“I am not the judge,” Ker said. The dragon’s eyelids flipped up and back down again, and again Ker felt sick at his stomach.
“You are more clever than you seemed at first. Remember what wisdom is?”
“Care for afterwards,” Ker recited promptly.
“Yes… and have you a care for afterwards here? What about their afterwards?”
Ker looked at the dwarves. They all looked at him with an expression of resigned defeat.
“If I were the judge,” Ker said, “I would do no more than has already happened. They have been afraid to the marrow of their bones; they have suffered enough.”
“Would you trust them again?” the dragon asked, cocking its head to peer closely at Ker out of one eye.
“I would,” Ker said. His back felt cold; he glanced around to see that the fire had died down to glowing embers.
“Why?”
Ker shrugged. “I don’t know. They feel honest to me.”
“So in their afterwards they prosper as the result of their carelessness… will this make them less careless?” The dragon had propped its chin on one vast front claw.
“I do not know,” Ker said. “You asked what I thought.”
“So.” The dragon’s head lifted a little, and the warmth of its breath touched Ker. “Hear my judgment, rockbrethren. For your carelessness in a sworn trust, you shall lose the gems in these—” A lance of flame, accurate as a pointing finger, touched the rocks and shards; Ker hardly felt warmth as it struck past him. When he turned to look, the rocks and shards had vanished. “Yet I will trust that you continue to guard the other well, and make no demands of reparation. So tell your king. I will watch more closely, but that is all. And I will also watch how you deal with this human, whom you have to thank for my inclination to mercy.”
The dwarves threw themselves on the ground; the dragon withdrew into the fastnesses of air. They looked up when it had gone, and scrambled to their feet.
“We’ve you to thank,” their leader said. His mouth twisted, then he smiled. “Well, that’s fair, I suppose. And what do you want of us, then?”
“N-nothing,” Ker said. His knees felt shaky again.
“That won’t do,” the dwarf said. “Sertig knows we’re not as rulebound as our cousins of the Law, but no one can say the brothers are mean enough to take such a service as you did us and give no gifts in return. And it’s not for the dragon’s sake, either,” he said, glaring up at the leaf canopy overhead. “I need no dragon to teach me generosity.” A bubble of light rippled through the dell, and he paled but shook his head. “No, and again no. We’re in your debt, a debt we can’t pay, but we can gift you with what we have.” He looked around at the others. “Come now, lads, let’s get busy.”
Before Ker quite realized what they were about, the dwarves had picked up the bundles he and his mother had carried from the village the day before.
“Where was it you were going, ma’am?” he asked Ker’s mother.
“I—I have family in the hills west of here,” she said. “Swallowbank…”
“Swallowbank, yes. A difficult road, ma’am, and a hard three days’ journey, if you’ll pardon me saying so. Would you consent to travel an easier one?”
“I—” she looked at Ker. “I—I suppose so. What road?”
“Ours,” the dwarf said. He turned to Ker. “We will take you on our road, smooth and straight and safe underfoot and overhead, we will carry all your burdens, and we will set you down safe and rested in sight of Swallowbank with all that you desire,” he said. “If you will accept our gift.”
“I thought—maybe—with Tam gone, and the dragonspawn—we could go back,” Ker said. “Rebuild our village—” Surely they were not all dead, all the people he had known; surely the dragon would not have killed them all.
The dwarf shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, but what the dragon deals with cannot be changed. For all they are great healers in their way, they are also great destroyers. That land will not accept humans for a span of years; the dragon would have made sure of that. You must find a new place, and a new life.”
“Then—I accept your offer with thanks.” Ker picked up the walking stick, half-expecting to be dragged a league away with his first step, but it remained a bark-covered stick.
The dwarf led them back up the way Ker had come down with firewood, to a rock fence smoothed by falling water. The rock opened suddenly, like a door, and they passed into a dark tunnel, smooth all around. At once, the walking stick burst into cold flame, lighting the tunnel in blue radiance. Ker stared at it, but it did not burn his hand, so he held it firmly and walked on.
Gravesite Revisited
The old woman held out her hand. Carver froze, crouched over the grave, the reindeer pendant still swinging slightly on its chain of carved bone.
“You know you can’t put that in with her,” the old woman said.
Carver scowled. “She liked it. She should have it.”
“You can’t. It’s not permitted.” The old woman glanced back over her shoulder, and the old man, Longwalker, nodded, emphasizing his agreement.
Carver clenched his fist on the pendant and chain, furious. “I don’t understand. She wasn’t Wolf Clan…. How could it unbalance the world to carry her own clan sign along?”
“It’s nothing to do with the hunt’s balance,” the old woman said. She reached for Carver’s hand, and pried up his fingers, then prodded the pendant and chain. “It’s this—this chain. The latepeople will see this and think. We don’t want them to think.”
“The latepeople?” Carver had lived in Molder’s family for only four years; he knew there were many secrets they had yet to share with him. By her father’s clan, her seedclan, she was Reindeer, but her mother’s clan, her bloodclan, was Ash, godtalkers. And the old woman, whose name he had never heard, being an outsider and only Molder’s chosen childfather, she was Ash. She had foreseen Molder’s death in a fall, and had withheld warning, for she was Ash, and spoke warnings only at the gods’ will, though she saw (Molder had told him once) all things that would come until the end of the world.
“The latepeople, those who will come when the times change,” the old woman said. “The latepeople find our bones, and our graves—”
“They dig up graves?” Carver was shocked. Animals dug up graves, but only because they were the Elder People, and had rights humans did not share.
“Yes, indeed, they dig up graves. And when they find what they want in a grave, they travel backwards until it is new, and rob it.”
“Backwards? In time?”
“Yes. As I see forward, which is proper for an Ash, and a gift of the gods, they see backwards, and travel backwards, by witchcraft.”
Carver shuddered. The past was past; he had been taught that the past was unbreakable, the foundation of time. Mistakes could not be unmade, so all acts must be carefully considered, but anything done rightly was as safe from error as a mistake from correction. To travel backwards, to tamper with the past, was obscene. The old woman nodded at his expression.
“They are witches,” she said. “Empty hearts, fearing their future, looking for treasures to rob in the past.” She smiled without humor. “We give them nothing to think about, nothing to rob.”
“But her spirit—” Carver’s people made better graves, he thought. Had thought before, and had not said, being a stranger among Molder’s people. It was discourteous to criticize the wife’s family. But his people laid food and tools with the dead, on a nest of flowers (in spring and summer) or fur (in winter), and a gift from each person close in relation or in feeling. He had grown up knowing that the dead lived in the shadowed lands, yet hungered for mortal food and the love of mortals. If not fed or gifted, they might come back as haunts, angry spirits who stole away children or even sprinkled death pollen over a whole encampment, so that sickness bloomed in terrible shades of red and white.