Waving a hand in farewell to Hammie, Vaylo took the stairs. Someone had thought to salt here and the steps were less treacherous than the rampart. The wind was beginning to pick up and he could hear it warping the sheet copper on the roof.
The blond swordsman Big Borro was heading up as Vaylo was heading down. "Snow?" Vaylo asked as Borro backed against the stairwell to make room for his chief to pass.
Borro had an apple pinned between his teeth and it made a sucking noise as he dislodged it. "Aye. Storm's brewing to the east."
Over Bludd. The Dog Lord nodded. He noticed Borro had a basic shortbow clipped to a brain hook on his shoulder belt "Taking the watch from Hammie?"
"Joining him. Drybone says on the nights when the clouds cover the moon we need to mount a double guard."
It was the first Vaylo had ever heard of such an order. But he did not let Barro know it. "Don't stand still. You might freeze."
"I know it," Big Borro said, nodding toward the cloak, face mask, and overmitts he had rolled in a loose pile and tucked under his left arm. "Got some spare for Hammie. Some of… Der's old stuff."
Vaylo met Marcus Borro's dark blue eyes. Der was Derek Blunt. And Derek Blunt was dead, attacked by only the gods knew what. If the Dog Lord remembered rightly Big Borro and Derek had married sisters. Pretty dark-haired girls who were waiting back at the Bluddhouse. "Derek was a fine warrior. One of the best men I ever saw wield a sword from the saddle."
Muscles in Borro's large fleshy face tightened. He was a big man, wide as well as tall, with some hard fat at his gut and the beginnings of a third chin. "Makes it harder to figure how he could have been taken while mounted."
Few replies possible to that and Vaylo did not attempt any. The two parted in silence, exchanging blunt and knowing nods.
Vaylo found himself little warmed when he entered the hillfort. Fires were burning somewhere, but not here in the west ward, in the hall above the temporary stables. There was a fireplace—a vast black cavity the size of a beer cellar topped with a stone mantle carved with thistles and fisher heads—feat the cook irons had gone, and an omi-| nous split in the flue wall, running from the mantel all the way to the roof, perhaps provided the reason why. At least the cold had killed off some of the molds. The green ones, if Vaylo wasn't mistaken. The black ones could probably live on the moon.
Even without the warmth of the fire some men still barracked here, and untidy rows of makeshift stretcher-beds, rush mats, burlap sacking and weapons gear lined three of the five walls. A few men were sleeping. Some were engaged in a tense game of knucklebones. Little Aaron was sitting beside Mogo Salt, watching with keen interest as Mogo rubbed yellow tung oil into Cawdo's peel-bladed Morning Star hammerhead. Aaron looked up as his grandfather passed, but the lure of such an exotic piece of weaponry was too great and he bared his bottom teeth in a hopeful grimace that meant something like, Sorry, Granda, don't be mad, but this is better than spending time with you.
Vaylo glared at him. Keep the boy on his toes.
It had been sobering to see how quickly his grandson had been won over by Gangaric. The boy's uncle had stayed at the hillfort for only three days, but by the second day Aaron was following Gangaric around like a puppy. "What's it like at HalfBludd? Do they eat slugs? Is Quarro Bludd chief now? Which hammer did Da wield at the Crab Gate? If we hold Withy why cant Granda be king? Where are you going? Can I come?" The questions had been relentless, and in fairness to Gangaric he had dealt with them with patience and some tact. He'd had twin boys himself, Ferrin and Yago, and he knew something about how to deal with bairns. He also knew, Vaylo was sure, what an impression he was making upon the boy. Aaron was seven, and easily swayed. Gangaric had wooed him with tales of the Bluddhouse, of Pengo's brilliance on Ganmiddich Field, of the importance of wielding a hammer, not a sword.
"Why don't you have a hammer, Granda?" the boy had actually asked yesterday.
"Because I lost it in a Dhoonesman's chest," he had replied, surprised by how sharply the question touched him. "And I never it got it back." And it happened because your father, the supposed hero of Canmiddich Pengo Bludd, deserted the Dhoonehouse leaving behind a crew of forty men. Forty. And you, my grandson, are one of the handful of people inside the house that night who escaped alive. He had come so close to saying, those words that if Aaron had been older he could have read them on his granda's face. As it was the boy had left him, his shoulders drooping, his skinny arms hugging his skinny chest. Gangaric and his crew were well gone now. They had ridden south to Withy eight days back, but damage had been done. Little Aaron's head was filled with tales of his father's and his uncles' bravery, and he had begun asking Nan when they were going back. Even Nan wasn't sure where he meant by this. It could be Dhoone, Ganmiddich or Bludd. Certainly in the past year Aaron had seen more of Dhoone than any other clanhold. He'd been barely six when they left Bludd, and could hardly be expected to remember it.
Vaylo exited the west hall, plucked a rushlight from a wall sconce, and took the stair up to the highest floor in the hillfort. Nan had made herself a solar there, and it was the time of night when she'd be done with her kitchen chores, and hopefully would have left the cleanup to the men. With Nan you could never be sure. She might stay and talk with the young ones. She had a way with them, a calmness that settled them and made them want to do things for her. Just this morning she'd had them stuffing mattresses with dried sedge and straw. Vaylo had caught mem all in the stables, laughing as they'd stuffed one particular mattress with scratchy burrs. "For Hammie," young Midge Pool had declared, beaming. "We're taking bets on how long it'll take him to notice."
Poor Hammie, Vaylo had thought, waving them on. It was good to see them doing something lighthearted, good to know also that his own lady, Nan Culldayis, had set them on the path toward it.
One of these days he was going to have to marry her. He was no fool. He knew that of the two of them she was the one with all the admirers. And the teeth.
The upper level of the hillfort was an oddly disjointed place, filled with tiny slant-ceilinged rooms that led from one another like jammed-in boxes. Corridors as such ceased to exist. To get to a room you had to walk through a room. The only spaces that were remotely private where those that abutted exterior walls — and most of them were running with damp. Vaylo sincerely hoped that the man who had designed this place had been forced to live in it. Between the deeply flawed roof and this dungeon-like maze it was about the most ill-planned, ill-formed lump of stone he'd ever had the misfortune to stay in. Made the Bluddhouse look like a palace. Made it look very good indeed.
The Dog Lord made his way across the floor, walking from room to room. Most of them were empty, but if you weren't careful you might surprise some poor sod on a chamber pot, or give someone who'd just fallen asleep the fright of his life. Vaylo made a lot of noise.
Trouble with Gangaric's visit was that it hadn't just unsettled the boy. It had unsettled him as well. Bludd was being run into the ground, its defenses neglected. Gangaric had said that Quarro had grown lazy and distracted—claims Vaylo found easy to believe. Out of the seven of them Quarro had always been the one with the greatest sense of entitlement. First born, first sworn, first to get his own roundhouse—none of it through any effort of his own. The only reason why he'd ended up with the Bluddhouse was because his fool of a father had decided to head west and conquer Dhoone. Quarro had never had to fight or struggle for anything in his entire life. And what was beginning to make less and less sense was why he, Vaylo Bludd, was stuck in this godforsaken mold heap in the middle of nowhere while Quarro was sleeping with whores and digging bear pits at Bludd.