Muscles in Bram's stomach loosened. He had heard of Castlemilk's gravepool and wondered if it was proper to approach it. The sheen of water was clearly visible on either side of Wrayan Castlemilk, and as Bram watched she knelt down and leaned forward. He continued walking toward the pool, curious and cautious, passing a children's court that had been colored with orange and blue chalk, and a mulched and caned vegetable bed, before coming to a halt thirty paces before the wall.
Unlike the roundhouse, the wall enclosing the gravepool was built from simple baked bricks, not milkstone and it had not aged well. Green mold grew at the base and mortar had worn away leaving deep cracks around the bricks. One of the gateposts was listing, and the gate itself had been hastily stained with the same matte limewash as the wall. A fox head, deeply carved into the wood, was its only decoration.
Beyond the gate, Wrayan Castlemilk rose to her feet and brushed dirt from her cloak. Her right hand glistened with water. Turning, she saw Bram. With a small crook of her wrist she beckoned him forward and then waited, motionless, as he approached.
"Welcome" she said once he had come to a halt. "I had expected you sooner."
Bram's face flushed with blood, and he was about to apologize when he remembered his brother Robbie's contempt for people who tried to explain their actions. A king has no use for sorry.
Wrayan Castlemilk watched Bram, her brown eyes shrewd and thoughtful She was the second-longest-reigning chief in the clanholds and had ruled Castlemilk for nearly thirty years. Bram could not guess how old she was. Her face was unlined, though her waist-length braid was equal parts red and gray. "Our guide, Drouse Ogmore, is acquainted with Robbie's new guide at Dhoone. Both men keep birds, in the manner of the old clans, and it is not unknown for messages to pass between them." The chief raised a cool eyebrow. "So if a boy was to leave Dhoone for Castlemilk and arrive ten days late Drouse, and therefore I, might know it."
Aware he was being reprimanded, Bram bowed his head.
"Come, Bram Cormac," Wrayan said. "Take a walk with me around the pool." She did not wait for him, and began walking a circuit of the artificial lake.
It was a perfect circle, about eighty feet in a diameter. Only a three-foot grass verge separated the lake from the wall that enclosed it. Bram was nervous as he followed the chiefs footsteps, worried that some errant impulse might make him leap into the water.
And that was one place he did not want to be.
He could see the lead coffins, dozens of them, lying beneath nine feet of water. Round and encrusted with mussels, they looked like pale, ghostly boulders. Bram wondered how the bodies of the Castlemilk chiefs had been fitted inside them, and didn't very much like the answer he came up with.
"Skerro Castlemilk, the Winter chief, used to farm the mussels and eat them." Wrayan came to a halt by the edge. "He went insane. Some say it was the lead."
Bram could think of no suitable response. He frowned at the water, hoping to look serious and alert.
Wrayan Castlemilk did not appear to notice. "The milkstone silt at the bottom is nearly a foot deep. At one time it was custom to have a boy stir it every day with a paddle so it looked as if the caskets were submerged in milk." She smiled flatly at Bram. Sunlight sparkling off the shoulders of her silver cloak threw a strange brightness upon her face. "My brother Alban lies here, though he swore every day of his life that he did not wish to end up in this pool. Once a chief is dead, though, he has no say over his clan, his body. His sister."
She had ordered her brother buried here against his wishes, Bram realized.
Wrayan acknowledged Bram's expression with a small nod. "Someone will do it to me one day, order my body cut and sunk. It is the Milk way, and a clan is nothing without its ways. Dhoone, Blackhail, Bludd: what do you think makes them different?" A tiny movement of her wrist indicated that Bram need not bother formulating an answer: the Milk chief would supply one for him. "Our customs are the only things that separate us from other clans. We worship the same gods, abide by the same laws, want the same thing. It is in the small details that we forge an identity as clan; boasts we speak, weapons we carry, the manner in which we dispose of our dead. Twenty-eight years ago, when given a choice between betraying Alban and betraying the customs of this clan, there was only one answer for me. I am chief. If I fail to uphold the old ways I diminish us." She gave him a cold look, a warning, before continuing.
"Castlemilk is an old and proud clan, Bram Cormac, and I am an old and proud chief. We dance the swords, and mix our guidestone with oil and water and drink it like milk. Our best warriors fight with two swords and name themselves the Cream, and our girl children are taught one new way how to kill a man every year until they reach sixteen. We have been sworn to Dhoone for four hundred years but before that we stood alone. If you believe you have come to a lesser clan you are mistaken and you can march yourself right back to Dhoone. I will have you only on one term: and that is absolute loyalty to Castlemilk. Drouse is in the guidehouse, waiting upon my word. He expects to hear an oath and so do I."
She paused, her chest rising and falling beneath the fine silver weave of her cloak. For the first time Bram noticed the elk lore, fastened to the cinch of her braid. A thick hoop of spine. "I will leave you now," she said, her voice calm. 'You have a quarter-hour, then you will either make your way to the guidehouse or collect your belongings and depart this clan."
Bram nodded once in understanding and she left him standing by the man-dug lake. A moment passed and then something—a fish or an eel—broke the surface of the water, flashed briefly, then was gone. Bram wasn't sure but he thought he saw tee%*
Clouds heading in from the north were moving swiftly toward the sun and he could tell it wouldn't be long before they killed the sunlight. For no good reason whatsoever he drew his sword and stood on the grass and inspected it in the last of the full sun. Light on the watered steel moved upblade toward the point. He tried angling the sword in different directions but he could not get it to move the other way.
"It wont be so bad, Bram. We both know you were never really cut out for Dhoone." Robbie's parting words sounded in Bram's head.
No going back.
Abruptly, he sheathed the sword and headed out of the walled enclosure. He had made his decision.
EIGHTEEN The Birch Way
It was the fourth day amongst the birches. The mist that had formed overnight rolled through the forest in breaking waves. It was a landscape of ghosts, pale and silvery, with nothing green or blue to be seen. The trees disappeared into the clouds, their straight white trunks the same thickness from base to crown. Hundreds of thousands of birches had seeded from a single mother tree, and the dark charcoal-colored scars where limbs had broken off were the only way of distinguishing one tree from another. Minute differences in spacing and light had produced branches at differing angles and heights, and the marks they'd left behind dappled the bark like paw-prints. Lan Fallstar read these prints, and they appeared to provide him with enough information to navigate the unchanging landscape of the birch way.
Ash March tracked the Far Rider's gaze as it jumped from tree to tree, noting the birches it settled upon and attempting to discern a pattern in Lan's choices.
They were walking their horses through the mist. The sun was a diffused steel disk low in the east. The air was damply cold. Underfoot the snow was wet and uneven. Ash had learned it hid potholes and pools of standing water. She was cautious as she placed her feet. The birches had grown on low-lying saturated topsoil, not all of it frozen. Often brown water oozed from the snow as she stepped upon it. Other times her feet would sense give followed by traction followed by more give, as the soles of her boots pushed through sloppy layers of snow, sedge, water, mud and dead leaves. Today she could not see her feet and relied upon following Lan's path as closely as possible.