Bill Ironforge's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

The chiefs were gone up the pass, but their hate stayed. Bill knew it. His wedding had shielded Phosphorus from the blade. It had not made one chief his friend. Now he stood in his great lodge of dark timber and stone, staring at the cold hearth. Five men wanted his wife dead. He needed them at a table instead. But no chief would ride to his gate again, and no chief would sit near the Empress with a knife at his hip. "They won't come to us," Lisa said. She stood by the mantel, ledger under her arm. She did not soften it. "And they won't sit near her. Not while she wears your name and their shame." Mary crossed the room, scaled arms folded. "Then we take away the reason to fight," she said. Her voice stayed quiet. "The high pass floods every spring. Both sides lose stock in the mud. Fix that, and every clan owes you before a word is spoken." Bill weighed it. It was cold and it was true. A shared road served no single chief. It served all of them. "A neutral ground," he said. "Not my roof. The pass itself." Phosphorus stepped from the doorway. Her wings sat folded, the copper wire still on her wrist. "I know that pass," she said, soft and sharp. "My old clan wintered below it. There is a stone shelf above the flood line. Wide enough for horses. No walls to trap a man. No gate to shame him." Bill looked at the three of them. His plan formed and he moved. He sent no threat. He sent word to all five clans: a work party would raise a flood dam on the shelf above the pass, open to any hand, no weapons at the stone. He would break ground at dawn whether they came or not. He rode out with his own men and hauled the first timbers himself. For two days no chief showed. Bill kept working. Then, on the third morning, riders came down from the far ridge. Not five. Two chiefs. They reined up at the stone shelf and stared at the half-built dam. "You'd drown your own road to prove a point," the elder chief said. "I'd build yours," Bill answered. He held out a rope, not a blade. "Lift with me and see." The chief looked at the water below. He looked at his own drowned pastures behind him. Then he swung down and took the rope. His men followed. By dusk the two clans and Bill's house had raised the dam together. No knife was drawn on the stone. Bill had his neutral ground at last. He had two chiefs standing at his side instead of at his gate. But three chiefs stayed away, and word came at dark that they now called the two who helped him traitors.