Karluk · Bearclaw Territory, Frost Fang Highlands
1716
Borgün died on a night when Karluk was four miles away, checking a trapline he could have left until morning. It was the tail of the short highland summer, eleven days after Karluk brought his family home from Ghurat’s hollow. The grass on the ridges was already the color of old rope and the nights were starting to get colder. He walked out in the dark for no reason other than that the walking was good and he wanted an hour to himself.
He came back at first light with three hares on his belt. From three hundred yards he knew the camp was awake in the wrong way. There were no cookfires. At that hour there should have been nine of them sending smoke straight up into the cold air over the hollow. The air smelled only of frost and the horse lines. People stood outside their tents instead of moving between them. A child was crying somewhere among them and nobody hushed him.
Senna waited at the edge of the path with their son on her hip. The color that always lived in her cheeks was gone. She said nothing until he reached her.
“What?”
“My father.” Her voice was level, and he knew. “In the night. His throat.”
The hares hit the ground.
When he reached the chieftain’s tent it was full of men who would not look at him. Borgün lay on his own furs with his hands folded. Somebody had done that for him. Above the furs the bear pelt he wore as chieftain hung from the center pole with its skull at the top. It hung there every night while he slept.
Karluk crouched beside the body. For now he set aside the fact that this was Senna’s father. Two braziers burned inside and the flap had been shut since before dawn. The air was close enough to make a man sweat in his coat. It was thick with charcoal and the iron smell of blood in the furs. The body was cold anyway. Not cool. Cold, like a body left outside.
It had not sat outside. One of the women who would wash him said so. Another told her the flap had stood open half the night, and the first woman let it go. Karluk set that aside until the body told him the rest.
The cut ran left to right, four inches or near enough. It was a single draw, deep at the start and shallowing toward the end. That put a right-handed man above him and behind. There was no bruising at the wrists or the jaw and nothing under any of the ten fingernails. The furs beneath the body were soaked through in one even spread rather than a smear.
He did not wake. Or he woke and did not struggle, which is worse.
Borgün was fifty-two years old and still slept with his knife within reach of his right hand. The strap across the hilt was untouched. A man who heard someone in his tent at night had a hand on his knife before he opened his eyes. Every man in the Highlands did. Borgün had not.
“He knew whoever it was,” Karluk said.
Nobody answered. He looked up and saw where everyone was standing. There were eleven men in the tent and not one of them stood near him. Rulf waited by the flap with his jaw set. Yassa stood closest to the body with his arms folded. His eyes were bloodshot from a night without sleep.
Karluk was still crouched over the furs. Borgün’s blood was drying on two of his fingers from testing the spread. “Say it,” he said.
“Say what?” one of the younger men asked, too quickly.
“Whatever it is that has all of you looking at me like that.”
No one moved. The silence went on long enough to answer him. Then Yassa unfolded his arms. His voice was quiet, and each word sounded as though it had to be dragged out of him. “Brother… Where were you last night?”
The trial took place in the open with the whole camp standing. It barely deserved the name. The sun was over the ridge by then. It burned the frost off the grass without warming anything. The hollow smelled of cold ash from nine dead fires, and the crowd made less noise than the wind blowing at the tent hides.
Bearclaw had no law beyond what the tribe agreed on in the moment. Karluk had never once minded it. He minded it now. He stood in the middle of two hundred people who had been his for two years and watched them decide. Without meaning to, he began to count who would stand with him.
Two hundred and eleven adults stood in that circle. Bearclaw numbered some eighty thousand across its valleys, but this was Borgün’s own camp. It was the only part of the tribe that was ever truly Karluk’s. Perhaps forty of them were men he had led somewhere and brought back. Of those forty, six would fight beside him without being asked. Fourteen more would fight if the first six did. Kelgrim’s ninety stood together at the back. The first of them to lift a hand for him would prove Yassa right.
Twenty, and himself. Twenty-one against the rest on open ground, with his wife and son standing behind him. His bow was back in his tent. Nobody had let him bring it and his hand kept rising to his shoulder for a strap that was not there.
So. No.
It had taken him seconds, and it disgusted him that his mind had done the sum at all. An innocent man should not need to know how many people would die for him.
Senna stood at the front of the crowd with the boy on her hip. He was awake now and holding one fist in her braids. She did not sit down once. The evidence came out in two pieces.
First came a knife, found under the loose hide at the back of Karluk’s tent. It was not his and he had never seen it before. It was a plain trade blade and nobody would own it. Borgün’s blood was dry on the hilt. Someone laid it on a scrap of hide at Karluk’s feet. The whole circle looked at it and then at him.
The back of my tent faces the horse line. Anyone walking to the horses passes that hide at any hour, and nobody would look twice.
He kept that to himself. Said aloud it would sound as if he had thought carefully about where to hide a knife. The second was four men who swore that Karluk had left camp alone in the dark and given no reason.
True. I did, and there was no reason to give.
Then Yassa gave them a reason. He laid it out with his eyes on the ground. His hands shook, while his voice held steady. “He married the man’s daughter. Six months after walking in here with nothing. Nobody minded. I didn’t mind.”
Karluk watched the circle take that in.
“Then Borgün started talking about the seat without naming anyone.”
Yassa lifted his eyes for the first time. “And the name this camp said back to him wasn’t a Bearclaw name!”
Someone at the back shifted his feet.
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“An outsider’s name!” Yassa said. “In a tribe with sons of its own.”
He is going to say the other thing now.
In two years of watching Yassa build toward a point, Karluk had never once mistaken the run-up for anything else.
“You all watched him take eighty of Borgün’s men and go east after Kelgrim,” Yassa said. “He came back with two hundred people and put them under our fires, and you’ve been eating beside them all winter.”
He let it sit. “And none of you asked whose confederation that was building.”
“That’s a reason for Borgün to fear me,” Karluk said. “It’s no reason for me to kill him. Every one of you believes he meant to give me the seat. Why would I murder the man who was handing it to me?”
Yassa looked at him then and his face was wrecked. “Because he stopped.”
A murmur went around the circle and died.
“He told me eight days ago. He said he’d changed his mind. That a man who takes two hundred prisoners and calls them family is a man who thinks in confederations, and that Bearclaw needed a chieftain, not an emperor.” Yassa’s voice cracked in the middle of it. It did not stop him.
“He said he was going to tell you himself. He asked me not to say anything until he had.”
It was a very good lie. That was what Karluk thought and it was not the same as thinking he is lying. It was colder. He was sizing up the story the way he would size up ground before a fight. No part of it could be checked. The only other man in that conversation lay in the chieftain’s tent with his hands folded.
It answered the one question the knife could not, which was why now. The words sounded like Borgün’s. A chieftain, not an emperor was the sort of thing he said about other tribes at other men’s fires. Half the camp had heard him say much the same. And every person in the circle already thought about it. For eleven days they had waited for someone to say it aloud so that none of them would have to.
“He never said that!” Senna’s voice came from the front of the crowd, hard and clear. “He was my father. He’d have said it to me first.”
Heads turned toward her and then away. They heard Borgün’s daughter and Karluk’s wife in the same voice, and in that circle the wife weighed more. Nobody answered her. Yassa kept his eyes on the ground. She did not say it again. Karluk had never once seen her leave an argument while she had breath to speak on it. Now she stood with her mouth shut hard and the color burning in her cheeks, and let the circle look past her.
Karluk looked at Rulf. Rulf looked back and said nothing. Karluk understood that he believed him and would not say so. Saying so would split the tribe in half over a corpse. Rulf had spent twenty years keeping Bearclaw from splitting over smaller things than this.
“Karluk.” Yassa spoke, closer now. “Say you didn’t. Say it and I’ll believe you. I’ve stood beside you in several fights. I’d take your word over the knife, over all of it. Just say it.”
That was what hit Karluk hardest, harder than the knife. He almost believed him. Absurdly he thought of a horse line in the dark more than three months gone, with the horses shifting on their tethers. Yassa had spoken at his shoulder and Karluk had answered. When I get back.
He had meant it. In the eleven days since he came home he never once went looking for Yassa to say the thing he had promised to say. For a second, he wondered whether his silence was to blame for this. Then he threw the thought out. A man did not open a chieftain’s throat over a conversation that never happened. The only other explanation was that Karluk was wrong about someone so completely that nothing he believed about anyone was safe.
He looked at Yassa’s face and searched for the flaw. The eyes were right. Men who faked grief overdid the eyes. The hands shook, and Yassa made no effort to hide them. A man performing composure would have hidden them. A man performing distress would have made more of them.
The voice broke in the middle of a sentence rather than at its end. That was where a voice broke when the grief was real. And Yassa said most of it to the ground. A man selling a story watched his buyers. There was no flaw anywhere.
Then it is true. Or he is the best liar I have ever stood in front of, and I have stood in front of a great many.
“I didn’t kill him,” Karluk said.
Yassa closed his eyes and sighed, almost like a relieved man. “Then who did.” He did not raise it into a question. “Because either the whole tribe is lying to me, or you are, brother, and I cannot make it be everyone.”
They did not kill him. That was Rulf’s doing, though Rulf did not claim it. He made an argument about a knife placed too conveniently and took his time over it while the circle muttered and shifted around him. He was the one man in the camp nobody could accuse of taking a side. It convinced no one. It bought just enough doubt to turn a killing into an exile. Karluk was given until midday.
Senna packed without a word. She was quick about it. Karluk stood in the tent doorway and watched her fold the life he had built into two bags. She did not hum. She had always hummed at the hide frame and over the cookpot. He had long since stopped hearing it, the way a man stopped hearing a stream he lived beside. Now he could hear that it was missing. The boy sat on the furs where she had put him, chewing the end of a strap. There was nothing left to do.
It came then, the thing he had set aside over the body. Borgün by the fire on the night Senna was taken, one hand closed on the edge of his cloak. Bring my daughter home, Karluk. I would prefer she didn’t have to bury her husband when she gets here. He had brought her home. She had buried her father instead. Karluk put his hand on the tent pole and held on.
“Not the loom,” she said without turning. “It’ll slow us.”
“Senna.”
“Don’t.” Her hands kept moving. “Don’t say it.”
“You could stay. Both of you. This is your father’s camp. You were born to it, and there’s not a man out there who’d raise a hand to you. The boy—”
“Karluk.”
She turned. Her eyes were dry and furious. “Do you think I married a chieftain’s favorite? I married a man who walked into this camp with nothing and told my father to his face what he was worth.”
He would rather she had cried instead.
“They buried him this morning. By tonight the seat is Yassa’s, and you want me to sit in that camp and watch it happen? Where exactly do you imagine I’d be staying?”
He had no answer. “Take the loom,” he said.
“It’ll slow us.”
“Take it anyway.”
She took it. The first snow of the season began while Senna packed, early even for the high country. It came down fine and dry. It ticked against the tent hides, too light yet to settle.
They walked out through a crowd that said nothing. Nobody led a horse out for them. Horses belonged to the tribe, and a man that had just been kicked out had no claim on one. He had imagined being driven out with stones and shouting. Open hatred had an ugly warmth to it. It would have been easier than this. Two hundred people stood at their tent flaps and watched a man they had eaten beside the night before walk away with his wife and son. Between them they carried two bags and a loom.
A woman whose husband he had brought back alive from the northern pass turned her face away as they walked past her. A boy named Bersi stood with his mother’s hand on his shoulder, crying. He had been eleven when Senna was taken and had watched the raiders from the treeline. For a year and a half he had followed Karluk around the camp asking about the bow. Karluk could not go to him.
Nobody looked at Senna at all. They had known her since the day she was born and they had buried her father four hours earlier. None of them knew what face to show her. Senna looked at every one of them.
Yassa was waiting at the edge of the camp. He was not gloating. Under the hood he wore against the snow his face was gray from lack of sleep, and every freckle stood out. As Karluk passed, Yassa spoke low enough that only the two of them could hear. “I’ll look after them. The two hundred, from Kelgrim’s tribe. I’ll keep them fed the way you would have.”
Karluk stopped. For half a second, part of him went very still and very cold.
Would have.
It was not will, or any of the other things a man said to somebody he expected to see again. It was the past tense, spoken about a man standing four feet away with a pulse and a wife. The part of Karluk that had read men’s hands since he was nine caught it and held it up to the light. The rest of him refused it. That part had gone without sleep and had watched Senna’s father go into the ground that morning. Now it stood in the snow, sent away from everything it had.
Then the moment passed and he could not find the thought again. The way Yassa said it stayed with him all the same. It sounded too finished, like a man setting a tent in order before he moved into it. All he could see now was that Yassa’s eyes were red, and that they had stood together in several fights.
“They’re good people,” Karluk said. “Don’t let anyone call them prisoners.”
“I won’t.”
Karluk walked north into country that did not want him. He had a wife who would not be talked out of coming and a son too young to know he had lost anything. He did not look back. Behind him he heard Yassa’s footsteps turn toward the camp, unhurried. It was the walk of a man going home.