Raif set the pace north. Even when the stand or red pines was hidden behind the crest of the slope the path was clear. They had to keep heading along the same axis. If the red pines marked the true border between the Racklands and Bludd then all they had to do was maintain their bearings and eventually they'd cross the Red Ice. If what the Trenchlander said was true. It had to be true. Raif didn't have time for it not to be.
One border. Four worlds. If they went far enough north would they enter the Want? And if they did would they know it? Raif looked down at forested valley that lay below them, the spires of cedar, the knuckles of red rock, the frozen streams, the kitty hawk circling for prey. It looked too full of life to be named the Great Want.
"Clouds are coming in."
Raif saw that Addie was right. A dark crack had opened up on the edge of the horizon. A blackness in the silver of the sky.
They spent the morning crossing the valley, eating on foot and stopping only to apply new leeches. The air was raw and changing, and the wind started to show its teeth. Raif walked huddled in the Orrl cloak, slightly bent at the waist to relieve the pressure of the wound. Addie had cleaned and bandaged it in the night; he said it was shaped like an X.
Raif found his thoughts kept returning to the moment the fire had gone out. If the Unmade had extinguished it then that meant they were capable of cunning. And that was something new and dangerous. Creatures that could plan as well as fight.
By the time they reached the valley's northern slope the clouds were moving with force. Sharp gusts broke icicles and brittle branches from the pines. Addie and Raif walked against the headwind, shoulders hunched. When they came across two big trees with boughs interlaced they stopped to shelter from the weather and apply another leech. They were down to one at a time now. As Addie took the jar from his gear pouch, Raif saw how few were left. And not all of them were moving.
The cragsman had trouble getting the leech to bite and prodded Raif s back several times. When he took his hand away his fingers were red with blood. "It's hanging," he said grimly. "Gods help it to stay in place."
To change the subject, Raif told Addie about Thomas Argola's words. "Four worlds?" Addie pondered, wiping his hand on his cloak. "Clanholds. Sull." He frowned. "The Want?"
Raif shrugged. "What could be the fourth?"
Addie tugged on the sock with force, quickly losing his patience with puzzling. "How the hell would I know that, lad? I'm a sheepman not a scholar. If it's land I know it. If it's fancy worlds dreamed up by Argola then I can't see that either of us has much of a chance of figuring it out."
Raif considered this. "I think you just insulted me."
Addie harrumphed. "Well I insulted myself as well."
The day darkened quickly as the thunderheads charged the sky. Raif felt wire-drawn and full of energy. His thoughts thrived in the gray stormlight, rippled along with the trees. He saw Traggis Mole take his final breath, sucking air through his nose hole, heard Yiselle No Knife ask quite clearly Do you know how to start a stopped heart? And smelled the emptiness of the space between the stars, the stench of voided steel.
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.