Chapter Two
The Sons of Ion
The day did not belong to Varn after that. It belonged to Halgrim, and Halgrim spent it the way a miser spends coin — slowly, and on other people.
By the time Varn had washed the mud from his legs in the cold trough behind the goat pens and eaten what Halgrim had promised would be his last easy meal — a thick gruel of cracked tarn-millet and goat’s milk, with a fist of dark bread and a smear of last autumn’s blackberry paste that the old women kept under a cloth and doled out like it was gold — the trainer had already been to four huts and was working on a fifth.
Varn trailed him through the waking village, and watched him work, and learned the first of the things nobody had told him.
“You don’t go alone,” Halgrim said, ducking out of the smith’s lean-to with a frown on him. “That’s the first lie the children tell each other. I’ll go up into the Tarn by myself and come back inked. No. You go alone to the contract — the offering, the bargain, that part is yours and yours only, no soul can stand in it with you. But you don’t get there alone, and you don’t get back alone, because the high Tarn is no friendly place and a boy with no tattoos walking it by himself is just a long pork roast that hasn’t met its fire yet.” He spat to the side. “So. You go with a squad. Small. Hunters. People who can put a thing down if it comes at you on the way up, and who’ll carry you home on a hide if it goes wrong.”
“And if it goes wrong at the offering itself?”
Halgrim looked at him, and didn’t answer, which was its own answer.
The squad came together over the morning in a way Varn found he had no part in. He’d imagined — in the thousand night-time imaginings — that he’d stride up to the strongest warriors of Ion and ask them himself, man to man, and they’d clasp his forearm and agree. It didn’t happen like that. It happened in low murmurs at hut-doors, in the trading of small favours and old debts, in Halgrim saying the Brennick boy’s going up and watching the name do its quiet work on people’s faces.
By midday there were three.
There was Maeve, who Varn had known his whole life as the woman who’d boxed his ears for stealing smoked fish when he was nine, and who he now understood, for the first time, to be a Spirit Warrior of the first tier — one tattoo, a band of dark interlocked figures around her right wrist that he’d somehow always taken for a bracelet. She was broad and short and built like a barrel set on legs, and she’d Contracted a boar-Anima called Ghest, a first-tier thing, low and mean, that lent her a heaviness and a refusal-to-fall that made her, Halgrim said, “the best wall in three valleys.” She agreed to come with a single grunt and a flat look at Varn that he couldn’t read.
There was Toller, lean and quiet and somewhere in his thirties, a hunter with no tattoos at all — uncontracted, Varn realised, a grown man who’d answered Halgrim’s old question with a no and lived the good long life Halgrim had promised. He carried it without shame. He could put an arrow through a marsh-thrush’s eye at sixty paces with a bow of horn and sinew that he’d made himself, and he spoke maybe six words before noon, and four of them were the wind’s wrong for the pass.
And there was the smith’s daughter, Yrsa, seventeen and sharp-tongued and carrying a tattoo of her own — a thin line of pale figures climbing the side of her neck, a hawk-Anima, first tier, that gave her eyes the village swore could count the feathers on a bird before it landed. She’d be the one watching the high ground.
A wall, an eye in the sky, a true bow, and a trainer. Four to carry one unmarked boy up into the mountains so that he could go the last stretch alone and either come back a warrior or not come back at all.
“It’s not a war-band,” Halgrim told him, seeing the look on his face — Varn couldn’t have said what the look was, but the old man read it anyway. “Don’t go thinking it is. It’s a few neighbours doing a hard favour for the dead. You’ll thank every one of them, and you’ll mean it, and you’ll remember that none of them owed it to you.” He paused. “And you’ll need one more. A Reader.”
“A what?”
But Halgrim had already turned away to deal with the question of food and hides for a four-day climb, and the answer to that one — Varn would learn — was waiting for him somewhere else entirely.
He went up to the graves in the grey hour before the evening meal, when the work of the day had loosened its grip and the light came in long and low and the colour of weak honey.
The dead of Ion were laid on the eastern slope, above the marsh and below the treeline, in a meadow where the wind came soft and the morning sun reached first. They weren’t buried. On Odo you did not put a Spirit Warrior under the ground — the energy in them, what was left of it, wanted the open sky, and so the bodies of the contracted were laid on raised platforms of woven blackthorn, called wind-beds, and given to the air and the birds and the slow patient work of the seasons. By the time Varn was old enough to climb up here on his own, his parents had long since gone to clean grey bone and then to nothing at all, and what remained of them was the platform itself, and the cairn beneath it where their few hard things had been gathered — Brennick’s belt-buckle of river-bronze, the iron core of Saela’s burned-away spear, and the soul-stone.
That was the thing Varn came for. He came for it more often than he’d ever have admitted to a living person.
A soul-stone was what was left when a Contracted Anima died knotted into its warrior. The energy of the dying — the warrior’s and the Anima’s both, fused, unbindable — didn’t simply scatter. Some of it set. It crystallised, over hours, into a fist-sized lump of something that was not quite stone and not quite glass, milk-pale shot through with a colour particular to that bond and no other. Vess’s soul-stone — Vess and Saela’s, for it had been both of them at the end — was the soft grey-green of marsh-water under cloud, and it had a deep slow light in it that never went out, that you could see even in full sun if you cupped your hands around it, a light that pulsed if you held it long enough, slow as a sleeping thing’s breath.
He held it now. It was cool, and then it was warm. It always warmed to him faster than it had any right to, and he had decided, years ago, in the private religion of a grieving child, that this meant something. He no longer believed it meant anything. He held it anyway.
“Going up the Tarn,” he told the platform, and the cairn, and the cool warming stone in his hands. His voice sounded small in all that open air. “Tomorrow, or the day after. Halgrim’s putting a squad together.” He turned the stone, watched the grey-green light slide inside it. “First contract.”
The wind moved the long grass. Somewhere down in the marsh a thing called out, once, low and mournful, and went quiet.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Varn said, more quietly, to no one, to the dead, to the stone. “I wanted you to know that. That I know I don’t know.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to admit out loud,” said a voice behind him, “to a pile of rocks.”
Varn didn’t startle. He’d had three years of not startling at that voice.
Arzan was sitting on the low boulder at the meadow’s edge where he was always sitting, the spot worn smooth by his particular small backside, with his knees pulled up and his arms wrapped around them and his chin on top, watching Varn with the bright dark eyes of a man who’d been there a while and said nothing on purpose, just to have something to say now.
He was a small man. There was no kind word for it and Arzan had never asked for one. He came up to the middle of Varn’s chest, and he was made narrow and quick and light, all of it, the kind of build the women cooed over in a child and worried over in a man — clever hands, thin wrists, a fox-sharp face that was always doing something, twitching toward a grin or away from one. Three years ago he’d come to Ion with a trader-clan out of the western valleys, a half-grown orphan boy attached to nobody, and he’d attached himself to Varn within the week with the unshakable confidence of a burr, and Varn — who had grown up the pitied centre of the village, the Brennick boy, poor lamb — had found, to his own surprise, that he’d wanted to be attached to.
“How long were you sitting there,” Varn said.
“Long enough to hear you confess your ignorance to your sainted mother and father.” Arzan unfolded himself and dropped off the boulder, light as a cat. “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe. I won’t tell the rocks you said anything.”
“You’re a comfort.”
“I am renowned for it.” He came across the meadow, and the grin he’d been holding back finally got loose, and then — closer, seeing Varn’s face properly, seeing the soul-stone cupped in his hands — it gentled, all on its own, the way it only ever did up here. “Halgrim’s been to half the huts in the village wearing his serious face. Maeve’s sharpening things. Yrsa told me to get out of her father’s smithy or she’d hang me from a hook.” He stopped a pace off. His dark eyes flicked to the stone and back up. “So it’s true, then. You’re going up.”
“I’m going up.”
“For the first one.”
“For the first one.”
Arzan was quiet a moment — a genuinely rare thing — and in the quiet Varn watched a whole argument happen behind his friend’s face, fast and silent, the way weather moves over the marsh. Then Arzan let out a long breath and said, in a voice gone oddly flat:
“You’re going to need a Reader.”
It was the second time Varn had heard the word that day. “Halgrim said that. He wouldn’t tell me what it means.”
“Course he wouldn’t. He’s a dramatic old goat, he wants it to land.” Arzan rolled his shoulders, and Varn saw — for the first time, because the light was right and Arzan had turned just so — the thing that was usually hidden under the collar of his friend’s tunic. A single tattoo. Not a band, not a climbing line of figures like Yrsa’s hawk or Maeve’s boar. This was a small, precise, intricate mark at the base of his throat, in the soft hollow above the breastbone: a spiral of fine grey lines that didn’t quite resolve into any animal Varn could name, that seemed to turn very slightly when you weren’t looking straight at it.
Varn knew, distantly, that his friend was a Shaman’s apprentice. Everyone in Ion knew it. It was the thing said about Arzan the way the Brennick boy was the thing said about Varn — that little western one, he’s no fighter, he’s gone to old Sef to learn the spirit-craft, well, what else would you do, built like that. Varn had never thought hard about what it meant. He thought about it now.
“You have a contract,” Varn said slowly.
“I have a contract.” Arzan touched the mark at his throat, two fingers, light, almost without meaning to. “Not the kind you’re going to get. There’s two roads up, Varn, and everyone only ever talks about yours.” A flicker of the old grin, but there was something under it. “You’re going to bind a thing for its strength. For what its body can lend yours — the boar’s weight, the hawk’s eyes, the cat’s quickness. That’s the Warrior’s road. You offer a wild Anima a place in your flesh and your soul, and if it’s strong enough and willing enough and you’re strong enough to hold it, you get to carry a piece of its power around for the rest of your life. That’s what your mother and father did. That’s what Maeve and Yrsa did.”
“And yours?”
“Mine—” Arzan blew out a breath, and looked, for once, almost shy of it. “Some of us can’t do that. You’ve seen me. I couldn’t hold a boar-spirit any more than I could hold a boar. The body’s the foundation, isn’t that what the old man always says? Well, some of us don’t have the foundation, and we know it by the time we’re ten, and we make our peace with it. But the spirit doesn’t only offer strength, Varn. That’s the thing nobody bothers to tell the strong ones.” He tapped the spiral at his throat again. “Some Anima don’t have much body to lend at all. Little things. Smoke-things. A thing the size of your thumb that lives in the reeds and has never fought anything in its life. They’ve got no strength to give a warrior. But they’ve got senses. They’ve got knowing. And if you can’t be a Warrior — if you go to a Shaman instead, and you spend two years on your knees learning the old breath and the old patience — then you can offer a bargain to one of those. And what you get back isn’t muscle.” His dark eyes had gone far away and a little bright. “It’s the world telling you its secrets. I’ve got a marsh-wisp bound under my skin — a first-tier, the smallest thing you ever saw, you could miss it your whole life — and through it I can feel the spirit in things. Where it’s thin. Where it’s thick. Where an Anima’s been, how long ago, and whether the energy of it was calm or starving or angry. I can read the Tarn like you read your own training-post.” The grin came back, lopsided. “That’s a Reader. That’s why I’m coming with you.”
The wind moved the grass. The soul-stone in Varn’s hands pulsed, slow, grey-green, once.
“You’re coming with me,” Varn said. It wasn’t a question, exactly. It was a thing he needed to hear his own mouth say, to find out how it felt. It felt like a stone going into water — a clean cold drop, and then a spreading.
“Somebody’s got to make sure you don’t walk you and your enormous head straight into a fourth-tier’s den thinking it’s a rabbit hole,” Arzan said. The lightness was back in his voice but it was paper-thin and they both heard it. “Halgrim asked Sef. Sef said no — too old for the pass. So Sef sent me.” He shrugged, a small sharp motion. “I’d have come anyway. You know that. I’d have followed you up there and you couldn’t have stopped me, so it’s good for everyone that it’s official.”
For a moment neither of them said anything. The light had gone from honey to copper, and the long shadows of the wind-beds reached across the meadow toward the two of them, and below in the village a horn sounded, low and round, calling the evening meal.
Varn looked at his friend — small, sharp, unbuilt-for-any-of-this, with a thumb-sized scrap of marsh-spirit knotted under his collarbone and a grin that wouldn’t quite hold — and felt something in his chest that he had no word for and didn’t try to find one. He’d been the pitied one his whole life. Poor lamb. Both gone, and the cat too. He’d hated it. And somewhere in the hating he’d built himself a private rule, hammered out at the post in the cold, that he would never be the reason anyone else stood in front of a horned thing in the dark.
“It’s dangerous up there,” Varn said. “Arzan. The pass. The high Tarn. You’re not—” He stopped. There was no way to finish it that wasn’t an insult, and Arzan watched him fail to finish it with that bright dark steadiness, let’s see how you get out of this one, and Varn didn’t get out of it. He just said, quietly, the true thing: “I don’t want you to die for me. The way Vess died for them.”
Arzan’s grin finally went all the way out.
He crossed the last of the distance between them, and reached up — he had to reach up, ridiculous, the top of his head level with Varn’s collarbone — and put one of his clever narrow hands flat against the centre of Varn’s chest, over the heavy slabbed muscle, over the heart going under it.
“Then don’t make it come to that,” Arzan said, and for once there was not one drop of laughter anywhere in him, and his voice was the most serious thing Varn had ever heard come out of him. “Get strong enough that it never has to. That’s the whole job, you great ox. That’s the only job there ever is, up here, down there, anywhere on this whole murdering world.” His hand pressed, once, hard. “Get strong. And let me be the one who tells you where the danger is before you walk into it. That’s my road. You let me walk it.”
The copper light failed toward red. The horn sounded again, impatient.
Varn put his own hand over Arzan’s small one, where it lay against his chest, and held it there, and did not trust himself to say anything at all. So he nodded — once, slow, the way Halgrim had sealed the morning’s bargain — and that was enough, and Arzan knew it was enough, and stepped back, and the grin came creeping home where it lived.
“Good,” Arzan said. “Now put your mother down and come eat. Maeve’s killed a goat for it and I’m not letting Toller get to the liver first, the man’s an animal.”
Varn knelt at the cairn and laid the soul-stone back in its hollow, in the dark beneath his parents’ wind-bed, and the grey-green light of it pulsed once in the gathering dark — slow, and warm, and certain — and then he banked it over with the flat cool stones the way he always did, and rose, and turned his back on the dead, and went down the copper slope toward the firelight and the smell of roasting meat and the one living person on all of Odo who had looked at the danger and chosen it anyway.
Behind them, the wind moved through the blackthorn wind-beds of the sons and daughters of Ion, and made a sound like a long, low, patient breath, in and out, the way the soul-stone pulsed, the way the whole world seemed to be waiting — and high above the meadow, far up where the treeline gave way to bare grey rock and the air thinned to a knife, the Tarn watched them go down, and kept its silence, and kept its things.