Soon, something promised within him.
Soon.
"Well would you look here." Addie's voice seemed to come from a great distance, and Raif had to force himself from the dreamworld to understand it.
The cragsman had stopped. They had reached the lip of the valley and a landscape of crags, rocky hills, and swaths of evergreen forest lay before them.
But Addie Gunn wasn't looking ahead. He was looking at a shrubby dried-up plant by his feet. "Trapper's tea, I swear it." His voice was filled with quiet awe. He plucked off a leaf, chewed on it, and then nodded with satisfaction. Squatting he pinched the stem of the plant close to the base and plucked the entire thing, roots and all, from the snow. "I'm a happy man" he said as if he meant it.
Raif murmured something. As Addie was chewing he had been looking east. Far in the east a break in the stormheads allowed sunlight to pour down onto a circle of heavily wooded hills.
Mish'al Nij.
A place of no cloud.
It had been a mistake to imagine the border between Bludd and Sull would run straight south to west.
Addie tucked the shrub inside his game pouch, and applied the last of the moving leeches to Raif s back. As he led the way due east, the first bolt of lightning split the air.
FORTY-FOUR Chosen by the Stone Gods
It was a Bludd sunset, firing the entire breadth of the sky from north to south, the cloud banks glowing like rubies, the sun shimmering like a bronze disk. Vaylo wasn't given much to fancy, but he was sure he could feel the sun's brilliance on his face. You couldn't call it warmth, as it was cold enough to freeze the spit on your teeth if you smiled, yet he had the sensation that he could feel individual waves of light bouncing off his skin.
Vaylo frowned at Hammie across the ramparts of the hillfort, suspicious that this bout of poetieism might be his fault. The Faa man had just said the sunset reminded him of Burning River.
That legend was sacred to Bludd; it struck something close to its heart. Touched fear and pride, gave children images to bring to their nightmares, and grown clansmen a sense of what it meant to belong to Bludd. Ockish Bull had been the one who first told him the tale in full. Vaylo must have been about nine; Ockish about twenty-one. Ockish had led a two-day hunt into the Bluddwilds north of the roundhouse and they'd bivouacked in a chest-high snowdrift. Ockish was the eldest so he had them doing all the grunt work. Vaylo remembered one of his half-brothers had come along. Arno. It had been a good two days. There'd been the wonder of digging a shelter from the snow, followed by the second wonder of it not melting when they lit a fire. Deer had been caught, gods bless their overstruck, overkilled souls—no one except Ockish had exercised any restraint. Even Arno hadn't been too bad, and there'd been a point when they'd mounted a water-bladder fight when he and Arno had been working together as a team, laughing, soaking and perfectly synchronizing the filling and the throwing of the missiles. For that one fine hour it had been «us» against "them."
Both of his half-brothers were easier to get along with when they weren't together, Vaylo had realized later.
That second night Ockish had ordered the construction of a parley fire. No one but him knew what this was meant, yet seven boys all under the age of fifteen had moved sharp to his orders, building a six-feet-wide hollow sphere of logs. "Its for light, not warmth," he had told them once it was done. 'That way we'll be sure to see each other's faces when we talk."
Vaylo and Arno had agreed that it was a fine thing. Ockish had lit the primed sphere with ceremonial flourish, and then handed Vaylo a flask to pass around the circle. "One swig per man." Whatever it was it had tasted like wood varnish and made everything Vaylo looked at that night seem sharp in the middle and blurred around the edges.
In his own good time, Ockish Bull had then told them about the legend of Burning River. "It was the time of the great Vor lord, Wardwir Crane, a thousand years deep in the past. Wardwir was a fearsome general and rode to battle wearing the black and winged cranehelm and wielding the sword named Beheader. His enemies shivered to see it. He wanted land and fancied HalfBludd and he took it on the Night of Wralls. It is told that Wardwir beheaded one hundred and thirty-one Halfmen in battle before he ordered his war scribes to cease the count. Wardwir judged that if a higher number was recorded his enemies might disbelieve the tale. And cease to fear him." A pause had followed where Ockish Bull's gaze had traveled around the parley fire, waiting for everyone present to register their agreement. Vaylo had nodded vigorously. A hundred and thirty-one was a good number.
Satisfied, Ockish had continued. Even at that young age he'd had a way with spinning tales, "The new Bludd chief Mannangler Bludd had no choice but to ride his armies south to meet Wardwir. When a Bluddsworn clan is invaded, he told his men, so is Bludd. Wardwir assembled his host on a field south of the Wolf and waited for Mannangler to make the crossing. Mannangler had been camped south of Broddic and arrived with many rafts and boats. The crossing was made in the dead of night. Five hundred Bluddsmen were on the river when it ignited. Wardwir had been waiting for him and had ordered naptha floated on the water. When he gave the signal his crossbowmen loosed a thousand arrows primed with bone phosphor. The fire of hell erupted. Flames as tall as towers lit up the night as if it were day. Bluddsmen burned on the river. When they threw themselves in the water to douse the flames they still burned. Some made it to the other side and cooked within their armor as they fought. Mannangler himself boiled so intensely in his full plate he exploded. The Bluddsmen who were still awaiting crossing heard the terrible cries of the clansmen and many took to the water, knowing they too would be burned but unable to stand by and watch their brothers die. Hundreds of Bluddsmen lost their lives that night, their weapons and armor melted to their skin, their bodies crisped to husks."
Even now, forty-five years later, Vaylo could remember the silence that had followed Ockish's tale. It had weight and meaning. Many took to the water, those were the words Vaylo had cherished the most. That was what it meant to be Bludd. Or so he had thought back then.
Now he wondered about other things in the tale. How could Wardwir have taken HalfBludd so easily? Both the Wolf and the Lonewater guarded its clanhold, and the HalfBludd roundhouse was not known for nothing as "the Siegebreaker." And what was the Night of Wralls anyway? At first Vaylo had assumed Ockish meant to say 'Walls" but he had heard variations on the tale many times since then and although several details changed from telling to telling that word remained the same. Wralls.
Vaylo shivered. "Hammie," he said, "why did you have to go and get me thinking about Burning River?"
Hammie knew when an apology was called for even when he wasn't exactly sure about the nature of his trespass. "Sorry, Chief." Vaylo wagged his head. "You should be. Keep watch." "Aye." Hammie Faa stood to attention. He was dressed in his new maroon cloak, and Vaylo could see that at some point in the past few days it had been tailored to fit him more precisely. Nan Culldayis had been busy with a needle. That woman had a giant soft spot for anyone whose named ended in Faa.
Thinking about Nan made him want to see her, and he took the short walk along the western rampart that led to the stairs. The sunset was fading to purples and dried-blood reds and black. Thicker, more serious clouds were heading in from the northeast. Old compacted snow that had been around for several weeks felt like stone underfoot. Part of the rampart wall had collapsed decades earlier leaving an exposed gap where a man could simply walk off into thin air. Vaylo considered why he had been here for nearly thirty days and not given the order to have it timbered. Nan was busy fixing things. Why wasn't he?