A Sword from Red Ice

He found himself imaging Guy and Jordie arriving at the Stonefly. Tired and breathless, they'd hasten through the garrison eager to speak with the head hatchetman, Tiny Pitt. Search parties would be dispatched. Messengers would be sent north to Dhoone: the Dog Lord was in the Dhoonewilds, heading east. The knowledge that Guy and Jordie would soon send a company of hatchetmen east when the Dog Lord was heading north should have made Bram feel something as a Dhoonesman. Yet it didn't. Instead he felt a small stirring of something else. It was good to have knowledge that no one else hut you possessed.

"Castlemilk." Bram spoke the word out loud, testing.

His allegiances were shifting and he no longer knew which clan he owed loyalty to anymore.

FIVE The Racklands

A night heron shrieked in the distance as Ash March crouched by the shore and drank. Moonlight had trans-formed the Flow into a river of mercury, silver-black and shiny as metal. Hopefully not dangerous to drink. Ash tasted the river as she swallowed; oily and strange, not quite water anymore.

Standing, she wrapped her lynx-fur coat around her chest and hiv-ered, though she wasn't really cold. It was an hour after sunset and the sky glowed dimly in the west. In the east a half-moon hung low between sentinel cedars. The moon was closer here, she'd noticed. Stars too. The night itself was blacker, richer, as if darkness had been distilled to its highest proof. Ash could feel it settling against her skin and siphoning through the lenses in her eyes. The land she stood in was ruled by the Sull: night and day had irrevocably changed.

A breeze set the cedar boughs swaying as she hiked up the shore, the sharp, spicy scent of their needles was released in a sudden burst like a seedpod ejecting it spores. The smell reminded Ash of Mask Fortress, of closed boxes, locked chests. Secrets. She had never seen such massive trees. Their boughs swept wide in vast shaggy circles that claimed the space of a dozen lesser trees. None of their needles were green. Silver and blue and a shade of dusky purple she had no name for, they had abandoned the colors of normal growing things.

Switching her path to avoid the tee-dried remains of something that might have been a fox. Ash returned to her makeshift camp. She was muscle-tired hut restless, and she did not want to sleep.. Seven days had passed sinece the stand at Floating Bridge and not an hour, awake or sleeping, had gone by where she had not relived the events of that night in her mind. In a way the nightmares were easier. There was something to be said for watching everything unfold in painstaking detail in her dreams. At least she was asleep At least her dream self wasn't constantly asking: What could I have done to save Ark's life?

Ash inhaled deeplv, found herself glancing back at the fox. Ark| Veinsplitter, Son of the Sull and Chosen Far Rider, was dead. Brought down by unmade pack of wolves, torn limb from limb by creatures who no longer had red blood pumping through their hearts or warm flesh coddling their bones. Daughter, he had called her. She would never hear him say that word again.

Deep within the overhang of her coat sleeve. Ash's hands made fists. I should never have stepped onto the bridge.

The memory of that night was as clear and sharp as a splinter of glass. Their party of three—Ark, Mai Naysayer and she herself—had been pursued by creatures from the Blind. From the moment she had become Sull in the mountain cavern they had chased her, and two hours south of Hells Town they finally brought her to ground. It might have been possible to outrun them if it hadn't been for the river. The wolves had cornered them on the north bank of the Flow, where the road met the Moating Bridge. Horses could not be ridden at a gallop across the four-foot-wide boards, so Ark and Mai had turned to make a stand. Her mistake had been to ride onto the bridge ahead of them. She could see it all: the wolves closing in, the Naysaycr drawing his six-foot longsword and stepping forward; and Ark … Ark pulling the linchpin from the Floating Bridge, and telling her how she had made him proud as the bridge began to float away. She and her horse had sailed east on powerful river currents, buoyed by pontoons that bounced like fishing floats in the water, unable to do anything but watch as Ark and the Naysayer battled the Unmade.