A Sword from Red Ice

The grangelords resented those two facts with such intensity they all but frothed at the mouth like rabid dogs. Power was theirs. They were the ones with the wealth, the land, the titles and the private armies so misleadingly named hideclads. Outside the city they were as good as kings. Within it they were reduced to supplicants-by baseborn, lowbred thugs, no less. That was what galled them the most. Marafice stretched his lips into a tight smile. They were his men the watch. Good men, hard-fighting, hard-playing, down-to earth. They weren't having roasted game bird for breakfast, that was for sure. It would be porridge with a dollop of lamb's grease-and a chunk of blood sausage if they were lucky. They were well-equipped though. Marafice himself had made sure of that. He wasn't about to send his brothers-in-the-watch to war unprepared. All seven hundred had Rive Blades, the blood-tinted swords fired in the Red Forge. The Knife had wrung money from the Surlord to pay for their pikes, and when he hadn't been able to wring more he had paid for their plate armor himself. It had cost him the entire dowry he had received from Roland Stornoway for the pleasure of marrying his eldest daughter. That, and half the savings he had on account with the tight-lipped priests of the Bone Temple. It wasn't fancy stuff like the Whitehog's, but it was solid, and if a lance blow landed just right it might make the difference between broken ribs and disembowelment.

Reaching the edge of the cliff, Marafice reined in his horse and dismounted. He was free of the camp now, hidden from hostile glances by a crop of spindly weed trees and some evil-looking thorns. Below him lay the great expanse of the Wolf River, its waters brown with tannin. Trees and bushes uprooted by an earlier thaw had log jammed to form an island midstream. Some kind of waterfowl perched atop one of the upturned root balls, but Marafice didn't know enough about birds to identify the breed. Abruptly he turned. The updraft tunneling along the cliff had chilled his dead eye.

Cover it, advised the very few people who dared speak to him about the loss of his right eye. Have a bridle maker cut out a patch and strap it over the socket. He had nearly done just that, but something had stopped him. Some kind of fool pigheadedness that he had come to regret but would not now reverse. For better or worse it had become who he was. The hollow socket repulsed him, and he had not willingly looked in a glass in three months. On his worst nights he suspected that his exterior now accurately reflected what lay within. People had always thought him a monster. Now he had become one.

The strange thing was that sometimes he thought he could see through his missing eye. In his dreams he saw further. The colors were deeper and the edges as crisp as a line drawing. Even after he woke he was sure the eye was still in place … right until the moment when he reached for the water pitcher and poured himself a cup. It spilled. It always spilled. He could see well enough over distance, but those small judgments close to the body betrayed him every time.

Marafice rubbed the socket with his gloved fist. The coldness was hard to get used to, the chill so close it could freeze his thoughts. Damn Asarhia March. Her foul sorceries had robbed him of the skin of his foot and an eye. She had killed his brothers-in-the-watch, too. Five of them, blasted against the hard granite of the Bitter Hills.

Enough, he told himself. What was done was done. He was Marafice Eye, Protector General of the Rive Watch, the Surlords declared successor, and husband to Liona Stornoway, Daughter of the High Granges. He had gained more than he'd lost, and you could not say that about most men.

True enough his new wife was a high-strung slattern whose belly was currently swelling with another man's brat. But she was rich beyond reckoning and she had the very great fortune of being horn into one of the five Great Houses of Spire Vanis.

Stornoway could give Hews a run for its money. It was older than Hews, claiming an ancestor of the Bastard Lord himself Torny Fyfe, and although it could not match the sheer number of surlords spawned by House Hews, it more than made up for it in wealth. Stornoway held the two most important high passes south of the city, and all goods coming north across the mountains were subject to its tariffs. That, canny management of its holdings and rumors of Sull gold made Stornoway a byword for untold riches in Spire Vanis. The scale of the wealth took some getting used to. What did a butcher's son know of baudekin, emeralds, ambergris, perfumed cushions, and gilded prayer books? What did he care? Power was what counted. That Stornoway gold would need to work. Arms, fortifications, horses, guards, bribes: those were the only things it was good for.

Marafice squinted into the eastern sky. Behind the stormheads the sun was rising. It was time to move out.