Neither of us knew what the hell to do. I set my ear to your chest—you were gone. Clean gone. That's when old Flawless gets there. Didn't run—he's not the sort—but he gets to it soon enough, starts pumping your ribs like they were bellows. All the while he's speaking in Sull, ordering Gordo to fetch this and that, telling me in Common to stop casting my shadow in his way. Sit, he tells me. I see to the boy. Next thing I know your legs start jerking, a noise comes from your throat like you're being strangled. Gordo's bringing all kind of medicines— leaves and tiny bottles and potions. Flawless pulls out his hunting knife, slices off your tunic as if it's a deerhide he fancies mounting for a trophy, and tells me to boil some water for the herbs. It all happened so fast I could barely track it. A minute later you're half naked on a horseblanket, being rolled onto your stomach so Flawless can have a look at the puncture wound."

Addie patted the horse's head. Noticing her nose band had ridden up, he automatically pulled it back in place. "Flawless asked what was up with you and I couldn't see a way around it so I told him everything: the piece of shadow that was lodged in your shoulder, the thing Yiselle No Knife said about it stopping your heart. Too damned shaken to lie. Too afraid that if I didn't speak the truth you just might die there in front of that bloody skinned bear."

Recalling the hollowed out eyes of the bear skull, Raif shivered. He could feel the leeches sucking on his back, feel hundreds of tiny teeth clamped to his flesh. "Who is this Flawless?"

"Some old trapper coot. Been around awhile, knows some stuff. Flawless isn't his real name, but it's as close as these old gums can get to it. He doesna seem to mind—specially after I explained to him what it meant. That will be my new name, he says. He's quite a one. He'll be in soon to check on your, you know … back."

Raif tried to control his revulsion. They were moving, that was the thing, their slimy bellies contracting as they pumped in blood. Motioning to the Sull horse, he asked, "Is that his?"

Addie understood this question. "Aye. Flawless has some Sull in him, more than Gordo that's for sure. Don't think he has much love for them though. I get the feeling the Sull aren't too happy about him trapping bears." Lowering his voice, the cragsman returned to Raif's side. "Know that trap I sprung the other day by the fallen cedar?" Raif nodded. "Gordo finds it yesterday, tells Flawless, who's convinced it was the Sull that did it."

Raif thought about this. "We're in Sull territory?"

"Just about. Apparently the borders are a little hazy around the top of Bludd."

"Help me up," Raif said, planting his palms on the tent floor.

"You can't get up," Addie protested, stepping back. "You need to lie there and rest."

"I need," Raif said, gritting his teeth as he leveraged his weight forward, "to find the Red Ice."

"Traggis Mole is dead. What does it matter when you find the damn sword?"

Pain shot along Raif s left arm as he pushed himself to standing. The tent spun and he stumbled as he tried to orientate himself. Light floated sideways and blurred. Addie's hand clamped on to his right arm. "Steady now."

Braced against Addie's weight, Raif waited for the tent to stop spinning. He felt a small loosening on his back. Something moved. A leech dropped to the floor. Addie kicked it away with the side of his boot, but not before Raif had seen something brown and bloody, like a piece of liver.

"Addie, I have to go. I need to find the sword." Swear to me you will fetch the sword that can stop them. Swear it. "I spoke an oath. I intend to keep it."

He had meant to say more, to tell Addie that he had broken his word so many times that there was now nothing solid beneath anything he said, that his fate was to wield the sword named Loss and slay the creatures that could be destroyed only with such a blade, and that every day he spent in territory claimed by the Sull he risked both his own life and Addie's. Yet he stopped himself. At the end of everything it was the oath to Traggis Mole that counted.

Addie had trained to be a Wellhouse warrior and then deserted his clan in favor of a life herding sheep. When Raif had asked him about it all those months ago in the Rift, the cragsman had said only one thing in his defense. I never took the oath. Those words defined Addie Gunn's life.

The cragsman guided Raif to one of the tents vertical support poles. "Set here," he said, handing him off to the unstripped birch log. "I'll fetch Flawless."

Raif held on to the pole as he watched the little fair-haired cragsman slip between the tent flaps. He didn't think he had ever met a better man.

The mule wandered over to inspect the blankets Raif had been lying on. A piece of onion was stuck against its nose. The Sull horse moved forward a few steps and then stopped. Raif wondered if she had watched him while he slept.

"Sick man go back to bed," came a voice from the far side of the tent wall. A moment later two small brown hands parted the canvas and the man named Flawless stepped through.

It looked as if he had been hammered from bronze. He was tiny and his skin was darkly burnished. His cheekbones were high and angular and the rest of his face seemed to hang from them, His eyes were star-Singly blue. "Bed now." he said jabbing his finger accusingly at Raif. "A pox upon the heart."

Shaking his head, Raif hung on grimly to the pole, "How long will it work for, the poultice?"

The little man put his hands on his hips. He was dressed in hunter's greens with mam bells and pouches strapped and slung around his waist and chest A silver bar as thick as a child's finger pierced the car-tilage of his right upper ear. "No leeches. Nowork. Bed."

Raif realized he didn't even know what time of day it was. The light seeping in through the canvas had been diffused by thick cloud. Stubbornly he said, "I'm leaving today. So do whatever youneed to" — he jerked his head backward—"with that to keep me going awhile."

Flawless hissed a few soft words in Sull. It sounded like he was curs-ing. Pulling a glass jar from the large rawhide pouch at his waist, he said, "Need another leech. Need at least twelve a day." As he unwrapped the twine holding the cloth lid in place, Raif saw the jaw was full of black squirming worms. Leeches. "Have thirty left."

Raif made the calculation.

"Turn," Flawless commanded, plucking a long wet leech from the jar. The creature's three-lobcd mouth was open and it wriggled in the old man's grip, trying to attach itself to his thumb.

Raif turned. Forehead pressing against the tent canvas he waited. Flawless started whistling. Raif felt a light touch close to the center of his back, and then the suckers bit into his skin.

"Bad back there," the Trenchlander said. "Keep clean."

Raif unclenched his jaw. Deciding it was time he got dressed, he released his grip on the pole. His legs felt like wet sticks, and he willed his knees to firmness as he stepped toward the blankets.

Flawless folded his arms and watched him. He was still holding the open jar in his fist.

"Need go Hell's Town," he said in his sharp, biting voice. "See healers in Maggot Quarter. Cut it out."

Raif nodded. He could not see his clothes, and remembered that Addie had said his tunic was cut into strips. The stormglass.

"Friend has belongings," the Trenchlander said, batting the mule away as it came to investigate the jar. "You know where you go?"

"Maggot Quarter."

"No. Red Ice. Friend tell you where?"

Raif kept his face calm. He did not blink. "You tell me."

"Red Ice not far north. Many bears. Maygi hide it. Do not know where going won't find it. Bluddsmen ride past, never see. On border. Half Sull. Half Bludd. North.

The man's ice blue eyes burned intensely as he spoke and Raif real-ized there were things here he did not fully understand. Histories and betrayals, hurts and resentments. Trenchlander versus Sull; and all that went along with being second best. Raif thought about Yiselle No Knife and the Spinebreaker and before them Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer: Prideful people not easy to like.