A Sword from Red Ice

Bram eased on his boot as he watched the swordmaster cross over to Beesweese, exchange a few words on his technique, and then head off to the house. He was tired and beaten up and he knew he would get a big braise on his neck where Enoch Odkin had sneaked him. It would go with the others he'd gotten over the past days. And then it would simply go.

Hauling himself up from the snow, he realized his pant seat was soaked through. This, together with his half-numb foot, didn't make for a pleasant walk back. The sun was behind clouds and the air hovered just above freezing. The kitchen gardens, walled garden, stable court, playground and cattle standing were lumpy with new snow. Two grooms were trying to force the stable doors open through thick drifts. A big white dog was barking at them.

A Castleman for a year. Bram reached into his tunic and slipped his new, alien guidestone from its hidden pouch. The gray liquid was suspended in water, and held in a stoppered vial made of cloudy gills. At one time Bram had believed that only the head warrior wore his Milkstone in this manner, but now he knew that all Castlemen and women wore theirs in much the same way. The difference was that Harald Mawl was allowed the privilege of display. All others, including the Milk chief herself, must show discretion when wearing their portion of powdered guidestone. It was a small thing, but Wrayan Castlemilk had been right when she said such small things made a clan.

Bram had seen her little since that day by the gravepool. She had attended the swearing of his First Oath, causing no small ripple of surprise when she stepped forward to accept Bram's swearstone and act as second to his oath. Bram had at first been relieved. Every yearman worried about that moment—who, if anyone, would step forward and back him? No one wanted to stand before his clan, alone and in silence, unclaimed. Yet afterward Bram had thought about it and wondered if he really wanted a chief holding the stone that was under his tongue as he spoke the Castlemilk oath.

"I will keep the Castlewawk between the Milk and the Flow and stand ready to fight for one year." It was a simple oath, unlike Dhoone's, and it did not claim that extra day.

The ceremony had taken place outside the guidehouse, in view of the Milk River, with the sun setting between ships of crimson cloud. It was the first oath Bram Cormac, brother to the Dhoone king, had spoken. He was a clansman: it would not be his last.

His days had been busy since then, filled with names and customs in need of learning, and the three separate and distinct pursuits that filled his day. Pol Burmish, the warrior who had greeted Bram at the door on that first night, had taken him to meet the swordmaster the morning after First Oath, and his training had begun in earnest. Swordfighting was taken more seriously here than at Dhoone and the level of swordcraft was higher. Bram had thought himself proficient with the longsword. He was wrong. At Dhoone he had been judged too small to train for the hammer and ax, and had taken up the sword instead. He was Mabb Cormac's son and people said he had some of his father's skill. It was a confusing time, Mabb promised to train him, then died. Jackdaw Thundy, the old swordmaster, had a stroke and retired, and was replaced by Ewall Meal, who had been Mabb Cormac's old rival. Ewall had liked the son little better than the father, and the training sessions had not gone well. "You're too small, boy. Step aside and let the next man have a go." Bram had stopped attending the sessions. After that he trained alone. Sometimes Mabb's old comrade-in-swords, Walter Hoole, would spend an hour or two with him in the evenings, putting him through his forms as he retold old stories about the glory days of Mabb and Walter. Often he was drunk. Bram had no way to gauge his progress, and had no longer been sure that he wanted to continue training. And then the Dog Lord invaded Dhoone.

Bram let himself in to the creamy maze of the Milkhouse. He had worked out the orientation of most of its corridors and doors and no longer had to figure direction by sunlight. Which was good. It meant he could get around on overcast days, and at night. But he had noticed things, absences where there should be chambers, or rather a lack of access to those chambers. He saw the ground floor of the roundhouse clearly in his mind's eye and knew there were spaces he had yet to enter.

Those spaces played on his mind. Rumor had it that histories were kept there; secrets about the clanholds and the Sull that had been hidden for hundreds of years. Bram had worked out the location of one of the secret chambers—it was located behind the west stairwell and adjacent to the women's solar—but a sense of honor kept him from searching for the entrance. Still, he would dearly have liked to see what lay inside it. And sometimes he thought that honor was a sham.