The Black Star (Book 3) (71 page)

The horses' hooves turned up the smell of damp earth. Tents were strung between trees, yurts concealed behind screens of shrubs. Dante's paranoia faded. If the clan were concerned, they would never have let him and Cee within bowshot.

Instead, the norren sat around on logs and stones, chatting and working at their nulla: sewing, carving, fletching, painting. A few looked his way, but none acted surprised or interested. To someone unfamiliar with norren ways, such cavalier disinterest in strangers approaching their winter camp might feel ominous, but that was simply how they were.

The first person to greet them was Orsen, a gangly boy whose friendliness was uncharacteristic of both teen males and norren of any age. He grinned at Dante. He still had some growing to do, but even though Dante was on horseback, Orsen was already so tall he hardly had to look up to meet Dante's eyes.

"Where's the trouble?" he said.

Dante glanced around. "Who said anything about trouble?"

"The only time you come to visit your clan is when you've got trouble." His gaze slid to Cee. "Is it her?"

"She is only trouble in the sense that she's as hard to remove as a tick." Dante glanced at Cee. "A very competent and useful tick."

"Don't worry," she said. "I took it as a compliment."

He turned back to Orsen. "Been tossed out into the woods for your trials yet?"

"This spring," he grinned. His beard wasn't as thick as the men's, but it was far denser than what Dante could grow. "He's down by the water. Of course."

"Of course." Dante smiled and rode past.

The water, in this instance, was a lazy stream half frozen over by the ice accreting on the banks. Hopp crouched over it, dabbing a paintbrush in the frothy current. A canvas was stretched on a frame beside him. Two black lines streaked its surface.

"How can it take you so long to paint so little?" Dante said.

Hopp looked up, brows bent. "That the lines are so few is why each takes so long. What do you want?"

"For you to help me sneak into a foreign, impenetrable nation and steal an item of unimaginable power."

"Oh. So you failed to find Cellen."

"Wrong," Dante said, flushing. "I found it. I had it. It was stolen from me."

Hopp sidled toward his canvas, crab-like, and dabbed his brush in a pot of black ink. "How many days did you cry for?"

"The person who stole it is going to use it to destroy Narashtovik."

"And thus you haven't stopped crying? Then it appears I have asked a trick question."

"This isn't a joke, Hopp."

His brush hovered over the canvas. "Does it sound like I'm joking?"

Rather than argue, which was exactly what the norren chieftain wanted, Dante launched into the story. It took more than a few minutes to relay. As he spoke, Hopp moved the brush near the canvas, withdrew it without touching, then extended his hand again. As Dante neared the end of the tail, Hopp laid a single stroke below one of the others, a parallel mark that neatly showed the bristles of the brush at its end.

"I am impressed by the severity of your situation," Hopp said after he finished. "And as your chief, I am, naturally, concerned for your safety."

Dante sighed. "But what does this have to do with you?"

Without turning, the norren smiled. "I knew I was smart to permit you to join the Broken Herons."

"First off, as you mention, I'm a member of this clan, and worthy of support, I'd say. Second, if the Minister destroys Narashtovik, you'll find yourself sharing borders with a madman."

"We don't have 'borders.'"

"If he has his way, you won't have anything else, either."

"You don't know that."

"He's violent and moody. He killed one of our monks for trespassing. For being in the wrong place. How do you think he'll take to the panoply of norren eccentricities?"

"I couldn't say. I don't know him, and I doubt the two of you have had much in the way of deep, personal conversations, either." Hopp slashed another line across the canvas, connecting it to the tip of the previous line at a perpendicular angle. "We suffered in the war as well."

"I know," Dante said. "I was there."

"Do you think there is something in you that likes these things?"

"Who
likes
war? Besides the worms?"

"Have I ever told you the story of the flagfish?" Hopp smirked; Dante smoothed the impatience from his face. "Don't worry, it's not a lengthy story. In the old days when all such things happened, the flagfish was the most beautiful creature in the river. Its fins fluttered from its sides like silken banners. The trout and the perch watched it strut past with envy; the catfish buried itself in the muck to hide its ugliness.

"The flagfish saw this, and was prideful. It turned this way and that, putting itself on display. Finally the catfish could stand no more. It burst from the mud and bit the flagfish's shimmering fin, spitting the piece out in the water. 'What did I do to deserve this?' the flagfish said. The others gave no answer. It turned with a flourish and the perch nipped its tail.

"The flagfish fled down the river to a pond. For a while, it kept its fins tucked close. Soon, however, it was flashing them again. When the schools of carp could stand no more, they swarmed the flagfish and chewed its fins down to the nub. The flagfish could no longer swim: so of course it died."

"Illuminating stuff," Dante said. "This time, it wasn't my fault."

Hopp dabbed his brush in its ink pot. "I will have to take your word."

Dante scowled at the rushing stream. He knew the norren as well as any human alive, yet there were times their thoughts remained as opaque as when he'd first met them. Opaque by human standards, that is—and that was his problem, he was thinking like a human. In virtually all situations, norren valued the abstract above the concrete.

"If the Minister smashed Narashtovik and menaced the Territories, you would just walk away with the clan, wouldn't you? Or hide in the wilds where he wouldn't care to hunt you down."

"That sounds likely."

"I won't pretend you're in our debt," Dante said, sounding out his thoughts. "The war benefited Narashtovik, too. We're our own place again, as we used to be. So the question is this: Is Narashtovik's existence, as a material thing and an idea, worth fighting for?"

"To you, that's the most compelling question? If we fought for everything worth fighting for, when would we not be at war?"

The question put Dante back on his heels. "But if you follow that path to its end, nothing is ever worth fighting for. How can that possibly be true?"

Hopp smiled slowly. "Now that is a question that cuts."

"Can we agree there is no responsibility to fight for anything except survival?"

"Assuming survival is deemed to be good? We can agree to that."

"Then I ask you to ask the clan if they value Narashtovik enough to fight for it." Dante smiled. "Tell anyone who does to be at the Sealed Citadel in no less than a week."

Hopp grinned, added a final stroke to his canvas, and stepped back to regard it. "A good dodge."

Dante spent an hour catching up with anyone who felt like speaking to him; he spent less time with his clan than he liked, but still felt as if many of them were his friends. He and Cee rode out at mid-afternoon.

"So?" she said.

He glanced downhill at the camp in the trees. "Hopp rightly views this as a suicide mission. He won't unilaterally decide to throw the clan into that. But he was unable to object to asking for volunteers."

"That's what all that talk about philosophy and mythical fish was about? Why not come out and say what you mean?"

"Because he's a norren. And a chieftain. His people chose him because of that ability to see and pursue the meaning behind the decisions posed to him."

She chuckled dryly. "No wonder Gask kept them in chains for so long. Imagine if human leaders were expected to act the same way?"

"I try to."

"I'm sure you do," she said with irritating lightness. "Where to next?"

"The Nine Pines." Dante fiddled with his earring. "Except Mourn isn't answering his loon."

"What could that mean?"

"He's asleep. Or he isn't wearing it. Or he lost it." Dante's horse crested the hill and started down the other side. "Their territory is a couple days' ride from here. I'll keep trying."

They rode until sunset, then camped in a draw. Dante had no idea what the Broken Herons' response would be to his plea. He would be no less surprised if none of them volunteered than if all of them did. He was consoled by the fact that recruiting the norren wasn't critical to the success of their mission. A troop of norren warriors would be an extremely valuable asset—and they needed every single advantage they could get—but they could infiltrate Corl without a single norren beside them.

Blays' end of things was a different story. Dante checked with Nak every night for updates, but there was little to hear. He was fairly certain Blays meant to do as he said, and when it came to getting things done, there was no one Dante trusted more.

But if Blays' heart wasn't in it, or it was beyond him, Narashtovik would find itself in dire straits. They could still attempt to cross the Woduns the typical way, but the logistics would be a nightmare. And there would be casualties. Impossible to guess how many. The cold would claim more than enough. He couldn't possibly hollow caverns large enough for a full troop of soldiers and their beasts of burden. A single kapper attack could decimate them. They would be much slower, too. What would befall them if they were deep in the Woduns when the Minister cracked apart the peaks?

That didn't sound like much of a plan. Better to wait in Narashtovik and prepare the best they could than to throw away soldiers, nethermancers, and resources doing battle with the mountains.

Two days later, they entered the lands where Dante believed the Nine Pines spent the winters, the rough hills (some grassy, some pine-coated) that abutted the mighty river demarcating the border between human and norren. Mourn still hadn't answered his loon. It must have been destroyed or lost—or its owner was.

Dante rode from ridge to ridge, checking every stream and pond big enough to sustain a clan of fifty-plus norren. At one, they found fish bones, still clean and white, and filled-in latrines. Tracks indicated the norren had headed upstream. A couple miles later, they found more bones and refuse. The third such site was fresh enough you could still smell the dung. It was at the end of the line, a hill-fed pond out of which the stream sprung.

But they hadn't seen a single norren all the while.

Cee toed a chunk of antler that had been deemed unfit for carving. "These guys are supposed to be friends of yours, right?"

"I'm closer to many of them than I am to my own clan. Why?"

She stood. "Looks funny, that's all."

With no more trail to follow, they burned two more days criss-crossing the hills. These felt endless, but the territory of any given clan was relatively circumscribed, and Dante thought they'd covered much of the Nine Pines' grounds. On the clan borders (which were unmarked, permeable, and elastic), they twice ran into other clans, one of whom Dante knew fairly well. He stopped to explain the situation to the chief and was allowed to address the entire clan. Unsurprisingly, most had little interest in running off to die for Narashtovik, but two young men and one middle-aged woman volunteered on the spot. He asked them to head to the Citadel as soon as they could.

Both clans claimed to have seen the Nine Pines recently and suggested they were still in the area. Dante got Nak to loon the tribes Narashtovik was in contact with. None had seen Mourn or his people, but Nak informed Dante, with no small pride, that he'd been able to convince three warriors to join the cause.

Dante wondered if he should give up on Mourn and visit the other clans instead. There were thousands of norren scattered across the hills, and Dante would be happy to come away with just a score of recruits. But he trusted Mourn and the Nine Pines above all others, both personally and as warriors. Anyway, at this point, he was starting to get worried about them.

On the morning of their sixth day since leaving Narashtovik, with three to go before they'd need to head home, Cee returned from foraging with a sack of frostberries and an odd look on her face.

She glanced back into the trees. "You up for something really stupid?"

"You're going to have to be more specific about the nature of this stupid. Is it potentially lethal stupid?"

"Nothing that would get you killed. More likely, you'll want to crawl into a hole until the shame goes away."

"That's where all my best ideas come from," Dante said. "Let's get dumb."

"Great. Hand over your clothes."

"You didn't say anything about
nude
stupidity."

She rolled her eyes. "Your spares. And your cloak. Let's go."

He handed over his cloak and the change of clothes he carried in case he got soaked or soiled. Cee glanced into the woods again and carried his clothes and her pack into a thicket. Twigs snapped. Leaves crunched. Dante sat on a rock and tallied up the other clans who might be worth contacting. If they called off the hunt for the Nine Pines today, they could take a meandering route back to Narashtovik, with time to speak to several clans along the way. That decided it. Better to come back with his second choices than to return with nothing.

Cee emerged from the brush dragging a bulky object that snagged in the twigs and thorns.

"What—?" Dante started.

She shushed him. "Get in the thicket. Don't say a word. Got it?"

He nodded and moved past her. She was lugging a scarecrow made from his clothes. As he settled himself inside the shrubs, she heaved it on top of his horse and lashed it in place. She mounted up and led his horse out into the clearing just past the trees.

Dante crouched in the thorns, feeling as foolish as she'd promised. He was cold without his cloak but not so much that he was shivering yet. He didn't know how long he was supposed to wait. Until Cee decided to come back, he supposed. He wrapped his arms around his legs to stay warm.