A Sword from Red Ice

Bram sat down on his cloaktails and watched them. He was dead tired, and relieved to have them gone. After a time he began massaging his numbed hand. Strange tingles still persisted, and although he knew it was probably nothing he was a bit worried all the same. He very much liked his hand.

Part of him was still trying to figure out how Guy could have made such a big mistake. Hammie Faa had barely managed to cover his confusion when Bram wished him a safe journey to Bludd. The Dog Lord wasn't heading home. He was heading north to the Dhoonewall. Guy had assumed that the Dog Lord was south of the roundhouse because he meant to follow the old Ruinwood trail east through Dregg. Where in fact the Bludd chief and his companions were circling the roundhouse before eventually turning north. The tunnel leading from the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes must have deposited them some distance south, leaving Vaylo with the diifficult job of guiding his party through land overrun by enemies.

Brain decided the Dog Lord was more than up to the task. Knowledge was interesting, Bram concluded, rising. Once you were in possession of it you could choose to pass it along or keep it to your-self. Power lived there just as surely as it lived in a swinging hammer. Only you didn't need muscle to wield it.

Thoughtful, he headed uphill. His throat was raw with thirst. Luckily Jordie had thought to unbuckle the saddlebags from the mare, and Bram found a waterskin and other supplies. As he drank he began planning for the night ahead. It occurred to him that it would be a good idea to spread feed around his bedroll. That way if Guy's stallion decided to return while he slept it would likely stick around until morning. Unable to locate horse feed, he used porridge oats instead. When he was done, he pushed a wedge of rye bread between his teeth and chewed. It tasted like wood. Swallowing forcefully, he drew the watered steel from its sheath. The edge needed oiling. Jackdaw Thundy, the old swordmaster at Dhoone, would whack a boy with the flat of his blade if he dared leave a sword untended after rainfall. Even the pride of Dhoone—hard and lustrous, twice-fired watered steel— was not immune to canker.

Frowning, Bram watched as moonlight flowed along the whorls and ripples in the blade. Robbie had given him the lesser of the two swords. The one he'd kept for himself was known as a horsestopper. A full-size battle sword with a two-handed grip that had the length and heft necessary to impale an armored warhorse, it was forged from the highest grade of watered steel, known as mirror blue. A blade made of mirror blue was paler and more glassy than one forged from traditional watered steel. Light shone through its point.

No light shone through the point of Bram's blade, but that didn't bother him. Truth was he preferred the smaller, lighter footsword with its simple cruciform handguard and the hare head surmounted on its pommel. His father had commissioned the ice-hare pommel as a tribute to his wife upon her death. Tilda Cormac had been the best wire-trapper in Dhoone, and when her husband was away for the winter on long patrols she had kept her family fed.

It was Robbie who had benefited the most. Tilda had always given her stepson the choicest cuts of meat: the fatty loin from the rabbit's hack, the coon liver, the porcupine's heart. Robbie had been born to her husbands first wife yet she had reared him as her own, Bram often wondered what she had received in return. Robbie had treated her like a servant, never showing her the respect due to a stepmother, "Elena Dhoone is my mother. Not you," he would scream when she would-n't let him have his way. "You're just a rabbit-trapper from Gnash."

Even though he didn't much feel like it, Bram unhooked the weapon care pouch from his belt and began working yellow tung oil into the sword. Tilda's sword. Robbie had been set to hand it over to the Milk chief in payment for the Castlemen, and Bram wondered how his brother had managed to get it back. His memories of what happened that night in the Brume Hall after Robbie sold him to Wrayan Castlemilk were not clear. Perhaps Robbie had renegotiated the gift of swords, but Bram doubled it A dozen watered-steel swords had been promised. A dozen had been delivered. Bram had a shadowy memory of Robbie kneeling quietly by the sword pile and sliding out Tilda's sword. If the memory was true he would have had to replace it with another blade. Why he had gone to such trouble was hard to know.

Bram decided not to think about it. Nerve endings in his fingers had begun to fire randomly as his hand came back to life, and he flexed the muscles to keep blood pumping.