The Steel Remains

The first child Ringil noticed was about eight—fresh-faced and gri

Jelim made a girlish, shrilling noise. Ringil thought he heard the raw edge of the word please submerged in the agony.

“Oi, you kids,” someone shouted. “Pack that in.”

Laughter, some of it adult.

“Yeah, fuck off, Granddad,” said the fresh-faced boy, and squared up for another throw. His arm came back.

Ringil killed him.

It happened so fast no one, Ringil himself least of all, realized what he was doing. He grabbed the raised arm at the elbow, locked his hand into the boy’s neck, and wrenched. The boy screamed, but not loud enough to drown out the hollow, meaty sound as his shoulder joint snapped.

It was not enough.

Ringil bore him struggling to the ground and smashed his face into the paving. Blood on the dung-strewn stone, and a wet mewling. He thought the kid was still alive when he dragged the head up the first and second times, thought he heard him still wailing, but on the third impact he went abruptly silent. And by the fourth and fifth, it was definitely all over.

He kept on pounding.

Thin, high screaming in his ears like a steam kettle left on the stove.

By the time they dragged him off, the kid’s features were pulp, barely recognizable as human. It was only then, as they hauled Ringil bodily away, thrashing and snarling and lunging out at the openmouthed terror of the other urchins, that he registered the high-pitched shriek in his ears for what it was—his own voice, like nails scraping at the doors of madness.

You have killed children.

He shook it off. Lizardshit and safe guesses, Gil, just like the rest of it. The war is furniture—anyone able-bodied your age or older was in it. A man with a blade on his back and a warrior stance, a man with the distance in the eyes that he knew he had. A shrewd fortune-teller could read the implications of it all, just the way you’d read a path through the marsh.

He walked away.

At his back, he thought he heard her cursing him.

HE WAS ALMOST BACK TO THE GLADES WHEN HE REMEMBERED THE last time he’d seen that pocketknife.

He’d put it in a pocket of his leather jerkin in Gallows Water, the night of the corpsemites. The jerkin he wore out to the graveyard and lost there in the fight.

Left there among the dead.

CHAPTER 14

It was on Greasing Night—night of masking and unmasking, night of Ynprpral Walking and the cold that strikes through like a blade, night of acknowledging the wheel of the seasons and inevitable change—that the sign Poltar had been waiting for finally arrived. He supposed it was appropriate in its way; he grudgingly approved of the symbolism it drove home.

Mostly, he was just glad the waiting was over.

He’d watched the sky for weeks after his encounter with Kelgris, gnawing on his hate and his lurid dreams of vengeance. The Dwellers make their will known for those with eyes to look above, his father had schooled him, long before Poltar had properly understood that he, too, would one day wear the wolf-eye robe. Where other men see only to the rim of the world, you must learn to look beyond. You must look to the sky.

Deeds followed words not long after—Olgan was a shaman in the old tradition, and he intended his son to one day wear his robes with the same conviction. From his father, Poltar learned the seasons and moods of the Sky Road, its colors and the sparks that Ura

Look to the sky.

But for weeks, the sky had given him nothing.

And then Ergund came to call.

“MY BROTHER ERGUND?” EGAR FROWNED, NOT REALLY FOLLOWING THE sudden digression, not really wanting to. “Well, why should he? Pay you respect, I mean? You’re barely sixteen, and you’re a milkmaid, for Ura

“To him, maybe not, or to that clamp-mouthed bitch wife of his. That’s not the point.” Sula laced fingers that had until a moment ago been otherwise—and better—employed, and sat back where she straddled him just above the knees. The view was superb—she was naked but for bangles and the bone-carved necklace he’d given her a couple of weeks ago. But above it all, her face had turned suddenly sulky. “Ergund knows damn fucking well what I am to you. Fuck it, I was on my sky-fisted way to your fucking yurt when I passed him. And, like I said, he just fucking shoves right past me, without a sky-shat word. Piece of shit wouldn’t even fucking look at me. Face all fucking screwed up like he’s pissed off about something I’ve fucking done to him.”

Egar sighed. His abruptly untended erection slackened, flopped sideways across his thigh. He reached out for the rice wine flask by his head, swigged at it, grimaced and swallowed.

“Look, he’s probably just jealous,” he said. “I doubt he ever had his hands on a pair of tits as gorgeous as yours his whole fucking life.”

That seemed to work. Sula sat forward again with a grin, tilted her shoulders at him, side-to-side, and back again. Like most of his conquests, she was a well-endowed girl. Her breasts swung heavily in the warm, speckled light from the yurt’s iron-mesh brazier. A coiling snake tattoo she had from collarbone to cleavage seemed to wriggle on her flesh with the motion. She licked her lips.

“Yeah, and a wife with a mouth closed that fucking tight won’t be much for blow jobs, either, right?” She chortled delightedly. “Bet he’s lucky if he gets three of those in a fucking year.”

“Strictly feast nights only,” agreed Egar, reaching up and cupping a callused hand to each of the breasts under discussion. He thumbed the thick, rope-end nipples back and forth, squeezed gently at the jellied weight with his palms. Dropped another broad hint. “And of course, she’s a woman of leisure, so, you know, probably got no strength at all in her fingers like you have.”

Sula’s eyes smeared wide with renewed lechery. She put her hands back on him, gathered up his prick, and began to work it slowly up and down. Ahhh, milkmaid’s fingers. He felt himself slam back to fully erect in seconds. Sula felt it, too, gri

“Oh, no. First things fucking first. We’re going to get the edge off. I’m not looking for a two-minute drunken herder’s fuck out of you, just so you can head off to the ceremonies in fine fucking form. You just fucking lie there and do as you’re told, Clanmaster. I—” In time now with her slow, rippling strokes. “Am going to milk you fucking dry. Just like one of my fucking buffalo, yeah? You like that? Then we’ll see what you can do for me.”