The Suitor's Blood in the Snow

The sleds halt where the fissure shelves into black pumice, but nobody offers to haul my pack.

Dirk van Houten drives the lead runner into a bank of frozen ash and kicks his team into silence. Thirty clan refugees collapse across the crust, groaning like dying seal calves as they pile their bundles against the wind. Smoke from the vents tastes like rotten eggs and cold iron. My legs burn from hours of trudging behind their grease-slick sled tracks.

I do not join them. I never join them.

Thirty paces out, sheltered by a blister of basalt that bleeds a thin ribbon of volcanic warmth, I drop my bedroll into the gravel.

First comes the horn.

I pull the bison horn from beneath my parka, checking the bone quill wedged into the tip. A faint, bitter trace of birch smoke rises from the hole. The live coal inside still eats the punk wood I stole from Dirk. My fingers are numb, stiff as salted cod, but I work the tallow plug with my thumb until the vent narrows to a pinprick. Air feeds it. Wind kills it.

Gravel crunches behind me. Heavy boots. Careless boots.

I do not turn around. My right hand slips into the pouch at my hip, fingers closing around the cracked obsidian shard I salvaged from the wolf fight.

"You sit out here like an owl, Grietje."

Bram van den Berg stops three paces from my rock. He leans on an ash spear tipped with knapped black flint, his broad shoulders hunched against the twilight squall. He is nineteen, two winters younger than me, with a patchy blond beard matted by dried elk grease. He smiles with teeth that have chewed too much frozen tallow.

"Wind misses this cleft," I say without looking up. "Until you blocked it."

Bram chuckles. He takes two steps forward, stepping directly onto the frozen pumice where my bedroll lies. The ash spear grounds with a dull thump between my boots.

"Dirk says the squall will turn this sleet to heavy ice before midnight," Bram says. His breath stinks of sour curd. "Two skins are warmer than one. My furs are thick. Frost-bear pelts, taken on the high shelf."

I look at him then. I look at his torn mittens, his thin blanket roll tied with frayed sinew, and the greasy collar of his tunic.

"Your furs are rabbit and ragged musk-ox, Bram," I say. My voice is flat. "You couldn't drop a frost-bear if it choked on your boot."

His grin tightens at the edges. "I am offering you warmth, fire-keeper. You sleep alone out on the skirt, you freeze. Or something comes down from the rim and takes you."

The hair on my neck bristles. I glance up toward the rim. Above us, sixty cubits into the swirling sulfur fog, the basalt ledge is empty. Only jagged rock and drift-ice. But the air smells wrong. The sulfur has a heavy, oily tang that does not come from the fumaroles.

"I have the horn," I tell Bram. I pat the curved bone against my ribs. "I have all the fire this clan owns. If I let you crawl into my furs, you will spend half the night trying to stick your hands under my tunic and the other half snoring until the wind shifts."

"You have a sharp tongue for a girl who eats our scrap meat." Bram sneers, shifting his grip on the ash shaft. "Dirk thinks you need a hunter to keep you in line. Someone to carry the horn when your legs give out."

"Touch the horn, Bram, and I will peel the skin from your knuckles with my skinning knife."

We stare at each other across the ash. His jaw works. He looks like he wants to hit me, but the rest of the clan thirty paces away is watching for smoke. If the fire dies, Dirk drops him down a crevasse before morning.

"Sour bitch," Bram mutters. He spits a gray glob of phlegm into the gravel beside my boot. "Freeze, then. When the ice comes through the vent, do not come crawling to my sled."

He turns on his heel. He does not head back toward the clan circle. Instead, he stalks toward the dark cleft where the basalt shelf cuts into the outer scree, muttering under his breath, loosening his belt to piss against the frozen stone.

I watch his broad back vanish into the yellow vapor.

The wind howls low through the volcanic ribs, a flat, scouring whistle.

Then the sound dies.

Not slowly. The wind does not fade. The hiss of the steam vent simply cuts out, smothered by an abrupt weight in the atmosphere.

A sharp crack echoes from the scree. Wood splintering under immense pressure.

No shout of alarm follows it, only a wet, heavy thud, like a sack of butchered meat dropped from a cliff onto wet shale.

I stay crouched on my haunches. My heart beats against my ribs, cold and rhythmic.

Two minutes pass. The steam begins to hiss again, sulfur drifting across the pumice in pale ribbons. Bram does not walk out of the mist, and no boots crunch on the gravel.

I stand up.

I secure the ember-horn tight against my ribs, knotting the rawhide cord twice around my chest. I draw my flint skinning knife, keeping the blade low against my thigh. My boots make no sound on the packed ash as I follow Bram’s trail into the cleft.

The cleft is narrow, choked with sharp basalt teeth and frozen moss.

Five paces in, Bram’s boot tracks end.

The prints in the snow are deep, heavy with his swagger. Then there is a skid mark where his left heel dug violently into the frost, spraying dark pebbles across the ice.

Beside it sits an enormous indentation. A splayed boot-print twice the width of a normal man's, sinking four inches deep into frozen ground that should have shattered an iron pick.

My breath leaves my lips in a thin shudder.

Three paces beyond the skid mark, Bram's ash spear lies discarded on the scree. The heavy shaft has been snapped clean in two, as easily as dry kindling. The rawhide lashing around the knapped flint point is soaked through with steaming, dark red fluid.

Fresh blood. It pools in the hollow of a shattered volcanic stone, melting a neat, smoking circle through the white rime.

There are no drag marks across the gravel. No signs of a rolling struggle. Something simply scooped Bram van den Berg off his feet by the throat and hoisted him into the vertical darkness.

I kneel by the broken spear.

The flint head is fine, sharp-edged and deadly, knapped from good river-stone. Bram was an arrogant fool, but his spear point is better than my dull knife. I take the upper half of the broken ash shaft, wiping the warm, slick blood against the hem of my wool skirt before shoving the crude short-spear into my belt.

A small pebble clicks against the cliff wall above.

I look up.

Ten paces above me, crouched on a narrow basalt horn that juts over the cleft, a monster perches in the twilight.

Eight feet of hulking muscle wrapped in the matted pelts of dead predators. The occult skull of the void-cat sits over his brow, its sweeping, jagged horns scraping the soot-stained rock. The dark eye cavities of the skull stare straight down at me, empty and fathomless.

His massive forearms rest on his knees. Thick, corded sinew, scarred by claw marks and frost-burns. Fresh scarlet drips from his heavy knuckles, pattering against the stones below.

He isn't crouching like a hunter hiding from quarry. He simply sits on the stone, steady as a monolith, inspecting his cache.

My grip tightens on the broken spear shaft. My knuckles ache with cold.

"What did you do with him?" I ask. The words scratch against my dry throat, barely louder than the wind.

The massive head tilts. The void-cat skull angles toward me, bone gleaming yellow under the twilight moons.

When he speaks, the voice is a low, abrasive rumble that vibrates through the rock at my boots. It sounds like two river boulders grinding together under a glacier.

"He breathed too near your fire."

A cold tremor runs down my spine. "He was a scout of my clan. Dirk will search for him."

The skull dips slightly, dismissing the entire migration with a twitch of bone. A red drop falls from his thumb, sizzling into the snow beside my boot.

"His blood was thin," the exile rasps into the dark. "It was going to freeze anyway."

He does not wait for an answer. With a slow shift of hide and bone, the massive silhouette turns on the ledge and melts back into the sulfur smoke. Only the faint clatter of shale marks where he climbed.

I stand alone in the cleft. At my boots, the pool of Bram's blood has already crusted into black frost.

I touch the sharp flint spearhead tucked into my belt. If I run to the sleds and tell Dirk what took his scout, a dozen terrified hunters will wander into the fog with torches, and the beast on the rim will butcher them all.

I turn my back on the blood and walk to my lonely rock.

I will keep the spear. I will say nothing.