Deep Water (62 page)

For the first time since his death, she could think of him with simple gratitude untouched by guilt. Perhaps seeing his death
reflected in the eyes of the Well of Secrets was responsible, but she thought it more likely because of all the death she
had seen, all the grief she had shared, while watching Acton’s life. Everyone dies. What matters is the life shared beforehand.

But, just as she had learned acceptance through living other people’s grief, she had also learned fear. Her body had learned
what it felt like to be afraid; had learned how fine the line was between excitement and terror. So here she was, with a creature
not human, who yearned to kill her, who
needed
in some way to kill her, in a landscape full of wolf and bear and sudden dangers, in a past she had no way of escaping. Her
body wanted to be afraid, as Elric had been afraid, as Baluch had, waiting for Sebbi to die. But she refused. To understand
fear was a good thing. The knowledge might make her kinder, she thought. But to let it fill her, let it take over, would lead
to more than death at the hunter’s knife. It would mean losing herself, the self that would survive death and go on to rebirth.

So she looked at the unfamiliar Forest, at the undergrowth which could conceal anything, and laughed, and the hunter laughed
with her, a deep belly laugh.

The days went past as they walked the Forest, and Bramble let them go without counting them. They had not come back exactly
in the year; it was full summer, and the best time to be wandering under the green shade.

They stopped occasionally to find food for Bramble. The hunter didn’t seem to need food, only a sip of blood from each creature
it killed, but it did need that, although not, perhaps, the way she needed to drink. It showed her how to stand so still that
the deer would come up and surround her and she could reach out and plunge her knife into a throat.

“A moment,” it said. “Just pause a moment for the fear to come before you thrust. Then you will be cleansed.”

But she wasn’t cleansed, just the opposite, so she left that to the hunter, after the first time, because it seemed calmer,
happier, after a kill. Although it might be covered in blood afterward, the blood vanished immediately, with a little shiver
in the light so that the hunter became momentarily hard to see. A ripple in time? Bramble wondered, but didn’t comment on
anything except the excellence of the hunt.

“It is my purpose,” it said simply, gutting and butchering the carcase of a fallow deer for her with swift, beautiful strokes
of its black rock knife.

She asked it no questions about its name, or its life, or anything not directly related to their path. The need to know would
be seen as a weakness, she was sure. An indication of fear. She remembered too well the feeling of its knife at her throat.
Then, she hadn’t been afraid; now, she had a task to complete, which made it harder to face death without regret. She owed
it to Acton to find his bones. Let him be a hero in death the way he had wanted to be in life but wasn’t, quite.

Although she guarded always against showing any fear, Bramble was happier than she could remember being except for when she
was racing the roan. This was where she belonged.

She found blueberries and raspberries as they walked, collected greens and wild carrots and onions, found tiny, sweet plums
and small black cherries. The hunter could find anything Bramble wanted, but she was determined to feed herself. She had done
it hundreds of times before, after all. As the days went past, the hunter seemed to acquire some respect for her knowledge
of plants. They seemed irrelevant to it; not needing to eat anything except death, plants were known but not important.

The hunter did not need to eat, but it did need sleep, as she did. At night they found soft grass to cradle them. Bramble
offered to share her blanket, but the hunter refused. “Cold and hot are the same,” it said, lying easily on its side.

Bramble watched it sleep and saw that it simply closed its eyes and was still, stiller than any human sleeper. Although that
stillness was strange, it was real, and she was reassured by it. The hunter was not tricking her into vulnerability. She closed
her own eyes and fell into slumber as easily as it had.

Four days after they left the tree — or was it five? Bramble couldn’t remember, and was warmed by the thought that it didn’t
matter — they arrived at a ridge, and Bramble realized that they were looking down into what would become Golden Valley. The
valley was wild, still, although the bottom was studded with the poplars that still grew there. But the rest of the valley
was pure Forest.

She smiled at the sight. “I like this time,” she said.

The hunter gave a small puff of laughter. “All time is the same,” it said, shaking its head at her.

They traveled through the Valley for some days, then headed west from the bluff at its mouth, going southwest on a long diagonal
that would bring them to the foot of the Western Mountains, near where Actonston would lie. On a cloudy day which threatened
storm, in a sparser, drier section of the Forest that favored pines and larches, they found themselves at the edge of a cleared
area of ground that led down to a farmhouse by the side of a river. It looked primitive. Not like the solid timber halls of
Acton’s time, nor the stonemasonry of her own. This farmhouse was slab construction, flung up in a hurry in summer to make
sure there would be shelter by the time winter came. A short line of skinny cows was heading for a shed which no doubt doubled
as the milking barn. In a pen near the barn, a scurry of calves bellowed for their mothers.

They stood looking down on the scene in silence. From a distance, the sound of axe blows cut through the late afternoon. The
hunter and she both winced, then looked at each other in a kind of comradeship.

“Come,” it said. “There are too many humans here.”

It led her through the edges of the Forest toward the mountains, until they could no longer hear the axe or the lowing of
the cows. The hunter went into a deep defile in the hillside, a narrow valley that raised its sides high above their heads
in minutes. At the end of the valley, where it could gather all the water that run off the hillside, stood a lone chestnut
tree, dominating the valley.

“Its roots do not go far enough, but it will take us some way,” the hunter said. “This is a good place of remembrance, this.
The tree remembers strongly.”

This time, the step forward, hand on the bark of the tree, took her to early, early morning, a winter morning which lay ice
still, frost covering the ground, tiny icicles edging each bare branch. Bramble looked up. The chestnut branches were dark
against the pale, cloudless sky. As she watched, the sun crested the rim of the valley and lit the tree: each icicle flashed
rainbows of colors, the whole tree flickered with brilliant light, with sparks and flames and ripples of cold fire.

This is what rebirth must feel like, Bramble thought. Shivering, she stood transfixed until, only a few moments later, the
sun had warmed the icicles enough so that droplets hit her face and shocked her out of the reverie. She turned to the hunter,
who was watching her with approval and a slight unease, as though her appreciation of the tree worried him somehow.

“Come,” it said, “we must cross the river.”

Unnervingly, although her breath was making steam, the hunter’s did not, as though its breath was as cold as the air. She
tried to remember the moment when its knife had been at her throat. She had been close enough to feel its breath, but she
didn’t remember feeling it at all.

Bramble fished her boots out of her saddlebags. Barefoot was all very well for the hunter, who seemed not to notice the cold,
but frostbite was something she’d rather avoid. She wrapped her blanket around her shoulders as well, but even so she was
very cold. She followed the hunter across snow dotted with the tracks of hare, followed by fox tracks.

The hunter chuckled. “The fox seeks its prey. Good luck, little brother.”

She smiled, too, until she saw that the hunter left no tracks in the snow, although she saw its feet sink in. It saw her looking
back at the single line of footprints in the powdery snow.

“I am here, in truth,” it assured her. “I just allow the snow to remember what it was before I passed. I will show you.”

It took a few steps and suddenly there were tracks behind it. Then it turned and waited, and the snow smoothed itself out.
Bramble couldn’t see any movement of snowflakes; it was just, suddenly, as though the tracks had never existed. It was a much
smaller manipulation of time than the one which had brought her back to this moment, but it unsettled her more, because it
was done so casually. As though time was infinitely malleable.

She needed to control her upset immediately, before the hunter sensed it and saw it as fear. She grabbed for the first thing
she could think of: Acton. If time
was
so malleable, did that mean she could journey back again? Change things? Stop Red plunging that knife down, and up again?
She shivered, and it was not just the chill air. What if he lived? What if he lived
while she was there
? Her heart beat faster at the thought. She could guide him; warn him. If she went back far enough, she could even prevent
Hawk’s massacre of Swef’s steading, and the resettlement from over the mountains would have been peaceful. She longed for
that; remembered the lightness and joy she had felt when she had thought that the invasion was not going to happen.

But like a shadow over the too-bright, snow-covered landscape, the memory of Dotta’s warning came back. She had said that
if Acton didn’t invade, others would. Nothing could save the Domains . . .

“How far back can you take me?” she asked the hunter as they trudged down the slope to the frozen river.

“Far.”

She left it at that, but she kept thinking about it; wondering which was the right moment to go back to. Where could she do
the most good? It kept her mind off the cold.

In this time, the steading they had seen did not exist; the Forest reached all the way to the river. They crossed by sliding
on the ice like children, laughing and falling and making faces at the water sprites who stared up, impotent and hungry, from
beneath the ice. These moments of gaiety came on and off to the hunter, and its laughter was infectious.

It led her through several more seasons, finding places of remembrance every few days. One was a vast holly thicket, which
seemed exactly the same in the earlier time. Another, a shaded clearing full of mushrooms.

“They go deep,” the hunter said, smiling.

Although she left her boots off unless it was very cold, by the time they came to the mushroom glade the soles were almost
worn through. They had traveled a very long way, and not by the shortest route. The hunter diverted them often; to hunt, to
investigate the health of a herd of deer, sometimes simply to see something it considered significant, although there was
no pattern to what was important: a single leaf, a spring, a small grouping of rocks. It never took her near a black rock
altar, and she didn’t ask why not, but she noticed that the gods left her alone. The whole journey was free of their presence;
she felt liberated and forsaken at the same time.

T
HEY REACHED
F
OREVERFROZE
at mid-afternoon. Martine had never been there, not in all her wanderings, and she stared as openly as Zel.

The town was sheltered by a ridge of light gray rock to the north which ran down to the sea, forming one headland of the huge
harbor. The other was a flat tongue of land to the south, which curved like a fishhook. The long, long wharves for which Foreverfroze
was famous ran out into the curve of the fishhook but were still in the lee of the ridge. The town looked exposed, compared
to the high-cliffed ports of Turvite and Mitchen, but it offered the best harborage available in the north, and had prospered
as the southern cities had grown — there was always a market for smoked whitefish.

There were no houses, as such — most of the buildings were underground, or at least dug in to roof level, so that the town
looked like a collection of hats left lying on the ground by careless giants. Some were roofed with straw, some with turves.
They were spaced in a series of circles, surrounded by gardens, so that no one was far from a neighbor’s door, but each household
had a green space around it. The gardens were full of vegetables but there were no flowers except the ones which bloomed casually
along the side of the street.

Foreverfroze was a casual place overall. Green-eyed, fair-skinned children ran by their horses, calling up at them in a sweet,
singing language, their black hair cut short, boys and girls alike. Martine realized that she was among people of her exact
coloring: the pale skin, the green eyes, the black straight hair. A wave of excitement rose in her. There were still places,
then, where the old blood lived together. Survived. Thrived. The last time she had been in a village of her own kind seemed
a lifetime ago. Was it twenty-two, twenty-three years, since the twin villages of her birthplace had been destroyed by the
Ice King’s men? She had thought that the old blood was permanently scattered, flung in droplets across the Domains, harassed
and driven and cheated and spat upon. She had thought there was no resting place for her people anymore. But here they were,
just living. Tears rose in her eyes and her heart felt hot and tight. She was grateful that the town itself was different
from her home. But the people were so similar, she almost expected to see Cob, or her mother, or one of her many aunties,
come around the side of one of the roofs.

Instead, men sat in groups by the small doorways of their houses, weaving baskets; or tended the gardens; or nursed a baby.
One lifted a hand as the party rode by. Occasionally an old woman mending a fishing net nodded to them as they went past.
They saw only one younger woman. She was heavily pregnant. Otherwise, Martine knew, she too would have been out on the fishing
ships.