When Hew Mallin came for him in the morning Bram was ready. It was an hour before dawn but he had already been awake for hours. He wasn’t certain he’d slept, and he was sure that if he had slept he hadn’t enjoyed it or found it restful.

A night in an enemy clan was not conducive to rest.

“Plans change,” Mallin had warned yesterday as they crossed the open ground between the northern woods and Blackhail roundhouse. Bram realized later that Mallin had already identified the two women archers by the creek and meant to use this chance meeting to his advantage. Bram also realized later that in some subtle and shaming way he had been a small part of Mallin’s plans.

“Would the young sir like a spot of breakfast?” A voice spoke over Bram’s thoughts. “I can hop over to the kitchens and have you fried bread and a sausage in a minute.”

Bram’s stomach grumbled. He was standing in the Blackhail stables where he’d spent the night sleeping in the hayloft—with the bats. Dinner had been trailmeat and carrots and he would dearly have liked something hot. Looking at the kindly and well-meaning man who offered this luxury, Bram Cormac shook his head. “Thank you, but my master and I need to be on our way.”

The man, who was as far as Bram could tell some kind of senior groomsman, was quick to nod in understanding. “Master Mallin, he’s a busy man. Always going more than coming.”

“The road’s my home, Jebb,” Mallin said, stepping from the box stall and leading out his horse. “It’s what you get for being a ranger.”

Jebb pulled down Mallin’s saddle from one of the tack hooks. As he handed the oiled and supple tan leather saddle to Mallin he cleared his throat. “You wouldn’t happen to have word of Angus Lok, would you? He’s a ranger, just like yourself. Fine man. Promised me he’d be round this spring to check the foals.”

Mallin sucked air through his teeth. “I recall the name but…” He shook his head. “Can’t say that I know anything about him.”

“Aye.” Jebb’s nod was soft and deflated. “Big world. Don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Bram,” Mallin said briskly. “Saddle Gabbie and get the bags. I’ll meet you out front.”

Bram did as he was told, climbing up the ladder to the loft to retrieve the packs and then bridling and saddling Gabbie. Jebb helped. Gabbie liked the groomsman a lot and even picked up his hoofs for Jebb’s inspection.

“You’ve got a beauty in this one,” Jebb told Bram as he filed Gabbie’s heel. “He’s got the look of the Castle about him.”

Bram made no reply. He reminded himself that horses were traded across the clanholds and just because a horse had the look of Castlemilk about it didn’t mean that it belonged to a Castleman. Or a Dhoonesman. “Could you help with the belly strap while I center the packs?”

Jebb was quick to do his bidding, crouching below Gabbie’s belly to fasten the cinches. “Done.”

Bram’s hand was already on the reins. “Thanks for your help, Jebb.” Looking around, he thought for a moment. “It’s a fine stable.” Bram could feel Jebb beaming against his back as he walked through the stable doors and onto the horse court.

The predawn air was chill and Gabbie’s breath blew in clouds. An orange line above the headland known as the Wedge predicted the sunrise and to the north the ptarmigan were calling, staking early claims. Mallin was already ahorse and his stallion was lively and kicking, spoiling for a run. Bram mounted and they trotted the horses south around the massive dome of the Hailhouse.

He was glad to be gone. Of all the things he had imagined upon waking up yesterday morning, spending the night in the Hailhouse had not been one of them. Right now, hundreds of leagues to the south, Dhoone was preparing to face Blackhail at Ganmiddich. Robbie wanted to take the Ganmiddich roundhouse from Bludd. Before he could do so he had to contend with the Hail armies camped on Bannen Field. That meant he, Bram Cormac half-brother to Robbie Dun Dhoone, had just accepted the hospitality of the enemy.

They did not feed me, Bram told himself as he and Mallin cut across the Blackhail greatcourt and onto the southern road. And he had slept not in the Hailhouse itself but in the stables along with the horses.

It had probably saved his neck. If he had supped and slept in the Great Hearth with Mallin and the Blackhail warriors, someone at some point would have recognized either his face or his name. Cormac? Wasn’t that Robbie’s name before he plucked a grander one from his mother’s side of the family? Or, You have the look of that mad swordsman from Dhoone, Mabb Cormac. What was your name again, boy? Bram imagined that both questions were equally likely. What he couldn’t imagine was how he would have answered them. To be uncloaked as a Dhoonesman in the heart of Blackhail; Bram wasn’t sure he would have lived out the night.

Mallin had been no help, of course. The ranger had warned early on he wasn’t Bram’s keeper and Bram now had a pretty good idea what that meant. Bram Cormac’s neck, keeping it whole and above water, was entirely Bram Cormac’s affair. Mallin took care of his own business, allowing Bram the privilege of tagging along and sometimes even helping him, but Bram better expect nothing in return. They were the rules of the game, take them or leave them. Bram took them. He was learning. How to stay alive in an enemy clan when you’ve been introduced to the chief’s wife by your real name was a lesson more or less worth receiving.

Keep your mouth shut, your head low, and duck out of sight when no one is looking: that’s what Bram had learned last night. The only moment he wished he could have taken back was the moment when Raina Blackhail asked him a direct question and looked him straight in the eye as he answered.

Where are you headed to next?

Bramfelt his cheeks heat so he kicked Gabbie’s ribs, commanding the stallion to gallop, so he could generate some air to cool them. Mallin had already left the path and was was riding for the woods in the southwest. Bram followed.

Trouble was he had liked Raina Blackhail. She was beautiful, like a queen. When she smiled at him he had felt it all the way down to the bones on his face. Her words, “We don’t bite,” were the first kindness he had received in months. When it came to it he had not been able to lie to her. His answer about where he was heading was the truth.

Lady, I do not know.

He didn’t know now. Sometimes he didn’t think Hew Mallin knew either, though the ranger appeared to have something in mind today as he had found a path leading west through the grazeland. Bram knew better than to ask. Direct questions to Mallin rarely yielded the truth. Mallin had lied outright to the groomsman. The first time Bram had met Mallin, the ranger had claimed friendship with Angus Lok. Today he had denied that friendship.

Bram didn’t understand, but he was watching and he was learning to emulate. He just hoped Mallin hadn’t overheard his reply to Raina Blackhail. I do not know, was hardly an answer worthy of the Phage.

Seeing that Mallin had slowed to a trot, Bram reined Gabbie. The rising sun sliced light through the grass and found all the standing water for leagues. Bram spotted a lake to the north, and for a wonder Mallin actually volunteered information about it. “That’s Cold Lake,” he said. “One of these days we’ll have to go and see old Mad Binny who lives on it.”

Mallin knew a lot of women. For some reason, not yet apparent to Bram, females liked him. Bram was no expert but he thought Mallin was a bit old. He was still wondering what the ranger’s relation was to the young Hailswoman Chella Gloyal. Something had passed between them. As they had entered the stables yesterday evening while Raina Blackhail was walking ahead, Mallin had slipped something into Chella’s hand. It was gone in an instant, lost so quickly to the folds of Chella’s gray cloak that someone watching may have doubted its existence, but Bram had good eyes. He knew what he saw.

Sometimes Bram thought he’d never get to know the secrets of the Phage. Other times he thought they were being revealed right in front of his eyes and all he had to do was watch.

Glancing at Mallin, who was buffing his fingernails with a shammy as he rode, Bram decided to risk a question. “Do most rangers work for the Phage?”

Mallin didn’t look up. “Rangers are rangers. They trade, trap, do day work.” He held his fingers to the light to inspect them. “They travel, get to know people. Mobility like that can be useful.”

Especially in the clans, Bram added. Was that what he was becoming then, a ranger?

Satisfied with his fingernails, Mallin tucked the shammy in his saddle pouch and regained the reins. “Let’s go find some weasel,” he said.

Bram followed Mallin’s stallion off the trail and through the brush. Last night, lying on his bedroll in the straw as the bats began to stir, Bram had listened to the stablemen talk. He guessed where they were headed now.

They followed an old trapping path that was soft with mud onto an open field that backed against a dense forest of hardwoods. Before they got twenty feet into the field, they were challenged and forced to dismount. Two Scarpe hatchetmen demanded their weapons for ransom. Bram looked to Mallin. The ranger was calm, offering both his sword and knife freely so Bram did the same. The weapons were stowed unceremoniously in a sack. Mallin appeared unmoved by this fact… but Mallin was not a clansman. He did not feel the insult of having one’s ransomed weapons removed from one’s sight.

“What have we got here?” The smaller of the two hatchetmen pushed open the flap on one of Bram’s saddlebags. He was pale-skinned and black haired with part shavings above both ears. Casually he picked out items, sniffed them, tasted them, threw them away. Bram could not recall which pack contained the Dhoone cloak.

“Gentleman,” Mallin said easily. “If you’re looking for the Dhooneshine it’s in the other pack. Brown flask. The one with the label on it saying A gift from me to you.”

The hatchetman grunted. Glancing at his companion, he walked around the horse and flipped the second pack. Thrusting a hand deep, he found what he was looking for. Silent, he drew out the flask, uncorked it, sniffed and nodded. His bigger, older companion addressed Mallin and Bram.

“Straight ahead. Lead your horses. Your weapons stay here until you’re back.”

Bram thought he’d like to pick up his bedroll and spare pants from the dirt but now didn’t seem like a good time. Abandoning them, he headed for the Weasel Camp.

Tents and wood shanties had been raised around a series of small buildings that had once been a farm. A house, a wood barn, a roofed well and cattle run were still standing, though the house was black around the windows as if it had been burned. Young trees had been logged and split to make posts and big square-shaped tents had been raised on a network of tensely strung ropes. Poison pine banners were flying from every point. The brown-and-black weasel standard, the personal badge of the Weasel chief, was stretched over the large central tent.

“Weasel’s in her lair,” Mallin murmured. He seemed close to happy.

Bram reckoned the numbers. There were a lot of people here; women, children, elderly. A surprising number of warriors—more than at the Hailhouse. Women were cooking, washing, drawing water from the well. Men were eating breakfast, brushing horses, repairing leather and honing steel. Children were crying, rubbing sleep from their eyes, squatting to relieve themselves, and running around the camp. A big vat of liquid was boiling on one of the fires. It smelled like chemicals, not food.

A single warrior, dark and lean and armed with a bastard’s sword, came out of the chief’s tent to greet them. His hair, eyebrows and lips were dyed black. “You intrude upon our camp.”

“Yes we do,” Mallin agreed.

“Leave, then.”

“May I present a gift to the chief first?”

The Scarpe warrior didn’t find much to like in Mallin’s easy manner, but he couldn’t find much to object to either. “Give the gift to me.”

“I’ll let you look at it.”

Suspecting a trap the warrior sent a hand to his sword. It was exquisitely sheathed in basket-braided leather. “Go on.”

Mallin opened his mouth and pointed to his tongue. “It’s right here and it’s called information.”

The two men looked at each other as a camp full of people watched. They could not have overhead what had been said but the battle of wills was plain to see.

The warrior was no match for Hew Mallin’s confidence. He made a jerking motion with his head. “Follow me.”

Bram slipped in step behind Mallin and they were escorted to the Weasel chief’s tent.

The interior space had been partitioned and they entered a large and empty reception area. A mink rug sewn from hundreds, possibly thousands, of individual weasel hides, floored the chamber. A high-backed chair made of a solid piece of oak with carved weasels for armrests stood in the center of the rug. Low braziers burned to either side of it, smudging the air with greasy smoke. No other furniture or ornament graced the space.

Mallin looked at the chair and slid something soundlessly to Bram. “Probably best if we stand.”

Bram accepted the item, tucking it under his sleeve as he pushed back his cuff. The warrior had gone ahead into the interior of the tent and Bram heard him speak and a female voice respond.

They waited. An hour passed and then another. Mallin walked around the chair, tapped it with his cleaned and buffed fingernails, and then did something with one of the braziers. He extinguished it.

“Gentleman.” Yelma Scarpe, the Scarpe chief, stepped through the flap in the interior wall. “I have kept you waiting.”

It definitely wasn’t an apology, Bram decided, not even an observation. It sounded more like a boast. The Scarpe Chief had kept them standing in her reception room for the better part of two hours and she was pleased to have done so.

“Uriah,” she said to the warrior who followed her into the chamber, the same one who had accompanied them to the tent. “Relight the brazier. It’s gone out.” She glanced sharply at Hew Mallin, who was all innocence.

As the warrior left to retrieve whatever was needed to tend the brazier, Yelma Scarpe took her seat on the weasel chair. She was clothed in a black dress embroidered with pine cones that was tightly cinched at her scrawny waist. Her neck and hands were heavily corded with sinews and veins, and also heavily dressed with jewels. Bram had no idea what age she was. Her eyes were clear and her face was tinted with rouge and colored pastes. She could have been anything between fifty and a hundred.

“I know you,” she told Mallin.

The ranger bowed. “Hew Mallin at your service.” Unfolding a hand in Bram’s direction, he added, “And this is my traveling companion Bram Cormac.”

Hard black eyes studied him. “You’re Dun Dhoone’s brother.”

“Half-brother.”

Yelma raised an eyebrow at the force of his reply. It appeared to give her pleasure. Jewels on her knuckles glittered as her fingers drummed the weasel armrests on her chair.

Bram kept himself still. Inside his stomach had turned to liquid, but if he could just keep the shell hard no one would know. He had just denied his brother.

“So we have a half-baked, oath-breaking Dhoonesman and a ranger so old he should be walking on sticks. Is there is no end to the pleasures of this day?”

“We’ve come from Blackhail,” Mallin said.

“I know,” replied the chief.

The warrior returned from the inner room, doused the brazier coals with fuel and used a taper to transfer a flame from the second brazier. Air whumpfed as the coals ignited.

Yelma Scarpe stirred the fresh wave of smoke with her little finger. “How do you find Raina Blackhail?”

“Afraid.”

“Really.”

Looking from the Scarpe chief to Mallin, Bram realized they were playing a game. Yelma may have kept Mallin waiting two hours but she wanted very much to hear this. Why would she trust him? Bram wondered. Then he tried out some answers. Because she’d received information from Mallin in the past? Or because she was hearing something she already believed?

Bram concentrated on keeping still. The smoke was itching his throat. He had an urge to cough and had to suppress it.

He had an urge to run and suppressed that too.

Mallin looked the Weasel chief straight in the eye. “Raina Blackhail doesn’t know what’s she’s doing. She’s a fool who shouldn’t be anywhere near a chiefship. Half the people in that house want her out.”

“Yet they helped her evict us.”

“I don’t think I said that Blackhail now loves Scarpe.”

Yelma lowered her head slowly in something that might have been a nod. “She won’t strike.”

It was not quite a question and Mallin said nothing.

Suddenly Bram couldn’t help himself and coughed.

Yelma looked at him, curled her lip, and looked away. He was a clansman without a clan: he was nothing to her.

“What’s the bitch’s defenses?” It was the warrior who, done with the brazier, had come to stand at the Weasel chief’s back. There appeared to be a family resemblance.

“She’s got that big hole in her wall,” Mallin said. “And she’s planning to dispatch a company of warriors to Dregg to escort Orwin Shank and the grain she sent him to purchase back to the roundhouse.”

Both the warrior and his chief thought on this. The warrior said. “I was there the morning Shank left. He was heading for Dregg all right.”

Yelma made a little sound in her throat.

“She knows she’ll have to send a decent-sized crew,” Mallin continued, raising his gaze to the roof of the tent, “to assure the grain’s safe passage.”

It took Bram a moment to realize that the thing stretching across the Weasel chief’s face was a smile. “Unfortunately,” she said, “there are a few new obstacles along the way.”

Like this camp. Bram started coughing again. The smoke was scratching his throat.

Mallin and the chief ignored him.

The warrior said, “When’s she going to send this crew?”

Mallin shrugged. “Soon. A few days give or take. You’ll know when you see them.”

In the silence that followed Bram tried to control his cough. And failed. His lungs were burning and his diaphragm started contracting and he just couldn’t stop.

All three were looking at him now. Bram’s face burned.

“Get the hell out,” hissed the warrior. “Control yourself.”

Mallin frowned at Bram. Bram could tell he was annoyed. “Go on,” he said impatiently. “Get yourself some water from the well.”

Bram left. The talks between the remaining three resumed even before he cleared the tent flap.

Outside everything seemed bright and busy. Scarpes stared at him. A child ran past him and poked him in the shin. A group of women standing close by found this funny and laughed. Bram rubbed his eyes and cleared the last of the smoke from his throat. He was glad to be out of the tent.

Glad to have something to do.

He went and got some water from the well.

Bram met up with Mallin a quarter later and together they walked their horses back across the field. Mallin was humming. Bram didn’t recognize the tune. It was midday and the sun was peeking through silvery rain clouds. Bram’s mind turned to his pants.

For a wonder they were still where the hatchetman had thrown them, though they were sporting extra boot marks now. Bram picked them up along with his bedroll as Mallin claimed their weapons from the hatchetmen. Both Scarpemen were drunk.

“Dhooneshine’s potent stuff,” Mallin told them without rancor. “You’re supposed to sip not gulp.”

The smaller hatchetman burped his response.

Mallin handed Bram his weapons. He had never commented on the loss of the mirror blue longsword. “Let’s get away from here,” he said.

Bram couched his weapons and mounted Gabbie, and they trotted off the field. When they reached the trapping path, Bram looked to Mallin for direction: north or south?

The ranger thought about this. “You know, I told Raina Blackhail I’d be heading for Spire Vanis. What say I keep my word?”

They headed south.