back to him vividly: “Whistle.” And it was as though he stood again on the cliffs outside Turvite with the wind wraiths trying to tug him over to his death.
He thrust the thought away from him. He knew if he moved while he was remembering that moment, he would fall. He swallowed hard and strode onto the last rock, then jumped as assuredly as he could to the shore. He stumbled, from fear or clumsiness, but fell face forward and grabbed hard at good, safe land. The sprite laughed at him.
Martine was safe beside him before he had picked himself up. She landed lightly and bent down to him, but he brushed off her hand, embarrassed and angry with himself.
“No harm done,” she said, amused.
He grunted and then turned to watch the sprite swim away. It moved like a dolphin, smoothly and powerfully. But it could never leap into the air for joy, he thought, and felt a brief spasm of pity; then he shivered with relief.
The road ahead rose steeply through more of the sharp rock maze, but going up toward the sky, even a twilight sky, felt to Ash like waking up on a fine holiday morning. At the top of the ridge they both paused and looked back. The river spurted and foamed around the ford rocks. It looked perilous, and he shivered again.
The other side of the ridge was different country; they had passed into the sparser, harsher land of the north. Still, it was a kind of country they both knew well. From the ridge they could see the road wind down for miles into a long, broad, shallow valley until it came to a stream, a tributary of the Sharp. Specks of light appeared on the other side of the stream, and Ash realized that the dark shapes he had taken for rocks were really cottages. It was much farther away than it had looked, and he remembered that distances were often deceptive in these wider lands.
“That’s Spritford. We’ll reach there sometime tomorrow,” Martine said. “Let’s find somewhere for tonight.”
Neither of them felt like going back to the river for water, so they cast about until they found a little pool in the rocks that had enough rainwater to make cha.
“It’ll be safe enough if we boil it,” Ash said.
There was enough shelter in the rocks to make an autumn night there not too unpleasant, although the ground was bruising to their hips. They drank, ate cheese sandwiches and some plums that Halley had given them, and settled back to sleep.
The next day was unseasonably hot and airless. The land was dusty, with flocks of goats grazing here and there, watched by young boys squatting on rocks who stared hard at them and sometimes deigned to nod when the pair waved. The scent of wild thyme and sage was strong and after a few hours Ash had a headache.
They rounded a low hill and found themselves on the final stretch of track down to the stream, with the village they had seen the night before on the other side.
R
IDING NORTH,
she was riding into autumn. In these parts, the season came in with a biting wind that crisped the leaves on the trees and bent the heavy grass heads flat by the side of the road. The horses didn’t like it. It was cold enough for their breath to form plumes in the air. They were fidgety, reluctant to do anything she asked. Bramble wasn’t any happier than the horses, and by late afternoon she was more than glad to see roofs above a rise in the ground up ahead.
The village was only a huddle of houses beside a stream. Like most of the country houses in this district, they were two stories: the lower one for the animals to winter in, the upper for the family. She stopped at the largest house and banged on the door with her fist.
“I need lodgings,” she shouted. “I can pay.”
The door edged open just enough to let her and the horses in, and was slammed shut behind them. The relief of being out of the wind was immediate. The stable felt stuffy, even warm, although she could still see her breath on the air. There were livestock in the stable, a cow and a nanny goat. A couple of dogs, which clearly had been curled up in the straw, bounced around them, sniffing avidly at Bramble’s crotch. She pushed them away.
“Gods! It’s cold enough to freeze the nuts off a gelding out there!” a voice boomed.
Bramble turned, unwound the scarf from her head and smiled. “It is that.”
The voice belonged to a tall blond woman, with strong arms and big hands that she was using to unsaddle Cam. Bramble left her to it and saw to the other horses. Even the relief of being out of the cold hadn’t sweetened Trine’s temper. She tried to kick one of the dogs and was clouted firmly on the nose.
“That’s it,” the blond said. “You’ve got to show them who’s boss.” She turned and shouted up the wooden stairs. “Lace, put a bran mash on. She’s got three poor beasts here near dead with cold.”
Side by side they rubbed the horses down in silence until Lace, who turned out to be a skinny adolescent girl in thick orange socks, brought down a wide pan of warm mash and emptied it into the feed trough. The three horses jostled to nose into it. The blond woman watched with satisfaction.
“That’ll do ’em. Come on.” She led the way to the living area above.
The room was untidy and sparsely furnished with wooden settles and a table and chairs, but softened by thick fleeces on the floor. Bramble, noting belatedly that her hostess had her boots off, took hers off too and sank cold toes into the fleece gratefully. Her feet tingled as the blood flowed more warmly in them.
“I’m Butterfly,” the blond said, and jerked a thumb toward the girl. “Lacewing.” Bramble didn’t show her amusement, but Butterfly grimaced anyway. “They call me Fly and her Lacy,” she said. “Our mother must have been crazy, but all the girls in her family were named for things that fly.”
Bramble smiled. “I’m Bramble,” she said. “With us, it was plants.”
Fly guffawed and relaxed.
Bramble sat at the table as she and the girl made cha and cooked bacon and eggs.
“Bad time to start a journey, winter coming on,” Fly said, glancing sideways as she turned the bacon.
“I’m on my way to the Well of Secrets,” Bramble replied. “Didn’t expect the cold to come on so soon.”
“Keep going the road you’re on, you’ll have more to worry about than the cold.”
Bramble raised her eyebrows.
“It’s shaping up for war, girl, and those horses of yours are like gold around here. Why do you think my stable’s empty?”
“The warlord?”
Fly snorted. “Shagging right. He’s commandeered every horse within thirty miles. Took both my broodmares — though thank the gods he’s breeding them, not using them as troopers. Wants to breed and train a cavalry, for the gods’ sake! If it weren’t for me being female, he’d have me up at the fort training the horses!”
“I don’t quite understand what this war’s supposed to be about.”
Fly scooped the bacon and eggs onto rounds of bread on wooden plates and slammed them down on the table. “Lace! Eat!” she shouted. “Thegan
says
it’s because the Lake People are bleeding us dry with the tolls they charge to ferry our goods across the Lake to the roads beyond, and because they won’t let us build a bridge instead, and besides, our Lady Sorn, his wife, has a right to the Domain through her grandfather.”
“And what’s the real story?”
“Well, look at the map, girl! He’s got the Cliff Domain already, now he’s married Central, if he takes the Lake he’s got the whole middle of the Domains under him, all the way to the coast. He’ll have cut us in two.”
Bramble considered it. “He won’t have a port, though. It’s all cliffs along the Central Domain coast.”
“If I were Carlion, I’d be feeling nervous.”
“He wouldn’t invade one of the free towns!”
The free towns had been set up by Acton, and they had
always
been free to govern themselves. No warlord had entered a free town by force in a thousand years. It was unthinkable.
“Who’s to stop him?” Fly answered.
The three of them ate thoughtfully for a moment.
The Domain nearest Carlion was South, where Bramble came from. The warlord there was better at encouraging his men to bully and steal than at training them for war. Three Rivers Domain was the next closest, but it was small.
Fly was right. Bramble grew cold from her toes to the tips of her ears. There was no one to stop him. Maryrose lived in Carlion. Perhaps she should turn around right now, go back to Carlion and warn them.
“Someone should warn Carlion,” Lace said.
“They wouldn’t believe us, honey. If I didn’t know Thegan, it wouldn’t even have occurred to me. But that one will stop at nothing.”
Bramble thought it over. The news of war with the Lake People would get to Carlion soon enough. There were people of intelligence there, not least Maryrose’s mother-in-law, the town clerk. They would see the need and recruit help. Few Domains would refuse. It was in everyone’s best interests to keep the free towns
free
.
Bramble relaxed a little. “He has to win the war with the Lake People first.”
“Easier said than done,” Fly said, nodding. “But he’s claiming the gods are behind him, because everything has gone so well in Sendat since the Kill was Reborn.”
“The shagging bastard! The pox-ridden, slimy little thief!”
Fly’s jaw dropped and then she shouted with laughter. “Bramble! Gods, it was you! The Kill Reborn!” She got up and made a mocking bow. “Well, well, well. So the Kill Reborn doesn’t support Thegan. He’s not going to like that, girl. Better not go to Sendat.”
For once, Bramble was inclined to listen to advice. Following her instinct was what she’d decided to do, and her instinct was to stay well away from anything to do with Thegan. It made her skin crawl just to think of him. He was everything she’d always hated about the warlord system: selfish, brutal, power hungry. He had tainted her by claiming her luck as his own, implicating her in his evils. She had never been so angry. Her blood seethed, hissed in her ears. Like the warlord’s man, she wanted Thegan’s face under her foot.
But not badly enough to seek him out.
She stayed the night with Lace and Fly, asking no more questions and having to answer none.
She packed early the next morning and was off just after dawn, paying Fly more than the woman wanted to take.
“Saved my life,” Bramble said.
“Good,” Fly retorted, putting the coppers back into Bramble’s pocket. “It’s good luck to help the Kill Reborn. I might need me some good luck soon — don’t take it away by paying me.”
Bramble wasn’t comfortable with the gesture, but thanked her and raised a hand goodbye. She had exulted in becoming the Kill Reborn, but carrying the name made her uneasy. It was as though the gods walked with her even when she couldn’t feel them, as though some other force used her feet to walk and her mouth to speak. All the more reason to be angry with Thegan, she thought, for using what belonged to the gods.
She turned back on her tracks. Fly had said that there was a minor road — “nearly a track, girl” — two miles back on the right, which would take her in a wide curve around Sendat and up to the top of the Lake, where she could take a ferry across and have an easy ride to the main north road.
It had rained overnight and she rode into a landscape of moving water: drops falling from leaves, streams rushing between hedges of reeds, trickles along the rutted road, and dew-laden sere grasses lifting to the weak morning sun. It was beautiful, musical, magical. Bramble felt the horses detect her stir of blood and lift of heart, and quickened their pace as much as she dared.
Thegan’s men saw her just before the turnoff. It was sheer bad luck. As she looked up into the morning glare, she saw six of them, picking their way down the road on sturdy mountain horses that were just bigger than ponies and starting to get shaggy with winter coats. Something about their silhouettes raised a shiver up her spine. She didn’t even consider running, the feeling of inevitability was so strong. Besides, she had two packhorses. They’d catch her in seconds.
Bramble was thankful that the sergeant didn’t look like either Thegan or the warlord’s man she had killed. He was in his fifties, an ordinary looking gray-haired man with the beginnings of a cold. He kept sniffing and turning his head politely to spit out phlegm. It gave a strange rhythm to their conversation.
“Where are you off to, girl?” he asked civilly, and spat.
“Carlion.” Eventually, she hoped.
He sniffed, but not in disapproval. “Well, sorry, lass, but you’re coming to Sendat today. Warlord’s orders.”
“I’m on a free road, going to a free town!”
“Warlord’s orders. All horses to be collected and their riders brought in for questioning, unless they’re on warlord’s business. What’s your name?”
“Bramble.”
He nodded and gestured for her to turn around.
She fell in with them and noted their professionalism: their way of surrounding her without jostling her, the sheen on their weapons, and the good condition of their tack. They all carried the short bows which work best on horseback, and they were slack but ready to be strung at a moment’s notice, the quivers full and protected by leather hoods. Thegan kept a disciplined guard, trained and well equipped. It didn’t make her like him any more. Trained to kill. Equipped to capture the innocent and steal from them. And what would happen to her once they reached Thegan’s stronghold? Robbed and then turned out on the road to survive as best she could?
It took them most of the day to reach the fort above Sendat, on muddy, slippery roads that made the horses uncomfortable and twitchy, and unsure of their footing. They stopped whenever they found a patch of clear ground to rest the horses. When they stopped again to eat their lunch, the men offered to share their bread and bacon with Bramble, “to show there’s no hard feelings, like,” and she was glad she could show that her own bag was full of food, and refuse without giving offense. She didn’t want to eat with them, or be beholden to them, but she wasn’t stupid enough to antagonize them unnecessarily.
They talked at intervals about the coming war, which they all seemed to look forward to, especially one man, the sergeant’s helper, the only one who kept his bow strung, “in case we see some rabbits for supper.” He shot at two in one glade before Bramble had even seen them, the arrows finding sure marks. They all waited for him to gut them, while the horses nibbled lichen from the trunks of the birch trees. Bramble peeled a little of the bark and chewed on it.
The sergeant looked up at her. “Get used to the taste of it,” he said sourly. “War in spring leaves the fields unsown and the granaries empty come winter. There’ll be nothing
but
birch bark to eat this time next year.”
The archer glared at him. “We don’t talk about my lord Thegan’s business to some Traveler slut.”
The sergeant stared at him for a moment, reminding him of their different ranks, but the archer still glared, full of righteous indignation.
“He’s not a god, Horst,” the sergeant said, and spat tidily into the ditch.
Horst glowered at him but held his tongue.
They reached the fort an hour before sundown, filing up the narrow Sendat streets as the shopkeepers were folding in their counters. The sergeant exchanged greetings with a few of them. They looked at Bramble curiously. One, a middle-aged woman selling candles, let her mouth fall open and then called excitedly to someone inside her shop.
“Father! Father! It’s the Kill Reborn! The Kill Reborn’s come to join the warlord!”
Immediately others crowded out of the shop and people stared and pointed.
“That true?” the sergeant growled. “You
that
Bramble?”
“So what?”
He smiled. “Well, I don’t think you need to worry about losing your horses, girl, ma’am, I mean. You’re our luck! Everyone knows that.” He paused. “I heard your Thorn passed on. I’m sorry.”
He sounded genuine. She nodded.
“I’m Sig.” He pulled off his glove and held out his hand.
For a moment she hesitated, not wanting to touch him, not wanting skin on skin with a warlord’s man. The feel of Leof’s hand leaped to her mind, warm, soft, strong. She reached out for Sig’s hand to banish that memory and was astonished to hear the crowd break into cheering, interpreting the simple gesture as a symbol of something bigger, as though everything she did was a sign of the gods’ will.
The fort was bigger than the one near Wooding. It covered the top of a plateau, maybe four or five hides of land, with a strong wooden palisade surrounded by a spiked ditch. As they rode through the gate Bramble saw that another wall, stone, was being built inside the wooden one. He’s preparing for more than war with the Lake People, Bramble thought. He’s making a palace like the kings of the Wind Cities.
The buildings were of stone below and wood above and rambled all over the southern side of the site, angled to the winter sun. The rest of the area was given over to stables and paddocks, with a huge gathering area in the center. That was where the sergeant led them.