A Sword from Red Ice

Raif tilted his head up and cracked the egg into his mouth. It was creamy and thick, newly laid. When he was done he threw the shell into the abyss. "How deep is it, Addie?" he asked.

The Cragsman had taken one of the eggs himself, and was now packing the remaining three in his chest pouch, carefully spacing them between lumps of cheese. "I canna say, lad. In its own way it's a mystery as big as the Great Want." He glanced at Raif. "At least a few of the souls who enter the Want come back." "No man's ever tried to climb down and see?" Addie snorted. "Show me a rope long enough to lower a man into hell. You fall. And keep falling. Simple as that."

Raif thought of Traggis Mole's body and shivered. Today at noon the Maimed Men would lower it into the Rift. Stillborn would be the one who touched the fane to the rope. The Robber Chiefs body would rock, suspended above the abyss, until the flames burned through the rope fibers and it plummeted into the depths.

I will not slit your throat, Raif had told him. Instead he had put a blade through his heart.

Raif glanced down at his sealskin scabbard, where he now kept Traggis Moles two-footlongknife. Stillborn had attempted to lend him another sword—a pretty hand-and-a-halfer with a double guard—but Raif had declined. The Forsworn blade had failed on him, and now he would not trust another sword.

Until…

Raif set the thought aside. The Mole's knife was wickedly double-edged and made from dense Vorish steel. It would do.

"Snow's coming again," Addie declared, looking east. "I can smell it." He fell silent, and Raif imagined him worrying about the lambs that would be born in the snowfall. "Best get off," he said after a while.

"Addie." Raif stopped the cragsman from returning to the trail.

Nodding toward the Rift, he asked, "How long before it closes?"

The cragsman looked at him with some surprise showing in his gray eyes. "It never closes, not wholly. North of Bludd it narrows so that men can cross it, but it's always there, a black crack running through the forests between here and the Night Sea."

Raif reached for his lore. Holding the hard piece of raven in his fist He continued east with Addie Gunn.

THIRTY-TWO A Lock of Hair

"Cut me a lock of your hair," Lan Fallstar said to her. " I would keep it. For luck."

Ash knelt by the lake, cupped its cold and green water in her palms, and splashed it against her face. The shock made her shiver and she scrubbed her cheeks, nose and forehead to warm them up. Briefly, she considered stripping off her clothes and tum-bling into the water. She recalled that every winter in Mask Fortress a handful of aging grangelords would break through the ice in the Fountain of Bastard Lords and frolic—there was no other word for it-in the freezing water. She and Katia had watched them one year, giggling uncontrollably at their flabby, yet somehow slack, naked bodies. Katia had called them "insane old coots" and Ash had agreed, thinking it a fine assessment. Now she thought she understood the impulse. There was a kind of wild freedom to be had in being naked in defiance of winter. And it would certainly get some kind of reaction from the Far Rider.

"Your hair," he said again to her, his voice light but insistent. "If you will permit, I will cut it for you."

Ash turned to face him. The bodies of her dress and the hair around her face were damp and cleaved to her skin.The snow was deep here and her booted feet were sunk into wells. It wasn't snowing yet, but the air had that tingle to it and the sun had been missing for hours. They stood within a woodland of giant white spruce feather with club-moss, and cold cedars with corklike trunks. Swordfers and licorice ferns poked through the snow, brown and wiry after the long winter.

Moss and silvery lichen grew on the rocks around the lake and on the north and west faces of the trees. The lake itself was small and darkly green. Much of its water was open, and Ash wondered if it was stirred by underground springs.