“One that will serve, for now,” said Lirael. She had also lost her sword Nehima in the binding of Orannis. With the royal armories open to her, she had tried several swords, good weapons of fine steel imbued with Charter marks, but none felt entirely at home in her hand. Sam had said he would make her one, but the hand came first, and in any case it would take him a year or more. But as she had told him, the latest blade she’d tried from the armory was good enough.
So she had a Charter-spelled sword, her armored coat of gethre plates, and the seven bells of an Abhorsen. Few would dare stand against her, so equipped.
“What are you waiting for?”
“I’m not waiting . . . I’m going!” said Lirael. “I mean, I’m talking to you, then I’m going.”
Ellimere laughed and gave Lirael a quick hug, before taking several quick steps up the stairs toward the mews, pausing there for a few final words.
“You’re too easy to tease. I’ll come see you off in the paperwing courtyard in half an hour. With a letter for the Barhedrin captain, and I’ll have Mistress Finney send a hawk to Wyverley now. I’ve got a bunch of messages to answer anyway.”
“Anything important?” asked Lirael.
“Don’t think so!” called out Ellimere, once again racing up the stairs. “The Bridge Company reporting some incident with the nomads, a few other things. Routine!”
But she was wrong. It wasn’t routine trouble with the nomads.
Chapter Three
AN OFFERING TO THE RIVER
Greenwash River, Northern Bank
Ferin finished tying off the bandage and inspected her handiwork. The quarrel hadn’t gone through her leg as she’d initially feared, instead scoring a deep furrow on the side of her calf just above her ankle. If it had been in the middle and higher up she would probably be already dead, the bone fractured and blood pumping out too fast to stop.
She’d been lucky, so far at least. But the wound could still turn bad, despite the healing paste she’d liberally smeared on it, hoping to stave off infection. Now her leg stank of bear fat and gwassen berries, the principal ingredients of the paste. The smell made her a little homesick. It was a long way from the mountains and the squat gwassen bushes with their bitter, restorative fruit.
With the bandage secure, Ferin gingerly hopped up on her good foot. She was concealed in a thick clump of black alders by the riverbank, but she still took care to move slowly and stay hidden. She hadn’t got close enough to be sure which clan the horse nomads who’d caught up with her came from, but it didn’t matter. The shaman’s immediate unleashing of the wood-weird confirmed her early suspicions: the word had spread to all Twenty Tribes now, to find the Athask woman far from her mountain. Find her and kill her.
All the clans that gave tribute to the Witch With No Face would obey that instruction. Which, as far as Ferin knew, was nineteen of the Twenty Tribes. Only the raft people who drifted across the bitter sea in the far west had managed to avoid the tribute and the retribution of the Witch With No Face, by the simple expedient of taking their rafts to the far side of their salty waters. The horse-folk of the steppe, and even her own mountain-dwellers, they all gave the Witch With No Face the required offerings.
“Offerings,” whispered Ferin, and smiled. That was how she had gotten her use-name. The name she had been given at birth was lost, all record and memory of it destroyed when she’d been chosen to be a tribute to the Witch. But later, her very smallest not-sister had tried to call her “offering” like the adults did, but only “ferin” had come out. While the adults carefully always called her Offering, as was traditional, nearly all the children called her Ferin.
At least they did when she was allowed to see them, which was not very often. Each clan’s chosen offerings had to live away from the rest of their people, a league or more from the main camp, to be overseen by the tribe’s best teachers, who ensured the offerings would grow up to be physically and mentally strong. Fast and lithe, supple in mind and body, trained with bow, sword, and knife. Taught to speak the common language of the clans and the Old Kingdom, even to read and write as well, something most nomads never bothered with unless they were to become a witch or shaman.
The Witch With No Face wanted only the best when it came time to move into her new body.
Ferin grimaced, both from the thought of that and from the pain in her leg. No muscle or tendon was severed, and it would support her weight if absolutely necessary. But it hurt, a pain that not only inhabited the wound but sent stabbing outriders up her leg and into every toe.
The tribute had been going on for centuries, the Witch With No Face demanding girls be kept ready, choosing one every dozen years or so, depending on how hard she had treated her current body. When that grew too old—and her bodies aged far faster than they would have simply from the normal passage of time—or was injured, the Witch With No Face would leave her old body and move into the new one.
If an offering achieved the age of seventeen without being chosen by the Witch, she was killed and her body burned, the ashes sent to the Witch as proof of the deed. After all, there were always plenty more. If one clan ran out, another would have a suitable candidate, a new body for the Witch With No Face.
But not anymore, thought Ferin with grim satisfaction.
Something had happened to the Witch some eight moons past, a great defeat that had completely destroyed the body she inhabited. This had briefly been a cause of rejoicing, on the first news, until it became clear that the death of her body did not mean the Witch With No Face was actually dead herself.
She had returned from Death as a terrible spirit, something like the entities which inhabited wood-weirds and Spirit-Walkers, or even the tiny, malignant things trapped in spirit-glass arrowheads. But much more powerful, because the shamans and witches could not control her, and even the most powerful spirit-glass arrows simply enraged her, instead of ensuring her final end.
The usefulness—or not—of spirit-glass arrows against her had been tested several times, to the archers’ cost. There were many among the clans who hated the Witch, and had lost children as offerings. Now the survivors had even more reasons to hate her, but were powerless to do anything about it.
There had been a brief hope that on becoming a bodiless spirit, the Witch With No Face wouldn’t need any more offerings, and would even let the current crop walk out of their solitary dwellings and return to their tribes. But this was not to be. Word had come that they must all be killed, their bodies burned on pyres, stacked high with fuel and kept extra hot.
For some reason, the Witch either feared the offerings, or perhaps wanted them killed to remove a reminder of the bodies she could no longer inhabit, the physical life she could no longer have.
All through the north, the offerings had been slain, and urns containing their ashes dispatched as evidence that the order of the Witch With No Face had been carried out.
Except in one place. The people of the Athask, the red-stitched goatskin-clad people of the mountains, had sent an urn containing human ashes, sure enough, but they were not those of their offering.
They did this because another witch had told them so. A witch who had died some nine years before and had stayed properly and sensibly dead. This witch had told the elders what was to come, Seeing it in the frozen waterfall that hung jewel-like in the winter, above the summer camp, the highest point in the mountains where the clans regularly pitched their tents.
Ferin had
only vague memories of the Cave Witch, as her people came to call the visitor, but she recalled a woman with blue eyes and skin a different shade of brown than the mountain-folk, her hair the color of dry grass. Ferin had been told how the witch had appeared one summer, taking up residence in a cave off the mountain trail between the winter and summer camps. She had slain five of the clan-folk soon after her arrival, including a lesser shaman. They had tried to kill her and take the rich and strange things she had brought with her, along with the two mules that had carried her goods. Mules were rare beasts on the mountain, and tasted even better than horse.
But the Cave Witch had killed her attackers with unusual magic. Old Kingdom magic, from the far south across the great river. Recognizing her power, the elders treated with the foreign sorceress. Normally they would have also sent word to the Witch With No Face, but this was one of the first things the Cave Witch told them not to do, as it would bring them ill luck. As she also correctly told them about an imminent raid from the Ranash people—the Moon Horse clan—who lived in the highest part of the steppe, close to the mountains, they listened to her. When she told them other useful glimpses of what was to come over the years, they continued to listen.
In the months before she died of the wasting sickness, the Cave Witch told them of her most important vision. She foresaw that the Witch With No Face would be killed but not killed, and would no longer need her offerings of young women. Instead, she would require something more, something that would end in the complete ruin of the clan, the death of the Athask people.
The blue-eyed woman told them the only way to stop this from happening was to send a messenger to her own people, and it was then she told the elders about the tribe of seers who lived around and under and beside a glacier in the Old Kingdom.