Karluk · Bearclaw Territory, Frost Fang Highlands
1715
The first hard snowfall of winter lasted three days. When it cleared, a dry cold settled over the Highlands and the air stung the inside of Karluk’s nose with every breath. It was his second winter among the Bearclaws. It was the first in which he had people of his own to answer for.
Two of Kelgrim’s former households were gone by the end of that week. Borgün named them Karluk’s responsibility in front of the whole camp. “You brought them here. Go and find them.”
“Yes.”
“Take someone who’ll stop you doing anything stupid.”
Yassa was beside him at first light and looked pleased with the appointment. Rulf followed with the packhorse because Borgün had given the provisions to the man least likely to forget them.
“He said someone,” Yassa said as they passed the last longhouse. “He didn’t name me.”
“Four men in that camp would try to stop me. You’re the one who’d manage it.”
Yassa drew up his hood. “That’s the kindest thing you’ve ever said to me and you made it sound like a request for oats. Say it again. Slowly.”
“No.”
“With a little warmth, perhaps?”
“Ride.”
The families had gone east before the storm closed in behind them. On the second morning Karluk settled on the only shelter within forty miles where they could have taken children. The wind had scoured the ridges and packed the snow into every hollow so he kept them to the high ground where the horses could find their feet. Drifted snow slowed them all the same and he judged they would not reach the shelter before the next afternoon. Yassa talked for most of the ride about Bearclaw’s horses and which families bred the best of them. He did not seem to care about their opinion.
“Who bred the gray mare?” Karluk asked.
Yassa turned in the saddle. “You’re asking me a question?”
“I’m asking about the mare.”
“Nobody bred that mare. She happened.” Yassa settled back and went on happily for another mile.
Karluk was coming to depend on that voice, though he did not quite admit it to himself. Six years alone had taught him to live with silences he could not end. Now he caught himself asking questions just to keep Yassa going.
At the fire on the second evening the wood smoldered. Rulf fed it another branch and cursed whoever had gathered it green. When the flames died a second time he rebuilt the fire two feet nearer the tents. Smoke stung Karluk’s eyes before the fresh kindling caught. Yassa talked on from the exposed side where his voice reached everyone whether they wanted it or not. He had spent most of an hour talking about Velda and how she was about to marry him or arrange his death for two years now. Then he stopped and looked at the fire.
“Thoragg sat here too.”
Karluk glanced at him. “On that rock?”
“In the open, you joyless man.” Yassa stretched his hands toward the flames. “He brought every tribe from the lake to the peaks around one fire, and any chief who wouldn’t sit at it he left frozen in his doorway. Frightened the south so bad they sent an old man north to put it out and the old man nearly lost.”
“He wasn’t old then,” Rulf said. “Barely thirty.”
“He is when people tell it.”
Rulf went back to the strap he had been mending since they left Bearclaw. Yassa returned to Velda without waiting for an answer.
“She threw a pot at me.”
“You mentioned that.”
“A cooking pot, Karluk. With the stew still in it! I understand anger. But wasting supper?”
“What did you say to her?”
“Something about her brother.”
Karluk waited.
“It was accurate,” Yassa said.
The laugh got out before Karluk could stop it. Yassa looked so pleased with himself that Karluk had to turn toward the fire smiling. Before Bearclaw he had laughed perhaps four times a year.
They found the families under a rock shelf on the third day. Eleven people huddled beside a fire that smelled of scorched cart wood while two goats nosed at the snow near the entrance. The cart’s wheels stood against the rock and its bed was feeding the fire. A woman sat on the yoke with her hands tucked under her arms. Karluk counted them before he dismounted.
All eleven were alive though one boy’s breath rattled deep in his chest. An old man sat nearest the fire with his feet bound in rags and Karluk knelt to unwrap them. Two of the toes were dead and black. Karluk doubted the swollen pair beside them would last until spring. He brought his horse close and Rulf helped the old man up into the saddle.
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“Can you hold the pommel?” Karluk asked.
The old man closed both hands around it. “If you lead him.”
“I will.”
A woman looked toward the cart wheels. Karluk followed her eyes.
“Leave them. There’s more snow coming.”
The air had the damp edge he had learned not to trust. Within the hour the families were moving. Yassa carried the sick boy for most of the six miles to the next shelter. The child wanted to see where they were going, so Yassa walked with his hood down in the wind. Frost gathered in his hair as he went. Nobody had asked him to do it. Karluk watched him the whole way.
That night all fourteen of them crowded under an overhang with the horses tethered on its sheltered side. Karluk took first watch at the edge of the rock. Yassa joined him an hour later.
“You’re meant to be asleep.”
“I’m meant to be a great many things.” Yassa sat down on the cold stone. “How long were you out here before Bearclaw?”
“Six years.”
“Alone?”
“Mostly.”
Yassa let out a low whistle. “I’d have gone mad.”
“I might have. There was nobody to ask.”
Yassa snorted and then let the quiet stand. The wind scraped loose snow along the lip of the overhang, and behind them Rulf slept among the families.
“I had a brother,” Yassa said.
Karluk turned. Yassa was looking out at the dark past the horses.
“Iktu. Four years older than me. Everyone expected him to have the seat one day.” He rubbed his thumb along a seam in his coat. “So did I.”
“What was he like?”
“Quick. He saw the answer while I was still figuring out the question and he could make a whole camp laugh without raising his voice.” Yassa smiled at the dark. “I would have followed him anywhere.”
“What happened?”
“Fever. It took him in four days.” His thumb stopped moving. “He was seventeen. I was thirteen.”
Karluk waited.
“Afterward they all looked at me as if I was him. I watched them.” Yassa drew his coat closer. “They were disappointed.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I’m loud, Karluk. It’s easy to seem amusing when you never stop long enough for anyone to judge you.”
Karluk said nothing.
“Then Borgün started keeping me close. He’d ask what I thought before he would decide on things.” Yassa’s voice dropped. “For once somebody wanted something from me that hadn’t been Iktu’s first.”
He sat with that. Karluk watched his breath drift out from under his hood.
“That’s enough shame for one night,” Yassa said. “You’ll have guessed most of it already.”
“I hadn’t.”
“Then I’ve given you too much credit.” The smile came back. “Your turn.”
Karluk looked past him at the sleeping families. The old winter ground was only two days away, near enough that he could picture the longhouse door without trying. His father had trusted the man who opened it. After that door came the Uhrs, and eighteen months in a pit under a stretched hide. Yassa had heard the accusation in Kelgrim’s valley along with everyone else, but Karluk had rehearsed those words for a dying man. Even Senna knew very little of what happened in the pit. Now a friend was asking. Karluk could not find the place to begin.
“My father died when I was nine,” he said. “The Uhrs held me afterward but it was a long time ago.”
Yassa took a breath before he answered. “Right.”
“It isn’t a good story.”
“I wouldn’t expect it to be.”
Yassa shifted on the rock. “Since neither of us means to sleep, you can explain why you keep defending that gray mare.”
“She’s nice.”
“So is a gatepost. I ask more of a horse.”
“You ask her to carry you.”
“And she complains as if I’d never fed her!”
He kept the argument going for twenty minutes. Karluk laughed twice and neither of them went back to what had passed between them.
They reached Bearclaw on the sixth day with both families and the goats. The longhouses sat so low in the slope that the snow had nearly buried them and their smoke showed before they did. Borgün was at the fire when people came forward to help the old man down. He heard the story standing up. With Borgün that meant he intended to answer it. By the time Karluk finished, forty-odd people had drifted within earshot.
“Six days in this weather,” Borgün told them. “He’s brought all eleven home.”
Karluk shifted his weight. Borgün did not look at him.
“Half of you called him a stray when I took him in. Half a year ago these families belonged to Kelgrim.” He nodded at the old man. “Karluk went after them without asking what they were worth to us. It never occurred to him to leave a man who couldn’t walk.”
A murmur of approval went through the crowd. Karluk’s ears burned and he twisted his gloves in his hands until Borgün was done.
Yassa found him afterward at the horse line. “Well.”
“Don’t.”
“I intend to enjoy this,” Yassa said. “That’s the kind of praise people remember.”
Karluk loosened a buckle. Yassa leaned on the rail, as pleased with himself as he had been on the ride out.
“I’ve spent six years trying to get him to say something like that in front of the whole camp. Six years. And you managed it in—”
The sentence stopped. His smile stayed where it was.
“A year and a half,” he finished. “I’ll tell it at every fire until the thaw. By spring I’ll be the one he praised.”
Karluk laughed and gripped Yassa’s shoulder. When he left the horse line Yassa was still smiling. Halfway to his tent Karluk remembered how Yassa’s voice had changed when he spoke about Iktu. They had known each other for nearly a year and a half and Karluk had never told him about the pit.
Maybe next time we have a fire to ourselves, he thought.
He went to see his wife. She was heavy with their child now and was coming out of their tent to meet him.