Cold Hands

The bilge water smelled of sour fat and drowned lice, and it took four attempts to drag my hips over the spruce thwart.

My knees hit the deck planking with the hollow thud of frozen pine logs. Around me, eighty people lay tangled beneath wet furs like worms under a lifted stone, their breath rising in thin, gray threads toward the starless sky. The squall had spent its fury an hour back, leaving only a dead, heavy swell that rolled the Mor-Kahn from side to side, eighty paces of stretched mammoth hide groaning against ash ribs with every drop.

Down in the dark of the bilge, seam forty-two held. My walrus-bone awl remained driven to the hilt through the overlapping margins, lashed fast with three turns of greased rawhide. It wept a slow trickle of brine, but the gap was no longer three fingers wide. It was closed for now, pinned by dead bone and the rawhide lashing.

The price of that pin sat at the ends of my arms.

I slumped against an empty water cask and held my hands up into the faint, milky glow cast by the White Stag's skin.

The thumbs were the worst. The skin from the knuckles to the nail beds had turned the color of bruised plums, mottled with dirty white patches where the deep frost had set its teeth. I pressed the tip of my left thumb with the horn handle of my scraping iron. There was no give. The pad was hard as tallow candle wax, dead to the scrape, numb down into the joint.

A stitcher without thumbs is a mouth without teeth: useless, loud, and waiting to starve.

\"Work, you miserable runts,\" I muttered.

I reached into my belt pouch, dug my stiffened fingers into the horn jar, and scooped out the last thimble of rancid seal fat. I smeared the grease across the dead flesh and began to rub. The skin did not warm; it sloughed a paper-thin layer of grayish brine. When sensation finally tore through the joint, it came not as warmth, but as iron needles driven straight into the bone. A sick knot formed in my stomach, and I had to lean my forehead against the cold spruce stave until my gorge settled.

The pads were dead, but the tendon still pulled. If I kept them wrapped in dry wool, I might keep the flesh from turning black and falling away into my stew bowl. But I could not pull a three-ply gut strand tonight. If another seam burst before dawn, my hands would fold like wet bark.

Across the deck, near the thick base of the mast, a dry cough rattled through the darkness.

The White Stag stood braced on trembling legs, his cloven hooves slipping in the frozen grease of the deck ring. The beast had thinned until every rib showed beneath his matted white pelt like the wicker slats of a fish trap. His breath came in shallow, whistling gasps, barely loud enough to drown the hiss of the sea licking our leather floor. Whenever that whistle hitched, the dark water beneath our hull gave a sluggish heave, as if something five times the length of our boat was turning over in its sleep.

At the beast's hooves sat Knotrow.

The old man was huddled beneath three shedding muskox robes, his knees pulled up to his chin, clutching his carved alder staff against his chest. His beard was crusted with frozen spit.

I hauled myself up, using the water cask to steady my trembling shins, and limped across the slippery decking. The hunters lying across the gangway did not move; they were hollow-eyed, curled around their stone points, hoarding whatever heat their starving ribs had left.

I stopped before Knotrow and nudged his boot with my toe.

\"Sit up, Elder,\" I said. My voice sounded like gravel ground between two flat stones.

Knotrow blinked through rheumy, crust-rimmed lids. He stared at my greaves, then up at my face, but there was no recognition in his milky eyes. He looked through me, out toward the black swells where the horizon ought to be.

\"The mountain grass was sweet this time of summer,\" he murmured, his dry lips sticking together on the syllables. \"The white bull led the herd across the high meadow. You could smell the wild garlic from two ridges away. Do you remember the garlic, niece?\"

\"I remember we left the mountain two moons ago, Knotrow,\" I said, crouching beside him. The reek of old age and unwashed wool rose from his furs. \"And there is no garlic in the salt sea. Listen to me. The seam at forty-two is pinned with an awl, but the bone will crack if we take another wave on the bow. Flintwick is resting by the stern. He has five boys with him, and their bellies are empty.\"

Knotrow hugged his alder staff tighter. The wood was carved with the spiral horns of beasts that had died before my mother was born.

\"The spirits will provide,\" he whispered. \"The stag sings the path. He will lead us to the green shore.\"

\"The stag is whistling through a broken lung,\" I said, leaning close enough that he had to look at my split lips. \"And your nephew Flintwick has forty-two seal bones tucked in his pouch to remind the boys how long it has been since they chewed meat. When the sky turns gray, he is going to walk up to this mast with an ash spear. You are the elder of the Sun-Hoof. You hold the blood-name. You need to stand on your feet and tell those boys that the first man who touches this tether dies by clan law.\"

Knotrow pulled his furs higher over his sunken cheeks. A shudder ran through his frail shoulders, shaking the shedding hair loose from his mantle.

\"They are hungry, Hidecombe,\" he whimpered. \"Burl cried in the night. The boy has stones in his belly. Who am I to tell a starving hunter he cannot eat? My teeth are gone. My blood is thin as ditch water.\"

\"Then give me the staff,\" I said, reaching for the carved alder.

He snatched it back against his chest with a sudden, frantic jerk, his eyes wide with childish terror. \"No! The staff belongs to the line of the hearth! You are only a stitcher! A woman of the needle cannot hold the council wood!\"

I stared down at him. The rage that usually warmed my blood felt cold and thin, burned away by the salt water in my veins. He was not an elder anymore. He was an old sack of brittle bones waiting for somebody else to tell him how to die. If Flintwick came with a flint blade at dawn, Knotrow would close his eyes, mumble a prayer to a mountain that had burned to ash, and let the throat be cut.

\"Keep your stick, old man,\" I said softly. \"Die with it in your lap.\"

I turned away from the mast.

Dawn was four hours off. The eastern sky was still black as pitch, but the wind had shifted from the north, bringing a sharper, cleaner frost that bit through my soaked tunic. Four hours. Once the light touched the masthead, Flintwick's deadline would fall due. He had eighty people behind him who had not tasted fat in five days. If I stood between them and the stag with nothing but an empty palm and two dead thumbs, they would pitch me over the gunwale before the first spear struck.

I looked toward the stern.

Flintwick and Burl lay sprawled beneath a mammoth-hide shelter cloth, their boots sticking out into the aisle. They were sleeping the deep, senseless sleep of men who had spent the last hour hauling water out of a sinking hull. Beside them, sitting cross-legged on a coiled hemp warp, was Cornet.

He was seventeen winters old, with a face like a hatchet and grease smeared under his eyes to cut the salt glare. An ash spear lay across his knees. He was supposed to be watching the sea, but his head nodded forward every few breaths, snapping back up only when the boat rolled hard into the trough.

Behind his heels sat the hunters' kit: three bundles of dried sinew, a basket of stone points, and the heavy roll of cured elk hide where they kept their knapping spalls and butcher blades.

I rubbed my dead thumbs together inside my sleeves, feeling the cold flint of my own heart settle into place. If the clan would not listen to the awl, they would have to respect something with an edge.

I limped past the sleeping row of women and children, keeping my footing light on the sodden deck. When I reached the stern thwart, I paused and let out a sharp, wet cough.

Cornet jerked upright, his spear tip knocking against the gunwale. His hand scrambled for the grip, his wild eyes fixing on me in the pale murk.

\"Who's that?\" he hissed, his voice cracking with sleep.

\"Keep your voice down, boy, unless you want Flintwick kicking your ribs,\" I said, stepping closer. I kept both hands tucked deep inside my sleeves, hunched against the wind.

Cornet lowered the spear slightly, though his shoulders remained rigid. \"Aunt Hidecombe. What are you doing back here? The leak's forward.\"

\"The leak was forward,\" I snapped, putting all the acid I had left into my tone. \"Now the stern scupper is choking on frozen bile. Did you let the drain plug ice over under this thwart?\"

He blinked, confusion dulling his thin face. \"The plug? Flintwick didn't say nothing about the plug.\"

\"Flintwick knows about sticking beasts in the ribs, not about keeping eighty paces of leather from rotting from the inside,\" I said, stepping directly in front of him so my wide woolen skirts blocked his view of the deck bundle. \"Look under the bottom rib, right where the spruce frame laps the skin. If salt ice has wedged into the drainage channel, the bilge will back up into the meat baskets before the first light shows. Get your snout down there and feel it.\"

Cornet hesitated, his belly rumbling with a wet, hollow groan. He glanced at Flintwick's sleeping form, then down at the dark, sloshing bilge beneath the floorboards. He was a hunter, bred to track tracks in the snow, terrified of the unseen machinery of the boat.

\"Go on,\" I muttered. \"Or do you want me to tell your spear-boss that you sat on your rump while the stern drowned?\"

He cursed under his breath, laid his spear across the thwart, and dropped to his knees. He leaned forward, thrusting his arm deep into the icy gap beneath the bottom timber, feeling blindly for a plug that did not exist.

The moment his head dipped below the thwart, I moved.

My left hand was useless for grasping, but my right still had two working fingers and a palm. I reached down behind his heel, caught the corner of the elk-hide tool roll, and flipped back the frozen flap.

Inside lay three unfinished stone points and a heavy, four-inch butcher's spall—a curved piece of dark black flint, struck clean from a river nodule and knapped along one edge until it could shave the hair from a calf's ear. It was meant for dressing caribou, heavy enough to hack through joint cartilage, sharp enough to part skin with a whisper.

I did not have the grip to pick it up with my fingertips. I pressed the flat of my palm against the rough dorsal ridge, curled my middle and ring fingers beneath the stone, and dragged it into the wide cuff of my sleeve.

The cold of the flint bit straight through my skin, sharp as winter ice.

Cornet pulled his dripping arm out of the bilge, shivering violently, his lips blue.

\"There's nothing there, Aunt,\" he chattered, wiping salt water across his greasy tunic. \"Just ice and old grease.\"

\"Then it cleared itself when the hull twisted,\" I said, not shifting an inch. I kept my right arm pressed tight against my ribs, feeling the stone's razor margin resting against my forearm. \"Keep your eyes on the swells, boy. The deep things don't sleep just because your belly aches.\"

He grumbled something about crazy old seamstresses and picked up his ash spear, settling back against the warp.

I turned and walked slowly back toward the center of the boat.

Near the mast, the White Stag let out another ragged, wheezing sigh, the sound trembling across the frost-crusted mammoth hides. Knotrow was still muttering to his dead mountains, curled like a dry grub beneath his furs. In four hours, the sky would turn from black to gray, and the young men would rise with ash spears in their fists.

I sat down against the forward timber, slipped my hand inside my wool wrap, and closed my stiffening fingers around the stolen flint.

It was heavy, cold, and wickedly sharp. When dawn came, they might take the stag, but they would not take him cheap.