Riverkeep by Martin Stewart Read Free Book Online

glowering through his brows, his muscles shaking.
    Behind Wull, the Danék moved along as it alwayshad—relentless and solid. Over Pappa’s straining he heard again with his mind the sputter of lanterns in the cold and he felt the weight of it all, the insides of him stewing in the bile of his fear, burning and wasting like a salted slug until he was nothing but the dull ache of Pappa’s anger and the river’s constant strength.
    He checked the bonds on Pappa’s wrists—they would hold. Fat, dirty fingers grabbed at his.
    Pappa met his eyes as he stood, but they were
not
Pappa’s eyes; clouded by milk and fury, they belonged to some hunted thing, not the man who had bounced Wull on his knee and whispered stories to him in bed.
    Wull took his hat from the floor, wedged it on, and shrugged himself inside the clammy, seula-gut shift and the deerskin coat (first skin-raisingly cold and then prickly with heat), heaved up the replenished bottle of whale oil, and went out into the frozen night, leaving Pappa tied to the spare chair.
    The wind had picked up, and the black surface of the moving water rippled and shimmered. A manic twitch moved the skeletal branches of the trees along the bank, shaking the stark, dead whiteness of the world.
    The bäta glared at him from under a soft layer of windblown white; it shouldn’t have been out for this time, he knew—the paint would flake down to the wood in the wet wind.
    â€œI’m sorry, all right?” he said, climbing gingerly aboard.
    The bäta nodded in the water, moved, he knew, by the river, not as an act of forgiveness.
    Wull pushed off into the current and let the boat drift. Even through his glove he felt the smoothness of the wood on Pappa’s seat . . . the Riverkeep’s seat. His seat.
    In the center of the night’s star-scattered black, the moon beamed down, half covered by scraps of cloud. If it was high that meant there were no ursas around; only when it dipped below the tree line would he have to worry about them, and by then he would be long gone. He
should
be all right, so long as he was careful. Only once on his keep had Pappa encountered an ursa: an adolescent cub, still twice the size of a man, disorientated by the effect of fermented sunberries. The animal had snapped one of the oars like a twig before Pappa had smashed his lamp on the ground and it fled in a shower of flame.
    Pappa had been lucky. “An ursa,” he had said, “will run an’ climb an’ swim an’ fight better than you—better than ten o’ ye, twenty o’ ye.”
    â€œWhat about twenty o’
you
, Pappa?” Wull replied.
    Pappa had laughed. “They’d make a big, long scarf out of twenty o’ me!” he’d said, and mussed Wull’s hair.
    Wull laughed, but Pappa had taken his shoulders and knelt beside him.
    â€œYe can’t be out past the dippin’ moon, all right? ’Cause the moment you see the flash o’ their skin it’s already too late;they’re on ye! An’ ye’d be just a scrap in their teeth.”
    â€œAll right, Pappa,” Wull had said, and then he’d gone to bed and dreamed fearless, childish dreams.
    And now he was here and they were all around him, hidden in dens covered by snow-drenched branches, caged behind only the thin barrier of sleep.
    Sometimes,
sometimes
, if they came at you, it worked to play dead. But you could never be sure. Wull looked at the shadows moving in the woods and wondered how much courage it would take to remain still and silent while an ursa snuffled about your skin and gave your flesh an experimental tug.
    In the distance, the ocean barge’s soft putter was fading, and the captain’s light had already been taken by the fog. The bäta’s nods felt impatient to Wull, and he sensed the eyes on him again.
    â€œFine, fine,” he said. “Let’s get it done. It’s all well