by Jim Butcher
Araris shrugged. “From a strictly logical standpoint, it’s possible. The Icemen follow the heaviest storms down from the north, so it’s always coldest when they meet legionares. It stands to reason that nearly everyone would be using the warmth crafting.”
“And no one was looking for that kind of influence,” Isana said. “Why would they think intense anger at one of Alera’s enemies was strange?”
Aria shook her head. “Centuries of conflict over some sort of hypothetical furycrafting side effect?”
“Only needs to happen for a few minutes at the wrong time,” Doroga interjected from several yards away.
Everyone turned to regard the barbarian, who stood beside his huge gargant, leaning his shoulders against Walker’s tree trunk of a leg.
“First impressions are important,” Doroga continued. “Icemen don’t look like you. That makes you people nervous.”
Araris grunted. “A bad first meeting. Tempers flare. There’s a fight. Then more encounters and more fights.”
“Happens long enough, you call that a war,” Doroga said, nodding.
Lady Placida was silent for a moment. Then she said, “It can’t possibly be that simple.”
“Of course not,” Isana said. “But a single pebble can start a rockslide.”
“Three hundred years,” Doroga said, idly kicking at the snow. “Not over territory. Not over hunting grounds. No one gains anything. You’re just killing each other.”
Aria considered that for a moment and shrugged. “It does seem a bit irrational, I suppose. But after so much killing, so much death . . . it takes on a momentum of its own.”
The Marat grunted. “Thought I heard someone say something about a rockslide less than a minute ago. But maybe I imagined that.”
Aria arched an imperiously exasperated eyebrow at the barbarian.
Doroga smiled.
Aria sighed and shook her head, folding her arms a little closer to her chest. “You don’t think much of us, do you, Doroga?”
The barbarian shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I like the ones I talk to. But taken as a whole, you can be pretty stupid.”
Aria smiled faintly at the barbarian. “For example?”
The chieftain considered for a moment with pursed lips. “Be my guess that your folk never even considered that you might have it backward.”
“Backward?” Lady Placida asked.
Doroga nodded. “Backward. Icemen don’t follow the storms when they attack, Your Grace.” He gave Aria a shrewd look as a particularly cold gust of wind threw up a brief, blinding curtain of snow. “The storms,” he called, “follow them!”
The snow kept Isana from seeing Aria’s face, but she clearly felt the startled little flicker of surprise—and concern—that suddenly permeated the woman’s emotions.
The wind died away, and as suddenly as that, nine Icemen stood in a loose circle around them.
Isana felt Araris and Aria immediately touch shoulders with her and with each other, forming an outward-facing triangle. Araris exuded nothing—no tension, no discomfort, no fear: She sensed nothing but the steady confidence and detachment of a master metalcrafter withdrawn into communion with his furies, ignoring all emotion and discomfort to stand ready against a threat. That presence bolstered Isana, granted her confidence she badly needed, and she studied the newly appeared Icemen closely.
There were differences in them, Isana saw at once. Instead of bearing similar styles of weaponry and adornment, as the group with Big Shoulders had, each of the nine was perfectly distinctive.
Big Shoulders was there again, fur and leathers and a handmade but obviously functional spear in his hands. But the Iceman beside him was at least a foot taller and far thinner, with a barely perceptible orange tint to his white fur. He carried a large club made out of what looked like the leg bone of some enormous animal, though Isana had no idea what could possibly grow femurs six and a half feet long. The fur around his head was threaded with seashells, a hole bored through each of them to make them into beads.
The Iceman on the other side of Big Shoulders was shorter than Isana, and probably weighed three or four of her. He was clad in a mantle and breastplate of what looked like sharkskin, and carried in one hand a broad-headed, barbed harpoon carved from some kind of bone, and wore over his shoulder a quiver of what looked like smaller versions of the weapon.
Walker let out a low, trumpeting huff that was equally a greeting and a warning, and Doroga nodded to Big Shoulders. “Morning.”
“Friend Doroga,” Big Shoulders said. He gestured to the orange-tinted Iceman beside him, and said, “Sunset.” He made a similar gesture to the harpoon-bearing Iceman on his other side, and said, “Red Water.”
Doroga nodded to each of them, then said, to Isana, “Sunset is the eldest of the peace-chiefs. Red Water is the eldest war-chief.”
Isana frowned. “They have different leaders, then?”
“Divide areas of authority between tasks of peace and tasks of war,” Doroga corrected her.
The presence of both the head peace leader and senior war leader was a statement, then, Isana realized. The Icemen were equally disposed toward either outcome. It might mean that they did not want her to sense that they would be reluctant to fight—or they might genuinely want to sabotage any possible talk of truce in favor of ongoing hostilities. Then again, perhaps they were simply being sincere.
Isana let out a slow breath, and lowered the defenses with which she habitually shielded herself from the overwhelming emotions of others. She wanted every scrap of insight she could get about the Icemen.
Lady Aria’s faint, tightly controlled anxiety became a painful rasp against Amara’s senses, as did Doroga’s low-key, abiding worry for his daughter. Behind her, very faintly, she could literally sense the presence of Alerans on the Shieldwall, cloaked in their gentle firecraftings against the cold. The wall hummed with a sensation of constant, quiet, long-term emotion that might or might not have stopped short of the line between anger and hatred.
“The young one tells us you are here to seek peace,” said Sunset quietly, in accented but intelligible Aleran.
Isana arched an eyebrow and nodded to him. “We are.”
Though none of them moved or reacted, Isana felt a ripple of suspicion and uneasiness flicker around the circle of Icemen.
Isana drew in a quick breath, touched Araris’s wrist to tell him to stay where he was, and stepped forward, focusing on making her emotions as plain and obvious as they could be. She stepped forward toward Sunset and offered her hand.
There was a flash of suspicious fury, and Red Waters was abruptly between them, the wickedly sharp tip of his harpoon dimpling the skin of Isana’s cheek.
Steel hissed as two swords leapt clear of their sheaths, and there was an abrupt surge of light and hot air at Isana’s back.
“Aria, no!” Isana snapped in a tone of sudden, iron authority. “You will not do this.” She turned—a calm, deliberate motion that nonetheless dragged the tip of Red Waters’s harpoon against her cheek in a tingling line.
Aria and Araris stood side by side, weapons in their hands. Aria’s left wrist was uplifted, and a small hunting falcon made of pure, white-hot fire perched there, wings already spread, ready to be launched skyward at a flick of her hand.
“High. Lady. Placida.” Isana spoke into the silence, putting a ringing emphasis onto each word, her voice rolling across the frozen landscape and rebounding from the distant Shieldwall. “You will put your weapon on the ground and dismiss your fury at once.”
Aria tilted her head at a dangerous angle, her eyes focused on one of the largest of the chieftains assembled there. “Isana—”
Isana took two strides to Aria and slapped her smartly across one cheek.
Lady Placida all but convulsed in surprise, overbalanced, and fell on her rump in the snow.
“Look at me,” Isana said in a hard, calm voice.
Aria was already staring at her with rather wide eyes. It occurred
to Isana that it was entirely possible that no one had spoken in such a tone to the High Lady since before her adolescence.
“We are here on a mission of peace, High Lady. You will immediately desist from your efforts to turn my introduction to the principals of a foreign nation into a bloodbath.” She lifted her chin, and said, “Dismiss. Your. Fury.”
The little fire falcon vanished in a hiccup of smoke.
“Thank you,” Isana said. “Now put your sword on the ground.”
Aria gave the assembled chiefs a quick glance, then flushed and did so. “Of course, my Lady.”
“Thank you. Araris?”
Isana turned to find that Araris, his sword already thrust point first into the snow, was standing with a folded handkerchief at the ready. He calmly pressed it to her cheek as he said, “You’re bleeding.”
The tingling on Isana’s cheek turned to pain as the cloth touched it. She winced. She’d had no idea that the weapon had been that sharp. “Ah,” she said, taking the cloth and holding it against the cut. “Thank you.”
Araris nodded once and turned to offer his hand to Lady Placida, helping her up from the snow.
Isana turned back to the Icemen and walked over to face Sunset again. She calmly lowered the bloodied cloth, and felt a slow warmth spread down her cheek. She very deliberately allowed her discomfort and annoyance to show on her face and in her bearing and stared at Sunset.
The older chieftain turned his gaze on Red Waters, and Isana felt a sudden, uncomfortably sharp spike of disapproval. Red Waters evidently felt it even more intensely than Isana had. He swayed slightly under the force of it and took a step back to stand beside Big Shoulders again, radiating a mild sense of chagrin. Amusement flowed around the circle of Icemen.
The Icemen, Isana realized, had just had their own version of the scene that had played out between her and Aria. Sunset had slapped Red Waters down—and the entire time, they never spoke. They hardly moved.
On an impulse, Isana opened her cloak and spread her hands, demonstrating that she was obviously carrying no weapons.
Sunset studied her for a moment, then nodded and passed his bone club over to Big Shoulders. Then he offered her his enormous, shaggy, claw-tipped hand.
Isana laid her own into it without hesitation, exactly as she would to convey her sincerity to another watercrafter. Whatever empathic sense the Icemen used, however it was done, it was obviously just as formidable as her own abilities, even though different. She wasn’t afraid that Sunset would harm her. The level of emotional control he had exhibited in conveying his displeasure to Red Waters was humbling.
His enormous hand enfolded hers gently, the claws never touching her skin. The Iceman watched her, expressionlessly.
“I have come here to seek peace between our peoples,” Isana said, allowing her feelings to flow down her hand and into Sunset’s grasp. She felt a brief urge to giggle. It was entirely possible that the Aleran arrogance that Doroga had warned her about was in play again. What made her suppose that she would be able to hide her emotions from the Iceman?
Sunset took a deep breath and bowed his head. A brief tide of emotion washed over Isana, every bit of it as real to her as if it was her own; grief, mainly, a sense of loss and regret that had grown to maturity over slow years. But mixed with it was fierce exaltation, weary relief—and tiny, painfully intense sparkles of hope.
“At last,” Sunset said aloud. “Your people send a peace-chief.”
Isana felt tears washing down her face, stinging painfully as they entered the cut on her cheek. She nodded mutely.
“This will not be easy,” Sunset told her. “Too much . . .” A surge of anger hit her, Sunset’s own, though it was under his control. The gentle grasp of his hand never wavered. “Too much . . .” He flashed another emotion at her: suspicion, and more than that—the expectation of betrayal.
“Yes,” Isana said quietly. “But it is necessary.”
“Because of the enemy attacking you,” Sunset said calmly. “We know.”
Isana stared at him for a moment. “You . . . you do?”
He nodded. “For three years, we have pressed you here, hoping that the enemy would weaken your people in the south. Force you to send your Wall-guardians there to defend your food lands and that your folk would follow and leave us in peace.”
And suddenly, Isana understood the attacks of the Icemen of recent years—why the winter storms and howling hordes had always arrived at precisely the correct time to pin the Legions of the north in place. Many folk, she knew, had feared collusion between the Icemen and the Canim—but it had been neither a mindless assault nor a sinister plot. It had been part of a considered campaign.
“That enemy has changed,” Isana said. “You do not know this.”
“One enemy or another.” Sunset shrugged. “It is of little matter to us.”
Doroga spoke for the first time. “It should be. Listen to her.”
“The foe that comes against us now is not a nation. It does not seek land or control. It is here only to destroy utterly anything that is not itself. It has attacked us without warning, hesitation, or mercy. It will not speak with us of peace. It slaughters innocents and warriors alike—and it will do so to any other than itself whom it meets.”
Sunset regarded her for a moment. Then he said, “Until today, I would have said that your people are little different. Many still would.”
“This enemy is called the Vord. And when it finishes us, it will come here for you and your people.”
Sunset looked at Doroga.
The Marat nodded. “And for mine. The Alerans caused your tribes to set aside your differences. They were a greater enemy. Now comes another enemy—one who will destroy us all if we do not lay our differences aside.” Doroga leaned on his cudgel and spoke intently. “You must permit them to withdraw in peace. To let the Wall-guardians travel south and battle our mutual foe. And to leave their people here in peace.”
Sunset stared at Doroga for a time. “What have your folk decided?”
“To let the Alerans fight,” Doroga said. “My people cannot defeat the Vord—not now. They are too many, too strong. You know that my people have no love for the Alerans. But we will not attack them while the Vord are abroad.”
Red Waters spat, “So we should let their warriors leave, but not drive their peoples from these lands? So that when the battle is done, their warriors return and take up their arms again?”
Sunset sighed. He looked from Red Waters to Isana. “He has a point.”
Isana frowned and looked at Red Waters, searching for the right words.
Araris stepped up beside her and bowed slightly to Sunset, then to Red Waters. “My people have a saying,” he said. “Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don’t.”
Red Waters stared hard at Araris for a moment. Then Big Shoulders let out a bark of laughter that was startling in how human it sounded. It spread around the circle of Icemen until even Red Waters shook his head, his rigid demeanor relaxing somewhat.
“Our warriors have that saying as well,” Red Waters admitted. He nodded at the blood, now freezing into scarlet crystals, on the tip of his harpoon. “But what peace-chiefs say is not always what war-chiefs do. Let us see your warriors depart. Then we will speak again of peace.”
“Antillus and Phrygia will never agree to that,” Lady Placida murmured. “Never.”
“You come to us asking us for peace,” Red Waters said. “But you offer us nothing.”
Isana met Red Waters’s eyes. “It seems to me that peace is not a gift one can give away. It can only be exchanged in kind.”
A sharp pulse of approval came from Sunset.
Red Waters answered him with a surge of sadness and caution.
Sunset sighed and nodded. He turned back to Isana, and murmured, “As I said. It will not be easy.”
“Too much anger,” Isana said. “Too much blood.”
“On both sides,” Sunset agreed.
He was right,
Isana thought. Certainly, Lord Antillus had been less than willing to accept the possibility of peace. The most he’d been willing to believe possible was that he could shake the Icemen up, disrupt them enough to send a single Legion south—
The steady, buzzing hostility of the Shieldwall hummed against Isana’s senses.
She had a sudden, horrible suspicion and every Iceman in the circle around her suddenly became more alert.
“Lady Placida,” she said quietly. “Can you tell me if there are any Knights Aeris aloft?”
Aria arched a pale copper eyebrow. Then she nodded, closed her eyes, and lifted her face to the snowy skies. A moment later, she drew in a sharp breath. “Furies. More than a hundred. Every Knight Aeris under Antillus’s command. But why . . .” She opened her eyes wide, suddenly, staring around at the assembled chieftains of the Icemen.
“Sunset,” Isana said, “you must leave. You and your people are in danger.”
“Why?”
“Because what peace-chiefs say is not always what war-chiefs do.”
Thunder rumbled suddenly overhead.
Red Waters snarled and made a swift, sharp gesture. The chieftains gathered around him and Sunset. Big Shoulders wordlessly handed Sunset’s bone club back to him. Sunset glanced at Isana and sent out a surge of regret. Then he grasped the weapon in his hands and turned to begin shambling away through the snow, the other chieftains gathering around him as the wind began to rise again.
“Too late,” Aria hissed.
Thunder rolled louder and the clouds whirled in a wide circle and parted, revealing a wheel of Knights Aeris aloft, tiny black shapes against the grey clouds with a circle of blue sky far above. Lightning danced from cloud to cloud and gathered into a wide circle, dancing between the Knights like the spokes of an enormous wagon wheel. Isana could feel the power gathering as the lightning prepared to fall on the retreating chieftains.
Aria cursed under her breath and threw herself aloft, wind rising in a roar to lift her into the skies—but even as she did, lightning burned a searing streak across Isana’s vision and struck the ground several yards behind the Iceman chieftains. The wheel of Knights above shifted, and the lightning burned its way toward the Icemen, digging an enormous furrow in the earth as it went.
