The Stag's Breath

I had four hours before Flintwick came to slaughter the White Stag, and neither of my frostbitten thumbs would bend. Jammed against the spruce mast of the Mor-Kahn, I clamped the stolen flint blade under my cuff and waited to see if eighty leagues of freezing salt water had left me enough grip to cut my nephew's throat.

Frost had silvered the hem of my wool skirt where it touched the deck planks, gluing the coarse weave to the wood. Every breath tasted of raw salt and iron. When I tried to curl my fingers into my palms, the dead pads refused the command. They felt like dry wooden pegs driven into swollen meat, numb on the surface and throbbing with a sickening ache deep in the bone.

Beside my hip, Elder Knotrow lay curled beneath his three muskox robes. He was snoring with the wet, rattling wheeze of an old dog dying behind a woodpile, one yellow-nailed hand still clutching his carved alder staff as though the dead wood could sprout leaves and feed him.

Eighty of us had scrambled off the burning mountain two moons ago. We had hauled thirty ash spears, forty bundles of sinew, and one sacred beast onto fifty stitched mammoth hides, yet somehow we had not brought along a single spare brain. The hunters thought meat was simply meat. They believed that if you carved up the god, filled your belly with hot liver, and wiped the grease across your chin, tomorrow would take care of itself. They had no idea how quickly fifty untreated bull hides turned to slimy moss in seawater once the singing stopped.

Above me, the White Stag shifted his weight.

His cloven hooves slipped on the frozen grease of the deck ring, tapping against the ash timbers. The beast had thinned until his flanks resembled the wicker slats of an empty fish trap. His white coat was matted with dried salt, and where his brow tines met his skull, the velvet had rubbed raw against the mast-lashings. His breathing sounded like a dry bellows pulled through sand—a thin, reedy whistling that barely kept the dark swells below us calm.

I reached up with my right arm, hooking my elbow over the lowest spruce cross-stay to haul myself onto my knees.

My joints popped with the crack of snapping kindling. I leaned my shoulder against the stag's left foreleg and laid the flat of my palm against his ribs. The skin was cold as river stone. Under the fur, his heart fluttered with a ragged, uneven stroke, pausing for a terrible beat before hammering twice in panic.

"Steady, you old fool," I muttered, keeping my voice low so it would not carry down the gangway. "Don't shake yourself to pieces yet. I have enough trouble with seam forty-two without you rattling the spruce ribs loose."

The stag did not shy away from the rough wool of my tunic. Instead, his antlered head swung down, heavy and slow. His dark, liquid eyes caught the faint, milky luminescence weeping from his own hide. He sniffed at my chest, his black nostrils flaring wide as he caught the sour tang of old grease, salt crust, and the blood dried under my fingernails.

Then his muzzle dropped toward my lap.

He nudged the cuff of my right sleeve, where the stolen flint blade lay cold against my wrist. I drew my hands out from the folds of the wool, resting them open on my knees. The thumb pads were gray and waxen, mottled with the purple bruising of the deep frost.

The stag lowered his chin until his whiskered lip brushed my knuckles.

He exhaled.

No sour reek rose from his gullet. The vapor rolled across my knuckles like steam from a kettle boiled over fresh pine needles. It carried the thick, sweet smell of thawed mountain dirt, crushed juniper berries, and sun-warmed turf—scents that had no business living on a starless ocean eighty leagues from shore.

The warmth struck my dead skin and sank straight into the marrow.

A gasp caught in my throat. No gentle easing followed. Sensation flooded the damaged nerves like boiling grease poured over ice. Needle-sharp pain spiked from my wrists to the tips of my fingers, so fierce that my vision grayed at the margins and bile surged up behind my teeth. My jaw locked. I dug my boots into the deck seams, fighting the urge to jerk my hands away from that burning snout.

The stag held still, pressing his soft muzzle against the hollow of my palm, bathing both hands in that impossible summer heat.

Slowly, the white pallor faded from my thumbs. Blood, thick and dark, pushed back into the crushed capillary beds. The frozen wax softened back into flesh. The tips remained numb, permanently deadened by the brine I had soaked in beneath the forty-second hide, but the second joints answered when I pulled the tendons. The deep stiffness broke.

I curled my fingers inward. My grip tightened, hard enough to blanch the knuckles. When I reached into my cuff, my fingers closed around the rough dorsal ridge of the flint spall with real purchase. I could hold an edge again. I could drive four inches of stone into a collarbone if the hunters tried the mast.

Above me, the stag staggered.

His forelegs buckled, his knees thumping against the ash decking before he caught himself with a sharp, wheezing groan. The white glow along his flanks dimmed to the gray of dirty snow. His whistling hum hitched, dying away to a thin rattle.

Beneath the mammoth-hide floor, the sea answered at once.

A heavy swell rose from the deep, lifting the eighty-pace coracle with a sickening, sluggish surge. Something massive and smooth rubbed against the outer leather two thwarts back, its weight groaning against the ribs before sliding away into the freezing dark.

The beast had spent a measure of its remaining life to thaw my fingers. He held no power to call down lightning or multiply loaves of dried meat. He was only an old spirit of the birch woods, bleeding vitality into a floating graveyard to keep eighty strangers from drowning.

"You should have kept that for yourself," I whispered, reaching up to stroke the coarse white fur behind his ear. "I'm just a dry old hide-sewer. I won't buy you much time."

He leaned his heavy brow against my shoulder, his breath coming faster now, cold and thin again.

I sat with him in the freezing dark while the hours dragged past. I flexed my thawing fingers against the cold stone, feeling the boat rise and fall on the heavy swell, watching the sleeping heap of the clan until the black slowly turned to ash. Four hours slipped away into the salt mist, and the gray pallor of dawn began to seep into the sky, turning the sea the color of curdled milk. The deadline had arrived.

Across the deck, a rawhide rope hissed across frozen timber.

I turned my head toward the stern.

From behind the mammoth-hide shelter cloth, dark shapes detached themselves from the sleeping clan.

Flintwick came first. He walked with the light, balanced stride of a wolf circling a wounded elk, his bare head ducked against the biting wind. Across his broad shoulders hung a thick coil of greased walrus-hide hauling line, heavy enough to bind a thrashing bull. In his right hand, his ash spear pointed low toward the deck planks.

Behind him came Burl, clutching an antler-headed mallet and a pair of broad flint skinning wedges. Cornet followed, his narrow face pale and hollow, carrying four short lengths of tethering cord. Three more young hunters trailed in their wake, their eyes wide, shiny, and hollow with the madness of five days without fat.

None of them looked at the sea. None of them looked at the sky. Their eyes were fixed entirely on the trembling white flanks of the beast tied to the spruce mast.

Elder Knotrow snored on beneath his muskox skins, blind and deaf to the world.

I did not call out to the old man. I did not waste my breath pleading with the clan.

I pushed myself up from the timber, plant-legged and braced against the mast ring, sliding the heavy four-inch flint butcher blade into the palm of my right hand.

Flintwick stopped four paces from the mast. He let the walrus-hide coil slide from his shoulder, dropping it onto the frozen spruce planks with a wet, heavy slap.

"Step aside, Aunt," Flintwick said, his voice flat and hard as knapped stone. "The boys are hungry."

I raised the flint blade so the gray morning light caught its serrated edge, and stepped directly between his spear point and the stag's chest.

"Take another stride, nephew," I said, "and see how much meat you have left on your ribs."