Blood Ties

Book 1: The Castings Trilogy

by Pamela Freeman

Genres: Action & Adventure; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

A thousand years ago, the Eleven Domains were invaded and the original inhabitants forced on the road as Travelers, belonging nowhere, welcomed by no-one. Now the Domains are governed with an iron fist by the Warlords, but there are wilder elements to the landscape which cannot be controlled and which may prove their undoing. Some are spirits of place, of water and air and fire and earth. Some are greater than these. And some are human. Bramble : a village girl, whom no-one living can tame . . . forced to flee from her home for a crime she did not commit. Ash : apprentice to a safeguarder, forced to kill for an employer he cannot escape. Saker : an enchanter, who will not rest until the land is returned to his people. As their three stories unfold, along with the stories of those whose lives they touch, it becomes clear that they are bound together in ways that not even a stonecaster could foresee -- bound by their past, their future, and their blood.

Release date: April 7, 2008

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 484

Sample

The Stonecaster’s Story

THE DESIRE TO KNOW the future gnaws at our bones. That is where it started, and might have ended, years ago.

I had cast the stones, seeing their faces flick over and fall: Death, Love, Murder, Treachery, Hope. We are a treacherous people — half of our stones show betrayal and violence and death from those close, death from those far away. It is not so with other peoples. I have seen other sets of stones that show only natural disasters: death from sickness, from age, the pain of a broken heart, loss in childbirth. And those stones are more than half full with pleasure and joy and plain, solid warnings like “You reap what you sow” and “Victory is not the same as satisfaction.”

Of course, we live in a land taken by force, by battle and murder and invasion. It is not so surprising, perhaps, that our stones reflect our history.

So. I cast the stones again, wondering. How much of our future do we call to ourselves through this scrying? How much of it do we make happen because the stones give us a pattern to fulfill?

I have seen the stones cast too many times to doubt them. When I see Murder in the stones, I know someone will die. But would they have died without my foretelling? Perhaps merely saying the word, even in a whisper, brings the thought to the surface of a mind, allows the mind to shape it, give it substance, when otherwise it might have remained nothing more than vague murmurings, easily ignored.

Death recurred again and again in my castings that night. I did not ask whose. Perhaps it was mine, perhaps not. I had no one left to lose, and therefore did not fear to lose myself.

There was someone at the door, breathing heavily outside, afraid to come in. But he did, as they always do, driven by love or fear or greed or pain, or simple curiosity, a desire to giggle with friends.

This one came in shyly: young, eighteen or nine-teen, brown hair, green trousers and blue boots. He squatted across the cloth from me with the ease of near-childhood. I held out my left hand, searching his face. He had hazel eyes, but the shape of his face showed he had old blood, from the people who lived in this land before the landtaken, the invasion. There was old pain, too, old anger stoked up high.

He knew what to do. He spat in his own palm, a palm crisscrossed by scars, as though it had been cut many times, and clapped it to mine. I held him tightly and reached for the pouch with my right hand. He was strong enough to stay silent as I dug in the pouch for five stones and threw them across the cloth between us. He was even strong enough not to follow their fall with his eyes, to hold my gaze until I nodded at him and looked down.

He saw it in my face.

“Bad?”

I nodded. One by one I touched the stones lying faceup. “Death. Bereavement. Chaos. This is the surface. This is what all will see.” Delicately I turned the other two stones over. “Revenge and Rejoicing. This is what is hidden.” An odd mixture, one I had never before seen.

He brooded over them, not asking anything more. The stones did not speak to me as they often do; all I could tell him were their names. It seemed to be enough for him.

“You know what this refers to?” I asked.

He nodded, absently, staring at Rejoicing. He let go of my hand and slid smoothly to his feet, then tugged some coins out of a pocket and let them fall on the rug.

“My thanks, stonecaster.” Then he was gone.

Who was I to set Death on the march? I know my stones by their feel, even in the darkness of the pouch. I could have fumbled and selected him a happy dream: Love Requited, Troubles Over, Patience. I could have soothed the anger in his eyes, the pain in his heart.

But who am I to cheat the stones?

After he left, I cast them again. This time, Death did not appear. She had gone out the door with the young one and his scars.

Saker

SAKER REMEMBERED the first time he had tried to raise the dead. It was the night after Freite, the enchanter, had finally died. By then he had been her apprentice for thirteen long years, but only in the last two had she shared any real secrets with him, and only then because he had threatened to leave her if she withheld.

Freite had wept for her great age and his refusal to any longer give his power for her extended life. She had no more to offer him. He had learned everything she had to teach of her Wind City magic, and it had not included pity, or generosity. So he refused to touch her in her extremity, knowing she would drain the power out of him to give herself another day, another week, a month if she was lucky . . . She had died cursing him, but he was cursed already, so he disregarded it.

After she was buried, the Voice of Whitehaven had pronounced Freite’s bequests and he had found that her house had passed into his hands, along with her savings, which were much greater than he had imagined. So there he was, rich but without a plan. He had gone to the stonecaster to find out what the gods wanted him to do next. And the stonecaster had sent him out the door with Revenge and Rejoicing awaiting him.

That first time, he hadn’t even known he needed the actual bones for the spell to work. The enchanter had told him half-truths, half-spells, trying to hoard her knowledge as though it could ward off death. Saker knew, certain sure, nothing kept Death away for good. That Lady tapped everyone on the shoulder, sooner or later. But sometimes, just sometimes, she could be tricked.

He raised the black stone knife level with his palm, forcing his hand not to shake. This must work. Now, finally, he had the means, seven years since the stonecaster had set him on his path . . .

“I am Saker, son of Alder and Linnet of the village of Cliffhaven. I seek justice.”

He began to shake with memory, with yearning, sorrow, righteous rage. There lay the strength of his spell. He touched the never-closing wound in his mind, drew on the pain and set it to work. The rest of the spell wasn’t in words, but in memories, complex and distressing: colors, phrases of music, a particular scent, the sound of a scream . . .

When he had gathered them all he looked down at his father’s bones on the table, his father’s skull staring emptily. He pressed the knife to his palm then drew it down hard. The blood surged out in time with his heart and splashed in gouts on the chalk-white bones.

“Alder,” he said. “Arise.”

Bramble

THE BLOOD TRAIL was plain. Every few steps a splotch showed brilliantly red. There were tracks, too. In summer it would have been harder, but in this earliest part of spring the grasses and ferns were thin on the ground, and the ground was soft enough to show the wolf’s spoor.

Even the warlord’s man would have been able to track this much blood; for Bramble it was like following a clearly marked highway, through new fern fronds and old leaf mold, down past the granite rocks, through the stand of mountain ash, blood marking the trail at every step, so fresh she could smell it. The prints on the right were lighter; it was favoring the wounded side.

It wasn’t sensible to go after a hurt wolf with just a boot knife in her hand. She’d be lucky to get home without serious injury. She’d be lucky to get home at all. But she couldn’t leave a wounded animal to die in pain, even if she hadn’t shot it.

The brown wolf had limped across the far end of the clearing where she had been collecting early spring sorrel at the edge of a small stream, too intent on its own pain to even notice Bramble.

The forest had seemed to hush the moment she saw the arrow, the wolf, the blood dripping from its side. The glade glowed in the afternoon sunlight. Rich and heady, the smell of awakening earth, that special smell that came after the snow-melt was over, rose in drifts around her. She heard chats quarreling far overhead. The trickle of the stream. A squirrel leaping from branch to branch of an elm, rattling the still-bare twigs. It paused. The wolf stopped and looked back over his shoulder, seeing her for the first time. She waited, barely breathing, feeling as if the whole forest waited with her.

“There he is! See him? Don’t lose him!”

“Quiet, idiot!”

The voices broke the moment. The wolf slipped into the shadow of some pine trees. The squirrel, scolding, skipped from elm to willow to alder and was gone. Bramble looked around quickly. The warlord’s men were close. Nowhere to hide except up a tree. She dropped the sorrel and sprang for the lowest branch of a yew. Its dark branches would hide her, unlike the easier-to-climb willow next to it whose branches were still showing catkins, but no leaves.

She climbed fast, without worrying about scratches, so she was bleeding in a dozen places by the time she had reached a safe perch. She grabbed some of the yew leaves and crushed them in her hands, wringing them to release the bitter-smelling sap, then rubbed it on the trunk as far down as she could reach, to confuse the scent in case they had hounds, who would sniff out the blood for sure and certain.

She wondered who they were chasing. An actual criminal? Or just someone who’d looked at them the wrong way? Someone old Ceouf, the warlord, had taken against, maybe, or someone who had complained? Bramble smiled wryly. At least it wasn’t a woman. Everyone knew what happened to a woman found alone by the warlord’s men.

It angered her, as it always did. More than that, it enraged her. The warlords claimed that they protected the people in their Domain, from other warlords, of course, and in earlier days from invaders. Perhaps they had, once. But a couple of generations ago the warlords of the Eleven Domains had made peace, and there hadn’t been more than a border skirmish since. The warlord’s men weren’t soldiers anymore, just thugs and bullies. You stayed out of their way, didn’t draw their attention, and spat in the dust of their footprints after they’d gone.

It’s not meant to be like this, she thought. No one should have to hide in fear of the people who are supposed to protect them.

Today she had been happy, happier than she had been for months, since her sister had married and moved away to Carlion, the nearest free town. She had been out in her forest again, rejoicing in the returning spring, giving thanks for new life. And they had brought death and fear with them, as they did everywhere. Her chest burned with resentment. Some part of her had always refused to be sensible about it, as her parents demanded. “The world’s not going to change just because you don’t like it,” they’d said, time after time. She knew they were right. Of course she knew it, she wasn’t a child or a fool. And yet, some part of her insisted, It’s not meant to be like this.

“This way!”

The voice came again. Bramble parted the needles in front of her until she could see the clearing below. There were two men, one blond, one red-haired, in warlord’s gear, with a blue crest on their shoulders to show their allegiance to this, the South Domain. They were young, about her age. Their horses were tethered near the trail that led into the clearing. One was a thin dark bay, the other a well-muscled roan. The trail ended there, she knew, and the forest, even in early spring, was too dense from here in for mounted men to ride.

“I know I got it,” the blond said. “I winged it, at least.”

“If you want to finish it off, you’ll have to go on foot,” the redhead said. They looked at the undergrowth consideringly, and then the blond looked down at his shiny riding boots.

“I just bought these,” he complained. He had a sharp voice, as though it were the other man’s fault that his boots were new.

“Leave it,” the redhead said, clearly bored now.

“I wanted the skin. I’ve always wanted a wolf skin.” The blond frowned, then shrugged. “Another day.”

They turned and went back to their horses, mounted, and rode away without a backward glance.

Bramble sat appalled and even angrier. He had left a wounded animal to die in agony so he wouldn’t get scratches on his boots! Oh, isn’t that typical! she thought. They’re the animals, the greedy, heedless, bloody shagging bastards!

She waited until she was sure they weren’t coming back, then swung down from the tree, pulled her knife from her boot, and went to look for the wolf.

She followed the blood trail until it disappeared into the big holly thicket. She skirted the sharp leaves and picked up the trail on the other side. It finally came to an end near the stream in the center of the forest.

The wolf had staggered down to drink and stood, legs shaking, near the water’s edge. Then it saw Bramble, and froze with fear. But it was foaming at the mouth, desperate for water, and she stayed very still, as still as a wild creature in the presence of humans, until it took the last few steps to the water and drank. The black-fletched arrow, a warlord’s man’s arrow, stuck out from its side.

After drinking, it collapsed on the muddy edge of the stream and panted in pain, looking up at her with great brown eyes, pleading wordlessly.

Bramble came to it gently, making no sudden move that might startle it. “There now, there now, everything’s all right now . . .” she crooned, as she did to the orphan kids she raised, or the nannies she helped give birth. She lowered her hand slowly, softly onto its forehead and the wolf whined like a pup. “Not long now, not long,” she said softly, stroking back to grip its ears. She gazed into its eyes steadily until it looked away, as all wild animals will look away from the gaze of anything they do not wish to fight, and then she cut its throat, as quickly and painlessly as she could.

Bramble sat waiting, her hand still on its head, ignoring the tears on her cheeks, while the blood pulsed out into the stream, swirling red. There wasn’t much blood. It had bled a lot already. Her fingers gentled its ears as though it could still feel, then she stood up.

She hesitated, looking at the caked blood on its side, then stripped off her jacket, shirt, skirt and leggings, so she wouldn’t stain them. She had to hope that the warlord’s men wouldn’t change their minds and come back. She could just imagine that scene.

Her knife was only sharp enough to slit through the hide. She had to heave the carcass over to peel the skin off and it was much heavier than she thought. There was blood all over her. She wrinkled her nose, but kept going. It was a good, winter-thick pelt and besides, taking it gave the death of the wolf some purpose, instead of it being a complete waste of life. She cut the pelt off at the base of the skull. It was worth more with head attached, but Bramble had always felt that tanning the head of the animal was a kind of insult.

She would have left the carcass for the crows and the foxes, but she didn’t want the warlord’s men to find it, if they came looking for the hide later. Let him think that he had missed. She dragged it up the hill to a rock outcropping, and piled stones on it. At least it would make a meal for the ants and the worms.

She washed the blood off both her and the hide, put her clothes back on, tied up the hide and hoisted it over her shoulder. It weighed her down heavily, but she could manage it easily enough. She set off home.

The way was through the black elm and pine forest, and normally she would have lingered to admire the spring-green leaves that were beginning to bud, and listen to the white-backed woodpeckers frantically drilling for food after their long migration. She had been observing a red-breasted flycatcher pair build their nest, but today she passed it by without noticing, although she stopped to collect some wild thyme and sallet greens, and to empty one of her snares. She found a rabbit, thin after winter but good enough for a stew, and the pelt still winter-lush. Her hands did the work of resetting the snare but her mind was elsewhere.

The forest was ostensibly the warlord’s domain, but was traditionally the hunting or grazing ground for a range of people, from foragers like Bramble to charcoal burners, coppicers, chair makers, withiers, pig farmers and woodcutters. It was a rare day that Bramble didn’t meet someone in the forest; depending on the season, sometimes she saw as many people there as in the village street. It was just her bad luck that today she had seen the warlord’s men.

She came out of the forest near the crossroads just outside Wooding and realized that it hadn’t been just bad luck. There had been an execution today.

Her village of Wooding saw a lot of executions, because it was on the direct road from Carlion to the warlord’s fort at Thornhill. For centuries the South Domain warlords had used the crossroads just outside Wooding as the site for their punishments. There was a scaffold set up for when the warlord felt merciful. And for when he wasn’t there was the rock press, a sturdy wooden box the size of a coffin, but deeper, where the condemned were piled with heavy stones until their bones broke and they suffocated, slowly.

Today they had used the rock press. There was blood seeping out of the box at the corners. The condemned often bled from the nose and mouth in the final stages of pressing. Bramble slowed as she walked past the punishment site. Did she want to know who they had killed this time? What was the point?

She went over to the box and looked in. No one she knew, thank the gods. Some stranger — the Domain was large, and criminals were brought to the warlord from miles away. Then she looked closer. A stranger, but just a boy. Fourteen, perhaps. A baby. Probably accused of something like “disrespect to the warlord.” Her heart burned again, as it had in the woods. Anger, indignation, pity. She would have to make sure she was nowhere near the village the next morning, when the warlord’s men rounded up the villagers to see the boy’s corpse removed from the box and placed in the gibbet. She doubted she could applaud and cheer for the warlord over this execution, as the villagers were expected to do.

Some did so gladly. There were always a few who enjoyed a killing, like the crows that nested in the tree next to the scaffold and descended on the corpses with real enthusiasm. But the rest of the villagers had seen too many people die who looked just like them. Ordinary people. People who couldn’t pay their taxes, or hadn’t bowed low enough to the warlord. Or who had objected to their daughter being dragged away to the fort by the warlord’s men. It was important to attend the executions, and to cheer loudly. The warlord’s men were always watching. Bramble had cheered as loudly as anyone, in the past, and had been sick later, every time.

So the warlord’s men would have done their job today and gone home as soon as the boy stopped breathing. The blond had probably taken the shortcut through the woods and had seen the wolf by accident. He couldn’t resist tracking it a little way. Couldn’t resist killing again.

A hunter who didn’t care if the animal he shot suffered deserved nothing but contempt. He certainly didn’t deserve the hide of the animal he had abandoned to pain and slow death.

But the sensible thing to do would be to take the skin to the warlord’s fort, say it had one of the warlord’s arrows in it when she found it, and let the blond claim it. Let him have his prize for killing.

Bramble looked at the boy in the box, whose face was still contorted in pain. “Well, no one ever said I was sensible,” she said.

She skirted the village and came to the back of her parents’ house, through the alders that fringed the stream. She dumped the wolf skin behind the privy, then went the whole way back so she would be seen to come home through the main street with nothing in her hands but rabbit and greens.

Bramble passed the inn and ignored the stares of the old men who sat on the bench outside the door, tankards in hand, until one of them called out, “Got your nose stuck in the air, I see! Too high and mighty to tell us how that sister of yours is doing off in Carlion!”

It was Swith, the leatherworker’s father, both hands cramped around his mug. He was a terrible gossip, but that wasn’t why he had called Bramble over. He wanted her to notice his hands. The arthritis that kept him sitting here in the mild sun had swelled his knuckles up like a goat’s full udder.

“She’s well, she says,” Bramble replied. “They’re building a new house, on the lot next to his parents’.”

“Ah, she’s done well for herself, that Maryrose!” cackled Swith’s crony, old Aden, the most lecherous man in the village in his day, and still not to be trusted within arm’s reach. “She wasn’t an eye-catcher like you, lass. But he got a good hot bed to go to, I’ll say that, her town clerk’s son!”

The other men frowned. Maryrose had been liked by everyone in the village, and she was certainly no light-skirt.

“That’s enough of that, Aden,” Swith said reprovingly. “Your mam and da will be missing her,” he said with a cunning sideways look. “She was their favorite, wasn’t she?”

It was an old match of his, trying to get Bramble to give him back a short answer. It kept him amused, and it didn’t do her any harm. Everyone knew that Maryrose was the favorite.

“They are missing her, of course, Swith,” Bramble said. Then, feeling she had given Aden and the others enough entertainment, she said, “I notice your hands are bothering you. Could I be helping? Give them a rub, maybe?”

“If you want to help a man by rubbing something—”

“Close that dirty mouth, Aden!” Swith bellowed then glanced a bit shamefacedly at Bramble. “Well, lass, now you mention it . . .”

She smiled at him. “I’ll come by after supper.”

It was a more or less regular thing she did, massaging goose grease and comfrey into the old people’s hands and feet. Not all of them, of course. Just the cross-grained ones who couldn’t find anyone else to help them. She was glad Aden didn’t have arthritis; she wasn’t about to get within groping distance of him.

She hefted the rabbit and greens in one hand. “I have to get these to Mam.” None of them had mentioned the rabbit, though they had eyed it and no doubt would have liked to hear all the details on where she had trapped it and what kind of snare she had used, the kind of talk that kept them occupied for hours. To ask would have been against custom, since they all knew Swith had called her over to ask her a favor, which she was granting. If she wanted to tell them about her hunting, she would, in her own good time.

If she hadn’t offered to help Swith, it would have been a different story, she thought with amusement as she walked up the street, exchanging greetings with Mill the charcoal burner, home at his grandparents’ until after the snowmelt and spring rains, and ignoring the tribe of dogs that swirled around her heels as they always did. But she had made the offer, so the old men couldn’t cross-question her without being unforgivably rude.

“I have a doe ready to drop twins, Bramble,” called Sigi, the new young brewster who had doubled the inn’s clientele after she had married its owner, Eril. Sigi’s three toddlers, who ran around her feet as she brought in her washing, were screaming with excitement about a maggot one of them had plucked from the rubbish pile. “If she doesn’t have enough milk for both, can I bring one to you?”

“Of course, and welcome,” Bramble called back. “I’ve no orphans this season so far.”

When Sigi had first met Bramble, she had reacted as many people did, with suspicion at Bramble’s dark hair and eyes. In this land of blonds and redheads, a dark-haired person was assumed to be a Traveler, a descendant of the original inhabitants of the Domains, who had been invaded and dispossessed a thousand years ago. Old history. But no one trusted Travelers. They were thieves, liars, perverts, bad luck bringers. Bramble had heard all the insults over the years, mostly (though not always) by people who didn’t know her, like ordinary travelers on the road through Wooding to Carlion.

Sigi had finally overcome her suspicion, and Bramble was trying hard to forget the insult. It would be nice to have a friend in the village, now Maryrose was gone, and Sigi was the best candidate. The other girls had long ago shut her out after she had made it clear that she didn’t have any interest in the things that obsessed them, like boys and hair ribbons and sewing for their glory boxes. Not that boys weren’t a pleasure, now and then.

Sigi’s oldest child grabbed the maggot and dropped it down her brother’s back and the resultant wailing distracted Sigi completely. Bramble laughed and went on to her own home, following Gred, the goose girl, as she shepherded her waddling, squabbling, hissing flock back to their night pasture outside the mill.

Bramble’s family lived in an old cottage, a house really, bigger than it looked from the street, as it ran far back toward the stream. It was built of the local bluestone, all except for the chimney, which was rounded river stones in every shade of gray and brown and dark blue. It was thatched with the herringbone pattern you found on every roof around here, although in Carlion they thatched a fish-scale pattern, when they didn’t tile in slate. The front garden caught the morning light, so it was full of early herbs just pushing through the soil. The vine over one corner was still a bare skeleton, but the house had a cheerful, open look with its shutters wide and its door ajar.

The door was ajar because her mother was in the road sweeping up the droppings the geese had left behind. The Widow Farli was doing the same thing outside her cottage a little farther down. Goose droppings were good fertilizer, and for someone like Widow Farli, who only kept a couple of scraggly hens, they were important. Bramble’s mother, Summer, kept pigs, as well as goats and hens, and really didn’t need them.

“No use wasting them,” her mam said as Bramble came up. She swept the droppings onto an old piece of bag. “Here, go and give them to Widow Farli.” She held the bag out.

Bramble took the droppings and handed the wild thyme and the sallet greens and the rabbit carcass to her mother.

Farli had a face you could cut cheese with, and the tip of her nose was always white, as if with anger, but at what, Bramble had never figured out. She stared past Bramble and said snidely, “Nice of your mother to take the trouble. She’s not one to go off gallivanting and leave all her work to others.”

“Just as well,” Bramble said, smiling sweetly, “or what would become of you?”

Farli’s face flushed dark red. “Your tongue’ll get you into mischief one day, young lady, you mark my words! Mischief or worse!”

She turned on her heel and flounced toward her back garden, keeping a tight hold of the bag of droppings.

Bramble grinned and went home. She had a pelt to cure. She fetched it from behind the privy and went to the kitchen door to ask her mother for a loan of the good knife to scrape the skin down.

“A wolf?” her mam said, that note in her voice that meant “what will the girl do next?” She had her frown on, too, the “what have I done to deserve this?” frown.

Bramble had grown up knowing she’d never be the daughter her parents wanted — never be like her sister, Maryrose, who was a crafter born, responsible, hard-working, loving in the way they understood. Maryrose looked like her mother, tawny-haired and blue-eyed, clearly one of Acton’s people, while Bramble looked like her granda, who had started life a Traveler. He looked like the people who’d lived here before Acton’s people had come over the mountains. Along with her coloring — or perhaps due to the way people looked askance at her because of it — Bramble had inherited the Traveler restlessness, the hatred of being enclosed. Where Maryrose was positively happy to stay seated all day at the loom with her mother, or stand in the workshop shaping and smoothing a beech table with her father, Bramble yearned to be in the forest, for the green luxuriance of summer growth, the sharp tracery of bare branches in winter, the damp mold and mushroom smell of autumn.

She had spent all her free time there as a child, and a lot of time when she should have been learning a trade. While she never did learn to weave or carpenter, by the time she was old enough to marry, a good proportion of the family food came to the table from her hands, and a few luxuries as well. Their flock of goats came from Bramble’s nursing of orphan kids or the runty twin of a dropping. If she raised a kid successfully, she got either half the meat if it was a billy, or the first kid if it was a nanny. She had a knack with sick animals, and sick people, too. In the forest, she set snares, gathered greens, fruits and nuts, herbs and bulbs. In early spring, the hard time, it was her sallets and snowberries that kept the family from the scurvy, her rabbit and squirrel that fed them when the bacon ran out and the cornmeal ran low. They could have bought extra supplies, of course, but the money they saved, then and all through the year, from Bramble’s gathering, made the difference between survival and prosperity, between living from day to day and having a nest egg behind them. And her furs brought in silver, too, although they weren’t the thick, expensive kind you got from the colder areas up north near Foreverfroze. And old Ceouf, the warlord, took a full half of what she made on them, for a “luxury” tax.

There was always someone in the village ready to spy for the warlord. At Wooding’s yearly Tax Day in autumn, it was amazing how the warlord’s steward seemed to know everything that had been grown or raised or sold or bought in the last year. Bramble suspected Widow Farli of being an informer, but she couldn’t blame her. A woman alone needed some way of buying the warlord’s protection.

Bramble had never brought home a wolf skin before, but her mam thought poorly of it for one of those “it isn’t respectable” reasons that she could never quite follow.

“The gods alone know what’ll become of you, my girl,” Mam said. That wasn’t so bad; it was said with a kind of exasperated affection. But then she sighed and couldn’t resist adding, “If only you were more like your sister!”

When Bramble was six, and seven, and eight, that sigh and that sentence had made her stomach clench with anguish and bewilderment. At nineteen, she just raised an eyebrow at her mother and smiled. It did no good to let it hurt; neither she nor her parents were going to change. Could change. And if there was still a cold stone, an empty hollow, under her ribs left over from when she was little, it was so familiar she didn’t even feel it anymore.

“I’ll make you a gorgeous coat out of it, Mam,” she said, and winked. “Just think how impressed they’ll be at the Winterfest dance.”

Her mother smiled reluctantly. “Oh, yes, of course you will. I can just see myself in a wolf-skin coat. A lovely sight I’d be. No, thank you.” She looked down at the rabbit and greens. “Well, these’ll make a good meal.”

Bramble nodded at the implied thanks, took the good knife her mother held out and went down to the stream to scrape the hide down thoroughly.

Every so often she couldn’t help looking up to where flocks of pigeons and rooks, coming home for summer, circled the sky. High above them in the uplands of the air, a blue heron glided, like the old song said, free from care. It came from beyond the Great Forest, from up near Foreverfroze. She longed to see what it had seen. One day, but not yet, because the gods forbade it.

“Time and past to milk the goats, Bramble!” her mother called from the back door.

Bramble groaned and trudged off toward the goat shed. She lingered for a moment at the gate, watching the sky turn that pale, pale blue that wasn’t quite gray, as it did on these spring evenings, just before it darkened. She wondered, for the hundredth time, or maybe the thousandth, where the birds had been. She had wanted to take the Road all her life. When she was a child, listening to her grandfather’s Traveling stories, she had promised herself that one day she would. Just go. But as she grew older she watched the Travelers who came to Wooding and realized that they all had trades. Skills. Tinkering, music, singing, tumbling, mural and sign painting, horse breaking . . . Bramble had no skills worth anything to anyone else. She could hunt and forage, but on the Road, far from the forest, what good would that be to her?

So she laid her plan: she would save her coppers and head north, to the Great Forest in the Last Domain, where the mink and the weasel and the fox furs were so thick that the city folk would pay good silver for them. She would not Travel, but travel, to where her skills were useful and could earn her bread. She would see the oldest forest in the world and learn its secrets and there, in its green darkness, she would be rid of this yearning.

When she came back to the house with a pail of frothy milk, her mam had warmed water for her to wash in, and had laid out cheese and bread and some dried apple, “to keep the wolf from the door until the stew is ready.” Bramble smiled — it was her mother’s way of making a joke, and making amends for maybe speaking too sharply. She never said sorry, but the dried apple was running low this side of winter, and to bring some out just for a snack was the only apology Bramble needed.

A while later, her da and granda came in from the workshop smelling of cedar and sat down eagerly to the rabbit stew.

“What are you working on?” Bramble asked.

“A blanket chest for the innkeeper. I told him that camphor laurel would do as well as cedar to keep away the moths, but he thinks that town-bred Sigi of his deserves the very best,” Da said, smiling.

“She’s the reason he can afford a new chest,” Granda said. “She’s a better brewer than he ever was.”

“Wouldn’t be hard,” Mam said, sniffing. Mam, rather surprisingly, liked a good strong brown ale, though, less surprisingly, she never had more than one.

The meal went on as normal; they discussed the day’s events and the village gossip, and wondered, as always, how Maryrose and Merrick were doing and when there’d be news of a grandchild on the way. Mam said nothing of the wolf skin and Bramble kept silent, too, not sure how much of the story to share. None, maybe. If there was trouble, she knew her family would be safer if they knew nothing.

Again she felt impatient, itching with annoyance. It was wrong that they had to go in fear of the warlord’s men all their lives. Sitting at the table as she’d done every night of her life, she was overcome by a familiar rush of feeling: the desire to get away, somewhere, anywhere, anywhere but here. It was so familiar that she knew what to do about it. Nothing. The next thing that would happen would be the voice of the local gods in her ear saying Not yet. They’d said it every time she’d felt like this, from the time she could understand the words. And every time she thought back to them: When? But they never answered.

But this time, when she was filled with impatience and the desire to fly away like the wild geese in autumn, there was no message from the gods. Nothing but silence. It sent a chill through her, to have one of the deep patterns of her life broken without warning, but it sped up her heart as well. She breathed more deeply, thinking about it.

After supper she went out into the windy, cold dark and made her way unerringly to the black rock altar in the wood near the village. Not the deep forest, this, but a beech wood of skeleton branches, floor clear of everything but last year’s leaves and a frail flush of new ferns. The altar was close to the burial caves, as it should be, in a clearing surrounded by other trees: oak, ash, hawthorn bushes, rowan, and willows near the stream that provided the gods with music. Bramble came to the rock at moonrise. It was a thin sliver of moon, on the wane, with the evening star underneath the crescent: a bad-luck moon, but beautiful.

She knelt at the rock and felt the presence of the gods lift the hair on her neck, as it always did. She didn’t pray, or offer sacrifice. She had just come to ask a question.

“When?”

The wind stilled. The glade filled with the presence of the gods, like pressure, like swimming deep down into the quarry pool until she could feel the weight of the water begin to push against her chest and eyes, like being smothered in strength.

Soon.

They spoke into her head, as they always did, and then left. The glade was now empty, the pressure was gone.

Soon.

What, she wondered, had changed?

She went home via Swith’s and massaged his hands, but she was so quiet he actually apologized for Aden’s crudity that afternoon. She laughed it off, but that night in her dreams she was a wild goose, flying forever across a gold-leafed forest.

The next morning she asked Gerda, the tanner, for advice about how to treat the hide, in case there was anything different about wolf skin from weasel and fox. There wasn’t, but she paid for the advice with a basket of tiny sweet strawberries that she’d collected from the deep glade where an old oak had fallen.

It was a lovely pelt, thick and glossy. Bramble slung it over the chair in her room and ran her hand over it every time she passed. The fur sprang back against her hand as though the living body had leaped and a small fillip of pleasure went through her each time she felt it. She didn’t want to flaunt it, but risked wearing it out anyway. Looking back, she was sorry she hadn’t hidden it in the forest and brought it back home after dark, sorry that she’d asked Gerda for advice.

The warlord’s man tracked her down in the clearing near the Springtree. She wasn’t gathering hawthorn, . . .