Nell Voss's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The trapper's shack smelled of pine smoke and wet fur. He gave Nell a mug of black tea and told her the Karsk would open the gate at first light on his word. Then he set the mug down and looked at her hands. Empty hands, he said. She would not cross the Karsk gate empty-handed. The clan read a guest by what the guest carried. Bread meant a short visit. Salt meant a long one. Nothing meant contempt, and his vouch would burn with her on the threshold. Nell had brought no pack, no coin, no cured meat. She had walked out of her rented room that morning believing a name would be enough. She asked what she could offer before dawn. The trapper shook his head. He had lines to run. What she brought was her problem. Nell sat by the stove and turned out her pockets. A folding knife. A stub of pencil. The folded hide with three words on it. None of it would do. The husky lay by the door, watching her with its one blue eye, and she remembered the border stone and the six fresh chips in the ice. She took the pencil and the flat of the hide and began to write. She listed every insult she had counted between the clans over two months, and beside each she wrote what the Karsk had lost by it — a trade route closed, a cousin buried, a winter without Bree salt. She wrote until the pencil was a nub. At dawn she rolled the hide and tied it with a strip cut from her coat lining. It was not bread and it was not salt. It was a ledger of the feud from an outsider who had bothered to count. She walked to the Karsk gate with the husky at her heel because the trapper had told the dog to see her there. The guard read the first three lines and did not laugh. He read the next ten and called for someone older. The older woman took the hide, looked Nell over, and opened the gate. Nell stepped through. Behind her the husky turned and trotted back into the pines, its work done, and she understood she was inside now without anyone left to speak for her.