by Jessica Daw
Holding onto the north wind was a whole new challenge, especially considering how overworked and drained I was. But it was life or death, and I wanted life, so I managed.
The storm intensified as we rose into the air, and I could see, through my seat at the base of the dragon’s neck, shards of ice flying up from the dragon’s huge wingbeats. Lightning streaked beneath us in brilliant flashes, changing the landscape from gray to white for an instant before darkness fell again, heavier than before.
We were closer to the ocean than I’d dared hope. Before I’d even thought to watch for it, we were crossing it. Even from our height, the waves the north wind’s passage created were monumental, and my stomach twisted at the sight of ships, tiny as ants, cresting the violent wakes. I didn’t tell the wind to stop, and I wondered if that made me wicked. I had no answer for myself. I’d gone too far to raise that question.
The world seemed impossibly vast from my vantage point, all of it storm and iron and ice, none of it caring about the tiny, vulnerable humans that could do next to nothing to control it. Even light stood no chance, swallowed by black clouds and sheeting rain and the crashing sea. If I tried to speak, no one would hear. Nothing would care. I was lost in the elements, entirely reliant on the power of the capricious north wind I rode. How could he care about something as small as me?
Rain pounded on me, a constantly repeated vow that I would never be dry again. Enough water ran down my face and soaked my clothes and my hair and clung to my eyelashes to fill a bathtub. My fingers were pink and wrinkled by it. I couldn’t seem to get enough air, though my mouth was open and my nostrils flared. I’d never worried that rain would drown me before those interminable hours.
That worry was all too soon consumed by others. I did not notice at first, but the north wind was getting smaller. The dragon I rode no longer seemed the size of a palace. Maybe the size of my and Kristian’s castle. Then, after how long I didn’t know, the deeply overcast day giving no hint as to the passage of time, he decreased to the size of a wealthy man’s home. A fairly large home. An average home. A large cottage. A cottage. A small cottage. My mind refused to stop noticing his ever-shrinking form.
Scarcely larger than my isbjørn. The size of my poor Rune. The size of Ruth’s mare Gerda.
By then, he was pale, faint as summer clouds after they’d released all their rain, no lightning whatsoever buzzing through him. I had no idea how he held me up, not when I could scarcely manage to keep my own head up, let alone stay seated on the wind. A dozen times I nearly slid right off him. The cold of the rain was all that kept me awake, and even that was dying away.
The unbearable din had long since died down. The only remaining sound was the softest sighing of the wind, loud against the arctic stillness of our surroundings.
My eyelashes were frozen, and whenever I moved my clothing crinkled, frozen too. It felt like my very blood was freezing inside my veins. I didn’t think I’d ever been so cold in my entire life.
I thought my eyes were deceiving me when an expanse of white appeared on the horizon. I could hardly keep them open. How could I trust them to relay the truth to me?
But as we blew forward, nearly skimming the ocean, the white solidified, glowing faintly in the increasing dark—finally increasing. Not that I wanted the day the end, because that meant less time to find a way to save Kristian, but it was disturbing to have no idea how long had passed since sunrise.
“Is that it?” I whispered.
The north wind didn’t answer. I didn’t know if he didn’t hear me or didn’t care to answer or didn’t have the energy. I suspected it was a combination of the latter two.
My dragon was smaller than Ruth’s little mare Gerda by now, the size of a large dog. I felt myself slipping through him –he was no longer solid enough to support my weight. The whispers of wind seemed to be gasps for air.
“Almost there.” I wasn’t sure if I was reassuring him or myself. He probably wouldn’t care for my reassurance.
The last stretch was the worst. I expected at any moment to be dropped into the ocean, which was still deep enough to be dangerous, not to mention the cold. As cold as I already was, being unceremoniously dumped into the ocean could prove fatal.
I held my breath, closed my eyes, and prayed.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lena
I crashed into ice and hard-frozen snow, bruising like stones. Still, better than drowning.
As soon as I could, I rolled onto my back and looked around. The north wind was gone, dissipated like his brothers had upon reaching my destination. I was surrounded by gray—gray ice, gray skies, gray seas.
Before I managed to catch my breath, I saw something else, gray but not entirely. It was hideous, the most hideous thing I’d ever seen, and terrifying.
Its feet were black cloven hooves, heavy and sharp, thick legs covered in shaggy fur. Its upper body seemed to be that of a man, an enormous bare chest visible through the shredded black cloth he wore, the skin beneath grayish-white with a network of raised black scars. Giant eagle wings extended from his shoulders, the feathers tattered and broken. He had arms besides the wings, human arms, massive and gray and ending in claws instead of fingers.
The worst, though, was his vicious isbjørn head. Black eyes were narrowed and without any hint of human feeling, animal rage and bloodlust burning from the matted yellowed fur. His teeth were much sharper than my isbjørn’s, long and disgusting and stained with . . . blood.
Something hung from his neck, but I didn’t get a good look before the monster was bearing down on me, his roar bloodcurdling. I scrambled to stand, to find a weapon, anything.
My fingers found the box of Ruth’s eggs. I screamed, “GIVE ME A WEAPON!” and broke the egg apart.
Then watched as a giant eagle, wings glistening, unlike the beast before me, flew away without a backwards glance.
The monster crashed into me, my moment’s reprieve gone. I screamed, this time wordless, terrified—but more than that, I was furious. I would not die, not after all the way I’d come, not after facing starvation and Rune’s death and the winds.
Gray, scarred arms tried to snake around me. Adrenaline ran through me like fire. That inspired me. I jammed my elbow into the gray-skinned stomach, then my other hand shot forward, my pointer finger lighting on fire exactly like I wanted it to. I shoved it straight into his stomach, which was hard and cold. I urged the fire to burn hotter, and the beast let out an enraged roar, arms loosening ever so slightly.
This was in my blood. I told myself, this was certainly in my blood. How many battles had Father fought? Besides which, though I’d never gotten much into magic before Kristian, I had learned to fight—even the most useless noble at least learned.
I dropped down, slamming my head back, hitting soft flesh. I cringed, then rolled away, digging through my pack. I had a knife, I knew I had a knife.
Abruptly I was airborne, my whole frame vibrating from the kick I’d received from those vicious cloven hooves. Calling on the wind . . . I discovered there was no wind to call on. For the second time, I crashed into the hard-frozen snow. No moment could be spared, I flipped onto my back and then into a crouch.
There was no time to dig through my pack. No knife. The beast was already bearing down on me. The isbjørn head would have been disconcerting, but it was so obviously different from my isbjørn that it did not even seem related.
No knife meant it would have to be fire. The thing was so gray, like a corpse. Or at least it was gray where flesh was visible and not buried under fur or hidden by shredded black cloth. Corpses burnt easily, didn’t they? I could not endure long. If I had to keep fighting for more than another few minutes, I would collapse from exhaustion.
It was easier to transform than to create, but air was the best thing to change into fire. Gathering it, I leaped up and pushed, screaming, “FIRE!”
The air in front of me burst to life, rushing towards the beast with much more precision than any of my previ
ous fireballs. Hotter, too. Its center was bluish-white. Maybe it was from my real desperation. My life could very well end.
Flame engulfed the monster, turning the yellow-white fur of the isbjørn head black, eating at the tattered fabric shirt, consuming the gray flesh beneath. His anguished roar was dreadful to hear.
I dug through my pack for a desperate moment. The fiery beast was running towards me, blind with fury.
Finally. My fingers found my knife, a knife Magdalena had given me more for the purpose of food preparation. Or at least that’s what I’d assumed, never really questioning it.
The heat crackling from my opponent surrounded me, and I screamed, stabbing the knife forward. One hand held the knife, and the other shoved against the beast’s chest. My fingers, of their own accord, clenched around the thing that hung around the beast’s neck.
For a moment, I didn’t realize that the heat trickling down my arm was different than the heat that ate at me. It was blood, black as ink.
The beast was going to fall on me. I shouted in determination, and rolled to the side, causing his fall to be directed to my left. The knife was ripped from my hands, still embedded in his chest.
A very human gasp made me move like lightning, ripping the knife from the beast’s chest like I hadn’t killed a being twice my size with an isbjørn head. I leapt to my feet, holding the knife in front of me, blood smeared on my arms and face, my clothes stinking of fire. My left hand was still clenched around the object I’d torn from the beast’s neck.
“Helena?” an amazed voice asked.
My eyes went wide, and my heart, so recently racing, stopped. I could not comprehend the face I saw, and all at once it was too much. The last thing I saw before falling into a dead faint were Espen Kjeldsen’s brilliant blue eyes, confusion and a whole lot of other emotions swimming in them.
I woke on the packed-snow floor of an ice cave, dark and cold. My independent fingers immediately clenched, and I felt the hard shape of the thing I’d torn from the beast.
“Are you alright?” I sat up much too fast, hitting my head on the side of the cave and briefly making my vision turn starry. That voice . . . could it really be . . .
In the darkness of the cave, I could still make out his face, crouching in front of me. Espen Kjeldsen.
I couldn’t write him off as a hallucination, because a hallucination would have looked exactly like the Espen I remembered, and this Espen in front of me did not. His blue eyes, which had so shocked me, were still as blue as ever, but they were much more wary, piercing and distant at the same time. His formerly silky blond hair was rough, hacked at the ends as if he’d cut it with a knife. It matched his untamed beard and mustache, covering half his face. The facial hair hid how elegant his face had once seemed, though it was hard to disguise his ruler-straight nose.
Then there were the scars. On the left side of his face, claw marks dragged through the end of his eyebrow and down his cheek. I could guess how he’d received those scars, remembering the beast’s claws, protruding from his gray human fingers. They were red and ugly, as if no one had taken care of them.
His clothes were patched-together skins, layered and bundled. He looked wild.
It occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn’t feel safe.
“Are you alright?” he repeated, one hand moving towards me, but stopping a foot away.
I was imploding with hunger, my head really wanted out of my skull, and the only sensation I had from my numbed skin was aching from being tossed around by the beast. Not to mention my whole inside was on fire from using so much magic to try to keep the winds under control enough to make it here alive. “I’m fine. What happened to you?”
Surprisingly, I was not desperate for the answer as I would have thought, so it wasn’t too torturous as he gathered his thoughts. I thought of how I’d fancied my heart permanently broken after he disappeared because I’d loved him so much. It had been sad to lose a friend, but my heart certainly hadn’t been permanently broken. And really, he’d been more of an acquaintance than a friend.
“Someone designed that beast to kill me.” I’d remembered Espen as eloquent, someone who could talk for hours about anything and be interesting the whole time, at least to me. That was all he had to offer for an explanation of his supposed death and the beast and his wild appearance?
“What do you mean?”
“It’s Sikken magic, old. Outlawed now. The monster is called a tupilaq. It’s specifically designed to destroy a target. They’re made from parts of other animals, and, as you saw, from people as well, stitched together and brought to life with a single purpose. It was made for me—its strengths were made to prey on my weaknesses, and to render my strengths useless. Its only goal was to kill me, which is why you were able to kill it with relative ease whereas I have been on the run for it for a year and a half.”
I prickled at relative ease, but my desire to have questions answered outweighed my offense, so I let it pass. “Who would do that?”
He shook his head, frustrated. “I have my guesses, but the tupilaq disintegrated by the time I’d brought you to safety and made sure you were stable.”
My mouth opened slightly as my hand tightened around the token. I wanted to show it to Espen. He’d been running from the tupilaq for a year and a half. As long as I’d thought he was dead. He was permanently altered, certainly not the finely-dressed, well-spoken, picture-of-elegance man I’d known.
But acting impulsively and blindly were what had gotten me into this situation, what had lost me Kristian, what had killed Rune. For now, I would keep the identity of his would-be killer a secret until I knew who it was and understood the situation better. This time, my mind was in charge of my hand, commanding it to clench tighter. My hand resisted for a moment, trying to release, to show Espen the truth, but I kept it closed.
“Who are your guesses?” Guilt layered upon the rest of the pain and aching I was drowning in, but I kept my fist clenched.
“I suspect someone in Queen Qila’s court. There was a group with me when the tupilaq first set upon me, and any of them could have done it. If only the thing hadn’t disintegrated!” he said with such sudden violence that I started. Espen hadn’t been a violent man, at least not that I’d been aware of. Father didn’t appreciate bloodlust in his associates, so I doubted he would have chosen a violent person for his heir and my future husband.
“Why does it matter?” I asked, the token in my gloved hand burning as I feigned ignorance.
“The nature of the spell used to create a tupilaq requires something personal. A tupilaq single-mindedly performs the task its master designed it to, and for that to be the case, something important to the person must be worn by the tupilaq at all times for it to function.”
I’d forgotten how intelligent Espen was. I felt foolish, afraid that if I didn’t change the subject, Espen would guess that I was in possession of the token. I questioned my reasoning again, wondering if it could possibly be right for me to conceal the truth. But . . . I needed to know who it was, and I wasn’t sure I could trust Espen. I needed at least one chip to bargain with.
Fortunately, Espen changed the subject himself. “What are you doing here? Did you come to find me?”
That annoyed me. “No.”
He looked genuinely surprised, whether at my irritation or my answer, I didn’t know. “Did you know I was alive?”
“No,” I said, more irritated. “But I wouldn’t have come all the way here to find you even if I did.”
Espen’s surprise increased, then he seemed to draw a conclusion. “Ah. You’re married?”
“No!” My jaw worked. Too much, too much, too much. I felt half-delirious, bone-weary, battered and bruised, the token burning in my hand with knowledge that both of us wanted terribly, Espen alive after all the trouble—I wouldn’t have met my isbjørn, my Kristian, if we’d known—I wouldn’t have met Kristian if Espen hadn’t flirted with Kristian’s betrothed. I realized that I had him to thank, but I was a
ngry with him. He’d hardly flirted with the Sikken princess for my sake.
“Then why are you here?”
“To try to save Kristian Bjørnes from a marriage that apparently would be better suited to you!” The words burst from me abruptly, sharp and angry and unreasonable.
Espen’s face went blank. “What are you talking about?”
“You and Princess Niviaq! Lady Magdalena of Tryllejor told me why Kristian broke off the engagement with her.”
His lips went thin. “Magda talks a lot.”
“Is it untrue?” I pushed
I was too tired to be surprised when Espen turned nervous, licking his lips uncomfortably. “Niviaq is . . . quite beautiful—and very flirtatious!” he said quickly, as if that were a defense.
I folded my arms, feeling violated. I had been dreaming of Espen every day, and he had been flirting with Niviaq, who was quite beautiful and very flirtatious.
“It wasn’t like that!” he said, too defensive. I hadn’t even spoken.
“Hmph. What was it like, then?”
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “I . . . I was very happy to marry you. Still am, but you’re somewhat . . . difficult.”
I shot him a venomous disbelieving glare. “You think you’re still going to marry me?”
Espen looked genuinely surprised, efficiently sidetracked from his would-be murderer. “You said you’re not married. We’re still betrothed, aren’t we?”
“What do you mean, I’m difficult? Is Niviaq—” I spat her name out like something sour “—so very accommodating?”
“You’re overreacting, Helena. I still would have married you and made you an excellent husband.”
“Have you ever heard of fidelity, Espen?” Espen was a man of fashion, free with smiles and flirtatious comments, I’d known that. “What, exactly, did you do with Niviaq?” I didn’t really want to know, but I asked anyway.
He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I . . . we talked . . . and . . .”
