Ice Forged (The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga)

by Gail Z. Martin

“I’m ahead of you on this one, Mick. Verran and I have been buying chickens and rabbits to fill the hutches out back. Kestel’s been drying the fruit and vegetables we raised, as well as everything we could buy. We set aside some extra sacks of wheat and flour as well, and paid a hedge witch to spell them against mice. Made some good homemade wine as well. With the gibbed fish you and Piran brought home, we should be able to go a while, perhaps most of the winter.”

  Blaine nodded. “Good to hear. Piran was going to set some traps for fox and wild rabbits.” He gave a wan grin. “And let me guess, Kestel’s been making extra offerings to the gods.”

  Dawe smiled. “How did you guess? The last sheep we slaughtered, Kestel made tallow candles, and offered the first two to Esthrane and Torven. She told me she was counting on favor from Esthrane for the last of the crops and for healthy herds this winter, and to Torven for mild storms.”

  Blaine snorted. “After the storm Piran and I just saw, maybe Kestel needs to leave better offerings.”

  Esthrane, one of Charrot’s two consorts, was honored at handfastings and at both planting and harvest. Esthrane was revered among Edgeland’s colonists during the unending days of the white nights. Torven, Charrot’s other consort, ruled the long dark.

  Dawe’s expression turned serious. “The mood around here has changed since you and Piran went out with the fleet.” He nodded toward the laughing and clapping revelers. “You can’t tell by tonight, but there’s something on the wind. Prokief’s nervous, and cracking down.”

  Blaine drained the rest of his ale. “I plan to stay out of it.”

  Dawe met his gaze. “That might not be possible.”

  The music changed tempo and the dancers drifted back to the edges of the festival area. Light’s End, the festival at the end of Edgeland’s six months of daylight, was also the customary time for handfastings before the long months of darkness. As the music took on a more processional tone, three young women, each accompanied by an older woman, walked into the center of the festival area. Each of the young women wore a crown woven of straw and dried flowers and each carried a small bough of fir. As the crowd watched, three nervous men walked to stand alone in front of their intended brides.

  “As I recall,” Dawe drawled, “you looked about that scared yourself when you made your handfasting with Selane.”

  Blaine could not resist a chuckle. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  The men did as they had been instructed, and each withdrew a hunting knife in a scabbard wrapped in a length of dyed rope or braided cloth, and presented the blade laid across their open palms to their brides. Back in Donderath, the ceremony would have involved a presentation of a sword-gift, but under Prokief’s rule, swords were reserved solely for the prison guards and the city patrols.

  The brides accepted the gift and passed the knives to the older women who accompanied them, who handed each of the brides a knife-gift for the grooms. On the pommel of each knife was a ring, and as the crowd cheered, the women who had accompanied the brides ceremoniously presented the bride and groom with their rings, then held their hands together and loosely bound their wrists with the lengths of rope. As the couples raised their twined hands, the crowd cheered once more, and Verran and the musicians began to play a familiar song. The crowd began to clap and sing, and the newly wedded couples danced one pass around the open area before the onlookers crowded toward them, joining in the dance.

  The crunch of snow under running feet caught Blaine’s attention. A dark figure barreled past the wagon where Blaine and Dawe stood, hurtling into the crowd.

  “Get your hands off her!” A tall young man with a shock of dark hair hurled himself at one of the new grooms and knocked him to the ground. The groom, a man who looked to be several years older than his bride, struggled to his feet as the girl screamed. Well-wishers stepped back and the dark-haired man swung a solid punch that knocked the groom back several steps, but the groom came back swinging and connected solidly with his attacker’s chin.

  Friends of the bride went after the attacker, while the groom’s friends came running. Across the clearing, Blaine could see Piran turn away from his card game to take note of the altercation.

  “Come on,” Blaine muttered to Dawe. “We’d better stop this before we end up with the guards called.”

  Blaine and Dawe waded into the fray from one side, as Piran shouldered his way in from the other. What had begun as a fight between two men had rapidly escalated into a free-for-all. The groom was holding his own, backed up by a handful of friends. The dark-haired young man who began the fight seemed to have taken the worst of the damage, as his eye was swelling and he had a growing bruise on his cheek, but he was still on his feet and surrounded by four angry—and more muscular—friends.

  Blaine tackled the dark-haired man, while Piran lunged at the groom. The dark-haired man struggled and twisted, but Blaine held him fast. Piran’s man was taller and heavier, but no match to Piran’s experience as a soldier and bodyguard. With the help of Dawe and some of the other men who waded into the fray, the altercation came to an abrupt halt.

  Blaine let go of the dark-haired man, who had stopped struggling, but Blaine drew his hunting knife from the sheath at his belt, and held it up as a warning. He turned to the groom, still restrained in Piran’s iron hold, and then looked back at the attacker.

  “What in the name of the gods were you doing?” Blaine asked the sullen man.

  The dark-haired man glared at Blaine. “Essie was supposed to be betrothed to me,” he spat. “She’s been pressured into this,” he said with a glare toward the would-be groom. “She doesn’t want to marry him.”

  “Von,” the bride begged, “don’t do this. Please. Let it go. I’ll… I’ll be all right,” she said with a nervous glance toward the groom. The groom had stopped struggling, but he was glaring at Von with a look that told Blaine the matter was far from settled.

  One of the women stepped up. She was old enough to be the bride’s mother, and wore the somber-hued clothing favored by the more mature women of the colony. In a place where none of the convicts had blood relatives, the older women banded together to look out for the youngest of the colonists, and to care for any of the colonists’ orphaned or abandoned children. It was the “wise women” who negotiated the bride prices for young women, who saw to the births and made funeral arrangements for the dead. Regardless of what infraction had landed them in Velant’s icy grip, the wise women had become the keepers of civilization beyond the prison’s walls.

  “The bride price was fair,” the woman said, squaring her shoulders and meeting the dark-haired man’s gaze defiantly. She had the raw-boned build of a farmwife, with hardship and sorrow etched in the lines of her angular face. Blaine guessed her to be somewhere in her third decade, which placed her among the elders. Few in Edgeland lived much beyond four decades.

  “It’s not about the damned coins,” Von said, anger and frustration clear in his voice. “Dilan’s a brawler and a drunkard,” Von said with a contemptuous look at the groom, who had emerged from the fight unscathed but had inflicted serious damage to Von. “She’s afraid of him, afraid to turn him down. You’ve got to stop this,” he said, looking to Blaine and then to the wise women in appeal.

  Essie, the young bride, stood between the two men. “It’ll be all right, Von,” she said, an edge of desperation in her voice. She cast a worried look back toward Dilan, who glowered in response. Essie dropped her voice and moved closer to Von. “You can’t protect me from him, Von. He’ll get what he wants, marriage or no marriage.”

  Blaine and Piran exchanged a glance at her words. Blaine stepped in front of Dilan, his hunting knife still in his hand. “I killed the man who took advantage of my sister,” Blaine said in a low voice. He fixed Dilan with a cold gaze. “I don’t much like men who don’t treat their women well. I can make sure the problem doesn’t go any further.”

  Dilan’s gaze flickered between the knife in Blaine’s hand and the hard set to Blaine’
s jaw. Piran still stood behind Dilan.

  “I wouldn’t push your luck, laddie,” Piran muttered to Dilan. “What’s one more dead man when he’s done time in Velant for murder already?”

  Dilan glared at Blaine. “What I do in my own household is my own business.”

  Blaine shrugged. “Maybe. But out here in the wilderness, ‘accidents’ can happen very easily. Might be me, might be someone else, but we’ve all got warning now what you’re up to. If Essie turns up hurt, Von won’t have to come after you by himself. Do you understand?”

  One of the wise women came forward. She gave Essie a shrewd look. “Bad enough to have been Prokief’s prisoner, without being forced into another prison,” she said. “Say now if you want no part of this.”

  Essie was trembling, but she shook her head. “No. I don’t want to do this.” She looked at Dilan. “He told me—”

  “Shut your mouth!” Dilan commanded. Blaine moved forward to thrust the knife under Dilan’s chin.

  “I’d like to hear what the lady has to say,” Blaine drawled, meeting Dilan’s eyes. Dilan glared, but said nothing.

  Essie straightened and collected her courage. “He told me that if I didn’t marry him, he’d find me and kill me,” she said, looking defiantly at Dilan.

  The wise woman took out a small pouch of coins from her apron, and forced it into Dilan’s hands. “Here’s your bride price. The marriage is undone.”

  Dilan scowled at the wise woman. There was a killing glint in his eyes. “This isn’t over,” Dilan muttered.

  Piran laid a hand on Dilan’s shoulder, poking the point of his blade into the man’s back. “Oh, yes it is,” Piran said quietly. “The guards don’t go looking for missing colonists. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave the young lady alone and go about your business.”

  Dilan jerked free of Piran’s hold. His friends had already melted away in the crowd, but more men had come to stand behind Von. With a curse, Dilan turned away and strode off into the night.

  Blaine did not sheath his knife until Dilan was gone. Piran and Dawe came to stand beside Blaine as the onlookers drifted back to the festival and Verran’s musicians struck up a lively tune.

  “How in Raka do I always end up in the middle of these things?” Blaine muttered to no one in particular.

  “You’ve earned a reputation for a cool head and a hard fist,” Dawe said with a shrug. “And surviving six winters up here is no small feat.”

  “I could use another drink,” Blaine said, heading off with Piran and Dawe behind him. A small crowd gathered around the wagon where the tavern master had his barrels. Blaine glanced back toward the newlyweds, who were dancing in the center of the clearing with their friends, but Dilan had withdrawn to the edges of the crowd.

  “Been no word of them at all,” a man dressed in the skins and furs of an Edgeland trapper was saying as the tavern master poured him an ale. “They should have been back by now, since they left before my party went out onto the ice.”

  “Missing some hunters?” Blaine asked as he waited for his drink.

  “It’s more than that,” the trapper said indignantly. His skin was rough and reddened by the harsh winds, and his dark hair was greasy, held down under a fur hat. “The lead trapper on one of those teams is married to a friend of mine. Amren is a good man, and a fine tracker. He knows the ice out there like a fox. So when he didn’t meet up with us like he promised, we went looking for him.” The trapper leaned forward. “We found their tracks. They went so far and just ended.”

  Piran frowned. “Fall into a crack in the ice?”

  The trapper shook his head. “No cracks to be seen. No animal tracks, either. I’ve seen the great bears wandering the ice. They come across the sea on the ice floes, and leave the same way. But that’s what I’m telling you—there were no tracks at all.”

  “That’s not possible,” Blaine said as he accepted a full tankard of ale from the tavern master.

  “Aye, that’s what we said. But it’s grown strange out on the ice. I’ve been hunting here for five years now and I thought I had seen all that the wilds of Edgeland had to show me,” the hunter said. His eyes had grown wide, and real fear tinged the man’s voice. “We camped near where Amren and the others had disappeared. We thought they might come back, or that we’d get some idea what happened to them. That night it was as if the world went wild around us.”

  Blaine leaned forward. Something about the man’s tale prickled at the back of his mind.

  “The lights in the sky were red that night. Gods bless me, I’ve never seen the like of it. Looked as if all the world was aflame. And it wasn’t just the lights. It was the magic.”

  “Magic?”

  The trapper nodded. “I’ve got no more than a hedge witch. I have a bit of tracking magic that helps me find the animals and a wee bit that can stop a fox or a rabbit in its tracks to get off a shot. But that night, Yadin strike me if I lie, I could feel so much magic around me I thought I’d suffocate. Truly, I couldn’t draw breath. I don’t know what the others felt, but I could feel the air crackle and the ground under me shake.

  “We gathered our things and ran,” the trapper said, taking a large gulp of his ale. “I’ve never run like that from anything, not even the guards who sent me to this godsforsaken rock. But we all ran—and that’s when we found out what became of the other ones.”

  “How?”

  The trapper looked from face to face before he spoke. “The lights took them.”

  Blaine leaned back, skeptical. “The lights took them?”

  The trapper nodded. “There were eight of us who went looking for Amren. All eight of us made camp at the place where we saw the lights. But only six made it out.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  The trapper’s face was tense, and his jaw tightened. “We don’t know. Sure as the gods are my witness, we were all together when the lights started and the magic thickened around us. I saw all of my men when we began running. But when we reached a point where the magic felt like it lifted, two of the men were gone.”

  “No shouts, no calls for help?”

  The trapper shook his head. “Nothing. But I couldn’t help wondering, since the magic went away at the same time that they disappeared, whether it got what it wanted.”

  “The magic?” Blaine pressed.

  “Aye.” The trapper nodded. “The magic. It took the slowest of our group, the two who fell behind the others. And then it disappeared, just like they did. Just like Amren’s group.”

  The crowd around the ale wagon peppered the trapper with questions, but Blaine turned away. Dawe and Piran caught up to him. “Some story,” Piran observed. “Any truth to it, you reckon?”

  Blaine shrugged. “Could be.”

  “Prokief would love to get his hands on magic that could make people disappear,” Dawe muttered. “I wonder if the warden-mages have felt anything strange.”

  “Not that we’re likely to hear about it,” Piran added.

  Blaine grimaced. “True. But Prokief would know about it. He already imagined that everyone was out to get him—”

  “We were,” Piran muttered.

  “So if he finds out there’s strange magic afoot, or worse, if people begin disappearing…” Blaine said.

  “He’ll blame it on the colonists,” Dawe finished. “He won’t care how it happened, he’ll be looking for someone to take it out on and he’ll figure it’s a plot to unseat him.”

  “Then we’d better have a plan,” Piran said. “Because I have a feeling this is going to get worse before it gets better.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THINGS ARE GETTING WORSE INSIDE VELANT.” Verran Danning put his case with his pennywhistle and his flute down on the table. “I heard the guards talking down at the tavern. The warden-mages haven’t been keeping the new convicts in line, so the guards have had to crack down.”

  “Is it just Prokief’s mages?” Blaine mused. “I’d love to know if something’s aff
ecting all the magic, or just the warden-mages.”

  Verran shrugged. “I use a small amount of magic when I play. It’s not much of a talent, but I can put the crowd at ease and give them a pleasant feeling toward me.” He grinned. “You’d be surprised how much of a difference a little thing like that can make in the coin I get for the night.” Verran licked his lips. “The last couple of times I’ve played, the magic felt ‘slippery.’ Sorry that I can’t explain it better.” He paused. “I did get it to work, finally. But in all the years I’ve used magic, I’ve never had that happen.”

  Dawe leaned back in his chair, stretching his long legs. “You know, I was working with some heated copper out in the shed a couple of days ago, and got a nasty burn for my trouble.” He held up his right hand with a half-healed burn on the palm. “I’ve worked with hot silver since I apprenticed at twelve years old, and I never did that before.” He bit at his lip as he thought.

  “When it happened, I blamed myself for not being careful. But like Verran, I use a touch of magic in my work—always have. Oh, it’s not big magic, not like the warden-mages or even the healers, but it helps me do just a bit more than talent or skill would allow. It’s so much a part of me that I rely on it. And I remember thinking, when I burned myself, that it was just like the magic slipped away from me for a moment.”

  Blaine had been leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. He pushed himself away and began to pace. “From what I’ve seen down in Bay-town lately, it’s like there’s been a full moon every night. People are on edge, acting crazy. Ifrem, down at the tavern, told me there’s been more fights in the last few weeks than he remembers in all of last year.” He shook his head. “I’ve had a headache for a week that won’t go away, and I must have heard a dozen people down at the tavern say the same thing.”

  A loud cry broke the night stillness.

  “That sounded like Kestel,” Blaine said, pushing back from the table so quickly his chair nearly fell.

  Piran also was on his feet. “Was that a scream?”