Stone Spring Read Online Free PDF Page A

the air just as Sunta had died, bringing death to this unique moment of life. ‘The owl. My Other! No mother, no father, now this . . . Oh, Jurgi, can’t you help me?’
    The priest leaned forward. ‘I am sorry. The Other chooses you . . . Come, Zesi, put a cloak around her.’
    From the other boat, in the dark, came the sound of Rute sobbing.

5
    Far around the curve of the world - to the west of Etxelur, beyond Albia’s forest-clad valleys, beyond an ocean flecked with ice and a handful of fragile skin boats - there was a land where the sun had not yet set. And a boy was crying.

    ‘Dreamer, what’s wrong with him?’ Moon Reacher plucked at Ice Dreamer’s sleeve. ‘Stone Shaper. Why is he crying?’
    Ice Dreamer stopped walking and looked down at Moon Reacher, the girl’s red, windblown face, her tied-back nut-brown hair, her shapeless, grubby hide clothes scavenged from the bodies of the dead. Moon Reacher’s words seemed to come from another reality - perhaps from the Big House where your totem carried your spirit when you died. Words were human things. Ice Dreamer wasn’t in a human world, not any more.
    This world, the land of the Sky Wolf, was a place of ground frozen hard as rock under her skin boots, and air so cold it was like a blade sliding in and out of her lungs, and, to the north, only ice, ice that shone with a pale, cruelly pointless beauty, ice as far as she could see. The only warmth in the whole world was in her belly, her own core, where her new baby lay dreaming dreams of the Big House she had so recently left. And Ice Dreamer didn’t even like to think about that, for when the baby came, who would there be to help her with the birth? All the women and girls were dead or lost, all save Moon Reacher, only eight years old. Maybe it would be better if the baby was never born at all, if she just stayed and grew old in the warmth and mindless safety of Dreamer’s womb.
    Yet here was Moon Reacher, still tugging at her sleeve. ‘Dreamer! Why is Stone Shaper crying?’
    Mammoth Talker loomed over them, massive in his furs, his pack huge on his back, his treasured spear in his fist.
    And beside him Stone Shaper was indeed crying again, shuddering silently, the tears frosting on his cheeks. His medicine bag hung around his neck. Even wrapped in his bearskin cloak Shaper looked skinny, weak; he was nineteen years old.
    They were all that was left. The four of them might be the last of the True People, anywhere.
    Mammoth Talker growled, ‘He cries because he is weak. Less than a priest. Less than a woman, than a child. That unborn thing in your belly, Dreamer. Shaper is less than that.’ Talker was somewhere over thirty years old, perpetually angry, irritated to be stopped yet again.
    Dreamer shot back, ‘If he’s so weak, Talker, you should have taken the medicine bag when Wolf Dancer got himself killed. Reacher, I think he’s crying because he thinks this is his fault.’ She gestured. ‘The cold. The winter. He thinks he isn’t saying the right words to make the spring come.’
    ‘That’s silly,’ Reacher looked up at Shaper, and took his hand. ‘The winter’s bigger than you will ever be.’
    Shaper looked down at her, taking gulping breaths.
    ‘She’s right,’ said Dreamer. ‘And you shouldn’t be wasting your strength on tears. Have you still got the fire safe?’
    ‘Of course I have.’ He held up his medicine bag.
    ‘Then you’re doing the most important job you have.’ She looked around. The world was a mouth of grey, the sky featureless, the tough grass on the ground frozen flat, the sun invisible. Trying to get some relief from the north wind they had been heading roughly east, skirting a bluff of rocks, soft brown stone worn by the wind into fantastic shapes. She turned to Mammoth Talker. ‘How late do you think it is?’
    ‘How am I supposed to know? Ask him. Maybe the answer lies in the track of his tears.’
    ‘Oh, shut up.’ They were all tired, however early or