A Sword from Red Ice

Bram had only ever seen one guidestone before and that was Dhoone's. The Dhoonestone was less than forty years old and its edges were quarry-sharp. Vaylo Bludd had stolen the old stone, and Sumner Dhoone, the Dhoone chief, had moved swiftly to replace it. Bram had not known what an old stone looked like, the scars, the cavities, the oil and mineral stains, the fissures, and cutting faces, and molds. The Milkstone was an ugly chunk of skarn mottled with iron pyrites and flawed with chalk. It was not level and its west face was braced with a scaffold made from bloodwood logs. Bram had stood and looked at it, astonished that a stone could look so … used.

"Approach it," Ogmore had said. "You've earned that right"

By speaking the oath? Bram wondered. He had stepped toward it, immediately feeling the coolness it cast on the surrounding air. Up close he could see the rasp marks and drill holes and he had the sense that this was a living, working stone. The Dhoonestone lay like a fossil in the guidehouse; ill regarded and barely viewed. It was the shame of it, he believed. No Dhoonesman could look upon it without knowing they'd been bested by a seventeen-year-old boy from Bludd. The Milkstone was different, proud and aging, no longer steady on its feet but still useful, still aware.

Bram had been unsure whether or not to touch it This is my guide-stone, he told himself, forcing his hand up. When his fingers were a pin's length from the stone he felt a force, like a magnet attracting metal, pull them in. Sucking in his breath he made a small, astonished sound, and watched as his hand homed to the stone.

It showed him things, flooding them into his thoughts in waves that hit in quick succession. A river fork. A man in a bearskin hat. Wrayan Castlemilk bouncing his swearstone in her hand. Robbie smiling and saying, Do it Bram saw a dense forest of trees and something rippling through them. Waterf? he questioned uneasily, before the stone snatched the vision away. After that he could not keep up with the flood of images, they crashed against him and fled. Parchment unrolling. A room cased in lead. A second river forking …

His hand snapped back, jolted and released, and his arm whiplashed with the shock. Exhaling in a great push he realized he had been holding his breath. For a minute he just stood there, breathing and staring at the palm of his hand, as the jolt the guidestone had given him dissipated through muscle and bone.

Drouse Ogmore's voice had broken through his daze. "You will spend half of each day here, working for me. Tomorrow I will expect you at noon."

The guide must have seen some of what had happened, Bram realized later, for he was standing all the while by the door, yet he had never mentioned it, and never again urged Bram to touch the stone. Deciding he'd better get started, Bram put his good foot to the shovel and started digging out snow. He'd been helping at the guide— house for seven days now and it was not the sort of work he would have imagined. He had thought he would learn secrets and history. Surely guides must know the clan histories? Legend had it that when the clanholds won their territory from the Sull the guides drove giant war-carts into battle. Some said that the guidestones themselves were loaded onto those cartbeds. Bram got excited just thinking about it. Such a sight would have been wondrous to see. Why didn't Ogmore talk about that?

The Milk guide just broke rock. He spent most of his days up the stepladder chiseling rock from the stone's northern face, or at his work bench breaking, grinding and sorting the fragments. Sometimes he would use the bow drill, bracing it against his chest with a wooden tile, as he yanked it back and forth. At the rear of the roundhouse there was a stone mill, the kind that could be driven by an ox, but Bram had yet to see Ogmore use it. When Bram asked him about it, the guide had favored him with one of his withering stares. "At Castlemilk we do not waste the gods' breath unless we must."

Considering this statement later, Bram had decided Ogmore was referring to the dust that would get blown away in the wind if the guidestone fragments were ground outside. Certainly Ogmore was obsessed with collecting every last mote that dropped on the guide-house floor. Bram was allowed to sweep only when all doors and windows were closed, and when Ogmore was drilling through one of the hallowed planes of the stone, Bram had to be sure to set down a sheet to capture the sacred powder.