The clan gathered to judge the smith's son at dawn, because it was afraid it would change its mind by midday.
The morning came out clear and spiteful, with hoarfrost on the wattle fences. The whole hamlet came together at the old oak: men with axes in their belts, women with children on their hips, old folk who still remembered the years when there had been nothing in this place but the Forest. In the middle of the circle stood Kres, the smith's son. Lame. Twenty winters old. Alone.
He was no thief and had raised his hand against no one. He was being judged because he had blown his father's forge back to life.
Three winters ago a fever had burned out the incomer smith, and the clan breathed easier. The stranger with the hammer had never sat well with them: he came from nowhere, spoke little, and looked into the fire as though the fire answered him. After his death they carried off his smithy log by log, and rubbed out his name the way a notch is rubbed off a tally stick with charcoal. Only the memory was left, and that a bad one: it was his father's fire, they said, that had sent the plague through the bee trees that year.
And this spring the bees died again. Whole hive logs, whole bee trees. Honey had brought the clan no small wealth, and in a single month that wealth was gone.
They did not look long for someone to blame. All winter Kres had been mending people's sickles and knives in a dugout out on the edge of things. In secret, for a thank-you. The fire he kept was his father's: he tended it, carried the ember with him the way an ember is carried from an old house into a new one, so that the house should live. Everyone knew this. They kept quiet while quiet paid. Now speaking paid.
Hort stepped forward, priest and elder, a tall old man with a long white beard. He did not shout. He never shouted, and that was why he was listened to.
"Strange blood brought a strange fire," said Hort, speaking to the circle. "The strange fire angered the gods. Twice we have paid in plague. A third time the clan will not survive."
The circle rumbled its agreement. It is easy to agree when the guilty one is not you.
Only Milava, the herb-woman, stepped out of the women's row and stood beside Kres. She was reproached for it afterwards, right up to the harvest.
"He set your sickles straight," she said. "If that is a sin, then you fed him with your own bread."
"No woman was given leave to speak at a judging," she was told, and they made her go back into the row.
Hort raised his staff. The sentence had been ready before dawn, and everyone understood that.
"The clan does not spill the clan's own blood," said the priest. "But there is no strange blood left in this clan. Go to the Rust Mire, smith's son. Live there as long as the Forest allows."
The Rust Mire. One of the women gasped. A killing place a day's journey down the river: a bog where the water runs red as watery blood, where cattle drown and mushroom-pickers vanish without a cry. Not even for cranberries did anyone go there. Exile to the mire was not called death, but only because death came there of itself, without a sentence.
The rite was short and old as the clan itself. The priest drew a line in the earth with his staff between Kres and the circle. The old keening woman, without weeping, sang over him while he still lived two lines of the burial lament: half of it only, the way it is sung for those buried without a body. And then the whole hamlet turned away at once, at the priest's word: the clan does not watch an exile go. Their backs to Kres stood the neighbours whose bread he had shared, and the old men whose knives he had set straight all winter. Only Milava did not turn, and Hort marked it.
Kres heard it out in silence. He knew how to be silent: lameness teaches that, when you are ten winters old and the whole hamlet laughs at the way you walk.
Lame he had been since he was ten. Back then, in his father's smithy, burning coal had splashed over him from an overturned forge. He lived, but for three days he burned in fever between life and death, and when he came to he looked at everything as though seeing it for the first time. He spoke less after that, and began asking strange things: why the grain was kept in one pit and not in three; why they drank from the river unboiled; why firewood was counted towards winter and not from summer. The hamlet whispered: the boy has been swapped, the spirits took his soul out in the fever and put a stranger's in. His father listened to the whispering, listened to his son, and then said, flat as a cut: "Not swapped. Added to."
Of his dreams Kres told no one. He dreamed of stone hamlets as high as the sky, iron bridges over rivers as wide as a lake, and thousands of steady cold lights that had no need of fire. He did not know whether these were his own dreams or the memory of a man who had lived so far away that no river would carry you there. One thing he knew: the dreams themselves did not frighten him. Waking did.
Then he did the thing the hamlet talked about until autumn.
He walked up to the clan hearth that had burned under the oak since his great-grandfathers' time, crouched, and with his bare palm rolled an ember out of it. He held it on his palm without wincing. And he put it into the birchbark box where he kept his fire-steel.
The circle went still. To take the clan's fire unasked was reckoned worse than theft: it was carrying off a piece of the common soul. Hort could have stopped him with a single word.
Hort did not stop him. He only narrowed his eyes, watching the birchbark smoke.
"You took fire, and fire will eat you," the priest said quietly. "The Forest does not suffer the proud."
"I will remember," Kres answered. It was his first word in the whole judging.
He walked through the hamlet, and people looked away. At the edge of the fields Vyun caught him up, the orphan herd-boy, ten winters old, forever hungry, forever nobody's. He shoved something heavy at him, wrapped in sacking, and bolted without waiting for thanks or a beating.
In the sacking lay his father's hammer. The very one the clan had not been able to find three winters ago, when it was pulling the smithy apart.
Kres stood on the path, holding the hammer, and watched a narrow strip of sail rising behind him over the far bend of the river. No one in the hamlet noticed it: they were all watching the exile go.
While the exile went off on foot towards the bog, the striped sail was coming up the river towards the hamlet. And the trouble it carried was no longer for one lame smith alone, but for the whole clan.
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