by Zoe Marriott
The spiral of the steps tightened as we descended, until it felt almost as if we were chasing in a circle, like little girls twirling in their new skirts. The light became more dim, and the air took on a new smell. Dry and crisp – and cold. Like snow, I realised. Despite the whole building being constructed of ice, this was the first time I had smelled it, or felt a chill within the Silingana’s walls.
Uldar reached the last step and jumped from it, letting go of my hand so that he could turn and offer a theatrical bow. It was so shadowy that I could barely make out his face. The faint light filtering down from above us seemed as distant as the moon, picking out random glints of gold in his hair, silver in his eyes, and fire on the metallic thread on his clothes.
I looked around exaggeratedly. “You were right. No need for lamps at all.”
His teeth flashed. “Put your claws back in. You’ll see.”
15
He turned abruptly and disappeared into the shadows, leaving me standing on the last step. I rearranged the femi on my dress, draping it more tightly around my neck.
In the near darkness there was a glassy tapping noise – one, two, three. A soft grey-white light bloomed, then flared outward into a circle. It bobbed toward me. Behind it, Uldar was easier to make out now, cast in ghostly grey, his face and hair and even the vivid colours of his clothes seeming bleached, like driftwood.
“Here,” the Prince said, offering the cloudy glass globe to me with both hands.
The orb was too large for my fingers to span its circumference. I reached out gingerly, expecting it to be very heavy, and warm, but –
“It’s cold,” I exclaimed, nearly fumbling it in surprise. It hardly weighed a thing. “Is this ice too? How do they make it glow?”
“I’ll show you. Don’t speak or move it suddenly while it’s open,” he warned, running his finger vertically down over the top of the globe. A black line ran after the touch, chasing across the orb’s surface as if his fingertip had been a pen tipped in ink. The ice opened, falling neatly into two hemispheres, still joined at the bottom by some invisible hinge.
Within, there lay a tangle of exquisite lacy stuff, formed of what looked like pure silver thread. The threads glimmered, infused with a kind of soap bubble iridescence that shivered through shades of green and blue, pink and purple. In the centre of the tangle there was a tiny shape, no larger than my thumbnail, eight legs curled in upon itself, shining with a fierce white fire that pulsed like breathing or a heartbeat.
A spider’s web, and the spider sleeping within it.
Uldar placed his hands beneath mine, palms against the backs of my hands, and carefully eased them together, closing the globe. As the two hemispheres touched, the bisecting line where they met went black, sealing the globe closed once more, and then faded.
“It’s a ninguid. A snow spider,” he explained. “They come from the deep, underground caves of ice that lie beneath Silinga, where no sunlight ever reaches and nothing ever thaws. So they make their own light.”
“Beautiful,” I breathed, cradling the globe reverently. “How do they live inside the globes? Do you feed them?”
“No need. The ice globes are enchanted. Ninguid-hunters place the orbs in their ice caves, open, and when the spiders crawl inside and make their webs, they collect and close them again and the spell activates. It puts the spiders into a kind of hibernation – something they do naturally anyway. They can live up to fifty years that way. The insides of the globes appear pitch black and silent to them, so that they seem to be in their natural habitat.” His face turned suddenly serious. “You must never open one of these for more than a few seconds, and never in bright sunlight or where there is much noise. That would wake the spider.”
“And waking the spider is bad?”
“When they’re startled, or exposed to too much light other than their own, they release a substance from their bodies. It causes their webs to become incredibly hot. Within an instant it would melt right out of the globe – and then through your hands. A nest of them can thaw an iceberg in a few minutes. Sometimes the webs even explode, and anything the debris touches will burn, even ice or water.”
“A chemical exothermic reaction,” I whispered, not in awe this time but dismay. My fingers were yellow where they pressed against the ice. “How many of these do you have within the Palace?”
He cocked his head. “Thousands? There must be a few thousand in here, at least, and we have them in several of the great rooms.”
And a handful of these things could melt through an iceberg in minutes? I did a quick calculation based on my observations of the Palace’s mass, and a conservative projection of ten thousand globes, and actually felt my face blanch. That’s enough to melt the Silingana to the ground in under an hour!
“They’re perfectly safe as long as you don’t open them foolishly,” Uldar assured me. “You could use one as a doorstop and it wouldn’t disturb the spell.”
“But what if the spell failed?”
“That could never happen.” Then he examined my expression and sighed. “Really, Theo! The Kings of Silinga have been using these for over three hundred years and apart from when the ninguid were first discovered there’s never been a single explosion. Not once. Teams of Ice Breakers maintain the spell every minute of every day, in shifts. It’s part of the greater magic keeping the whole Palace preserved.”
“That is... comforting.” Doubt saturated the words, despite my best intentions. Three hundred years with no accidents sounded, to me, less like evidence that nothing could ever go wrong, and more like proof that they were long overdue for a disaster. These things were like more powerful versions of the blasting pots they used in the gold and copper mines at home. Except that the rough clay jars, filled with black powder and sealed with wax, could only be lit by setting fire to a fuse, and the fuses could be stamped out or removed. The ninguid globes had no fuse, and could be detonated instantly, with no warning.
And all it would take was a single instant of inattention or incompetence from one of their pet ‘magicians’.
Built on the backs of Ice Breakers...
“Come on,” Uldar said, impatient with my musings. He took the orb from me with a complete lack of caution, gesturing for me to come down off the step. “I want to show you the rest.”
I wasn’t sure anything else on the tour could quite compete with the revelation that I had held a massively destructive chemical explosive right in my hands. I followed him rather distractedly, still feeling as though my brain had been tipped off its axis.
Uldar reached up and placed the shining orb in a wall bracket with a quiet chink, then turned back to face me. “Clap your hands.”
“A-all right.” I slapped my palms together politely, still seeing visions of fiery conflagrations in my mind’s eye. Nothing happened.
He tsked at me. “Show some enthusiasm. Again!” He broke into loud applause, as if he had just seen a respectable sparring match or musical performance. After a blink I joined in, feeling the blood rush back into my chilled hands.
Gradually, softly, like dawn breaking through a heavy bank of clouds one ray at a time, lights flickered to life above. One. Two. Six. Twenty. A hundred. I lost count of the ninguid as I stared up at them. Some were smaller than my fist, softly glowing. Others must have been larger than my head, and blazed almost too brightly to look at.
But as their light chased away the shadows, the globes themselves lost my attention. They room they revealed was too astonishing. I left my place by the wall, turning and turning, mouth dropping open as my hands fell limply to my sides.
From this perspective one could see all of the ice staircases that criss-crossed the deep well of the ballroom as it descended. They circled, widened, twisted, bent and curved, making an impossibly complex, organic pattern high overhead, a pattern that revolved and changed as one progressed across the midnight blue ballroom floor. The underneath of each staircase formed a forest of jagged icicles, and each icicle flashed and w
inked with its own internal colours – turquoise, sky blue, jade – as the ninguid globes that dangled from their pointed tips threw clear icy light onto and through them. The walls of the room were the same slabs, uncarved and unadorned, that made up the steps, and their internal structures now glinted with diamond fire, revealed in the spider light.
It was so bright. As bright as the highest peak of a sand dune in the glare of the mid-day sun at the height of the dry season. Yet it was intensely different too, because the space of the ballroom, while vast, was entirely enclosed. And it was cold, and still, without a breath of a draught stirring within it. It felt like being within some astonishing natural wonder, sacred to the Gods. But it was, every piece of it, entirely manmade.
“This was the first room of the Silinga. It used to be the throne room and the great hall, before the Palace was expanded and all the new wings were built. They say that Vorogana, the one who had it built, fell through the ceiling of a glacier when he was a boy, and while he was trapped within Morogana sent him a vision, showing him the Silingana, and where it should be built, and how. Vorogana was the first to unite all the warring tribes of old Silinga into a real Kingdom. They say he discovered the ninguid, too.”
“I will never forget this,” I said gravely, drawing my eyes away from the almost frightening splendour around me to look at him. “Not as long as I live.”
“Good,” he said, face splitting into a pleased grin. “But we’re not finished yet.”
He took my hand in his again and led me across the floor, zigzagging around the bottoms of the staircases toward the far wall where he found a groove amid the ice and, apparently without effort, slid back a whole panel of it. A frozen wind made me recoil, but Uldar barely seemed to notice the cold. He started forward eagerly, drawing me with him into – not another room. Into daylight and biting fresh air and blue, blue everywhere.
Into the outside world again.
It was a kind of natural terrace, protruding from the sheer, towering wall of the Silingana: a stone formation, I realised, part of the cliff that the Palace was built on and around. The rock was the same midnight shade as the ballroom’s dance floor, within. The highly polished, reflective surface in there was not ice, for once, but the dark, bedrock granite of the cliff itself.
The escarpment was a pointed oval, shaped like the prow of a ship, thrusting out into the sky. The sun was behind us, on the other side of the Palace, and it was possible to stare out over the breath-stealing vista without squinting against the blinding glare of the Silingana’s ice walls. At the same time, the terrace must have been somewhat sheltered in the lee of the building, for the temperature was not quite cold enough to make my breath smoke, and although the savage Silingan wind could be heard – a hollow, ululating moan that vibrated through the slender, crystaline towers above us – it did not reach out its jagged fingers to freeze us, nor threaten to sweep us from the rock.
There were no safety walls, no rails. Nothing to keep the viewer from the wind scoured sky above or the wave scarred ocean below. Except one thing.
On one side of the rock escarpment there was, unbelievably, a tree.
Black as pine tar, it was immense, seeming to grow not only over the edge of the rock but actually through it in places. The trunk was twisted, pitted, rippling and ridged like the hide of an alligator, and the iron-hard roots wreathed around and over the granite in swirling patterns that I could not imagine any man’s axe or pruning hook making so much as a dent upon. It overhung the rock terrace with a dense, shadowy canopy of limbs that carried no leaves. No buds. Only, I saw, as Uldar drew me closer, a bristling harvest of thorns.
A shiver travelled down my spine. I imagined for a second that I was being watched – that the thorns might stir, and open into staring eyes. There was power here. A great, wild power.
“In Vorogana’s dream, the God’s voice came from a spiny black tree that grew up through the ice in the glacier. When he located the place where Morogana wanted him to build, he found this – a great tree, of a kind that no one had ever seen growing anywhere else in Silinga. Its roots went through the rock and seemed to burrow right down to the base of the cliff, into the ice caves below sea level. The builders wanted to chop the tree down, for fear that its roots would undermine their building. But the King forbade it. He took one of the great branches buried in the ice cave below to carve his throne, and later his Queen’s throne, but left the tree and the promontory upon which it grew undisturbed.”
Uldar’s words had a sing-song formality, as if of a story many times repeated.
“They say that in times of great peril, the Kings of Silinga can come here and call on Morogana’s council, and the tree moves and cracks as if in a great wind, and lights glow in the branches, and Morogana speaks to them.”
“They say?” I asked, gaze fixed on the tree in awe. Morogana was not my God, but this was a kind of power that I understood and respected: the power of the deity to reach out through the mortal world to his children in their extremity. “Have you seen it? Or your Father?”
“Well – no. Silinga hasn’t been in peril for a long time,” he said sheepishly. “But the histories say it, so it’s not a children’s tale or a legend; it really did happen. And no matter how hard the snow falls, none ever falls on this rock, or on the Tree of Morogana.”
That was most likely why it was possible to be out here without being swathed in five layers of fur-trimmed clothing.
“It’s – not beautiful,” I said carefully. “It’s a little frightening to look at, I think. But there is a kind of beauty in that, as well as power.”
“Can you feel it?” He asked, turning to me in sudden excitement. “Normally only the gifted can feel that. You’re not gifted are you? No one told me!”
“Gifted?” I tore my eyes from the tree to blink at him. “You mean am I Blessed? Oh, no – no, at home the Blessed are always taken from their parents to be trained as soon as their abilities manifest.”
“Even from the royal family?” he asked, frowning.
“Yes. You cannot be a Whisperer and a Queen. I couldn’t stand in line to inherit the throne if –” and my voice choked off, died, humiliatingly before I could finish the sentence. I could not stand in line to inherit Yamarr’s throne if I had a Blessing.
Because I was no longer in the line of succession, was I? It didn’t matter that no Queen of Yamarr could also be Blessed, that if I had a Blessing I would have been taken away for a Whisperer. It didn’t matter at all.
Blessed or not, I would never be Queen of Yamarr.
I cleared my throat and finished lamely. “I have no gifts.”
Uldar’s clear blue-grey eyes seemed to look directly into me, and his face changed, made suddenly older and sadder, as if he had glimpsed something that hurt him. His grip on my hand, which I at least had forgotten about, tightened in a quick double squeeze as he stepped closer to me in the shadow of the black tree. “Theo. That isn’t true.”
I felt myself tremble. This was dangerous. Too real, too raw. The wiser part of me wanted to cringe from the sudden closeness. Break this moment that had exposed my vulnerability before it became too dangerous. But – if I were to win him, I could not reject him. I must welcome his understanding, lean into his support, lean into him. Let him know my weakness. Could I? Could I do it?
Above us, the twisted limbs of the Tree of Morogana began to move.
16
Our hands tore apart as we both scrambled away from the rustling, shifting tree.
“Is it going to speak?” I demanded, stopping a few paces back.
“Why are you asking me?” Uldar seized a fold of my femi as if to drag me with him – or take shelter behind me. “I don’t know!”
And then I saw something white among the black branches. A hand.
“There’s someone up there!” I hissed. Assassin? No – that made no sense, we would already be dead. A spy? A dizzying flush sent every drop of blood I possessed rushing to singe the surface of my skin
. What did we say? “They were eavesdropping on us.”
“No, it can’t be! No one – no one would dare! Even a child, even a mad person wouldn’t do that!” he protested, appalled. “You can’t just climb the Tree of Morogana!”
“Someone did!” I pointed accusingly as a fold of dark blue cloth slipped into sight, draping over one of the lower branches. But Uldar’s words were still sounding in my head, and I felt my battle-ready tension ease as they sank in. Not even a child or a mad person... I let my pointing finger fall. “It’s Shell.”
As if the sound of her name had been a signal, Shell’s face suddenly appeared, hanging upside down amid the canopy of thorns. She smiled a wide, unselfconscious smile, one hand making a vague waving movement. Before I could work out how she was supporting her weight with the use of only one hand, there was a slithering whirl too swift for my eyes to follow, and she somersaulted effortlessly from the branches, landing in a supple crouch amongst the tree roots.
A velvet dress was kilted up carelessly around the tops of her long thighs. Her trailing sleeves had received the same treatment, tied into knots at her shoulders that would doubtless ruin the fabric. I remembered, on the boat, thinking her so thin and fragile looking. Now I could see the long, wiry muscles that stood out in her legs and in her upper arms. She must be very strong.
Not a single scratch marred her smooth skin, although I was willing to bet that every single one of those thorns was long enough and sharp enough to spear right through a man’s hand. Her hair – clearly arranged into some elaborate style earlier – was a tangled mess, from which jewelled pins and combs gently unravelled and tumbled as she straightened up, falling like glittering petals from a flower to gather in the folds of her dress.
Her feet were bare.
I looked helplessly at Uldar. His expression was once again nearly impossible for me to read. Not due to studied blankness this time. It seemed more as though many very powerful emotions were doing battle in his head, all at once. I saw a hint of outrage, disbelief, maybe some wariness. But helpless desire was clearly there too, and putting up a struggle. Who knew which of them he would finally give in to?
