Northlight (26 page)

One of the northers reached out from the dock, steadied the boat and jumped in without a bobble. Older than the others, he did his best to look dangerous. He had white-ginger braids and deep lines in his face, around his eyes and from the curve of his nose down beside his chin. He drew the dagger from his belt, making sure I got a good look at it, then put it back and drew it again, double-quick, and held the point to my throat. Eyes unblinking into mine and the whole damned circus. He thought he was tough, that this little demonstration would convince me not to try anything while we were in the boat.

I did my best to look properly nervous. It wasn't difficult under the circumstances. If I was stupid enough to jump him, where would I go?

The norther put away his knife a second time and picked up the paddle lying along the floor of the boat. Within a few seconds we were moving swiftly toward the island.

We slid — if that was the right word to use with boats — into the dock on the island with my norther guard again holding the point of his dagger to my throat and trying to look dangerous. I moved very slowly getting out. Then two more northers, all stone-calm faces and scars, took me one by each arm, and before I had much of a chance to study the buildings, marched me into one of them.

Here I was now, the loop around my wrists tied to a rope from one of the crossbeams. My hands stretched over my head, the rope just long enough to let me rest on my toes. I didn't know where Terris and Etch had gone. If the demon god of chance owed them anything at all, they weren't where I was, Etch in particular. I hadn't been able to get close to him, but he'd held himself in the saddle like a man near the end of his strength.

I tried to take a deep breath, but with so much weight hanging from my arms, my ribs were bound up and the most I could manage was a slower pant. After a while, the muscles of my feet and calves were going to ache, and then to burn, and then to give out, at which point breathing would become optional. Until then, I could curse myself for not acting while I had the chance. Or I could take a look around.

The room was small, with no outside windows, surprisingly bright from the light filtering in from above the crossbeams. I stood in a stone hollow like a fire pit, and I wondered for a moment if it was indeed a fire pit, except there was no obvious channel for the smoke. Swiveling, I spotted two doors, one open and the other guarded by one of my escorts.

I pushed myself farther up on my toes and wrapped my fingers around the ropes just above my wrists. Slowly, so as not to attract any undue attention, I tightened my muscles and took just enough weight off my feet so that I hung. I knew I couldn't hold the position for very long, but light-headed as I still was, I hadn't been sure I could do it at all. Furtively I gauged the distance to the guard at the door. If I could curl myself up, get my body swinging, lash out with both feet — could I reach him, knock him out? Down wouldn't be good enough, it would take more than a second to get to my buckle knife and if he came to while I was wrestling with it —

The second guard came back with a woman who was dressed, like the two in the yard, as a warrior. Her straw-colored hair was divided into several braids like a man's, but tied together at the ends with dark wool. Her quilted vest looked plain but that could have been because, I now saw, she was very young. Her eyes were dark like the lake water.

She said in a flat-toned voice, “I must search you now,” and began with my hair. Her hands had calluses right where they should for spear work. They trembled a little, checking every seam, every pocket of my Ranger's vest. She came to my belt, paused as if unsure, then began to unbuckle it.

“Hey,” I protested, trying to sound casual, “my pants'll fall down!”

She gave me a look of pure terror, handed the belt to the second guard and kept searching. Carefully, missing nothing, rechecking the empty slot in my boot top, perhaps considering whether I might have something hidden in the heel. Finally she pulled off my boots and left the room. About ten minutes later she stuck her head in, signaled to the guards, and one of them cut me down.

By this time my shoulder joints were alternating serious threats of future agony with my calf muscles. With relief I sank to the floor. My wrists were still tied, but it felt wonderful to have them down where they belonged. Then, one big guard on each elbow as before, we marched through the inner door.

The long, narrow room ran the whole length of the building, its roof open to the sky in a wide section midway down each slanted side. We entered it about half way down, and as we made our way to the eastern end, I took a look around and did my best to pull myself together.

The long hall might be rough-cut conifer on the outside, but these inside walls were lined with tapestries, intricately woven or stitched of matched-shade elkskin, shelves with glass and pottery and carved horn, bunches of fragrant herbs and sheaves of quick-rye braided into figures and symbols. Thick woven rugs cushioned my feet. In their muted patterns, in the wall hangings and the dried sheaves, again and again I saw the symbols of the Mother, and something that might be the father-god. I couldn't be sure; I never questioned those particular laws. Beside them I noted a pattern of one shape flowing into its opposite, both making a whole, circles enclosing a single dot, as well as other things I had no time to look closely at.

At the end of the hall, Terris stood, his back to me, held as I was between two muscle men. He was talking to — rather, being questioned by — a norther seated on what looked like a drum of carved wood, dark with oil and age, covered on one side with sheepskin, the other with elk, hair left on but rubbed shiny along the edges. Two more northers stood nearby, holding spears and daggers, looking as if they'd as soon skewer me as look at me.

The norther who sat on the drum stool wore elkskins and a quilted vest just as the others, plainer than some. He appeared ordinary enough, plaited hair the color of the sand that blew across the steppe. Yet I felt a difference in him, a stillness. Not like a panther waiting to strike but worse, much worse — like the hush when a baby takes his first breath. Men might die for a leader with a panther spirit, but they would stay alive for one like this.

From this angle I couldn't see his eyes. A trick of the light cast a shadow across them as it brought into bitter relief the triangular scar across one cheekbone.

He took his time with Terris, studying him, weighing whatever answer he'd given before I was brought in. He felt my presence, even as I felt his. In that way, we understood each other already. He knew I was that crazy Ranger who'd leapt halfway across a frozen clearing at him and given him that scar.

And I in turn remembered who he was.

The breaker.

Seven years ago he was the unspoken leader of a bunch of hotheads. Now he was the heart of this fort or trading post or whatever it was. In ten years he would be the soul of the north, even as Pateros was of the south.

I could end the norther menace with a single stroke. I could become Montborne's assassin. If I had a knife in my hands, no one here could stop me.

As they approached the lake with its margin of evergreen forest and island settlement, it seemed to Terris that the ice-pure morning air had sharpened his senses, honed them like a knife. As he inhaled, the smell of the sweating horses surged through him, along with the tang of wire-grass and the salty odor of human bodies after days on the trail. His ears echoed with the pounding of hooves on the frost-hard earth and the whistling of his own breath through his chest.

When had he ever seen such a sky? Shimmering above the tundra, azure and brilliant, it penetrated the very marrow of his bones. He shivered in the wind from the lake and thought of Etch, how he'd looked this last day, swaying in his saddle, clutching his injured arm, his face distorting whenever his horse stumbled.

Terris drew the folds of tight-woven wool closer around him, awkwardly because his hands were bound, and tried again to prepare himself for whatever might come. He didn't know what the northers might do to him, and yet he mistrusted his preconceptions about them. He'd discovered during the long silent hours of the journey north that nothing was as he'd thought. Nothing...

Not Montborne, heroic general and assassin. Not the University, that bastion of privileged scholarship. Not Esmelda, with her feet of uncertain clay.

Not Etch and Kardith — teachers, followers, he didn't know what they were to him, beyond the best and truest friends he'd ever had.

And not himself. Surely not himself, he thought as they came to a halt by the lake's edge. Different, a misfit — yes, he admitted that to himself. He could never go back to Laureal City as Esmelda's adjutant and heir, never pretend he could not feel the things he'd felt or see the things he'd seen. He sensed something more, as if, for a single fragile moment, he'd touched the still center of a tempest. Currents surged and shifted around him — Laurea poised for war against the hungry north, Montborne and Esmelda sparring and scheming, Avi lost somewhere on the Ridge where things that ought not to exist at all twisted the edges of sunlight. All of them circled the point on which he stood, linked to him in ways he could not understand — not yet.

Noises jolted Terris from his musings — voices shouting, the bleating of penned brush-sheep, the shuddering whinny of a horse calling out in greeting. As he dismounted, he tried to make sense of what he saw. The northers were supposed to be savages — nomads and subsistence hunter-gatherers, a paranoid society whose only outside contact was a naked spear. What was known about them came from war stories and tradition, for no social scientist had been able to study them firsthand within present memory and the older records were mostly a blend of folklore and myth, not true scholarship.

Yet the lake encampment reminded Terris of nothing so much as the Laureal City plaza on Solstice Day, the tents with their curious jumble of the familiar and the exotic, the smells of food, the swirls of motion, the sudden flashes of color, the bits of music and laughter. Where were the piles of skulls, the cauldrons of blood, the instruments of torture? He stared at the encampment, fascinated, and began making mental notes.

A hard shove between the shoulder blades sent Terris stumbling in the direction of the simple pier. He lowered himself into one of the boats, narrow and tapering at either end. It bobbed under his weight, satisfyingly familiar to one who'd lived his whole life between two rivers. Etch, in the boat in front of him, looked gray-faced and uneasy, huddled into himself. All Terris could see of Kardith was her back.

The northers paddled their narrow craft swiftly to the island. As soon as they landed, Kardith was manhandled away in one direction and Etch in another, each between two tough-looking guards. Terris was led away, a spearpoint digging into his back.

The long-house smelled faintly of wool and leather, smoke and some resinous incense. The man on the drum stool sat very still, like mirror-smooth water, lean and taut-muscled under the buttery elkskin shirt and breeches. He wore a vest of quilted felt embroidered with complex patterns. His dark blond hair had been woven into half a dozen braids and tied with strips of red-dyed leather. Sun streaming through the slats in the roof burnished the top of his head into a golden cap while it cast his eyes into shadow.

Terris's guard yanked his cloak from his shoulders and shoved him forward. He stumbled and caught his balance, holding his bound hands in front of him. He could not see the seated man's eyes. The effect was deliberate. He'd experienced it before. It was exactly the kind of intimidation a master's committee might use to test a candidate's self-confidence or a Senator to impress a new assistant. Esmelda wielded it as freely as if it were a normal and necessary part of social intercourse.

Any sane person in his situation would be paralyzed with terror, and yet Terris wanted to laugh aloud.
What you're doing to me, it's been done before, and by experts!
Hilarity, he'd been told, was a common and natural reaction to stress. It only showed how frightened he really was. Any moment now the mood would shatter, leaving him truly defenseless.

The seated norther spoke at last, his voice resonant and slightly lilting. As he talked, he raised his hands. His fingers were strong and tapering, covered with whitened scars and callouses. Several knuckles were prominent and odd-shaped, as if they'd been broken and badly healed.

“And what are we to do with you?” the norther said.

“If you're asking my opinion,” Terris answered, “I'd be just as happy to go back to minding my own business.”

“‘Minding my own business'?” the norther repeated. “I only wish you'd had the sense to. But like all southers, you think nothing of barging in where you have no right to be. Tell me, what would happen to one of
my
people caught trespassing on
your
territory?”

Heat rose to Terris's face. He'd expected to be threatened, harassed, bullied. But he hadn't expected such blatant unfairness. “We weren't trespassing,” he answered stiffly. “It was your own men who dragged us over the border.”

“I'm the judge of what crimes you've committed. I'm Jakon of Clan'Cass and it was Clan'Cass land you were taken on.” There was no bluster in his words, only a quiet statement of fact. Then, with a mercurial shift of mood, he added, “Since I already know where you're from, you might as well tell me your name.”

“Cassian territory...” Terris searched his memory for the bloodthirstiness of their reputation, but his brain seemed to have turned to mush. He certainly wasn't making a very good start at resisting norther interrogation. Right now, he couldn't think of a single coherent reason not to give the man his name.

“Your name?” Jakon repeated in a bantering tone. “Or should I call you ‘souther' or ‘you there'? Or perhaps you'd prefer simply, ‘batbrain'?”