Free The Storyteller Trilogy by Sue Harrison

realized it would be the same for her if she lost her son. She crawled from the lodge tunnel and stood up.
    The stars were close, as they always were on nights the spirits walked. In their light she saw Ghaden, then drew in her breath as she realized he had clasped the spirit around the legs.
    “The boy is mine,” she said in a small voice, and fought to keep her words from trembling. Daes reached toward Ghaden, and it seemed that the motion of her arms pulled her body, as though she did not walk but floated over the packed ice path. She grabbed her son and picked him up. She kept her eyes turned down, away from the spirit’s face. In the starlight she saw the spirit’s furred boots, caribou hoof rattlers tied at the ankles.
    Then Ghaden placed something long and hard against her chest. It was a knife, and she pulled it from his hands. It smelled of blood.
    “Ghaden,” she said, “where …” She lifted her head and saw that the one standing before her was no spirit.
    “You killed something?” Daes asked. “You need help?” But as she asked she wondered, Who hunts at night? Only animals. So perhaps this is an owl or wolf, and my eyes deceive me into believing it is someone from this village.
    “If you need help,” Daes said quickly, “I and my sister-wife Happy Mouth will come.”
    The hunter reached out and took the knife from her hand. Daes gave it easily, as though it were nothing more than a feather lying across her palm. She turned toward Brown Water’s lodge, but though her feet had floated easily when she walked away from it, now she seemed to sink with each step.
    First her feet went through the ice, then into the soil. The earth was cold and pressed hard against her flesh as it drew her in. It pulled the heat from her body like marrow sucked from a bone.
    Then she felt the knife. There was no pain, only the force of the blade plunging. It pushed her farther and farther into the ground until only her eyes and the top of her head remained above the earth. Then she saw that Ghaden, too, was being sucked in, his feet already buried, his legs pale in the starlight so that he seemed like a birch tree growing. But then the knife came for him. He crumpled to the ground, and the blood that welled from his wound ran into Daes’s eyes, until she could see nothing more.

Chapter Four
    C HAKLIUX’S BREATH WAS A cloud in the cold air. The dark spruce that grew around the village were rimed with frost, but the early morning sky was clear. By midday, the sun would turn the ice paths into mud.
    More than once Chakliux had fallen into the black muck of those paths, but though his clubbed foot affected his balance, he limped only when he was tired or when he ran. This morning, he carried a large sael, the birchbark container full of dried fish for his grandfather’s dogs.
    Chakliux enjoyed visiting Tsaani. With only a few comments or a simple story, the old man could send Chakliux’s mind on a journey that lasted the whole day.
    As he walked past Day Woman’s lodge, Chakliux lowered his head and hoped he would not see her. She carried her heart in her eyes, and he could not look at her without feeling himself drawn back into being her child, the baby she had left to die. Each day that he spent in this village seemed to pull away more of his power. He wished he could return to his own people and learn to be himself again, but he needed to stay at the Near River Village. Both Tsaani and Wolf-and-Raven had begun to trust him, to know that he worked for peace.
    The raucous calls of camp jays came to him, breaking the silence of late winter. For a moment he lifted his eyes toward the birds, and so did not see the bundle of fur until he tripped over it. He dropped the sael but caught himself with his fingertips. As he stood, he realized the fur was not some blanket carelessly left outside a lodge, but a young woman. He recognized her—Daes of the Sea Hunters—and knew also that she was dead, her eyes open and staring,