A Sword from Red Ice

Food was growing scarce and the low grade hunting afforded by being constantly afoot rendered little beyond ptarmigan and molting hares. Snow had driven anything larger into hiding. Given time Addie could prepare a decent bird, but he didn't have any love for plucking and usually assigned feather duty to Raif. Raif seemed to recall that Tern had known a couple of ingenious ways to pluck birds, but couldn't for the life of him remember any of them—one might have had something to do with mud. Oddly enough it was the lack of tea that was felt the most. The ritual of boiling water and steeping the herbs was something they both missed. Addie still insisted on boiling and serving water, and had collected various twigs and leaves along the journey in attempt to conjure up new kinds of tea. So far saxifrage, goatsbeard, hagberry and dead nettle had delivered various watery, yellowy weed-tasting teas. Addie was still hopeful. Legend had it that a plant existed called trapper's tea that bloomed with white flowers in high summer and could be found growing amidst rocks. The drink produced from crushing and then steeping its leaves was said to be so delicious that Addie could only talk about in a whisper. "Day we find it there'll be some fine drinking," he'd murmured more than once.

Addie had grown chilblains on his nose and hands and was having a spot of bother with his feet. Every night he would dry livermoss on a stick above the fire and every morning he would stuff the springy filaments into the toes of his boots. The cragsman moved no slower for his troubles, but Raif had seen him hesitate a few times before starting a sharp descent, and then lean heavily on his stick. Raif's own feet were holding up. Both he and Addie wore double layers of hareskin socks that kept out all but the worst of the cold, and Raif's ancient hand-me-down boots fitted him so well that there was little chafing. When he touched his face he felt patches of hard and tender skin and he thought there might be some frost damage, but as long as it didn't hurt he didn't spare it much thought.

It was the shoulder that bothered him. Slowly, steadily, over the course of the past seven days Raif had felt it burning a hole in his chest. He'd once watched as Brog Widdie proofed the temperature on a batch of blister steel he had been firing. With his long, crab-craw tongs the master smith had formed a small portion of the red hot metal into ball, and then pulled it from the fire. Immediately he dropped the ball onto his proofing block and watched how quickly the molten metal burned through the green wood. The ball would blacken and hiss, igniting a ring of flames as it burned a hole through the wood. That's what the Shatan Maer's claw had begun to feel like to Raif; a piece of molten metal incinerating his flesh.

uDo you know how to start a stopped heart?" Yiselle No Knife had asked Addie Gunn in the Sull camp by the Rift. The words haunted Raif, the tone of them, the lightness yet certainty in her voice. She had meant to shock both of them, him and Addie, and she succeeded better than she realized. Until she spoke Raif had managed to squash it into the back of his thoughts. The shoulder hurt. It had grown worse since the creature on the rimrock had smashed him in the back. It ached, sometimes a lot. That was it. Now it loomed constantly in his thoughts, and he couldn't tell if he was imagining that it was growing worse, or if it really was growing worse. Either way Yiselle No Knife had won a victory. She hadn't prevented them from heading east as she had intended, but she had intimidated them. The Sull were experts at that.

"Let's head a mite south," Addie mumbled, surprising Raif by speaking for the first time since they'd broken camp earlier that morning. "After those icestones we drifted too far north."

Raif nodded his agreement. They were both wearing face masks roughly shaped from hareskins, and as it was difficult to talk they'd taken to signing basic instructions and requests. It was snowing in big flakes that were as light and airy as dandelion fluff. The clouds were thickly gray and did not appear to be moving. Underfoot the snow formed complicated layers, by turns mushy, grainy, gravelly and plain hard. Some drifts were as deep as Addie's waist, but generally the cover lay between one and one and a half feet. They'd been lucky with the afternoon thaw two days back: it had prevented the snow from becoming too deep.