The Sledder watched from the icy outcropping as a lone figure far below scavenged the newly dead. Thin and ragged, the wary form darted toward the downed soldiers dotting the bloody snow, rifling through the various uniforms and pack sacks, most often finding nothing. He had been tracking her for two days--if the slight being was female, from this height he could not hazard--ever since he'd seen her ransacking bodies after a Lowland skirmish in which soldiers from his unit of the Northland Guard were slaughtered.
He had watched the carnage from above with horror. Unable to warn his comrades in time, there had been nothing he and the other scouts in his detail could do from the heights but look on as their unit was crushed like ants. Scant hours later the scavenger crept out of the rock strewn valley to pick over the bodies, slowly, methodically. The mood around the campfire that night had been sullen and the talk bitter, laced with glacier beer. Several of his mates had vowed to sled down through the foothills and kill the old witch who dared desecrate their kin. But he thought otherwise.
Before dawn the next morning, he pulled his sled out of line from the entrance to main trail, his assigned route that day. Flipping the bobsled over his head in one deft practiced move, he traversed to another chute, masking his route through the glacier pass. He knew what risk lay ahead. Ditching his unit would brand him a deserter and render his comrades suspect to those in the Garrison at Bordertown. Most likely his detail would be questioned and detained, then broken up and scattered, lest another traitor remained in their midst. He left silently, not even daring to tell his fast friend Niles he sought find the old hag and keep her safe. For if he was right, she was the one of the twelve mentioned in his mother's yarns. And if he was wrong, well he was in enough trouble already, his father had seen to that.
Ever since his conscription months ago, whispered words like turncoat and traitor had floated around Warren's head in the garrison's training barracks at night, as restless rumors flew from bunk to bunk in the dark. Not all the murmured accusations were true but enough of them were. There was a crude hidden track of sorts through Top Notch and he had been forced to help his father build their section of it to aid the Lowland army. What gain Kendrick received or expected, Warren never discovered. Not once or twice, but three times his father had faked a moose hunt at the sleep out, a ruse to cover the flow of mercenary builders willing to risk their lives for Lowland gain. As the secret sled trail grew from a riverbed connector to a track heading North, Warren grew afraid for Kendrick, who seemed at times like a stranger possessed by greed and darkness. He used his own sons as Lowland decoys and Warren thanked his lucky shards that he had been the one who had been spotted, and not Garth.
The Northland Guard had come for him a week later. Squinting against the sun, Warren watched intently as the witch made her way around the killing field. Once in awhile she slipped something into a pouch slung round her neck but most often, a find went into a pantry sack she at times dragged and other times hefted across her back. The dead soldiers she sought to rob this day had been a detachment from the Middlelands, he feared. He had glimpsed the torn banner from above, recognizing the emblem of a fair tent with pennants flapping against a spring sky next to a blue swath that represented River Runne. He knew he must investigate if only to satisfy himself and the families of those who may never know what happened to their husbands and sons slain in the frozen North. His biggest fear, and one he could not voice even to himself, was that he would fine the torn bodies of his father, Kendrick or mayhap his younger brother Garth among those laying in the snow. He positioned his sled at the top of the pass and began slow easy slaloms across the slope, using the switch backs to control his speed and direction down the steep mountainside. It had snowed again last night, just a light dusting, and the fresh powder glittered and hissed across his horn goggles, held fast by leather bindings. Hunkering down inside the cavity, he picked up speed as the wind resistance lessened, knowing that the hide of the Alpine Moose stitched by his mother's hand would allow him to pass unseen through the snowy outcrops. Halting, he left the sled high enough so that next downward slice would allow him the momentum to mount the next pass without a carry--or so he hoped. Tightening his nailed glacier boots, he sidestepped carefully down the steep slope.
It was warm in the valley and what hit him first was the smell of death. Trained as a scout these past few months meant that he was never directly involved in any skirmish and the sight of the reddened snow and thawing bodies made his stomach churn. Taking slow deep breaths to still his innards, he focused on the torn banner flapping in the breeze and made his way across through the deep drifts. Pulling the stiff canvas from the snow, he ran his moose mitts over the outline of the tent and pennants, the blue River Runne and feared he would recognize many laying in the snow this day. With growing dread, he trudged from body to body, forcing himself to look for the jackets of Northland blue and gray, to turn over those forms lying face down in the powder.
The bruised purple and burnt gold uniforms of the Lowland dead were easy to spot against the snow scape and he avoided them. He'd seen few Lowlanders at close range and of those most of them dead. Even without the sunset hued uniforms they would be easy to identify, so different was their race.. They were a short and muscular clan, with skin burnished from the desert sun and dark reflective eyes under hair streaked russet and gold from the sun. Their words were few. Some said they talked more with their eyes, others with secret hand gestures. Warren hoped he would never get close enough to a band of them to find out.
Among the Middleland dead he recognized a few ruffians he knew from the mead halls in Middlemarch and a boy from the Granary in Bainbridge, who used to hold the ponies when Warren backed the wagon to the loading dock for feed, his young face frozen in a wide eyed grimace of surprise. With relief, Warren trudged down the icy slope, seeing no sign of his father or brother among those fallen, seeing no one he knew at all until he rounded the last drift on the slope. Across the field the old witch rummaged on and at his feet was another downed infantryman in the snow.
When he turned the body over, there was no mistaking the unblemished visage for anyone other than his childhood friend Averill from the Mill on the Rill. Dark cropped hair lay unruly across the peaked brow and for a minute Warren fooled himself into thinking Averill just lay asleep. Then his gaze dropped to the multiple gashes made by a Lowland short sword that has stained the uniform, the fabric as blue as Averill's lifeless lips and glazed eyes, as blue as the hair ribbon clutched in his bloody hand, a ribbon that could only be Skye's. Warren freed the ribbon and tucked it inside the lining of his mitts. How would he ever tell his sister that her childhood sweetheart was never coming back to the flour mill at the bottom of the Notch?
"What a waste," he murmured, straightening Averill's jacket for no reason. He felt his eyes burn and he looked away, blinking in the glare of the midday sun. Would Averill's sister Katarina ever learn his fate? His mother had already lost her husband to a mill accident years ago. How would she take the news? Shaking his head, he turned fingering the bit of ribbon inside his mitt, realizing there was naught left to do but walk away.
It took him less than a quarter of an hour to scout his quarry. Soon there were only a few stunted trees and snow drifts between himself and the hag, who was a woman, he could see that now. She was bone thin with a mane of ragged white hair and skin browned and wrinkled by years spent unprotected in the high alpine sun here at the glacier. He stole closer and hunkered down behind a juniper bush. She had her back to him and was humming to herself, singing a tuneless ditty that sounded much like a nursery rhyme with the words "Mae, mae, mae," interspersed where other verse might go. Oblivious to the carnage, she picked through the bodies with the glee of a child sorting pebbles on a beach. She had donned several army jackets, layering them over her spare frame like quilts. Warren spotted the light blue gray of a Northland Guard tunic hanging below a vest of the deep bruised maroon and burnt gold of by the Lowland Infantry.
Pins and medals she had foraged were arrayed at random down one sleeve of the jacket, where they winked garishly in the sun. As she swung toward the next body, Warren glimpsed a small but heavy drawstring pouch slung around her scrawny neck on a piece of fine braided cord. With a hasty look around, she tucked the swinging sack back inside her shift, the yellowed nails of her clawed hands scrabbling at her throat. Although he was sure she could not see him, Warren froze when she abandoned the body she was kneeling over and let her mindless tune dissipate into nothingness. Rocking back on her haunches, she sniffed the air like a wild dog at a scent and Warren's breath caught in his throat. Warily, she rose to a half crouch, a wolf sensing prey and Warren hunkered lower behind the juniper bush, so that he could just barely glimpse her between the dense branches. Slowly she turned, sniffing still, coiled like a spring. As she stretched her arms to the skies, the pantry sack slid to the snow unheeded.In one fluid motion she sprang and Warren gasped involuntarily for suddenly they were face to face, just the juniper branch between them.
"Mae," she screamed, smiling in the sun. "Mae, mae, mae."
"Ma-Mae?" he stuttered. For now he thought he understood. "Lavender Mae?
It is you, is it not? You are Lavender."
"Ha," she screamed, her hot smoky breath in his face. Then she was gone