Skin Taker by Michelle Paver

Author:Michelle Paver [Paver, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Wolf Brother
ISBN: 9781789542431
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Dark hated being angry. The hot churning in his belly made him feel sick – and it hurt. For so many winters he’d buried all thoughts of his father. He felt as if someone had ripped off a scab and rubbed grit in the wound.

Or crystal, he thought sourly, chipping at the scarlet stone in his hand.

He had told Fin-Kedinn everything. In the gloom of false dawn they sat in the shelter, making arrows.

For the shafts, the Raven Leader had taken an alderwood shaft from one of his own arrows, and one made of sea buckthorn from a Whale Clan hunter. Dark was fashioning the arrowheads. The scarlet crystal was eerily easy to work: it wanted to take the shape of a birch leaf. Now almost finished, it lay on his knee on a wad of rawhide; he was pressure-flaking the edges with an antler tine.

Fin-Kedinn had already shortened his arrowshaft slightly to fit Renn, having measured her before she left, so that the finished arrow would be exactly her draw length plus half a thumb. Now he was making the shaft lighter, fining it down with a small beaver-tooth adze.

‘If what Realvi told you about the Deep Forest is true,’ he said without raising his eyes from his work, ‘it’s the best news we’ve had since the Thunderstar.’

Dark snorted. ‘If we can believe him.’

‘Odd that he didn’t tell us sooner.’

‘I asked him about that, but he weaselled out of it.’

‘You don’t trust him.’

‘How can I?’ Dark glowered at the crystal lying on his knee like a gout of blood. ‘The day after my mother died he told me he was taking me into the Mountains to give me my clan-tattoos. Instead he left me. I was eight winters old. Why should I believe a word he says?’

Fin-Kedinn blew dust off the shaft. ‘Is that arrowhead finished?’

Wordlessly, Dark handed it over.

He watched Fin-Kedinn scrape birch tar off the flat rock they’d placed by the fire, and daub some on the stem of the arrowhead. Expertly the Raven Leader slotted the stem into the tip of the shaft, then tied it in place with split reindeer tendon which he’d soaked in water. The tendon would shrink as it dried, binding the arrowhead even more securely.

The blue crystal lay forgotten in Dark’s lap. It calmed him to watch Fin-Kedinn’s strong, capable hands perform the tricky task of cutting a slot at the other end of the shaft, using sufficient force to make a groove that would take Renn’s bowstring, without overdoing it and splitting the shaft.

Next Fin-Kedinn cut three flights from a partridge’s reddish-brown tail-feather which he’d obtained from a Rowan Clan hunter. Having glued and bound each flight in place to make a neat, sure spiral, he trimmed them with a flint flake, skilfully removing any excess that would weigh down the arrow and lessen its speed, while leaving just enough feather to make it shoot true.

‘Maybe your father really is sorry for what he did,’ he said quietly.

Dark shook his head.

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