Arvid spent the next day organizing. The first women with babies were arriving from the nearby villages, and Cat was billeting them within the fort where possible, and then in Two Springs, the village which surrounded the fort. By tomorrow, Moss would have the first of the shelters ready. Rough and no doubt drafty, but it was spring and they would cope well enough. He sent boys to the shallow lake a few miles away to harvest reeds and put another group to weeding and stamping down the ground where the shelters would go. They were losing some of the ground where the milk cows grazed, but they could be tethered in one of the open areas near the coppice.
They had taken the barrels and salt they already had and begun to pickle the meat on hand. The butchers had been told that a large slaughter would be needed as soon as the salt arrived. They had to give the meat time to cure, unfortunately. Brine was faster than dry curing, but it didn’t happen overnight, although slicing the meat first would hasten things.
“A week,” the cook had said. “A week to be really sure it’s safe.”
At least they had plenty of workers. Cat had drafted all the people whose trades had been disrupted—and it was astonishing how many of them there were. The smiths, of course, black and gold and silver, the potters, candlemakers, even the fletchers had spread their hands at him and shrugged. “Glue, my lord,” the fletcher had said. “I can’t make glue without fire. I can make shafts, but I can’t fletch them.”
“Make the shafts,” he had ordered, a vague sense of anxiety sitting in his belly. They were weak, at the moment, and when a domain was weak it was likely to be attacked. If the Ice King chose this moment to assault their defenses, things would go badly. They had to be prepared as far as they could be. Even an unfletched shaft would cause damage. It wouldn’t be accurate, but if there was a wide enough target to shoot at… he remembered an assault by the Ice King’s men, thirty or forty of them, storming down a mountainside in the north of the domain. They hadn’t needed accuracy that day, they had just shot and shot and shot until the attack reached them and then it had been sword and knife and pike and blood.
He needed a stonecaster.
For a moment he stood in the fletcher’s doorway, irresolute. He could not humble himself to ask her… but it was the safety of his domain at stake.
“Are there no glues which do not need fire?” he asked.
The fletcher shrugged, her shoulders rising almost to her ears. “Egg, maybe. Mixed with blood… It won’t last longer than a single flight, my lord, if that.”
“Try it,” he said. “If we need these arrows, the first shot will be the most important.”
She had blanched and nodded, then started snapping orders to her apprentices, her three sons, lanky and pimpled and completely cowed by their mother. They ran to obey while Arvid walked back through the increasingly full muster yard to the hall.
Martine was not there.
He found her in his workroom, reading the report the Prowman had written. But the man himself was nowhere to be seen. Arvid said to Sandpiper, “I told you—”
The man was shaking. Already shaking, before Arvid had spoken to him. His people did not fear him to that degree. Surely.
“My lord, I couldn’t stop him! Truly, truly, I didn’t even know what he was going to do—”
“True, my lord,” Martine said. “Sandpiper couldn’t have stopped it.”
Arvid felt the calm of battle come over him, that sense of time slowing down to allow the time to do what must be done.
“Tell me,” he said.
“He finished the report and then he asked to see the lady, so I sent one of the girls for her and she came.”
Arvid looked at Martine, but there was nothing to see except that calm, impersonal front she had assumed earlier.
“He handed her the report and then he, he, he just disappeared!”
Sandpiper was shaking harder as he spoke. This was what he feared. The demonstration of a power far greater than a warlord’s. Arvid ignored him. “Where has he gone?” he demanded. Martine spread her hands, exactly as the fletcher had done.
“Wherever She has sent him,” she said. “I doubt he knew himself.”
“The Lake’s secrets are Her own,” she said. “I know he has moved in time. Whether She can move him across country as well, I don’t know.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“Not in words,” she said. And then, as if to pay him back for what he had said upstairs, she added, “If you do not have the Sight you will not understand.”
“Tell me what he said,” Arvid replied, low and dangerous. He could hear the growl in his voice, and he didn’t care that Sandpiper could hear it too. Let them gossip.
“He offered me refuge, if I needed it,” she said.
That was a punch in the guts. He needed a moment to recover from it, and in that moment she walked past him. He grabbed at her arm and she froze. Ignore the Prowman, his instinct said. Ignore everything except your duty.
“I need a stonecaster,” he said. “Cast for me.” It wasn’t a request, but it wasn’t quite an order. She flicked a glance at Sandpiper and turned back, sitting not at Arvid’s worktable but at Reed’s desk. She took the linen square from her belt and spread it carefully, then put her pouch—red leather, he had given it to her when her old one split from long usage—on the edge of the linen.
“I am ready, my lord,” she said.
“You can go, Sandpiper.”
Arvid waited until the guard had shut the door behind him, and then brought a stool and sat across from her.
“Ask your question,” she said.
“Is the Ice King preparing an attack?”
She waited, sitting absolutely still. Reluctantly, he spat in his hand and stretched it to her. The first time they had touched since… All the other times they had done this together ran through his mind. Winter, summer, night, day… a ritual that was as much a part of their lives as lovemaking. He tore his thoughts from that and clasped her hand, the smooth fingers cool in his.
She dug in the pouch with her other hand and cast. He knew some of her stones by sight, but today he could not concentrate on anything except her long fingers, delicately touching one after the other.
“I don’t…” Her voice was puzzled. He looked up to find her frowning at the stones, a thing he had only seen once or twice before. “Destiny,” she said, touching a stone. “Danger. Ice.” Two of the stones were face down, and she turned them over. “Evenness. And the blank stone.”
The blank stone was a bastard, and a source of hope. It meant the future was uncertain, that the actions they took would determine the outcome.
“How can you have Destiny and the blank stone in the same casting?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen it before,” she said. “And never with the Evenness stone, which stands for balance restored and justice.”
“So what does it mean?”
Martine’s green eyes were wide and unguarded, as they might have been the day before. “The stone for a warlord isn’t there. No stone for fighting, or death, or battle…”
“So. No attack?”
“But there is Ice, and Danger,” she muttered.
She cocked her head, touching the stones again and bending to listen to them. He would never quite get used to that. The idea that the stones actually talked…
“I think,” she said slowly, “that there will be danger, but not in the form you expect.”
Arvid let out an exasperated sigh. Yesterday his life had been simple. He had been sad about losing Ember to the south, but they would visit, and he’d already agreed with Merroc that the first son would stay in the Far South Domain and the second would come here to be fostered and eventually be his heir. Martine had argued about that, wanting Ember to inherit, and using the Lady Sorn, ruler of Central Domain, as her precedent. But although Ember was far smarter than she ever let on, she was not the slightest bit interested in ruling a domain. If ever there was a girl designed to be a ruler’s wife, it was her. Even Martine had agreed with that, eventually, once Ember had finished begging to go south with Osfrid, away from the winters she loathed. A wedding, future grandchildren, a domain safe and secure, a loved and deeply trusted wife. All gone.
“Danger,” he repeated. “Wonderful.”