by Amy Lane
“Aldam,” she said as his cleanup efforts became more cosmetic, “what did you do?”
“Remember the frog?” he asked, taking another section of shirt and pouring water on it from a flask at his side. He applied the shirt to her knees that had been skinned on the hard ground as she’d fallen. She nodded her head, feeling stupid.
“Yes, I remember.” They had needed to dissect frogs in school, and although Roes hadn’t gone through school with Torrant and Aldam, Aldam’s reluctance to “break something” just to see how it worked was legendary. Eventually he had been persuaded to take the frog apart, but first, Professor Austin had been persuaded to find a frog that was already dead.
Aldam moved to her other knee, and she hissed as he pulled gravel from it. Around them, the hold folk were returning in twos and threes, bearing the occasional wounded member with them. Fredy got to them first, four trussed and gagged guards on a lead rope in his hands, and he and the prisoners ogled the remains of Aldam’s only kill with shocked breaths and numb eyes.
“I just thought of the frog,” Aldam was saying calmly as Fredy asked, “Aldam?” in a surprisingly thready voice.
Aldam looked up at him, his summer-blue eyes as steely as the winter sky above them. “He hit Roes” was the simple answer. “You shouldn’t hit Roes.”
Fredy and the hold folk all nodded vigorously in agreement, looking at Roes’s weary smile for reassurance. “Right, got it, no hitting Roes. Ever.”
The men on the lead rope looked at the remains one more time and then at the hold healer who had made the kill. Without a word, their eyes rolled back in their heads and they passed out.
“Good,” Grand Wind said ruminatively, earning Fredy’s look of approval. “It will make it easier to give them a story for Rath.”
“They’ll wake up at night with nightmares,” Aldam reproved, and Fredy’s even-toothed smile was as carnivorous as wolves.
“Like he said: good. Now let’s get this all cleaned up before we let the children out, shall we?” And the bemused, triumphant Goddess folk began cleaning up their home, making it safe for the winter.
A Few Difficult Jobs
CWYN HAD heard the story of Triannon, and Torrant and Aylan’s terrible, frantic, two-day ride to get four days’ worth of journeying done, but he’d always been more concerned with what had happened after. The battle had always seemed the scariest, most interesting part, and the ride had been secondary—a passing inconvenience in the story of two heroes.
The six-day journey to Wrinkle Creek felt like a thousand years of heaving, exhausted horse, screaming stomach, and cold damned toes. His brain was crammed, exploding with visions of what could be happening to Roes and Aldam and what could happen to his family if these soldiers raged unchecked. Every breath was an agony of cold, but worse than the cold, it was a crucifixion of anxiety, a terrible flashing etch on the inside of his eyes, detailing the terrible things that swords and steel could do to the bodies of the people he loved. Every moment of rest felt like a squadron of horses thundering over his chest.
Which is why it only took him four of the six days.
Roes’s gelding—yet another foal of Courtland’s—had been a real trooper, but even the sturdy black bay was stumbling as Cwyn recognized the cedar-treed landmarks of Wrinkle Creek. By the time he found the path that led to the healer’s home, he was on foot, leading the poor, exhausted animal through two feet of new snow.
He didn’t realize how tired he was himself until his foot slipped on an icy patch under the snow, and he went down hard on one knee. Swearing loudly enough to bring Pansy, the dark-eyed, tart-tongued girl who worked for the clinic, outside, he swore some more when his cold, shaking hands dropped poor Artie’s reins.
Pansy took the horse from him with brisk movements and not a little sympathy. “Go inside—Prof Austin’ll take a look at your knee. You look awful, Terror—what’ve you been doing to yourself?”
“S… sold… ier… s…,” Cwyn chattered, and Pansy, who was not stupid, and who had some idea of where Torrant, Aldam, and Roes had gone when they left, started calling for the Professor even as she took the horse to the small barn, and Cwyn stumbled up the steps to the kitchen of the clinic.
Professor Austin’s middle years were wearing longer on him these days, and plenty of white had infiltrated his dark hair and faded out the stark contrast of his Goddess streak, but he was by no means old and slow yet. The professor had taught all of the Moon family who’d gone through Triannon—Torrant, Aldam, Aylan, Trieste, and Roes—although he had only ever met Cwyn in passing. But he’d heard plenty about the family miscreant and had formed certain expectations of the “little terror.”
The gangly, sober, frantic child sitting on Aldam’s sturdily built chair in the cozy, bare-boarded kitchen was hardly the disaster he’d been expecting, but he did bring disastrous news.
“How far behind you are they?” Austin asked after pacing a bit. Pansy came in and busied herself with tea, handing Cwyn a mug of it first and then passing an obviously treasured mug into Austin’s absent grasp.
“They should be here late tomorrow,” Cwyn replied on a satisfying gulp of scalding tea.
“Which way do you think they’ll come?” Austin sipped at his tea, then remembered himself and thanked Pansy.
“There’s only one way, really—the main road, the one that goes past Wrinkle Creek and on to Triannon, right?”
Austin smiled, a foxy, tricksy smile at odds with his weathered, comfortable face. “Tell me, young Terror, did you have to pass over a bridge to get over the narrow section of the river?”
Cwyn blinked. “Yes, Professor.”
That uncomfortable smile widened. “Now, did the river look frozen over?”
Cwyn wasn’t the “Terror” for nothing. Even his cold-numbed mind could leap that devious twist. “Yes, Professor.” He smirked.
“It’s not, you know,” Austin informed him conspiratorially. “That’s why we mark the edges of the bank with red, so the children won’t fall through that thin ice.” The Professor nodded sagely. “The river moves slowly there, with a thick, fast undercurrent.”
“That would be dangerous if the bridge was out,” Cwyn suggested guilelessly.
“It would indeed, young Terror. How are you feeling?”
Cwyn’s brown eyes twinkled mercilessly, and he smiled with pointy teeth. His knee was suddenly feeling much better, and the cold fell away.
“I’m thinking we could have that bridge ripped out and the markers removed before sunset,” he said with relish.
Pansy was dispatched to warn the townspeople that the bridge would be out for a day or two, and Cwyn and the Professor mounted two fresh horses and set off to make it truth.
KING ALEC of Otham paced his study and reread Trieste’s last letter for the sixth or possibly seventh time.
Anxiously, he looked to the leather divan where she usually tucked herself with her knitting when he was finishing up business for the day. That she wasn’t there, that she hadn’t been there for a month, sent a nice little splinter into his aching heart and made him want to kick something.
Dammit, he missed his wife.
And now, looking at her letter, he was worried about her as well.
Rath was a madman. They all knew that. When Trieste had gotten Bethen’s panicked letter and started packing for Dueance, Alec had been quick to remind her of the fact. Trieste had taken his face in her hands and kissed him, soberly, and with her full heart in her gray eyes.
“Beloved,” she’d said calmly, “this is family. My family has gone into this place….”
“Look, I know you care about him….” Her first lover. She still cared about her first lover. It had never bothered him before, not until that moment.
Her smile had been sweet and wicked. “Them, beloved. I care about them. He’s no longer a ‘he’ or a ‘him,’ all mysterious and tragic, right? You know that? My two brothers have gone into danger, and my little sister is pursuing them with all t
he single-mindedness she’s shown her whole life. It’s my job to go help her or go bring them all home. Do you understand?”
Alec ran a hand through his silvering hair, his elbow sticking far out at odds with his body. He was a very tall man, with long limbs, and there were some gestures—the ones he only did in private—that could not be done with grace. Trieste had never felt so honored in her life as she had the day she realized that she saw these moments, these graceless, awkward moments, and nobody else, nobody on the planet, would ever know the king of Otham possessed them.
The last four years had been the happiest of her life, but she never would have known how to love or how to make a house a home if it hadn’t been for Torrant and his loud, lovely family. She’d told Alec so the evening before she left, and he had let her go. She owed them, whether they ever knew it or not, and she had a debt to repay, just by being their family. She told him it was the sweetest weight—it was as sweet, she told him, as a baby would be, growing inside of her, made from the two of them.
“You think?” he’d asked, pleased, because he hadn’t wanted to press the issue—she’d been so young when they’d married.
“I know,” she’d assured him soberly. “But I need to go do what Torrant is doing. I need to go make sure my family will be safe and that the world our child grows into is safe. Now, when I can, before my mind gets muddled with Goddess thinking, when I can still play the games of the gods, right?”
It was Goddess thinking that was sending her away from him, he thought dismally, but he didn’t tell her that. Everything she felt she owed the Moons, he owed them double, because the woman his beloved had grown into owed her completion to the confidence she found in their love.
But now, looking at her wistful, lonely letter, talking about the rift between two lovers who by all rights needed to be together for the sun to even rise in the morning, he couldn’t help reading all of the gods’ business in between the lines.
Curfews. Public crucifixions. A consort’s son dead by his own hand. Explosions. Kilns for the living. A hero who bore the wounds of too many people.
It was terrifying, all of it. And he wanted her out of it, as far out of it as they could go, exiles into the Desert Lands or the Garden Lands, deserting his own little island of sanity to Rath’s insanity, just to keep her safe.
He looked out the window that sat behind his great, granite desk and sighed. A white lace of snow was heavy against the velvet of the night, and he didn’t have to press his face against the pane to see that the edges of the ocean were frothy with violence against obsidian waves. Otham was at peace and well stored, but this would be the last letter he would get before the seas quieted, two moon cycles after Solstice, and Trieste had known it.
He paced some more, wishing for a horse or a boat or his wife’s willing body or anything to take away this terrible, pressing restlessness of knowing she was in danger and being forced to sit, rocklike, while things just happened beyond the reach of the king of Otham.
Reflexively, he looked at the corner where his wife should be sitting one more time. When she still wasn’t there, he let out a cry of rage that echoed through the empty private rooms of the palace and turned and kicked his desk so savagely his toe would be bruised for a week. Fruitlessly, he pounded his hand on the polished surface of the desk, screaming again and again, until his steward came barreling through the door, awakened by the inarticulate and terrible sounds coming from his beloved king.
“Aurgh!” Alec cried with one last pound and then whirled around, bellowing his steward’s name. “Crean! Crea—oh. There you are.”
Crean was a spry, thirtyish, bald man with extreme and arrogant efficiency in all things. He skidded to a halt inside the door and bowed at the waist. “My lord?”
“Crean, I need you to make a list. What things do we need, what preparations do we have to make, to take half our army out of Otham in three months’ time?”
Crean gaped. “Sir?”
Alec wiped an unwieldy arm across his cheeks, hardly noticing that he was sniffling in a decidedly unroyal way. “Do it, Crean. We leave as soon as the seas are calm, do you hear me?”
Crean nodded, stunned. “Absolutely, sir.”
And with that, Alec turned toward the taunting, beckoning blackness, wondering if he could hear Trieste call his name across the waves.
CWYN AND Professor Austin watched impassively from the far side of the river as Rath’s small contingent of soldiers heard the first ominous crack of the ice.
The plan had been geometric in its precise execution, and Cwyn was mildly surprised. He hadn’t realized that sometimes plans actually worked, and as he watched the surprise turn to dismay and the dismay turn to terror on the faces of the doomed guards, he thought maybe he wouldn’t write off the exercise of planning altogether.
They had eliminated the bridge the night before. That morning, they had both shown up on horseback and waited, walking their horses to keep them from chilling too badly, until they heard the clink and clop of soldiers, and then they had minced to the very edge of the deceptive and thin ice at the edge of what was really a deep, wide section of river.
The moment the soldiers appeared over the rise to the river, Cwyn and the Professor had jingled their tack and run away.
By the time the soldiers heard that first crack of ice and realized exactly where they were, the entire contingent of forty or so were panicky, breathing dead men.
The river was deep, and the current was strong, and in a terrible explosion of blade-jagged ice and squealing horses, the contingent went down in a floundering, screaming, flailing mass. The minute that black-and-teal-liveried armor hit the water, the men were dragged to the bottom and shoved along with the current. Many of the horses snapped their forelegs with the first break of the ice.
When it was all over, a few of the horses straggled to shore, blowing hard, and Cwyn moved forward to collect them. Although it was probably dangerous should a follow-up contingent be sent, Austin didn’t stop him. Neither one of them had uttered a word since they’d watched Wrinkle Creek swallow up forty men and thirty-three horses under her white-crusted black depths. Words just seemed too awful.
But the silence began to strangle them as they cantered back to the surgery, and finally Professor Austin spoke up.
“Well, you’ve done your good deed for the year, young Terror—where to next?”
Cwyn opened his mouth and closed it again, because the first thing that would have popped out of it was not what he should have been planning.
If he had been Torrant, he would have been planning to see if he could make it back to Clough to help Torrant and Aylan or, if the snows grew too deep, he could stay here in Wrinkle Creek and watch for more soldiers. Bleakly, he looked behind his shoulder and over the rump of the jouncing horse, out at the narrow gorge of black water, seeing that the skin of ice was trying to reassert itself after all the hullabaloo was over.
“Where do you think they’ll end up?” he asked remotely.
Austin “hmmed” a little, thoughtfully. “Well, the current is pretty strong. They should be out past Wrinkle Creek in an hour. Then the river widens, but it’s still at least five feet deep. They’ll either end up stuck on the bottom until there’s not much left, or they’ll get dragged out to sea by Eiran.”
“Eiran?” Cwyn’s voice squeaked, and Austin looked at him kindly. He didn’t have much experience with murder, but he had worlds of experience with unhappy adolescent boys.
“You could be there in four days. It won’t snow again for five.”
“Oy?” Cwyn’s merry dark eyes were suddenly bright and shiny.
“Oy,” repeated the professor. “Are you up for the trip, young Terror?”
Was he?
STANNY GRUNTED and swung his pick again. The snows above Hammer Pass must be getting deep, he thought grimly, because the ground was getting harder, even this far down in the cave tunnel, frozen into the jagged granite of the mountain.
He’d been
hewing through the rock-hearted core of one of Torrant’s greatest foes for three years. He knew its moods, he knew its seasons, and right now, he knew that the beast was almost done fighting back.
But winter was going to stop the battle in its tracks—it always did.
Torrant himself had given Stanny the idea to cut a path under the mountain in order to evacuate the Goddess folk from Clough. It had started innocently enough, twelve years before, when Torrant had given Stanny the map he’d made while sitting on a cave floor and channeling his gift through a battered piece of cloth.
Stanny had always loved maps.
Eiran was his home, and he’d always loved it, but he’d also dreamed of “beyond.” Beyond the sea was Otham, but what was beyond that? Beyond Clough were the Jeweled Lands and the Desert Lands and the Garden Lands—and then what was there? What was “beyond”?
Stanny had spent Torrant and Yarri’s entire first winter with the Moons staring at that map and wondering what it was like beyond Eiran, up on the mountain. (Since he’d been laid up with a broken leg for part of it, there had been precious else to do!) And then he saw all the pits marked on the map and thought about the volcanic soil on the Clough side of the Hammer and the Anvil, and instead of wondering what things were like “beyond,” he started wondering what things were like “under.”
When he’d first started helping his da deliver to the ghettoes in Dueance, all he could think of was getting the people out. He’d grown up looking at the ocean, with the promise of “beyond.” The people he saw were locked in the tiny rotting brickyard space of the ghettoes, and they were denied “beyond.”
It seemed like such a simple solution.
But it had taken three years. Three years of sneaking with a small group of trusted workers, three years of not telling anyone but his father where he was going, not even Evya until just recently, not even his mother. If the heart of the Hammer hadn’t been rotten with pockets left by the cooling lava of the last eruption, it would have taken them much longer. As it was, none of them knew when their picks would resound against what looked to be a solid rock wall and then echo and plink. It was a good sound—they all knew that sound. It was the sound of instant headway.
