“Perhaps,” said Jame, chilled. It still seemed strange that Vant should hunt with the Burnt Man’s pack, but there was a rage in him that apparently had survived his death by fire. And he was Greshan’s grandson, tenacious of life.
“I will have justice, or I will have revenge.”
Against whom? Torisen? Damson? Herself?
“If so,” said Gran Cyd, following her own thoughts, “he does his followers no good. They should have slept the cold time away, keeping their fires banked. What came for our slayer could barely shamble through the snow. If he had not fed them, I doubt that they would have survived winter.”
That sounded like Vant, who had never learned that to lead is also to serve.
Moreover, it explained why he hadn’t brought the Burning Ones south to hunt his true prey: they had been too weak.
Were they still? Should she fear them as she did that other seeker-out of guilt, the Dark Judge?
But the sun still shone and, really, what did she have to feel guilty about?
Don’t answer that.
They passed several waterfalls, then a series of them rising in tiers to the lip of an escarpment overhung with ice. In the field below the men had set up trestle tables and were cooking in huge cauldrons suspended over pale, bright flames.
“Here are the Steps,” said Gran Cyd. “Climb them and behold a wonder.”
Jame found a twisting trail beside the river and scrambled up it, clinging to bare shrubs. At the top, she looked out over an ice-locked lake winding back between steep, dark mountains into premature dusk. Wintry sunlight gleamed blue off the nearer shore, deepening to cobalt under the streamers of snow that drifted over it. Sparkles here and there reflected back from ice rills as if the night sky had fallen into the ocean.
“Is this the headwater of the Silver?” Jame asked as she regained the queen’s side.
“Yes. It stretches through a chain of lakes farther north, to the foot of a glacier, in the shadow of a greater darkness.”
That sounded uncomfortably like the Barrier with Perimal Darkling on the other side. One tended to forget that it was there, just out of sight.
“That, they say, is where the blackheads breed. We have yet to see one. The northern tribes speak of a lampreylike fish native to those benighted waters that lays its eggs in other fish and seeks to migrate with them even as the eggs hatch within and devour their host. If they should ever find their way into the Silver . . .”
Chingetai laughed behind them, making Jame start. “A tale to frighten children. They even claim that the larvae can reanimate the dead. I ask you!”
Cyd turned to face him, hands on her hips. “You are a great hunter and raider, housebond, doubtless, but no fisherman upon the ice. The depths beneath terrify you.”
The chief swelled in outrage. He really was a big man, thought Jame, looking up at him, seeing mostly chest and the underside of a jutting, bearded chin. Still, he wasn’t quite up to Marc’s stature, in any sense of that word.
“Nothing scares me!” he declared. “When my sick friend craved fresh salmon, did I not go out onto the ice and catch him one? He was so overjoyed that he devoured it raw and so regained his strength.”
“Not noticeably,” said the queen wryly.
She indicated a haggard man hovering near the cooking pots as if led there by his nose. His eyes were glassy and while otherwise thin, his belly swelled like that of a pregnant woman. The cooks shied away from him.
Chingetai harrumphed and stalked away.
“Fresh salmon, at this time of the year. I would think that he caught one of the mothers of the school who return more than once to spawn, except that this one was male. With eggs. Nonetheless,” Gran Cyd lowered her voice and leaned to confide in Jame, “it was an act of courage for him to go out onto the ice. He fears deep water in all its forms and has ever since his sister was chosen when they were both children.”
“Chosen for what?”
“Ah.” The queen turned away from her. “Here is my sister Anku, leader of the war maids.”
Anku might have been the queen’s age or slightly older; with her weathered face and trim, hard body, it was difficult to tell. She smiled at Jame. “I hear that you have cast your glamour over my grandniece Prid. She talks of no one else.”
“I don’t deserve that.”
“Ah, but who among the Kencyr is closer to being a war maid than you, and such a one as to have fought the River Snake and won! Prid envies what she sees as our free life.”
“It’s hardly that,” said Jame, thinking of the trials of Tentir.
“So you and I know full well. But Prid remembers her mother, who died in child-bed. For her, the village lodges stink of duty and death. A pity for that nice boy Hatch, now that she is almost of an age to make her choice.”
The crowd stirred. “Here comes the feast!” exclaimed many voices.
The men served them steaming bowls of fish stew—perch, pike, walleye, and blue gimp—all the fruits of winter fishing boiled up with the season’s last root vegetables, washed down with tankards of strong ale. Noisy, almost hectic merriment spread. Unlike the previous time when Jame had feasted with them, rather than simply enjoying themselves, the Merikit seemed to be trying to get drunk as fast as possible.
One of the men tending the fire suddenly knelt, drew out a long, charred stick with a knob at each end, and brandished it on high with a shout of triumph. The Merikit cheered.
“A Burnt Man’s bone,” said Gran Cyd, pleased. “Probably a femur. They have been showing up in our fireplaces ever since the winter solstice. We have maybe half of them by now, set aside for the Summer’s Eve bonefires.”
At that time, Chingetai would use them to close the Merikits’ borders; but if even one was missing, as had happened last year due to Jame’s unintentional interference, the rite would fail. Such matters in the hills certainly were complicated.
“You seem very pleased,” said Jame to the queen, speaking under the noisy chatter. “Has the Burnt Man’s protection as a border guard entirely been withdrawn this past year?”
“Oh, but yes. Not that it isn’t weakened every year between the burning of the effigy and the return of the bones on Summer’s Eve. We risk something, sacrificing one of the Four and then waiting for his resurrection. Hence the importance of this ritual evoking the protection of the Eaten One.”
“I’m still confused,” Jame said. “You need special permission to fish the Silver, but not the Silverhead?”
“The lake falls under the protection of neither the River Snake nor the Eaten One. We take our chances with what swims there.”
“Then, too, one of your stories says that the Maid was eaten by the River Snake, another that she stuck halfway down the gullet of a giant catfish.”
Tungit paused in passing. “Lady, these are men’s mysteries, not to be questioned.”
“Then go away, old man,” said the queen, not unkindly, “lest our foolish talk offend you.”
The shaman shrugged and continued on to his place at table.
“I will be sorry someday to lose that old one. He has as much sense as his creed allows him and, I suspect, somewhat more. Look, Earth Wife’s Favorite.”
She drew a stone figurine out of the pouch that hung at her waist and gave it to Jame. It was roughly diamond-shaped, bulging toward the middle, tapering at the points. It took Jame a moment to make sense of the lines scratched on it. Two sagging breasts, a pendulous belly, no head, hands or feet to speak of . . . all the stress was on fertility, none on personality. “This is the Earth Wife?”