Loses His Way pointed out the place where he nearly speared the Icefalcon during the Summer of the Two White Mammoths, and the Icefalcon said haughtily, "You missed me by ten inches, and your spear was too dull to have pierced my tunic," at which they both laughed.
The lands were barren now and sheeted with meltwater from the glaciers, where it wasn't blotched with slunch. There was no hunting. All three were living on pemmican and dried lemming, and even Yellow-Eyed Dog looked thin.
A few days previously the Icefalcon had cut the tracks of the Talking Stars People, and though they'd covered their traces well he still recognized the hoofprints of Blue Child's horse Merrykiller in their midst.
Logically, if they were trailing the caravan, they'd move up Dwarf Willow Creek, or what was left of it.
Scrying and scouting the lands around them, Cold Death claimed she also had seen a band of the Earthsnake People, two hundred and two strong, led by their chieftain Pink Flowering Vine. The Icefalcon wondered whether they were aware of the presence of Blue Child and her warriors, or she of theirs.
In the nights the phosphor sheen of the slunch reflected in the thin meltwater lakes, and across those glowing sheets, by the light of cloud-dimmed summer stars, the Icefalcon half saw, half guessed the beating of demon wings.
Few demons dwelt in the Vale, and those that did seldom impinged on human affairs, but since his experiences of shadow-walking he felt a greater awareness of their presence and a greater uneasiness of them.
They piped and hooned and whistled on the water and called out in the semblance of those the Icefalcon had known here or echoed the voices of those who had once ridden through these lands.
Sitting on guard in the heavy jacket of mammoth wool that had been woven by a woman of the Empty Lakes People, he thought he heard Noon's voice: I thought to make you truly my son. Or was it, You have betrayed us all, my son? Another time he thought he heard Blue Child's cold slow tones, whispering the promise to give someone his horses and, later, the free joyous laugh of Dove in the Sun.
Beside him, Cold Death said softly, "Is it true that you left Dove in the Sun to die?"
He looked around quickly. His sister was one of the few he could not hear come up on him. She sat down at his side, tiny in her great coat of musk ox-hide, with her black eyes peeking out from beneath her skraggy black hair.
"She could not have lived, injured as she was," he explained patiently, as he had explained before, twelve years ago and many times since. The brilliance of the moonlight was such that he was able to knot thongs on a pair of snowshoes, a task he could have accomplished by touch in the dark; these he now set aside.
"White Bear of the Salt People speared her through, and she and her horse fell together off the high rocks in the Place of the Brown Dogs. I saw them lying on the highest of the three ledges there. The others in the band were pinned down by arrow fire, farther along the canyon. By the time I reached her she would have been dead. She was too young to have come on the raid. She had not the strength to keep up, nor to save herself when she was in trouble."
"Yet you allowed her to come."
The Icefalcon shrugged. "She thought herself ready."
Cold Death considered him with those bright prairie-dog eyes. "Did you love her?"
The Icefalcon looked away.
"Or did you allow her to come with your raiding party only because you knew Blue Child did not permit her to ride with hers? Because you wanted-out of love for her and a desire to show up Blue Child-to give her what Blue Child would not?"
The Icefalcon was silent. The doors of his heart shut, like the adamantine doors of the Keep, locked with hidden mechanisms of steel and guarded with the ghostly runes of ancient spells. Endlessly distant, some slunch-born nameless thing floated over the sterile landscape that spawned it and there was a bodiless crying of demon voices on the air.
For a time it seemed to him that he could see the diminutive Dove standing with her arms upraised in the dawn of the Summer Singing, blood running from the ritual cuts in her palms and sides, her hair the color of the new-lifted light and her clear voice carrying to the heavens.
He picked up his snowshoe again. "There was a time when I loved her. She had the heart of a young hawk, wanting to be a warrior, wanting to prove herself, to find her own name. She thought Blue Child was keeping her back on purpose, even while she loved her."
He knotted the leather and pulled it tight, fingers gauging the tension and the shape of the bowed wood.
His fingers were blistered with cold already; he tucked his hand in his armpit. "I told her that this was not so. By then I knew that they were for one another, heart and soul, and I had given over that love."
"Did you think her ready to take on a warrior of the Salt People?"
The Icefalcon shook his head. "I made an error." He went back to lacing the leather and the wood, not meeting his sister's eyes. "I have regretted it since. But Dove in the Sun made her own choice to ride with us. Blue Child knew this."
Beside him, Cold Death sighed. The glacier wind that whisked her breath like a white banner from her mouth bore on it the stench of the carrion in the wagons of Vair na-Chandros, the stink of the few sheep remaining, the smell of mules, and the waste of men who are eating badly of dried meat and slops.
"Blue Child knew this and hated me." The Icefalcon glanced back toward the shallow depression in the ground where Loses His Way slept, sharing his huddle of earth-colored robes with Yellow-Eyed Dog, invisible in the darkness.
"What Blue Child did was worse than murder. The day will come when I will have a reckoning with the chieftain of the Talking Stars People."
Cold Death left him and went to sleep on the other side of Yellow-Eyed Dog. The Icefalcon blew on his frozen fingers and continued to work, finding comfort in the undemanding task and listening all the while to the night.
At the end of that summer, when the Talking Stars People were once more in the ranges they'd disputed with the Salt People, he had returned to the Place of the Brown Dogs, though this was not the custom of his people, and had borne down the bones of Dove in the Sun, with some trouble, for they had been much scattered by coyote. He buried them farther back in the canyon, at the place where wild roses first appeared in spring. The Dove had loved wild roses, risking the bees that swarmed over the shallow streams to lie on the rocks and smell the blossoms.
The place, the Icefalcon realized, was not many miles north of where he now sat.
Around the fire pits of their hunting camps and the longhouse hearths of winter, the Icefalcon's kindred had all his life told stories: about the habits of bison and the fat-rumped black sheep and the big antelope of the North, about tracking hares and how musk oxen breed, about weather conditions at different times of the year in Dwarf Willow Creek or in the Sea of Grass, about the Ancestors. Useful matters having nothing to do with old kings or wild roses.
The Stars had spoken to the Ancestors, giving them spells and cantrips to keep their souls from being drunk away by the Watchers Behind the Stars and their eyes from being deceived by the illusions of the Dream Things.
But above the glowing ice, the milky sheets of water that lay at the feet of those black barren hills, the Stars kept their counsel.
Chapter 11
Vair na-Chandros and his men made camp beneath the diamond wall of the end of the world, the ice in the North. From the sheltering curve of the shoulder of rock that had once been known as Daylily Hill, the Icefalcon watched them take down the wagon-boxes from their wheels and cut trunks of birch and elder to make sled runners.
"Are all of them mad?" Loses His Way propped his shoulder against a deadfall spruce. "They cannot hope to get those wagons up the wall of the ice."
"It is an elaborate madness," murmured the Icefalcon, folding his arms. The wind that streamed cold and steady from the ice stirred his long braids-he had left off shaving, finally, a few days ago, to let his beard protect his face. "And Vair na-Chandros would seem to have convinced a goodly number to join him in his fantasy."