A Flame in the North, page 38
“Useless?” He stoppered the skin with a savage twist, looking down at me with what seemed honest surprise. “Hope is rarely so, my lady Question.”
“Rarely so?” I could barely believe he was indeed speaking to me, instead of disdaining a volva’s aid; I counted it a pax-offering and essayed a smile. “Is that a riddle?”
“No.” Eol looked past me as he did many times during our travels, his dark gaze moving from each member of our group to the next. He took much care with his men, for all they were so few. “The things which live here spin this fabric, and many are those who have been caught in it. We are fortunate winter makes them slow, but that bears its own danger.”
What had changed, that he seemed so willing to grant some information? Yet I had other questions. “What manner of creature? Do they hibernate, or—”
“Sol?” Arneior uncoiled, and the word was a sharp bark. For a moment I thought her simply cautious of a man so close to her charge.
I had no time to wonder, for there was a skittering rush nearby; a cold breeze ruffled my braids. The oak’s dead limbs thrashed, twigs festooned with rot-pale cloth shaking free. I might have cried out, startled, but seidhr thundered in my ears and Eol moved, blurring-quick.
My arm was nearly wrenched free of its socket. I flew, a short stomach-flipping journey ending on hard-frozen ground, a bare root digging painfully into my hip. There was little time to complain, for Eol of Naras landed squarely atop me, rolling us both aside with another wrenching effort as something large and glowing-pale lunged, sharp spear-legs burying themselves where we had rested a bare moment before.
“Sol!” Arn yelled, and one of the Northerners cursed in the Old Tongue—a term of surpassing vileness, almost scorching frozen air.
Dazed near-witless, I could only blink as the thing’s bulk flickered aside, drumbeat-footsteps in pattering succession. It was unholy quick, and a rising growl shattered the stillness.
A shaggy ink-mass poured itself upward; Eol coalesced from its depths, his sword ringing free. Every blade had left its sheath, and there was a sharp twang as Daerith loosed, the arrow flicking to bury itself in a mass of weeping, fungal-glowing globes. Scabrous luminescence clung to a hairy hide, for in the gloom of Mistwood those long-legged predators carry what little light they need upon their abdomens and in their terrible, bulbous, many-faceted eyes.
Arneior skidded to a stop and bent, her hand closing about my wrist as I thrashed. She hauled me upright, looking over my shoulder, and her freckles glared no less than her woad-stripe.
By the time I could turn, my mantle all awry and my throat full of sour copper, all I witnessed was a whitish blur the size of a well-grown ram scuttle-diving into deep shadow. Branches thrashed afresh, snow pattered down, and I still had little idea what, by the bright gods and the dark, had happened.
“We must move.” Bits of ashen clingcloth stuck to Aeredh’s hair. His hand shot out, closing upon Eol’s arm; the captain looked ready to dive into sparse undergrowth, and strained against his hold. “Gather torch-limbs, as many as you can carry.”
My shieldmaid nearly dragged me along, and did not halt until we were surrounded by Northerners. “Fast,” she said, softly. “By the Wingéd, I did not see it in time.”
“They hunt by stealth.” Gelad was pale too, but not nearly so much. “Are you hurt? Either of you?”
I felt almost transparent. My head still rang; had the thing attacked with seidhr or was I simply stunned? I could not tell, and patted at my skirts. I brushed my sleeves, tugged them into place, and a great wave of shuddering passed through me. “No.” I was shaken, bruised, and dizzy, but it seemed little enough. “Not… by the gods, that… that thing…”
“’Tis gone now.” Arneior held her spear aside and examined me for damage almost roughly, finally sliding her free arm around me for a brief, bruising hug. “Leaving only its stink.”
So it was, a noisome odor lingering heavy at the back of the throat. A long streak of rotting ichor fringed with strange velvety patterns as it dried was the only evidence of the skirmish—that, and a few broken twigs wrapped with rotting, clotting not-cloth. The sticky, hanging veils moved slowly on soft invisible breezes, and each time I glimpsed one twitching I almost flinched.
It took me a few moments to kindle the first torch, but I accomplished it, and lit a few others besides. When I looked up from the task, shaking my bare fingers and pulling my glove back on with hurried tugs, I found Eol watching. Perhaps he was irritated at my stupidly needing rescue, for the wolf in him was visible again, a restless flicker under his skin, a savage brightness in his dark eyes.
In short order we set off again, most of the men carrying lit brands, Daerith with an arrow nocked, and every hand to hilt except mine.
We plunged deeper into the Mistwood.
Every Fire Loses
Swift as the falcon,
Fierce as the wolf,
Bright as the stars,
Cold as the North.
—Anonymous, The Rede of All Things
I did not see the creatures again, though their evidence was everywhere. They gathered as dark fell, strange multifaceted eyes reflecting firelight, but did not dare approach. That was one comforting thing—the wood’s hanging shrouds crisp-cringe from flame, and fire is the greatest friend of those who must travel in that place.
Not many do. At least the long-limbed things living there hunt the servants of the Enemy as avidly as any other prey, and we traversed only the very barest edge of their territory.
Arn caught a clear look at the things once, during a moonless night full of relentless vigilance and stealthy shadow-sounds. She shuddered at the memory long after, and despite her desire for a good song she would not describe them beyond, Like a long-legged weaver, and yet unlike, Sol. Twisted things. That sheep-monster must be kin to them.
I spent a great deal of our time there lighting brands wrenched from the web-hung trees, blue aelflame casting radiance far beyond its small flickering. Perhaps that was the reason the Elder were now so polite.
Aeredh, of course, was only slightly more somber than usual. But Daerith the harpist gave Arn signal attention, asking many a question of southron habits and ways in a low tone. Yedras and the others—at Redhill I had learned their names, from golden-haired Hadril to the spearman Kieris Quickwit, from Gedron son of Maevras to Aeamiril the Knifemaster, and Kirilit called Two-Sword for the paired blades he carried, and the rest all familiar from songs of our journey—often made the curious Northern salute when our gazes met, a swift light touch to heart and lips before the forehead. It seemed akin to a shieldmaid’s homage to a woman she respects, and of course the men of Naras used it occasionally, but I did not know what the Elder meant by the gesture.
I was merely glad to be of some use during sunless days of constant watch and chill misery broken with short, sharp battles I rarely saw. My only task was to light the torches for driving away many-legged creatures and the larger fires when we halted to rest, snatching sleep in brief spates until shaken awake by Arn at the approach of skittering feet and manifold eye-gleams. The calling of aelflame burnt itself deep into my fingers, for I performed it over and over again; had it been summer the fire might have escaped and given us yet another danger.
But in winter after the deepcrack freeze, every flame—wood-consuming or hidden in the depths of a living body—loses in the end. Even now I do not know how long we traveled in that terrible forest. ’Twas well past the solstice and the days were slowly lengthening, but the nights were still terrible and far, far too long.
Especially under those shroud-choked trees.
When the gloom of Mistwood faded there was little relief. Snow crept through unwrapped branches, thickening on hard-frozen ground littered with great clumps of granite boulders and dead or sleeping undergrowth; the thornbrakes and other bushes were filigreed with heavy clear frost. It was no longer so stifling-shadowed, but even at noon sunlight barely filtered through interlocked branches far above. The clearings were choked with drifts, and sometimes thin ice-hard streams glittered balefully amid their breathless shadows.
The near-constant sensation of being watched lessened somewhat once the trees drew away, and so it was we reached the Glass.
In thaw, summer, or autumn that vast shallow bowl is a swamp, the land depressed in great roundish pockets or branching sloughs, filled with melt or the mazed wandering of a thousand tiny watercourses. It was fortunate we crossed when we did, for it was slippery but solid, and did not swallow us whole.
Even in the deepest cold, though, strange lights burn over great branching rents in the ice, sickly colors having no name pulsing from twilight to dawn with nauseating randomness. They are not the dancing sky-lights of Fryja’s veils but uncanny exhalations burning with heatless flame, as certain substances will emit noisome light when mixed. The denizens of Mistwood bear a different sickly, pale hue, so the change should have been a relief.
It was not.
I was glad of my felted overboots, for warriors’ footgear is less sure upon the Glass. Nevertheless, the Elder passed without slipping, and shadows in the distance were the black-clad Northerners, moving with less grace but equal assurance in a wide guard-ring now that we were free of the trees.
We did not stop, for there was nothing to burn but great lumps of frozen, ice-hung thorn-tangle and the shrunken, twisted remnants of summer-succulent foliage dead and dormant in the cold season. The Elder gave Arn and me draughts from their flasks—winterwine, sitheviel, and other warming things. The Northerners… well, there were small animals suitable for hunting eking out a winter existence amid the crevasses and thorns, for life endures even on the Glass in that season.
Sometimes I can still feel Aeredh’s arm over my shoulders, and the cold of that passage. When you walk with another for so long, so closely, it is impossible not to learn summat of their inner world, and it was there I glimpsed a fraction of the Crownless’s true strength and thoughts. We spoke far less than Daerith and Arneior, yet we looked to each other often, and in agreement more often than not.
A terrible wind came from the North, raising whirls of stinging snow-pellets and doing its best to rob us of all warmth. And yet sometimes at night, the clear gemlike stars also bore veils of shimmering light in more wholesome colors than those exhaled from ice-crevasses, and I could not help murmuring a wondering prayer to Fryja whom my mother loved—for while it is Vardhra who lit the bright white fires hanging in the sky and scattered them in a river of milk, it is the green-robed, fruitful lady of the Vanyr who sends the shimmerveils on certain nights to remind us of joy’s necessity.
Each time I did, Aeredh’s arm tightened slightly, and he echoed my prayer in the Old Tongue. It seemed to help conserve a little heat.
The Glass, for all its name and seeming flatness, is relatively easy to hide upon even during the dead cold, for the freeze buckles and pleats the ground in strange ways. There are even tortured ice-shapes looming, where a spume tossed high at end of autumn snap-freezes in frigid wind. Yet each welcome obstruction to the fury of frigid, moving air also makes the swamp-bowl more difficult to traverse, for great rents and crevasses open in its floor, and none has plumbed their depths—nor will they, I think, except whatever god built that place. Or perhaps they will be emptied when the Allmother finally unmakes the world like a woman retwisting a skein.
On that day everything lost in those deep places may well return for a brief moment, all mysteries solved before the maelstrom of Unmaking swallows them afresh.
A long weary time of wandering, with Elder liquids burning in our limbs to grant some semblance of strength, passed under Arn’s and my feet. The Elder shepherded us carefully, for we could not leap the ice-ravines, and often had to trudge along a crumbling edge before finding some slim thread of solid-ground safety. Yet a dark line of tree-robed hills approached in fits and starts as the Glass began to ravel at its edges, a wall of forbidding peaks topped with perpetual grey haze. Though none but Aeredh knew it, those hills meant we were ever closer to our goal.
We almost made it through without a battle.
Almost.
Hold, and Be Ready
So the Blessed directed him, and so did my father build his city. While fell things might go forth from Agramar and pass nearby, they long could not discover its fastness, and well ’twas so. Even the Enemy may be blind to the closest danger; long did he brood in his citadel, for of all the Children of the Star he hated Taeron not the least.
—Naciel Silverfoot, The Rise of Laeliquaende
Stormwind died between one step and the next as we edged wearily along yet another ice-ravine’s southron lip. The Northerners had drawn close, for even a wolf’s nose might well lose companions’ scents in the driving, whirling white of ground-snow scrape-gathered and flung skyward. My mantle was heavy, ice building upon my shoulders, and at every stop Arn and I had to endure the Elder breaking frost from our clothes—quick, skimming hand-brushes laden with seidhr gauged just hard enough to shake the carapace free without damaging cloth or flesh underneath.
I saw how they performed that feat—Daerith let me stand close by while he attended to Arn, and did not bother to hide the technique—but I had little enough strength to try it myself. The warming breath and seidhr both barely sufficed to keep me from freezing solid.
The light was failing. All day something other than the cold had thickened around us, a steady invisible current dragging at our progress. When the wind stilled, heavy vapor exhaled from the Glass’s deep crevasses, giving the entire plain an eerie likeness to a steam-boiling pot.
I was almost too weary to shiver. Even the Elder cannot forever hold off a Secondborn’s need for rest, and there is only so much sleep one may take while walking. When Aeredh halted that violet-dusky afternoon I could not even wonder at the event, for I was staring at my ice-capped overboots and the pebble-laced frost underneath, and at the edge of my vision the ragged edge of a ravine yawned. The crevasse was shaped like one of the spear-harbor shores far to the west; I had seen those only while my invisible selves traveled with the aid of herbal fumes from Idra’s brass brazier.
Arn’s sudden soft inhale brought my head up, my mantle-hood slipping slightly. I almost twisted to glance behind us—for we were once more in loose file, Daerith and my shieldmaid following, Elder before and behind us, and the Northerners upon our southron side suddenly appearing through rising icefog, drawing close. I caught sight of gaunt Eol slipping between two forms, and his dark gaze lingered upon me for a long moment before he turned, his snow-crusted back presented to us and his swordblade gleaming as he drew.
Aeredh muttered summat in the Old Tongue, and even had I not known that language I would have understood the curse. I still could not guess his true age, but he sounded as deeply unsurprised as Flokin, who could bring together scathing couplets capable of flaying a fellow warrior to bone, pride, or muscle, given strength by the sharp sheer depth of his experience in life and battle both.
“Do not,” Daerith said, then cursed alike and used the southron tongue. “Do not, lady shieldmaid. This is beyond you. My king?”
“Hold, and be ready.” For once, Aeredh did not take the harpist to task for addressing him with that particular honorific. “Stay close, Solveig.”
I could not have moved, in any case. I was too tired.
A wolf-howl rose before us—Efain, I thought, for its modulation carried a seidhr-breath of his scars and his silences. It cut short, and there was a flurry of movement; Elder and perhaps Gelad and Karas, for they had been taking lead against the terrible stinging wind, relieving others who had endured its brunt most of the day.
Eol did not move, his broadsword’s length catching a last ruddy gleam as the sun broke free of perpetual icefog, the golden flower of day reduced to a strengthless red coin as it sank to the westron horizon.
I shuddered, but not with the cold. At that moment it seemed there had never been anything other than journeying half-frozen through this nightmare, Arn and I simply fumbling strengthless in a trap. The Elder, especially the one holding me still as danger approached, had merely brought us here to die.
A great quiet ate every sound, even the clash of battle near the front of our line. Eol stood, sword still glowing, his shaggy, haggard head slightly cocked. He looked very small against the indistinct smear of ice-hummocks, icebreath fog rising in billows since the wind was now not knifing it to shreds, and jumbled, frozen thornbushes.
“Sol?” Arn whispered, as if from very far away. I had never heard her sound so…
Well, so frightened. And well she should be, for the certainty of death closed iron-frozen fingers around my throat. I gasped, and the tiny sound caught something’s attention.
I see you, a foul rotting voice mumbled, yet I did not hear it with my physical ears. No, it lunged for my living warmth with a quick blind grasping of rot-clotted seidhr I had not noticed in my misery, for it had crept upon us in stealthy stages for days now. Come, little thing. You are ours now.
“Hold,” Aeredh said quietly. His arm was an iron bar, his fingers digging into my mantle-clad shoulder. The eerie blue radiance of an Elder’s seidhr-selves burned fitfully around him, coruscating like Fryja’s shimmerveils—for, as I had discovered, they do not merely fight with hand or sword, the Children of the Star. “And be ready.”
“Nathlàs,” Yedras answered, and there was a terrible weight to the word. I tasted it, bitter forge-ash against the very back of my tongue, and there was another faint scuffling sound much nearer—Arn attempting to draw away from Daerith’s grasp, to meet this foe the only way she could, with spear and warcry both.
That managed to loosen the thing’s grip upon me. Not the presence of the Elder nor their collective might, not the copper taste of danger nor the sudden terrified pounding of my overburdened heart. But my fear for my shieldmaid, that she might somehow slip Daerith’s hold and fling herself at this new terror—no, that broke the hypnotizing, blurring, buzzing invisible whisper of its preliminary attack. “Arn,” I gasped, loud in the unnatural stillness. “No. Stop.”
