Fremur did not like walking, but when his horse had eventually wandered back after the raid on the stone-dweller settlement his brother Odrig had claimed it, saying, “Any man who cannot keep his horse does not deserve one.”
Everyone in the Crane Clan seemed to know about this, so there was no shortage of mockery as Fremur trudged between the wagons and out toward Birch Meadow. He kept his head down and bit his lip to prevent himself from shouting back. Odrig himself had made it clear that he approved of the insults: “Until you grow a man’s tough skin, you are useless to me or anyone else,” he had said only the previous night. “You are like a warrior made of cheese.” Odrig’s way of toughening a man’s skin seemed to be frequent beatings and humiliation in front of the other clansfolk.
Fremur did not think the skin of his body had toughened much since childhood, but there were times when he felt certain his heart had shrunken and hardened like wet leather left in the sun. He often thought of himself that way, as if his insides were a rawhide knot, something that would only grow tighter the harder it was pulled. He sensed something like that in Unver as well, although whatever was drawn tight inside Unver was under much greater strain, like the huge ropes used to tug the standing stones at the Clan Ground back upright after an earth tremor had felled them. The ropes had creaked with every pull against the stones’ unimaginable weight, until it seemed like the great cords and the muscles of the men who pulled on them were at war with the earth itself. Unver was like that, but his cords never slackened. The other men of the Crane Clan disliked him but they feared him too, his height and long arms and his hard, blank face, as unchanging as one of those stones, standing against all wind and weather.
He is too fierce, and he does not bend his neck to my brother. Someday Odrig will kill him or drive him out of the clan.
Nobody in the clan, except perhaps for the tall man’s stepfather Zhakar, could even remember Unver’s real name. When he had first come to the clan as a gangly boy, someone had asked him who he was. “Unver,” he had replied, staring at Odrig and the other boys like a bear surrounded by baying dogs—it meant “nobody”— and that was what the clan had called him ever since. Even Fremur’s sister Kulva still called him that, and she was one of the few folk who treated the tall man with kindness. To the rest, he was only a strange, unfriendly clansman who lived with his drunken stepfather on the outskirts of the camp—a good horseman and fierce fighter, but otherwise to be avoided.
As Fremur reached the edge of the meadow he saw old Zhakar sitting on the steps of his wagon, sharpening a knife with long, screeching strokes. Fremur wanted nothing to do with the sour old man, so he took a path through the trees, around behind Zhakar’s ill-maintained wagon and into the grove of birches where, as expected, he found Unver, who was using stones to smooth the wood of his unfinished wagon while his big, dark horse Deofol nipped listlessly at the grass. The green was thick on the plains at this time of the year, and all the horses were growing fat. It was a time of celebration, at least for most of the clan.
“Ho, rider,” Fremur called. “May your hooves always find the path.”
Unver looked up. “I can’t say the same for you. Where is your horse?”
Fremur didn’t really want to talk about it. Instead, he nodded toward Unver’s wagon, which looked as though it was nearly finished, an altogether finer piece of work than his stepfather Zhakar’s rickety cart. The wagon was not yet painted, but every joint showed careful attention, and every spoke of the wheels had been rubbed as smooth as glass. “How does it go?”
“Well enough.” Unver held out the wineskin.
“I would help you to finish, if you want,” Fremur said, taking a sip of the sour red stuff. “Your wagon, I mean, not your wine. Since I have no horse, there is little else for me to do.”
Unver raised an eyebrow but did not ask the obvious question. “There is more polishing to do before the paint. You could help with that—but the Grass Thunderer save you if you put a nick in the wood, Mouse.”
He did not know why he said what he said next, but he said it. “I have never liked that name.”
Unver watched him take a long swallow, then took the wine back and had a drink himself before wiping the residue from his long mustaches. He was not so dark as most of the clan, whose skin the sun and dust of the plains usually turned the color of cherry wood. Unver’s flesh was lighter, like the rounded tan stones in the bottom of riverbeds. His prominent nose was sharp and thin, his cheekbones high, but the strangest thing about him were his eyes, gray as rainclouds.
Fremur waited, but Unver did not ask him to explain what he had said about his nickname. Instead, the tall man watched as a pair of clansmen rode by on the far side of the meadow, a long bowshot away. The squinting, storm-colored eyes followed them until they were gone, as though Unver were a hunting animal and they were prey.
Fremur was growing frustrated by the other man’s silence. He had come here with a yearning for comradeship, looking for someone else who knew what it meant to be an outsider in his own clan. “What do you think of my sister Kulva?” he said, then immediately regretted it. He had come to give news. This was not the best way to deliver it, but he had been stung by Unver’s seeming disinterest.
The other man looked at him carefully, as though the words might be some kind of trap. “She is a woman.” He seemed to realize this was inadequate. “She is a good woman.”
“You care about her.” Fremur said it as a statement, not a question.
Unver’s expression grew more remote, as if a cold wind had brought frost. “She is nothing particular to me. And it is nothing to you, either.”
“I have seen you walking together.”
Unver’s hand dropped to the knife at his belt and his face hardened into something fearsome. “You have been spying for Odrig—”
“No! No, but I have seen you together twice, walking and talking, when I was looking for her. And I know my sister. She would not be so easy with you if you had not spoken together that way many times.”
Still the gray eyes fixed him, but at last Unver let his hand fall away from the knife. “Why do you say these things to me, Fremur? Do you plan to defend her honor yourself? If you insist it will be so, but you will die for nothing and her reputation will be ruined. I have not dishonored her in any way. We merely spoke away from wagging tongues.” He narrowed his eyes. “Or are tongues wagging already? Is that what you have come to tell me?”
Fremur was about to answer him, but Unver leaped to his feet suddenly and strode toward the unpainted wagon. “You must think me a fool, as all the rest of the clan does. Would I try to steal the sister of the thane? I would be hunted forever.” He stopped and spread his arms. “No! This is what I have built with my own hands—the finest wagon in the Crane Clan. I have gone on every raid, I have taken every task anyone would give me. Look!” He threw open the door of the wagon and pulled out an oilcloth bundle. He unwrapped it as Fremur stared, revealing a tumble of bright objects. “Real gold for the horses’ traces and reins. Silver for the hinges and fittings, specially made by the finest smith in the Lynx Clan. When I show this wagon to your brother, he and those other fools, their eyes will pop out! He will have no choice but to give Kulva to me.” Unver was breathing hard as he rolled the oilcloth again, as though he had run a long way. He shook the bundle at Fremur and the fittings clinked. “She will ride like a queen of the lakelands!”
Fremur now felt sick at his stomach. He had only wanted to make bad blood between Unver and his hated brother. He had not understood . . .
“But that is not . . . !”
“Not enough?” He was angry and would not look at Fremur. “Then I will get enough. I will bring your brother a dowry of fine horses. Not all my gold has gone to buy fittings!”
“Unver, no.” Fremur shook his head. He did not know where to begin. “That is not what . . . I only came to tell you . . .”
His eyes almost seemed mad. “What? Tell me what?”
“That my sister Kulva . . .” Fremur swallowed. It was not easy, because the lump in his throat seemed big enough to choke him. “My brother has promised her to Drojan. They will set out the marriage stones at the clan gathering, when the moon is full.”