Free The Stone of Farewell by Tad Williams

skull-faced specter at his shoulder. “You have made a mistake, sir—this is a boy you address, my acolyte ...”
    â€œPlease.” The fox gestured amiably for silence. “It is time to doff our masks. Is that not how Midsummer Night always ends?”
    He lifted the fox face away, revealing a shock of white hair and a face seamed with age. As his unmasked eyes glittered in the fireglow, a smile quirked his wrinkled lips.
    â€œNow that you know who I am ...” he began, but Cadrach interrupted him.
    â€œWe do not know you, sir, and you have mistaken us!”
    The old man laughed dryly. “Oh, come. You and I may not have met before, my dear fellow, but the princess and I are old friends. As a matter of fact, she was my guest, once—long, long ago.”
    â€œYou are... Count Streáwe?” Miriamele breathed.
    â€œIndeed,” the count nodded. His shadow loomed on the wall behind him. He leaned forward, clasping her wet hand in his velvet-sheathed claw. “Perdruin’s master. And, beginning the moment you two touched foot on the rock over which I rule, your master as well.”

3
    Oath-Breaker

    Later in the day of his meeting with the Herder and Huntress, when the sun was high in the sky, Simon felt strong enough to go outside and sit on the rocky porch before his cave. He wrapped a corner of his blanket about his shoulders and tucked the remainder of the heavy wool beneath him as a cushion against the mountain’s stony skin. But for the royal couch in Chidsik ub Lingit, there seemed to be nothing like a chair in all of Yiqanuc.
    The herders had long since led their sheep out of the protected valleys where they slept, taking them down-mountain in search of fodder. Jiriki had told him that the spring shoots on which the animals usually fed had been all but destroyed by the clinging winter. Simon watched one of the flocks milling on a slope far below him, tiny as ants. A faint clacking sound wafted up to him, the rams butting horns as they contested for mastery of the herd.
    The troll women, their black-haired babies strapped to their backs in pouches of finely stitched hide, had taken up slender spears and gone out hunting, stalking marmots and other animals whose meat could help to eke out the mutton. Binabik had often said that the sheep were the Qanuc people’s true wealth, that they ate only such members of their flocks as were good for nothing else, the old and the barren.
    Marmots, coneys, and other such small game were not the only reason the troll women carried spears. One of the furs ostentatiously wrapped around Nunuuika had been that of a snow leopard, dagger-sharp claws still gleaming. Remembering the Huntress’ fierce eyes, Simon had little doubt that Nunuuika had brought down that prize herself.
    The women were not alone in facing danger; the task of the herdsmen was just as perilous, since there were many large predators that had to be kept from the precious sheep. Binabik had once told him that the wolves and leopards, although a threat, were scarcely comparable to the huge snow bears, the biggest of them heavy as two dozen trolls. Many a Qanuc herder, Binabik had said, met a swift and unpleasant end beneath the claws and teeth of a white bear.
    Simon repressed a reflexive tremor of unease at this thought. Hadn’t he stood before the dragon Igjarjuk, grander and deadlier by far than any ordinary animal?
    He sat as late morning passed into afternoon, watching the life of Mintahoq as it lay spread before him, as simultaneously hectic yet organized as a beehive. The elders, their years of hunting and herding past, gossiped from porch to porch or crouched in the sun, carving bone and horn, cutting and sewing cured hide into all manner of things. Children too big to be carried off to the hunt by their mothers played games up and down the mountain under the old folks’ bemused supervision, shinnying up the slender ladders or swinging and tumbling