A Sword from Red Ice

"Castlemilk is an old and proud clan, Bram Cormac, and I am an old and proud chief. We dance the swords, and mix our guidestone with oil and water and drink it like milk. Our best warriors fight with two swords and name themselves the Cream, and our girl children are taught one new way how to kill a man every year until they reach sixteen. We have been sworn to Dhoone for four hundred years but before that we stood alone. If you believe you have come to a lesser clan you are mistaken and you can march yourself right back to Dhoone. I will have you only on one term: and that is absolute loyalty to Castlemilk. Drouse is in the guidehouse, waiting upon my word. He expects to hear an oath and so do I."

She paused, her chest rising and falling beneath the fine silver weave of her cloak. For the first time Bram noticed the elk lore, fastened to the cinch of her braid. A thick hoop of spine. "I will leave you now," she said, her voice calm. 'You have a quarter-hour, then you will either make your way to the guidehouse or collect your belongings and depart this clan."

Bram nodded once in understanding and she left him standing by the man-dug lake. A moment passed and then something—a fish or an eel—broke the surface of the water, flashed briefly, then was gone. Bram wasn't sure but he thought he saw tee%*

Clouds heading in from the north were moving swiftly toward the sun and he could tell it wouldn't be long before they killed the sunlight. For no good reason whatsoever he drew his sword and stood on the grass and inspected it in the last of the full sun. Light on the watered steel moved upblade toward the point. He tried angling the sword in different directions but he could not get it to move the other way.

"It wont be so bad, Bram. We both know you were never really cut out for Dhoone." Robbie's parting words sounded in Bram's head.

No going back.

Abruptly, he sheathed the sword and headed out of the walled enclosure. He had made his decision.

EIGHTEEN The Birch Way

It was the fourth day amongst the birches. The mist that had formed overnight rolled through the forest in breaking waves. It was a landscape of ghosts, pale and silvery, with nothing green or blue to be seen. The trees disappeared into the clouds, their straight white trunks the same thickness from base to crown. Hundreds of thousands of birches had seeded from a single mother tree, and the dark charcoal-colored scars where limbs had broken off were the only way of distinguishing one tree from another. Minute differences in spacing and light had produced branches at differing angles and heights, and the marks they'd left behind dappled the bark like paw-prints. Lan Fallstar read these prints, and they appeared to provide him with enough information to navigate the unchanging landscape of the birch way.

Ash March tracked the Far Rider's gaze as it jumped from tree to tree, noting the birches it settled upon and attempting to discern a pattern in Lan's choices.

They were walking their horses through the mist. The sun was a diffused steel disk low in the east. The air was damply cold. Underfoot the snow was wet and uneven. Ash had learned it hid potholes and pools of standing water. She was cautious as she placed her feet. The birches had grown on low-lying saturated topsoil, not all of it frozen. Often brown water oozed from the snow as she stepped upon it. Other times her feet would sense give followed by traction followed by more give, as the soles of her boots pushed through sloppy layers of snow, sedge, water, mud and dead leaves. Today she could not see her feet and relied upon following Lan's path as closely as possible.

She had not realized it would be such a long journey through the trees. Nor had she imagined that walking through them could make her feel as if she were imprisoned. The birches were like iron bars. Fifty feet tall and stripped bare of leaves, they stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see.