A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (19 page)

As she approached the narrow tunnel that led out to the guidehouse, Raina smoothed her dress and checked her boots for mud. Foolishness, but she could not help herself. There would be a battle here—she sensed it—and she had long learned to fight with whatever weapons she had at hand. Inigar would see her as chief’s wife, not some scared little maid he could bully and cajole.

Pulling composure about her like a mask, she entered the Blackhail guidehouse.

The cold struck her first, the sheer depth and deadness of it. How long ago had the freeze set in? Ten days? Surely now it was passed. Just yesterday she had watered Mercy at the Leak, and she was sure she had felt the first whiff of spring. Yet here, in the guidehouse, time seemed to have stopped at midwinter. Chilled, she rubbed her arms, wishing she had thought to bring a shawl.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, the massive bulk of the Hailstone emerged from the shadows like something conjured up from another world. Its bulk and power humbled her, and despite her best attempts to discipline her feelings she felt the old stirrings of awe.

Then she saw the stone was steaming.

Fear, instant and so concentrated she could taste the salt in it, leapt from her throat to her mouth. The Hailstone was steaming like a side of frozen meat.

“Yes, Raina Blackhail. Eagle lores always know when to fear.”

Startled by the clan guide’s voice, yet determined not to show it, Raina straightened the curve of her back and said, “How long has it been like this?”

Inigar Stoop stepped free from the shadows and smoke.
He has aged
, she thought as the two regarded each other. The clan guide’s eyes were as black and hard as ever, but his body seemed shrunken and dry, sucked clean of blood. She tried not to show her shock, but Inigar Stoop was not an easy man to fool.

“You find me changed, Raina?” he said, his voice as sharp as ever. “Then perhaps you should have come here before now.”

She made no reply.
I am chief’s wife and will offer no excuses to this man.

He knew what she thinking, she was sure of it, and for a moment the two faced each other as adversaries: chief’s wife and clan guide, gazes locked and bristling. Then, abruptly, Inigar shrugged. Strangely, he pulled off the pigskin gloves he had been wearing and held them out toward her. “Take them. Touch the stone.”

Annoyed that she had lost control of the situation, but also affected by the grimness in Inigar’s voice, she hesitated.

He offered the gloves once more. “You cannot touch the stone without them. It would skin you.”

How can it be?
she wanted to ask. But she feared that question more than touching the stone, so she took the gloves from him and drew close to the guidestone’s eastern face. Cold breath rose from the monolith, making her teeth chatter like a little girl’s. This close she could see the living surface of the stone, the valleys and fissures and weeping holes. Normally it was damp and oozing, but now a frost covered it like scale. Wary, she reached out and laid gloved fingers upon it.

Oh gods.
It was like touching a dying man. Always when she had touched it before—at the end of her girlhood, after both her weddings, and Dagro’s death—its power had leapt toward her fingers like heat. Now it was cold and all power had withdrawn from the surface. She sensed it buried deep. As she took her hand away she felt a faint stirring, as if something reached toward her . . . but failed.

The loss numbed her.

Inigar Stoop stood silent, watching. After a time he said, “The gods send ice into the heart of the stone. It will shatter before the year’s out.”

Raina touched her measure of guidestone, held in an embroidered pouch at her waist. She had heard the tales of guidestones cracking, but they had always seemed more like legends than truth. Quietly, she said, “The Eve of Breaking?”

Inigar nodded. “The night Stanner Hawk sent a hound to the fire.”

She bowed her head. It was too much to see the weight of knowledge on his face.

Slowly, she backed away, feeling for a wall to support her. The guidehouse was in disarray, the smoke fire almost burned out, grit and ashes littering the floor, chisels scattered like sticks. Even the clan guide’s clothes had been neglected, and his once fine pigskins were stained and torn. Suddenly she felt pity for him, but knew better than to show it. “Have you told Mace?”

“You know I have not. What good would it do to strike fear amongst the clan?”

“Yet you show no such scruples to me?”

“You are a woman and do not fight.”

She wanted to strike him for his arrogance. How dare he! She fought. Gods knew how she fought for this clan. Shaking, she said, “I wonder why you brought me here since you think so little of me.” With that she turned to leave.

“Stay,” he commanded, his voice calm with practiced authority. “I said only that you do not fight, not that you hold no power.”

Tired of games, she threw the pigskin gloves onto the floor. “What would you have of me? The stone is broken and I cannot fix it. I’d have to be a god for that.”

Still he did not rise to her anger. Moving to pick up the gloves he said, “Do you know all stones have lives? Ask any farmer. Stones can appear in their fields overnight, cast up by the restless earth. Mountains calf and move them, rivers and glaciers carry them, and heat and ice destroy them when all else is done. Whenever a guidestone dies a new one must be found to take its place.”

Inigar Stoop grew silent, and Raina found herself wondering when he had ceased talking of stones and begun talking about himself.

“I want Effie Sevrance, Raina. Tell me where she is.”

So this was what he wanted. Effie. She should have guessed it. “You cannot protect her, Inigar.”

“I am clan guide. I watch over this clan, and will watch over her.”

Yet you did not watch over her the night Stanner Hawk tried to burn her in the forge.
And then the damning thought,
None of us did.
Anger at her own failing made her sharp. “You are only one man, Inigar Stoop, one amongst thousands. Effie is no longer safe in this clan.”

Inigar’s hawk nose whitened across the bridge. “She is needed. I choose her to be the next guide.”

Raina stopped herself from replying sharply. Looking at the guidehouse, at the smoke-blackened walls, stone troughs and stark benches, she knew Inigar did not see this place as she did. Again the pity came.
He is sick and will one day die, and there is no one to take his place.
She said gently, “You must choose another, Inigar. Effie will soon be gone from here; I’m sending her south to my sister at Dregg.”

Cold anger burned in the guide’s eyes. “So the girl is more important to you than clan?”

It was not a fair question, and she could not answer it. All she knew was that when Bitty Shank came running to find her on the Eve of Breaking, telling of how he’d found Effie outside in the dog cotes, shaking with cold and fright, she had thought her heart might break. No child had lost as much as Effie Sevrance; Raina was determined she would lose no more.

Inigar spoke over her thoughts. “I have searched for five years for someone to train as my replacement. Every time a boy was born I hoped. Whenever a child took a special interest in the guidehouse I watched and waited and dreamt . . . but no new guide ever came. And then Effie began to come here and sit beneath that bench. No child has ever disturbed my dreams like she has. There’s power in her, Raina. Power this clan can use. She is young yet, but she will grow and learn more. I will teach her myself.

“I know you see only the bleakness of this guidehouse. Don’t deny it. It’s plainly written on your face. What you don’t see is the life behind it. When I stand here and take a chisel to the guidestone I deal in men’s souls. Every man and woman in this clan holds steel fired by Brog Widdie and powdered guidestone ground by me. Which is the most powerful, Raina? Tell me. That which kills or grants grace?”

He paused, not for her to answer, but to allow her time to think. The Hailstone smoked behind him, a giant slowly dying as it froze.

“It would not be a bad life for her. Sparse and solitary, yes, but ordered and meaningful too. I think if you were honest you would say it would suit her. She came here often enough of her own free will. You know she is happiest in closed, dark spaces. Let me take her and teach her. She can sleep on one of the benches, and take her meals with me.”

Almost he persuaded her, for there was much truth and sense in his words. Effie feared open spaces—Gods knew how they would get her to Dregg. But get her there they would. What Inigar offered was a kind of half-life, led amidst darkness and quiet and smoke. Raina would not have it for her. She had raised Effie as her own child, taught her how to speak and hold her spoon, and she wanted simple happiness for her. She wanted her to dance at Dregg.

Inigar read it all on her face, and she was prepared for his anger, but in the end there was only resignation. “Take her, then,” he said. “No matter if she ends up in Dregg or the farthest badlands, you cannot change her fate. She was born to the stone, Raina Blackhail, she wears it around her neck. You’re an eagle and can see clearly and know I speak the truth.”

Raina nodded, and there was nothing else to say, so she left Inigar there in the darkness, a broken man with a broken stone.

She couldn’t get out of the roundhouse quick enough. Running, she made her way along the tunnel and out through the entrance hall. People saw and tried to hail her, but she paid them no heed. She needed light and wind and freshness, and she raced to the stables to saddle Mercy.

Sweet-faced Jebb Onnacre trotted out her mare. “I thought you might be taking a run,” he said. “Be careful around Cold Lake, the ice is rotting there.” As she took the reins from him their gazes met. “I’ll be telling anyone who asks that you headed south to the Wedge.”

She thanked him, glad in her heart for the small kindness. Jebb was a Shank by marriage, and the Shanks’ loyalty to Effie remained unchanged. Orwin Shank knew where the girl was hidden, and Jebb had doubtless guessed that Raina was on her way there. Well, she was, but she’d lay a little ghost trail first. Mace had her watched and she had to be careful.

Little mice with weasels’ tails.

Shaking off her unease, Raina gave Mercy her head.

Oh, it was glorious to ride! To feel the mare’s muscles beneath her, and the wind buffeting her chest. She grinned with the joy of it, sending Mercy galloping over a series of hedgerows for no good reason at all.

South first, must be careful
, she counseled herself, somehow afraid that her joy might make her careless.
Turn west only when you reach the trees.

They had tried to find Effie, of course. Mace and Stanner Hawk and Turby Flapp. They suspected Raina and the Shanks had concealed her, but the Shanks and the Blackhail hammermen had closed ranks: Effie was one of their own, and no one was going to find her, so help them Gods. Mace had questioned Raina about it, casually asking why she’d rode out so often these past ten days, especially given the freeze. He knew she was lying, but could not press her. After all, his interest in Effie had to be seen to be purely honorable, a chief concerned for a little girl. He did not fool Raina. She knew whose hand lay behind the burning of the hound. She had heard the threat herself.

Slowing her pace to a canter, Raina turned for Cold Lake. All about her stone pines and black birch showed signs of the sudden freeze. Ten days back the temperature had dropped so low so quickly that you could hear the trees exploding. A thaw had begun a week earlier and the winter-starved trees had begun drawing water. Longhead said that the freeze couldn’t have come at a worse time, for the water in the pines turned to ice and split the trunks clean open. Over five hundred mature trees had been lost in the Wedge alone, the worst anyone could remember in a single season.

More bad omens
, thought Raina grimly as she turned onto a little-used dogtrot to the lake. Two hours passed as Mercy worked her way through a mire of half-frozen bulrushes and mud. Raina found herself thinking longingly of the fine trail that led directly from the roundhouse to the lakeshore and could be traveled in less than a hour.
Damn rushes!
They tore her ankles to shreds, and Gods only knew whether firm ground or water lay beneath them. When she finally spied the ugly little crannog extending out across the lake, she let out a great sigh of relief.

Mad Binny was out upon the pier, waiting for her, cool as if she’d known all along Raina would come. The old clan spinster was dressed in black, and she held a wooden mallet in her hands. “For the fishes,” she said in greeting, seeing Raina’s gaze upon it. “They come up to the surface by the poles, and they’re slow at this time of year.”

Raina could think of nothing to say to that, though she did notice that several fair-sized bull trout lay skipping at the spinster’s feet. Dismounting, she looked over the queer little crannog Mad Binny had claimed as her own.

Raised on stilts above the water, it commanded the southernmost shore of the lake. It had been built by Ewan Blackhail in the time of the River Wars, when every clan chief worth his guidestone had been obsessed with running water and the need to defend it. Looking around, Raina could not understand the crannog’s position, for none of the streams that fed the lake looked wide enough to hold a boat. Still, men would be men, and if other clans were building defensive crannogs then so, by Gods, would Blackhail.

Trouble was, this one hadn’t been built well at all—Hailsmen not being rivermen and so unfamiliar with the challenges of building over water—and forty years later it had fallen to ruin. The roof sagged, and had been mended here and there with bulrushes and animal hides, the window frames were rotten and broken, and an entire wall of outbuildings had half sunk into the lake. Gods knew what lay beneath the water. It was a wonder the thing still stood.

“You’ll be wanting to see the bairn, then?” Mad Binny squatted and hit one of the skipping trout with the mallet. “She’s inside, learning how to make a broth to boil a fish.”