A Sword from Red Ice

It had felt like a slap in the face. If there was a custom here she was not familiar with, why could he not simply explain it? Why did he treat her with contempt? And why did she let it hurt her?

She had spent a miserable night, rolled in her cloak and drowned in vapor. When she'd woken, her hair was glistening with thousands of tiny drops of moisture. The Far Rider was sitting on his saddlebag, facing southeast. Fingers of mist were curling past his blank and open eyes. As soon as she moved he stirred. His face was pale, the skin around the jaw oddly slack. He asked her to tend to the horses while he rebuilt the fire. She had been eager to do his bidding.

By the time she'd returned from feeding, watering and brushing down the horses Lan was back to his normal self. He did not speak to her as they ate their breakfast of dried horsemeat and raw and fertilized snipe eggs.

Disappointed, Ash had looked out at the prison of trees and wondered when she would see the end of them. The first night she had met Lan Fallstar, he had warned her about the birches. What day had he said the insanity set in? She knew he had been referring to a person traveling alone and without knowledge, but she felt it anyway. He rarely spoke to her, and as she had no understanding of how the forest was laid out she was left with the dizzying sense that she was walking the same path over and over again. It was as if the birches were revolving in a great wheel around her. She had no way of gauging her progress.

Today, with the mist swirling at knee height and the clouds low and hazy, the world had been reduced to a band of stakes. She couldn't even carry out her normal job, which was to collect any stray branches that had snapped from the trees—she could not see the forest floor. From time to time, she would step on a branch, snapping it in two, and would pick it up and add it to the bundle on the gelding's rump. She had a sense that by gathering the fallen branches she was doing more than merely collecting firewood. The task had the feeling of housekeeping about it. It was as if by removing any identifiable marks, she was maintaining the birch way. When she had asked Lan about this his only reply had been "It is forbidden to cut down the birches."

Ash wished she knew more about the Sull. Her lack of knowledge made her vulnerable. Right now she existed at Lan's mercy, and she did not know enough about men and Sull to judge whether this made her safe or unsafe. She did not know her own worth.

She knew he watched sometimes; when she slipped off her cloak and dress to wash and sleep, when she rubbed grease into her arms and legs, and loosened her hair. During her final year in Mask Fortress, she had grown accustomed to frank attention from men. Some had told her she was beautiful, others had whistled as she rode across the quad. She had not disliked the attention. Sometimes she had even invited more of it. It gave her an intoxicating little thrill of power.

Whenever she caught Lan watching her she made a point of prolonging whatever action she had been doing. She was not fully Sull and he disdained her for that fact; but here was something that she had that he desired. There was more to it than that, though. That was the confusing thing. She felt attraction toward him too.

Whenever they shared the small wolfskin tent she found herself thinking about him. The tent was raised on a frame of hollow canes and the skins had been expertly cut and stitched to fit it snugly and seal out rain and wind. When you were inside you felt closed off from the world. Light coming in through the skins was amber and golden and strangely shaped; the skins acted like stained glass. The sleeping space was small, perhaps eight feet by six, and when they were both lying within it, Ash became herself acutely self-aware. Roll over just half a foot and she would touch him. The thought disturbed and excited her, and two nights back when they had last shared the tent she had spent several hours awake, resisting the urge to push herself closer. Even through the thickness of her blankets and furs she could feel his warmth. Or imagined she felt it. She also imagined that he was in the same state of awareness that she herself was. There was a false evenness to his breaths, not unlike her own, and a stillness to his body that seemed too controlled for someone who slept.

When Ash awoke in the morning she saw that the half-foot of space separating them from each other had been expertly maintained.

They had not shared a tent since then, but even this morning as she washed her face and neck with snow he had watched her through the flames of the fire. Later as he helped her saddle the gelding he had leant in toward her as she leant toward the horse and she had felt his hand touch her hip. It could have been an innocent miscalculation, but Lan Fallstar did not strike her as the kind of person who would mistake what he did with his body.