Addie had grown chilblains on his nose and hands and was having a spot of bother with his feet. Every night he would dry livermoss on a stick above the fire and every morning he would stuff the springy filaments into the toes of his boots. The cragsman moved no slower for his troubles, but Raif had seen him hesitate a few times before starting a sharp descent, and then lean heavily on his stick. Raif's own feet were holding up. Both he and Addie wore double layers of hareskin socks that kept out all but the worst of the cold, and Raif's ancient hand-me-down boots fitted him so well that there was little chafing. When he touched his face he felt patches of hard and tender skin and he thought there might be some frost damage, but as long as it didn't hurt he didn't spare it much thought.
It was the shoulder that bothered him. Slowly, steadily, over the course of the past seven days Raif had felt it burning a hole in his chest. He'd once watched as Brog Widdie proofed the temperature on a batch of blister steel he had been firing. With his long, crab-craw tongs the master smith had formed a small portion of the red hot metal into ball, and then pulled it from the fire. Immediately he dropped the ball onto his proofing block and watched how quickly the molten metal burned through the green wood. The ball would blacken and hiss, igniting a ring of flames as it burned a hole through the wood. That's what the Shatan Maer's claw had begun to feel like to Raif; a piece of molten metal incinerating his flesh.
uDo you know how to start a stopped heart?" Yiselle No Knife had asked Addie Gunn in the Sull camp by the Rift. The words haunted Raif, the tone of them, the lightness yet certainty in her voice. She had meant to shock both of them, him and Addie, and she succeeded better than she realized. Until she spoke Raif had managed to squash it into the back of his thoughts. The shoulder hurt. It had grown worse since the creature on the rimrock had smashed him in the back. It ached, sometimes a lot. That was it. Now it loomed constantly in his thoughts, and he couldn't tell if he was imagining that it was growing worse, or if it really was growing worse. Either way Yiselle No Knife had won a victory. She hadn't prevented them from heading east as she had intended, but she had intimidated them. The Sull were experts at that.
"Let's head a mite south," Addie mumbled, surprising Raif by speaking for the first time since they'd broken camp earlier that morning. "After those icestones we drifted too far north."
Raif nodded his agreement. They were both wearing face masks roughly shaped from hareskins, and as it was difficult to talk they'd taken to signing basic instructions and requests. It was snowing in big flakes that were as light and airy as dandelion fluff. The clouds were thickly gray and did not appear to be moving. Underfoot the snow formed complicated layers, by turns mushy, grainy, gravelly and plain hard. Some drifts were as deep as Addie's waist, but generally the cover lay between one and one and a half feet. They'd been lucky with the afternoon thaw two days back: it had prevented the snow from becoming too deep.
Neither Addie nor Raif no longer had much idea of where they were. Most mornings they would align themselves with the rising sun, pick a point far in the distance—a stand of big trees, a ridge, a hummock, a frozen pond—and head toward it. If they reached it before dark they'd pick something else, correcting either north or south depending on how Addie felt about the going. This morning Addie had picked a knoll that stuck out above the forest canopy and glinted with blue-green lenses of ice. Now they slowed their pace while the cragsman chose a second target farther south.
Hiking onto a rock, Addie surveyed the land ahead. His brown wool cloak was deeply ringed with pine sap and his boots had been poked so many times by rocks and branches that the leather looked like it had been chewed on by dogs. Never one to waste much time, the cragsman made his decision, and then carefully lowered himself onto the floor of the slope. "Stream. This way" he said, striking a new path that took them down into the trees.
The cedar forests to the south formed a green lake on the valley floor, leaving the slopes and ridges free for other, scrappier trees. Spruce and white pines took the ground the cedars did not want, but even they stayed clear of the higher slopes. Forest fires and bog rot had killed successive generations of trees and there were many fallen logs and standing deadwoods. For the past day and a half Raif and Addie had walked above the northern treeline, following a goat path along the rocks, but now they entered woodland.
Light dimmed and the air grew colder. The snow underfoot was patchy, but you could hear the great weight of it in the trees. Boughs creaked and whirred as they strained to hold their loads. No decent wind in several days meant the trees had been given little relief. Some pines had bent in the middle, forming white humps that looked like bridges. Branches had failed and snapped. Entire trunks had split in two. Raif suggested they pick up their pace. Addie grumbled but agreed.
It was hard to know exactly where they lay in relation to Bludd. At some point in the east, Bludd forests melted into forests claimed and patrolled by the Sull. Bludd was a huge clanhold, and its northeastern reaches were wild and barely populated. Occasionally Raif and Addie saw smoke, but after the encounter with Yiselle No Knife and the Spinebreaker, neither had managed to work up sufficient desire to investigate. Raif assumed they were still above Bludd's borders, but couldn't be sure. Addie had an understandable fear of traveling too far north—the Want lay that way and you might simply blink and find yourself in the middle of it, unable to get out—and tended to steer them due east and southeast.
The Rift no longer existed as an unmissable marker that divided the continent into the clanholds and the lands of the barren north. The great fissure in the earth had narrowed to a canyon filled with debris, then a gulch choked with willow, then a simple gash in the rock. "It's still there," Addie had said, wagging his head at the ground when Raif asked, "but now you have to look for it. With all this snow we could be standing right upon it and wouldn't even know." Whenever Raif thought of Addie's words he couldn't help looking at his feet. He glanced down now as they made their way through a stand of hundred-year cedar. Nothing underfoot only pine needles and snow. "Whoa, laddie," Addie said, gripping his arm.
Raif looked at him, startled.
"Nearly lost your footing then" Above the face mask, Addie's gray eyes searched Raif's. "Probably hit a tree root."
A question lay behind the statement. Raif blinked. He felt as if he'd missed something. He'd been looking down at his feet and then then … Addie had spoken.
"Rest a minute," Addie said, clenching Raifs elbow like a vise. "Take a mouthful of water."
Considering Addie had him in an arm lock, Raif didn't have much choice. His chest felt strange. Tight Inside his boarskin glove all five fingers of his left hand were numb. When he held the water bladder above his head to drink, strange tingles passed along his arm to his shoulder.
Addie watched him. Raif knew what the cragsman was thinking. He tried to formulate a reply to the inevitable questions but couldn't think of anything reassuring that wouldn't be a lie.
Snow sifted down to the forest floor as they stood facing each other, silent. Last year's ferns poked through the ground cover like rusted iron bars. Finally Addie said, "Dead men don't fulfill oaths." Angry, he set off along the path on his own.
Raif bit off his glove, swiveled his arm back and rubbed his shoulder with numb fingers. A point deep in his chest felt hollow. Walking back along the course of his and Addie's footsteps, he searched for the exact spot where he'd looked down to check for the Rift. After a minute or two he thought he found it. His footsteps had been steady, evenly paced and all pointing in the same direction, and then one—just one—went awry. The toe of his left boot had made contact at a slightly different angle to the previous steps and the outside edge that led from it formed a wedge shape as if Raif had been in the process of making a sudden turn. There was no heel mark.