He hurried to catch the couple steps he’d lost to Robert, face flushed with a vein-flooding rage. What was wrong with him? Why was he so afraid of the cold and the heights? Robert was managing just fine. Blays wasn’t complaining. Either he’d die or he wouldn’t. There was no in-between and either way he wouldn’t have to worry. He was so sick of the mantle of panic he let himself feel whenever he faced the slightest trouble. It was disgusting. It was commonplace and it was weak. He spit into the swirling snow. It was time to become something more than the sum of his emotions.
Robert slogged along and Dante slogged behind him. He made his mind go quiet and endured. It was impossible to tell how much time was passing. Light continued to fight its way through the mist and the snow, but who knew how much was left. He hummed to himself, having heard you couldn’t feel fear when you were humming. Blays didn’t seem to notice. He made himself recall from memory entire passages from the Cycle of Arawn: the opening verse, “The stars shimmered on the waters and for thirty years Arawn took their measure. As he held the nail of the north, Taim jostled his shoulder and all came loose: and down came the waters to drown out the land”; near the end of the first chapter, “And Arawn said to Van, father of Eric Draconat,’Make no sacrifice, for it shall all be mine in time’”; much later, when Arawn had disappeared as an active force and the tome turned to kings and priests, “Gil Gal-El rode seven times around the keep, shaking his sword and naming the seven bodies of the heavens, and at the seventh circle the keep fell and the king was no more.” Fragments, half-remembered stories, scores of names. Again he forgot the trail.
It had stopped snowing at some point. The stuff on the ground was deeper than it had been at the wind-scoured gap at the peak of the pass, now swallowing the horses to their knees, but it no longer lashed Dante’s face. The mists began to lift; sometimes he could see the green smears of snow-bent pines a couple hundred yards away. And then it was gone and he could see the entire trail twisting its way along the side of the mountain, and the skies rose until the clouds hung not on his face but a thousand feet above, and to his right, in the valley between the bodies of the mountains, he could see a long, silent lake, its waters cobalt and shining sapphire and at times a creamy, scintillating green he’d never seen in all the world. His breath caught.
“What kind of sorcery are we heading into?” he said to Robert. The wind had dropped to a strong breeze and he no longer had to shout to compete with its moaning grief.
“That’s just glacier water, you ninny,” Robert said, but his gaze fixed on it while his shoulders stayed in swing with the rhythm of his horse. “It’s nothing special.”
“Do you see that?” Blays said behind him.
“Yeah.”
“It looks like burning glass.”
Dante nodded, eyes clinging to the shelf of ice above the lake, ice that was white at its cap, blue as a frozen summer sky in its middle, that same otherworldly green at its feet. The wind hushed and all he could hear was the snow as it crumpled and squeaked under the horses’ hooves. The air was cold and clean in his lungs. They followed a curve in the trail and a wedge of rock and pines occluded the aching blue lake. Dante kept glancing back, glancing to where the valley should be, wanting one more glimpse of the hidden waters.
* * *
Robert pushed them on till the light ceased gleaming from all that white snow to be stolen by the westerly peaks. They were still in the mountains proper, as far as Dante could tell, but the cold was less stunning, the wind less biting. Robert spied a broad, flat break in the pass a few minutes downhill and took them there, tying the horses to the pines that would offer them some shelter. He started to scoop away the knee-deep snow with his gloved hands, just enough space to lie down in; when they did, Dante saw, their bodies would be hidden from sight and wind. He and Blays pitched in, sweeping away the snow with their boots, grateful for an excuse to flex their numb, sodden toes. It was nearly dark by the time they finished. Robert straightened his back and considered their work.
“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said. “Nobody died? Fell off a cliff? Froze to death?”
“There’s still time,” Blays said, wiping his nose.
“Hard part’s over. Tomorrow we’ll get back down in the hills. Might not even be snowy.”
“It’s the north,” Dante said.
“So what?” Robert clapped his hands together. “It’s just the north, not another world. You boys need to get out more. Besides, mountains make the weather act screwy, you never know what it’s like back in reasonable elevations.”
“Couldn’t these people have started their little rebellion in the summer?” Blays mumbled. “Would that be too much to ask?” He rummaged through the saddlebags, picking out some food. He tossed the heavy wad of Dante’s blanket at his chest. “Catch.”
Dante caught it and almost fell back into the snow. It had frozen or something. Thick to begin with, it now weighed ten or fifteen pounds. He stretched up his arms and tried to roll it open, frowning when it drooped to but a slightly less creased position, then shook it hard, sending ice particles flying into the last of the light.
“This stinks,” he said.
“Ah, it’s not that bad,” Robert said through a mouthful of cheese. “At least we’ve got blankets. Think how bad it would be if we were up here naked.”
“Why would we be up here naked?” Blays said.
“But just think if we were.”
“There’s no possible reason we would ever be up here naked.”
Robert shrugged and took another bite. “I’m just saying. Some years it’s snowed in six weeks ago. We’ve been lucky.”
“Huzzah,” Blays said. He wrapped himself in a couple blankets and stared out on the snowfields, on the black of the trees and the gray of the unlit snow. The clouds parted and a three-quarter moon washed over the valley with pale rays.
“Doesn’t that make it all worthwhile?” Robert said, scratching his beard and smiling.
“No,” Blays said.
“I’m cold,” Dante said.
“Lyle on the rack. Then go to sleep. You may hate this day, but you’ll be able to remember the story twenty years from now. Assuming the gods suffer a collective collapse of reason and decide to extend your whining lives that long.”
Robert got up and stamped around the campsite, patting the horses, touching the pine needles. Dante hugged his blankets around him and wiggled his fingers and toes. After a while they stopped hurting.
By noon the next day they’d dropped out of the mountains and into an endless sea of white-coated hills. The snow was shallow, though, no more than three inches, sometimes disappearing entirely in the places where the sun shone unshadowed for most of the day. Compared to the trudge through the pass, the horses all but flew as they walked. They saw no one before the sun had set and they took shelter in the hollow of a draw. No riders, no farmers, no trails of smoke and civilization. The day after was just as empty. It was as if the snows had wiped away the world. They crossed a ridge and to their right a circle of great gray stone blocks stood like the grave markers of all things. Dante pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. After that moment he couldn’t shake the sense they were being watched, that there were eyes in the trees or the dark creases between hills, but he knew that was foolish, people had better things to do than spy on them all day, things like keeping themselves alive or getting the hell out of these wastelands. Still, it stuck with him. That uneasy creep of a presence among the isolation. He didn’t mention it, not wanting to look like a scared little child, and so he just walked on, one more hour, one more day, that much closer to the dead city.
* * *
“Ever get the sense we’re being watched?” Robert asked the next afternoon. They’d crested the saddle of a hill and paused to gaze out on all the ones yet ahead of them. Blays took the break to scare some food from his packs.
“Sometimes,” Dante blurted, then waited for Robert to volunteer more.
�
��Me too. But this time I think we really are.”
“Oh?”
“Can’t be, though. There’s nowhere to move without being seen.” Robert gestured to the open rises of snow. Trees lined the folds of the hills and sometimes sat in clusters at their base, but mostly it was empty, easy travel and easier sight.
“Have you seen anyone?” Dante craned his neck. It looked as barren as ever. He pushed back his hood, felt the cold breeze on his cheeks and nose and ears.
“Maybe.” He pushed his brows together. “Ah, who knows. Been so long since I’ve seen anyone but you two winguses I’m probably imagining things.”
Robert motioned them on. Somehow Dante had stopped feeling the cold. He recognized its presence, knew if he’d appeared here after a week in the relatively balmy offshore breezes of Bressel he’d be shaking like an epileptic, but for now the chill no longer hurt. They rode downhill and were enfolded in the soft swell of the land. They rode uphill and were bracketed by mountains to the west and south, huge things of blue and white beneath the tight tarp of gray clouds. When Dante dismounted he imagined his shoulders were still rocking to the gentle bounce of his horse. There was no proper road, as such, nothing paved or even rutted, just any number of dirt trails that joined and forked every few hours, but Robert checked Cally’s map often, squinting at the course of the sun and, at night, at the particular dial of the stars. A river glinted to their west and over the course of a day it swung to intersect their path. The ground angled down to meet it and they cut through the snowy grass to drink fresh water and fill their skins with the cold mountain runoff. Dante spotted a bulge in the bank that created an eddy where fish might rest, but they had no poles, couldn’t spear them from the shallows like he and Blays had done at the pond. They’d made good time on the day and Robert suggested they set up here and enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Dante and Blays shrugged off their second shirts (it was still cold, but between the sunshine and the running around they doubted they’d need them) and ranged down the river’s banks, eyes sharp for the deep purple of janberries. Dante judged they had about an hour of sunlight left. It was the first honest free time they’d had since they’d left Gabe and his defense of Shay, the first time they’d had that wasn’t spent riding or throwing together a shelter or hugging themselves and trying to remember what a fire felt like, and they ran beside the river, tagging each other with pine cones, cutting reedy branches and dueling in the late afternoon. Blays twirled his branch beneath Dante’s with a smooth turn of his wrist and pressed its springy tip against Dante’s heart.
“Yield, you menace!”
“Never!” Dante said, cocking his elbow to strike at Blays’ neck, and Blays rammed his stick forward. It bent against cloak and doublet, then snapped two-thirds down its length. Dante waggled his weapon. “Ah ha! You’re unarmed!”
“And you’re minus one heart,” Blays said, throwing what was left of his stick at Dante’s feet. Dante turned toward the river and slung his like a spear. It disappeared into the waters, then bobbed back to the surface, straightening in the current. Blays jogged up the bank a ways and called Dante over to a janberry bush crouched against the foot of a pine. The purple berries were small and hard and sour, never truly in season, but it was good to taste anything fresh. All the food in their saddlebags was as dry as licking paper. They ate all they picked, then gathered a handful each for Robert, popping a few in their mouths as they backtracked toward the camp.
They climbed a short ridge and saw Robert on his hands and knees in the grassy snow peering across the waters. The boys froze and leaned into the nearest tree, following Robert’s gaze. All Dante saw on the other banks was a few squat pines surrounded by bushes. He had a word half-formed when one of the bushes moved.
Norren. Four, make that five of them, swords at their belts, bows slung over their massive shoulders. Staring right back at them. Robert motioned for them to get down. Blays made a long face at Dante and Dante shrugged. The river washed between the two groups. Not quite a bowshot across, and the weapons the norren carried looked as tall and potent as the men who wore them. Blays crammed the rest of his janberries into his mouth, then hesitantly raised a juice-stained hand.
The norren stood as stolid as the hills behind them. Dante reached out for the nether, awaiting their move. One of them lifted a hand and waved back. Another dropped its eyes to whatever he’d been examining in the dirt and poked at it with a long staff. Their voices rumbled over the water. They talked a while, gesturing upriver, then turned as one and walked on.
“What was that all about?” Blays said. He spit out a stem.
“Looked like hunters,” Dante said. They started toward Robert, who was already striding their way down the shore.
“Next time try not to bumble right into the war party,” he said, glaring between them.
“Well you could have said something,” Blays said.
“Yes, I really should have just shouted’Watch out! There’s some men over there that could probably kill and rob you if they wanted to bother!’ Would that have done it?”
“What about a signal? Whistling like a bird?” Dante said.
“What about you look around once in a while?” Robert said, poking him in the chest. “We’re five hundred miles from home. You’ve never stepped foot here and I’ve only been here twice, neither of which was recent. Things are different now. If you don’t keep your eyes open, you could be killed, you can’t just be goofing around. Have some gods-damned sense.”
There was a long silence. “I brought you some janberries,” Dante said. He held out his berry-stuffed hand. “Blays ate all his.”
Robert closed his eyes and sighed. He grabbed a few from Dante’s palm and lobbed them into his mouth.
“Sour,” he said.
“They’re janberries.”
“I know janberries are sour. I was just saying.” Robert ate a few more, face slackening as he munched. “May as well follow the river for now. Should be the Lagaganset, if I’m reading the map right. Find a town eventually, pick up some fresh food, then find a road straight to Narashtovik.”
“Plus plenty of janberries on the way,” Blays said, tipping his chin at another bush a short ways down the bank.
“Just keep your stupid eyes open,” Robert said, shaking his head. “Those norren were tracking deer, looked like. Water attracts all kinds of men and beasts. Probably see more of them before we see any chimney smoke.”
Blays gazed into the current. “Laga…Lagagaga…what the hell was it?”
“The river. Call it the river.”
“Right.”
The norren-sightings increased their frequency the further they penetrated into the territories of the north. Blocky silhouettes on dawn ridges. Silent hunters crouched along streambeds, eyes gleaming from the thicket of their beards, tracking deer and elk through the snow. Sometimes Dante saw tracks so big it looked like two drunk children had been falling down every four feet. He tied the set of horns Gabe had given him to a length of leather string and draped it over his neck. They saw men, too: a single-sailed boat coasting down the river one afternoon, the twists of farmhouse smoke out on the flat expanse of the basin, a pair of raggedy travelers on foot who gave them one look before cutting away from the river into open land. It snowed one noon, adding a couple inches to the two or three already on the ground, going mushy and soggy once the sun broke back through the clouds.
Villages began sprouting up every ten-odd miles. Farming, fishing, the smoke of smithies. They’d pass two or three a day. Not yet wanting for food, desiring no contact with the locals, they toured around, cutting through the lightly-treed fields and fallow farmlands. The ground got lower and the snow got thinner until one day it gave out altogether. For the first time in two weeks they were able to light a fire. The boys leaned so close their damp clothes and blankets steamed. Dante doused his bread in water and let it warm until it wouldn’t crunch between his teeth for once. In the mountains and the hills they’d sometimes slept withou
t keeping a watch, but in these lowlands, with the spark of their camp visible for miles in the night, they split shifts between watch and sleep. The nights were coming on the longest of the year and even with three hours of guard duty spent sitting with their backs to the fire or pacing around the rim of light they’d wake before dawn, fixing breakfast, chatting idly, waiting for the ground to grow gray enough for the horses to see.
“That spire there,” Robert said the day they saw their first real town in these lands, pointing to the tall, dark finger of a temple sprouting from the middle of the city. “I’ve been there. Almost twenty years ago, but I was there.”
“Does that mean we should go around?” Blays said, giving Dante a smirk.
“What? Of course not. Anyone who’d remember that’s probably dead by now.” Robert rubbed his beard. “Or wouldn’t recognize my face, at least. I’m sure they’ve forgotten.”
“Oh,” Blays said.
From a few miles out it looked the same as the cities of the south. From half again as close it smelled the same. Once they drew near enough for the buildings to resolve from grayish lumps to individual structures, Dante could see some of the outlying houses seemed to be roofed with sod. Not even the poorest houses were thatched, like he’d always seen in the outer ring of Bressel or down by the docks; these homes were roofed with steeply piled dirt or tight-set planks or overlapped tiles of shale. The nobler manors and wares-houses were set from firm, chunky, mortared stone. It looked like a city that would last a thousand years after its last occupant had died.
“Looks all right to me,” Dante said.
“Wait a minute, I’m sure it will get horrible soon enough.” Robert took the lead toward the town.
“I mean, no fires. No fighting. No hordes of armed men. Where are Arawn’s faithful?”
“Maybe it’s already over,” Blays said.
Robert rubbed his mouth. “Could be it hasn’t started.”
“But this is much closer to Narashtovik,” Dante said. “That’s where Samarand and her council lives. Things should be ten times as crazy up here. What’s going on?”
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