by Zoë Archer
“Wait,” she said, sensing what he was about to do.
He cocked his head to one side, curious.
“Remember the legend?” she asked. “Once at the white lake, we were to lend our voices to song. Not sing, but howl. Wolves circle their prey when they hunt—just as the mountains here are in a circle. And when you howled a moment ago, the sound echoed from every peak. Save one. I’m not certain which, though. You should hear it better than I.”
He gave another soft bark, understanding. Turning so that he faced into the valley, the mountains encircling the ice field around him, he howled again. Then waited, listening.
As she had thought, the sound echoed around the valley, bouncing off each of the wolf-headed mountains. Except one. It stood on the far side of the ice field, but the strange and complete absence of sound returning from this peak was immediately evident to Nathan. Once he had confirmation, he shifted back into his human form, though it was difficult to corral the beast in him.
“That one,” he said, donning his clothes and nodding toward the mountain. “Not only did it not echo, the sound just moved straight past it. Almost as if it wasn’t there.”
“That is where the wolf pack is incomplete,” Astrid deduced.
He saw what he had to do. “And I must complete it.”
Easier in theory than practice to cross an ice field. The whole of the icy plain was riven with cracks and crevasses, faults that hid their depth beneath thin crusts of ice. A wrong step could send either Nathan or Astrid plummeting twenty or more feet into white nothingness. They tethered themselves with rope, and she shouldered her rifle in order to carry a short pickax to chop into the ice, should one of them start to fall. Only one set of grappettes in their gear, and Nathan insisted that Astrid wear them to keep her footing secure.
“What about you?” she asked.
“My footing’s better without shoes.” The ice on his bare feet felt cool but not bitter.
So she strapped the four-spiked grappettes onto the front of her boots, and, with the aid of her walking stick, they began to slowly, slowly cross the ice field toward the peak that did not echo.
The rope stretched between them as she would step, test the strength and depth of the ice with her walking stick, and then move on, Nathan behind her. His beast snarled at being led, yet the man knew it wasn’t a leash but a source of strength. Only a damn fool would go bounding across the ice field without guidance or care, and he wasn’t that.
“It’s good there hasn’t been any recent snowfall,” she said over her shoulder. “Hides the crevasses. Very dangerous. Makes every step uncertain.”
“I know something about uncertain steps,” he said, dry. “Every day in Victoria was that for me, a constant danger.”
Astrid threw a wry smile of understanding over her shoulder.
“This icy crossing,” he said. “It’s like life.”
“How?”
“Two people, bound together,” he said. “Doubt in each step should the world collapse underneath them. And if one falls…”
“The other would plunge down, too,” she finished.
“Or be the means of their salvation.”
She paused for a moment, giving him a charged look that sent heat and awareness sparking through him, before turning back to their trek.
She was careful as she moved over the glacial field, but confident. Alert, yet unafraid. Becoming, with each foot forward, more the girl she had been before the death of her husband, as well as the wise woman she had developed into afterward. Maybe Nathan had helped shape her change. He wanted that. He wanted to imprint himself onto her as she had marked and changed him.
His reverie snapped as a patch of ice Astrid tested suddenly buckled. A chasm opened. Slabs of ice shattered, spreading out in a lace of fractures. The ice beneath her feet shuddered, then fell. She fell with it, too fast to use her ax for purchase, too fast to speak even a word. The tip of her braid disappearing into the ice was the last he saw of her.
Nathan threw himself back to stop her fall. He dug his heels into the scraping ice and skidded, scrabbling for a foothold. He grabbed the rope leading from his waist, felt the burn of it sliding through his palms. Then there was a hard tug as the length of rope played out and she dangled in free fall. He gritted his teeth against the pull, the combined weight of her and her heavy pack suspended in midair.
Holding tight to the rope, he turned over and dragged to the edge of the chasm, knees digging into the slippery, granular ice. He braced himself above the opening in the ice, arms shaking as he wedged against the frozen breach, and looked down. Astrid hung over a crevasse that seemed to stretch down into oblivion. Hot terror coursed through Nathan as the rope between them groaned, threatening to split.
“Drop the pack,” he called.
She looked up, naked relief in her eyes, then frowned. “Our gear—”
“Your life,” he shot back.
Seeing that there was no choice, she began to tug the straps off her shoulders. Her efforts ran up the rope, pulling on him with sharp jerks, and he tensed his entire body to brace them both. Sweat chilled his back. He clenched his teeth with effort until his jaw throbbed. Then, relief. The pack fell from her, careening down into the icy void. He didn’t hear it land.
She still held her pickax and stuck it into her belt, her rifle over her shoulder.
“Climb,” he yelled.
Lips tight, she did. Hand over hand, she drew herself up the rope, while Nathan supported her weight over the opening. She was a hell of a lot lighter without that son-of-a-bitch pack. When she was high enough, he leaned back and hauled up the rope, arms aflame. After several agonizing minutes, her hands appeared at the edge of the crevasse. He grabbed her slender, strong wrists and pulled until he groaned.
Then she was out, and he wrapped his arms around her with enough force to make her gasp. Dimly, he realized he was shaking. But not from effort.
Her arms were also around his shoulders, her fingers interlaced behind his neck, as they both half lay, half sat at the rim of the chasm, breath coming in frantic puffs, hearts knocking against each other. Finally, she raised her head, and he pulled back enough to look into her flushed, lovely face.
“Another typical afternoon for the Blades of the Rose,” she murmured.
“Insanity.” He brushed his lips over hers.
She returned the kiss. “No better way to live.”
“Or die,” he countered.
Her look was surprisingly thoughtful, considering she had just been dangling over frozen death minutes earlier. Thoughtful, but the darkness that once might have overtaken her did not appear, and that gladdened him. She murmured, “That’s the price for an extraordinary life.”
“And we are extraordinary.”
“We are, without a doubt.”
The walking stick was lost to the icy recesses of the chasm, so the rest of the journey across the ice field to the base of the mountain proceeded at a crawl. He wanted to run, knowing the Heirs of Albion were barred only temporarily from the valley.
“And they’ll find a way in,” Astrid said with grim certainty. “It is merely a matter of when.”
But haste meant even more danger. A slow progression, then, much as Nathan, and his beast, hated it. The closer they got to the mountain without an echo, the more the animal in him lunged and clamored for release. He was already worn almost to breaking from the trek in, and recovering Astrid from her tumble into the ice. Forcing down his beast was yet another strain on his taxed will.
Almost at the base of the mountain, he halted. She turned when she felt the tightening of the rope.
“Here,” he rasped. Energy ran through him, demanding, alive. His body was a lightning rod, every cell vibrating, the beast pushing hard against the boundaries of his flesh and spirit.
“Where?”
Hand trembling, he pointed. To an enormous crevasse ten yards ahead.
They carefully approached the slender, deep fissure and peered in. The
opening was narrow, barely enough for a man to slide through, but they could see that, past the first feet through the thick ice, the crevasse opened wider. How much wider, neither could tell. Everything within looked blue and frigid.
“Down there, somewhere,” he said.
She lowered onto her stomach and looked into the crevasse. “I think I see a floor of some kind. Made of ice. And something embedded in the ice.”
Nathan removed his pack. “I’m going in.”
She looked up at him, alarmed. “No, you aren’t. I am.”
“I don’t want you down there.” Fear and anger hardened his words. “Too dangerous.”
Astrid surged to her feet, glowering, just as angry. “I appreciate the sentiment, but your chauvinism is unacceptable. Do not forget that I was a Blade for years, and, until a short while ago, you were merely an attorney. I have experience with Sources. You do not.”
“I won’t let you down there alone,” he snarled.
“And I won’t let you go by yourself, either.”
They glared at each other, at an impasse. She would never consent to wait for him. A compromise.
“We go together,” he finally gritted.
She didn’t answer, but went to his pack and pulled out another length of rope, along with some loop-topped metal spikes. “At least two-timing Edwin was prepared,” she muttered. She fastened one end of the rope in a strong knot through one loop. With the side of her ax, she hammered the spike into the ice several feet from the opening of the crevasse, then untied the rope from her waist and spliced it to the end of the other rope.
“I go down first,” he said, stepping forward and taking the pickax and remaining spikes from her. He tucked them into the waistband of his breechcloth.
The scowl she sent him was ferocious, but she did spare him a dispute. As he neared the entrance to the chasm, gripping the rope, her anger was replaced by apprehension. Nathan realized how she more easily showed her emotions now—very different from the stoic hunter he’d met at the trading post—and it pulled fiercely on his heart. Just before he lowered himself into the crevasse, she took one of his hands and gave it a hard squeeze, her lips compressed whitely into a line.
He held her gaze with his own, an unspoken promise, and then lowered into the entrance of the rift.
The first few feet pressed in close, hard walls of ice, and he hammered in a spike, through which he threaded the rope. He went down a little farther, and the opening widened. Gusts of glacial air spun around him, blue and mineral, and he found himself within an ice cavern some two dozen feet across. The walls shimmered and glowed without sunlight, sparkling as if made entirely of diamonds. As he climbed down the rope, Nathan thought he saw, within the swirling patterns in the ice, forms of wolves. Running, hunting, heads back in eternal howls. His throat tightened as his heart raced. Beautiful. This place was part of him, and it was beautiful.
The rope did not quite reach the icy floor. He jumped the few feet remaining, and, finding the floor solid and stable, called up to Astrid, “I’m down.”
He waited just below as she climbed down, ready to catch her should she fall. Yet she was strong, and didn’t lose her grip. Soon, they were in the ice cavern together, staring at the wolf shapes as their breath puffed.
“This is marvelous,” she breathed. “But where is the totem?”
He felt the pull, at his feet, and looked down. His heart shot up, and plunged. “There.”
She followed his gaze and murmured her own mixed blessing and curse.
Embedded several feet farther within the ice at their feet was the totem. A wolf tooth, the half length of his forearm, belonging to a wolf of mythic size. Nathan tried to imagine the beast to which it belonged. A being of legendary scope that walked the surface of the earth back when magic covered the globe, unhidden, omnipresent. Power emanated from the totem in unseen waves that shook Nathan to his core.
“Someone else had the same idea,” Astrid whispered.
Curled close to the totem, also trapped within the ice, lay a human body. Caught in its moments of final agony as it stretched its hand toward its prize, thwarted.
Thick ice made it difficult to tell whom the unfortunate treasure-seeker had been. Astrid knelt and wiped at the ice with her glove. “This body could date to last week or a thousand years ago.”
“Whoever, whenever he was, he failed.”
“We won’t,” she said. Absolute confidence energized her voice as she stood.
He warmed himself on the flame of her strength, knowing it to be the equal of his own. “We have to break through the ice.”
She stepped close, and in the shimmering icy light, her face became ethereal, like a star come down to earth. When she reached toward his breechcloth, excitement and confusion battled.
“Here?” he asked, raising a brow. Not that he had any objections. He’d have her whenever, wherever he could. Even an enchanted ice cavern. Still, the Heirs could arrive at any moment, and the wolf totem played hell with his self-control.
“I want another kind of cleaving.” With a wicked smile, she pulled the pickax from the band of his breechcloth and held it in both hands.
A rueful chuckle. “Cat,” he teased.
“This is a better claw,” she said, hefting the pickax.
“Sharper, not better.” He moved to take it from her, but she stepped back with a shake of her head.
“I’ll chop, you stand ready, should anything crop up. We don’t want what happened to our friend”—she nodded toward the body imprisoned in ice—“happening to us.”
Even though he was physically stronger than her, he let her experience in dealing with Sources guide them. He took a few paces back, giving her room. She positioned herself over the totem.
Astrid adjusted her grip on the handle, raised the ax, then brought it down with a forceful chop into the ice. Shards of ice flew, splintering mirrors. The chiming sound echoed off glassy crevasse walls. Tiny chips of ice sparkled on her cheeks, her eyelashes. Again and again she lifted and swung the ax, hacking into the hard, frozen surface, each blow hard and sure. Nathan wondered if he was a deviant because he found the sight of her wielding a pickax to be potently arousing.
He felt it before she did. A rumbling under the ice. “Stop,” he commanded.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth, than the ice over the totem erupted into spikes of ice. Nathan lunged forward and pulled her back, just as a spear shot up precisely where she had stood. Like an avenging spirit, the frozen body pitched upward, impaled on icy lances. Jagged pieces of ice stabbed through the corpse’s eye sockets. Its clothes were ancient, hides covered in beading and quills, but the body shattered into pieces as it was thrown aloft, pierced.
Nathan sheltered Astrid with his body, but they both stared as the totem rose up, borne upon the spikes. Liberated from its icy vault, the wolf tooth was even larger, nearly the length of Nathan’s forearm, and wickedly white and sharp. Someone had threaded a thin leather thong through its wider end.
The totem was free of the ice. At once, the ice stopped rising, leaving a circumference of frozen spikes, with the totem in the middle.
He and Astrid shared a wondering glance. Could it be so simple? The Source was being delivered right into their hands.
He started toward it. Her hand on his arm stopped him. “Look—the ice,” she breathed.
Groaning, splintering, the ice shifted. The gleaming spikes gathered around the totem, arranging themselves into—
“A mouth, a wolf’s mouth,” he whispered.
Like a wide-open jaw, the tooth and the icy spears gaped. Then shifted again. The jaw slammed shut as a huge wolf grew from the cavern floor, entirely formed of ice. The totem became one of its massive teeth. The rest was made of ice, but yet it had the motion and movement of a living wolf. It turned crystal eyes to Nathan and Astrid, its paws gouging the ice at its feet. Then growled. He’d never heard a sound like it, a sound of magic and threat, reverberating in the crevasse.
> Astrid pulled from Nathan’s arms, her gun out, ax clutched in her other hand.
Spikes of angry fur rose along the giant wolf’s back as it bared its teeth in a snarl. It crouched, ears upright, tail stretched out so that it scraped the icy walls. The unspoken language of hostility and dominance.
Nathan stepped forward. The damn beast would have to get through him to reach her, and that wouldn’t happen. He became pure instinct, barely having time to throw off his shirt and breechcloth before his own wolf burst free with a ferocious snarl.
It didn’t matter that the ice wolf dwarfed him. Bristling, Nathan faced the other wolf, his own sharp, ready teeth brandished. His growl thundered deep in his chest. Human thought vanished. Aggression, the need to protect Astrid and dominate this challenging wolf—all he knew and felt. He gave his beast complete freedom.
He and the ice wolf circled each other, their growls filling the cavern. The moment stretched, tensed.
With a snap of its immense jaws, the ice wolf feinted, aiming for Nathan’s throat. Astrid, behind him, cocked her gun and brandished the ax, ready to take on the other wolf if necessary. But Nathan wouldn’t yield, standing his ground. The other wolf’s ploy revealed to be merely that, a ploy. The wolf pulled back and hunkered into a crouch, as if taunting Nathan to try the same gambit.
Nathan lunged. He launched himself at the ice wolf with a growl. Its gullet, vitals. He would tear them out if he had to. Ice or flesh. Didn’t matter.
But Nathan’s teeth met only air.
The ice wolf’s crouch had shifted into a cower. Its tail lowered and ears flattened as its back curved into an arch. The wolf’s head sunk down to the ground, muzzle pointed up at Nathan.
When Nathan advanced, still growling, the other wolf rolled onto its back, tucking up its paws and exposing its stomach. A plaintive whine threaded from its throat.
“It’s submitting,” Astrid whispered, but Nathan knew instinctively.
The ice wolf opened its jaws wide, not to bite, but to reveal the totem within its mouth. It waited like this, patient.
