Springwar (5 page)

Rrath joined him. “I have to be outside to do that,” he murmured. His breath ghosted into the air as he tugged his
hood closer around his face and reached back to snare their skis. He yanked at the door, but it was stuck.

Masking a surge of impatience, Eddyn jerked it closed. Eronese conditioning, if not Eronese Law, said that one should always leave a shelter as one found it. Someone else might need this place.
Some fool
.

“I could’ve managed,” Rrath muttered.

Eddyn nearly hit him. Forced confinement with someone he had little cause to like had worn his always-volatile temper dangerously thin. “I’m sure you could,” he growled as he stomped into the waist-high snow drifted around the porch. A pair of strides put him into knee-deep powder atop a hard-packed base. The river glittered a dozen spans beyond, totally iced over save for one narrow channel, courtesy of the steam venting upstream. Pines lined the gorge to every side: dark against the white.

“I was afraid you were going to—”

“I nearly did,” Eddyn snapped. “Don’t make me regret it.”

Rrath glared at him, but his guileless features and youth made him easy to dismiss. “I think we’re even,” he dared at last.

Eddyn grunted. “Until we reach Tir-Eron.”

“Assuming we do.”

Eddyn dipped his head to the right, where an impressive escarpment glowered, easily six spans high. Snow softened scorched walls at its summit: the ruins of Woodstock Station, now abandoned. “Might as well get to it.”

“But the birkits—”

“Even birkits go to ground in blizzards,” Eddyn retorted. “The fact remains: Either the gem is up there, or it’s in the Ri-Eron. And while I doubt that Rann or that woman who was with them had the thing, we’d be crazy not to check.”

Rrath’s eyes flashed challenge for one wild reckless moment, before their fire faded. “Apparently,” he spat, “my choice is whether I’m killed by birkits, you, or my own clan.”

Eddyn’s face was like frozen stone. “That’s a fair assessment.” And with that, he started up the timbered slope.

Eddyn knew what they would find long before they peered over what had been the way station’s outer palisade, but he motioned Rrath to caution anyway.

The tracks told it all: two fresh sets of ski trails from the station to the riverside, ending just out of sight of the boathouse, then footprints going back up, but angling away from the station. Birkit spoor in indeterminate number accompanied both sets, all several hands old.

So Rann and the woman had survived. They’d evidently risen early, skied down to the river to search for Avall’s body, and, not finding it, had struck out overland, back into the Wild and heading west. Which made sense, given that both were wounded, and the woman would surely have a permanent shelter fairly close by. More to the point, they
hadn’t
pressed on to Tir-Eron. By the look of the sky, he and Rrath shouldn’t, either.

“Best I can tell,” Rrath murmured, “Rann and the woman left at first light.”

Eddyn peered over the blackened wood of the outer palisade. A courtyard lay beyond, clogged with drifted snow from which more blackened timbers rose—the remains of the station proper. And a wellhead. A messy maze of prints, human and birkit, already melting in the fickle morning light. The air was sharp and crisp, but without the deadly bite of the last few days. Eddyn didn’t trust it.

Scowling, he began to skirt the wall, targeting what had once been a gate a dozen strides to the right. “We could follow,” he observed, “but we’ve already argued that to death.”

“Indeed,” Rrath dared. “Of course, two days ago I could’ve told which way the gem had gone.”

Eddyn didn’t hear him, having slipped through the gate and entered the compound proper.

Eddyn flung a snow-caked white cloak over the frozen body he’d found sprawled atop a millstone, revealing a tan-green tangle of entrails where its abdomen had been. Fighting
back an urge to vomit, he stalked off to the shelter of an arched alcove, facing into the sun. It was almost warm there; snowmelt ran in trickles across the blackened pavement, carrying soot with it, for the fire was barely four days old. They’d been poking and prodding through the ruins for almost half a hand.

It was strange, though, that neither that body—nor the three they’d found stripped to their small clothes in the cellar—had been savaged. They showed claw marks, true, and deep gouges from the fangs that had killed every one of their companions. But the big predators hadn’t lingered to avail themselves of fresh, hot-blooded prey.

Which made no sense.

Not that anything else did, either.

When, Eddyn wondered idly, had reality come unraveled?

Rrath joined him, handing him a mug of something that steamed. Eddyn took the drink in a gloved hand and sniffed it suspiciously, then glanced uphill, toward where the ghost priests’ camp had been. That, too, barely seemed real.

“So,” Rrath ventured primly. “What do you make of the situation, since you seem to have claimed leadership?”

Eddyn stared across the snowy court, noting how blue the shadows looked against the white; how green the needles seemed on the trees. Recalling how red the ghost priests’ blood had been when it splashed across the snow.

Shaking his head to clear it, he rose, squinting at the sun, which was approaching noon. “There should still be a fair bit of food around, fire or not. Best we stock up on rations, then head downriver, in case Avall’s body has washed up. Not that I expect it to,” he added.

Rrath gnawed his lip. “Or … we could just stay here in the Wild. We could find another station and weather the winter there, and …”

“We could not!” Eddyn huffed. “There’s living and there’s being alive. You’re letting fear rule you, and that’ll get you killed. Except that it might get me killed, too, and that I won’t risk. No, we’ll press on to Tir-Eron and hope to catch up with Avall on the way—if he’s still alive. In either
case, I can tell Tyrill what I know and let her handle the rest.”
And maybe buy forgiveness
, he added to himself.

“The river will take us there,” Eddyn announced, after consuming the rest of the morning consulting the maps he’d salvaged from the ghost priests’ camp. He thrust a sheet of parchment beneath Rrath’s nose. They were back in the boathouse and the light was bad, for they were letting the fire coast down to embers. Even so, it was sufficient to show the wavy blue line that continued more or less southeast from Woodstock Station, through at least two more days’ travel to the plains. Other abandoned stations were marked along the way, lavish reminders of the plague’s depredations. A few fish camps were likewise indicated, but they’d be closed for the winter. Right at the point where the Wild met the plain, a tower was sketched: a winter hold.

“There’d be people there, if we need them,” Rrath observed.

“Then we don’t stop,” Eddyn replied flatly. “We’d have no choice but to report to our sub–clan-chiefs, who’d ask all the wrong questions. Never mind that anyone in your clan could be a ghost priest agent.”

“Eddyn–”

Eddyn rounded on him. “What’re you going to say? That it’s over? That you’ll conveniently forget that you joined up with a bunch of people no one knows exist, who may be playing major power games here? Do you think they’ll let you back out now? Eight, Rrath, who
can
you trust? The only protection you’re going to get from here on out is from my clan–or the King. And neither of
those
is guaranteed.”

Rrath didn’t reply, though Eddyn gave him plenty of time. “The river’s the straightest way,” he said at length, “and the most level. I’d say we ski on it as much as possible, keeping watch for weak spots. Otherwise, we hug the shore. When we find empty stations, we avail ourselves of whatever supplies remain. Same for fish camps. When we near the hold, we travel down the opposite bank under cover of darkness. There’re outbuildings on both shores. If we’re lucky,
we can shelter in one without getting caught. In any event, we have to get going. There’s a fish camp that looks to be no more than a half day’s hard trek away. We can target that, and if we make good time, we can think about pressing on to the next one. The map shows the river’s fairly smooth that far: no rapids, so the ice should be plenty thick. And there’re buoyancy vests in one of the boats we can wear, in case one of us falls through—though we should still travel with rope to hand.”

Rrath eyed him neutrally, and the sky with more trepidation. “At this point, I’d simply say we should travel.”

The sun was driving their shadows before them when Rrath and Eddyn finally swung around a particularly imposing granite spire—one of many that ornamented this section of the Wild—and at last caught sight of the snowcapped cluster of low stone domes that comprised the first fish camp. Their shadows obligingly swung left as they turned right, which took them off snow and across bare ice that showed green, and which snapped ominously as Eddyn’s weight skimmed across it.

In spite of the weather, it had been an uneventful afternoon, if perhaps the most tiring of Eddyn’s life. The frozen river had been monotonously smooth, and there’d been little to appreciate in the endless leagues of trees beneath whose shadows they passed. Trouble was, whichever of them was in the lead (they alternated once every half hand, and tried to keep four spans between them) had also to keep an eye out for patches of open water and thin or rough ice. Never mind checking every pile of flood wrack for signs of Avall. All of which tired the mind out of all proportion to the physical effort involved.

Not that they’d found any trace of his kinsman, or really expected to. His body, in all likelihood, was lodged beneath the ice. If it surfaced at all, it would be around Sunbirth, at the equinox.

There
were
hot springs, however, which often generated sufficient heat to permit stretches of open water. And there
were animals that either dug down to water or broke through to it with their weight—sometimes to their detriment, as evidenced by the unfortunate elk they’d found drowned two hands back, supported above the ice only by its magnificent rack.

There were fish, too—a few: enormous, ancient catfish that rose now and then for a gulp of air to augment that which sustained them in the cold, dark depths where they drowsed away the winter unmolested.

But they were closing in on the fish camp now, and that promised sleep of a warmer kind, not to mention a reliable source of food in the form of salt fish stored away to season for the winter.

Eddyn and Rrath ate well that night and slept decently—in an actual bed.

The wind turned bitter the next day, and blew snow in their faces, forcing them to raise mouth-masks, wrap gauze around their eyes, and fret about their ears. Still, they persevered, not altering their pattern until the following evening, when another fish camp did double duty as a way station. And then the storm fell upon them in earnest, forcing them to remain where they were.

Nothing
moved outside that second night, in all of eastern Eron.

T
he hold had been built as a hunting retreat in more prosperous times, and had been deserted eighteen years—since the household to which it was attached had succumbed, every one, to the plague. Four stone slabs, each rougher than the last, marked the ashes of a father, two sons, and a mother. There’d been no one to bury the daughter, but Div and her husband had found her bones in bed when they’d found the hold, four years ago. They’d also found the phial of poison.

It was Div’s hold now, and typical of such places in the Wild. Which is to say it had thick, rough-log walls; many shuttered windows; steep-pitched roofs of split-board shingles; and a massive fireplace that heated a large common hall and ducted to smaller bedrooms and the bath. Div had lived there with a man from Tannercraft at first, and, later, alone. Now it was filled with her scourings from the Wild: tubers, nuts, and berries she scavenged in season; herbs to flavor the dried or salted fish and flesh that were her staples. And, stretched from countless frames and racked against the walls, the pelts of the beasts she hunted for the trade scrip that bought other food. Like barrels of flour and cauf, jugs of butter, and wheels of cheese.