Beade watched as she murdered him.
There were hard sinews and thickly walled tubing in a man's throat and Raina had to saw with the knife to sever them. Blood pumped trom the ragged hole, coating her hand. It was as warm as bathwater. Beade was losing strength. His hands and lower arms flailed, yet he could no longer lift his upper arms from the sleeping mat. His teeth were bared. Surprise and panic had left his eyes. The eyelids fluttered, preparing to close.
Rising higher, Raina applied more force. "Look at me," she whispered. "You waited too long, Scarpeman. Should have killed me the same day you murdered Anwyn. Should have watched your back. The Hail Wolf returned and you didn't even know it'
She spoke other things then, dark words that spilled out of her like poison, words that had been trapped inside her body ever since the day in the Oldwood when she had been raped by her foster son. Mace Blackhail. She spoke and sawed as blood rolled across the floor and pooled around her knees and the lamplight beyond the door flickered and waned. Mace, she named the dying man. Mace. Mace. Mace.
When his heart began seizing she reached behind her back and pulled Dagro's silver ceromonial knife from her belt. Probably she was damned forever for what happened next, for she took the knife in both hands and stabbed him through the heart. She was smiling.
Rising, she left him there: a corpse in the chiefs chamber, a chiefs knife sticking out from its chest. She felt wild and filled with power.
Released.
One more job to do and she was done. Hieronymus Buck, a tied miner, had once told her what they did to open seams in the mine. "Light fires we do. Heat up the rock face so it nearly glows. Then we pumps the water from the Bluey. Water hits the rock and it's the mother of all explosions. I've seen thirty feet shatter in a single go."
Raina Blackhail wiped the blood from her hands as she made her way through the roundhouse. She'd be lighting a fire under the Scarpestone this night.
FORTY-TWO The Dark of the Moon
"Khal Gora," Lan Fallstar said as they crossed the last stretch of causeway leading over the sunken fields of,brown and black sedge, dwarf pine, and hackled ice. "Fort Defeat. Its ruins stand here. There is good water. We will spend the night."
Ash looked ahead to where the headland rose from the saturated tundra. Charcoal gray limestone bluffs, deeply fissured by running water and pulverized by tree roots, led up to a tableland that on first glance seemed overrun by cedar and silver pine. As her gaze followed the ridgeline she spied a blank rampart of stone partially concealed by the crowns of the trees. The fort wall appeared to be slightly domed, and it was smooth, without windows, arrow slits or battlements of any kind on its southwestern face. Three towers, all broken and fallen in, rose to heights not much higher than the fort itself. The tallest was open-walled and Ash could see the square-shaped shadows of its inner chambers. Frozen blue snow glowed in the corners.
She shivered. The air was raw here in the lowlands. 'Why is it named Fort Defeat?"
They were riding in single file on a narrow path of piled stone and Lan did not look around as he replied. "In the Time of Maygi it was called Khal Hark'rial, the Fortress of the Hard Gate. A battle was fought and we were defeated at great cost. A thousand years later we remanned the fortress, believing our ancestors' previous defense to be at fault. It was a mistake. We were overrun and tens of thousands of lives were lost. The fortress is flawed. No one who holds it is safe. After the defeat He Who Leads decreed that its name should be changed so that future generations would never forget."
Ash gathered her loose hair in her fist and tucked it beneath the collar of her cloak. Winds cutting through the open fields had been making it blow in her face. She would have liked to ask Lan more questions about the fortress, but knew better than to push her luck. Ask something else and she risked him turning cold; this way they could ride in amiable silence and she wouldn't have to endure being belittled or ignored.
Stupidly she had thought that after the night Lan heart-killed the unmade creature in the woods, things would change between them, become easier. That night he had seemed almost tender when he held and entered her, and later when he ran his fine golden fingers through her hair. Yet since then he had been colder than ever. She supposed it was just his character, and decided she did not like it very much.
The attack had taken place seven days ago and they'd been traveling hard ever since. East and then south, through ancient forests overgrown with moss and ghostvines, along worn stone roads that ran alongside icy green rivers and blackwater lakes, through hills milky with pale winter grasses, and past the valley of blasted trees. That had been the only day when they had seen other people, when they had ridden along the valley's rim and looked down upon square leagues of flattened and blackened pines. The valley was a perfectly shaped bowl and the trees had fallen in a radial pattern as if blasted from a central point. Their trunks were black and greasy and some had crumbled into sections like fallen pillars. An open mine was being worked in the valley's center, and Ash saw the distant figures of men and women digging with picks and working machines. The chink and rumble of their labors was amplified by the valley's steep walls.
She could smell the stale char of the trees. "What's happening down there?" she had asked Lan.
Lan had been maintaining a brisk pace along the ridgeline and did not slow to answer her. "It is Scara'il Ixa. A Hole Made By God." He would say no more.
Ash had the sense that he wanted to be gone as quickly as possible. He did not acknowledge the faces that turned upward to look at them, or the two horsemen armed with longbows who patrolled the head of the valley. She wondered if he had been nervous. He held the reins more closely than normal and his gaze continually scanned the spaces between the trees.
"Where are we going?" she had asked him later that day as he crouched by a stream os snowmet to fill his waterskin. " The Heart Fires are to the south." She didn't know this for a fact but she stated it like one anyway. "And we are heading east."
"Tommorow we turn south," he had said.
She had decided she would leave him if thev did not head south in the morning.
That night she did not sleep in the tent and had bundled in her blankets by the fire. The sky had been diamond clear and crushed with stars. As she watched the constellations turn, the horses wandered over to check on her. The stallion held itself at a companionable distance and began nosing the snow for grass, while the gelding stood right over her and blew on her face. She'd had to push him away in the end, but it had felt good to know that both horses had offered their company.
As she settled down to sleep, she glanced over at the wolfhide tent. The entrance flap was moving back and forth. Ash watched it come to rest, and then waited to see if a stray gust of wind might sat it into motion. It did not. Had Lan been watching her? Or had he simply heard the horses stirring and put out his head to check on them? Uneasy, she had fallen asleep.
Her dreams were of the gray, unsettled place, and the armies of creatures that suffered within it. They roiled with the smoke, hissing, arching their spines, jerking back their heads and clawing at each other and themselves. To be there was a torture. And they wanted out. Something dark and infinitely evil moved along the edge of her perception. It was the calm in the rage, the master of the chaos. Mistressss, it warned. Do not come here m the flesh.