A Sword from Red Ice

Tutting softly, Merritt shook her head. "Think clearly, Raina. My position on Scarpes in the Hailhouse is unchanged. Tomorrow, through that very door, two hundred Scarpes will come and kick me out of my hearth. They've done some sort of swap-around with the tied Hailsmen who were due to take it. It's a disgrace, and you underestimate me if you think that Stannig Beade can convince me otherwise. He hasn't tried to. I doubt if he'd dare. What he did do was come to me and ask my opinion on some things. And for a wonder he actually listened to the answers. That, I respect. It's fitting that a new clan guide acquaints himself with matters of clan, and also fitting that he takes the time to introduce himself to its widows. He knows there are things wrong in this clan. But right now he doesn't have time for that. His priority is the new guidestone—and rightly so. We must be settled as a clan before we can move forward, have a heart beating before we can breathe. You know that and if you would look beyond his colors, you would see that Stannig Bead is guide first and foremost. Not a Scarpe."

Raina felt a little stunned, as if someone had knocked her with some force on the head. How on earth was she to deal with this? At least now she knew how Stannig Beade had got to Merritt: he had flattered her and opened up a channel to power. It was telling that Stannig Beade had made no such overture to the chiefs wife, no cozy little talk, no confessions of uncertainty, no delicate request for information. He wouldn't dare. Five days ago on the greatcourt they had met eye-to-eye, and she had seen through him and he through her. Stannig Beade knew the chiefs wife for his enemy, and Raina Blackhail knew that before her stood a man who coveted Blackhail's power.

It was then, looking into Merritt Ganlow's superior face, that Raina had decided to steal the Hailstone. She'd be damned if she'd stand by and let some clever, scar-faced Scarpemen have his way with the remains. And Merritt could go to hell too.

Now, one day later, Raina had lost the bravado she'd felt outside the widows' hearth. Strange, but when she had actually stolen the stone from the nibble that was heaped against the roundhouse's east wall, things had begun to change for her. She had chosen her moment carefully, for the night crews were still working on the wall and her only opportunity to be alone was when one of Anwyn's kitchen girls had called the crews inside for ale and supper. Oil lamps and guarded candles had been left burning on poles and on makeshift pedestals of piled stones. A big vat of tar was bubbling on a slow green flame and buckets of white lime had been arranged in a loose half-circle around it. Timber boards and split logs were strewn across the ground, and Raina could smell the itchy, dry-skin odor of sawdust A second scaffold was now in place, bridging the gap between bare ground that had once held the guidehouse and the shattered remains of the stable block. Raina had to be careful to duck her head as she crossed toward the scrap pile of granite.

Stannig Beade's mule-powered stone mill cast its big blocky shadow against the remains of the Hailstone. The new clan guide was wasting no time and Raina could see that the largest chunks of stone had already gone under the mill. What remained were pieces no bigger than a man's head, and even these had been sorted and were lying in a separate pile close to the millstone. Stannig would be grinding at dawn. A charge of anger ran down Raina's spine. How could Merntt Ganlow not see what this man was about? Snapping her head once, as if to shake off some unpleasant insect that had alighted upon it, Raina approached the remains. She had thought, wrongly, that it might be difficult to tell Hailstone from roundhouse stone; the explosion had blasted and commingled both types of rock. Yet there was no mistaking guidestone. If she was ever asked what the differences were, she would not be able to provide an answer that would satisfy anyone other than a clansman. It was guidestone. It was different..

She picked the largest piece, how could she not? And struggled to lift sixty pounds of dead weight to her chest. She had not thought to bring a saddlebag or pack, and had only her shawl to conceal the stone. Now that she no longer had fine chambers lo call her own she slept in one of the dry cells beneath the kitchen that Anwyn used few storing herbs. She took the stone there, walking around the exterior of the roundhouse and not through it. When she rapped on the kitchen door Anwyn answered. The clan matron did not know what Raina carried and did not ask.

Later Anwyn brought her supper, hot onion soup and a wedge of fried bread, and nodded briskly at Kama's request for while spirits and a shoulder pack sturdy enough to carry a small child.