The Huntress

Bracken did not shout. He put his mouth close to Wren's ear and said, "Wake them. Quiet. Captain first."

She went back into the barn at a crouch. The fire was down to a red eye of embers in the middle of the floor. She found Iyene by the smell of her coat, oiled leather and horse, and put a hand on her shoulder, and Iyene was awake before the hand was all the way down.

"Dead," Wren whispered. "In the orchard. Coming up."

"How many?"

"I don't know. Lots. A dozen?"

Iyene was up, and asked nothing more. She went down the barn in the dark touching people, a hand on a shoulder and a word, and one by one they woke. Alder sat up with a grunt. Pip rolled over and was on his feet with his knife out before his eyes were open. Dorrit woke with a start beside Merritt, and when Iyene knelt and spoke to her she nodded and stayed where she was.

The barn was a long roofless box of stone, with its doorway at the west end, a great round arch made for hay-wains. At the east end, farthest from the door, Merritt lay against the wall with Dorrit beside her. The wreck of the old hayloft lay along the north side in black beams and fallen stones. In the middle of the south wall there was a gap where the wall had come down, a slope of rubble as high as a man's chest. Beyond the gap and the doorway was the orchard, and beyond the orchard the stream.

Two ways in, then. Wren said it to herself, so she would remember.

She went back to the doorway, where Bracken still stood in the arch with his spear. The faces were closer. She could see them now without trying, a slow ragged line coming up between the trees, pale in the moonlight, with the frost going ahead of them on the grass.

"Torches," said Iyene, behind her.

There were no torches. There was the fire, and a heap of broken loft-timbers that Bracken had gathered for it, and the last of the oil in the jug. Iyene tore the sleeve off her shirt and wound it round the end of a timber and soaked it from the jug. Pip did the same with a strip of blanket. Alder cut the hem off his old brown cloak with Pip's knife and did the same, and said, "My tailor would weep," and nobody laughed.

They thrust the heads into the embers. The oil caught with a soft thump, and the barn filled with jumping yellow light and long shadows. Out in the orchard the pale faces stopped, and turned toward the light, and began to come faster.

"Here they come," said Bracken.

"Sergeant, the door. I'll take the gap. Keeper, with me. Sandover, the mule." Barrow was tethered to an iron ring in the north wall, and he had smelled them. He was stamping and blowing and rolling his eyes. "Warden, the fire. Keep it high. Mistress Fallowmere, you stay with Merritt, whatever happens."

"I'll stay with her," said Dorrit. She had a burning timber in one hand and her little curved knife in the other. "Let one of them come near her. Just one."

Wren took a torch. She tucked her sling into her belt beside it, with a stone ready in the pouch, and went with Iyene to the rubble of the south wall, where she could see down the orchard.

There were more than a dozen of them, in rags and old leather gray with frost. Some were old dead, dead long before the Frost, with their faces gone to leather and bone, and some were not. At the front, taller than the others, walking a little ahead in the moonlight with his arms hanging loose at his sides, came a man in a Crown rider's blue coat.

The coat was torn at the shoulder, and there was a short sword in its sheath at his hip. His mustache was gray, and she knew the face above it.

"Captain," Wren said. "Captain, it's..."

"I see him."

Fenn walked out of the trees into the open grass in front of the doorway, and stopped. He stood in the moonlight with the frost spreading out around his boots and his face turned toward the door, toward Bracken standing in it with his spear, and his eyes were white.

"Corporal," said Bracken.

Fenn did not answer. He did not know his name; Wren could see that, even from the rubble. He stood with his head a little on one side, as he had always stood for Iyene's orders, and there was nothing in his face at all.

Then he came at the door, fast. The faded were slow when they were cold, Alder had said, and fast when they smelled warmth, and there was warmth in that barn: a fire, and seven living bodies, and a mule. Fenn came across the grass at a run with the others behind him, and Bracken set his spear.

Fenn ran onto it. The iron head went into his chest under the breastbone and out through his back. He did not stop. He walked up the shaft, and his hands came out and closed on the ash wood, and the frost went up the shaft from his fingers toward Bracken's hands, white and fast.

Bracken let go of the spear and stepped back. Iyene was there beside him with a burning timber, and she put it in his hand. He did not look at it. He looked at Fenn.

"Sorry, Corporal," he said, and pushed the torch into Fenn's face.

Fenn caught with a sound Wren would hear for the rest of her life, a soft hungry roar like a chimney catching. The fire went over his head and down the blue coat. He did not scream. He only stood there burning, with his hands on the spear, until he went down on his knees in the doorway. Bracken stood over him and held the torch to him until he fell all the way.

Then the others were there, and there was no more time for anything.

They came through the door in a crowd, over Fenn's burning body, and Bracken was in the middle of them with a torch in one hand and nothing in the other. Iyene went to him. Wren heard her sabre hiss out.

And they came over the rubble at Wren.

The first one was a woman, or had been. She came up the stones on her hands and feet, fast. Wren swung the torch down and caught her across the face, and she went over backward with her hair alight and rolled down the rubble burning.

The second one got a hand on Wren's boot.

The cold came straight through the leather, like standing barefoot in a snowdrift. Wren kicked, and it held on. She brought the torch down on its arm, and the arm caught, and it let go. She scrambled back up the rubble with her foot gone numb, so that she could not feel the stones under it.

"Keeper!" Iyene's voice. "Back! Get back from the gap!"

She got back. She came down off the rubble on the inside of the barn with her dead foot folding under her, and turned, and a dead man came over the top of the stones after her. He was old dead, leather and bone and rags, and she could see the moon through the holes in his cheek.

She whipped the sling off her belt and swung once round her head and let fly. The stone hit him in the middle of the forehead with a crack, and his head snapped back, and he fell backward off the rubble and did not get up.

"Good shot," said Alder, from the fire.

"It won't stay down."

"Then hit it again."

It was a fight in the dark and the firelight, and afterward Wren could not have told anybody in what order it happened.

She remembered Bracken in the doorway. He had wrenched his spear out of Fenn's burning body and was using it two-handed, swinging it wide, the broad iron head smashing into the dead and knocking them back into the ones behind. His torn forearm had come unbound, and she could see the blood on it, black in the firelight. Iyene fought at his left shoulder with sabre and torch, hacking and burning, very fast and very neat, and the dead fell in front of them and got up again and fell again.

She remembered Pip. A small dead thing had got past the door and gone for Barrow along the north wall. Pip stood in front of the mule with his knife in one hand and his torch in the other and screamed at it. "Get off! Get off him, you rotten great…" He shoved the torch into its chest. It went up, and Barrow kicked it, burning, halfway across the barn.

She remembered Alder at the fire, throwing on timber after timber until the flames went up higher than a man. Every time one of the dead came near him he swung a burning branch at it and it went back. He did not look like a Warden. He looked like an old farmer beating off crows.

And she remembered Dorrit at the far end, standing over Merritt with a burning timber in both hands while a dead thing came at her along the east wall. Dorrit did not step back. She swung the timber low and took it across the knees, and when it fell she hit it again, and again, shouting at it the whole time. "Not her! Not her! You rotten stinking dead…" and a great many other words that Wren had never heard her say, even at Hobb.

Then the horn blew from the orchard, long and high and clear. It rose, and held, and fell away by steps, and ended in a little flourish, and every dead thing in the barn stopped where it stood and turned its head toward the sound.

The hounds came after it, over the rubble in the south wall in a wave of white. There were six of them, great pale hounds with ice in their fur and eyes as blue as the Ice at the Doors, and their mouths were blue-black and wide. Their baying filled the roofless barn and went up into the sky. Barrow screamed. Two of them went straight for the fire and Alder, and the others went for the door, for Bracken and Iyene, from behind.

"Sergeant!" Wren shouted. "Behind you!"

Bracken turned. The first hound hit him in the chest and they went down together. The second went for Iyene, and she met it with a straight thrust of her sabre down its open throat, and it died on the blade and nearly pulled her over with its weight.

Wren ran at the fire. One hound had Alder backed against the loft beams, snapping at the burning branch he held in front of him, with its back to her. She hit it across the spine with her torch as hard as she could, and the fur went up with a crackle and a stink. It spun round screaming. Alder brought his staff down on its skull, and it fell twitching into the fire.

She looked for the other one. It had gone for Pip.

He was still in front of Barrow with his torch, white as milk, waving it at the hound as it circled him low with its lips drawn back.

"Pip, get back!"

"I can't! He's tied!"

The hound sprang, and Pip went down under it, and Wren heard him yell. Then Bracken was there, bleeding from the chest, and he drove the iron head of his spear down through the hound's ribs and pinned it to the floor of the barn. It thrashed there, howling, and Bracken leaned on the spear until it stopped.

Pip crawled out from under it. His coat was torn across the shoulder. "I'm all right," he said. "I'm all right. Is Barrow all right?"

"Barrow's fine," said Bracken. He pulled Pip's torn coat back from his shoulder and looked at the scratches under it, shallow and bleeding. "So are you, near enough. And he kicked two of them. Barrow's the best of us."

The horn blew again, closer. It was right outside the door.

She came in through the arch at a walk.

She was taller than Bracken, and she wore a long hunting coat of dark green, rotted through in places so that it hung in rags, with high boots and a belt with a knife on it. A silver horn hung at her side on a green baldric across her chest. It caught the firelight and threw it back, and there was a device cut into it, too small for Wren to see.

Her face was pale and fine-boned, and it had been beautiful once, and still was. Her hair was white, long, tied back at the nape. Her eyes were not clouded like the eyes of the dead, but gray, clear and sharp and awake, and they looked around the barn and took in everything.

She had a boar-spear in her hand, like Bracken's only longer and lighter, a hunter's spear with a crossbar under the blade. She held it low and easy, as if it weighed nothing, and the dead that were left drew back from her.

"The Huntress," Wren heard herself say.

The woman in green looked at her, just for a moment. Then her eyes went to the satchel at Wren's side, and she moved.

She was faster than anything Wren had ever seen. She crossed the barn from the door to the fire in three strides, and Iyene got in front of her, and the spear came round and knocked Iyene's sabre aside and Iyene with it. Iyene went down on one knee. She came up again with her sabre cutting, and it went into the woman's side under the ribs, deep, a killing cut.

Nothing happened. The Huntress did not even look down. The blade came out clean and white with frost. She hit Iyene in the face with the butt of her spear, and Iyene went down again and did not get up.

Bracken came at her from the side.

He came in low and hard and fast for so big a man, and he did not swing. He drove. The broad iron head of the boar-spear went into her body just under the heart and out through her back, and the crossbar slammed against her ribs. The Huntress stopped.

Wren saw the iron go into her, and saw what happened where it touched. There was a hiss, and a white smoke came up round the spear-shaft where it entered the green coat. The woman's lips drew back from her teeth, and for the first time she looked as if something hurt.

She was slow now. She put one hand on the shaft and began to draw it out of herself, inch by inch, with the white smoke hissing up. Bracken leaned his whole weight on the other end and could not stop her. Her gray eyes were on his face the whole time. The crossbar came clear of her ribs, and the head came out of her back, and the iron left her body with a sound like a boot pulling out of mud.

Then she took hold of the spear-shaft with both hands, with Bracken hanging on to the other end, and threw him.

She threw him across the barn. The biggest man in the company went through the air with his legs kicking, hit the wreck of the hayloft with a crash of old timber, and lay among the beams and did not move.

"Bracken!" Dorrit screamed, from the east wall.

The Huntress turned toward Wren. Wren pushed the torch at her face, and the Huntress flinched and jerked her head back from the fire, and her gray eyes narrowed. She did not come on. She circled, and Wren circled with her, keeping the torch between them, and her foot was still numb, and she knew that she was going to fall.

Then Alder stepped between them with his staff in his right hand and a burning branch in his left. He was gray in the face and his white hair was standing up, and he looked more frightened than Wren had known a man could look, and he did not move out of the way.

"No," he said. "Not her."

The Huntress looked at him. Then she reached out and took his right arm, the staff arm, at the wrist.

Wren saw the frost go up his sleeve. She saw the woman turn her hand, not fast, almost gently, as if she were turning a key. Alder's arm went round behind him, too far. There was a wet pop from his shoulder. He screamed. The staff fell out of his hand.

Wren dropped the torch and grabbed the Huntress by the wrist.

She did it with her left hand, because it was nearest, and on the middle finger of her left hand was Tansy's mother's ring, plain iron, old, worn thin. Iron. Don't take it off.

The iron touched the Huntress's skin, and it hissed. White smoke came up between Wren's fingers. The cold of the woman's wrist was so great that it burned, and Wren felt her fingers go numb, and she held on. The Huntress snatched her hand back and let go of Alder, and he fell to the floor with his arm twisted behind him.

The Huntress stood over them both, looking down at Wren. She lifted her wrist. There was a dark mark on the white skin where the ring had touched.

For a moment they looked at each other, and Wren was sure she was going to die.

Then the sky over the barn went gray. It was only a little paleness in the east, over the far-off Cloudwall and the roofless walls, but the Huntress lifted her head to it and looked up at the sky. Then she lifted the silver horn and blew.

It was a different call, short and falling. The hounds that were left heard it and broke off, and went out over the rubble in the south wall in a white rush. The last of the dead turned and shambled after them into the orchard.

The Huntress looked at Wren once more, at her face and then at the satchel. Then she turned, and walked out through the arch, and was gone.

Wren sat on the floor of the barn in the gray light and shook, while her foot came back to her, prickling and burning.

Little by little she could hear things again: the fire crackling, and Barrow blowing through his nose, and somebody crying, which was Pip. Somebody was groaning beside her, and that was Alder, with his arm twisted behind him and his face running with sweat. And from the wreck of the hayloft came a long, steady stream of swearing.

"Bracken," said Dorrit. She was across the barn before Wren saw her move. "Bracken. You great ox. You great stupid lump. Are you dead?"

"No, Mistress."

"Can you move?"

"Don't want to, Mistress."

"Move anyway." She was on her knees among the timbers, pulling them off him, running her hands down his arms and legs. "Anything broken? Ribs? Your head? Look at me. How many fingers?"

"Too many."

"Oh, mother of mercy." She put her hands over her face. Then she took them away and hit him on the chest. He grunted. "Don't do that again."

"Wasn't my idea, Mistress."

Iyene was sitting up by the fire with blood running down her face from a cut on her cheekbone. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and looked at it. Then she got up and went round the barn as she had in the night, touching people one by one: Pip, Wren, Alder, Merritt. Merritt was awake and white and staring. Nothing had reached her, and there was a heap of burned dead along the east wall to show why.

"Mistress Fallowmere," said Iyene. "The Warden's arm."

Dorrit came. She looked at Alder's shoulder, and put her hand on it, and Alder made a thin high sound through his teeth.

"It's out," Dorrit said. "Out of the socket. I can put it back. It'll hurt worse than anything's ever hurt you. Bracken, come and hold him."

"I'm resting, Mistress."

"Rest after. Come and hold him."

Bracken came limping, and knelt, and put his arms round Alder from behind. Dorrit took Alder's wrist in both her hands, put her bare foot in his armpit, and looked him in the eye.

"Ready?"

"No," said Alder. "Not in the least. I should like..."

She pulled. Alder screamed. There was a deep clunk, like a bolt going home, and then he sagged in Bracken's arms and was quiet, breathing hard, with the sweat running down his face.

"There," said Dorrit. "That's the worst of it. You'll have it in a sling for a week, and you'll not lift that staff above your head till Midwinter. But it's in."

"Thank you," said Alder faintly. "I think."

They burned the dead in the orchard when the light came up, for there was plenty of wood. The four hounds they dragged out by the legs and burned too; they were heavier than they looked, and even dead the cold came off their fur.

Fenn they burned last, alone, on a pyre Bracken built of loft-timbers under the biggest apple tree. There was not much left of him to burn, but Bracken built the pyre carefully anyway, and laid him on it, and set it alight, and then stood back beside Iyene.

Iyene stood very straight, with her face bruised and swollen down one side where the spear-butt had struck it and the blood wiped away. She looked at the fire, and when she spoke, she spoke as if she were giving a report to a senior officer across a table.

"Corporal Harl Fenn. Second Troop, the King's Mounted Escort. Twenty-two years in the Crown's service. Held the passage of Wystan's Ice on the fifth of September, against the dead, so that the company might pass. Taken there. Burned with honor in the Empty Kingdom, on the tenth of September, by his sergeant, as he would have wished." She paused. "He was a good soldier. He never once complained about the food."

"Sir," said Bracken.

They stood and watched it burn.

Afterward they sat in the barn, in the sun, which had come up warm and gold over the orchard. Dorrit had bound Alder's arm across his chest in a sling torn from his cloak, and he leaned against the wall with his eyes half shut, looking very old.

"What was she?" said Pip. He had not stopped shaking. He had the little wooden horse out of his pocket and was turning it over and over in his fingers. "The Captain cut her. I saw it. The Captain cut her right in half, near enough, and nothing happened. And the Sergeant stuck her right through, and she pulled it out. What was she?"

Alder opened his eyes. "She is Taken," he said.

"What's that mean?"

"There are two kinds of dead that walk in the cold. You have seen the first kind. The faded. They have no minds. They go toward warmth, and they grip, and they kill, and they can be burned and hacked down like any other thing of flesh." He shifted his arm in its sling and winced. "The Taken are the second kind. They are rarer, and they are worse. They are people the cold took whole. It took their lives and left them their minds. They think. They remember their skills, their arts. They remember how to hunt." He looked toward the door. "They remember everything except who they were."

"Can they be killed?"

"Iron holds them. You saw what the Sergeant's spear did, and what Wren's ring did. Fire hurts them. You saw that too. Steel does nothing at all."

"So how do you kill them?"

"Nothing ends them," said Alder, "but their name. Their true name, spoken aloud to them, by someone who knows who they were."

Pip stared at him. "Her name? Her real name? From before?"

"Yes."

"But she's three hundred years dead! Who knows her name?"

Nobody answered him.

Iyene had been sitting apart by the doorway with her dispatch case on her knees. It was a flat case of black leather with the royal arms on the lid, battered at the corners, and she had carried it from Merrow and never let anybody else touch it. Now she took a small key from her coat and opened it.

She took out a book, not large, bound in faded red leather, with the edges of its pages gone brown, and held it up so that they could see it.

"The officer rolls of the Kingdom of Meddan," she said. "The Crown's copy. Every holder of every royal office from the founding of the Survey to the Frost, with their names and their houses and their devices." She laid the book open across her knees. Her bruised face was calm. "She blew the royal hunt call. She wore a royal officer's horn. I saw it in the firelight, and there is a device on it."

"And?" said Wren.

"And I have the rolls," said Iyene. "Then we'll find out who she was."