Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) (14 page)

A cold hand stole through her furs and moulded itself around her breast, squeezing it. Then it began unlacing the front of her jerkin.

‘Drwyn will have your fruits for fish-bait,’ she said quietly, eyes still closed. The hand stopped.

‘Only if you tell him.’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

Harl resumed picking at her laces. ‘You’re a whore. One
daigh
is much the same as another to your kind.’ He used the crude name for the male genitals, perhaps to see if she was shocked. ‘You spread your legs for the old chief, too, didn’t you?’

‘So what if I did?’ Teia snaked her left arm free of her furs and grabbed his wrist. ‘I am Drwyn’s woman now. What do you think he’ll do when he learns you’ve had your filthy paws on me?’

He was not deterred. ‘He’ll not marry you. No chief would take a bride who wasn’t a virgin, not to be the mother of his sons. He’ll tire of you soon enough. Perhaps then he’ll give you to me.’

‘Who says this? The Speaker herself sent me to him, you fool!’ She ground her fingers into the small bones below Harl’s thumb until his hand spasmed and thrust it away from her. His face was satisfyingly pained. ‘Think before you go dipping your fingers in another man’s mead! Now let me down. I want my own horse.’

Harl jerked the reins, bringing his mount to a sudden stop. He let go of her without warning so that she slithered helplessly to the ground. Unable to catch herself, she landed heavily on her ankle and fell, yelping with pain.

Her grey mare was tied to the saddle; Harl pulled free the leading rein and dropped it.

‘My lady,’ he sneered, then spurred his horse into a trot and left her.

Teia got to her feet slowly. Side throbbing, she limped over to the grey as the rest of the clan filed past up the rocky trail into the rumpled skirts of the mountains. Most kept their faces blank but some watched her curiously, openly, and she wondered how much had been seen or overheard. More than enough to start gossip at the cook-fires, no doubt.

Righting her clothing, she mounted, wincing at the sharp pain in her ankle, and waited until she saw her family riding past. She urged the mare over to join them, but her father brought his own horse out of the line to block her path.

‘Da!’ she protested, peering past him. Her sisters had their heads high in spite of the wind. Only Ana looked back, one brief, sorrowful glance over her shoulder.

‘You don’t belong with us any more,’ Teir said. He refused to meet her gaze. ‘We are not your family now.’

‘But I’m your daughter!’ Tears prickled at her eyes. She tried to push past him, but her father’s horse was war-trained and blocked her at a twitch of the reins.

‘Once you were. Not any more. It is clan law. The Speaker . . .’ His voice broke and his lips twisted, as if the words tasted foul in his mouth. Just for a second he glanced down at her and she saw the anguish in his eyes. ‘Things are not as they were with Drw. Bear him a son, Teia. Make him wed you. Restore your honour, and mine.’

Then he whirled his horse around and cantered away to join the rest of the family. He did not look back. Teia watched him go, fat tears rolling down her cheeks and the bitter wind lashing her hair around her face. Misery welled up in her chest and pressed on her lungs.

‘But I
am
carrying, Da,’ she whispered. ‘Please come back.’

Teia reined in at the top of the stony track leading up to the caves. She was tired and cold after a week spent sleeping – or rather, not sleeping – on the ground; the land in the foothills was too steep to pitch tents, and even rolled in the chief’s blankets with his body at her back for warmth, she’d been unable to rest for long before the cold or the pain in her rib woke her.

In between dark, half-remembered dreams she’d lain watching the slow wheel of moons and stars across the heavens until one by one the constellations dipped out of sight behind the wall of the southern mountains. Then, on the third night, the clouds had rolled in and she was denied even that.

Now it was snowing again. Dry, floating stuff for the most part, it hung in the air like ash, or the feathers from a pigeon taken by a hawk. Drifting, snatched up and scattered again by chance gusts of wind, never able to settle. No matter how she pulled her hood up and fur collar close, flakes found their way behind it and down her neck, tiny biting kisses on her skin. She was too tired and sore to try to keep them out any more.

Through the snow came the last of her kinsfolk, thickly wrapped against winter’s bite, leading pack ponies, carrying bundles on their backs. In ones and twos they disappeared into the broad mouth of the mountain. Teia watched them from the far end of the ledge outside the cave. Her own family had already gone inside, and the Speaker before them, all without a backward glance. She’d long since given up hoping someone would catch her eye and acknowledge that she still existed.

She should have been inside well before now, readying the chief’s chamber for his return from the hunt – after months of disuse it would need work to be made habitable again: carpets spread and hangings hung to mask the stone’s chill – but she couldn’t make herself go into the mountain and give up the daylight that was her last reminder of her freedom.

The dark of the caves had never daunted her before. Now she dreaded it: the mere idea of going into the earth felt as if she would be descending to the underworld, where the stories said Noam had gone to rescue the princess. Except she wasn’t a princess, and no one was going to come looking for her. So she sat her horse under leaden skies and watched the snowflakes dance around her, and wished she was far, far away.

Winter was the wrong time to run. Every season on the plains had its dangers: spring floods that rendered the rivers too swift and turbulent to cross; the windstorms that came with summer’s heat and scoured the earth of every leaf, every blade of grass for miles around. But in the winter, when the days grew short and dark and the great white cold crept down from the mountaintops, then men went outside to die.

Hunting the white stag, they called it, when they’d had enough. Old men, mostly, afraid of infirmity or losing their wits, but young men too sometimes, grown tired before their time, would take up a spear and go out into the night for one last hunt. They never returned. Sometimes their kin would find them come the spring, build a cairn over them and sing their souls to the afterworld, but more often the plain simply swallowed them, bones and all.

The wind picked up and Teia shivered despite the thick beaver fur pulled up to her chin. Probably most of the missing were dead, but surely not every man who went to hunt the white stag was ready to die. Surely some of them survived, maybe joined the Lost Ones. It must be possible to endure. It must – if one were strong.

Taking one last look around at the dark pines stubbling the lower slopes of the mountain, the plains beyond shifting in and out of view through veils of snow, she dismounted and led her horse inside.

10

DUNCAN

‘Duncan.’

Kael’s voice. Duncan opened his eyes, squinting in the lantern-light. Leaping shadows and Kael’s steaming breath gave his face a demonic cast.

‘What is it?’

‘We have company.’ Kael set down the lantern and ghosted back to his watch.

Duncan kicked off his blankets and shivered into the cloak he’d been keeping warm underneath them with his body before stepping out of the cave to follow Kael through the sheeting snow. Blizzards had sprung up in the short, bitter days towards the heel end of the year, one after another, slowing their progress to a crawl and finally penning them in that small cave for the night when the conditions grew too dangerous to push on to the shelter of the fortress. The snowfall had slackened a little with the dawn, but the clouds showed no sign of emptying. They squatted over the mountains that ringed Saardost Keep, smothering the sky with their skirts.

He had barely a glimmer of snowlight to help him pick a path along the ledge above the valley. A black shape against the white mountainside beckoned him forward and he tucked into a notch in the rocks beside Kael. Below them, on the other side of the valley, the keep was a smudge in the snow.

‘Tell me where I should be looking,’ he said, and Kael pointed towards the vague shape of the easternmost tower of the main keep. Duncan squinted but saw only snow. ‘I can’t see anything. It’s whiter than a virgin’s thighs out here.’

‘Wait.’

There. The snow billowed and lifted like a curtain over an open window and he saw a smear of orange light before the curtain dropped again. Firelight. Someone was either careless or extremely confident.

‘How many?’

‘Two for sure,’ Kael said. ‘There’s a pair of saddle horses and a pack pony inside the guardhouse.’

‘You’ve been down there? Slaine’s stones, Kael!’ Duncan bit back anything more. There was no point reminding Kael that he’d put himself in danger, or what might have happened if he’d been discovered. The sallow-faced seeker went his own way and always had. Trying to change him was about as useful as trying to change the wind.

Shrugging, Kael said, ‘We needed to know. They’re Nimrothi, by their saddle charms.’

The Nimrothi hadn’t crossed the mountains in numbers in a thousand years, not even to trade. Duncan stared at him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

He would be. Kael knew his craft too well to be mistaken about something like that. This could not be good news. Sighing, Duncan swiped clinging snow off his face. ‘You’d better fetch Sor.’

Kael’s outline faded into the blizzard. Minutes later, footsteps creaked through the snow as he returned with Duncan’s brother and they wedged themselves amongst the rocks next to him.

‘Two scouts?’ Sor said. He peered through the wavering veils of snow at the hulking shape of the fortress. ‘There’s no cover. If they were even half-awake they should have skewered you before you reached the bridge, Kael.’

‘I took a different way down. There’s a blind spot where the west wall butts against the mountain.’

Sor grunted. ‘And they’d have no reason to expect anyone sneaking up on them from that side.’

‘They’re probably hiding from the weather, like us,’ said Duncan. ‘I can’t see any tracks – they’ve not come out recently.’

‘There’s plenty of game here, even in winter. With staples brought in on the pony, they could have been sitting here for months.’ Swearing softly, Sor blinked snow off his eyelashes and studied the fortress as it ducked in and out of view.

‘Waiting for something.’ Duncan exchanged a long look with his brother and knew he was thinking the same thing. The Hound they’d been tracking.

It had been running on a more easterly course when Kael had lost its trail two days north of Brindling Fall, where they’d met the Gatekeeper. They’d doubled back through the pass and then travelled east along the foothills of the an-Archen towards home, only to have evil prickle across Kael’s senses like itchweed ten days later and lead them back north towards Saardost Keep. It could be the same Hound, another or something worse; only Kael could say and only when he got closer.

‘Can you still sense it, Kael?’ Duncan asked.

‘It’s not moved since the snow started,’ said the scarred clansman. His fingers flexed around his knife-hilt. ‘Laying up, most like.’

‘If it’s another Hound and the clans have summoned it . . .’ Sor’s blue eyes were hard as stones.

‘They wouldn’t be so foolish, would they?’ Even as he said it, Duncan felt the certainty hardening his gut.
No. They can’t have forgotten
.

‘We need to know what they know.’ Sor was brisk, determined.

‘I’ll go back down and ask. It needn’t be a long conversation.’ Kael eased his long knife meaningfully in its sheath.

Straightening up, Sor shook snow off his cloak. ‘No. If we go, we go together. Tell Cara to make sure the horses are secure, then join us up here. Where’s this alternative route down?’

‘Not far. Over there, where the ledge runs out.’ Duncan followed Kael’s gesture, but all he could see was black rock and snow.

His brother nodded, decision made. ‘Then lead on.’

The ledge became progressively narrower and steeper as it followed the flank of the mountain around towards the keep. Kael’s old tracks were mere dimples in the snow, already well filled. Duncan kept his hood pulled forward to shield his face and his eyes on the ground. If he missed his footing it was a long way down.