Frowning, Bram watched as moonlight flowed along the whorls and ripples in the blade. Robbie had given him the lesser of the two swords. The one he'd kept for himself was known as a horsestopper. A full-size battle sword with a two-handed grip that had the length and heft necessary to impale an armored warhorse, it was forged from the highest grade of watered steel, known as mirror blue. A blade made of mirror blue was paler and more glassy than one forged from traditional watered steel. Light shone through its point.
No light shone through the point of Bram's blade, but that didn't bother him. Truth was he preferred the smaller, lighter footsword with its simple cruciform handguard and the hare head surmounted on its pommel. His father had commissioned the ice-hare pommel as a tribute to his wife upon her death. Tilda Cormac had been the best wire-trapper in Dhoone, and when her husband was away for the winter on long patrols she had kept her family fed.
It was Robbie who had benefited the most. Tilda had always given her stepson the choicest cuts of meat: the fatty loin from the rabbit's hack, the coon liver, the porcupine's heart. Robbie had been born to her husbands first wife yet she had reared him as her own, Bram often wondered what she had received in return. Robbie had treated her like a servant, never showing her the respect due to a stepmother, "Elena Dhoone is my mother. Not you," he would scream when she would-n't let him have his way. "You're just a rabbit-trapper from Gnash."
Even though he didn't much feel like it, Bram unhooked the weapon care pouch from his belt and began working yellow tung oil into the sword. Tilda's sword. Robbie had been set to hand it over to the Milk chief in payment for the Castlemen, and Bram wondered how his brother had managed to get it back. His memories of what happened that night in the Brume Hall after Robbie sold him to Wrayan Castlemilk were not clear. Perhaps Robbie had renegotiated the gift of swords, but Bram doubled it A dozen watered-steel swords had been promised. A dozen had been delivered. Bram had a shadowy memory of Robbie kneeling quietly by the sword pile and sliding out Tilda's sword. If the memory was true he would have had to replace it with another blade. Why he had gone to such trouble was hard to know.
Bram decided not to think about it. Nerve endings in his fingers had begun to fire randomly as his hand came back to life, and he flexed the muscles to keep blood pumping.
He found himself imaging Guy and Jordie arriving at the Stonefly. Tired and breathless, they'd hasten through the garrison eager to speak with the head hatchetman, Tiny Pitt. Search parties would be dispatched. Messengers would be sent north to Dhoone: the Dog Lord was in the Dhoonewilds, heading east. The knowledge that Guy and Jordie would soon send a company of hatchetmen east when the Dog Lord was heading north should have made Bram feel something as a Dhoonesman. Yet it didn't. Instead he felt a small stirring of something else. It was good to have knowledge that no one else hut you possessed.
"Castlemilk." Bram spoke the word out loud, testing.
His allegiances were shifting and he no longer knew which clan he owed loyalty to anymore.
FIVE The Racklands
A night heron shrieked in the distance as Ash March crouched by the shore and drank. Moonlight had trans-formed the Flow into a river of mercury, silver-black and shiny as metal. Hopefully not dangerous to drink. Ash tasted the river as she swallowed; oily and strange, not quite water anymore.
Standing, she wrapped her lynx-fur coat around her chest and hiv-ered, though she wasn't really cold. It was an hour after sunset and the sky glowed dimly in the west. In the east a half-moon hung low between sentinel cedars. The moon was closer here, she'd noticed. Stars too. The night itself was blacker, richer, as if darkness had been distilled to its highest proof. Ash could feel it settling against her skin and siphoning through the lenses in her eyes. The land she stood in was ruled by the Sulclass="underline" night and day had irrevocably changed.
A breeze set the cedar boughs swaying as she hiked up the shore, the sharp, spicy scent of their needles was released in a sudden burst like a seedpod ejecting it spores. The smell reminded Ash of Mask Fortress, of closed boxes, locked chests. Secrets. She had never seen such massive trees. Their boughs swept wide in vast shaggy circles that claimed the space of a dozen lesser trees. None of their needles were green. Silver and blue and a shade of dusky purple she had no name for, they had abandoned the colors of normal growing things.
Switching her path to avoid the tee-dried remains of something that might have been a fox. Ash returned to her makeshift camp. She was muscle-tired hut restless, and she did not want to sleep.. Seven days had passed sinece the stand at Floating Bridge and not an hour, awake or sleeping, had gone by where she had not relived the events of that night in her mind. In a way the nightmares were easier. There was something to be said for watching everything unfold in painstaking detail in her dreams. At least she was asleep At least her dream self wasn't constantly asking: What could I have done to save Ark's life?
Ash inhaled deeplv, found herself glancing back at the fox. Ark| Veinsplitter, Son of the Sull and Chosen Far Rider, was dead. Brought down by unmade pack of wolves, torn limb from limb by creatures who no longer had red blood pumping through their hearts or warm flesh coddling their bones. Daughter, he had called her. She would never hear him say that word again.
Deep within the overhang of her coat sleeve. Ash's hands made fists. I should never have stepped onto the bridge.
The memory of that night was as clear and sharp as a splinter of glass. Their party of three—Ark, Mai Naysayer and she herself—had been pursued by creatures from the Blind. From the moment she had become Sull in the mountain cavern they had chased her, and two hours south of Hells Town they finally brought her to ground. It might have been possible to outrun them if it hadn't been for the river. The wolves had cornered them on the north bank of the Flow, where the road met the Moating Bridge. Horses could not be ridden at a gallop across the four-foot-wide boards, so Ark and Mai had turned to make a stand. Her mistake had been to ride onto the bridge ahead of them. She could see it alclass="underline" the wolves closing in, the Naysaycr drawing his six-foot longsword and stepping forward; and Ark … Ark pulling the linchpin from the Floating Bridge, and telling her how she had made him proud as the bridge began to float away. She and her horse had sailed east on powerful river currents, buoyed by pontoons that bounced like fishing floats in the water, unable to do anything but watch as Ark and the Naysayer battled the Unmade.
Ark had fallen. Two she-wolves had brought him down as the pack leader sprang for his throat. The battle had lasted mere seconds after that. The Naysayer finished it. Ash had grown up in Mask Fortress, and for ten years her sole view was of the hrothers-in-the-watch weapons courts, which lay below her bedroom window. Not once in all that time had she seen a man wield a sword like the Naysayer. He ended the battle in just four sword strokes, and then dropped to his knees by his hass. Ash had no longer been able to see clearly by then-the cur-rent had carried the bridge close to the river's south bank — but she had understood the motions performed by the distant shape that was Mal Naysayer.