Ember and Ash

by Pamela Freeman

  Sing! Elva cried to Atos, and he began to sing, turning to the others to encourage them, to lead them, to bring them into one voice, as they needed to be to repel the wraiths. But turning away left a gap and one wraith slid through the window, clicking its claws, bits of ice breaking off with sharp cracks as it forced its way through. Atos turned, but too late—the claws were outstretched, reaching for him.

  His wife threw herself between them, crying, “No!” and the wraith’s claws went through her chest, right to the heart, her blood freezing in an instant, her face turning blue.

  Elva felt Atos’s heart stop for a long moment as he watched her fall, and then thud again, harder than ever, as anger took him. He screamed revenge and snatched a chair from under a woman nearby. She fell on the floor, scrabbling backward, away from the wraith who had come wholly within the room. Atos swung the chair over his head with impossible strength and smashed it down on the wraith. The wraith fell to the floor. Another man, emboldened, grabbed a hoe from a corner and attacked another wraith at the window. Then the woman on the floor picked up a bowl and broke it, using a long shard to stab into the wraith on the floor.

  It writhed and screamed—a dark, low sound that made Elva sick to her stomach. Then it melted. Its fellow at the window cried out and slid away, and Atos closed his eyes and sank to the floor, his hands gentling his wife’s body, gathering her up to hold the cold, cold flesh close to his own heart.

  Sing, Elva urged him. Sing, or they will be back. Slowly, painfully, Atos relayed her message, and the villagers began to hum. The woman who had stabbed the wraith led them, her shard shining in the streaks of light that came through the shutters. Shining clean, as though it had been new-washed.

  On the Ice

  She was a Last Domain girl—cold and snow and ice were as familiar to her as her heartbeat. She knew how to wind her scarf around her face to keep the air from freezing her lungs; she knew how to test the ice in front of her for cracks, for the drumming which was the most terrifying sound of all, because it meant a hollow drop under a thin cover; she knew how to pace herself, how to slide her feet forward rather than lift and drop them, how to work her arms so that her thighs weren’t doing all the pushing. She knew how to survive.

  But that was in the Last Domain, where ice had an end—where the end of the trek was home, and safety, and warmth.

  Well, there would be warmth enough, if they reached Fire.

  The hoofbeats behind them thudded and stopped just as they reached the top of the ice cliff. She stuck her pole in for balance and turned to watch. They were high—higher than a spear could reach, but perhaps not out of arrowshot.

  Tern had taken cover behind one of the huge boulders which the glacier had pushed out in front of it, and he was waiting to see what their enemy would do. They didn’t see him.

  It was Ari, with Nyr close behind. Other men, too—she saw Urno on the edges, his eyes red. He and Bren had laughed together as they danced, she remembered, and felt guilt strike her in the heart.

  Ari looked up at them with consternation as well as anger.

  “Come down!” he shouted. “Come down! No one is allowed on the ice!”

  So he could speak their language, too, although he had pretended not to.

  There was silence. Ash was going to let her deal with this, which was as it should be, but it still made her feel lonely.

  “I have a task,” she said loudly. “I must go to Fire Mountain. And there is something you should know, Ari Hárugur King. The fire in your hearth, the warmth of the bathing pools, these are not gifts from the Ice King. They come from Fire Mountain.”

  “Blasphemy!” a man shouted, brandishing his spear.

  Ari looked at her strangely, and there was no other sound but the slow creaking of the ice.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We are bound to serve the Ice King. That was the ancient bargain, and it stands. We survive.”

  “Just,” she said.

  “Enough to make your people fear us!” he retorted.

  “How many people have died to ensure that? How many of your people?”

  Something crossed his face—a spasm of grief, of memory?

  “We are bound to serve Him,” Ari repeated heavily. “If you had met Him, you would know why.”

  “I have met Fire,” Ember replied. “And I will never serve Him!”

  He blinked.

  “Then why—?”

  It was time for truth, as Ash kept telling her.

  “He has taken back all the fires in my domain,” she said, her words dropping down like slow leaves into water. “My people will freeze this winter unless I bring back fire from the mountain. He has said it.”

  Ari’s head came up, and she knew he was calculating how this changed the balance between the two domains.

  “They will still be ready to repel your attacks,” she said quickly. “My mother will still predict where you will come, and when.”

  He nodded. “And you are the witch’s daughter,” he said slowly.

  Tern had been edging around the boulder he hid behind. From the corner of her eye, Ember saw him ready a stone in the slingshot and stand, arm back. He was aiming at Urno.

  “No, Tern!” she called. Ari whipped around, spear in hand, and sent that spear straight into Tern’s chest.

  It pierced him. He dropped the sling and his arms went wide. He fell back, slowly it seemed, spreadeagled on the harsh rocks.

  Ember screamed as he fell, but no sound came. Ash and Cedar cried out. She was on her knees, hands clenched, imploring whatever gods that could hear to make it not be true, to make Tern get up, and live.

  Ari looked up at her, a mixture of satisfaction and grief on his face. One of his men handed him another spear and he took it without looking, as if they had done this a thousand times before. As though a thousand men of the Domains had fallen to his spear. And perhaps they had.

  “You took Bren from me,” Ari said heavily. “My oldest friend, my councillor, my most valuable man. This boy’s death is light repayment for that but I say, the debt is paid.”

  Ember felt again how the knife had gone into Bren’s side, how it had balked at his shirt and then gone through, how it had slid easily into flesh and up under bone to find his heart. She remembered how he had fallen, as Tern had fallen, and she saw that Ari’s face wore the same silent scream of grief as hers. Worse, perhaps.

  This was another lesson her father had given her. Sometimes, he had said, there is nothing to be done because what has happened cannot be undone. Then you must find the best way forward.

  She couldn’t speak agreement; she couldn’t say out loud that Tern’s death had been justified. But she bowed her head in acknowledgment to Ari.

  Astonishingly, he dropped the hand with his spear and let it rest by his side. “The Ice King will deal with you,” he said, almost sadly, “and then your people will die, and we will take your land.”

  Fear gripped her so hard she could barely breathe. It sounded so likely, so inevitable. But Ash was there, shaking his head, helping her up.

  “You forget, there is Fire to contend with. Do you think He would bring her all this way just so His enemy can kill her?”

  That was true. That was true. Her heart began to beat again, swift and light.

  Ari’s mouth twisted awry.

  “Then, it is between the two of them,” he said. “So be it. If you return…”

  She stood as proudly as she could. Remember Sigurd, she thought, and raised her chin, stilled her shaking hands.

  “When I return,” Ember said, putting every ounce of rank and privilege into her tone, “we will discuss the future of our two lands.”

  He nodded, glancing at Nyr, and she realized that he understood her. Halda must have spoken to him. Her father had done his best to prepare her for this, for the moment when she ceased to be a person and became a bargaining chip, but it was hard, none the less. She didn’t even like Nyr all that much. But the futures of two peoples were more
important than her personal preferences. Stepping onto the ice, raising her head above the edge of that cliff and seeing the endless expanse, the deathly eternal white, had shown her, finally, where her duty lay. Gods of field and stream, she prayed, help your daughter.

  “Good luck,” Ari said, oddly enough, and raised a hand in farewell. He said something to his men who, apart from Nyr, hadn’t understood their conversation. It sounded like, “The King will deal with her.” They looked dissatisfied, but Nyr said something sharply and they shrugged. The man who had accused her of blasphemy—odd that it was the same word in both languages—glared at her and spat on the ground.

  Then they simply rode away and there was only the ice.

  There was less wind here than Ember had expected, just a light breeze which tossed Ash’s hair, but the cold was fierce and the morning sun, reflecting from the ice, brought tears to her eyes. She wrapped one layer of her scarf over her eyes—there was still plenty of light coming through.

  At least they could see their destination.

  For the first time she realized the pressure which had pushed Acton to invading the Domains. The Ice King had taken everything—not as winter did, for a time, but for always. Ari’s people lived on the edges as guillemots fought for nesting space on a seacliff, jostling for a toehold. They had nowhere to go, no way of expanding, of feeding their people, of doing more than survive.

  It was not right.

  Acton, she felt sure, would never have brought that rockfall down, sealing them on the other side. Acton would have let them all come through, bit by bit, settling throughout the Domains. The Last Domain hadn’t been settled until a few generations ago—there was plenty of room without unhousing the original inhabitants. But there she came up against the truth of history, which was that the original inhabitants—her mother’s people—had been massacred and dispossessed and forced into servitude and fear. It just would have happened faster if the Ice King’s people had been allowed through.

  “History is over,” her father had said to her more than once. “Our job is to acknowledge its truth and then build for the future.”

  So.

  They had left thirteen days ago, if she had counted right. There was still time to get home before Snowfall—if they could return as quickly, if the horses were still there when they came back, if the Forest didn’t stop them, if Ash didn’t fly away with that shagging blue crane, if Ari didn’t change his mind… too many things to worry about. She put one foot in front of another, following in Ash’s footsteps, hearing Cedar coming behind, concentrating everything on simply getting to Fire Mountain and doing what she had to do.

  Ash took the lead. He was their eyes and ears, finding safe passage among the great clefts and crevasses, the sudden chasms and hidden traps of the ice kingdom.

  Calling them into a huddle, he expressed surprise at how many tunnels and crevasses there were.

  “As though it’s been carved,” he said in puzzlement. Ember wondered whether there was a pattern to it—whether the Ice King had written a message in ice so large that only he could read it. Or perhaps Fire, from the mountain, could see it all.

  “Follow exactly where I step,” Ash said. The leader. Ash was from the mountains, accustomed to ice and snow… If Holly had been with them, would she still have led?

  The Forest seemed like a lifetime ago, a different world. She had hated the everlasting shade of the trees, but now she would welcome the respite from glare. A headache was building behind her eyes, sharp and aching at the same time.

  There were a thousand traps here, and many of them came from inside—lights dancing on her eyeballs where there were none; tears freezing her lids together; hands fumbling at the pole as they lost feeling. Her own desire to see a safe path would have made her reckless, but she curtailed her natural inclination to go first, to go fast, to hurry, and submitted to Ash’s authority, stepping only where he had stepped.

  They stopped regularly for rests, and to drink the little water that was still liquid in their flasks. On one halt, Ember looked back to see how pitifully short the distance they had come. Not worth thinking about. She looked forward, instead, to where the mountain seemed as far away as ever. But there was something different. More clouds, perhaps, around the summit? No. The clouds were darker.

  “Smoke,” Ash said in her ear, making her jump. “He is building His fire.”

  “To welcome us, I hope,” she said, aware of his warm breath against her skin, his hand on her arm. She waited, but the flame didn’t sweep through her as it had every other time he had come close. There was no sudden liquidity in her bones, no shortness of breath. She almost whooped with relief. Out here, on the ice, Fire had no power. He could not inflame her with false desire, not speed her heart, even a little. She was free of it; free of the sickness of fake need, of induced lust, washed clean by cold. Ash was simply Ash again, friend and cousin and stalwart support.

  Happy, she turned to him, their heads close, and smiled into his eyes. There was a moment, a heartbeat, when the breath mingled between them, warm as homecoming, and then his eyes darkened and he caught his breath. Her heart turned over in her chest; a hand clenched her lungs so she could not breathe. Desire surged through her that was different, completely different to the manufactured lust Fire had plagued her with. Clear, aching, it filled her to her fingertips, to her toes, like warm mead, sweet honey, golden and molten and painful because of its tenderness.

  Tears filled her eyes and Ash raised one gentle hand to brush them from her cheeks before they could freeze. Gods, she was undone. She had been fighting lust all this time when it was love she should have been wary of.

  She raised her own hand to his cheek and his face changed, seeming almost like a stranger’s, need and yearning in his eyes. She moved closer, just a little, just so she could feel his warmth against her, and as she did he said something under his breath, an oath, something, and pulled her to him, his hand against her back, the other sliding up and underneath her hat. The touch of his fingers against her neck made her weak, made her feel like crying. Him, too? Love? For her?

  Ember turned her face up to him. His mouth was cold; her lips were chapped too and on the first kiss their skin snagged; but then it softened, their lips warmed, clung: eager, desperate, sweet.

  Vaguely, she heard Cedar say, “Oh, not now you two!” and felt Ash smile against her mouth before he kissed her again, his breathing faster than before, his hands a little unsteady.

  She would stay with him forever, she thought in a daze, tasting him. They could live on one of her father’s estates, one she would inherit in any case. They would raise a family, love, be merry, be happy, away from the fort and everyone who disapproved. Her father had married whom he chose, and so could she.

  “Let’s go,” Cedar ordered.

  Reluctantly, they pulled apart, staring at each other. Ash’s hazel eyes were dark with desire and wonderment. She smiled at him, just a little because that was all she could manage; she wanted to cry with happiness. His mouth moved in response, but it wasn’t quite a smile.

  She gulped a breath as Ash turned away, clearing his throat.

  “Yes. Let’s go,” he said. But he kept hold of her hand for the first few steps, until it became clear that she needed him to break the trail for her.

  Only the habit of the last hour saved her; she trod in his footsteps because her feet had learned that path; she kept her head down because she needed to block out the glare; she kept going because otherwise, otherwise she was lost in a fluttering confusion, an insane world where Ash and she, she and Ash…

  She wished she really believed it was possible.

  Palisade Fort, the Last Domain

  How can wraiths attack?” Arvid demanded furiously. “What about the compact?”

  Martine shook her head. “The compact is against air, water, fire and earth beings. We’ve never needed one against ice…”

  Her voice faltered. “Poppy. Saffron. They’re both north of here.”
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br />   Elva listened and waved reassurance, and then signaled for them both to start singing. They would need everyone. Everyone.

  The braid in her mind was growing thicker and more intricate as she brought in the new strands, from Salt and Oakmere and Purple Lights and Tinderbox and the Plantation and Brown Hill and Marsh River.

  Each a different texture and color, in her mind they were brown and blond and red and black, Traveler and Acton’s people, townsfolk and farmer, woodster and crafter, officer and soldier.

  This is the first time, she thought. The first time ever we have been bound together, with no distinction made. It made her vaguely proud, but a small part of her wondered what changes that would bring, if any. She could imagine her sister-in-law, Drema, advising dryly, “Don’t get your hopes up, lass. People don’t like changing the way things work.”

  But now, but now… now she wove them all in, every color, every kind, and they were together, singing together, swaying together, a whole domain of unity. This was the time. She focused on Purple Lights, where Atos was still trying to sing while he nailed a board across the window, sobs interrupting his song.

  As he did so, the door burst open to a flurry of sleet and the ice wraiths surged through.

  SING! she shouted at him but he was too frightened, too slow. She was losing her ability to sense him. Help me, she begged the gods, but they didn’t answer her. Then she felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder, and her mother’s calm strength enter her mind. She reached out to Atos. Sing, she begged him. The wraiths were playing as a cat plays with prey, making little feints to goad him further. Atos swallowed against a dry throat and hummed one note. Just one, but it was the note that everyone, everyone in the domain, was humming at that instant, and Elva gathered up the strength from Poppy and Saffron and Thyme and all the others and sent it down that note into the shabby hut at Purple Lights, sent it through the frailest vessel they had, an old, old man, and he put his hands out as though to ward off the wraiths.