Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Read online

  But Bright had wanted her to stay. Or wanted her to want to stay.

  She had landed a sizeable pickerel and thrown back a young walleye by the time Huon got to business: “A few years ago, when we were at war with the Church Universal and Triumphant, there was an attempt on the life of Órlaith, King Artos’ heir. The assassins got into Castle Todenangst. They could never have done it, but one of the kitchen staff left a storage room window open for them, and poisoned a guard.”

  “Did the girl survive?” Jane asked.

  “The assassination was unsuccessful and the baker fled,” he said. “Lady d’Ath has learned he is living among your people. His name is Charles Frayne.”

  “’Spoze you want him back.” She scratched the back of her neck, then asked Lester. “This about who I think?”

  Lester looked as if he’d dozed off by the fire. “Chuckwagon Charlie.”

  “You know him?” the Baron said.

  “He’s engaged to the princess of the Kip Kelly Rodeo.”

  “He’s well liked,” Jane added. “Reckoned a nice guy. He makes these crab-apple turnovers, ohmuhgawd—”

  “He’s—” He paused for a breath, to master his feelings; Finch saw it only because she’d been watching. “We are engaged in tracking down the last of the CUT magi. He might be one.”

  “So you’re here to see if you can rope him from out the Hoedown?”

  “The six of us, kidnap him?” The idea that they could take on the entire gathering Cree nation was preposterous. “I’ll request he be given up to face justice.”

  “Allie Sawchuk, the rodeo princess, sits on the Council. She’s a fair bet to be the next Grand Chief.”

  Consensus, Finch thought. They won’t give him up.

  “We can only ask,” Huon said. His tone was still light, hiding feelings that, Finch knew, ran deep.

  Jane sucked her teeth. “The famed Lady Death—it’s her house you mean?”

  He nodded. “The one she was in charge of guarding, at least. She had to dash up the stairs and take care of it . . . personally. I was there.”

  “Kind of an insult, breaching her walls?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Maybe you could never hope to kidnap Charlie, but an arrow might cut him down easy enough. We’ve heard about your Montival longbows.”

  Huon shook his head. “We want him, but not enough to risk war. And speaking of our longbows—” They eased gracefully back to minor issues, trade and weapons exchanges.

  By now, Finch had landed a third fish, a pickerel as long as her forearm. She cut it open, throwing the guts to an eager, fox-faced dog before bringing the rest to the fire. When Jane gestured—go ahead—she set it out on the grill. One of the others rolled out a cake of flatbread batter beside it.

  Lester, she saw, had got into her saddlebag and was leafing through Finch’s sketchbook, a gift from the Queen Mother and her most precious possession.

  “This your king, then?” he asked.

  She had drawn Rudi Mackenzie, Artos the first, standing tall on a hill with the Sword of the Lady drawn and half-raised.

  Finch nodded, more interested in the smell of roasting pickerel and the bread dough. Nevertheless she named the portraits as he leafed through them: Lady d’Ath, the Baron’s sister, the Queen and the Queen Mother, various people of the court.

  “And this?” A Scout, in formal dress, short pants and badges all present and correct.

  “Nathan, called Bright.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “No,” she said, forcefully, her tone icing over that inner voice that said her feelings for Bright should run a deeper course.

  Lester, who missed nothing, clucked sympathetically.

  That night, rather than shelter with the Baron and his men, she dug a sleeping trench in a snowdrift, uphill from the main camp, and lined and covered it with pine branches. A single gap left in the nest allowed her to watch the camps, to see people come and go.

  Near midnight a brawl broke out, four agile young-looking shadows from two different camps coming together, seemingly by design, to circle, shout taunts, and then thrash one another. It was a short fight, as fights often were. After, they clasped hands before limping in separate directions.

  Newcomers roused her twice, riding in on the southern trail, speaking to the sentries before setting up shelters of their own. Later, Bright came to expel her from a pleasant dream with bitter words: You care for me, but you do not burn.

  She woke aching and annoyed—with him for demanding, with herself for failing to want him as she should. Lester was slinking across the ice; she watched as he disappeared.

  As the moon sank into the trees, the fox-faced dog she’d fed that afternoon nosed its way into her shelter and curled against her chest, a welcome companion and bringer of warmth.

  Later, the sky clouded and the cold eased; a warm wind licked down from the west. Snow glistened, melting just enough to form an icy skin over the drifts.

  The smell of roasting buffalo teased through Finch’s pine screen well before dawn. Drumsong rolled across the ice from the forest as people lit fires: voices singing in languages she didn’t understand rose and fell in something that sounded like a lamentation.

  One couldn’t wait for the sun, not at the ebb of the year, not so far north. Finch walked the edges of the camp in the predawn darkness, the dog at her side. She caught the eye of a lithe young man, familiar only because of the coyote tattoos arching over his eyes. Her fishing companion. He was clad today in a quilted coat and a fur-lined hat.

  He had a well-constructed face: smooth red skin, strong nose, straight teeth, and eyes the color of smoke.

  He offered her a place at his mother’s fire, and a skewer of roasted buffalo. “You came with Lester Pica.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “The Old One’s partial to the rodeo folk. This thing with your baker; they’ll be angry he’s helping you.”

  She ate the meat and then, as the weather was clear and dry, opened her satchel and took out her book. Taking up an ancient charcoal crayon, she began to draw, sketching the lines of the camp, the porcupine shadow of the Fortress, the shadows of totems on the far bank of the water.

  “I’m Raki,” the young man said.

  “Finch.”

  “Do you sing?”

  She nodded; of the five music badges, she had four.

  Raki cast an admiring gaze over her picture. Feeling strangely shy, Finch tore it free and rolled it, holding it out. “It’s not waterproof.”

  “I won’t get it wet, then.” An ember of flirtation within those smoky eyes drew a smile from her—then his mother called, and he darted off with a wave.

  Feeling strangely moody—homesick, she supposed—Finch circled back to the Twelvestepper wigwam. The Baron and his men were up, dressed, and armed.

  “Did our Scout see anything interesting?” Huon asked.

  “They socialized all night, off and on. Chief Jane had more visitors than most.”

  “People asking our business here.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Lester crossed the lake; he went into the Fortress, and later into the woods near the Hat totem.”

  “And made it back for breakfast.” The old man popped out from behind the shelter with a delighted caw at having surprised them. “Lotta folks arrived last night.”

  “The Kip Kelly Rodeo?” Huon asked.

  “Rough riders always run late.” Lester shook his head. “C’mon, want you to meet Chief Lundy.”

  The Lundies were bards, singers of songs from both before the Change and since, keepers of stories and, thus, a useful source of information. They had arrived pulling travois laden with instruments both ancient and modern. Finch recognized a fiddle the Baron had included among last year’s gifts.


  They brought a drink made of roasted dandelion root, Saskatoon jelly sweetened with beetroot sugar for the morning bannock, and four plump ducks, shot by their archers on the way to the Hoedown. They offered the first serving to Lester and then, while the others were eating, sang a lengthy song about the people of Raven—the Haida, they meant—and that people’s first post-Change Chiefs, the ones who had set them on the path of piracy. They said Huon could share this story with his king, by way of thanks for the violin.

  Finch wondered if Huon would have to compose an ode if he wanted to ask about Chuckwagon Charlie. But Lester laid the situation out in a few sentences, between helpings of the jam.

  Lundy said:

  “I know your baker. Was us found him round old Wetaskiwin, like to freezing. He says he was baking that morning, up early. Some fella showed him a badge, covered in rubies. Mean anything to you?”

  The Baron nodded. “It happened a great deal: the CUT had put many people under their thrall.”

  He didn’t add that others had gone to them willingly.

  “Next thing Charlie knew, Lady Death’s guard was kicking him, as a prelude to dropping him in the dungeon. Things were a bit crazy, after the attack. He got a chance to burrow into a wagon fulla horse shit, caught a ride out.”

  This time the Baron couldn’t hide his surprise. “He confessed, to strangers?”

  “We Lundies are Winter’s historians. We demanded his tale before we saved him.”

  It was easy to follow the turn of Huon’s thoughts: revealing the truth might be the act of an innocent man, or a careful one. The betrayal would be a familiar tale to all who knew Charlie now. There could be no shock or outrage in it, as there would have been if he’d been concealing his history and suddenly exposed.

  Lester belched. He was contemplating the Saskatoon jelly, the color of it, Finch suspected. How did he make his totems so lifelike? Carved Scouts, placed carefully at the Morrowland borders and hard to tell from real guards, might deter casual trespassers.

  * * *

  “If Charlie was forced, Baron, would you leave him in peace?”

  “If the story is true, certainly.” Huon shook his head. “If he’s one of the CUT magi we’ve been tracking, he’s a danger to you all.”

  “We’ve bagged a couple of the tormented folk. We haven’t been worried about Charlie,” Chief Lundy said.

  “Perhaps you should be,” he said. “The damage a magus can do is incalculable.”

  “Aww, he’s fine.” But Lundy’s gaze flicked to Lester, and he seemed disturbed by the suggestion.

  “Our King, Artos, carries the Sword of the Lady. It tells him whether someone is lying.”

  “Mystic bullshit detector?” Lester said.

  “If Charlie is one of them, or if he sought their influence at any time, it would reveal the truth.”

  “Tell us about it,” Lundy said, by which he meant he wanted the whole story of the Quest. Huon told him, in detail, and if the hour it took wore on his patience, it did not show.

  “May we tell this tale?” Lundy asked.

  “Yes.” Huon had apparently had time, as he spoke, to think the present matter through. “If the baker was innocent, why did he run?”

  “Little thing called fear, maybe?”

  “Maybe. If he returned with us and faced the Sword, I believe the King and Queen would show mercy.”

  “Mercy? To someone who threatened their infant?” Lester leaned in.

  “They have been reasonable, even kind, to those touched by the actions of traitors.” The Baron’s voice was steady.

  “I doubt the Council would agree to send Charlie off on a maybe.” Lundy shook his head. “Too easy to lose him on the way, have an accident . . .”

  The young knight stiffened, taking offence.

  “These things do happen,” Huon agreed. “But no harm would come to him by our hand. And . . . I could give my word that if he was exonerated, he would be returned.”

  “You’d guarantee your King’s mercy?”

  “Maybe.” Huon was considering, and Finch sensed that the prospect pained him.

  He could probably tell, himself, if the baker was still under CUT thrall—he’d come close to ending up that way himself. The question, with Huon, would be whether he had truly been surprised by the badge-wielding invaders, or had courted them.

  Lester gave him that hunter’s look.

  “Would you take warriors with you, some of the rodeo clowns? To see to his safety?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Or leave a hostage?” Lester gestured at Finch.

  Finch felt herself twitch as all the men’s attention focused on her.

  Say yes, she thought, though her heart was hammering: the truth about this baker must be exposed, for everyone’s sake.

  Huon put his large hand over her mittened one.

  “Trust isn’t grass, Lester, to spring up after a night’s rain. It grows slowly, like the trees. Everyone here understands that this friendship between us has only just been seeded.”

  One of the musicians mouthed the words, clearly liking the phrases, or perhaps memorizing them.

  “That is a diplomat’s answer,” said Chief Lundy.

  “You’ve given me a lot to think about. But the Cree should think, too. Unless King Artos were to see Charlie, he might never believe he was forced, as he says.”

  “Better make more friends here at the Hoedown, then,” said Chief Lundy. “If you want any chance of taking him.”

  All day they did exactly that, crossing from camp to camp, horse swapping as Lester called it, meeting and greeting and making small deals. They dropped in on the Doubledoubles to see Raki’s mother, and her son promptly invited Finch out to something called a track meet.

  She looked to the Baron. “Shall I?”

  “Yes. Shine those eyes around,” he murmured. “And by the way, if you’re worried about me leaving you here as a hostage—”

  She shook her head, and was surprised to feel a small hum of disappointment, one low chord.

  The young people at the Hoedown were engaged in games she knew from her own cubhood in Morrowland, practices that in time led to hunting: ringtoss, a throwing game called chunkey stone. Some of those her age had made foot-powered ice sledges and were racing them: Raki showed her how to drive one, and waited as she drew a plan of its undercarriage and asked its makers exhaustive questions on its construction.

  Her gaze kept returning to his smoky eyes, the tattooed arch of his brow. Her thoughts, as she walked with him, became far from businesslike.

  He gave her a snow snake, recompense for the picture she had drawn that morning. She tucked the weapon, a short sort of throwing spear whose use she didn’t immediately see, into her pack. She would practice with it, take its measure.

  After the games, she and he crossed the lake so she could examine the glaze on the totems. The stacked hats rose up fifty feet or more, and had facets beaten into them: a honeycomb pattern, invisible at a distance, that caught the light and reflected it at different angles. Bits of fool’s gold on the bands of the hat brims brightened the effect.

  “This is Lester’s work?”

  “The people of Haida Gwai have claimed Raven for their own,” he said. “Magpie, Lester says, is that trickster’s poor cousin. An illusionist: you should see him do card tricks.”

  He was saying something important, but before she could puzzle its meaning, he stepped close and kissed her.

  She kissed back as a summer storm of feelings gusted up within her. Her arms came round him, barely reaching because of the bulk of their heavy coats.

  He tastes like Bright.

  She remembered his opposition to the Pack’s sending the Eyes of Explorer Troop as far as Montival. What would he think if he knew where she was now, how far away?

  She had
wanted to go.

  She pushed on Raki’s chest, lightly, and he stepped back right away. “I shouldn’t tangle with—I’m returning to the South.”

  “I wouldn’t hold you,” Raki replied, tracing the line of her jaw with his thumb.

  She caught his hand, feeling her whole body sing with desire.

  What had Lester said? Winter demands unanimity of purpose. A Scout should be certain: mind and body in accord. “May I think about it?”

  He nodded, and took her to see another totem, a great metallic riding animal, on a balance, with a big scoop for a head. Liquid black covered it, as though it had just been dipped in thick glossy paint. It had a saddle, and a ladder leading up to it.

  “Petroleum pumpjack,” Raki said. “The ancients used them to drink the blood of the earth.”

  Though the thing was more machine than monster, its red eyes had that same lifelike quality; they burned with madness, a need to devour. The whole totem seemed to strain to come to life, to spring to the hunt. She was happy to flee its gaze.

  That night, Huon said to Finch. “What do you make of the Cree?”

  “The chiefs speak of a Council, but they look to our guide when we talk of the baker.”

  “Lester pretends to be an itinerant old sculptor, but his voice carries weight here,” Huon agreed.

  “Are you—” Finch thought better of the question.

  “Yes?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s all right, Finch.”

  “Your mother betrayed Artos.”

  He nodded.

  “Lady d’Ath wants this man Charlie. To show lenience, even if he was compelled . . .”

  “Am I afraid to return home having forgiven a traitor? Given my history?”

  “It isn’t my place to ask.”

  “No,” he agreed, a little sharply. Then, more softly, “It’s a fair question. But the real issue is whether he can harm them.”

  They let that sit for a moment, before she said: “They seem an honorable people. Worthy of badges.”

  “The Drumheller folk underestimate them,” he agreed.

  “That’s their design.” Illusions, she thought.

  “We could trade here. They have an eye to all the northern borders. The Night’s Watch monitors the west—those troublesome Haida—closely.”