Madbond Read Free

it will take a notion to surge up again. There is no telling.”
    I did not understand him, how the sea could make caves. Still less, how its level could change. I knew but little then of the ways of that vast, cold greendeep.
    We came to a room, or rather a large hollow, which glowed warm and red with fire. There was a stone firepit built against an upward crevice, which made a smoke hole for it. Much food stood by the fire, and there were places for many people, timber stumps topped with thick pelts for sitting on and long, flat, timbers laid between supports for the placing of food. But there were no folk. Birc threw his torch in the fire and left the place, nearly running, and Korridun motioned me to a seat on one of the fur-topped stumps. But I settled myself cross-legged on the floor instead, as is the Red Hart custom, picking with my hands at the rushes that strewed it. Korridun dipped me food out of a basket of spruce roots, tight-woven and sealed with pitch to make a vessel fit for cooking in. It was a thick soup made of fish, boiled in the basket with stones heated in the fire, much as my folk would have made a venison stew and used the stomach of the deer to hold it. Korridun brought the food to me in a bowl of red clay, and I felt all the honor of that. Vessels of clay had to be traded from the Herders, from the far plains beyond the thunder cones. Most Seal folk, I thought, would eat from dishes of wood or shell. But perhaps Korridun himself was accustomed to clay. He was the king.
    He handed me the bowl and a bone spoon. “Eat slowly,” he cautioned me.
    I was ravenous, as hungry as I had been after the days of my name vigil, but I was not much accustomed to fish, and the odd, oily taste kept me from gulping it too quickly. Korridun got some of the stuff for himself and sat on a sort of bench, setting his bowl on a flat timber. I eyed him, holding my own bowl on my lap, and we ate in silence. There were many questions I was not asking—how I had come into the prison pit, and when, and why I had been bound, and why were the marks of the thongs on my limbs, as if I had fought most fiercely, and why was he, Korridun King, attending me. For the most part, I did not want to know the answers. But when I had taken the edge from my hunger, silence began to press on me again, and I spoke.
    â€œIf you are king here,” I said to Korridun, “how is it that no one waits on you?”
    He gave me a look so wry it might have been a smile, though in fact he did not smile. “It is the custom of the Seal Kindred to humble their kings,” he said.
    I ate, and regarded him curiously. He was half a head shorter than I, and perhaps too slender to be very strong—so I thought at the time. But he was trimly thewed in a way that I never would be, with a centered look about him, a control. It was in his face, too, a quietness. Something about the glance of his eyes, as if Sakeema’s time looked out of them, deep time, creature time, the always now. And his face comely enough so that no woman, I thought, would scorn him. But for all that, he hardly seemed a proper king to me. A young shaman, perhaps, but a king should be thewed for war. I bore in my mind the image of a king—
    And as I thought it, the fell arrow of fear pierced me again, and all seemed black.
    â€œArcher?” Korridun inquired, seeing pain in me. So I supposed.
    â€œNothing. A cramp in my gut.” I straightened and faced him. A smoldering, reasonless anger started in me because he dared to be kind to me, so quaint are the ways of petty pride. And I decided that he might be king to others, but he was no king of mine. I would not call him by the king’s name, Korridun, an ancestral name of his royal line. Nor would I call him Rad, as his loved ones might. I would take his kingly name and make it smaller, as I felt myself lessened. I would call him Kor.
    â€œKor,” I tried it on my tongue.
    His head turned to me,