Hundreds of clansmen and clanswomen stood in silence as Orwin Shank clicked the team of horses into motion and drove Anwyn Bird's body east toward the Wedge. It had been a small victory for Raina, that insistence that Anwyn not be laid to rest in the Oldwood as was planned and considered proper. She had won it not by reasonable argument or by wielding whatever small power she had left as chiefs wife. She had won it by a near-hysterical fit thrown in the presence of many people in the greathearth. "No," she had cried when she learned where Stannig Beade intended to place the body. "No. No. NO!"
After the outburst Stannig Beade had seemed pleased to let Raina have her way. It had been dark days for her then and she looked back now and realized she had lost some essential portion of control. And she was not sure she had it back.
Certainly she knew enough to play her role as grieving friend and chiefs wife on the greatcourt this gray and cloudy morning. She kept her silence and nodded acknowledgments at people, her bearing grave. But beyond that she felt wild and not-properly-hinged; an insane person playing at being sane.
People were treating her as if she were a damaged piece of pottery likely to break. They were careful with her, watchful, attempting to buffer her from shocks. Raina despised such treatment and would not normally have stood for it, but she could not rally the will to bring it to an end. It had its comforts, the buffering, the cautious care. She was fed and clucked over, shielded from the messages that arrived nearly daily from Ganmiddich and Bannen, and relieved of the duty of running this vast and creaking house.
Merritt had stepped into her place, emerging from the widows' hearth like an ancient warrior called by a sacred horn, Raina did not mind it much. At least Merritt was a Hailsman.
"Are you not coming?" Merritt said to her now as the cart lurched from the solid stone of the court onto the softer, lower surface of the road. "I'll walk with you."
The head widow's hand fluttered toward Raina's arm but Raina stepped away from it. She wanted no one touching her. "I am not going."
Merritt opened her mouth to protest this latest strangeness, but then thought better of it. Lips pressed into a tense line, she nodded curtly, and left to join the procession that was forming behind the cart.
Raina stood still against the flow of people. Corbie Meese, holding his delicate wife Sarolyn firmly by the waist, nodded to her as he passed. No man or woman would ride a horse to the laying-down of Anwyn Bird. They would walk the league and a half to the Wedge, where Stannig Beade would be waiting for them by a site he had deemed suitable to one of such high status. It would be a wooded glade cleared of snow or a stone bank above a stream, or perhaps she would be laid close to one of the paths so all that used the Wedge in the coming months would see her slowly blackening corpse and pay the respects that were its due.
Blackhail never buried its dead. They were left to rot on open ground, often in full view of hunting tracks, roads, rivers and lakes. Children who played in the woods and fields might stumble upon the hollowed-out basswoods and receive a lesson in death. No matter how beautifully a corpse was prepared, how it was nibbed with poisons and packed with precious metals, the flesh always corrupted in the end.
Raina recalled a nasty trick played on her the first summer she was here. She had befriended a handful of clan maids, Ellie Horn was one of them, and it had been decided they would go to the Oldwood to collect the wood violets that were in bloom and could be brought home and pressed into oil to make unctions. The girls were high-spirited that day, their voices sharp, their whispers theatrical and broken off by sudden gales of laugher. Raina recalled Ellie Horn complimenting her most particularly on her dove gray wool dress, "So pretty," she had said. "What would you call the color? Mouse? Mud?" The rest of the girls had giggled wildly while Ellie just looked at Raina with big fake-innocent eyes. Raina remembered the skin on her face pulling tight. She had been unsure of herself in such new company and had said nothing in her own defense. They had reached the first stand of trees by then and it seemed easier to go along and pick violets-
After they had spent an hour or so in the woods Ellie Horn had sought her out "I'm sorry for what I said about your dress. It was mean of me." There was such candor in Ellie's voice, such appeal in her bright blue eyes, that Raina had immediately believed her. "Look," Ellie had continued, moving closer, "I just found the best, most purply violets growing out of that downed log over there. I was going to take them myself, but then I started feeling bad about what happened and I thought to myself, I'll let Raina pick them." Raina had hesitated. Ellie nodded vigorously toward the old felled log. "Go on. You'll be surprised by how fine they smell."
That was the first time in her life Raina had seen a dead body. She had approached the log hopeful, not about the violets as much as about the prospect of friendship with Ellie Horn. Ellie was the important girl in the clan. The prettiest, the most smartly dressed, the ringleader. Raina recalled seeing something black and burned-looking and not understanding what it was. She had moved closer? — smelled the sickly foulness of rank meat, and then recognized the contours of a face. The blackened skin was floating above the skull, suspended on a sea of maggots.
She had not screamed. That must have disappointed Ellie Horn and the other three girls who were hiding in the shadows behind the yews. The girls had broken into nervous, excited laughter and it was only then that Raina fled.
It had been one of the many hard lessons she'd had to learn at Blackhail. This was not an easy clan. Its roundhouse lay the farthest north of any in the clanholds, and had not been designed to keep out the cold or take advantage of the bright northern sun. It had been built solely for defense. The main structure had so few windows that there was only one chamber in the entire building where you could be sure to feel sunlight on a cloudless day. The winters were long here, and springs came late. Raina had learned to set aside the light and airy pleasures of Dregg—the dancing, the hotwall gardening, the embroidering with city-bought silks—and had replaced them with more earthly ones instead. There was the pleasure of a sprung trap with a mink in it, the delight of being recognized by a herd of milk cows and the satisfaction of building a hot blazing fire against the cold.
She had learned to love Blackhail, and its proud, grim ways. She had even become proud and grim herself, and when friends or kin visited from Dregg she would feel superior to them. We are the first amongst clans, she would remind herself as she tolerated their frivolities. That claim was Blackhail's alone. Dregg might be brighter and better situated, but it would never be first.
Raina stared at the cart rolling across the graze and the crowd of people walking behind it and tried to hold on to some of that old and deeply held pride. She had the sense that if she could it might anchor her. She feared that she, Raina Blackhail, was drifting free of this clan. How much could a person lose and remain whole? A husband, peace of mind, a dear friend? What was left? Dagro was gone. Effie was gone. Now Anwyn. She lived in a house full of strangers, some of whom wished her harm. Since Dagro had died her life had been this clan. But this clan had changed. The Hailstone had shattered and the gods had fled. Stannig Beade had wheeled in half of the Scarpestone to lure them back, but no god would enter such an ili-begot stone. Blackhail was cursed. Its chief had murdered its chief, its guide was a man who would stop at nothing to gain power, and the guidestone at its heart was as dead and useless as Anwyn Bird's corpse.
Breathing hard, Raina turned her hack on the procession She found herself staring directly at the Scarpestone that stood on its tar nished silver plinth at the center of the greacourt. Work had just been completed on a wooden canopy that would be hung with skins to protect the narrow hunk of granite from rain and snow. Raina's lip twitched as she looked at it. At first she had wondered why the gods didn't simply destroy it as they had the first Hailstone. It would be an easy thing for a god—an exhalation. Now she realized the god didn't care..