Heaven's Needle (15 page)

The iron road ran alongside the Windhurst, weaving in and out of blue-tipped spruce and speckled birches. Crusts of half-melted snow sparkled between the trees, dwindling day by day. They passed isolated farmhouses and charcoal burners' cottages, but saw few people abroad. A rider in the blue and gold of Knight's Lake galloped by on a lathered mare, and they crossed paths with a group of pilgrims traveling south to the Dome of the Sun, but otherwise they were alone.

To fill the time, Falcien took to singing trail songs in a surprisingly clear tenor. Once Heradion tried to join him in an unsurprisingly terrible one, until Evenna shut him up by throwing an apple core at his head. After that he contented himself with teaching Asharre to drive their wagon.

“It isn't hard,” he told her. “Calmest animals alive, these oxen. Just pretend they're big gray boulders and hold the reins relaxed, like so. It's a straight road here, you can hardly foul it up.”

“We do not have animals like this in my clan,” Asharre said through gritted teeth, holding the reins as if they were
live snakes. The oxen plodded on, mercifully oblivious. Despite their fearsome horns, they did appear to be calm. Calmer than she was, anyway. “Goats, yes. Dogs. Sometimes a wolf. Nothing like this. Nothing so … big.”

“If I didn't know better, I'd think you were afraid of them. Come now. You've been living in Calantyr for years. Surely you must be used to
oxen.
”

“Seeing them. Not driving them.”

“Well, then, you'll learn something new.”

“We'll end up in the river,” Asharre warned him, but to her everlasting amazement they did not.

In thanks, or perhaps revenge, she took to training with him by the campfires after the caravan stopped each night. Heradion was not as strong as she was, and he lacked her reach, but the Knights of the Sun had taught him well and he was a worthy opponent. Colison's guards lent them a pair of blunted practice blades. Though their balance and weight were nothing like Asharre's
caractan,
she could fight well enough with longswords to repay Heradion's driving lessons with bouquets of bruises.

After watching curiously the first night, Colison's men began to join them. Colison himself fought a few bouts. The merchant-captain used a quarterstaff rather than a sword, but he was no less deadly for lack of a blade. He was the only one, besides Heradion, who ever held his own against her.

“Are you sure you won't reconsider doing a Swordsday melee?” Heradion asked her one evening while they watched two caravan guards trade blows on a patch of muddy slush by the road. The slippery ground did nothing to help their footwork, and Asharre was not surprised when one of them lost his balance while backing away from the other. He splashed messily on his rump. The fallen man
slapped the mud to signal his concession, and the victor raised his hands to cheers and catcalls.

Stupid to surrender there, she thought. The winner had hurried forward, careless in victory, even before his foe gave up. Easy to kick his feet out from under him and subdue him in the mud. Asharre shook her head disapprovingly, then glanced at Heradion. “What?”

“Melee. Swordsday. Remember? You could make a fortune in the contests. More to the point,
I
could make a fortune betting on you. They might not give away princesses anymore, but I'm a simple man. I'll settle for coin.”

“
Sigrir
do not fight for sport. It would dishonor my training.”

“Not even for me? What if I bat my eyelashes?”

Asharre snorted and watched the next fight. He'd have better luck convincing the Blessed to open a brothel. All she had left of her clan were her oaths and her scars, and she could no more part with one than the other.

The second fight was as pitiful as the first. Neither of the men fell into the mud, but that was the best she could say of them. Heradion chuckled at her expression. “You won't enter a Swordsday melee, but you're willing to match swords against the likes of these?”

“This is practice.”

“Why wouldn't that be? You'd learn more than you do from these poor fellows.”

Asharre thought about that as the last match ended and she retired to her bedroll. It was tempting. But she had never fought for glory or for money, and she was not inclined to make excuses to start. A
sigrir
fought for duty. There might be glory in it, and she could claim her share of plunder from the dead, but a
sigrir
drew her weapon only for the honor and protection of her clan.

Who was left to remember that, though? Oralia was dead, and these summerlanders knew nothing of a
sigrir
's rules or rites. The Skarlar would not care what she did; to them she was an exile and a traitor, unworthy of her clan name. If she tried to go back to Frosthold, her sisters would shun her and the rest of the Skarlar would kill her. She'd earned that for Surag's death, if not for her own betrayal.

No one knew the full weight of her oaths save herself. If Asharre wanted to be free of them, wanted to fight for glory or for profit, she could … but when she faced that thought, and considered the cost of her liberty, she wanted to cling to her oaths even more tightly. There was a kind of terror in the idea of giving up a name she had worn for so long.

Except she had no clan. When Oralia died, so did the heart of Asharre's oath. There
were
no other Frosthold Skarlar for her to protect, and without them, she could not be true
sigrir.
Yet she still had her skills and her scars, and she could no more change those than she could bring her sister back across the Last Bridge.

So what was she?
Who
was she? If she was still to have some place in the world—and, as Asharre lay under the stars amid the cracking shell of her grief, she realized that she
did
still want that, somehow—she would have to weld some new identity from the pieces of the old. But what?

Sleep stole over her before she found an answer.

The next morning Colison's guards rose groaning and joking over the bruises they'd given each other. One man had a broken finger, and another complained of sore ribs. Those two went to Evenna to have their hurts prayed over, while the others ladled bowls of oat porridge from the communal kettle to break their fast.

“Nobody ever comes to
me
for healing,” Falcien grumbled.

“You're not as pretty.” Heradion sniffed ostentatiously. “And your perfume leaves a great deal to be desired. What
is
that smell, anyway? Did you rub a wet dog all over yourself this morning?”

Asharre took her bowl and left them to their insults. She found Colison walking along the wagons and checking their cargoes. He stopped by a wagon loaded with covered wicker cages and lifted the oilcloth draped over one. Inside was a long, lithe beast, shaped like a stoat but larger. Colison dropped a dead mouse into its musky-smelling cage.

“What is that?” Asharre asked.

“Hmm? Oh.” Colison dropped the oilcloth and moved to the next cage. It contained a similar creature, slightly darker. He fed it another mouse. “Ferrets. We're carrying five of them.”

“For trade?”

“For safety.”

“Safety?”

Colison rubbed a gloved hand over his bald head. “Friend of mine suggested them. Suppose I'll find out soon enough if he was just playing a bad joke. We'll reach the mountains today.”

The day seemed to grow colder after that. Hour by hour, the road grew steeper under a sunless sky. Heradion took back the reins as the trees dwindled and rock walls closed in on either side. Silvery scales of ice clung to the road where the stones left it in shadow. They cracked under the oxen's hooves, and the rumbling wheels crushed them into tracks of melting powder. The wind shrilled constantly through the ravine, whipping at their clothes and hurling flurries of stinging snow from the mountainsides.

The next two days brought more of the same. “We'll go up another day, day and a half, before we come to
Spearbridge,” Colison told them on the third afternoon. His cheeks were red with windburn, and he'd pulled a snug wool hat over his ears. “Once we cross the bridge, we'll come back down the other side, and then we'll be in Carden Vale. Call it four, five days. Almost there.”

Asharre nodded, shivering under the yellow sheepskin she'd bundled atop her cloak. Somehow the Irontooths seemed to carry a fiercer chill than the winters of her homeland. Perhaps it was only the empty fortress that made it seem so. One of Duradh Mal's towers stood on a crag ahead, its windows black and hollow. A shattered iron lance, its pennon long gone, crowned the tower.

The bulk of the fortress was not in view. Colison said it stood on the other side of the mountain, overlooking Carden Vale, and that what they saw was merely one of several sentinel towers that guarded the approaches to Ang'duradh. Tunnels bored through the mountain connected Spearbridge Tower to the main fortress, allowing its soldiers to come and go without exposing themselves to freezing wind or spying eyes. Those same tunnels, he said, had carried Ang'duradh's doom to its towers.

It was easy to imagine baleful ghosts watching them from the tower, their mutterings mixed with the wind's howl. The story of Ang'duradh's doom was known even by the White Seas. Asharre had never listened closely—why did it matter how an army of summerlanders died centuries ago?—but now, riding beneath Duradh Mal's gaze, she wished that she had. Baozites were formidable soldiers, as fierce as wildbloods and far better disciplined. Even Ingvall's children paid grudging respect to the reavers' strength. Whatever could crush one of their strongholds, and do it so completely that not one soldier remained alive to tell the tale, was a power to be feared.

In six hundred years, it might have vanished. Then again, it might not. She spat to take the tang of fear from her tongue and turned from the tower back to the road.

“We'll get closer to it before we get farther from it,” Colison said, not unsympathetic. “Spearbridge is as close as we'll come to the ruins. I won't lie. It takes some folk funny, that bridge, especially the first time. The old magic they used to build it … well, you'll see for yourself when we get there. It looks ruined worse than the rest, old Spear-bridge, but it'll hold up under your feet. No problem with that. Problem's with the memories on it.”

“Memories?” Heradion looked over, the reins looped around one wrist.

“Aye.” Colison paced alongside their wagon, rolling a splinter between his teeth. “Memories. You'll notice we've been going through this ravine for a while. Widens up a bit ahead, but we'll be staying on a narrow path right up to Spearbridge. That's no accident. Road's made to meander more than it needs to, and to keep anyone on it nice and bunched together. Way back when, I'm guessing, the Baozites liked to have plenty of time to see who was coming, and to get rid of 'em easy if they weren't invited.

“Spearbridge, near as I can tell, was built with the same idea. But what this path does with rocks, it does with magic. Well, magic and a nasty long fall on each side.

“The bridge is made from things the Baozites took off dead folk. Weapons, shields, banner poles. All the things they lost. When you go across, you see their last memories—what happened right before they died. Mostly you see 'em getting killed by Baozites, and mostly it isn't pretty. You”—he tilted the splinter in his mouth so that it pointed at Asharre—“would probably see some wildbloods who raided a little too far south back before your grandfather's
grandfather's day. Your friend might see some old Knights of the Sun whose crusade went sour on 'em. Me, I see a little of everybody, seeing as how my folks were wanderers before me. There's a few who don't see anything, or get to feeling happy as they go across. I got my theories about those. Seems to me they're the ones who aren't far from Baozites themselves. You see a man who doesn't wince on Spearbridge, you know he's not to be trusted.

“Anyway, the bridge won't cause you no harm. The oxen don't even notice. I've never lost a wagon on Spearbridge, though the memories always slow down the crossing something terrible. That was the point, back when there were soldiers in Spearbridge Tower to shoot down anyone they didn't care to see coming, but the tower's empty now and you don't have to fear no arrows. Just the memories, that's all.”

“That sounds
wonderful.
” Heradion said. A breeze ruffled his red-gold hair and left a dusting of snow crystals that melted as they rode. He ducked his head as the meltwater trickled down his neck, adjusting his scarf too late to keep it away. “Why didn't we take a barge to Carden Vale, again?”

“Bassinos said it was too early in the season,” Asharre replied. “The ice on the river has not melted. He said traveling overland was safer.”

“I'd rather deal with ice than dead men's memories.”

“There's worse than ice on the river.” Colison turned the splinter around in his mouth and began chewing on the other end. “People been vanishing off those barges. Whole crews. Someone else'll come along the river and find the barge drifting, or run up on the banks. Poles unbroken, dray horses unhurt, cargo seals untouched, but not a soul to be seen. No signs of fighting. Just … gone.”

“Oh, now you're just trying to frighten us,” Heradion complained. “Bassinos said it was peaceful all winter. Even the bandits are quiet.”

“Worse things to be than frightened. Foolish, for one.” Colison spat the splinter under the wagon wheels. “You ask me, the bandits are quiet only because they were the first to vanish, before whatever's out there started taking barge crews. But you're right, Bassinos doesn't know about it. Who'd want to carry him a story like that? ‘I hear people are disappearing off the barges, reckon there's ghosts making off with 'em. Maybe it's the mad wind.' Carry him that tale, he's liable to think old Colison spent too long on the mountain and froze all his brains. Then it's no more caravans for me, and my Lalinda runs off with a spice merchant, and I'm left in an empty house eating watery porridge and wishing I'd kept my mouth shut.” He chuckled. “No, Bassinos doesn't know. You need proof for a man like that. I don't have any. I'm only telling
you
this because you've already paid me. Once we're in Carden Vale, that's it for us. Onetime job lets a man speak more freely.”