After allowing the first couple of frantic swallows, the man asked, “Where’s your horse?”
Around his mouthful Inglis answered, “Left her lame on the Crow Road. Then I walked.”
“Oh.” The man’s mouth pursed in disappointment.
It came to Inglis that the young woman must have prepared this repast for him, with her own hands. He eyed her more closely over his chewing. Her face was mountain-broad, lips and cheeks rouged only by cold, her body work-lean; her youth lent her a passing prettiness. The fellow was not much older. Hunter, shepherd? Both? Up here, all men put their hands to all tasks, as the turning seasons ordered them. The two shared the light hair and blue eyes of this mountain stock, close kin surely.
“Who are you?” Inglis asked in turn after his next swallow. “Where is this place?”
The woman smiled hesitantly at him. “I’m Beris. That’s my brother Bern.”
Bern offered more reluctantly, “This is the summer grazing camp for Linkbeck, the village in the valley. Our hunting camp in winter.”
So, he’d not traveled quite so far back in time as the place’s crude look suggested. Not to the world of Great Audar’s era, when these mountain tribes had held their high fastnesses against the invaders as the Wealdean forest tribes had not. Or maybe the Darthacans had taken one look at the damp precipitous country and decided they didn’t want it that much. The Temple’s invasion in these lands, replacing the old ways with the new, had been a slower process, more a gradual weeding out than a violent burning over. With a chance, a hope, if not a prayer, that they’d not uprooted everything…
No. He eyed the great dog, its furry triangular ears pricked as it tracked the progress of the meat strips to his mouth. A certainty. “That dog. Who owns it?”
“Arrow is Savo’s beast,” said Beris. “Had him from his uncle Scuolla this past autumn.”
The dog lay down on its belly, wriggled up to Inglis, and shoved its head under his left hand. No pup, but a full-grown animal, mature—middle-aged and dignified, after a fashion. Absently, Inglis scratched it behind the ears. Tail thumping, it whined and licked at his bloodied arm.
“He seems to think he’s your dog, now,” said Bern, watching this play through narrowed eyes. “Hasn’t left your side since we brought you in. Why is that—traveler?”
“Was Savo with you when you found me?”
“Aye, we’d gone out hoping for red deer. I’m not sure you were a fair trade, since we can’t skin or eat you.”
They’d seemed willing enough to skin him; Inglis trusted they would have stopped short of the eating, yes. But there had been no shaman among the hunters, or they would surely have recognized each other, and this conversation would be very different. So, not Savo.
“That knife,” said the brother, Bern, looking at him sideways. “Are those real jewels? I bet Churr not.”
Inglis had never imagined they might not be real. He drew out the knife and stared at it. The slim eight-inch blade was hafted in walrus ivory; he could feel the echo of old life in it when he held it in his hand. The beautifully curving hilt widened to an oval at the end, capped with gold, flat face holding small garnets, one gone missing in some past time and not replaced. They encircled a cabochon-cut red stone he guessed might be a ruby. Tooth and blood, how fitting. His blood on the steel had darkened and dried already, its life sucked in as ravenously as he’d just wolfed down hard bread and cheese. He set about rubbing off the residue on his trouser leg. “I suppose so. It was an heirloom.”
The silence in the room grew a shade tighter. He glanced up to find a disquieting stew of curiosity, avarice, and fear simmering in his watchers’ faces. But… they had brought him in off the mountain, and given him food and drink. He owed them warning.
“Why do you, uh, give it your blood?” asked Beris warily. “Is it, that is, do you think it’s a magic knife?”
Inglis considered the impossibly complicated truth, and the need to quash that avarice before it created trouble—more trouble—and finally settled on, “It is accursed.”
Bern drew breath through his teeth, half daunted, half dubious.
Beris’s gaze tracked up and down the scabs on his arms. “Couldn’t you feed it, I don’t know, animal blood?”
“No. It has to be mine.”
“Why?”
His lips drew back in something not much like a smile. “I’m accursed, too.”
The pair excused themselves rather swiftly, after that. But they left the food and barley water. Arrow declined to follow, though invited with an open door, soft calls, chirps, a whistle, and firm commands. Bern circled back as if to grab the dog by its ruff and drag him, but, at Arrow’s lowered head and glower, thought better of the plan. The door closed behind them.
Like most people, they underestimated the keenness of Inglis’s hearing.
“What do you make of him now?” asked Beris, pausing a few paces beyond the hut.
“I don’t know. He talks like a Wealdman. I think he must be out of his head.”
“He wasn’t very feverish. Do you think he might be uncanny? Dangerous?”
“Mm, maybe not to us, the shape he’s in right now. Perhaps to himself. Churr could inherit that knife he coveted so much after all, if he goes from chopping up his arms to cutting his own throat.”
“Why would a fellow do such a thing?”
“Well, mad.” (Inglis could hear the shrug.)
“His voice was very compelling, did you feel it? It gave me the shivers.”
“Mother and Daughter, Beris, don’t be such a girl.” But the mockery was tinged with unease.
“I am a girl.” A considering pause. “He might be handsome, if he smiled.”
“Don’t let Savo hear you say that. He’s already annoyed enough about his dog.”
“I am not Savo’s dog.”
Siblings indeed, for then he barked at her, and she hit him, and their squabbling voices faded out of even Inglis’s earshot.
He coaxed the dog up under his arm with a bribe of smoked meat. Hugged him in, stared into the clear brown eyes, then closed his own and tried to sense. The animal’s spirit-density was almost palpable, hovering just beyond his present crippled reach. How many generations of dogs were poured into this Dog? Five? Ten? More than ten? How many generations of men had cultivated it? This could be a dog to make a shaman, immensely valuable.
And who was Scuolla, to give such a treasure away? Was the man an illicit hedge shaman, had he made Arrow? Intended this nephew Savo for his secret apprentice? Or was he unknowing of what he’d possessed? Horrifying, that he might be unknowing.
Appalling hope, that he might be wise.
“As soon as I’m on my feet,” he told the dog with a little shake, “let’s go find this ungrateful old master of yours, eh?”
Arrow yawned hugely, treating Inglis to a waft of warm dog-breath entirely lacking in enchantment, and rolled over like a bolster against Inglis’s side.
V
Penric’s party came to the town of Whippoorwill, at the head of the lake, in the early winter dusk. It was half the size of the more successful Martensbridge, and a bit resentful of the fact, but still fivefold larger than Greenwell Town of Penric’s youth. Even the anxious Grayjay made no suggestion that they press on any farther this night. At the local chapter of the Daughter’s Order, which lay under the princess-archdivine’s direct rule, they found crowded, but free, lodgings.