Deep Water (32 page)

Zel sighed in the darkness. “It’s a shame he don’t like us pleasuring our own selves after,” she said wistfully.

Martine laughed softly. “He won’t come tomorrow night if you do,” she warned, as her own mother had warned her.

“I know,” Zel sighed. “Dung and pissmire. By the day after tomorrow, even Cael’s going to start looking good to me!”

Bramble was shivering as though she, too, were feeling the effects of the Equinox, arousal without release. Martine reached
out and patted her hand soothingly.

“Shh,” she said. “It’s all right. Shhh.”

Bramble quieted a little, and Martine let her hand fall away. She looked up into the star-blazing sky and wondered what they
would do if they couldn’t find a flint tomorrow. There was only one solution she could see, and it terrified her.

H
ER NOSE WAS
twitching, like a rabbit’s. The cold air hit as though a door had opened into hell. The body she was in was a man’s. Don’t
think about it, she told herself, trying to ignore the sensation of testicles contracting as the cold surrounded them. She
strained to see and suddenly was blinded by whiteness: snow lit by high sun, dazzling, painful. On one side cliffs sheered
up to the bright blue sky, on the other, a high slope covered with snow threatened them. Snow thin on the ground, gray stone,
a thin, rocky trail between high boulders. Any noise here would echo off the cliffs and grow as it echoed. Bramble wanted
to shiver — fortunately, the man she was with was shivering anyway.

The man was riding a chestnut horse, last in a line of four of the stocky little horses she had seen before. Asa was in the
lead, followed by Acton, with another man behind them. That man wore bright red boots. Bramble felt herself smile at the sight
of them, as if she had glimpsed something homely and reassuring. Swef, she thought. All she could see was his back, which
was broad. Younger than Harald, but with gray hair showing beneath his cap, red to match his boots. He sat his horse well
enough, but without the ease that familiarity brought. The bridle and bit were muffled with rags, and the hooves of the horses
in front were in rag boots. Swef looked apprehensively up at the snow-covered slopes.

Death Pass, Bramble thought. They were in Death Pass. She realized she was looking through Gris’s eyes.

There was an end to the defile in sight just ahead. She had only a glimpse of the mountain falling away sharply, of green
land below, of trees far beneath and then the waters swept in and seemed to knock her sideways.

A fire. Warmth. Flickering shadows. A deep, accusing voice.

“You ask for privileges in words you learned from those of our people whom you stole to be your slaves!”

Gris raised his head to stare straight into the speaker’s eyes. A younger man than Bramble expected, only about forty, and
at last, at last, someone with dark hair! She hadn’t realized how much the eternal blondness and redness was irritating her.
The man stared back at Gris with something like hatred.

“True,” Gris said. “We have stolen. We have enslaved. We have killed. That is true. Have you never raided, Hawk?”

The man looked aside, and then brushed the question away. His hand movements were odd: larger than Bramble was used to, and
with the second finger touching the thumb. They were sitting by a proper hearth, not a fire pit, in a house which only seemed
small because she had become accustomed to the large halls of Acton’s home. The walls of the house were wattle and daub, but
the chimney was made of flat field stones, intricately pieced together without mortar.

“We have had no time for raiding for some years. We must defend ourselves instead,” the man — she must not think of him as
a Traveler — said.

“But what if that were to change?” Asa leaned forward to speak persuasively. “What if your people were returned to you? If
you no longer had to worry about raids? If you had strong friends at your back?”

Hawk ignored her as though she were not there.

“We could make you strong,” she said, trying again. She exchanged a puzzled glance with Acton and gave a little shrug.

Acton raised his eyebrows and repeated, “We could make you strong.”

“At what cost?” he countered immediately. In the pause that followed, he turned to Asa as though seeing her for the first
time.

“The women are in the scullery,” he said, and pointed to an open door on the far side of the fireplace.

For a moment, the three other men froze. Swef bit his lip. Asa’s face went blank but Bramble could almost hear the thoughts
racing through her mind: her dignity was not important enough to risk this negotiation.

“My mother is a wise counselor,” Acton began, but she hushed him.

“I will speak to the women,” she said. She rose and went in stately silence to the door. The dark-haired man smiled thinly
in triumph.

Bramble was shocked. She had always assumed that women were less esteemed than men in the Domains because of the invasion,
because Acton’s people were flawed. She had never wondered how they had been treated in the old days.

“How strong can men be who take counsel from women?” Hawk asked scornfully.

Gris smiled. “Easy enough to control weak women, cowed from birth. It takes a real man to control a woman who knows her own
mind.”

“And you do?”

“My wife has a sharp mind and a sharp tongue, but she follows my lead.”

“As you would have me do. You wish me to follow your instructions like a woman.”

Bramble lost interest in the maneuvering for position and dominance, in the promises of alliance and mutual support. What
was the point of listening, she thought, when they didn’t keep any of those promises? When they slaughtered everyone instead?
She wondered what Asa was doing and saying in the kitchen. Probably promising the women that their stolen children, siblings
and husbands would be returned to them. Bramble suspected that even in this culture, men listened to their women behind closed
doors. Unlike the sleeping halls of Acton’s people, there were lots of closed doors in houses like these.

Her attention was reclaimed when Swef sat up straight and said, “So it is agreed?”

The man put up a delaying hand. “It is agreed that I will discuss it with my advisers, and ask their counsel. If they agree,
we may try next summer — a small settlement, to the north where the forest ends. If that is successful, more may be possible.”
He spoke as though he were a chief and they were slaves, but Gris nodded in thanks.

Acton looked impatient, and annoyed by the man’s pretensions. “Hawk, who will decide if it is successful?” he asked.

Well done, lad, Bramble thought. That’s the real question. Who’s got the power?

“I will,” Hawk said, standing and looking down his nose at the three of them, even though he was shorter than they were. Swef
let out a breath that was almost a snort. Gris simply nodded.

A girl came from the scullery with a platter of cheese and bread and apricots and put it down on a small stool next to Acton.
She was pretty: black-haired and dark-eyed, honey skin and red lips, slim and very slight compared to the blond girls over
the mountains. He smiled at her, that sideways smile that all the old stories mentioned, and she blushed and smiled back.
Bramble could see why. That smile
was
attractive, the invitation to shared mischief, if you didn’t know that this man would soon butcher all your relatives — perhaps
even the girl herself.

This is dispiriting, Bramble thought, and if the water which came up then had been real she would not have had the energy
to save herself.

Still in Gris’s body — she was coming to recognize his scent, if not his mind — she surfaced to find him in a cave with Hawk
and Acton and a woman. Bramble wondered where Swef was, whether this was another visit altogether. Jumping about in time was
wearying. She longed for it to be over.

The woman was old, the oldest person Bramble had seen so far on this journey, and she wore animal skins roughly stitched together.
Her white hair was felted together like a mess of snakes and her skin was dirty. She sat on a bear skin in front of a small
fire, toying with a set of stones. The air should have been smokier here than it was.

Acton seemed to share the thought, because he looked up to the shadows above, and Gris followed his glance. The smoke wound
its way out of a vent at the top of the cave. The woman caught Acton looking and gave a toothless grin.

“Clever one, aren’t you?” she asked, casting stones casually across the skin. Without looking at them, she gathered them in.

“I don’t understand you,” Acton said slowly, still finding his way in a foreign tongue. “What do you want?”

“Sit down,” the woman said, but it wasn’t a reply. She was looking at Gris hard and leaned forward, as he sat on the other
side of the bear skin, peering into his eyes. Her breath was rank, like dog breath.

“And you, kinslayer, you’ve got a passenger. Hello, girl.”

If she’d been in her body, Bramble would have jumped at the words. The woman was clearly looking straight at her,
seeing
her in Gris’s eyes. Gris had tensed at her words, but more at the word “kinslayer” than the greeting.

“Dotta!” Hawk reproved her. “This is important.”

“You think this is not?” Dotta replied, but she leaned back and spat into her left hand. Hawk copied her and they clasped,
palm to palm. Hawk prepared himself, as though he had thought the question out carefully.

“What will be the results of allowing the strangers to settle in our territory?”

Dotta drew out the five stones — so little of this ritual has changed, Bramble thought, I wonder why? The stones were mountain
stones, gray and black and silverfish. They fell face up.

“Death. Betrayal. Chaos. Ruin. Destiny.” Dotta poked at each stone in turn like a baker testing if dough has risen enough,
then gathered them in. She didn’t look at the men.

“Hah!” Hawk broke his hand free and glared at Gris. “So.”

“Wait!” Acton said. “I have a question.”

Dotta didn’t speak; she simply spat in her hand again and held it out to Acton. Reluctantly, he spat in his own palm and clasped
hers. They don’t have stonecasting, Bramble realized. I never thought before, but no one consulted the casters about the Ice
King. The stonecasting is part of the Domains, not the Ice King’s land… she wasn’t sure what that meant, but it seemed
important, somehow.

Acton’s gold hair shone in the firelight. He bowed his head for a moment as though praying, then asked carefully, in a halting
accent, “What will be the results of
not
allowing us to settle in your territory?”

Dotta laughed and cast the stones.

“Death. Betrayal. Chaos. Ruin. Destiny,” she chanted as they fell. They stared at her in astonishment, but she was right.
The same stones, in the same order. Dotta hawked and spat in the fire and laughed at their expressions. “Did you think the
Destiny stone meant nothing?”

“If we don’t let them come . . .”

“They will come anyway,” she said. “If not these men, then others. I have advice for you, Hawk, which you will not take. Run!
Take your women and your children and your animals and your chattels and run a long, long way from here. The world is wide,
but the Ice King’s country is small and getting smaller. Run, little one! Or you will not see two more summers.”

Hawk sat very still. “Is that prophecy?”

“It’s common sense, which is worth more!” she retorted, reminding Bramble of Martine in Oakmere.

He relaxed a little. “Then there is still room to prevent the worst.” He turned to Gris. “If we let your people in, you can
support us against the others. The stones say Death and Ruin, but not
whose
death. Let us make it the deaths of others!”

Dotta made a disgusted noise and rose with audibly creaking bones.

“You,” she said to Gris. “Come.”

She picked up a piece of bone with a plug on one end. It hung by a cord from her fingers. With the hem of her skirt guarding
her other hand, she plucked an ember from the fire and dropped it in the bone, and put in tinder which she had had lying ready.
Then she took a step back and began to swing the bone around and around her head, like a slingshot. Gris, Acton and Hawk scrambled
up and out of the way. Dotta chuckled.

“The old ways still work,” she said. The tinder burst into flame like a torch. “My sisters are dead,” she added, “but I still
keep the flame. My sister’s daughters have taken it now, far away, where it will be safe. For a time, a long time.”

The men were silent.

“Come,” she said again to Gris, swinging the bone lightly from side to side, so that the tinder burnt just enough to give
off light.

He followed her deeper into the cave, to a passageway. She turned and put her hand on his sleeve, looking into his eyes intently.
Her smell was overwhelming, so close.

“Girl,” she said. “Remember this. You will have need of it later.”

Bramble shivered and wondered if it were her own body or Gris’s that trembled. There was no doubt that Dotta was seeing her,
talking to her as though Gris weren’t there.

She led him through a labyrinth of passageways, telling Bramble each turning. “Three down and then left. Two down and right.
Four down, past this outcrop and sharp right. Down on your knees, now, for a while . . .”

The path went on for some time, Bramble trying frantically to memorize all the turnings and twistings. At last they came to
a larger space and Dotta stopped. She whirled the bone on its cord in a wide circle above her head, illuminating the walls
and ceiling of a large cave. There, floating on the walls above them, vivid with ochre — red and brown and charcoal black — were
paintings. Animals. Aurochs, the wild cows that still could be found in these mountains, even in Bramble’s day. Hares, their
long ears absurdly pricked. Elk raising noble antlers to the sky. Deer running and leaping in a herd. Running from a pack
of men with spears. Tiny black figures, but unmistakable. Other figures, too, smaller, rounder, darker altogether. Bramble
had no idea what they were.