hands were stained blue from the dye, and there was an errant streak of blue beside her nose. Yet no herdman would have said the evidence of her diligence made her less fair. Her face was still thoughtful of the work she had just completed. But as she picked up the water bucket to pour water to wash her hands, her eyes caught his. She smiled at him, almost shy to catch him watching her. The genuine fondness in her gaze called up his own slow smile, but he dropped his eyes from her look. He felt his heart must break, not because he loved her, but because he did not. She warmed his bed and cooked his meals, she rubbed his shoulders when he came in cold and weary from the hunt, she stroked his hair as he lay breathing deeply after their mating. But the feeling he had thought would grow in him seemed more absent than ever. He liked the girl. But sometimes he longed to put her hands from him, to shake free of her gentle touch and stride alone into the night. She had so little understanding of the determination that drove him. Always she tried to lure him aside from the things he knew he must do, to make him content to sit out a stormy day by her warm hearth. Sometimes he felt he could not breathe. And sometimes he dreamed of another hearth, and a boy who sat beside it.
He had not been back to the healer's hut since that day. He felt ashamed to go back, as if he had committed a great and cowardly wrong there, one there was no explaining.
He thought of Kerlew, crouched and sobbing in the snow, and sighed. He was too busy to go, really. He had a wife now, and a life of his own to tend to.
Elsa was right. He had no right to interfere in the boy's life, to make him hungry for things he could not have. He stared at the board and at the trap he had been maneuvered into.
'The bucket's empty!' Elsa exclaimed in annoyance.
'So fetch more water,' Missa told her daughter calmly, not glancing up from her work.
'I'll go for it,' Heckram volunteered. The sod hut seemed suddenly suffocating, closing him in like a sorting pen closes in a herd of reindeer. Like them, he felt the urge to gallop wildly against the boundaries, seeking some way out. But even as he rose, thinking of cool air and the black sky arching over all, Kuoljok's hand closed on his wrist.
'No you don't, Heckram!' Elsa's father cackled. 'You won't slip away from the game that easily. Stay and lose like a man!'
'Finish your game! I'll be back in just a moment,' Elsa promised them. She did not even bother to slip on her outer tunic for the quick dash down to the spring. Bucket in one hand, she lifted the door flap and vanished into the night outside.
'A word of warning, young man,' Kuoljok counseled him in a loud whisper. 'Never do for a woman what she can do for herself. Or soon there'll be nothing she does for herself!'
Missa gave a derisive hoot. 'Listen to the old man! As if this woman ever asked him to do for her! I do my own work, and half of his as well! Where were you when your vaja and calf nearly drowned in that stream crossing three springs ago? This one was in the water up to her shoulders, trying to hold onto the calf, and hold off the mother that thought I was hurting it! And what does he call from the stream bank? 'Looks like you can handle it, Missa. I don't want to ruin the new pants you made for me by getting them wet!' Such a help he is!'
The incident had been herdlore for three springs now, but they all laughed anyway, Kuoljok loudest of all. Heckram alone frowned at the dice that had fallen in the worst possible combination. Slowly he slid his hunted wolf from the apex of one triangle to another. There was no winning this game. The old man had him, and he knew it.
Kuoljok shook the dice fiercely, grinning at Heckram's long look. Heckram looked aside, let his fingers idly trace the fading pattern on the trunk top. Joining Elsa had been like wedding Lasse, he thought to himself glumly. A fine and merry companion, honest, competent, skilled, and caring. What more could he ask for in a wife? he demanded of himself. And had no answer. A surge of anger and panic pulsed through him suddenly at the choiceless direction his life was taking. He found himself reaching, to snatch the wolf marker from the board just as Kuoljok's knuckly hand was about to capture it.
'Hey!' the old man exclaimed in surprise. Heckram forced a frozen grin to his face and dropped the wolf marker into the hand that opened to receive it.
'You've caught me, fair enough,' Heckram conceded. As Kuoljok grinned and scooped the markers and dice into their little leather bag, Heckram rose. He stretched, his fingertips brushing the rafters of the hut.
'Elsa has been gone a while, hasn't she? I thought she was just going to the spring.'
He idly touched his fingertips to the long fibers of beaten root that she had hung to dry.
They came away blue.
'Don't touch that!' scolded Ristin. 'You'll spoil her work. No doubt Elsa ran into someone and has stopped to talk. Don't fret so much over her. You're joined now!
Surely you can be apart for a few moments.'
'It just seemed that she had been gone a long time,' he said lamely.
'So it does,' said Missa sagely. 'Put your mind at rest, then, Heckram. Go and fetch her.' Heckram didn't miss the conspiratorial look that passed between the two mothers.
Had not they once been young women finding an excuse to be alone under the crisp winter sky with a handsome young man? 'And the two of you might bring some of the good blood sausage from the meat rack. A bite or two would taste good this evening,'
Missa added.
'Mind you don't kiss her, Heckram. You'd be playing right into her hands,' Kuoljok suggested wryly, with a look that said that women were not the only ones who played such games.
Heckram snorted noncommittally and shrugged into his heavy tunic. Since he and Elsa had joined, they treated him more as a child than as a man. He, who was several years past the age when most herdmen wed, was addressed as if he were a moonstruck youth. It was but one more thing that rankled this evening. One more goad he would not respond to.
Pushing the flap aside, he stepped out into the night. The winter camp was quiet.
Evening chores were done and folk were snug inside their huts. The village dogs slept close to the doorflaps of their owners' huts, savoring the warmth that leaked out.
Heckram stretched in the chill night, drawing in a deep lungful of the cold night air.
There was a moon tonight, nearly full. The snow reflected its silvering light, painting a world of blacks and silvers and grays. His kneeboots crunched on the packed snow of the path as he passed the crouching huts. Light leaked from some of them, voices flowing out with it to warm the night. One dog stretched and rose to greet him as he passed. A quick pat and a quiet word settled the animal again. He passed his own hut, silent in the darkness.
The spring was at the far end of the village, set in a tangle of willows. No huts were built close to it, for in spring the ground became soggy muck hidden by a waving forest of reeds and grasses. Only the freezes of winter reduced its flow and tamed it. The cold water welled up from the earth, black and chill, in a still pool no wider across than a man's two strides. It flowed away in a stream now covered by ice and a layer of smooth snow. But the herdfolk kept open this one circle of water, where they might fill their buckets.
Elsa knelt by the stream, almost hidden in the shadows of the surrounding willows.
Her bucket lay empty at her side, and she stared at the black circle of water. Heckram wondered what could fascinate her so, to sink in the snow, so lightly clad, and stare at the water. 'Elsa?' he called softly, not wishing to startle her. She made a guttural sound.
Her head swung slowly to face him.
'Elsa!' he cried, and the cold night swallowed his horrified cry and gaped over him for more. The moonlight was gentle as it touched her, but its shadows could not hide the ruin of her face. Her jaw sagged awry and the darkness that dripped from her open mouth stained the front of her shirt. She lifted a hand to him. White fingerbones flashed an instant in the moonlight; then her hand fell into the white snow beside her. Darkness spread from it.
There was no way to be gentle enough. She cried out wordlessly as he lifted her and her legs flailed him with her pain. Running would have jarred her, but his soul fled ahead of him, racing between the long row of sod huts. He couldn't find a voice to call for help, to raise an alarm. They were unprepared when he kicked the tent flap aside
